Untitled Linux Show 235: Happy Holidays

Summary

Untitled Linux Show 235: Happy Holidays | December 28, 2025

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Episode Overview

This special holiday edition of the Untitled Linux Show brings together Jonathan Bennett, Rob Campbell, Jeff Geerling, and a call-in from Ken Starks to recap their predictions from the past year, discuss key Linux and open source stories of 2025, share their favorite moments and command line tips, and make bold predictions for 2026. With relaxed banter and deep technical insight, the hosts settle scores on last year's predictions, reflect on the biggest surprises and misses, and share what they're most excited (and worried) about for Linux and open source in the coming year.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Reviewing 2025: Predictions vs. Reality

Rob Campbell’s 2025 Predictions (03:05–08:40)

• 3% Linux Market Share on Steam
  • Prediction: Linux would hit 3% in the Steam gaming survey.
  • Result: "I nailed that one. Linux hit 3.05% in October of 2025, almost 50% more than macOS on the same survey." – Rob Campbell (03:30)
• Cosmic Desktop Final Release
  • Prediction: A final release in 2025.
  • Result: Not quite at year’s end, but close; final release likely early next year.
• New Steam Console Announced
  • Prediction: Valve (or another) would announce a new Steam console.
  • Result: Announced but not yet released; also, emergence of Steam Deck competitors.
• Proxmox Datacenter to See Major Improvements
  • Prediction: Proxmox would make big strides, replacing VMware.
  • Result: “That metric was a big failure… the Proxmox datacenter software hasn’t seen a single update since the alpha a year ago.” – Rob (06:02)
• Premium ARM Linux Laptop
  • Prediction: Expected to hit the market.
  • Result: Upstart products fizzled out, with a lack of manufacturer support.
• Wayland Adoption by Straggling Distros
  • Prediction: The “Wayland stragglers” would finalize their plans.
  • Result: Partial success—most mainstream distros moving to Wayland or offering experimental support, but some holdouts remain.

Jonathan Bennett’s 2025 Predictions (08:42–13:49)

• HDR Support in Browsers on Linux
  • Result: “If you’re on Wayland, you just turn it on and it works.” – Jonathan (09:29)
• Culture War Issues and Forks in Open Source
  • **More drama and bans happened, but forks haven’t gained traction or threatened original projects.
• Potential BRICS Kernel Emergence
  • Predicted: If geopolitical tension continued, a separate kernel could appear.
  • Reality: “If this has happened, it’s not made the news.” – Jonathan (12:10)
• Raspberry Pi 500 Pro/XL Launch
  • Prediction: An enhanced Pi 500 would be released.
  • Result: The Pi 500 Plus debuted, matching the spirit of the forecast.
• Software Liability Legislation
  • Prediction: Legislative movement towards holding software companies liable for damages.
  • Result: Ongoing evolution, but full liability has not materialized.

Jeff Geerling’s 2025 Predictions (16:26–24:51)

• Kernel LTS 6.18 & 7.0
  • Prediction: New major Linux kernel version.
  • Reality: Not quite yet; possibly early next year.
• AMD Graphics Sales Stumble
  • Prediction/Result: “Nvidia handed them the market on a plate, and they price themselves out… they didn’t order enough units.” – Jeff (17:08)
• CUDA Alternatives Gaining Traction
  • Progress: “I think it’s actually becoming a real alternative now… the performance gap is closed quite a bit.” – Jeff (20:34–21:42)
• Ubuntu vs Fedora as Cutting Edge
  • Result: Core releases are fighting to be first with new features, like early Rust integration.
• First Major Distro Proposes Dropping X11
  • Prediction: Fedora or Ubuntu would propose dropping X11.
  • Result: Directionally accurate; proposals and momentum, but not yet full abandonment.
• 2025 Was a 'Boring' Year for Hardware
  • Consensus: Minor updates from CPU and GPU vendors, no revolutionary leaps this year.

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Biggest Misses and Surprises (25:01–28:46)

• Windows 11’s Rocky Reception
  • “I missed how much of a train wreck Windows 11 was going to be… particularly because of all of the weird stuff Microsoft keeps cramming in there.” – Jonathan (25:37)
• Mainstream Tech's Shift Toward Linux
  • LTTS, Gamers Nexus, and PewDiePie all gave Linux more attention than expected.
• Steam Frame Announcement
  • Valve’s hardware moves were surprising in timing and execution.
• Clear Linux Project Disappearance
  • Significant layoffs at Intel led to the end of Clear Linux and cuts to other open source initiatives.
• ExLibre Fork of X11
  • The rise of ExLibre to preserve X11 was “obvious in retrospect,” given resistance to Wayland transitions.

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Favorite News Stories of 2025 (29:21–34:54)

• Valve's Ongoing Contributions
  • “All of the Valve announcements, their hardware, their Steam survey showing Linux on the rise, Proton on ARM—everything Valve.” – Rob Campbell (29:32)
• Wayland's HDR Progress
  • Valve and KDE drove important HDR updates, pulling Wayland forward as a desktop option.
• Proton's Continuous Improvement
  • Better gaming compatibility on Linux, thanks to Valve’s investment.
• “Anubis” Linux Catgirls Meme
  • “It’s hilarious and it’s fun and it was a lot of fun to talk about…” – Jonathan
• Linus Torvalds' Softer Yet Effective Rants
  • “He lets his rage out—it’s more G-rated now.” – Jeff (31:47)
• Benchmarking, Distro, and Hardware Comparisons
  • Jeff: “I just love comparing distros and hardware—what can I say, I’m a hardware guy.” (31:02)

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Important Stories: Not Favorites, but Big Impact (39:10–41:16)

• AI’s Impact on Open Source
  • Large influx of AI-generated code, “slop security vulnerabilities,” and maintainers forced to wade through low-quality, mass-generated pull requests.
• Firefox Losing (But Thunderbird Gaining) Market Share
• Ubuntu's Aggressive Rust Adoption
  • “Ubuntu really pushing the limits with Rust is potentially pretty big.” – Rob Campbell (41:08)

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Favorite Linux Command-Line Tips of the Year (41:25–44:28)

• Rob Campbell
  • Uptime Kuma for service monitoring (41:37)
  • Systemd auto-restart for failed services
  • Ansible and Semaphore UI for automation management
• Jonathan Bennett
  • strings utility: “Super useful for figuring out what’s going on inside a binary…” (43:12)
• Jeff Geerling
  • cheat: “Like TLDR, but more complete, pulls from Stack Overflow and elsewhere.” (43:34)
• Ken Starks
  • wpctl status for Pipewire control (44:00)
  • topgrade for updating all systems centrally

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Predictions for 2026 (44:28–56:49)

Rob Campbell

• Asus Launches Their Own Steam Machine
• Linux Hits 4% on Steam Survey (no stretch to 5%)
• Wayland Goes Stable (Not Default) on Mint Cinnamon; XFCE makes progress
• Announcement (not yet shipping) of a Tuxedo Computers Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM laptop
• Canonical Will Roll Back Some Rust Changes for 24.04 LTS

