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Untitled Linux Show 228: Smooth Before, Smooth After
01:31:31
Gnome Drops X11, KDE Sheds Megabytes, & Flatpak Gets Its Groove Back
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- [00:00]
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- [01:31]
Jonathan Bennett
Hey folks, this week we're talking about Flatpak and the little bit of a hiccup that they've had in development and how they're getting back on the right direction. We're talking about the new Turris Omnia router that you might be able to afford, but it looks really impressive if you can. There's KDE Plasma News. We get a little geeky with the security, both with amd, Zen, RD Seed and a couple of misconstrued security articles. We we set those right as well. Then there's Fedora 40 and some big Gnome news. When it comes to Wayland, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [02:11]
Ryan Seacrest
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [02:15]
Jonathan Bennett
This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 228, recorded Saturday, November 8th. Smooth before, smooth after. Hey folks, it is Saturday. You know what that means. It is time to talk about Linux. It's the Untitled Linux Show. We're going to get geeky with some hardware and software we're going to talk about gaming, probably all kinds of other stuff. It's going to be a lot of fun. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today I've got with me Mr. Jeff Massey and Mr. Ken McDonald. Welcome to both of you guys. Oh, that was unexpected. All right, welcome to both of you guys.
- [02:56]
Jeff Massey
Why are we moving around and Mr. Wow. I, I got, I got a promotion.
- [03:02]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes. Up to. Mr.
- [03:06]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it's been, it's been a.
- [03:07]
Ken McDonald
Pretty good, I got that promotion about 25 years ago.
- [03:12]
Jonathan Bennett
Is it pretty good week, Jeff?
- [03:13]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, I actually got. So people know, I've said it a hundred times, but I'm running cash EOS now. And normally for those newer listeners, I do folding at home in the wintertime when it's cooler, and it, it's folding proteins for science and it's put through the University of Berkeley and looking for cures for, you know, cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, a whole bunch of different things. And there's not an official build for Cashy, but it was in the aur and, you know, I was able to actually get it going and fire it up. And so I'm now happily folding proteins.
- [03:56]
Jonathan Bennett
As we speak to keep yourself warm at night. Who needs a crackling fire to have a crackling gpu? Yes, Fun, fun. All right.
- [04:08]
Ken McDonald
And Fastfitch says I'm now running on a Kubuntu 2510.
- [04:15]
Jonathan Bennett
Did you have problems with Kubuntu this week?
- [04:19]
Ken McDonald
No, because I had actually updated last weekend.
- [04:22]
Jonathan Bennett
There were some problems with the Kubuntu website this week, if I remember correctly. At least they.
- [04:29]
Ken McDonald
It's saying Kubuntu because of the desktop, but it's actually Ubuntu Studio.
- [04:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Ah, yes, yes. Yeah, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. They weren't serving malware like another distro was a couple of weeks ago. I believe the SSL certs just went bye bye. And so that was the deal. It was tls, right? In this case, it wasn't a deal. Well, it may have been a DNS problem underneath, but, you know, one few times it wasn't DNS, it was tls. But yeah, it seems to be back up now. If I understand correctly, I saw that as one of the stories that we could have, we could have covered in more detail, Ken, to get us started on actual stories, you've got here one about Flatpak, everybody's favorite way to launch applications. What's going on in that world?
- [05:23]
Ken McDonald
Well, thankfully this week Bobby Borisoff wrote about Flatpak Development Restarting Now According to Bobby Red Hat Sepastian Wick has shared some interesting insight into Flatpak's development following the version 1.17 pre release. This is the first update that we've had in six months now. Sebastian acknowledged that Flatpak had reached a stagnant phase earlier in 2025, with development slowing and open contributions piling up. Thanks to renewed efforts from longtime contributors, along with new maintainers stepping up to review and merge code more actively, development has restarted. The project has reorganized and streamlined its review process, resulting in FlatPak 1.17 pre release. It begins a new unstable series, hopefully paving the way toward a stable release later this year. It introduces a series of technical refinements and new capabilities designed to make this pre release more reliable and easier to integrate across Linux distributions. These capabilities include up to date documentation, pre installed app definitions, enhanced Open Container Initiative support, and a updated permissions model. We also see work continuing on a new systemd APPD service that will help authenticate and manage running flacpac instances. There are new efforts underway to improve desktop integration. Now I've just touched on some of the highlights from Bobby's article, so I do recommend reading it if you do want more details.
- [07:16]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, interesting. I went back to look at the future of Flatpak and apparently that was a talk that was given at Linux App Summit 2025 about six months ago. Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder if some of this is because of the growing popularity of Snap.
- [07:38]
Ken McDonald
Could be. Or is it growing popularity of app images?
- [07:42]
Jonathan Bennett
App images has been around for a very long time.
- [07:45]
Jeff Massey
Yeah.
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Ken McDonald
They're not getting any more popular?
- [07:48]
Jeff Massey
I don't think so.
- [07:49]
Jonathan Bennett
No.
- [07:50]
Jeff Massey
No, they seem kind of leveled off. At least when I see packages I almost never see an app image. It's either Flat Pack or Snap.
- [07:59]
Ken McDonald
I think we're going to see the exception to the rule then later tonight.
- [08:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I have a. I have an app image that I'm running right now to be able to do stuff.
- [08:08]
Jeff Massey
But oh, and I've run them. I just. It just doesn't seem as I run across them near as much.
- [08:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, it's not. It's not the new hotness anymore, right.
- [08:15]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it's just my anecdotal, you know, observations. But I'll be honest, I didn't know that Flatpak was having some hiccups in their road. I just thought they were still developing as normal and.
- [08:30]
Ken McDonald
Yeah, well apparently they did when they put out their loudest latest blog that.
- [08:37]
Jonathan Bennett
Bobby Red yeah, seems to be better Now I I'm curious why one of their previous maintainers stepped down. I didn't see. I've not seen any any details on that. I'm wondering if that was part of the shakeup we talked about Multiple companies were changing how they were investing in open source. I'm just curious if this was part of that shakeup. And it sounds like maybe Red Hat, because I think Sebastian is a Red Hat guy, maybe was told to step up and Red Hat is taking on a bit more of that maintenance. Perhaps. We will see.
- [09:20]
Ken McDonald
All right, with Flat Pack, does it help with managing KDE much?
- [09:28]
Jonathan Bennett
No, no, I don't think so. But talking about kde, that's a terrible one, man. Talking about kde, Jeff has a story on it of shaving off some memory usage and fixing things. What is new with KDE, Jeff?
- [09:44]
Jeff Massey
Well, KDE Plasma 6.5 just came out and it's even had a couple of bug fix releases, but there are things happening with the planned 6.6 release. So Nate Graham is out with another blog talking about what's coming and there he lists some fixes in 6.5.1, 6.5.2 and 6.5.3 which make the system more stable. You know the the point, you know 6.5 point X, those are polishing updates. Now if you don't have 6.5.3 yet, don't worry. It isn't fully released, but it should be on November 18th and it'll be making its way down your repository path to your favorite distribution. The main reason for this story though is to talk about Plasma 6.6. Now one of the big things is 6.6 has reduced memory usage by over 100 megabytes by unloading wallpaper images which are not needed anymore. Now because of how this works, it breaks tiled wallpapers for technical reasons but but to get around that, there's a new tiled wallpaper plugin. So you can still have tiled wallpapers. It just takes a different plugin. Now they're just the way they did this. There just wasn't a way around it. You know, they kind of coded themselves into a corner. It's just kind of an incompatible methods. Now the developer did note that the memory savings is assuming a 4K screen. If you have a regular high res screen, you know, 1080p with basically a quarter number of the pixels, then you're going to have a quarter of the memory savings. So keep that in mind. It scales with your window resolution. Also fixed is dragging and dropping between X Wayland and Native Wayland Windows is now much less likely to crash and should work better overall. Toggling Bluetooth can will no longer briefly freeze the UI and also change as the current activity is now stored in the state file and not in the config file. Now there's been bug fixing and polishing of the interface as well, such as the developers have clarified an unclear label in the Open Connect VPN Open VP Open Connect VPN authentication dialog. Tongue twister. They added another page to the HDR calibration wizard to figure out the maximum full screen average luminance. And if you've been playing with 6.6 and change resolutions or you shifted your screen arrangements, that should no longer cause your icons to shift. Now some of the biggest changes to 6.6 is the ability to limit a virtual desktop to only the primary screen if you have a network you would be able to connect to that you would like to connect to. There's now a button on the network widget which allows connection via a QR code. Something big which has bet which has had something big which there's been positive feedback about is how the Dr. Conkey crash reporting system now notices crashes for non KDE apps as well. It will prompt you to report the crashes to the developer. Now there was some comments about this and some people were actually very happy about this in the comments. So you know, good, good on them for expanding the feature set of that. You know there's a lot of good things that are coming, but it's going to be a bit before we see all the updates. So I said 653 is November 18, 654 will be released on December 9, 6, 55 will show up January 13 and 6.6 will come out officially on February 17. Now keep in mind that's all tentative dates, stuff could slide, but that's what's planned for now. And there's a lot of soft freezes and beta steps between the 6.5 series and the 6.6 series. You know I'll cover them more as they become more solidified. But you know there's some, like I said, soft freezes, betas, betas, two beta 3s, RCS, you know we'll, we'll cover that in the future. But so currently 6. 6 is an alpha. So if someone wants to try it, they can but expect things not to be totally smooth. If you take a look at the article linked in the show notes, you can see full details on the bug fixes, the updates and you know, the things that I didn't fully cover, so have a look. And happy windowing.
