Untitled Linux Show 247: Trips off the Tongue

Summary

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Untitled Linux Show 247: Trips off the Tongue (March 22, 2026)

Podcast: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
Episode: Untitled Linux Show 247
Host: Jonathan (with Rob, Ken, Jeff)
Main Theme: Open source developments, Linux community news, software freedom, security, and the state of key projects.

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Episode Overview

This week, the team dives into key happenings in open source and Linux:

• Germany's move to mandate the Open Document Format (ODF)
• The meaning of "free" in free software
• Systemd’s dominance and the fate of its alternatives
• Google’s compromise on Android’s unverified install flow
• Blender’s major new release and AMD GPU support
• The Manjaro Linux internal crisis and community split
• Security updates (Snapd vulnerability) and command line tips

The tone is geeky, relaxed, sometimes irreverent, with the panel bouncing between nostalgia, technical advice, and real-world concerns in open source.

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Browser Roll Call and Opera GX Discussion

[01:36–05:58]

• Jonathan starts a light-hearted check-in: “What browser is everyone dialing in with?”
  • Rob: “Microsoft Edge, of course.” (02:36)
  • Jonathan: “That checks out.” (02:44)
  • Jeff: “Firefox is my main browser.” (02:45)
  • Jonathan: “I am running Chrome, not a Chromium.” (02:50)
  • Ken: “Today I am trying out Opera GX...my normal day-to-day use is Firefox and Chromium.” (03:06)
• Ken explains Opera GX’s gamer-focused features:
  • RAM/network limiting to avoid tab bloat during gaming
  • “It’s got a Discord button!” jokes and bookmarks (05:03, 05:07)
• The team discusses Discord’s browser issues versus the standalone app (05:33–06:24)

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What Does “Free Software” Really Mean?

[06:50–14:35]

• Rob quotes the GNU Free Software Philosophy:

  “Free software means software that respects users’ freedom and community...You should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.” (06:52)

• Reviews the Four Essential Freedoms (running, studying, redistributing, modifying with access to source).
• Advice: Communicate clearly—specify if you want “free as in freedom” or “free as in gratis.”
  • “I see a lot of confusion...the answer is all over the place because it’s an ambiguous term without context.” (10:31)
• Jonathan: “That’s why Floss Weekly is free libre open source software.” (11:25)
  • Highlights “freedom 0”—the right to use software for any purpose (even purposes others consider ‘evil’).
  • “Free software is not anti-capitalistic...Red Hat is the most famous example.” (13:05)
• Wraps up: “If you want a free alternative, be explicit about what freedom you’re after.” (14:32)

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NEWS: Germany Mandates ODF for Public Administration

[14:58–20:53]

• Ken: Germany’s new "Deutschland Stack" mandates ODF and PDF UA, excluding proprietary formats.
  • “This is not a recommendation...it is a mandate.” —Florian Effenberger, Document Foundation (16:07)
  • The move is about sovereignty, interoperability, and limiting vendor lock-in.
• Jonathan & Rob reflect on:
  • The importance of open formats for long-term access.
  • The challenge of old/proprietary formats (Word, Works, Lotus), and the “pain” of extracting old documents without open standards.

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INIT Systems: Whatever Happened to Systemd Alternatives?

[23:03–31:38]

• Jeff gives a quick history of init systems before systemd:
  • Upstart: Ubuntu’s 2006–2015 event-based system.
  • OpenRC: Used by Gentoo/Alpine; more “do one thing well.”
  • RunIt & S6: Lightweight systems with higher learning curves.
• Why systemd won:
  • Integration (“complete package”), broad adoption by Red Hat/Debian, ease of alignment.
  • “One of the biggest reasons, too, that systemd won...alignment made things a lot easier.”
• Panel jokes about pronunciation: Sysv (“Vee” or “Five”) and how things "trip off the tongue"—referencing the show's title (31:09, 31:34).

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Google’s Unverified Install Flow for Android Apps

[33:38–42:31]

• Jonathan: Google’s original plan to block all side-loaded, unverified Android APKs met major backlash (F-Droid, open source, developer use cases).
• Google’s compromise:
  • Installing unverified APKs initiates a 24-hour delay and phone reboot to disconnect scammers.
  • User must confirm twice (after reboot) and biometric authenticate.
  • Once enabled, F-Droid and similar stores can function, though initial setup is inconvenient.
  • “It’s a pain, but much better than disallowing it altogether.” (35:25)
• Rob & Ken: Discuss developer concerns about new Play Store requirements (ID, fees, verification)
• Rob: “My complaint was in the past I paid $25 one time...iOS was $100 a year…” (38:42)
• The team muses on how malware still hits even official stores, and real-life phishing (banking app) attacks. (39:26)

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Age Verification Laws & Systemd’s New “Birth Date” Field

[42:31–51:17]

• Rob: Highlights Ageless Linux, a distro created in protest against OS-level age verification mandates (in Germany, California, Brazil, Colorado, etc.)
  • Arch Linux 32 blocks downloads to affected regions as noncompliant.
• Systemd adds a (non-mandatory) “birth_date” field for possible admin/compliance use.
  • Jonathan: “There is nothing inherently wrong with an age field in Systemd...it’s just a field." (47:23)
  • Pushback from social media, but panel agrees: the issue is with government mandates, not merely having a field.
  • “People are just getting stupid over this now. Come on.” —Rob (47:15)
• If required, centralization is useful for business (distros like Red Hat, Canonical); it's not a privacy crisis for personal/noncompliance use.

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Blender 5.1 Update: Performance, AMD HIP, and More

[52:48–56:37]

• Ken details highlights of Blender 5.1:
  • AMD GPU ray tracing via HIP enabled by default.
  • New FCurve Gaussian Smooth modifier; window management improvements under Wayland.
  • Switch to TBB Malloc proxy for memory allocation.
  • Benchmarks show up to a few % CPU rendering improvements over 5.0.
  • Links provided to full reviews and a CG Cookie video demo of new features.

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Manjaro’s Crisis: Community vs. Company

[56:44–66:30]

• Jeff covers the upheaval inside Manjaro:
  • Project stagnation, expired TLS certificates, stalled updates.
  • Company co-owner (Philip Müller) centralized resources, didn’t reinvest; sole dev lost income.
  • Community proposal: Split into Manjaro GmbH (company) and Manjaro Project e.V. (community nonprofit), transition all assets, infra, trademark for €1.
  • Co-owner Roman Gilg publicly sides with the community.
  • “The project has been declining over the past decade.” —Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto
• Jonathan: “This is why it’s always useful to have more than one...decision-maker at the top.” (62:54)
• The fate of Manjaro will be a test for community-run Linux projects’ resilience.

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Chrome Coming to ARM64 Linux

[66:51–73:32]

• Jonathan: “Finally, Chrome is coming to ARM64 Linux in Q2 2026.” (66:52)
  • Will enable full Netflix, DRM, Google Pay, and password manager features unavailable in Chromium.
• Panel discusses if Netflix works on Firefox ARM (Jonathan tests live: “Firefox impresses Jonathan!”), and the advantages of Chrome sync, device continuity.
• Tangent on flip phones, tech nostalgia, app patterns of “luddites,” and use cases.

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Security: Snapd Vulnerability

[74:27–78:10]

• Rob: Snapd local privilege escalation (CVE-2026-3888) on Ubuntu (25.10 & all supported LTSes).
  • “A local user could potentially gain root privileges by recreating SNAP’s private temp directory when systemd temp files is enabled.”
  • Not a “hair on fire” bug for most, but important for shared/multiuser systems and worth patching soon.
• Panel jokes: “Those of us without hair—not a problem.” (78:05)

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PipeWire Updates

[78:20–80:55]

• Ken: PipeWire 1.6.2 and 1.4.11 bring mixer optimizations, fixes for JACK compatibility, and improved filter graph, noting which bug fixes backport.
• Discussion on PipeWire’s V4L2/OBS integration: “Better, but not there yet.” (80:09)

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Btrfs File System Performance in Kernel 7.0

[81:59–89:48]

• Jeff: Michael Larabel’s ongoing file system benchmarks: Btrfs, Ext4, XFS, regression around kernel 6.15 (checksumming fallback for VM images).
  • “If you want your file system to be super boring—good.”
• Panel quips on file system nomenclature and real-world relevance of benchmark deltas: “The difference is so slight, it’s not humanly detectable.” (88:10)
  • “Performance-wise, you need about 10% uptick before you even really perceive it.” (88:55)

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Command Line Tips

[90:56–101:54]

Rob: Oh My Posh

• “A tool to theme/customize your shell prompt. Next week: easier install & more.” (90:56)

Ken: Midnight Commander (mc)

• Classic text-based file manager, “better than the default file manager in many cases.” (92:27–94:49)

Jeff: Memos

• “A focused, open-source self-hosted note-taking app—ideal for small teams, families, gaming groups.” (97:00)

Jonathan: ClamAV

• Open source antivirus scanner for compliance needs or attachment scanning (also freshclam updater).
• “If you want antivirus on Linux but don’t want closed source, try ClamAV.” (99:11)

Panel jokes: “All of these tips brought to you ‘free as in speech’.” (101:54)

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Closings and Plugs

[102:34–105:44]

• Rob: Visit robertpcampbell.com for more, accept coffee donations (thanks, Mike!).
• Ken: Plugs SuperTux, a classic open source Mario clone.
• Jeff: Offers a tech haiku:

  "Errors have occurred.
  We won’t tell you where or why.
  Lazy programmers." (104:50)

• Jonathan: Recommends Hackaday’s “This Week in Security” by Mike Kershaw.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Rob: “Free software can cost money.” (13:03)
• Ken: “The concept of freedom...that’s the most expensive concept out there.” (14:35)
• Jonathan (on Systemd): “There is nothing inherently wrong with having an age field...it’s just a field.” (47:23)
• Jeff: “I hope all of your boots go smooth.” (end of INIT segment – 28:26)
• Jonathan (on file systems): “You want your file system to be super boring.” (87:02)
• Jeff: “Errors have occurred. We won’t tell you where or why. Lazy programmers.” (104:50)

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Timestamps Quick Reference

| Segment | Start | |----------------------------------------------------|-----------| | Browser check & Opera GX intro | 01:36 | | Free software meaning & GNU definition | 06:50 | | Germany/ODF news | 14:58 | | INIT systems & systemd alternatives | 23:03 | | Android unverified install flow | 33:38 | | Age verification & Systemd’s new field | 42:31 | | Blender 5.1 release | 52:48 | | Manjaro community crisis | 56:44 | | Chrome for ARM64 Linux | 66:51 | | Snapd vulnerability | 74:27 | | PipeWire updates | 78:20 | | Btrfs benchmarks | 81:59 | | Command line tips | 90:56 |

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Episode Flow Summary

1. Warm-up: Casual browser discussion, leading into open source topics.
2. Defining Terms: Revisiting “free” in free software context; importance of clear language in FLOSS.
3. News Deep Dives: Germany’s ODF mandate, INITS before systemd, Android’s sideloading policy, legal and technical impacts of age verification.
4. Project/Software Spotlights: Blender’s improvements, Manjaro’s community split, Chrome for ARM64, Snapd security, PipeWire tweaks, and file system performance.
5. Practical Segment: Command line app tips, geared at listeners wanting to sharpen their Linux skills.
6. Wrap-up: Plugs, humor, and community thanks.