Jonathan Bennett

• Next Steam Deck Announced (ARM-Based)
• Anti-Cheat Support for Linux Becomes Ubiquitous
• Continued Wayland Drama (“That group… are just really good at their drama.” – Jonathan 46:59)
• NPM Security Overhaul as large-scale attacks persist and "worm" packages spread (49:17)
• x86 Decline Begins in Earnest: ARM and RISC-V see more attention amid Windows 11 malaise

Jeff Geerling

• At Least One Major Game (e.g., Fortnite, COD) Ships with Working Anti-Cheat on Steam/Linux
• Open Source NVIDIA Driver Hits ≥80% of Proprietary Driver Performance
  • "I think we will have an Nvidia open source driver within 80% of the proprietary driver." – Jeff (52:14)
• Ubuntu Moves Away from GNOME as Default, Switches to Cosmic or Reboots Unity
  • “Normally I would say KDE, but they’re going to probably… do their own thing.” – Jeff (53:07)
• Modest CPU, Significant GPU Hardware Leaps
• The AI Bubble Deflates (But It’s Not a Pop):
  • "It's not a bubble, it's a balloon… We're going to see people take a chill on AI a little bit…" – Jeff (54:50; 56:49)

Ken Starks

• Pipewire Version 1.6.0 Early in 2026
• Video Routing Advancements, but Not ‘Prime Time’ Ready

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If you’re on Wayland, you just… turn it on and [HDR] works. No more hoops to jump through.” – Jonathan Bennett (09:29)
• "AMD: Nvidia handed them the market on a plate...and they price themselves out of it." – Jeff Geerling (17:08)
• “I think at this point those people are not stragglers…they are just rebels. They're very happily where they're at.” – Jonathan Bennett on X11 holdouts (07:10)
• “Steam Frame…did not see that one coming.” – Jonathan (26:43)
• “All of the Valve announcements — hardware, Steam survey, Proton on ARM — everything Valve.” – Rob Campbell (29:32)
• “The command I actually use all the time…is strings.” – Jonathan Bennett (43:12)

Fun Ending & Community Spirit

• Jeff’s Dr. Seuss-style technical manual reading:
  “If the label on your cable on the gable at your house says network is connected to the button on your mouse…” (58:31–59:58)
• “I was worried it was not going to end!” – Rob Campbell (60:00)
• Ken’s advice: “Review your backup processes…and test your recovery methods. It doesn’t do any good to back up and not be able to recover.” (60:31)
• “As sure as I’m a poet, the sucker is going to hang.” – Jeff Geerling, quoting the poem (59:48)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Start | |--------------------------------------------|----------| | Last Year’s Predictions Recap | 03:05 | | Notable Fails & Surprises | 25:01 | | Favorite News Stories | 29:21 | | Important News (non-favorites) | 39:10 | | Favorite Command-Line Tips | 41:25 | | 2026 Predictions Roundtable | 44:28 | | Wrap-up & Holiday Messages | 58:31 |

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Tone & Style

The episode maintains a conversational, geeky, and good-humored tone, with in-jokes, gentle ribbing, and cheerful holiday wishes. The hosts are frank about both wins and misses, offering honest—but optimistic—takes on the future of Linux and open source.

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Summary

This holiday roundtable provided listeners with a brisk but comprehensive survey of Linux and open source in 2025, including both triumphs (Valve’s impact, HDR and gaming strides, mythic memes) and travails (hardware dullness, open source drama, security blunders). The hosts remain hopeful about 2026, forecasting more Steam-driven market share, further hardware evolution, more Wayland drama, and the relentless rise of ARM and open drivers. With playful banter, honest self-reflection, and charming chaos, it’s the perfect capstone for a year in Linux.

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Transcript

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[Jonathan Bennett]

Required.

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[Rob Campbell]

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. One of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's Unlimited Wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment.

[Commercial Announcer]

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[Jonathan Bennett]

See mintmobile.com hey folks, last year we had predictions and some of them even happened. We go over and settle the score, talk about the things that we missed, the big stories and what is coming. We think in 2026 you don't want to miss it. So stay tuned.

[Rob Campbell]

Podcasts you love from people you Trust.

[Jonathan Bennett]

This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 200 for December 27th. Happy holidays. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with Linux. But this is a little bit different. This is the Saturday between Christmas and New Year's and it means that right now the lights are off at TWiT and we are coming to you from Christmas past. Well, actually about a month past and we have prerecorded this segment. We are going to go over our predictions from last year, talk about our favorite stories from this year, talk about the surprises, and then look ahead and see what we think is coming. It is at the very least going to Be me, Jeff and Rob. And we may get some extras cut in from Ken. I'm not sure. That depends upon how much magic the people at TWIT want to do. And Ken actually gets his recorded. But welcome, guys, to this very special holiday edition of the Untitled Linux Show.

[Rob Campbell]

Happy holidays.

[Jeff Geerling]

Love being here, as always.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, this will be fun. All right, so we're going to start with Rob, and Rob is going to tell us about his prediction. In fact, I can read Rob's predictions. Rob, here were your predictions. What's that old TV show this is your life or something? Rob, this is your predictions. You said first off that Linux would hit 3% on the Steam survey. That happened, didn't it?

[Rob Campbell]

I nailed that one. Linux hit 3.05% in October of 2025. And I would like to also just say that that was 50. Almost 50% more than macOS on the same Steam gaming survey.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes. You also said we would get a Cosmic Desktop final release this year.

[Rob Campbell]

Did that happen at the time of this recording? Not yet, but their last announcement, last time they announced, they said they plan to release by end of year, so in December is what they planned. So right now it's still too soon to call. We're going to have to judge this in the new year.

[Jeff Geerling]

It's close.

[Jonathan Bennett]

There's going to be a photo finish.

[Rob Campbell]

I think it's close enough, but.

[Jeff Geerling]

You get at least partial credit.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, yeah, I'd say. All right. Rob also said that we would get a new Steam console, probably from Valve, but maybe from someone else, which is interesting.

[Rob Campbell]

So, I mean, I nailed this, but I didn't. I mean, so this has been announced and I don't recall if I specifically said it'd just be announced or we'd actually have it. So it's announced. We don't have it yet, but I don't know. That's a good prediction there, I think it was.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I also find it real interesting that you hedged your bet and said that maybe somebody else will bring out a Steam console and other people have brought out, like, Steam Deck competitors.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, I wasn't even thinking that.