- [14:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. I just updated to KDE 6.5 on the main desktop behind me, and the KDE side of it seemed to go pretty smoothly. I have some concerns about the BIOS on my motherboard now, but that's sort of a different story. I had to start it up about three or four times before it finally came up and actually did its thing. But we got there eventually. That's all that counts, right?
- [14:34]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. Yeah. You made it. Yeah, Yeah. I just got yesterday. 6.5.2 on my system.
- [14:42]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. So I'm still playing with it to make sure it does all the things still the way that it's supposed to.
- [14:47]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. For me, 6.5. You know, you could see things seemed a little smoother. 651-652. They just work. I don't think I was running into any of the bug fixes that they took care of.
- [14:59]
Jonathan Bennett
So.
- [15:01]
Jeff Massey
Smooth before, smooth after.
- [15:03]
Jonathan Bennett
There you go, Ken.
- [15:05]
Ken McDonald
Now, with the virtual desktop being limited only to the primary screen. Talking. The primary monitor, or are they. If you've got dual. Dual monitor set up. What's considered the primary screen.
- [15:25]
Jonathan Bennett
You set one in kde.
- [15:27]
Ken McDonald
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [15:30]
Jeff Massey
You pick what you want. Usually the one that.
- [15:32]
Ken McDonald
If you set that option.
- [15:36]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. You don't. You don't have to limit it. It's just an option. You set it where you. You can have it anywhere or you can say, I only want it on the primary. And primary is usually the one that you have your little start button, you know, the kde.
- [15:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Although you can put it on both if you want to.
- [15:54]
Ken McDonald
You can have it spread across both.
- [15:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [15:57]
Jeff Massey
Yes. But. But in. In general, out of the box, the primary is where you find that. So that's. But it. When you. In your monitor setup, it will you. If you got multiple screens, you pick which one you want to have as your primary.
- [16:12]
Jonathan Bennett
And it.
- [16:12]
Jeff Massey
You can pick any screen you want and you can fold, bend, mutilate, staple, however you see fit.
- [16:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Absolutely.
- [16:21]
Jeff Massey
Because maybe you have a monitor to the side you go, that's going to be my primary. And I always want my virtual desktop there. And on the monitor you normally look at, it's a secondary, but you're locking your virtual to a separate window.
- [16:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. All right, let's talk about a couple of weird security stories that both of these have a twist. That's why I put them together that I covered this week. And the first is Apache Open Office. They got hit with ransomware, and the Akira group are out threatening to release their employee Documentation and all of this. And so Apache, OpenOffice, the history there, of course, OpenOffice was part of Sun. Sun was bought by Oracle. Oracle didn't really want to have an open source project doing Open Office, so they spun it out and said, Apache gets it. So it's now a part of the Apache Software Foundation. The Akira ransomware gang, who've come out and said, we've got all this stuff, we're going to release it if you don't pay up the ransom, and representatives from the Open Office foundation and the Apache Software foundation, so that the Open Office project, excuse me, and the Apache Software foundation both came out and said, we don't know what you're talking about. We've not gotten any ransom notice. We've looked. We're pretty sure nobody broke into our systems. You got the wrong guys. It was just a weird story all around. There is a, in the response from the project, there is a really weird statement there. And I want to get it, want to get it exact so that we can talk about this. They said, since Apache Open Office is an open source software project, none of our contributors are paid employees for the project or the foundation, so we don't even possess the data described in the claim. And I looked at that and I went, wait a second, are they saying that there's Nobody working on OpenOffice that's getting paid for it? Like there are no professional maintainers for Open Office? Like that's kind of what that sounds like to me. There's a little bit of wiggle room that there could be someone contracting. It's not an employee. The other possibility is there might be someone at another company that is being paid to maintain Open Office. And if you sort of read between the lines, that might be what happened here. The ransomware hit some other company that happened to have documentation about Open Office. It's unclear exactly what's going on there, but as far as I can tell, Open Office themselves were not hit by any ransomware. But there is this sort of troublesome statement that, no, we're not paying anybody to work on Open Office. Like maybe you should be. I'm pretty sure the guys at LibreOffice are paying some of their people to work on the source code. So maybe you should be. And then the other story that, yeah.
- [19:27]
Jeff Massey
Go ahead, just a quick interjection is we're going to release what we have. So you're going to release my open source software again.
- [19:39]
Jonathan Bennett
So there would be the software that is already open source, the other things that they claim to have were like tax documents for employees, internal messaging and unreleased vulnerabilities.
- [19:55]
Ken McDonald
Makes you wonder did they get Open Office confused with Only Office maybe or LibreOffice or.
- [20:02]
Jeff Massey
I, I am thinking more what Jonathan said is they, they got into some company, they saw the Office suite documentation.
- [20:12]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [20:12]
Jeff Massey
And assume that's what they had and probably non native language speakers and something got lost in the translation.
- [20:20]
Ken McDonald
Probably be worse is if they accidentally got into Oracle's old archive of Open Office.
- [20:26]
Jonathan Bennett
That might be what it is. Yeah, it's hard to say. All right, so there's that weird security story. There is another one that I came across and that is a bit of conflation between two different CVEs. So CBE, that's the common vulnerability of. I forget what the E stands for. It's the numbering system essentially for vulnerabilities and so common vulnerabilities and exposures. That's what the E stands for. That's why I can't remember it. It's a dumb name. So there are each of these vulnerabilities that get released, they will be assigned a number. And so those numbers are things like 2025, dash, you know, 5 7, 32 1. I don't know if that one's a real one or not, but that's kind of the format that these have. And so each vulnerability that comes out in a year it'll be given a number like that. And so you can use that number to cross reference and find like does somebody else have more information about this? Look it up in your Linux distro and see has it been fixed for this yet, that sort of thing. The problem that you occasionally will run into is those numbers are not the easiest to remember. And so the is it sometimes like Google and other search engines will try too hard to turn things up for you. Okay, so what happened here? And I don't know how widespread this was, but I saw a conflation between CVE 202538593 and 2025 48593. And so 48593 is a CVE in Android that is really pretty nasty. It is a zero, a critical zero click vulnerability that enables remote code execution in Android. It's really pretty bad. And of course that one is getting fixed in all the various places. It was part of the November Android Security bulletin and what I saw is that it was conflated with CVE the same number, but the one starting with a 3. So 2020538593 which is a Bluetooth bug in the Linux kernel. And so I saw in at least one place someone said the Linux kernel has this terrible zero click remote code execution in the BLE stack because these two numbers got conflated together. And I went and did the legwork and no, that is not what happened. The, the 38593 is a not particularly bad. It's, it's a race condition but it's a double free as far as I can tell. There's no way that you could ever turn that into remote code execution. It's literally just, it will cause your machine to reboot. If you hit it, it'll crash your kernel and it happened to be one number away from this really bad one in Android. And so there is some, a little bit of conflation there. So I think the, the lesson is particularly if you're covering this professionally or you have much of an interest, pay attention to those details and make sure that you don't have an off by one error in your numbering because it's a bad deal to misunderstand what's going on and think you have a super critical Bluetooth vulnerability in the kernel when it's just off an Android code. Those are my two weird security stories for the week. They were odd.