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This episode uniquely blends practical advice, deep dives into FOSS definitions, reactions to global policy moves, software updates, and some classic Linux banter. The team balances concerns about the future of software freedom and real-world security with nostalgia and actionable tips for Linux users of all skill levels.

Transcript

[Jonathan]

This week we're talking about Germany and the odf. That's the Open Document foundation. And then the guys remember what used to be before systemd. We talk about Google and the finally unveiled unverified install flow for Android. There's a Blender update. We discuss whether Manjaro is cooked or just cooking and a whole lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

[Leo Laporte]

This episode is brought to you by outSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the Outsystems platform and with good reason. Build, run and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Outsystems is trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission critical apps. Teams of any size and technical depth can use Outsystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and and security. Without systems you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. Outsystems build your agentic future. Learn [e-mail] TWiT that's outsystems.com

[Jonathan]

podcasts you

[Jeff]

love from people you trust.

[Jonathan]

This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 247, recorded Saturday, March 21. Trips off the tongue hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for Linux and getting geeky about open source software. We're going to talk about some hardware stuff, lots of good stuff today on the Untitled Linux Show. We got a Motley Crue with me today and it is of course our normal guys. We were talking a little bit before the show about metal bands and so Motley Crue just seemed appropriate. But anyway, we've got Rob, we've got Canon, we've got Jeff, and there's an interesting question that I have for each of us before we dive into the actual news. And this will come up here in a moment, it'll come up again a little later. But what browser is everybody connecting from? Let's let we go Rob and then Jeff and then me and then Ken. Rob, what browser?

[Rob]

Microsoft Edge, of course.

[Jonathan]

Are you serious? Do you really dial in with Edge on Linux?

[Rob]

I do, yeah.

[Jonathan]

That checks out.

[Jeff]

Actually, Jeff, Firefox is my main browser.

[Jonathan]

I am running Chrome, not a Chromium, real deal Chrome on my Linux Machine here. And Ken, this is all a setup if you hadn't figured it out for what Ken has to talk about before we get into the news. What browser are you using?

[Ken]

Today I am trying out Opera gx though my normal day to day use is Firefox and Chromium depending. I use Firefox when I'm going to any personal accounts that I don't care about that I want to keep private and then I use Chrome for those that I don't want to show. And why did my screen lock up?

[Jonathan]

Oh, well, that's fine. You're still moving for me. So we got you still.

[Ken]

All right.

[Jonathan]

Your screen inside of. Inside of the new browser. Oh, okay. So yes, inside of the new browser. Maybe that's a great sign.

[Rob]

You got to explain what GX is for those.

[Jonathan]

Yes, yes, yes. What is.

[Ken]

It's Opera. I actually haven't seen it spelled out this way, but I'm assuming it's Gamer extreme since it's got a lot of gamer centric options in it. In fact, let me go ahead and let's. There we go. And as you can see, it says GX Corner. It comes up with Steam Spring Cell and you've got the GX control which lets you control your RAM in the. For the browser, do network limiting on the browser and you can kill hot tabs. So I thought I'm going to. Based on all of this and since I actually heard about this through my grandson who uses it on Windows, that it's. And he does a lot of gaming on his Windows PC that's primarily meant for gamers so that they can pull it up and use it there.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, we were teasing Ken before the show started. He's like, it's got a Discord button.

[Rob]

It's like.

[Jonathan]

You mean like a bookmark? Well, yeah. Okay.

[Ken]

Kind of like that.

[Jonathan]

And then he says, and it does RAM limiting. And Jeff joined it about that timing. Why would you ever want to limit your ram? But no, no, it's. It's. You limit the RAM that the browser uses so that your game does not get RAM starred. Which is actually an interesting idea as. As those of us that tend to run more tabs than we should, let's say know that that does indeed become a problem eventually.

[Rob]

Yeah, if you're running. If you're running Discord on the browser, that'd be a great place for it, I think.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah. I've had weird problems with Discord in the browser. It used to work great and then suddenly I've had like over the last month, just random times where it's like one individual person in a call I can't hear until I refresh or the computer behind me I go to join a call in Discord Audio never connects. It's the weird, the weirdest thing.

[Jeff]

And I have the exact opposite problem. Usually I only run in the browser because the standalone program was always causing me fits and wouldn't connect to audio.

[Ken]

Yeah, and I don't even think I've installed the standalone browser or application Discord application on the new system. I did have it run where I tried it once or twice on the old system. I want to blame the hardware for how it ran on that one.

[Jonathan]

Well, yeah, that's probably true, but now I've had, I've had weird problems with it recently. I didn't used to run it in, in the standalone app at all. But anyway, let's move on to some news and we're going to let Rob. This is sort of ironic, Rob connecting from Microsoft Edge. But Rob is going to talk about, well, Free software.

[Rob]

Yes, this isn't news, but I'm going to help answer the question what is free software? Because I've had some chats online recently and in the past. A lot of people seem to be confused about what free means when describing free software in the floss, you know, Free Leroy, Open Source software world, you know, and I'm going to. First, I'm going to start by reading a snippet from the GNU Free Software philosophy quote. Free software means software that respects users freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. We sometimes call it libre software, borrowing from the French or Spanish word for free, as in freedom. Freedom to. To show we do not, you know, we do not mean the software is gratis. So you know, you may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software. Easy even to sell copies. So according to the gnu, there are four essential freedoms for free software. And it's funny they Label them Freedom 0, Freedom 1, Freedom 2, Freedom 3. But anyway, the first one, the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose. The second one, the freedom to study how the program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish you know, access to the source code is a precondition for this because if you don't have access, you can't change things. The third one is the freedom to redistribute so you can help others. And then the, the fourth one is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified version to others. By doing this, you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this also. So, you know what I'm, so, you know, the next time you're speaking to someone in the Linux and Open source community, you know, make sure to use clear communication terms, you know, because if you're looking for alternative Microsoft Office, it doesn't cost any money. Be clear and say that, you know, free as in beer. You don't, you don't, you won't. You want an alternative that you don't have to pay for. Because, you know, if, if you tell me you want a free, you know, a free alternative, I, since we're in an open source community, I'm just going to think you want free as a speech. But you know, also if you're, if you want to be clear, since there's a lot of confusion of the term free software, you know, if you're looking for software that provides you the essential freedoms from the free software philosophy, you know, you could use the words like libre and freedom, you know, open and free, as in free speech. But try to be clear because I see, like, I see a lot of confusion when people ask for I want this free. And the answer is kind of all over the place because it's a very ambiguous term without the context in place. And to me the context, hey, you're in a Linux community, I'm going to give you free speech software, you know, because, and if I see someone, you know, I will criticize those, suggest like software that isn't open source, regardless if it costs money or not. Because, you know, I'm kind of a social media troll like that, you know, if you're in a Linux community, Open Source community, free software means free speech. So be clear about what you're really asking for.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, this is why Floss Weekly is free. Libre, open source software. And another rabbit hole that we may go down at some point, not today, is the difference between free and Open Source, which means two slightly different, similar but slightly different things. When you talk about the Free Software definition, there's one in particular that people are sort of forgetting these days, or maybe we're having to relearn lesson that freedom 0 the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose. That's, that's pretty important. And that's why the, the Open Source Initiative and Free Software foundation, they will not approve any license that have any sort of morality clause in them. And so, you know, people have this great, oh, I'm going to write the software, but I'm going to say, but you can't use it for evil. Well, define evil. Okay, let's, let's dive into some actual use cases that you might consider evil, that I might not. I might consider the exact opposite thing to be evil. And you know, you get into all sorts of law enforcement and government use and various things like that where people don't necessarily agree on what would, would and would not be considered evil. And so that is the primary reason why that little clause is in there for any purpose. And you have the same thing in the Open Source definition. No, no morality clauses. It just doesn't work. And one of the other things to point out with Free Software is talking free as in Freedom. Free Software is not anti capitalistic. It very much works within the capitalist framework.

[Ken]

If anything, ethically speaking and monetarily speaking, it can be the most expensive.

[Rob]

Yeah, free software can cost money.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, it's usually not, but it certainly can be. So you've got, I mean Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has got to be the most famous example of this. I think there are paid versions of suse and then you've also got things like iredmail, I use that. They've got a paid version of that. All kinds of free software out there that's free as in freedom, but you get to pay some money for it.

[Jeff]

Ubuntu with their server support.

[Jonathan]

That's true, yeah.

[Ken]

Zorin, Zorin Pro and there's some where you pay with the time invested into it.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah, I mean that's true, but not quite what we're talking about.

[Rob]

What, what made me think of this? I can't even remember other question. I should have noted it down, but somebody had a question on a Linux group I'm in and they're like, hey, I'm looking for this for free. And people were giving some, oh, it was a Zoom. I'm looking for a free alternative to Zoom. And people are like, but Zoom is free. Google, Google and, and, and that.

[Ken]

But Video Ninja, the Google one.

[Rob]

I'm like, and I'd be, I was responding to people like, that's not free. What do you mean it's not free? I was like, here's what free means in. In the Linux and Open Source community I had people arguing, they're like, no, I've been using this for 20 years and free has always meant it doesn't cost money. And then I posted the GNU like,

[Jonathan]

read it and weep, suckers.

[Ken]

The concept of freedom. I hate to say it, but that's the most expensive concept out there. But then we're getting into politics and

[Jonathan]

let's not do that, all right? Although I think Ken is gonna drag us into some politics with his story. What's going on in Germany? Oh boy, oh boy.