[Jeff Geerling]

But it was pretty close, though. All right, I'll give you that one.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You also said that Proxmox would replace VMware or try to replace VMware.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, well, and I said they would see major improvements as it tries to replace VMware. And then I said that the measuring metric for that was going to be a final release of Proxmox Datacenter. And at this time of the recording, this one is definitely a. Well, it's a failure. Based off of the metric as proxmox itself, it has seemed some nice updates, but. And I've heard many businesses switching to it. I've even, you know, even some data centers, you know, not where I work, but I know of at least one ISP that has switched to Proxmox from VMware. But the Proxmox data center software itself unfortunately has not seen a single update since the alpha was released a year ago. So that metric was a big failure. I thought they'd at least have another alpha, at least. I don't know what's going on there.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep, Yep. All right. Did you get your. Your Premium ARM Linux laptop?

[Rob Campbell]

I did not quite. You know, I thought that was a softball prediction for sure to happen. Maybe, I don't know, maybe I didn't think that. I think.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I don't know.

[Rob Campbell]

But it kind of fizzled out. There were plans and they got canceled.

[Jonathan Bennett]

It's interesting, isn't it, that all of that didn't go quite as well as people anticipated and the brakes got put on.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah. It just seems like those ex Elites that came out just didn't quite have the manufacturer support and weren't really up to what was needed for ARM yet.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, interesting. And then your last prediction from 2024, looking forward to 2025, was that the Whelen stragglers would be finalizing their plans to be all in on Wayland.

[Rob Campbell]

Well, what do you guys think?

[Jeff Geerling]

I'd give you about 70% credit. There's still a lot of people really hanging on to that x11 warm blanket.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I think at this point those people are not stragglers. I think they are just rebels. They're not. Yeah, they're not. They're not straggling. They are. They're very happily where they're at.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah. And I'm not even so much talking about the people. It's the distros.

[Jonathan Bennett]

So still though, I still. You're going to have distros that their whole thing is going to be, we run X11 and you know, that's. That's fine.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah.

[Jeff Geerling]

When we say distros, I kind of just picture the top 20 or so and because there's always going to be those weird ones out there in left field that, you know.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah. I call this mostly a win.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I would say so.

[Jeff Geerling]

Yeah.

[Rob Campbell]

But you know, as many of the, the more niche distros, you know, are running desktop environments that are a little behind the whaling wagon but they, you know, even they've announced, you know, MX Linux. I thought they might be a little behind because. Just because they're. They like the init 5 system, but they also have System D. So, you know, I guess that wasn't a hold up. Papa was going all in, Cashy, all in. You know, they're all in on whaling. Some of the others, you know, Mitt has experimental slackware antics, you know, some of those other ones, you know, that they're. They're not all in on Wayland, but they're starting to get there. They're dipping their toes with experimental. Even, even a niche desktop environment that I didn't expect. Like a budgie, you know, they went all in a Wayland. So some went. Some. Some not quite there yet.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep, yep.

[Jeff Geerling]

Yeah, 70%.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Okay, let's go to mine. I said that browsers will start supporting hdr. HDR will support it first on Linux. And that must be a. That must be a typo. That must be a typo. What, what's written there doesn't make any sense. I think Firefox will first support it on Linux is probably what I meant to say anyway. And then by the end of 2025, YouTube HDR will just work. And I've got to say, guys, it just works. Now we are at that point, if you're on Wayland. If you're on Wayland, you're running a reasonably decent system. Like if you're on up to date Fedora and if you've got a monitor that'll do it, then yes, you just. It works. It just works. No more hoops to jump through it. Just you turn it on and it works.

[Jeff Geerling]

I'm recording this on HDR or with HDR capability on everything.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say you don't look like you're in hdr.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, you're all pale.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Definite standard.

[Jeff Geerling]

That's just my natural color depth. But I'm brighter white now, you know, extra pasty.

[Jonathan Bennett]

You're a brighter pale.

[Rob Campbell]

Brighter whites in the face, darker darks in the background. Got it.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes. I also said that we would see more culture war issues in open source, more people getting banned. I think that absolutely happened. The, the other thing I predicted, I'm not sure that it has. I said that probably some of these forks will gain steam and threaten the original projects. I don't know that I've actually seen that yet.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, I haven't seen that one.

[Jeff Geerling]

I don't know what that would. Yeah, yeah, I can't think of any.

[Jonathan Bennett]

One of the ones that I was looking at that I thought might have a chance was the fork of Godot to they made, did they call it Red Dot or Rideau? I don't know how that was intended to be pronounced.

[Rob Campbell]

And I called out that prediction last year. I said, you know, these forks because of culture wars never make it. So I didn't expect it. Yeah, rarely, at least.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, well.

[Jeff Geerling]

And I think a lot of times people like we need to do this and then they start doing it and go, whoa, this is a lot harder than we thought. You know, this, this, this is not the easy recompile we were planning.

[Rob Campbell]

They make it when they're technologically better or have something better that people want.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Right? Yeah, it, I think it's, it's probably a matter of like what happens, what happens next is the big question. So like when, when, when Godot went a little nuts and started banning people. Like did they bring some of those people back? I'm not sure. I didn't know actually. I have not actually gone and followed up on that particular story. But there are ways to step back from the precipice as a project, as it were. So that has a lot to do with this as well, I think. I don't know we're going to come back around to things we missed and I have more to say about that. But anyway, the other thing that I called is that we may see a BRICS kernel and if this has happened, it's not made the news, I'll put it that way. BRICS in this case being Brazil, India, China, Korea and Russia I think is who makes up the BRICS nations anyway. It's sort of the anti NATO and this came out of the Linux kernel getting sort of a notification that hey, by the way, you really should not have people that work at these countries, that work in these companies listed as maintainers. Really, really bad. Breaking the law. Don't do that. Don't break the law. And so I looked at that and I said, well if this continues then you're going to see a kernel for it. We've not gotten to that point yet. I don't know if we will or not. I am a little surprised but the.

[Jeff Geerling]

I've used compile options and I bricked a kernel myself. I can give you partial credit for there.

[Jonathan Bennett]

There you go.

[Jeff Geerling]

Give you 1%.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, there you go. 1%. I'll take it. 1% is enough. I did say that we were going to get a PI 500 pro or XL. I missed it by that much. They called it the PI 500 plus. That is an improved PI 500 because I knew that there was the NVME slot and everybody wanted NVME on their Raspberry PI 5s.

[Rob Campbell]

Well, and you weren't specific on your name. You're like Pro XL or some other name like that. But basically an improvement, which you do. You definitely got that name right.

[Jeff Geerling]

I'd give you credit for that because it's the plus. I would file it under like Pro or Excel or. Same thing. It's a synonym.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep. And then the last thing that I talked about was legislation where software is. Is liable for damages caused. And we did not get this exactly. But we do continue to see, particularly out of Europe is where it's happening a lot is that the models for software and how liability works with it and the things that software companies are going to be required to do does continue to evolve. And I talked about a new funding model. I don't think we're quite there yet. I'm going to call this partially right because the things we were talking about are still going on.

[Rob Campbell]

There's some slow progression. It just. It hasn't been a real hot year for it, but Right. Still there.