- [24:21]
Ken McDonald
Did you notice with the CVE that begins with A3, the Bluetooth one that I was looking over the link that you've got in the your article to suse where it says Note from SUSE security team on the deck Kernel default package SUSE will no longer Fix all CVEs in the Linux kernel anymore, but declare some bug classes as won't fix.
- [24:53]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Do you know why that is?
- [24:56]
Ken McDonald
Kernel's not being maintained.
- [24:58]
Jonathan Bennett
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is because the Linux kernel is doing, I consider it malicious compliance. Every bug gets a CVE in the Linux kernel. Every bug because it's in the kernel is basically theoretically exploitable. And so every bug fix gets a CVE. And this is the OpenSUSE guy saying that's nuts, we're not doing it. We're not backporting every of your dumb bug fixes. Not all of them are security problems. We're not going to do it and.
- [25:34]
Ken McDonald
We'Ll wait for the next kernel to come out.
- [25:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, the problem is when they try to ship a long term support kernel, that's really where all of this, where it butts heads, particularly if they're shipping. If they want to do long term support on a kernel that's not an LTS version, that's really where you run it like Red Hat. Red Hat does this. Red Hat will historically has just picked a kernel version and okay, that's the one that we're going to ship in Red Hat Enterprise Linux X and we're going to do all of the backporting work to keep it up to date to fix the things in it, but it's not one of the kernels, lts kernels. And so they just, they get to go through and find the ones that are actually vulnerabilities and backport those fixes. And I think the guys at the kernel got tired of that happening and so they said, fine, every bug's a vulnerability. Have fun. And yeah, it's been a little chaotic.
- [26:32]
Jeff Massey
Ruffled a few feathers. There's been others that had the same. Yeah, well, there's been others that had the same thought of like, oh, this is just stupid.
- [26:41]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, technically speaking, there is a valid argument to be made, but it is kind of silly.
- [26:46]
Jeff Massey
Yes, you're getting pretty pedantic.
- [26:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Pretty pedantic, yes. All right.
- [26:52]
Ken McDonald
Apple has done in the past.
- [26:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, here in just a second we're going to talk about the Open Document foundation and a new standard. We'll be right back after this for that. Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line, but first there, the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
- [27:32]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. As winter approaches, make sure you set aside some time for self care now through December 2nd. Get great savings on personal care essentials when you shop in store or online. Buy two participating self care items and save $3. Shop for items like Tresemme Shampoo, Dove Shampoo, Dove Men's Care Body Wash, Dove Body Wash and Axe Shower gel. And save $3 when you buy two or more items. Offer ends December 2nd. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call you. Talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's going to happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings. Crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the Weekends, I never know what's going to happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today. Beautiful.
- [28:31]
Leo Laporte
Anonymous hi, I'm Leo laporte, host of this Week in Tech and many other shows on the Twit podcast network. Can you believe it? 2026 is around the corner. So this, my friends, is the best time to grow your brand. With Twit, nobody understands the tech audience better than we do. We love our audience and we know how to effectively message to them. We develop genuine relationships with brands, creating authentic promotions that resonate with our highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. You know over 90% of Twitch audience is involved in their company's tech and and it decision making. Can you believe that 90%, 88% have actually made a purchase based on a Twit post read ad. No one comes close. We're the best at this. As one Twit fan said, I've bought from Twitter sponsors because I trust Leo and his team's knowledge of the latest in tech. If TWIT supports it, I know I can trust it. You cannot buy trust like that. Well, actually you can.
- [29:37]
Jonathan Bennett
You can buy an ad on Twitter.
- [29:38]
Leo Laporte
All our ads are unique. They're read live by our expert host, Micah Sargent Me. We simulcast all during the shows on our social platforms so everybody can be watching live. You know one of our customers, Harun Meer, the founder of ThinksCanary, he's been with us since 2016. Since 2016. He said we expected TWIT to work well for us because we were longtime listeners and who over the years bought many of the products and services we learned about on various Twitch shows. And we were not disappointed. The combination of the very personal ad reads and the careful selection of products that Twit largely believes in gives the ads an authentic trusted voice that works really well for our products. 10 out of 10 we'll use again. Thank you Harun. We love you. And it's been nine years. That's kind of. That's the proof, right? Partnerships with Twit offer valuable benefits including over delivery of impressions. You get presence on show episode pages. So there's a link right there that our audience can click on. We're in the RSS feed descriptions, a link there too. And social media promotion. Our full service team will craft compelling creative to elevate your brand and support you throughout your entire campaign. I work on the copy myself to make it authentic, to make it real. If you want to reach a passionate tech audience through a network that consistently over delivers, please contact us directly. PartnerWIT TV that's the email address. PartnerWIT TV. Let's talk about how we can help grow your brand. Or just go to Twit TV advertise for more information. I look forward to working with you.
- [31:21]
Ken McDonald
Thanks for listening Al Jonathan this week Marco and I do apologize if I mispronounce this Foriato wrote about the upcoming release of the Open Document format for Office applications version 1.4. According to Marco, ODF 1.4 has already met all the approvals it needs. So right now all we're waiting for is for the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is that Oasis to proclaim it ready. The latest versions of LibreOffice have already implemented the first drafts of the ODF 1.4 features. Now ODF is an open XML based file format designed for saving and exchanging Office documents such as word processing files, spreadsheets, presentations, charts, and graph graphics. ODF is currently used as the default format for LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Calibera Office, and Calligra productivity suites. Now current releases of Microsoft Office 365, Google Docs only Office, Gnumeric and Zoho Office Suite also support ODF 1.4. Now Marco's article also delves into the real reason why Microsoft could establish and maintain an almost total monopoly on desktop computer for decades. Now, with the arrival of ODF 1.4, we now have a viable alternative to proprietary document formats. According to Italio Vignoli, co founder of the document Foundation, ODF 1.4 safeguards Digital sovereignty by removing a single company's control over documents and returning it to the community. ODF 1.4 includes improved open standards in areas such as accessibility and better support for assistive technologies, added document formatting for pros, and advanced functionality across text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. I recommend reading Marco's full article to get all the details, since I've only touched on some of the ODF 1.4's many improvements and why it matters, especially when it comes to comparing it to proprietary formatting.
- [34:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I wish there's a quick cheat sheet like what 1.4 introduced. I don't see it in that particular article. I imagine somebody will put that together in the future. It's always interesting to see this sort of the back and forth between Microsoft and like the LibreOffice foundation because they both have ideas about what these file formats should look like and and Microsoft has the audacity to call theirs also open standards. Yes, yes, Microsoft has the audacity to call it an open standard. It's not. It's really not.
- [34:50]
Ken McDonald
It's not open. It may be their internal standard.
- [34:55]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it's open to the people working on Azure, the os, the internal apps, you know, every paid employee of Microsoft.
- [35:06]
Ken McDonald
Why don't they just stick with the standard that they had with Notepad?
- [35:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Just text files. Yeah, just text files are kind of.
- [35:14]
Jeff Massey
Nice because as long as you're locked into that file format, you can't get out. Think how many people would switch out of Office if just. Because a lot of people use Office and just need kind of the basic functionality, they're not using the super advanced features. There's a lot of people that would just go, you know what? I don't need to pay for Office anymore or even the web subscription or the standalone programs because I have full compatibility and anybody that is using it can fully read my format that I'm putting out for my spreadsheet, my PowerPoint, my whatever. And that would. Microsoft doesn't want that. They want to keep everything locked in.
- [35:53]
Jonathan Bennett
So, so, so DocX, like dot Doc X on a Microsoft file, is the Office open XML international standard for Office documents. It's not Open Office, but it's Office Open xml. So crazy.