[Ken]

This week Bobby Borisov wrote about Germany mandating the Open Document Format, or odf, as the standard for public administration documents within its new Sovereign Digital Infrastructure framework. Now, this framework is called the Deutschland Stack and published by the Federal Ministry for Digital and State Monitoring Modernization. And the framework sets technical standards for a unified interoperable digital environment across all levels of government. So yes, I'm dragging us straight into politics with this. Now it explicitly requires ODF and PDF UA as document formats, excluding proprietary alternatives from official use. Mandating OTF at the federal level ensures consistent handling of documents, system compatibility and long term accessibility of official records across the public institutes via the open ISO standardized file format. According to Bobby, the Deutschland Support Stack supports a broader strategy to build sovereign digital infrastructure using open standards, open interfaces and reduced reliance on single vendors. It also prioritizes local data storage and open source development to limit vendor lock in in government IT systems. Florian Effenberger and I do apologize if I'm mispronouncing that Executive Director of the document foundation said in a press release. This is not a recommendation or preference, it is a mandate. Germany's decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years. Open vendor neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations. Now, there's more information about the framework available in Bobby's article that I've got linked in the show notes. So I definitely recommend diving down that rabbit hole by starting with that article.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, interesting.

[Jeff]

Oh, the sauerkraut's hitting the fan now.

[Jonathan]

It's funny, you know, so I was, a week and a half ago I was in Germany and it was, it was real fascinating to hear like the differences, talk about the differences between particularly EU and the German state and like things going on in the U.S. i'm not gonna, I'm not gonna dive into details about the stuff we talked about because again, we don't want to get into the partisan politics but there were questions. It's like why does Germany have a high speed train network that works really well and the US doesn't? Well, there are reasons and multiple people we can blame for that, you know, that sort of thing. It's pretty cool though to see and this is directly the work of people like Simon Phipps and everybody else at the odf really going out and spreading the good word, trying to educate politicians and policymakers about what it actually means for a protocol to be open and not proprietary, not something owned by Linux, by Microsoft and so good for them.

[Rob]

And that really makes a lot of sense if, if you want something to last and be open available for the long term, you know, because theoretically, I mean, I don't know that the Microsoft format's going away but you know, something could happen to Microsoft and they're not there anymore and that code's locked up and eventually gonna go away. Microsoft format with Doc Doc X. Yeah,

[Jonathan]

I mean you've got, you've got support for that inside of a LibreOffice. It's been, it's been reverse engineered. But I definitely get the point there

[Ken]

that especially considering how many different formats the Word Documents gone through over the years.

[Jonathan]

Yep.

[Jeff]

There's, you know, there's always comply.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah, there's a few of those formats that are actually really difficult to get data out of. Was it wps, the old Microsoft Works that works documents? Yes. I remember we had a copy of Microsoft Works that we use on a computer years ago and trying to get that data back, get it to open in anything was a huge pain. I think LibreOffice will do it. But Microsoft Office wouldn't for the longest

[Ken]

time or open a so called text file from 40 years ago.

[Jonathan]

40 years ago, you're probably okay. But Microsoft did have that rich text format, rtf that was, that was pretty wonky.

[Ken]

Yeah, but what character definition were you? Ascii.

[Jonathan]

Everything was ASCII before and if you've

[Ken]

dropped ASCII out of your options, I

[Jonathan]

don't think that's ever going to happen. ASCII is too baked into, too baked into C and C ascii ASCII forever.

[Rob]

You know, and you know, even though like you said, the Doc Doc EX formats, all those and the various version of them over the years have been been reverse engineered, they have been today. But that doesn't mean the next one's going to be as easy or the one after that. And even then they're often not a perfect replicate representation of being on the word format. I think they've gotten pretty good these days. But that doesn't mean that the, the next 2026, 2028 version is going to have something that's going to be harder to reverse engineer and absolutely.

[Ken]

Does anything support any of the Lotus document formats?

[Jonathan]

I think LibreOffice will open them. But yeah, it's another, it's another example of something pretty obscure that maybe you can't, you can't open. All right, let's learn. Yeah, you've got WordStar. You've also got like Claris Works. I've got a customer that's still got some Claris Works documents hanging around. I don't know if anything can open that other than an ancient install of Claris. Fun, fun old stuff. Let's move on here. In just a minute, Jeff is going to talk about not System D, or maybe he is going to talk about System D. But before we get to that, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. I have created the most advanced AI soldier.

[Jeff]

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[Jonathan]

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[Rob]

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[Jonathan]

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[Jeff]

Hang on.

[Jonathan]

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[Jeff]

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[Jonathan]

Also expensive.

[Jeff]

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[Jonathan]

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[Jeff]

So last week we talked about systemd coming out with a new release candidate and how they were going to put some documents in the release to help guide AI. And then we talked a little bit about the story of systemd and alternatives. You know, people bring up the INIT system a lot, but there are others that also tried to become the standard and there are some of these alternatives. I thought they were interesting to cover and you know, why not let's, let's talk about it and talk a little bit about why they didn't make it. Now first on the list is upstart. Now honestly I forgot about this one since it had been a while since I used it. Upstart came from Canonical and was used in Ubuntu from 2006 to 2015. It was an event driven system which didn't run a bunch of scripts but reacted to things happening in the system. Now while it had a strong start and many people thought it would be the next big standard because when it started Ubuntu was one of the Linux distributions at the time. If you go back 2010, say for example, well, what was its downfall? It was just focused on INIT and service management where systemd went beyond that and people took a look and, and a lot of other things like integrated logging, device management, timers and other things which systemd kind of had wrapped up in it. Debian then also chose systemd in 2014. That was pretty much the end of it for upstart, especially since Ubuntu is downstream from Debian and Debian is one of the main pillars of, of the three main pillars in the Linux community that, you know, it has a lot of effect on of various distributions. So that pretty much sets a standard. Canonical decided not to fight it and didn't, didn't try to swim upstream or anything. So they went System D. OpenRC was another, another, another one. Gentoo and Alpine. Linux used it and Alpine still uses it today. It was designed to be just an improved SYSV INIT and it kept things to just the boot and service parts of the system, which some people like because it follows the Unix style of just do one thing but do it really well. Others like the fact that systemd was a complete package and bundled a lot of the lower level system stuff together. OpenRC never really went away, but it never got a ton of traction. So it's just been a small player even today. Run INIT was another one and like OpenRC, it had a limited scope, but it was limited to even was limited even more than OpenRC. It's tiny and very predictable. But the minimalism also is what hurt it. Just like OpenRC having to run several other tools around it to get a fully working system, while doable, was just not the favored choice people wanted. Like the more complete package of System D. Now, S6 is an init system that, unlike the last two examples, goes for a highly organized collection of services. It provides a structured framework for process supervision, dependency management, and reliable service state transitions. The system puts a lot of emphasis on correctness, deterministic behavior, and carefully defined failure handling. Why didn't it become popular? Well, all of that rigid structure, you know, makes it complex and hard to work with. So there's a large learning curve to get X6 set up and behaving like you want. And people just didn't want to fight with it. They didn't want to tackle the learning curve and they wanted a little simpler and, you know, make a little change and everything works and they're on with their day rather than learning something a little, little more intricate. And really, alignment was one of the biggest reasons too, that systemd one, you know, several INIT functions were all rolled into systemd, so it was a more complete package. And one of the big arguments on that it should be unified. You know, one of the big arguments is should it be unified or should they stick to the original, do one thing and do it well. And that's a lot of what people argue about today with systemd is their philosophies on how that should be handled. Now, Red Hat picked it as well and actually led the charge because Debian followed Red Hat. You know, you've got two powerful distributions. That's a lot of alignment in the ecosystem. And then most others just kind of followed along because, you know, other tools were already integrated to work with it. Alignment made things a lot easier. Documentation was better. You know, it, it just kind of made sense at that point. But, you know, like I said, there, there's alternatives out there, and some distributions are still using the alternatives. You take a look at the article linked in the show notes, you can get even more details and deeper pros and deeper cons of systemd versus the various alternatives, past and present. And no matter which side you fall on the systemd fence, I hope all of your boots go smooth.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, you got me looking. And Fedora, after it went from Sysv and it actually ran upstart for a few releases. And then Fedora, I think it was 15, they finally went to System D, so it had another one of those sandwiched in between.

[Rob]

It's funny, Ubuntu went way in on systemd just because their. Their beloved Snap package or snapd requires it. And it's one of the few major things that really require that. That has a major requirement of it.

[Jeff]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[Rob]

Yeah, yeah, you can't run it like MX Linux back in the day used to be able to pick not. Not very long ago. I think now it's defaulted to systemd. But you could pick the old SYSV in it, or that was the default, or you could pick systemd, but if you wanted to install snaps on there, you had to do systemd. It just wouldn't work. I haven't tested to see. I want to see what happened. Just. You can't. It's a requirement. I wonder if any of the discontent, the newest discontent of the community is going to have any effect on, you know, any of these other options out there. But.

[Jeff]

Well, a lot of those aren't, you know, S6 and would be one of the. The big ones or if they want to go simple with the run it. But you know, see, that's the one that's still in use today because some of them have been kind of abandoned or not kept up as well.

[Ken]

From the article, it sounds like they're just running on top of the initial INIT system that was ported from the commercial unix system that AT&T had come out with. Well, 1983.

[Jeff]

Yeah. Some of them are improvements on the INIT system, some are more rewrites. It kind of depends. The ones that are simple and just handle the basic structures. That's usually just an improvement upon the INIT system versus the more complex complete packages that they're definitely a different set of software. And like I said, a lot of it boils down to no, no, we need to have it do one thing and do it well. Or I like the whole package because it makes it easier to handle.

[Ken]

Do you say system sys v or sys 5?

[Jeff]

I say v because I noticed that

[Ken]

apparently Wikipedia says you say system Vibe.

[Jonathan]

It's the Internet. People read it however they want to and we don't ever actually talk to each other.

[Jeff]

Yeah, let's be real. In my house, I defined it as

[Jonathan]

V. When I got, when I first got started doing it work, I called it Ethernet and I got people really looking at me weird for that one.

[Rob]

It's like what I mean, it's like Mac OS 10. I call it Mac OS X. I'm going to always call it OS X. OS X just doesn't flow off the tongue.

[Jonathan]

Indeed.

[Ken]

Yeah, it trips off the tongue.