[Jonathan Bennett]

It's still happening. These things just happen very slowly because government's involved. So it happens slowly. Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch fix online Personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style and budget preferences. I order boxes when I want and how I want. No subscription required. And he sends just for me, pieces plus outfit recommendations and styling tips. I keep what works and send back the rest. It's so easy. Make style easy. Get started [e-mail] Spotify. That's stitchfix.com Spotify Tito's Handmade Vodka is.

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[Leo Laporte]

Hey everybody. Leo Laporte here with a little bit of an ask. Every year at this time we'd like to survey our audience to find a little bit more about you. As you may know, we respect your privacy. We don't do anything, in fact, we can't do anything to learn about who you are. And that's fine with me. I like that. But it helps us with advertising, it helps us with programming to know a little bit about those of you who are willing to tell us your privacy is absolutely respected. We do get your email address, but that's just in case there's an issue. We don't share that with anybody. What we do share is the aggregate information that we get from these surveys. Things like 80% of our audience buy something they heard in an ad on our shows or 75% of our audience are it decision makers. Things like that are very helpful with us when we talk to advertisers. They're also very helpful to us to understand what operating systems you use, what content you're interested in.

[Jonathan Bennett]

So, enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just ask you if you will go to TWiT TV Survey 26 and answer a few questions. It should only take you a few minutes of your time. We do this every year. It's very helpful to us. Your privacy is assured, I promise you. And of course, if you're uncomfortable with any question or you don't want to do it at all, that's fine too. But if you want to help us out a little bit. TWiT TV survey 26, thank you so much. And now back to the show.

[Jonathan Bennett]

All right, Jeff, you talked about, you made some really boring predictions here. Jeff talked about the kernel LTS 6.18 and a new one being 7.0. I don't think we have a 7.0 yet, do we?

[Jeff Geerling]

No. If it is going to be 7.0, it'll be in February, January time frame.

[Jonathan Bennett]

So I have heard some rumblings that 619 is probably going to be the last of the six series.

[Jeff Geerling]

So yeah, that's what they're talking about. But 619 is going to be, it's going to take us through the year.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, yeah, seems to be. You, you called it that AMD graphics were going to stumble this year in sales. Did they stumble in sales?

[Jeff Geerling]

Yeah, they. Okay, it's, it's how you look at it. But they, they went up in, in their sales percentage but they dropped the ball so bad, Nvidia basically handed them the market on a plate and they price themselves out of it. They, you know, it just how they handled everything was terrible. All, all reviewers just said, yeah, they, they could have had half the market by now if they would have played their cards. Right. And they didn't, they really, they didn't order enough units. They, they were just behind the ball on a lot of different cases.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes. I think it's probably worth pointing out though that this year has been a very, very difficult year as a GPU manufacturer because the AI thing has just gone nuts. And so every bit of that fab time, the allocations are so tight and I'm hearing from people that I know that fab allocations for next year are as bad, if not worse. Not necessarily.

[Jeff Geerling]

Oh, it's all sold out.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, but not only is it all sold out, but like people that want to manufacture devices, you know, the meme here, take my, take my money, that's actually happening. And people are just like, you wanted to buy 10,000 of those, you know, X, Y or Z, whatever it is, we can spare you 1500. That's how many you can get for the year for the same price. Well, in some cases, sure. But yeah, apparently it's 26 is looking to be challenging again.

[Jeff Geerling]

It is, but, but my reference was more that Nvidia handed them the perfect storm. They basically had paper launches, they had some driver issues. They, you know, the pricing, the it, it's like we couldn't hand you the market on any better silver platter. And AMD got a little greedy. They got, instead of looking at the law now, they did, they did do right when they didn't release, they didn't play Nvidia's game. They didn't release until the driver was ready because historically they'd released too early because, oh, Nvidia's released and we got a release too. Well, it just, then the driver had issues and it went bad there. So at least they did that. Right. But yeah, there's a lot more they could have done better.

[Rob Campbell]

Okay, no hardware sales in 20 or don't buy any hardware upgrades in 2026. Wait till 2027. Unless it's a Steam machine or a premium arm laptop.

[Jeff Geerling]

Well, the scary, the scary thing too is there, there's some rumors out there that for example, Nvidia is not going to bundle the memory to some of their smaller board partners, which means the smaller board partners will have to source memory on their own. And that would scare me from, you know, board partners going, we want to cut, undercut everybody. We found this really bargain basement memory and you know, is it going to have problems? Is it, you know, we'll, we'll see, we'll see what this next year holds. Because yeah, memory, memory is sold out for a long Time.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep. Yep.

[Jeff Geerling]

All right.

[Jonathan Bennett]

He talked about there would be work continuing to fight Cuda and that some of these things would gain traction but not fully replace. Where are we with the Cuda alternatives?

[Jeff Geerling]

I think it's actually becoming a real alternative now. They, we've had a few stories through the year where they've had pretty big improvement and I, I said not replace and be, but become valid because Cuda's got so much momentum with kind of being the de facto standard for a long time. But we now have the rock M and the, the hip and the other things that couldn't actually now compete against Cuda. It's, it's, it's. And I don't. I won't. It, I won't say it'll beat Cuda, but it's at least viable. It's not one of those where, well, we can run stuff. Yeah, but you. 80% behind, it's like. No, you're much, much closer. The performance gap is closed quite a bit and I, I think it'll continue into this next year as well. Because intel also has a valid reason to want to get in on this because it's an AMD standard, is an open standard, and like intel has also been helping with them and other. Other partners to, to get out of the proprietary CUDA lock in.

[Jonathan Bennett]

All right. You talked about Ubuntu and Fedora starting to fight to be cutting edge.

[Jeff Geerling]

I kind, you know, I kind of think that's happened because they're using, you know, rc. RC kernels in some cases in some of their releases and they're really trying to get ahead now. LTS is. They're much more careful, but other releases, they're really trying to.

[Rob Campbell]

All the rust that they're throwing in real early. Come on. Yeah, that's a definite win.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah. Yeah. All right. And then the other thing was, ah, the first major distro. Jeff predicted the first major distro will at least propose dropping X all together. Have we seen that?

[Jeff Geerling]

Yep.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Which distro is that?

[Jeff Geerling]

Wasn't. Wasn't that Fedora?

[Jonathan Bennett]

No.

[Jeff Geerling]

Or their new releases?

[Rob Campbell]

Well, Fedora did propose it. Red Hat too, is that.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I think Red Hat is proposed to stop. Basically stop doing maintenance on X. Yes. I don't know. Is Fedora gonna drop X altogether?

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, they did propose that, I think in a couple releases here or something like that.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I know the desktop environments have. But I was not aware that they were going to drop support for it altogether.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, there was a story within the past couple. Couple weeks here. I remember.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Okay.

[Jeff Geerling]

I'm just looking here and it says. Yeah, Ubuntu and Fedora are both dropping X11 support in their default editions now. Red hat.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, see, I don't know if that counts. It's moving in the right direction. But if you can still open your package Manager and install X11. I don't know that it counts to say that they've dropped support for it yet. I'm going to get you on the technicality here.