- [36:09]
Jeff Massey
And it changes whenever they feel somebody's getting close to cracking it open.
- [36:13]
Ken McDonald
Yeah, just about when you do install Office or set up for 365, go in and change the default format you use so it matches the odf.
- [36:27]
Jonathan Bennett
That's an interesting idea. I usually do it the other way around. When I do a LibreOffice install for somebody, I'll go tell it to use Docx by default so that they can just send their documents and things will.
- [36:36]
Ken McDonald
Open up until Microsoft makes an incremental modification.
- [36:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, the nice thing is that Microsoft is always pretty. They're always pretty open to making their own software work against their old versions of their software. It's like an old Docx will pretty much always open in new versions of Word. So you're kind of safe with what LibreOffice is going to spit out as a docx because it just follows along.
- [37:06]
Ken McDonald
I can name one format you can't open anymore with Word.
- [37:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, I know there's several of them.
- [37:12]
Ken McDonald
That Microsoft put out.
- [37:15]
Jonathan Bennett
The Old Works. The old Microsoft Works wps, I think. Yeah, Yep. I think Libya Office and Open Office will open those. I think I've made. I've made people's day by getting their documents back. Find Song Liberia Office for them. Yeah, that's always fun because I came.
- [37:30]
Ken McDonald
Across an old Microsoft Works file that I'd forgot I had. What was how do I get into this?
- [37:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [37:38]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, Jeff, let's talk about RDC AMD's RD seed woes. What's the story here?
- [37:45]
Jeff Massey
Well, this segment's going to come in two parts and both are related to cache eos. So the first is Cash EOS is having issues with RD seed. What is it? RD seed is principally used for seeding software pseudo random number generators with additional entropy where it's not needing really high quality randomness like RD Rand. AMD has acknowledged the issue and a summary of what AMD said about the bug is AMD was notified of a bug in Zen 5 processors that may cause RDC instruction to return 0 at a rate inconsistent with randomness while incorrectly signaling success, indicating a potential misclassification of a failure as a success. This issue was initially reported publicly via the Linux kernel mating list and was not submitted through AMD's Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure, their CVD process. AMD has determined that the 16 bit and 32 bit forms of the RDC instruction on Zen 5 processors are affected. The 60 bit 4 bit form of RD seed is not affected. So why is this a problem for Cash OS specifically? And we'll go in more. There's some others that this will catch, but most distributions don't have this problem. If you have a Zen 5 processor, then cache OS will build the operating system assuming Zen 5 capabilities, and part of that is that RD seed usage is permitted. Now, most distributions do not compile for a family of CPUs and they just use the version 2 or version 3 of compile options, which covers a lot of CPUs and assumes only a few features are supported. Cash U S does this because they build an optimized distribution to get the most speed out of the hardware that they can. There is some discussion on how to handle this, and it comes down to two fixes. One is micro code from amd, which sounds like it is on the way, but we don't know when we'll see it. The other fix is only use the 64 bit version of RDC'd and then you take what you need out of the 64 bit number. Now, it's not been fully decided yet on the path forward. Most people are leaning to the AMD microcode because of the sheer volume of code that would have to be tweaked for the RD seed on the software side, but we'll see how it comes down. Now here's where I say this isn't just a Cache EOS issue as anyone compiling their system with a Zen 5 architecture or even Zen 4 and enabling RD seed will have this problem. So Gentoo or Linux from Scratch could have this problem if you're using optimized compile options. So take a look at the first link in the show notes for all the details and other links in the article to trace the issue back to the first time it was found and much greater details on the progress and the specifics of the issue. So if you want to go in deep there's plenty plenty of links inside links that you can data mine that now the second story is also about Cash OS and how the com compile time optimizations do affect the operating system. This means Michael Larable over at Phronix did some benchmarking between Cashios, Ubuntu 2510 and Fedora 43. They were tested on a Ryzen 5, Zen 5 Ryzen AI Max plus 395 CPU and it used integrated Radeon 8060s graphics. All three of the operating systems were installed just how they come no optimizations, they just ran how they were come out of the box. Benchmarks included games, database functions, compression, encoder tests, rendering tests, many others covering a wide range of use cases and there were more than 60 benchmarks ran with the three distributions. And honestly as expected, Cashios came out on top. It was 7% faster than Fedora and 10% faster than Ubuntu. Now looking at the results and the comments of the testing it was thought where Ubuntu came out on top because it did a few times, it was probably due to the ext4 file system which is pretty fast faster than BTRFS because it doesn't have a lot of the other extra overhead and checks that BTRFS has. In the case of Fedora or Cashios coming out on top it was thought it had to do with the compile optimizations which are used where cache EOS is the most aggressive and they try and take other steps to tune the operating system for the most performance. Now that clear Linux from Intel is gone, which was the distribution which would always win these benchmarks, it looks like Cashios is the new performance crown champion. There's been a request to Michael in in the comments to expand the benchmarking and you know, do things like include play in Debian. People were thinking that maybe Debian would run a little faster because it less canonicalized than Ubuntu is. Susie Tumbleweed, you know people want to see if that rolling distribution is how it fares if Michael does a larger shootout. I Will, I will be on it and I will let you know all about it. Until then, take a look at the second article linked in the show Notes for the full details on each of the benchmarks ran to see if there's a compelling enough reason to change which operating system you're using.
- [43:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, interesting. So the, the RDC'd issue. That's, that's really interesting. I looked into this and so really what's happening is, you know, you're supposed to get like a. Is it the 64 bit that's broken or 64 bit that seems to be working?
- [43:44]
Jeff Massey
64 bit works. It's the 16 and 32 broken.
- [43:47]
Jonathan Bennett
So you say, hey, I want a 16 or a 32 bit number. Which, that's going to be a big number. It's going to be some, some random number. And then you also get a data bit back that says it worked. And about 10% of the time in this one guy's tests, it would come back and say your random number is zero. Like here it is, it's random zero. And oh yeah, it worked. We're good to go. You know, seal of approval. Something, something's going wrong there. It reminds me of the, the X Key XKCD comic where it says random number three, guaranteed random by NIST standards or whatever. Yeah.
- [44:31]
Ken McDonald
Though I would be interested in seeing how Tumbleweed fares in the benchmarks.
- [44:39]
Jonathan Bennett
That would be interesting.
- [44:40]
Jeff Massey
Yeah.
- [44:40]
Jonathan Bennett
Because the Tumbleweed is such a different distro than any of the Debian based ones.
- [44:46]
Jeff Massey
Historically. Yeah, historically, if I'm remembering correctly, it was kind of always mid pack. But that's been a while.
- [44:57]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm sure it has its, its few things where it really shines. Most distros do.
- [45:01]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. There's always even, even the slowest distribution and when they have a huge number roundup of distributions, there's always something that, you know, one of them just dominates at.
- [45:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep.
- [45:15]
Ken McDonald
Though from looking at these benchmarks, I bet Jonathan's happy to see Fedora pulling my head.
- [45:20]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I've got some, I've got some news about that actually. We are going to get back to that Fedora thing right after this.
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Jeff Massey
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Jonathan Bennett
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Jonathan Bennett
Typically takes 15 days.
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Jeff Massey
Free phone via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement. Exactly.
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Jeff Massey
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- [46:30]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first there the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
- [46:59]
Leo Laporte
Hey everybody, Leo Laporte here and I'm going to bug you one more time to join Club twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25% of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more, we can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public. Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you find out more at TWiT TV Club TWiT and thank you so much.