[Jonathan]

It trips off the tongue. All right, let's move on to Android. So we've talked about this a bit over the past few months actually and there is, well, there's trouble in Android land. But we now know that there is at least some level of hope on the horizon. We are of course talking about unverified Android apps and Google in their new policy where they were going to just say, nope, nope, you don't get to side load unverified apps. You can only sideload apps from a verified developer. And of course people lost their mind over it, me included, because that's a really terrible idea for things like F Droid and doing just development through GitHub. Lots of, lots of reasons why that's a problem. On the other hand, and I've made this point before here on the show, I do understand what Google is getting at because there is legitimately a problem with sideloading apps from malicious sources. And goodness it, a couple of weeks ago I was on a, I was trying to download something on a website and you know, it would had an ad that would redirect you to another website and it would show the ad, do the redirect and then an APK would start downloading. And it's like this, I'm sure is malicious. I guarantee you it's a malicious apk. Like that's how you get your machine, your, your Android machine botnetted and you know, all kinds of bad stuff. So I wanted nothing to do with that. I knew what was going on. But a lot of people do actually get hit by those sorts of things. So in some cases they look really, really good.

[Jeff]

They look.

[Jonathan]

So I understand that Google wants to kill this inside of Android. They want people to stop getting their devices infected by these rogue APKs. But again, on the other side, you've got places like F Droid that are totally legitimate that need to be able to do side loaded unsigned APKs. So there's been a back and forth in the community between just about everybody in the community in Google. Google has finally now revealed their grand plan for how we can side load. And it's actually not terrible. It's not as bad as it could be. This seems like maybe don't throw stones at me, but this seems like a reasonable compromise to me. So the process, you grab the apk, you say download it and Google will give you a prompt and it will say, are you being coached? Is someone guiding you? And I believe if you say yes, someone is guiding me, it just refuses to do it. Because again, the idea here is they're trying to cut down on scammers. And so they'll probably kick you over to a webpage that says, here's how to know if you're being scammed. You say, no one is instructing me. You get to go on to the next, the next, the next part, which is a security delay. So what it does is you hit the button and say, yes, I want to be able to side load unverified apps. Your phone will reboot. And the idea behind the reboot is again, it's going to disconnect the remote desktop session, the remote access session, it's going to disconnect the phone call, whatever it is, where someone is trying to scam you into doing this. And then after you reboot, you have to wait 24 hours and it will then once again prompt you, Are you sure you want to do this? And you get to do your biometric authentication, fingerprint, face unlock, device, pin, whatever it is you use, it will prompt you to go through that process again. And then you finally get to either temporarily or permanently enable unverified sideloading. So for those of us who use F Droid, that just means it's a 24 hour process to set F Droid up on a phone, which is a huge pain, I grant you that, but at the same time, it's much better than disallowing it altogether. And it's also better than grandma's phone constantly being inundated by malware, where someone called and you know, your Android needs update your, your, your, your Google YouTube, Chrome needs updated. Go to this link. Yes, install that apk. You know what, whatever it is that's going on. So it's, it's going to be a pain, but it seems to me at least to be, well, not as bad as it could be and also not the end of the world. What do you guys think?

[Rob]

I question.

[Jonathan]

I have questions.

[Rob]

All right, so my, my question is, sure, it takes 24 hours to do F Droid, but what about the individual apps on F Droid? They're not coming from the Google Play Store. Is it going to consider each of those to be a sideloaded app?

[Jonathan]

Yes.

[Rob]

So each app that you install from F Droid is going to, you have to wait 24 hours?

[Jonathan]

No, you wait 24 hours, you get the option to enable sideloading either temporarily, like you turn it on for seven days or you enable this sideloading indefinitely. If you're going to use F Droid, that's what you're going to do.

[Rob]

So it's not 24 hours per sideloaded apk. Correct. Unless you did a temporary. Okay, so that it sounds good to me.

[Ken]

Even if you are using F Droid, but you know you're only going to be downloading a select few within that next seven days. Then you could do the seven day option.

[Jonathan]

You could, but then you're going to run into it again when F droid tries to update something. Because that's part of the deal with F Droid is it's its own app store and so it downloads updates. And if you're not familiar with F Droid, what it is, it is explicitly an app store for open source applications. And when an application gets hosted on F Droid, the F Droid guys build that application. In fact, they build them all on air gapped servers, which is why they can't opt in. It's not that they don't want, not necessarily just that they don't want to. I think that's part of it. But they literally cannot opt into this developer verification because they do these builds on an offline air gap server. They are, they are very picky about making sure that those builds are done correctly and done securely.

[Ken]

And I got a feeling you're going to see several developers move from Google Play to F Droid because it's too expensive now to do it through Google Play.

[Jonathan]

It's really not. I mean there is a little bit of a price for the, the verification.

[Rob]

Yeah, when I did it was like 25. That was life.

[Ken]

You haven't heard, heard the recent news then on what they're asking developers to do? No, they're asking for a lot of personal information from developer plus money. $25.

[Jonathan]

There's always been personal information because you're essentially signing a business contract with Google to get into that and there's all kinds of compliance issues. But what's the cost that they're talking about?

[Ken]

Look it up here real quick.

[Jonathan]

I was going to say, I can't imagine it being too terribly much.

[Rob]

Yeah. My complaint was in the past, I paid $25 one time and when I looked into it like iOS was $100 a year, which that was what annoyed me. And I'm just a hobbyist, so I don't want to pay $100 a year for something that I really don't care about. But $25 one time. I'll be, ah, why not? Here you go.

[Jeff]

I'd be curious the rate of malicious software versus the Google Play Store versus F Droid, what the ratios actually are, because I know people get a Lot of malicious stuff off of the official stores too.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, that's true.

[Ken]

Well, at least half of it on the, to the official store.

[Jeff]

Yeah.

[Jonathan]

I will, I will tell you that when I was, when I was doing the security column every week, there were quite a few times that we would talk about, you know, something happening on Android and the, the way that it was getting onto people's phones was, you know, someone set up a watering hole attack. Right. Where it's like they had this website where they were sending people to. And then you went to the website and it wanted to download an apk and the APK was claiming to be an update for whatever the watering hole website was about. So, you know, oh, you want to use this bank that you just typoed? Well, download this apk. It's the updated banking app and lots of people fall for it.

[Jeff]

Now, I, I'm curious just, just simply from the fact I'm the exact opposite. I'm, I'm kind of a luddite when it comes to the phone. I think I've told people before, you know, I got probably about four apps on my phone.

[Ken]

You still have a dial tone on

[Jeff]

yours or just about.

[Rob]

But yeah, I don't think I see companies moving to it now any more than before. I mean, F Droid's been available forever and now it's just slightly harder for people to get F Droid apps.

[Ken]

It's harder to update it because I had downloaded it through the Google Play Store years ago and recently it's been saying it's ready, ready for update, but it's not giving me the option to update it through the Google Play Store.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's the same problem. You probably need to uninstall it from there and go grab their APK and sideload it. It's basically all the same problem.

[Ken]

Yep. But it's still a one one time $25 registration fee. Here's where I think you're going to have a lot of developers balking.

[Rob]

It's funny, that hasn't changed in like over a decade though.

[Ken]

Yeah, well, when you're having to give 30% of your income to them for hosting the

[Rob]

pre apps, anything I've ever put on there is free. I think I put like one thing.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. Google is, Google has gotten its cut from the Play Store for a long time. I don't think the 30% is new either.

[Ken]

No. In fact, I think there's recent talk about them dropping it down to 15%, but it's the Verifying your identity. You've got a complete developer identity verification. Now this is a required for all accounts and it includes providing a government id.

[Jonathan]

Well, I mean get ready, that's coming for just about anything on the Internet

[Rob]

before, you know, seems fair if you're selling something on their platform.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I mean it's a compliance, it's a legal thing. I'm sort of surprised that this hasn't been a thing before now. So I just teased it and now I look and I see that Rob is actually teed up to talk more about this. Rob, let's continue on with this idea of identity verification, not just for developers, but what about for the rest of us?

[Rob]

Well, yeah, we've talked quite a bit over the last few weeks about age verification laws going into effect in various places like California, maybe Colorado and New York. And there have been a lot of questions about the laws and now someone has answered that ageless question. What are we going to do if all distros are going to have age verification? What will, you know, privacy loving penguins like us run? The answer to that ageless question is ageless. Ageless Linux, that is, is a new Debian based distro. But what makes it notable is that it is created as a symbol of resistance to the growing push for for operating system level verification. Ageless Linux responds to that concern by positioning itself as a deliberately non compliant alternative, rejecting the idea that an operating system should act as a digital identity keeper. The project purpose is to offer users a familiar Linux system with age verification mechanisms removed or avoided, preserving the view that an operating system should simply run software, not monitor or categorize the people using it. That is one way to attack the problem. But in places like Colorado we have people like Carl from System 76 appealing to the government to exclude open source. And according to a recent tweet, it sounds like they're actually making progress and may get that put into their law. But then there are other areas of the world that at least unless you talked about when I wasn't here, we completely missed on this topic. I even used an example of, you know, what somebody makes a distro in Brazil and tries to use in California, but this is also happening in Brazil as they're passing a. Well, they've already passed a potentially stricter that went into effect March 17th I think it was, but you know, more stricter but maybe more vague age verification law to which distros like Arch Linux 32, which is a 32 bit spin of Arch, has just completely blocked downloads to Brazil So if you and California, so if you come there from, from one of those places and your IP is properly geo located, you're going to get a page that says yeah, we just can't support you basically, you know, and if all those ideas aren't good, you could just give in and add it right to the core components of Linux itself, which is what systemd did. Systemd added an optional birth date field to its user user records. So now there's a standardized place where an administrator could store a user's birth date. System B itself is not doing age verification, not enforcing policy and not sending age data to apps. It is just adding a field that other software could use as a centralized location of a distro or project, you know, decides to build any kind of age features into it. Still, it's enough reason for systemd haters to say I told you so. And from what I'm seeing on social media today, they're going insane with comments. Those watching, I got some behind me, I have names crossed out so you can't see the full names, but comments like, quote, system D is just showing who they are and possibly sealing their fate. Another one, another reason to avoid System D in which somebody replied to that person, quote, as if we needed another reason. And then, and then I saw questions online from apparently a new Linux user says he's new use Mint a couple weeks, a week or something asking for distros that don't have System D saying because this new feature quote puts every system based distro at risk upstream. What are we to do? It's just horrible. Okay. You know, I mean I'm not for this age verification stuff and I think a lot of it's just dumb. But people are just getting stupid over this now. I mean, come on, slippery slope, I don't know.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, okay, so there is nothing inherently wrong with having an age field or a birthday field in System D or I'm pretty sure this has been in Unix in the past is, you know, user's birthday, user's current age. Like there's nothing.