[Jeff Geerling]

Okay.

[Jonathan Bennett]

But I think at least directionally we're correct and that that full drop is coming for some of these.

[Rob Campbell]

And I've seen recently KDE also dropping it too. I've seen a lot. I saw KDE just announced that I think real recently. So that's going to hit the KDE spins.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Well, for sure, for sure. All right. And then one other thing that Jeff called is that hardware would be boring this year. Was the hardware world boring in 2025?

[Jeff Geerling]

Yes.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah.

[Jeff Geerling]

Because intel, we were still riding on their release on their CPUs. It was. Yeah.

[Rob Campbell]

Ho hum, you know, I'm not gonna disagree.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah.

[Jeff Geerling]

The 5000 series AMD, or I mean Nvidia, just a minor update from the 4000 series. It wasn't a major jump like we'd seen historically.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Right.

[Jeff Geerling]

AMD's 9000 series fell a little short of where we hoped it would be. It was not quite the game changer we thought it would be. And so it. Yeah, nothing. Nothing super exciting.

[Rob Campbell]

If hardware is so boring and over 50% of your stories are about hard, what does that say?

[Jeff Geerling]

I'm a boring person? What can I say? I'm plain oatmeal.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Oh my goodness. All right, so Rob and we made just kind of free for all this one. But we'll let Rob get started with it. What did you miss that you should have known about? What didn't you see coming?

[Rob Campbell]

What did I miss? I didn't prep for this.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I know I'm putting you on the spot.

[Rob Campbell]

You are. I don't think I missed a thing.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Right, right, right, right. Sure.

[Rob Campbell]

That I remember.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah. I didn't miss anything that I can remember. I don't recall. Okay. I'll tell you. I prep for this. I guess I sort of cheated. I'll tell you what I was thinking of. I missed how much of a train wreck Windows 11 was going to be. I mean, we kind of knew, but man, it's been rocky. Particularly because of all of the weird stuff Microsoft keeps cramming in there. Like we're going to make the newest thing now is we're going to make Windows 11 an agentic AI. That's going to be the purpose of the desktop, man. A lot of people don't like that you have Windows recall. People did not like that. It's just, it's been sort of a train wreck then the end.

[Jeff Geerling]

10 yeah, my mist was kind of tangential to that where I was going to say I totally missed how much mainstream tech was going to start picking up on Linux. You know the, the LTTS, J's, 2 cents, gamers, Nexus, you know.

[Jonathan Bennett]

PewDiePie.

[Jeff Geerling]

PewDiePie.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes. Yes. Yeah, that was something I had in mind as well. I'll tell you something else we missed was the Steam frame. Did not see that one coming. Not in that we knew, we knew Valve was making hardware, but we did not think about it coming in that particular combination.

[Rob Campbell]

At least not last year. Once they started working on some ARM stuff, we're like, what are they doing here? But that was pretty late in mid-2025 when we even noticed that.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep, yep.

[Jeff Geerling]

Say we missed, missed clear Linux going away.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, that's true. So I actually have a note here that one of the things that we missed was the layoffs at intel and some other places that these, these companies would, would cut their Linux and open source stuff in the way that they have. Intel has been the big one, but not the only one doing this sort of thing. And that I think we missed the other one.

[Jeff Geerling]

And I should, I should preface that, that intel cut a lot of things, not just the open source. It was, they've, they've been through. For anybody that doesn't know, they went through massive cuts and layoffs and shutting down entire divisions.

[Jonathan Bennett]

So yes, it was not a fun time to be at Intel. No, was not. And then the other thing I have under this, this kind of goes back to that prediction I made about forks gaining Steam and threatening the original project, Ex Libre. I think that's, that's maybe the one where you could make the case that it threatens the original project because the original project x11 they're trying to kill, they're trying to shut it down and Ex Libre is coming along and saying no, we won't let it die. The real ironic one about that is in my mind it's not primarily a culture war fork. It's just a we still want this thing to exist fork. And ironically they've kind of like the, the people doing the fork have tried to make the case that it's a culture war fork.

[Jeff Geerling]

And I don't think it is.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I think it's sort of waving that false flag, which is a really weird thing to see.

[Rob Campbell]

And I think this is a big miss because I think this is something we could have predicted pretty easily. And a lot of those others hit and miss. But, you know, X is going away. We've known this for years, really. And we've known how much people love X and don't want to let it go and don't want to go to Whalen. It should have just been obvious that somebody would fork it.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes. But in retrospect. All right, any other misses that we should call out on ourselves? Jeff, you have anything?

[Jeff Geerling]

I think. I think you covered the big ones.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Okay. All right, let's talk about our favorite news from the year. We'll let Rob go first again. What happened this year that was your favorite?

[Rob Campbell]

My favorite news is all of the Valve announcements, their hardware announcements, their Steam survey showing Linux on the rise, and the work they've been doing with Proton and now even Proton on arm. So everything Valve.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep.

[Jeff Geerling]

That matches. I had that one, too.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah.

[Jeff Geerling]

I've got every exciting thing.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I've got three things. Got three things that are my favorite news. And the first one is Wayland getting sorted with hdr, which is Valve, that Valve and KDE put their heads together and said, let's just fork Wayland. And the guys at Wayland said, oh, maybe we'll actually take your pull requests. We thought about it and we'll take your pull requests now. Okay. So that made things work at Wayland. My second was Proton Gets Better. Again, that's Valve. They're the one putting the money into it. The third thing on my list that I find is just, it's hilarious and it's fun and it was a lot of fun to talk about. And that's Anubis, aka the Linux CatGirls that you see in your browser when you try to go to certain places. It's just fun. It's dorky. The security side of it does not necessarily work, as our friend Tavis Orban D. Pointed out, but it's just hilarious. I like it so much just because it's fun. Those are my three. All right, Jeff, what was your favorite?

[Jeff Geerling]

Well, did you have some more, Rob?

[Rob Campbell]

No, that's it. All together is mine.

[Jeff Geerling]

So I've got one here that you'll, you know, Mr. Oatmeal Hardware Benchmarking. I really love seeing all the comparing distros, different hardware, different, you know, all that kind of, hey, I'm a hardware guy. What can I say, you know? And I just I just really enjoy those. And the third thing was I loved all the Linus Torvald's rants. I loved all the, where he would just go off on people for bad code, improper polls, you know, things like that. And it was, it was just really fun reading where he, you know, it becomes cathartic for him. You know, he's got all this balled up rage and he lets it go. Only it's, it's more G rated now after he went through his training.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Anger management training.

[Jeff Geerling]

Anger management training. But you know, sometimes that's what you need just to keep that kernel on track. And you can't argue with the success of the Linux kernel. I mean, as much as people say, oh, this is the year of Linux, it's been the year of Linux for a long time. Just not on the desktop, it's one everywhere else.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, I think, I think, I mean they're fun, the drama's fun. I think you could do better though. I mean, there are ways to help guide people in the right direction without being a total jerk.