- [47:46]
Jonathan Bennett
So we've talked about this a little bit in the weeks gone by, but there is a new kid on the block. Fedora 43 is finally here. It is out. It became generally available this week and there's a bunch of new things in there and we've talked about some of these and you can go to the release notes and look at all of them. Some of it is as expected. They bumped to the higher Python version, they've bumped to a new open Java version. All of that kind of stuff. There's a few interesting under the hood things like RPM 6.0 is in there, some other plumbing sort of things. And I took a look and I kind of asked myself like, how's the rollout going for people? And found a Reddit thread where multiple people were complaining that it's broken, it doesn't work, and it seemed to be mostly on system upgrades. And it was funny. One of the things that people were saying to do it seemed to be when you're running KDE and the solution was go and install the KDE X11 package. That's the one that's not officially done by the KDE team in Fedora, but it's another Fedora maintainer and I'm curious. I have questions about what's going on there, but apparently for some people that was the workaround that they needed. I am partway through updating the big system behind me to go to Fedora 43. It's on 42 currently. I will let you know if I have problems with it. I don't anticipate it, but I have had to fight with Fedora in the past. So far, the only problems that this machine gives me is it tends to hang BIOS for a couple of minutes and I get too impatient and go twiddle the power button multiple times before I walk away and it finally boots up. But yeah, Fedora 43, it's out. If you are a Fedora fan, it's probably time to go and get it. Jeff, do you run Fedora anywhere?
- [49:53]
Jeff Massey
Not anymore. I did for a while, but now I just got Cashy and Ubuntu.
- [50:00]
Jonathan Bennett
You need to buy another machine so you have someplace to put Fedora.
- [50:04]
Ken McDonald
I'm trying to remember if the Lenovo ThinkPad I've got if I'd put a Fedora on it or not.
- [50:12]
Jonathan Bennett
You could.
- [50:13]
Ken McDonald
I did it one time. I know. I don't know if it's still there.
- [50:16]
Jonathan Bennett
As a real install or virtual machine.
- [50:18]
Ken McDonald
Real install. That was one of the Fedora spins for doing music stuff. Audio production.
- [50:29]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [50:30]
Jeff Massey
I'm just thinking of the conversation in my head. Honey, I've got to have another machine. It's for the show. It's very important. It's for research.
- [50:37]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, absolutely.
- [50:39]
Jeff Massey
I need another machine. It's just got to happen.
- [50:41]
Jonathan Bennett
I'll sign up on that.
- [50:42]
Ken McDonald
She's going to say, fine, they can pay for it.
- [50:46]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm not signing up on that one.
- [50:47]
Jeff Massey
It's only for the show. Go ahead. Yeah, it's important everybody hold your breath for that to happen.
- [50:55]
Jonathan Bennett
That's terrible. All right, so there is another piece of hardware that you could probably run Fedora on, although it is definitely not.
- [51:06]
Ken McDonald
Made for actually lets you run it. I'm going to tell you something about that, but first I'm going to ask you a question.
- [51:15]
Jonathan Bennett
Sure.
- [51:16]
Ken McDonald
Jonathan, would you like a router where you could upgrade its radio when new standards emerge?
- [51:22]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, I have the OpenWRT one, partially disassembled. That has A. What do they call this thing? Is it a Mediatek port? I forget? Microbus. It's got a Microbus port on it and I've actually got a little Lora radio in there running meshtastic on the OpenWRT one, so I sort of already have that.
- [51:48]
Ken McDonald
Well, according to Giorgio Mendoza, you may be interested in the Taurus Omnia NG router. If that's tweak your interest.
- [51:59]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm definitely interested, yes. I was at the conference where they first announced the Taurus Omnia, by the way, one of the Open WRT Conference. Like the first or second Open WRT Conference. It was in Dublin like 10 or 15 years ago. Sorry, go ahead Ken.
- [52:15]
Ken McDonald
Yeah, but basically the Omnia NG router is described as a new open source device focused on security, performance and modularity. The Omnia NG router features a quad core processor, Wi Fi 7 connectivity and M2 based expandability. It is powered by a quad core ARM V8 processor operating at 2.2 GHz and integrates a gigabyte that's 8 gigabyte of onboard EMMC storage along with an NVME slot for expansion. The router supports up to ding 10 gigabits per second networking through one SFP plus WAN port and provides additional 2 and a half HP GB gigabytes per second LAN interfaces. It also adds Wi Fi 7 connect capability and introduces a modular approach to wireless connectivity. This replaces the fixed radio module with an M2 card that can be upgraded and includes unpopulated M2 slots and USB 3.0 ports for additional expansion. The router features a color IPS display for system information and uses passive cooling for maintenance to maintain silent operation during heavy network loads. The router incorporates the adoptive firewall system Turris Sentinel to identify and mitigate threats in real time. The Turris Omnia NG runs Turris OS, a Linux based operating system derived from OpenWRT. It supports LXC containerization, automatic updates and a browser based interface that allows users to install and manage their preferred Linux distributions directly on the device. So you could install your preferred Linux distribution on it?
- [54:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, very cool.
- [54:38]
Ken McDonald
I think your customers would be happy with this.
- [54:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Jonathan the price has been the sticking point historically. I got real excited when the first one was announced and then they told me the price and it's like if I'm going to make some money on top of that, that's going to be a really expensive router for most of the small businesses that I work with.
- [54:57]
Ken McDonald
But you got to point out that it's the initial investment, but you've got the ability to upgrade as time. Time goes on.
- [55:05]
Jonathan Bennett
With this one, I will tell you from someone that's done business in that field, that is an argument that will only work on certain people. And others will say, I shouldn't have to pay for this at all. Dang it. Just give me the $20 router. Make my Internet work. All right, I can do that.
- [55:22]
Ken McDonald
I can do that. Or if you've got a venture capitalist at backing you, maybe offer to rent it to them.
- [55:33]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, there you go. It's a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea. It really running. Yes. Well, the whole, the whole idea of having venture capital backing you so that you get to do these dumb things.
- [55:45]
Ken McDonald
Yeah, that too.
- [55:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [55:48]
Ken McDonald
Because then you got somebody else you got to make happy.
- [55:52]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes. Yes. So Jeff has a story about AI. Take a drink. It combines a lot of weird things, though. We've got AI, we've got Mozilla, and we have Japanese Sumo. I very much want to know how these things go together and we will find out right after this.
- [56:13]
Ken McDonald
Well.
- [56:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first, there, the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
- [56:45]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [57:16]
Jonathan Bennett
Hi there.
- [57:16]
Leo Laporte
Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network you probably already know about. This Week on Tech. Every Sunday I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for this Week in Tech. Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. This Week in Tech from the Twit Network. Thank you.
- [57:48]
Jeff Massey
So AI is always an issue, and while it can do great things, it can greatly screw up things as well. Case in point, it caused the ending of The Sumo Group Sumo stands for Support Mozilla and it's the Japanese language support for Firefox and other Mozilla projects. This group is one of the oldest and most dedicated groups in supporting Mozilla. The group would bring together supporters for Mozilla products and they would translate, maintain and update documentation, tutorials and troubleshooting guides for Firefox and other Mozilla products. The leader of the organization sent a message to disband the group for the reason of Sumo Bot, which is an AI translation tool, and it was released on October 22nd and it started to approve translations and edit existing translations. This was an issue because the Sumo group says quoting it disregards Japanese translation guidelines, resulting in literal and sometimes inaccurate text. It overrode existing localizations, effectively erasing community approved work, and it automatically approved machine translated content for all archived articles within 72 hours, removing the review window for human contributors. It operated without consultation, control or communication with the Japanese community. The result of this was over 300 existing knowledge base articles were overwritten by Sumo Bot. The leader then said the following I quit to contribute to support.mozilla.org I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for sumo bot and AIs. I request to remove all my translation from learned data of Sumo AIs. However, individual Japanese contributors may want to work in in their responsibility. It is their choice. We don't care nor support by so the comments in the Sumo discussion forum had some Mozilla folks talking about what happened and maybe it was related to a bug, but others who translate in another language and in this case Italian. Somebody spoke up and they were talking about how they have to always go in and fix the translations. And they also mentioned it's a very small window in which the bot acts, so they are always in a rush to get things correct. There was also a discussion by a person involved with the AI saying they never expected it to be turned on for all locales. They expected it for the 20 languages which do not have an active translator person or group. So they have roughly 20 languages that are kind of orphaned right now and nobody, nobody's helping work on them. And he thought that's where the bot was going to be used. A good point also brought up is that AI can do translation, but especially in the case of the Sumo group, people were doing transcreation, which is where you have to adapt the message from one language to another while preserving its intent, style, an original tone. It's much deeper and harder to do that than actual literal translation so to take that as in a. I can give a specific example is that that I found out about. I work with teams overseas and one of the sayings in the US we have is the grass is always greener on the other side. Meaning no matter where you're at, it always seems better in somebody else's. Their life is better, what they have is better, they're happier. However you want to take it. Well, I got told that in certain parts of Asia it's far away, drums sound better. So it's not a literal translation. That would be a transcreation. So when you say that it means the same thing, but it's because you don't hear the small imperfections when the drums are far away. But it means, you know, just looking over without any real sense of detail. Things look a lot better when you're not inspecting it up close. So that's where to the same meeting, the same intent has literal translation differences and, and there's a, a lot of things like that that they were talking about that it doesn't. Literal translations fall down a lot of times. So take a look at the article in the show notes and then read the comments in the link on the Sumo discussion forum because there's a lot of insight and people who are deeply involved with the translations and the, and the AI itself adding their comments. So I really hope they can turn this decision around, but only time will tell. But they're gonna have to make a lot of apologies I think because it, they really made the head of the sumo organization pretty, pretty upset.