[Rob]

Their office.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, number. This is, this is typical stuff.

[Ken]

Yeah.

[Rob]

If you go on Reddit, it's just insane. It's just pages and pages of people in Facebook, Linux groups and everywhere. It's like.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I can imagine. Right. So let's. And the reason I say this though is that there is an issue here, but you need to understand what the issue is. And it's not having an age field in System D. I could care less about that. But the idea of, you know, a government forcing a Linux distro to ask someone's age when they create an account. Like, that's a, that's a bridge too far that I think in my opinion that's pushing beyond what's appropriate for, for freedom to use a computer. At the same token, I understand why there is this push for, you know, let's have an age field and filter what, what you get to see online by that. And, and like on a technical level, that could be useful even, right? Like what advertisements get shown on various websites. I would, I would really love for my kids to not see some of the advertisements that get shown on some websites. So like, I get that too. But yeah, it's a, it's, it's a pain. Now to be clear what, what none of this is talking about is having to go through and do a government ID verification to be able to do a Linux installer to create an account. Nobody's asking for that. Nobody. That's not part of this, the suggestion at all. And so what this is, is it's just when you create an account plays into your current age and so it's not as onerous as people think it is.

[Rob]

And that age just stays in the same.

[Ken]

Your current age or your birth date?

[Jonathan]

I don't think the law, at least the laws that I've looked into, I don't think they specify which way to do it.

[Ken]

No, the field.

[Jonathan]

Oh, I have no idea.

[Rob]

It's birth date.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Rob]

The actual field is birth capital, D date.

[Jeff]

I read it as. Now you can optionally set a variable to a value.

[Rob]

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is.

[Jonathan]

And, and so there's, there's another angle.

[Jeff]

There's nothing more there.

[Jonathan]

There's another angle to this too, and that is those, those guys running the distros that are like blatantly against this, you know, that's fine in places where code is free speech. So in the US that's absolutely not a problem at all. You get to do that because our Supreme Court has ruled that code is free speech, code is speech, and therefore you get to do things like this because we had the First Amendment. But in a business setting, that will not fly at all. And so that's why IBM, Red Hat, Ubuntu, they are going to do what the law says that they're going, that they need to do because they are businesses.

[Rob]

And those distros can use System D without touching that feature.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Jonathan]

You don't have to use it just because it's in there. It's not like it's spying on you, collecting your data to upload to the

[Rob]

government, but those corporate systems that have to use it, this provides a central location. Otherwise you're going to have Canonical and Red Hat forcing either forking System D because they want to centralize there, or they're gonna have to make their own place to put it where it's gonna be different everywhere across every system. And you know, eventually it's this just makes it centralized so that way everybody's on the same page.

[Ken]

I gotta. What I think's gonna happen is you'll have systemd doing this and then when you create users, it's going to include this as part of the information that goes into that comment field that you have. That's basically a text string that's generally used as a short description of the count and in most cases is used as a field for the user's first full or full name.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I think what systemd has done is they've added an additional field for this. But yeah, you could absolutely put it in there if you didn't have that. But yeah, so all of this I think is just yes, it's an important thing to think through, like whether you want your local government mandating something like this. But the hysteria that we've seen from it is just a little ridiculous. So we're going to let Ken in just a moment talk about a new application. Well, not new, but a new update to an application application that we all know and love. First, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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[Jonathan]

all right, let's talk Blender.

[Ken]

I agree, Jonathan. Let's talk Blender. This week Marcus Nester and Michael Larabel wrote about the Blender project's latest release. I'm talking about Blender 5.1. Now according to Marcus Blender 5.1 highlights include AMD GPUs with hip RT ray tracing enabled by default, and a new fcurve modifier called Gaussian Smooth that allows non destructive smoothing of FCurves. Blender 5.1 adds support for opening windows without decorations on Wayland by using the dash dash no dash window dash frame argument, removing the dependency on the LibDecor client side decorations library for Wayland Silent. Also, Blender now uses the this is all in CAPS TBB Malloc proxy for memory allocation on Linux. Now according to Michael's benchmark marking article, overall Blender 5.1 on Linux is running well with CPU rendering performance up to a few percent faster than Blender 5.0. Also new in Blender 5.1 is an operator to replace the action on multiple objects, support for snapping and precision. You use control and shift keys for doing that, while using bevel and add support for avif files or aff. Now, since I don't have time to cover all the new features, I do recommend reading Marcus and Mark Michael's article now. I'll also provide a link to the nearly 14 minute video hosted by Jonathan Lampel from cgcookie.com that demonstrates most of the new features. I don't think you want me to take 14 minutes, do you Jonathan?

[Jonathan]

Probably not quite that long. So if anyone like me couldn't remember and wondered what AMD's HIP stands for, I.e. aMD. Heterogeneous Compute Interface for Portability. And that's what we call it. HIP. Heterogeneous Compute Interface for Portability.

[Ken]

Just call it HIP and forget that

[Rob]

other yeah, Ken, save your 14 minutes for your command line tip.

[Jeff]

Yeah, I think it's good that they got HIP in there by default. You know, get more of the GPU rendering cpu, rendering performance increase. How many people are actually using the CPUs to render these days?

[Ken]

You know, those with AMD cards.

[Jonathan]

Not anymore.

[Jeff]

Not anymore.

[Jonathan]

Maybe you have an intel card? You're still using it?

[Ken]

Yes. Oh really?

[Jonathan]

Yeah, maybe. Well, I don't know.

[Jeff]

I'd have to look because Rock, Rock M and HIP and all that. That was supposed to be open source, so intel could.

[Jonathan]

But I don't think, I don't think. I don't think they've ported ported it to intel cards. That would be really interesting if they did, but I don't think it's happened anyway. Yeah, so again, Blender is another one of those things that's on my very long list of things to play with and learn how to use.

[Ken]

Above or below caliber?

[Jonathan]

Not sure. It's not a literal list, it's a mental list. You know, like yeah, there you go. It's more like more of a pile

[Ken]

and it keeps changing from today, today on which one's on top of yes, it does.

[Jonathan]

It does very much.

[Ken]

That definitely sounds like a pile.

[Jeff]

A mental pile really?

[Jonathan]

All right, Jeff, let's talk Manjaro. And is it cooked? Is it cooked?

[Ken]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

Well, today we're going to dive into a Linux shakeup in the internal collapse and attempted rebirth of the Manjaro project. Now, if you've been around Linux for a while, you probably remember when Manjaro was the go to Arch based distro for for newcomers. You know, it offered Arches power with a friendlier, more curated experience. But over the past decade, things have gone downhill. Slowly at first, and then kind of all at once. Now, a Manjaro team member recently published a Manifesto titled Manjaro 2.0 and it confirms that what many users suspected, the project has been stagnating, losing contributors and repeatedly making the same mistakes without fixing them. One line from the document says it plainly, the Manjaro project has been declining over the past decade. The problems weren't just minor bugs. We're talking about basic infrastructure failures like TLS certificates expiring multiple times, leaving users unable to update. Team members built tools to fix these issues, but leadership never implemented them. Updates to the stable branch sometimes stalled for months, and the project became known for mismanagement rather than innovation. At the center of the crisis is Manjaro's leadership structure. The project is effectively controlled by one person, Philip Mueller, co owner of the Manjaro company. According to the manifesto, he centralized access to the infrastructure, refused to delegate, and didn't invest company funds back into the project. As a result, Manjaro's only full time developer lost their income when the money ran out. Now, this isn't new tension. For years, the line between Manjaro, the community project and Manjaro, the company, has been blurry. There have been controversies and for example, like spending €2,000 on a laptop purchased without the treasurer's approval, which, after which, when the treasurer was questioning some of this, the treasurer was removed. The team finally reached a point where they felt the project was dying. And their solution split Manjaro into two entities. So you'd have Manjaro GmbH the company, and then Manjaro Project EV. It's a new nonprofit run by the community. As you can tell, those are German type letter designations at the end of the Manjaro name. Under this plan, the nonprofit would take over nearly everything. The git repos, the domains, the infrastructure, the forums, the finances, essentially the entire project. And the company would become downstream and would have to pay for any infrastructure it used. So one of the most striking details, the company would eventually hand over the Manjaro trademark to the Nonprofit for one euro. When Mueller didn't respond to the proposal, the community escalated. Moderators, admins and assistants went on strike. No new forum regulations were approved, no moderation happened. Internal discussions were archived so nothing could be deleted. But the message was clear. Either leadership changes or the project collapses. Now, I should say before they posted this, there were some internal postings about this as well to try to get Mueller on board. But it was basically silenced the whole time. So eventually they had different stages. This is where it went public. So this is not like they just immediately went public with this. They were tried to handle it behind closed doors for a while and nothing happened. So that's why they were like talking about archiving and that kind of stuff so that they have record of their previous communications. Now I did say co owned and the other 50% owner, Roman Gillig G I L G publicly supported the nonprofit plan and challenged Mueller to explain why the asset shouldn't be transferred. His involvement is significant, he has equal legal authority and he's siding with the community. Now the manifesto also criticizes how Manjaro was marketed, especially the claim that it's perfect for beginners or ideal for gamers. The author argues that this was misleading, driven by the company's desire to attract customers rather than accurately describe the distribution. Now the video. Now because in the show notes there's a link to a video and the video says there isn't an update and if Mueller is going to respond. You know, there isn't any update on if Mueller is going to respond. But in the comments section there was an update and it appears that the agreement is going to go through. And so it was it. The comment was by the. The maker of the video after the video already went out. Now I'm saying appears. Not that it's for sure or is going to appears. Time will tell. But take a look at the video in the show notes for even more details and because I condensed a 25, 30 minute video and we'll keep a watch out for the results of this and we'll give updates as results come to light.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, that's. It's always a little disheartening to see something like this where a project kind of somebody goes AWOL and the project kind of has to suffer and you're not sure what's going to happen with it. This is why it's always useful to have more than one. And in this case they're learning the hard way more than two people at the top to be able to make these decisions when you've got two people there and they are essentially split 50 50. Then there's not a whole lot you can do even with one of them present. It's even worse so.