[Jeff Geerling]

Well, but they have a. But they already have a lot of these rules. Here's how it works. Here's. It's the people that just try to go, wow, I'm just going to get this in here anyway. And they have just such horrible code. Or you don't ever put this into a. In the middle of an rc, you don't add all this stuff or you know, things like that. And that's where he gets really mad of like, you missed the 12 road signs that said don't go here.

[Rob Campbell]

And I've been.

[Jeff Geerling]

You still went there.

[Rob Campbell]

I've been seeing some old videos of his post and I mean, not that old, I don't know, probably five plus years ago, like one I saw recently. He is like saying, I've tried Ubuntu once and I couldn't just run make or make install or whatever. He said to compile my kernel. So that was a deal breaker for me. And I did not. I thought that was kind of silly just because I don't think most mainstream distros have the dev tools with them by default either to do that. So all you got to do is install the dev tools.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I don't think that's what he was talking about. I think it was the idea that once you get your devtools installed and you run a make install, it still doesn't install. The kernel on a place where you can boot. Was a little bit more sophisticated than that. I know the video you're talking about and what he was complaining about was a little more sophisticated than just I had to use APT to install make before I could do kernel. It wasn't just that he's like if.

[Rob Campbell]

You have to do install packages. And I don't know, I only caught a snippet too. So maybe the context is missing.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep, yep. The other thing with Torvalds is I've seen some of his before he went through anger management he had some comments about this, like why he's so abrasive and he actually talks about early on in the kernel when he had a he had a moment where he realized that like one the kernel was going to be a really big thing and there were people that cared around the world that cared about it very deeply. And he talked about how that there were people that would have ideas and want to do things and he would not like it but try to be nice about it. And then someone would put all this time into it and finally get the pull request and he would have to tell them no. And apparently he had someone that got suicidal on him over it. And that was sort of the point where he said I can't afford to be nice. I have to essentially have to be a painfully clear communicator is where he came to. And that's where a lot of that came out of.

[Rob Campbell]

I think you could be painfully clear without like using the words of you're an idiot.

[Jonathan Bennett]

You know.

[Ken Starks]

Well, Jonathan, this is just Ken here calling in to give you my views over what happened this year that I thought were my highlights, as well as some predictions on what we can expect to see next year. Let's first start with the by looking back over 2025 where I saw caliber version 7.2.24 released back in January and I just recently saw that it has reached 8.16. So I'm looking forward to seeing some future releases as we go into next year. But what I really thought was important with those releases was some of the new features that they've included to include the ability to connect to a folder and treat it as though as a USB Ms. Based device Improve Kobo support allowing you to edit, view and convert Kobos kepub format and of course them adding an Ask AI tab to the dictionary lookup panel and Calibers ebook viewer. Now another popular utility, almost you could say underpinning for Linux is pipewire. It actually started the year with version 1.2.7 and is ending the year with a 1 version 1.4.9 as of this recording though we may see 1.6 release before the end of the year. Since we are already up to the fourth release candidate for 1.6 we are.

[Jonathan Bennett]

My goodness, this was supposed to be like a 30 minute Christmas episode. We got to move guys.

[Jeff Geerling]

Hey, this is Linux. We give you more for your money.

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[Jonathan Bennett]

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[Commercial Announcer]

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[Rob Campbell]

Good morning Crust. It's a great day to be a bread brother.

[Jeff Geerling]

Mornings are not my jam or jelly.

[Rob Campbell]

Oh come on, stop loafing around. I just woke up feeling hollow inside. Just grab one of the new morning Uncrustable sandwiches like Bright Eyed Berry or up an apple filled with 12 grams of protein and tons of deliciousness crust.

[Jonathan Bennett]

What are you eating? It's just granola. Not even yogurt. No crust, no fuss. Uncrust your mornings.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello everybody. Leo laporte here. You know what a great gift would be, whether for the holidays or at just any time? A birthday? A membership in Club Twit. If you have a Twit listener in your family, somebody who enjoys our programming and you want to give them a nice gift and support what we do. Visit TWiT TV club TWiT. They'll really appreciate it and so will we. Thank you. Twit TV ClubTwit.

[Rob Campbell]

Yep.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep. All right. I have a couple of things noted here that I think is not my favorite news, but the important news from the year. A couple of big stories that didn't fall into the favorites idea and one was just this overall AI and open source. So many projects I've talked to over on Floss, you look at it in the kernel, they're all having to deal with this. Like you have the Curl project where they have AI slop security vulnerabilities coming in that people have to take time to wade through. Basically every project right now is getting AI. In some cases it's slop, in some cases it's decent. But Pull requests like, hey, Gemini, it would be great if this project did this. Please write a pull request for me. And then they actually pull it. Make the pull request. And then somebody on the other end has to slog through the 30,000 lines. Changed. The CEO, he wants this one thing and the AI changed all this other stuff. It's been a big thing, big change for projects this year. And then the other one that I think is just a huge deal this year is Firefox losing so much market share, trying to turn it around and not necessarily being successful yet. You see, Thunderbird has made great success. Firefox Jerry's still out. We'll see what happens.

[Jeff Geerling]

Well, they did say they're gonna. There's. And it's gonna take a while before we see the fruits of the development, but they're gonna focus more on the browser itself and less of the little side show circus tricks.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah. Yep. All right, either of you guys have a story that comes to mind that was just important from this year? One of the something that really changed the landscape or did I claim the two that you would have thought of?

[Jeff Geerling]

No, I think you covered pretty much. Yeah.

[Rob Campbell]

I think Ubuntu really pushing the limits with Rust is potentially pretty big.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, that's true. I think so too. I think that's a big deal. All right, let's talk about our favorite command line tips. Rob cheated. He's got two. He's gonna run her up.

[Rob Campbell]

I lied when I said that I have two first places and two runner ups. He's got four of them.

[Jeff Geerling]

All right, so Rod's indecisive. Rob's indecisive.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes.

[Rob Campbell]

So my. My number one though ultimate is uptime. Kuma. Since I've done that, you know, my tip was in the June 14, since I did that one, being able to know what when there's an outage somewhere. I've had cloudflare outages and various things and be able to jump on and. And try to resolve things quickly. I could do anything about the cloud failure 1.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I was gonna say jump on and stare at the. The stare at Twitter or Facebook or wherever. With all the rest of us down.

[Rob Campbell]

There have been some I've been able to resolve quickly before anybody knows the next one it's tied to it. But like I've had services stop on web server and when I did the learn the auto restart failed services in System data that 1 8:30 or August 30th, that one's improved my uptime. My next two are the runner ups.

[Leo Laporte]

They go Together.