- [63:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it sounds like, it sounds like that if they were going to turn this around, they missed the window to do so There needed to be a very quick. Oh my goodness, that is not what this was supposed to do. We're gonna go revert all of this and turn the bot off. We're going to fix this and make it right. And they didn't. Yeah. And come back from that.
- [63:26]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it never said who actually. And they, they said, you know, they need to come out and do that restore all the documents to what they originally were, you know, basically undo what the bot did. But because even like I said, even the creator of the bot or at least one of the people that create was was working on it was surprised it was using this waves like this is not what it was for. And there's, there's you know, comments of course of like the language subtleties that direct translation could be insulting in another language, you know that.
- [64:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, absolutely.
- [64:01]
Jeff Massey
It translates over that's and that's where you have to have somebody with localized knowledge to say, no, no, no, you don't say it like this. We're going to insert this other phrase that means the same thing, same intent.
- [64:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Japanese is, Japanese is sort of famous for that, having that idea of polite language. You know, there's, there's three different ways that you can refer to yourself. Three different first person pronouns and if you use one of them, you're either a very small child or you're trying to insult someone. It's. To us English speakers it is the weirdest thing, but I can see that coming up a lot.
- [64:37]
Jeff Massey
Well, they give an example in the, in the comments too of where they say, and this is in the, the mailing list of the Sumo site that somebody posted in there something in Japanese. And I'm like, oh, what is this? So I translated it and at least in this, and I'm now I'm kind of trusting AI on this. But they said it's, it's how you say thank you, but it's, it's generally used in a form that you're, you're thanking somebody that works for you, not a superior. And so it could come off as rather, yes, demeaning, a little insulting if you, you know, you think you're saying thank you, but it's like you're kind of given a backhanded compliment, you know.
- [65:24]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah. This is, this is unfortunate to see. This is, this is going to be a real problem for the, the translator community. It's, you know, this is the kind of thing you're going to see in a lot of, not just projects, but a lot of different places. Like is the, is the AI good enough? And then do you get rid of the real people running the show once you believe the AI is good enough? And then like the next question is, what's going to go wrong as a result?
- [65:50]
Ken McDonald
Well, the translation, the bot, it's going to get something it doesn't know.
- [65:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [65:56]
Ken McDonald
Of course, as trouble under translating, especially if it's trying to translate one of those double or triple entendre that we like to do in English.
- [66:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. There's another interesting thing in here that I've recently discovered has the potential to be a really big problem. One of the things that the head translator said is I request the removal of my translations from Sumo's AI data sets. That's basically impossible. You know, the way you do that, you do, you start over, you redo the training without it. And I saw a, I saw an article where someone was talking about The EU privacy laws and the right to be forgotten. It's like, how do you, how do you jive the right to be forgotten with AI data sets that came from the Internet, Your name, you what, that whatever it is you feel you have the right to be forgotten is inside that data set now. And the only way to get rid of it is to delete it and retrain it. And it's really immovable or a unstoppable force about to meet an immovable wall. Because there's no way that you just can't. You can't do that and have AI the way that's trained right now. And the law says that you have to.
- [67:22]
Jeff Massey
And maybe, maybe the way to think about it, because it's. This stuff is tokenized. But a good kind of an analogy would be, okay, I make a file, Jonathan makes a file, Ken makes a file, and we merge them and hash them, and then the original files are gone. And someone says, okay, Jonathan wants his information removed out of the hash.
- [67:46]
Jonathan Bennett
All that stuff is so mixed together, there's no way to get it back.
- [67:48]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, you can't. The only way is you'd have to generate a new hash. Just saying, oh, now we're going to get the original Jeff file and the original Ken file and then hash that. Because you can't pull it out. It's just not how it works.
- [68:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I will say that. I actually, I think the whole right to be forgotten laws, I think they're a terrible idea for multiple reasons. This is only one of them. I think you also have problems with, like, trying to preserve history. And the idea of the right to be forgotten gets in the way of that. There's like YouTube videos that people have taken down that were historically important, they're just gone forever. And sometimes things like copyright law, things like the right to be forgotten are part of that, part of that problem. So, yeah, I'm not a huge fan of it.
- [68:39]
Jeff Massey
And here's some transcreationisms. Just in the comment section, Ilag says, asked to get the salt out of the salad, where Quippy says, no way to get the toothpaste back into the tube. Depending on your culture, that may or may not have a lot of meaning or I don't understand that.
- [69:01]
Jonathan Bennett
I, you know, yeah, I get the meaning of the salt out of the salad, but that's not a turn of phrase that we would use.
- [69:09]
Jeff Massey
No, that's. That's why it kind of caught my eyes like, oh, I know what it means. And it's the same as the no way to get the toothpaste back into the tube, but it's. I've never heard anybody actually utter that.
- [69:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah. Interesting stuff. All right.
- [69:25]
Ken McDonald
I have seen where people have said, take it back and bring me one without. So.
- [69:32]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, that, that's, that's the same thing as. For that. You got to start over.
- [69:35]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes.
- [69:36]
Ken McDonald
Yep.
- [69:37]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, well, we've got one more story to cover and that is about gnome and x11. And this one's real. This is real short. GNOME has merged a pull request to drop the X11 backend. It's gone. No more. No more X11 gnome. That's it. That's the story. Bye bye, bye.
- [70:00]
Ken McDonald
But what about X11's applications?
- [70:04]
Jonathan Bennett
They'll still work because you've got the shimmer. Yeah.
- [70:10]
Ken McDonald
Wayland.
- [70:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. So this is just the back end going away.
- [70:16]
Jeff Massey
So. So, so you don't have that server anymore, right?
- [70:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, the. The only place that server runs is as a Wayland application to be able to. To run your legacy X11 stuff.
- [70:30]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. The actual X11 itself is gone. It's just the program interfaces that use it is still there. And that's where X11 comes. X Wayland comes in and says, okay, we're going to pretend to be an X server so we can talk to you.
- [70:45]
Ken McDonald
And I've got 1x11 app that I wonder, will still work.
- [70:51]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, apps still work. It's. It's. You have to run GNOME with a Wayland system, unless it's a very specific.
- [71:02]
Jonathan Bennett
App doing one of the more creative things that X11 lets you do. So, for example, the Xeyes app, I don't know if you guys remember that. It's the one where it's just the window with the two little eyeballs and they follow your cursor around. That doesn't work very well running under Wayland because the app can't spy on where the cursor is. So broken by design.
- [71:23]
Ken McDonald
My X eyes won't work anymore. Nope. Unless I'm running a K G with a X11, which you don't have much.
- [71:34]
Jeff Massey
Time frame on that either. Most. Most distributions are getting set to either have or they're getting set to drop x11.
- [71:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Indeed.
- [71:45]
Ken McDonald
Because wasn't that one of the ways of testing whether or not a window was working for.
- [71:52]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [71:53]
Ken McDonald
With X Wayland or not.