[Jeff]

And it's even worse because Mueller centralized like I said, a lot of stuff under him. So the legality wise 50 50. But there's a lot of other stuff Mueller has total control over.

[Rob]

I remember when Manjaro was the Linux distribution that Leo used because of it. I tried at that time for a little while until it broke and then I moved on.

[Jonathan]

Yep.

[Jeff]

And you know, I. Cashios is stealing a lot of the Arch distribution thunder too. So Manjaro to come back, they're probably going to have to fight uphill a little bit and really have to work to distinguish themselves from.

[Rob]

Even before Cashy Endeavor was starting to steal a lot of thunder. Now cash is just taking it away. I don't, I, I don't see how Manjaro can come back from that.

[Ken]

But.

[Jeff]

Yeah, well, if they can differentiate themselves, you know, maybe they take on a little more server role or they go cutting edge as well or you know.

[Rob]

Well, didn't I have a story about Cashy having a server release? I thought, I thought I had one of those. Yeah.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. Well, I will say this. So like Benjaro has made the news because of this. If they do successfully do this and, and you, you get a decent community that takes control and they didn't then push out an update and get things going again. Like that will be some publicity for the brand. And sometimes, sometimes you can take, you can take something like this where it looks like bad news and then you, you snatch victory back from the jaws of defeat. That could be a, you know, very effective. I, I don't mean this to sound quite as heartless as it's going to, but man, that's an effective marketing tool. I.

[Rob]

Well, one thing I remember liking about Manjaro, I mean you can do it anywhere. I've used it after that because it. But I discovered it with Manjaro is they. I had the, the Quake or maybe his Quaker one of those versions. But the Quake terminal where you just hit the. I don't use anymore. But the, the. I don't remember one of the F keys F12 and it would pop down and I really like that I should install that again.

[Jonathan]

But yeah, KDE has that with your Quaker spelled with a K. Yeah.

[Jeff]

And, and really, you know this I. And I use this statement at work all the time is there's opportunity and chaos. So if they can grab this, you know, then run with it. It'll. It'll work.

[Jonathan]

Absolutely.

[Rob]

KDE is not built in by default though, right? You have to install it.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, it's an application. Yeah, but it's part of. It's part of the kde.

[Rob]

Yeah.

[Jonathan]

Desktop.

[Rob]

I mean, yeah, Manjaro. I was just in default when you install Manjaro is just there.

[Jeff]

But you're supposed to hit Tilde to hit console.

[Ken]

Jeff, I'm surprised you didn't include the link to the Manjaro 2.0 manifesto with your other link.

[Jonathan]

That one right there from Kenmac999.

[Ken]

I'm going to go ahead and add it to the show notes as well.

[Jonathan]

How. How new is this?

[Ken]

It's an ongoing. When it comes up to.

[Jonathan]

Looks like two days ago was the latest. 9th of March.

[Ken]

19th of March. Yep.

[Rob]

Let's run a diff on their first one and compare with this one and see what's. What they've got taken out of there.

[Ken]

Oh, this is an.

[Rob]

Never mind.

[Ken]

Actually, this is an ongoing thread.

[Jonathan]

Well, we will keep an eye on the Manjaro folks and if we have anything, anything interesting happens, we'll be back next week and we'll talk about it. But I've got. Well, I've got a bit of a gripe actually. I like arm, I like Raspberry PIs, and there is a problem. Dang it. They don't have a decent browser.

[Ken]

Chromium is not decent.

[Jonathan]

I'm being a little facetious. Don't throw anything at me. There's Firefox and there's Chromium, but man, I miss my real Chrome over on Raspberry PI. And there's reasons for that. One of the reasons is widevine support to be able to watch things like Netflix and all of that just doesn't work there. Well, finally Chrome Google is bringing the heat to the ARM64 party and they have now announced that they are officially bringing Google Chrome to ARM64 Linux in Q2 of 2026. So within the next three months we should see this and it'll be a full on. It'll be a full on Chrome, just like you can get on Linux on the desktop. Linux on x86 will now be able to get it over on ARM. And you know, there's already Chromium. So for some people this is really not going to matter very much. But there are some things that do get bundled with Full on Chrome that you don't get with Chromium. And like I said, the tools to watch Netflix And Amazon prime and some of those other things are one of the ones that will be interesting. There's also the Google Pay integration and Google has its enhanced protection in safe mode browsing. They've got some other stuff that they mention here. You can actually log in and get your Google Password Manager. If you use that, it can be part of this as well. So some interesting things going on. And so I'm just as a.

[Ken]

I'm

[Jonathan]

already getting grief for this in the comments. I see live coming in. But you know, if you are like I am an ARM 64 and yet also a Chrome enthusiast. Well, finally we'll get a decent browser.

[Jeff]

So you can't watch Netflix on Firefox on ARM, because I know you can on x86.

[Jonathan]

I don't think so. I, I don't know for sure that I've tried it, to be honest with you. It was a while back the last time that I actually tried this.

[Ken]

But depends on if you. I think you have to accept some options in Firefox for enabling digital rights management.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, that's the thing though. I don't know if that those DRM extensions are in Firefox on arm. I've got an ARM laptop here. This is my. Yeah, well, it's a Raspberry. It's a c. It's a Raspberry PI CM5. I forget the name of the argon. The argon. Argon one up.

[Rob]

That's what this year now. Argon.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. I'll boot this up and I'll see if I can get logged into my

[Jeff]

Netflix and then we'll just find testing in production.

[Ken]

And the advantage of being able to run Google's Chrome browser is that you can automatically sync between devices.

[Jonathan]

That is one of the things. Yeah, that's one of the things that's

[Ken]

super nice to include transferring a web page that you have open on one device to another to make it easier. Say you've got something that you've opened on your phone that you want to enter stuff in, but you'd rather use a keyboard to do it. Transfer it to your Chrome browser on your Linux computer and use that keyboard.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I mean you can log in with your, your, your Google account and all of those things work in Chrome and not so well in Chromium or Firefox. Waiting on this to boot up, we'll check it out.

[Rob]

Bookmark sync and you end up having

[Ken]

to export the bookmark then import it back into Chromium or Firefox.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, kind of.

[Jeff]

Firefox was going to have Sync across. I don't know if they fully.

[Ken]

If you set up an account with Firefox.

[Rob]

Yeah.

[Ken]

Do you have an account set up with Firefox, Jeff?

[Jeff]

I do not.

[Ken]

I don't either, but.

[Jeff]

But I don't. You know, see, talking about transferring browser windows, I don't. Or pages. I don't do that because I don't. I don't browse on my phone. Really. Like I said, I'm a Luddite. I mostly texting and calling is what my phone's for. I call people on your cell phone.

[Jonathan]

What's up with that?

[Rob]

I don't have a flip phone.

[Ken]

Using what app?

[Jeff]

Because you can't you really get a flip phone anymore?

[Rob]

Oh, yeah, you can. We still sell them.

[Jeff]

Yeah, but they're garbage now. They're just kind of.

[Rob]

They've always been

[Ken]

flip phones.

[Jeff]

Do what?

[Ken]

Do they have any flip phones that are capable of 5G?

[Jeff]

Yes.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, it's not very. They're not very popular in the US but they are in some other places.

[Ken]

So in other words, living in the US you might not be able to find one.

[Jeff]

Oh, you can see, I. For me though, see it. Part of it is just. It bugs me on my phone. Like, oh, you can surf on your phone. No, I want my 46 inch monitor with monster machine power in this. And just what if you're not at home?

[Ken]

I agree with you, Jeff, on that because that's easier for me to read.

[Jonathan]

I'm looking.

[Jeff]

Yeah, I'm looking around. I'm socializing. I'm out and about.

[Rob]

What about when you're in the restroom?

[Jeff]

I just.

[Ken]

That's getting too personal. Yeah.

[Rob]

You have a 40 inch screen right in there for you, don't you?

[Jeff]

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not hanging out all the time, you know, I'm not go in, get the job done and leave.

[Rob]

I mean, sometimes it takes a while or you have a game to finish.

[Ken]

Well, that's what those paper books are for.

[Jeff]

I don't ever play games on my phone.

[Jonathan]

Okay, So I am getting in Firefox a prompt. You can't see it here, but he says you must enable DRM to play some audio or video on this page. Let's hit the button and see if it works. Honestly, I will be impressed if this does work here, but we'll give it a try.

[Ken]

What Firefox is that? Let's see.

[Jonathan]

Is it actually going to.

[Rob]

It does play Firefox gx.

[Jeff]

There's a show title right there. Firefox impresses Jonathan.

[Jonathan]

It does play. I didn't think it would. I'm actually pretty impressed by that.

[Ken]

Then you've got one of the later versions.

[Jonathan]

Oh yeah, it's up to date.

[Rob]

Firefox.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, for sure. It is 148.

[Ken]

Not too old.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah, that's pretty. That's pretty recent. We did updates on this not too long ago, but it will. It will play. I did not expect it to do that. So yes, Firefox does impress Jonathan that that is a valid. It's a valid title. No, no clickbait there.

[Ken]

Right.

[Jonathan]

We are going to. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to talk about a vulnerability and one of our favorite pieces of software. We'll be right back after this.

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[Rob]

may apply we all love to hate on Snaps and Ubuntu and all the things Canonical, but sometimes they just make it too easy. Last week Ubuntu users were dealing with apparmor security concerns, and now another issue has surfaced, this time involving Snaps. A newly discovered vulnerability, CVE2026 3888 affects SNAPD and has been rated as a high severity. According to the report, a local user could potentially gain root privileges by recreating SNAP's private temp or tmp directory when systemd temp files is enabled. That makes it a local privilege escalation issue rather than a remote attack. But if they have any user at all, a remote user can log in and, you know, exploit that local privilege escalation. And so it's still serious because it could cause a normal user to user account to gain full control of the system. The story is especially notable because it involves Snaps, which is already a frequent target of criticism in the Linux community, arguing that it's too heavy, too slow, too centralized, and too tightly tied to Canonical's ecosystem. So when there's a flaw, of course the community is going to talk about it. The flaw has led to security Updates for Ubuntu 25.10 and all supported LTS releases back to 1604. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 25.10 are affected by in default configurations, while Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and older releases are only affected in certain non default setups. So even though patches are available, this gives Snap haters just one more reason to hate. And if you're not a snap hater and you're going to keep on using it, make sure you're updated.