[Rob Campbell]

Also Ansible I did on September 13 and the follow up on September 20 is Semaphore UI, which is the web user interface to Ansible. Those have been fun.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, yeah, very cool. I picked a favorite tip. The first one I picked was to which is the serial monitor. We didn't cover that this year. We covered it the year before. So I went back through. Okay, what did we actually cover this year that I use all the time and the one that I turn to so often, such a simple thing is strings. The strings command goes through a binary or goes through a file and pulls out the strings. You can then, you know, grep it or search it in whatever way you want to. Super useful for figuring out what's going on inside of a binary that otherwise you just wouldn't have any idea what it's doing. That is my favorite tip. Jeff, what is your favorite command line tip that we covered this year?

[Jeff Geerling]

I did the same thing. I was like, oh B top. And then I looked, I'm like, oh yeah, that predates 25.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Old news.

[Jeff Geerling]

Yeah. Then it would have to be cheat where it's like tldr, but it pulls from tldr. It pulls from Stack overflow. It pulls from other places. So it's like a more complete TLDR. Yeah, yeah.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Cool.

[Ken Starks]

Well, Jonathan, my favorite command from 2025 has to be the wire plumber control command or wpctl, especially its status sub command which I covered back on episode 215. Though right now I'm going to have to say top grade, going all the way Back to episode 136 is still my overall favorite command for updating all my systems from a single terminal, even remote systems.

[Jonathan Bennett]

All right, it's time. It is time for the big thing, the thing everyone is here for. We'll let Rob go first with this. What's your predictions, man? What are we looking forward to in 2026?

[Rob Campbell]

So my predictions, these are I kind of soft, but anything I missed last year I think is going to happen. But no, it's not my prediction. Anyway, I'll start it. Asus will make a Steam machine of their own like the Asus Rog machine or something. Okay, next, Linux. Okay, I'm. I'm stretching this. I thought my 3% was a stretch last year because my soft was 2.5. So this year I'm just going to go right for the 4%. That's going to be a stretch but I think with the Steam machines out there, let's go for it.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I think that's pretty reasonable actually. It would not terribly surprise me to see 4%.

[Rob Campbell]

It's a bigger jump that we've had for a while.

[Jeff Geerling]

Maybe stretch to 5 or ever.

[Rob Campbell]

No, I'm not stretching the 5. I'm going to say 4%. It is not going to hit 5. Sorry. Wayland will not be default but will move out of experimental on Linux Mint Cinnamon and to go with that I think the XFCE will make further steps to be Wayland also. Two more. Okay, we won't see a premium ARM Linux laptop this year. We're not going to. But it will be announced that Tuxedo Computers will be doing a Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop. My last one, Canonical is going to roll back some of their rust changes for the lts.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep. I like it. I like it. All right, here's mine. I think in 2026 we're going to get announced, probably not released, but announced the next Steam deck and it's going to be ARM based. I think anti cheat is finally going to get sorted on Linux because the Steam Machine thing is going to become so popular and so hot that there's not going to be any choice. People are going to just complain way too much and so the holdouts are finally going to either get it together and make it happen or their games are just not going to be very.

[Rob Campbell]

Relevant anymore or they're going to say if on the Steam Machine a play nowhere else.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I guess that could be. That could be. We're gonna see more Wayland drama because that group of people for whatever reason are just really good at their drama. You will, you will see probably KDE and Valve again coming to them and saying you guys need to get it together and pull this. This needs to. Or maybe it'll be Google this time but there will be something where, you know, they have been watershedding for three years over the very idea of. You mean you want your Windows to go to specific places and Google is going to come along and say pull the dang pull request, guys. Okay, something like that's going to happen.

[Jeff Geerling]

That's a. That's a pretty safe one there.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, I'm going to say 100% not Google.

[Jonathan Bennett]

You say that they won't. There is Chrome OS and there is the new Aluminium which is probably going to be Wayland. So Google does care about some of this.

[Rob Campbell]

There's Chrome OS for now, but not for long. And I don't know what Aluminium is going to run. I mean it's Android so Android's not going to run that.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Who says Android can't run Wayland?

[Rob Campbell]

I'm just saying.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Anyway, I've got one more that is in my relatively safe batch. We've not talked a whole lot about this, but NPM has been seeing terrible security problems. One of the so NPM, for those that don't know that, is the Node JS Package Manager. It is a repository of JavaScript packages and for the longest time now people have been uploading malicious code there and they've been doing what's called typo squatting. So you know, if you have a package that's got the word color in it, C O L O R. Someone will upload a package that's the exact same thing but spelled C O L O U R, the British spelling. And it'll have inside of the, like the, the install script part of the package. It will have some malicious code that'll, you know, look for a bitcoin wallet on the local machine and upload it, you know, that sort of thing. The most recent thing with NPM is that that idea has been pushed to the limit and now people are writing worms, self replicating worms inside of these packages. And so it will do things like instead of going and looking for a.

[Jeff Geerling]

Bitcoin wallet, it will go and look.

[Jonathan Bennett]

For NPM credentials on the local machine and then it will push malicious code to any packages that are available using those credentials. And it's a couple times now it's just been a terrible problem where hundreds and hundreds of packages have gotten compromised. NPM is actually owned by GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft. So it's kind of a big black eye for them right now. And I imagine that sometime in 2026 something big is going to change at NPM to try to address this, because it has to. We're kind of at the point now to where we're pushing towards not being sustainable for this, this model of real time package fetching, like live package fetching to work. There's something to be said for the old C and C model where you have your libraries permanently installed anyway. And then my stretch prediction in 2026, I think we're going to see signs of decline of x86. Now you might say that we've seen that already, I don't think we really have. But particularly if Windows 11 continues to be as unpopular as it is, when you get Windows 11 being sort of unhitched from the idea of what a desktop, what a computer is, you have a lot more flexibility to run Linux, which means you also have a lot more Flexibility to run ARM and RISC V and all of those things. I think with that, you're going to see less of the x86 monopoly. So that's my stretch prediction for 26. All right, Jeff.

[Jeff Geerling]

I could see that. Just because, you know, Apple showing off their M hardware is proving what you can do with battery life.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi there. 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.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Thank you.

[Jeff Geerling]

I actually had you and I matched on one. I believe we're going to have it. I said at least one major game next year with anti cheat code working on Steam. So, like, when I say major, I'm talking, you know, like a Call of Duty, a fortnight, you know, a big one. Not, you know, Bob's cookie Chase or something. I think the open source. By the end of next year, the open source Nvidia driver is going to be within 80% or more performance match of the proprietary driver.

[Jonathan Bennett]

No, which, which Nvidia are you talking? Nova. The Nvidia's Nova driver. Okay.

[Jeff Geerling]

Yeah, right, right, right now they're on. No, no. Vu using it to kind of boot into the open stack that Nvidia's got because Nova's not quite ready yet. But I think we will have an Nvidia open source driver option and I'm gonna leave. Well, since. Since you try to get me on technicality, I'm just gonna say we're going to have an Nvidia open source driver within 80% of the proprietary driver. All right, here's a wild one for you. I think Ubuntu will either move away from Gnome or announce it's moving away from GNOME in the next year.