- [71:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that was, that was. There was. There was a way to use that to test whether you know how a window is being written to your screen. I'm overlooking at the KDE blog and I'm trying to remember. They Had a statement about this when they were going to Continue maintaining the X11 backend for KDE and when they were going to drop it. And I don't. It may be that they. They promised to maintain it all the way through Plasma 6 and he also.
- [72:33]
Ken McDonald
Says drop it with plasma.
- [72:35]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, they didn't say that they were going to drop it. It was just the. The commitment was that they were going to keep the X11 back in for all of the six releases. Yeah, I'm not seeing anything more. More concrete than that. So we'll have to wait and see what KDE is doing. Are they going to follow the gnome? Are they going to follow the GNOME train? Are they going to do what GNOME did here, use it as cover to get rid of it? Yeah.
- [73:04]
Jeff Massey
The clock is ticking on that.
- [73:08]
Jonathan Bennett
I think so We've talked about this a couple of times but you're about to see with Red Hat, one of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions is about to hit like the extended support and then drop off of support and that is going to remove a lot of the budget for fixing problems in X11. And I think that is actually a big part of this that not very many people are talking about. But it's one of the reasons that so many distros are intentionally leaving jumping ship.
- [73:37]
Ken McDonald
Does anybody know any where there's a list of Wayland applications or commands that will replace some of the old X11 applications or commands that were used like Xrander?
- [73:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I think there may be some. I'm sure you can find some places. So like the old SSH application forwarding, that was one that famously people were complaining that that didn't work under Wayland. And so someone made the Waypipe application which does that. It lets you run those the same way and then you've got some things like xrender that kind of stuff is no longer handled by Wayland per se. It's handled by your desktop environment. And so all of those things are now, you know, inside of. So for example in KDE it's now part of K screen doctor Is what you would use and gnome I'm sure has its equivalent command because that's kind of what Wayland did is it said a lot of this code that was inside X11. It doesn't make sense to have there when so much of this is being done by the desktop environments. Just sort of moved that area of responsibility to the desktop environments and does.
- [74:55]
Jeff Massey
But I'm trying to think there was.
- [74:56]
Ken McDonald
Environment provide some way to do that from the terminal.
- [75:01]
Jonathan Bennett
So K Screen doctor is what it is in kde and I'm sure Gnome does well.
- [75:05]
Jeff Massey
And I remember when they were starting on some of this, even a couple years ago, there were. A few years ago there was. People were talking about wow. But you know, X11 does. And I can't remember was remote servers or redirection of Windows or I don't remember exactly what it was. But the developers like actually X11 hasn't been able to do that for a very long time because we had to.
- [75:26]
Jonathan Bennett
Kill that feature for whatever tech for security reasons usually.
- [75:30]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. And it's like. So what you say is, oh, I can't. I can't afford to lose this. You haven't had it, you know, many years.
- [75:38]
Jonathan Bennett
It's.
- [75:39]
Jeff Massey
It's not, you know, it's kind of a straw man.
- [75:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, yep, Absolutely. All right.
- [75:47]
Jeff Massey
Well, yes, Jack, just a side note here. So I looked up. So you know, I said 6.6 is coming out in November or I mean February and if you normally it goes to about 5 or 6 before you get a full version before we see KDE 7 probably right now they've got 6.6.6 as July 7th. So that's probably, you know, sometime late spring, early summer. We're going to see the start of 7.0 and that's probably where they're going to go. Yeah, we're just getting rid of X11.
- [76:30]
Jonathan Bennett
They really missed an opportunity to put that 6.6.6 release on either October 31st or 13th of the month. That happened to be a Friday. Just would have been on the nose.
- [76:41]
Jeff Massey
They did. I was. Yeah, I wasn't gonna. I wasn't going to go there.
- [76:46]
Jonathan Bennett
I went there. I'm not afraid.
- [76:49]
Jeff Massey
Yeah.
- [76:50]
Ken McDonald
But I made some future command line tips.
- [76:56]
Jonathan Bennett
There you go.
- [76:57]
Jeff Massey
So probably in sometime at 26, that probably would be my New Year's prediction is. Or one of them will be that KDE in 26 is going to drop x11.
- [77:12]
Jonathan Bennett
You think in 26 could be. Yeah, we will see. We will see. All right, we've got some command line tips and we are going to cover those right after a quick break.
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- [78:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first there, the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes. All right, Ken, what is your tip for us today?
- [78:57]
Ken McDonald
Well, I declare that my tip is going to help you with handling variables, functions, and their attributes. In fact, I'm going to show how you can declare variables and functions. Now, most of you know that you can type A equals hello. And then if you do echo dollar sign A, it prints out hello. Right?
- [79:22]
Jeff Massey
Mm.
- [79:23]
Ken McDonald
Okay, let me go ahead and pull up my terminal here. Is that big enough for everybody that's watching the video to see?
- [79:32]
Jonathan Bennett
It looks pretty good.
- [79:33]
Ken McDonald
Okay, now, as I said, we can always type let's get it. Give that the. I think, as I said, A equals hello. I don't want that. I want that. And then we can echo dollar sign A and it gives you hello. Now, one thing you can do is you can also put a declare in front of that. That and choose some of the options that are available to it for setting certain attributes for some of those variables or functions. You'll look in here, you'll see you've got quite a few options. I'm just going to touch on some of those. I'm going to let you all play around with the others. The first one I'm going to touch on is the dash lowercase A, which lets you make names into indexed arrays. So if I do a declare dash A A equals hello. Or just. I'm just going to say A. And now we can type in echo or A equals. Let's go. A.
- [81:27]
Jonathan Bennett
A bracket.
- [81:28]
Ken McDonald
Ooh.
- [81:33]
Jonathan Bennett
One.
- [81:37]
Ken McDonald
Equals. Get my keys. Hands on the. Find the. There we go. Let's put that in quotes. All right. It's the pressure.
- [82:03]
Jonathan Bennett
It's the pressure. It's getting to him. You get it?
- [82:06]
Ken McDonald
Okay, so I just type let's go back up to echo A. It still gives us hello. Let's put where's that bracket? And I'm going to put the at Sign, close bracket. I don't want to shift. What do you think is going to happen here? Huh?
- [82:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Not that. All right, so how do you. How do you dereference it then? If. If do. If that's the way I would expect it to work.
- [82:57]
Ken McDonald
Yeah, let's see.
- [83:02]
Jonathan Bennett
Is that the way you expected it to work too, Ken?
- [83:04]
Ken McDonald
No, I'm trying to.
- [83:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, okay, good.
- [83:08]
Ken McDonald
Because let's do this. But another option that you can use is a capital way for making associative arrays and the associative arrays where it treats it as a key and value.
- [83:34]
Jonathan Bennett
It looks like you can't do it with just the dollar sign. It has to be dollar sign, curly brackets.
- [83:41]
Ken McDonald
Yeah, I think you're right. Curly brackets.
- [83:43]
Jonathan Bennett
It is curly brackets, but it's square brackets, so. Yep, okay, that did work. Yeah. Interesting. This commit not found the dollar sign.
- [84:15]
Ken McDonald
In there, at least trying to remember.
- [84:21]
Jonathan Bennett
I think it may be. I think it may be square brackets there. Yeah, I think it's square brackets there.
- [84:32]
Jeff Massey
So.
- [84:34]
Jonathan Bennett
So if you do that right after the dollar sign, between the dollar sign and the A, put in a curly bracket open.
- [84:42]
Ken McDonald
Right. Put the curly bracket here.
- [84:52]
Jonathan Bennett
You're saying, yeah, the open curly and then the A and then the open square bracket and then you're at. Then close the square and close the query. Try that. There you go.
- [85:21]
Ken McDonald
But the declare, what I really like is declare dash F because this lets you go in and look at all your functions and what they expand out to.
- [85:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh.
- [85:46]
Ken McDonald
Now if you just do a capital F. That's all the functions I've got that's created by the system. Now I've got a file that I keep my functions that I've written and I can load it with this command. It's an alias to the actual file. And at the bottom of that I want to pull it up here. Let's see, that's the actual file.
- [86:35]
Jonathan Bennett
My functions sh.