[Jonathan]

I will say that for most of us, this is not that big of a deal. If you've got something malicious running on your machine, you're already in deep trouble. But it is definitely good hygiene to get this updated, get it fixed on the upstream side and get this updated.

[Rob]

The biggest issue is if you have a multi user system, especially maybe a server where you let other users log on for some other reason or whatever. If you're the admin and they are not, they could take advantage of it.

[Jonathan]

Yep, absolutely.

[Ken]

How about if you're just using SSH to remotely log in from another system?

[Rob]

Well, they, they first have to to exploit something to take over that SSH and get in there. But if you're just using it.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, you're not gonna, you're not gonna pull this off on yourself.

[Rob]

All right.

[Jonathan]

Not a whole lot of sense unless you accidentally locked yourself out of your system or you're just doing it for fun, you know, Various options there, but yeah, this is, this is definitely not a, this is not a hair on fire vulnerability for at least most of us.

[Rob]

Oh, but it snaps. It snaps.

[Jonathan]

I know it snaps. It's fun to dog on snaps.

[Jeff]

Those of us without hair, not a problem.

[Jonathan]

Jeff and Robert, good to go.

[Ken]

By the way, my snapd is fixed.

[Rob]

There you go. Say the neuter.

[Jonathan]

Okay, Ken, save us from Rob's terrible puns and let's talk pipewire for a minute.

[Ken]

So you want me to do my own puns?

[Jonathan]

Yeah, unfortunately, that is what I'm asking for.

[Jeff]

Oh, no.

[Ken]

In that case, Jonathan, this week I'm going to bring some articles from Marcus Nestor and Bobby Barsol. Now, Marcus wrote about Hypewire 1.6.2, adding some small optimizations to the audio mixer, marking props or properties as write only in the lib camera library and fixing the jack underscore port underscore type underscore ID with a colon, not columns, but the parentheses open and close parentheses after that function to return values compatible with Jack 1 and 2. Now, Bobby wrote about a small maintenance update for the older 1.4 stable series. That's PipeWire 1.4.11. It addresses a potential issue with invalid memory freeing and file descriptor handling that could lead to crashes, resolves a segmentation fault affecting some jack applications, and several improvements made to the Filter graph system. Now comparing the Release notes for pipewire 1.6.2 to the pipewire 1.4.11, it looks like some of the bug fixes for 1.6.point 2 may have been backported to the 1.4.11 as always, I recommend reading Bobby and Marius articles for all the information I did not cover.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, interesting stuff. You know, every time we talk about a pipe wire update, I have to go and refresh myself on the V4L2 debacle inside of OBS and you know, eventually I'm sure we will get pipewire output and you know, full pipewire video stream capabilities.

[Jeff]

But it's just I. I tried it recently, it's still. It's better, but it's not there yet.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, currently to do it you got to use the V4L2 out of tree kernel loopback plugin and it's just not great.

[Ken]

That's what I'm using with the Opera GX to get the virtual camera.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. Which is, you know, it's better than nothing, but it's not amazing.

[Jeff]

Yeah, if I use the actual pipe wire, I get about four, five frames per second.

[Jonathan]

It's not enough. That's not very many frames. No.

[Ken]

What version of Pipeware are you currently running? Do you know? Whatever command line you can just type white pipewire space dash dash version. I think I covered that command.

[Rob]

Can't you do just dash v? Isn't that quicker?

[Jeff]

162

[Ken]

well, you're up there. You got updated to the latest one, this antiquated Ubuntu 25.10 running 1.4.7147 so I've got notification of some updates.

[Rob]

You can't just do dash V. Huh? Lame.

[Jeff]

It would have been funnier if Rob would have said, yeah,

[Jonathan]

yup, that would have been great. All right, Jeff, let's talk Butterfs or better FS or BTRFs, however you want to say it. We're on the Internet, nobody knows how to pronounce anything. Yeah, well, better we demonstrated that we do not.

[Jeff]

Yeah, we can't even get names right. But you know, in my house I like to. I mix better and butter because I Like butter. Well, anyway, last week we talked about performance of some popular Linux file systems and one of the benchmarks looked at several systems and how they compare to each other with the Linux kernel 7.0. And the other benchmark we talked about had XFS and ext4 and how their performance changed through the last several kernel revisions. This week we can add betterfs to this list through kernel history performance changes. And we talked about last week that Michael Erba was going to run this and he's added it to the data set. So this better FS data is added now to the XFS and EXT for performance. Now right now there's no ZFS or bcache FS as they are not in the kernel and there are requests to see those as well. But with the 7.0 kernel they're just having some issues and until they're fixed, Michael Erbo Fronics was gonna said we're gonna have to wait. They just can't be fully ran through the series of kernels yet. Now not surprisingly, the two top speed file systems from last week are still on top and well ahead of BTRFs through time. And what what is surprising though is the speed regression that BTRFS took around kernel 6.15 which is also the time that ext4 took a large uptick. Now the regression isn't in all the tests. It shows up in the Tiger Beetle and FIO random writes benchmark. So not all benchmarks are showing the issue though. When you look at the geometric mean, there is an overall slight slowdown in performance happening at that 6:15. Well what happened? It fixed an issue. The patch, which they knew was going to cause a slowdown in specific conditions said fall back to buffer write if direct IO is done on a file that requires checksums. This avoids a problem with checksum mismatch errors observed for example on virtual images when writes to pages under writeback cause the checksum mismatch reports. Now this may lead to some performance degradation, but currently the recommended setup for VM images is to use the no cow that's no copy copyright copy back on write file attribute that also disables checksums. So this isn't an everywhere type of fix, but it could still have an effect. And that was from the comments of when they put the patch in in the 615 kernel. So if you go through and read the comments on the story, basically things fell into two camps. The pro betterfs because of the images copy on write and all the other features that it has which can help keep your data safe. Some said it's great for servers and others said it's even more important for home users because the average home hardware is not susceptible or is more susceptible to stability problems than server hardware. The second camp was the Pro EXT 4 and XFS. As they talked about how speed was most important, they didn't need the extra features, and others said they were worried that they were going to lose their data with better fs and they'd rather just use backups with ext4 and xfs. Those who brought up OpenZFS and bcachefs, you know, Pharonix did have a benchmark on the 617 kernel and it was posted in the comments if it holds true whenever they run on 7.0. Both OpenZFS and BCachefs were significantly slower than BetterFS. And you know, there's also comments they're talking about future enhancements to BetterFS and you know, there's hope that they're going to see more performance increase,

[Rob]

you know,

[Jeff]

and some of that's going to be. It'll probably never be as fast when you're doing so much more overhead and checking and things like that. It's just never going to be there. But as I said last week, personally going from ext 4 to betterfs, I never noticed a difference even in game loading times, you know, I don't see a difference. You know, I guess I'm not hitting the drives hard enough to notice. But you know, take a look at the article linked in the show notes and let us know the, you know, on Club Discord what you think and where you fall into the file system side of the fence, you know, and you know, what do you use in your machines and what's their use case?

[Jonathan]

I have a hot take for you. You want your file system to be super boring.

[Jeff]

Yes.

[Rob]

Here's my hot take.

[Ken]

Videos Exciting file systems boring.

[Rob]

Yeah, that's that right. My hot take is it's butterfs, not better fs. I just can't believe it's not butter, so.

[Jonathan]

Just can't believe it.

[Jeff]

Yeah.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, this, this is something there. This is something. This is something I've learned doing business stuff too, that it's like there's a certain subset of things that either are just going to be boring or you really want them to be boring. And there's a reason that it is. It is an oriental curse. May you always live in interesting times. File systems. You really want to be boring.

[Rob]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

And you know, and like I said a lot of times Too. Some of this stuff, it shows up in benchmarks, but doesn't really show up in real world applications. I mean, other than extreme examples.

[Ken]

Is that because the difference is so slight it's not humanly detectable?

[Jonathan]

It's because when you're doing a benchmark, it's such a. Homogeneous. Homogeneous, yes, it's such a homogeneous use case, you're doing the one thing over and over and over and over again. And so any tiny derivation in that one use case just grows and so suddenly you can see it. But in real world computer use, you know, you're doing this, you're doing that and you got this. You know, it's very, very heterogeneous. That is to say you're doing all of these different file system things all at the same time. And so you, you don't have just the one use case that really shows up at the top unless it is a huge difference, either a huge speed up or a huge recession revision or

[Ken]

something that's visible like a 10 second delay after you click something.

[Jeff]

Exactly right. It will. Performance wise, you need about 10% uptick before you even really perceive it humanly perceivable. Below that it's kind of lost in the noise.

[Jonathan]

Yep.

[Jeff]

And, and here's, here's a perfect.

[Rob]

It really depends. If you're talking about something that takes an hour and you cut off 10 minutes, I'll notice that

[Jonathan]

that's not 10 though.

[Rob]

Yeah, I know, I don't want.

[Jonathan]

Okay, I think you failed the math.

[Rob]

You're talking an hour and 40 minutes and it takes, and it cut it down to an hour and a half. I'll notice it.

[Jeff]

We just have Rod because he's pretty. Not for his

[Jonathan]

now, I don't know go that far.

[Ken]

If it takes 5 microseconds and you see a thousandth of a second delay, will you notice that?

[Jonathan]

Definitely not. Not unless you're doing it, you know, a million times.

[Jeff]

You know, I can give a good hardware analogy to this is there's some new processors being released and you can, they're talking about the up uptick, the tdp, the power thermal results, but they're actually gaming and doing a lot of other stuff. If you say, oh, I turned it up so it now has 110 watt TDP, a lot of times you're not running but like 80, so it's like you can, oh, I uncorked it. You're not hitting the limit anyway. It's just not outside of benchmarks. You're just not hammering it enough.

[Ken]

Yeah, like Hammering at that keyboard when you're typing in those commands.

[Jeff]

I can't type fast enough to bog down my processor.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, well, speaking of commands, it is time for command line tips. Well, it's almost time. We're going to take one more quick break and then we're going to end out the show with our favorite command line tips for the week. We'll be right back. Let's get to command line tips. We're going to let Rob go first and he has a very posh command line tip for us. What do you got for us, Rob?