[Jonathan Bennett]

As its default.

[Jeff Geerling]

Yes. I think they're going to try to find something else.

[Jonathan Bennett]

What do you think they're going to go to?

[Rob Campbell]

There's only one other option.

[Jeff Geerling]

Well, for them, normally I would say kde, but they're going to probably, oh, we're going to make this thing or we're going to.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, you're right. That's what it Is we're going to write our own desktop environment. Hats and a bunsy thing to do.

[Jeff Geerling]

Yeah, I guess maybe cosmic. Cosmic.

[Rob Campbell]

Or they could take Unity back.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Go hire the 13 year old.

[Rob Campbell]

Well, he's already, he's already backing out of it. So that's why they need to develop it again. So they'll stick it back to keep it alive.

[Jeff Geerling]

Well, just imagine Cosmic. If you had canonical in there, go. Okay, we'll just dedicate 10 people to help fine tune and advance and cover a lot of ground really fast.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, you're right. That is another option. Actually, that's maybe the better option. I wasn't thinking of them for some reason.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, my mind went straight to cosmic. I don't know if Ubuntu would do it, but knowing Ubuntu, it's more. It's probably more likely they would try to do a Unity 2.0 or something.

[Jeff Geerling]

Yeah, that's why I said that. I'm like, yeah, they would. They got to shoot themselves in the foot, you know.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, of course.

[Rob Campbell]

I'm gonna say, I gotta say, with their big things like rust this, rust that. You know what? That makes it even bigger. Cosmic. I, I think I like that one. Cosmic. That's. That's the big stretch for them. And they've been stretching. Not the lts, but then in the fall. Yeah, I like it.

[Jonathan Bennett]

You're right.

[Rob Campbell]

I'm with you.

[Jeff Geerling]

Whoa, hey, we got that on. We got, we got that recorded.

[Jonathan Bennett]

It's on video.

[Jeff Geerling]

I was right.

[Rob Campbell]

I had to think about it. Well, next, you're obviously saying you were wrong, but.

[Jonathan Bennett]

All right. Anything else, Jeff?

[Jeff Geerling]

I have CPU hardware will be released, but it's. It's only going to be modest gains. We're going to see like 20% or less performance coming. Basically. The uplift will be underwhelming, but I do say GPU hardware will be released and it will have a much larger performance jump and really get people looking at having an upgrade. I'm not counting the people that always have to have the latest, greatest. I'm talking about, whoa, there's a nice step in performance from what I'm running to what this next one is. And the last one is, I say I. You know, people talk about AI being a bubble. I don't think it's gonna. I don't think it's a bubble. I think it's a balloon. And we're gonna see the air come out of it a little bit. It's gonna become a little more commodity. And it's not like, oh, the balloon popped. It's all going away. We're going to see where people kind of take a chill on AI a little bit and go, okay, it's, it's going to be around. It's going to be like spell check or grammar check or. I mean, it's going to be in a lot of places. It's going to be another tool in the toolbox. But people aren't going to have the, the feverish build out. It's going to kind of slow down. There's going to still be build outs, but there'll be more planned, less quick, throw money at it, you know, kind of things.

[Rob Campbell]

Have you read the posts on the Internet? I think spell check was a bubble that burst a long time ago.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I actually, I 100% agree with Jeff there. I say it a different way, but I've been saying this for a while. I think AI, I would say it is a bubble, but it is a bubble in the same way that the web was in the 90s and the personal computer was before that. You know, these things, people poured a lot of money into them, then the bubble burst. But those things still change the world. And so I think AI is set up in a very similar place. You have a bunch of businesses that are going to go bust and a lot of money is going to dry up, but there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. So I'm with you. I like that balloon analogy, though. It's not a bubble, it's a balloon. I'll have to remember that one's pretty good. Yeah.

[Jeff Geerling]

Because everybody had a balloon. The air kind of went out of it. It shrunk a little bit, but it's still there. It's not an all or nothing, but you're still going to have a lot of hardware sales because you're going to have people going, oh, this hardware is a few years old. We got to replace it. But everything's going to a cadence and scheduled. And it's a.

[Rob Campbell]

It's a car tire. And winter's coming.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, winter is coming. Yep.

[Ken Starks]

And I'm going to assume y' all have already covered all my predictions for, for this 2025, so I'm not going to review those again. But I do want to add my predictions for 2026 by continuing with pipe wire. If it doesn't happen before the end of this year, I'm predicting that early next year we're going to see version 1.6.0 rollout. And hopefully throughout the year, we'll continue to see improvements with Video routing, though I don't expect it to be ready for prime time by next December because video is a difficult animal to control. But hopefully we do see some improvements throughout the year, maybe to the point where we can use it to connect from obs to all the different browsers via pipewire.

[Jonathan Bennett]

All right, this has been a lot of fun, guys. We got to wrap this up so that we can go do today's show. I want to let each of the guys, though, plug some if they want to. We'll let Jeff go first today for this special holiday show.

[Jeff Geerling]

For the special holiday show, I have a special poetry, a technical manual written by Dr. Seuss. If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk aboard, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report. If your cursor finds a menu item following followed by a dash and the double clicking icons, put your window in the trash and your data is corrupted because the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless and your system's going to crash. If the label on your cable on the gable at your house says network is connected to the button on your mouse but your packets went want to tunnel to another protocol that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of Gauss so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse. Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang because you're sure. Because as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker is going to hang. When the copy of your floppy getting sloppy on the disk and the microcode is instructions cause unnecessary risk, Then you have to flash your memory and you want to ram your ROM so quickly turn off your computer and be sure to tell your mom. Have a great week, everybody. And I hope you have a great year coming up.

[Jonathan Bennett]

That's fun. All right, Rob.

[Rob Campbell]

That was great, though I was worried it was not going to end. Hey, Happy holidays. Why don't you come and connect with me on the social medias and, you know, tell me happy Holidays in whichever way you like. And to do that you go to Robert P. Campbell.com there's links to my LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky Mastodon. And if you want to send me a little present, there's this coffee cup here and you can click there and donate a coffee to me. Happy holidays all.

[Ken Starks]

All right, now, as we prepare for the new year, I just want to remind everybody review your backup processes, especially if you have more than one, and also test your recovery methods because it doesn't do any good to back up and not be able to recover from that backup. And Happy Holidays to everyone to include a happy upcoming New Year.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Appreciate you guys.

[Jeff Geerling]

It was actually hard to read that poem without laughing.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, we could tell. We could tell. Appreciate you guys being here for this special edition. Thank you so much. If you want to find more of me, well there is of course Hackaday that is it is the home of Floss Weekly and so if you are interested in more of this sort of thing, but talking with the people behind Open Source, that is the show to check out. We appreciate everybody that is here, those that get us live and on the download and we will see you next week next year for another Untitled Linux show.

[Rob Campbell]

Thanks.

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