- [86:39]
Ken McDonald
And this gives you the end of it. And you'll see I've got the declare capital F. And then I made sure I actually had to go through and rename some of them. So they began with a capital letter. And then I used a grip dash capital E and search for any capital letter at the very first of it. And then I sorted to get this listing when I load that file in the command prompt.
- [87:11]
Jonathan Bennett
Cool.
- [87:12]
Ken McDonald
Which makes it easy for me to just go like for example, to the connection function and then I can immediately paste it to the line. And that help. That just sets up my SSH file system.
- [87:30]
Jonathan Bennett
One of the other cool Things flipping through the manual for declare. One of the other really cool things in there is you can force a variable to be an integer. So you could do sort of a poor man's typing, as in data types inside of bash. That's really interesting.
- [87:47]
Ken McDonald
In fact, let's go ahead and you can even do some debugging. This is an example.
- [88:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it sounds less there.
- [88:09]
Ken McDonald
And you'll see what this is. What if it runs it and you've got the command and then what the command does the output from it. You see it going through. And one of the commands that you have is to clear dash function T for a trace function. Now when you do the normal function, it comes back with inside normal function fired for echo. Finished. And it just does that. But if you come down to the trace fired for traced function. Fired for trace function debug fired for echo inside the trace function. Inside the trace function. Notice how you're calling the trace function and it puts the fire trapped fired for trace function before it actually does the command itself.
- [89:26]
Jonathan Bennett
I can see that being super useful.
- [89:31]
Ken McDonald
So that there's the actual file itself just playing around.
- [89:36]
Jeff Massey
Nice.
- [89:37]
Ken McDonald
And the other one is the dash G for global. So say you are in a function and you realize you're creating a variable, but you want to make it a global variable. The dash D would do that.
- [89:53]
Jonathan Bennett
Cool.
- [89:54]
Ken McDonald
So it can be used globally.
- [89:57]
Jonathan Bennett
I like it. That is a very useful command to know about. I didn't know that existed at all. I think that's a BASH ism. Like it's built into bash.
- [90:05]
Jeff Massey
That is. That is built into bash. Because on Fish, its set is the equivalence.
- [90:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's where you get into that sort of weird gray area of. My script only runs inside of bash, not any UNIX shell.
- [90:22]
Jeff Massey
Yeah.
- [90:25]
Jonathan Bennett
All right.
- [90:25]
Ken McDonald
And manual page for that or there is no manual page for it. You have to pull up a manual for BASH to dig into how to use it.
- [90:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [90:39]
Jeff Massey
Built in.
- [90:41]
Jonathan Bennett
That is built in. All right, Jeff, you've got a tip again about butterfs. What are we doing this week?
- [90:49]
Jeff Massey
Well, you know, last week we talked about BTRFs scrub. Well, this week we're going to cover butterfs. Check. Well, where scrub took care of. Check some errors. Check. Will go in and check the actual file system integrity. And if you have been using BTRFs fsck, because a lot of times on like the ext file systems, FSCK is one of the main file system check utilities. That's deprecated. And if you use it, it's simply just A link or an alias pointing to Better FS check. The link in the show notes is just a direct link to the Better FS file system documentation. And they, they do a nice job because they break it into safe and unsafe operations. For example, just running BetterFS space check. It'll scan for drives with the correct file system. You could. You don't even have to unmount your drive. It will, it will say it's mounted, but you can use a force command and it'll do it. But it's considered safe because it will scan the drive but it's not going to make any changes. I mean, you don't want to actually repair a drive that's mounted very, very bad to make changes, you know, while flying the plane, so to speak. But it'll look for issues and it'll just report them to you. Now, I'm not going to deep dive into all the options because it's like fsck. There's a lot of things you can do, but in general it breaks the sections into. You have the safe options and that's how do you want the data to look. Limit the memory consumption in trade for taking a longer scan time. And if you want to look at specific parts of the drive, you can just look at subsections or specific pieces of the file system. There's an unsafe options which are dealing with repairs and changes in the drive, both fixing issues to rebuilding some of the both fixing issues. And there's also some file trees that you can rebuild from scratch. And you know it. They call out in this section which options to use with care and which ones that if you don't know exactly what you're doing, don't even use the option because you have a chance to really mess things up. But they're really good about calling out which is which. So take a look at the article linked in the show notes for all the details on how to check and care for your BetterFS drive and happy Scanning.
- [93:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, super useful to know about. All right, I've got a tip. It's not exactly a command line tip, but it is. It's fun and that is. I went looking for a soundboard solution and I came up with Amplitude Soundboard. There's a couple others out there that run on Linux. The one that I found that looked the most interesting was no longer being updated and so that was kind of a no go for me. Found Amplitude and it's really pretty simple. You just have a grid of buttons. You can right click on one of them and you get the option to create a new clip here, and then you can click it and it'll play it well. So I'm doing some really fun. Some really fun shenanigans with this. Like the bell sound. I have that set to a hotkey of left alt plus right alt B bravo, the B key. And I then have in my stream deck software a command line command to run to send the alt B keys to the system. And so I can now just go up and hit the stream deck and get the bell to ring. So that took a bit of doing to figure out and then to route them together. It's actually pretty simple.
- [94:54]
Leo Laporte
The.
- [94:56]
Jonathan Bennett
Application Amplitude Soundboard, it just creates an ALSA plugin on your pipewire stream. And so you can open up something like a QPW graph. And just once you've started, whatever you're recording your zoom call or whatever, you can just drag and drop the amplitude node to the. The record node, you know, left and left and right, and it just comes up and works like it. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out for the first time, but it seems to be working fairly well. And I enjoy it. It's fun to play with. It'll be. It'll be my D and D sound effects. So I.
- [95:34]
Jeff Massey
And. And I have the page up and it's. There's a lot of format audio for file formats it supports. So whatever you have your sound clip in, it's probably a supported clip. Yeah.
- [95:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, absolutely.
- [95:49]
Ken McDonald
That's what it looks like.
- [95:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, There you go. That is what it looks like.
- [95:53]
Ken McDonald
And I started that from the command line.
- [95:57]
Jonathan Bennett
The app image. Yes. We talked about app images earlier. Yes, it is an app image. Pretty. A pretty cool one, too. I enjoy it. It's fun.
- [96:05]
Jeff Massey
Yeah.
- [96:06]
Ken McDonald
I just got to get some sound clips now.
- [96:09]
Jonathan Bennett
I. I very carefully went looking for clip libraries that are, you know, licensed, Creative Commons or, you know. No, no copyright. All that good stuff. They're out there. You just have to do a little bit of legwork. All right, let's give each of the guys, if they want it, the chance to plug something or get the last word in. We'll let Jeff go first.
- [96:33]
Jeff Massey
Nothing really crazy to plug. So. Poetry Corner, here's about some hardware again. Long ago, your capacity mattered. Storing dozens of floppies on platters. Your 20 megs ample space. Now, that's far from the case. My sledgehammer. Your cylinders shattered. Talking about old rust. Spinning rust. Hard drives.
- [96:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes.
- [96:59]
Jeff Massey
So, you know what? Have a great week, everybody. We love seeing you here. Be sure to come back.
- [97:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep. Absolutely, Ken.
- [97:07]
Ken McDonald
Well, I've got in the show notes a link to a article that Thena Kumaragan Garunathan. Right. Wrote. It's a compelling opinion piece about self hosting versus streaming. I know those of y' all who do self host will probably agree with it.
- [97:30]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, yep. Very interesting stuff. All right. Appreciate you guys both being here. It's been a lot of fun. Right?
- [97:40]
Jeff Massey
And one thing about those who are not in Club Twit, when we talked about the language translations, there has been a lot of talks from various languages about how things translate and don't translate. So you're missing out on a lot of interesting information.
- [97:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Immediate feedback. Yes, it's been great.
- [98:00]
Jeff Massey
All right.
- [98:01]
Jonathan Bennett
I do want to plug Hackaday. That is the current home of Floss Weekly. It's where those are at. It's also where my security column goes live every Friday morning. So if that's something that tickles your fancy, feel free to go check that out over at Hackaday. Just want to say thank you to everyone that's here. Those that watch or listen, whether you get us live or on the download, we appreciate it. And we'll be back next week on the Untitled Living show.