[Rob]

Oh my posh. So that is my command line tip. Do you like to rice your computer? As they say, a lot of Linux folks love to customize their Linux desktop till their heart's content. But I don't hear about a lot of people customizing their shell, their command line. Well, oh my Posh lets you theme your and customize your shell. So for those watching, you could see a little bit what it. What it. This is just one of the themes and you can see a little bit how I have customized the. The breadcrumb, I guess to, I don't know, look a little fancier. And there are directions on the site to manually install this. But next week I'm going to show you an easier way to install and manage oh my posh. And you can go through and see all the various themes that they have available.

[Jonathan]

Oh, so we got to wait for next week to actually do the install. You're teasing us this week. Such a. Rob is such a tease. All right, well, that's fine. That looks pretty interesting though. I will definitely have to take a look at that. In fact, what I will do, I'll come back next week and I will listen to what Rob has to say about doing the install and maybe get it going then. All right, Ken, what is mc?

[Ken]

Well, this is one I'm surprised we have not covered.

[Jonathan]

Ah, yes.

[Ken]

Have you ever heard of Midnight Commander?

[Jonathan]

Midnight Commander? Yes, that was an old. Was it a DOS program first?

[Ken]

Yes, I think DOS originally and let me switch my.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, that's opera. I don't think that's the one you wanted to show off.

[Ken]

I don't know why, but today I'm having to keep going in and select the monitor that I want to use. But here's Midnight Commander and some of y' all may remember this if you've used the bygone days, but it's a great way to go into from the terminal. Now I'm going to go ahead and quit out of this and as I've got in the show notes, it's got MC as the actual command. Well, find that F10. Oops.

[Jonathan]

This is. This is interesting to go and poke it there. GitHub. It's been around for a very long

[Ken]

time, but it's still being maintained.

[Jeff]

Yeah, 94.

[Rob]

Even as the old DOS blue.

[Ken]

There we go.

[Jonathan]

Yep, the good old days.

[Ken]

And I'm going to go back up here because you can put the directories that you want to open up in beside it. And if you use man mc, you can see what the various options are when you launch it. As you saw, I just launched it and it opened up with both panels having the same directory. But with this one I can go in and it's got the my downloads directory on the left side. I can use the tab key to go over to the right side. And this is my home directory. You go in, you can find items. Let's see, here's my avatars that I keep. Here's the one for the current show and. You gotta. You can hit F1 and this will give you the main help screen and to go to the interactive help facility. From here I just hit Enter and it gives you the various keys that you can use to mountain trail and escape will exit out of that. It also provides mouse support. So I can click up here and I can go to info. And as you saw, I went to the left one and it gives the info about the file current dash, avatar, ping and it shows that it was created today.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, so apparently Midnight Commander was a clone of Norton Commander which was first released way back in 1986. Yeah, and of course that date got me going down the the rabbit hole. Did either of these show up on the Computer Chronicles? Midnight Commander did not. I wonder if Norton Commander did.

[Ken]

I bet that one did.

[Jeff]

Probably Norton. I might have been thinking of NORTON Commander on DOS, not midnight.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, it says so. The AI says that it was. And here's a 1990 Home PCs episode of Computer Chronicles, so I'll have to watch that later. I love the Computer Chronicles. I especially the ones from like the. The 80s and early 90s. Something about them are just. They're just great.

[Ken]

But I do recommend playing around with Midnight Commander. You may find it a great alternative to using the default file manager that comes with your system on occasion.

[Jeff]

Yeah.

[Jonathan]

All right, well, what if you just need to leave yourself a note? Jeff, you got anything you'd help us out?

[Jeff]

I do Memos, which is a free open source note taking app. Open source freedom. While a Lot of other applications try and do it all. Memos is pretty much just focused on taking notes. So there's not a monster array of things that it also does in addition focused on notes. When typing notes you can easily add tags and so then you can everything things become searchable. Because it uses a markdown language. You can easily format your notes, organize ideas quickly without ever really leaving the keyboard. You can reference pass notes, you can have things linked, you know, pass notes linked to your current notes, multiple ways you can search and filter and if you're hosting. So this is set up also so you can, you can host it yourself to various people. You can set it so there's security options so you can see set who can see it. So you can have like private or just tag certain people so they, they can only see it or you can open it up to everyone. So it, it's kind of flexible. Like if you had a small group or family setting where you wanted to collect notes for whatever, whatever thing you're doing a project, you know, whatever you got. The link is to an article which does talk about Windows. But don't worry, I didn't go full rob on all you, on everyone. If you want to look at the link in the article you can go to the GitHub page where they have both source and pre compiled binaries for Linux. They do recommend you run it in a Docker container and they talk about how you set that up. But the thing I kind of liked is I think it makes a lot of sense for those who want to share information with smaller groups of people. Like I said, like families, educational uses, small teams. You know, maybe you got a gaming group that you want to have a central little repository of notes and you just want to self host it without putting it all over the Internet. So yeah, take a look, take a look at memos.

[Jonathan]

Very cool. All right, so I've got a command line tip that I'm sort of surprised that we haven't ever covered. But I've not seen it in our notes. I don't think we have talked about it. And that's clamav. And so this is. You normally see this run on like mail servers to try to try to catch malicious attachments, but you can actually run it on your local machine and run do an antivirus scan on your local Linux machine. And this is particularly interesting and useful if you find yourself like I have recently in a position where for compliance reasons you've got to have an up to date antivirus scanner on your machine and you really don't want to install something closed source on your primarily open source Linux machine. So I went looking and remembered clamav and you can do an install. It's actually quite easy to do an install on Fedora, which is where I've got it. And then you can just manually run clamscan to run a very quick scan. And then of course you can use either your. I'll show it to you real quick. You can use either your built in package manager or there is a screen, a command that is dedicated to doing updates which is. Let's see, I had it here a moment ago. Fresh Clam. Fresh Clam is the signature updater. And then you can just run Clam Scan. You can use it as a root or as an individual user and so it'll load all of those, all of those things up into, into memory and then run through everything in your home folder and it gives you a quick scan. It looks like, it looks like Restream has completely failed to actually share my, my screen here. But that's all right, it works, I promise. It looks really great here. I'm sorry nobody else was able to see it. But anyway, ClamScan, if. So if one, you want to be able to scan things or two, if you are required to have an antivirus on your Linux machine for compliance reasons, you might want to think about it as well.

[Ken]

Yeah, and I was thinking I covered this ages ago, but I don't couldn't find it in our command.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I know. If we, if we have talked about it as a tip, it would have been a long time ago. So maybe we, maybe we covered it.

[Ken]

It's not even in the command line spreadsheet.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, maybe we covered it as a story at some point instead of as a tip.

[Rob]

And all vision. All of these tips today have been brought to you as free as speech.

[Jonathan]

Free Libre Open source software.

[Rob]

Libre Free as in speech.

[Ken]

Yes, they've been paid for with blood, sweat and in some cases tears.

[Jonathan]

I would say the blood is probably the most optional one there. I don't always bleed while I'm programming.

[Rob]

Sometimes my fingertips.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I mean I, I have cut myself open reaching into a computer before. That has happened multiple times.

[Rob]

Just get a bloody nose because it's so dry.

[Jonathan]

Well, that's a little different.

[Ken]

Sharp edges on those cases can draw a little bit of blood.

[Jonathan]

Yep, that's the one. All right. That is the show. Although I know a couple of us have some stuff to plug here at the end. We'll let Rob go first. He is going to tell us about his stuff. Places where you can donate coffee to him and all of that good stuff. What you got?

[Rob]

Yes. So for those of you want to get more of me, you can come connect with me at Robert P. Campbell dot com. That's my website on there is links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Blue sky, my Mastodon and a place to donate coffee to me. And I also want to thank. I forgot to look this up beforehand. Mike, who bought four coffees. This was before the last show. I wasn't here last weekend. So after the show before, who bought four copies, one for each of us. He says ULS remains the most entertaining way to keep up with developments. Thanks for keeping it up. One for you and one for George, Paul and Ringo. So thank you, Mike.

[Jeff]

Now who is who, I wonder?

[Jonathan]

Nice. I actually claim John. That's. That's. That's me.

[Rob]

Well, John. Yeah. I don't know, Rob.

[Jonathan]

Can't be John. This just doesn't work. Anyway, who's the quiet one? I don't remember.

[Rob]

I mean, obviously I'm John because I'm. He said you, which is me, George, Paul, Ringo.

[Jonathan]

So sure.

[Ken]

No, no, you make me think more of Paul.

[Rob]

Hey, you tell that to Mike.

[Jeff]

I just want to thank Mike just for the simple fact that I don't owe Rob any money now.

[Rob]

Yeah, we're free.

[Jonathan]

Nice.

[Rob]

I still owe the other two.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I think you owe me two coffees now. Anyway, Ken. What? You got to close the show out.

[Ken]

Well, this week I've got a link in the show Notes that takes you to an article by Marcus Nestor. This week he wrote about a free classic 2D jump and run side scroller game that distracted me for several hours.

[Jonathan]

Super tux. Yes, a good old Mario clone.

[Ken]

Very cool.

[Jeff]

All right, Jeff, not much to cover, so I'll just have a technology haiku. Errors have occurred. We won't tell you where or why. Lazy programmers. Have a great week, everybody.

[Jonathan]

Great. All right, thank you guys for being here. It has been a lot of fun. So, as everybody knows, I normally plug something over at Hackaday. It's one of my other places to do things we talk about Floss Weekly. I'm going to plug something in Hackaday that is no longer mine. And that is the this Week in Security column is back. I am no longer the one doing it because my plate was full to overflowing. Mike Kershaw of Kismet fame. Mike is great and he has done two or three columns. Now he's back to doing them once a week and I have been able to go back and enjoy those as a reader rather than as the writer.

[Jeff]

And I am loving it.

[Jonathan]

So if you want to get your weekly written security fix hackadays this weekend of security, I recommend it. And then of course, while you're there, check out Floss Weekly too. But we appreciate everybody that's here with us and whether you get us live or on the download. And we will be back next week with the Untitled Linux Show. Hey everybody, it's Leo laporte.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you trying to keep up with the world of Microsoft? It's moving fast, but we have two of the best experts in the world, Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. They join me every Wednesday to talk about the latest from Microsoft on Windows Weekly. It's a lot more than just Windows. I hope you'll listen to the show every Wednesday.

[Jonathan]

Easy enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Just subscribe on your favorite podcast client to Windows Weekly or visit our website at Twit tv. WW Microsoft's moving fast, but there's a way to stay ahead. That's Windows Weekly. Every Wednesday on Twitter.

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