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Untitled Linux Show 261: I Regret My Decisions
01:20:37
Steam Machine Prices, Akrites Security, & COSMIC
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- [00:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Morning decisions how about a creamy Mocha Frappuccino drink? Or sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate Mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits.
- [00:12]
Jeff
Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.
- [00:16]
Rob
Mornings have a rhythm. You can hear it, feel it. And at Quaker we fuel it with
- [00:24]
Jonathan Bennett
100% whole grain oats and a good source of fiber in every bowl, helping
- [00:29]
Rob
you turn that rhythm into your soundtrack
- [00:32]
Jonathan Bennett
for a great day. Fuel to start Whatever's next Quaker Official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26. Get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card with unlimited 2% cash back on all eligible purchases, unlimited 5% cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online and and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business. You'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of $1,500 cash back after you spend $50,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership terms. Apply. Learn more at GO MX Graphite this week we're talking about the Steam Machine. We finally have pricing and it's a little expensive, but maybe not terrible. And then the Academy Software foundation is talking about Wayland. A lot of businesses are talking about AC rights and fix open source software in the age of AI vulnerability disclosure. There's a smart speaker that you might be interested in. There's ups and downs for performance and a couple of really interesting updates for our favorite desktop environments. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [01:49]
Rob
Podcasts you love from people you Trust.
- [01:53]
Jonathan Bennett
This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 261, recorded Saturday, June 27th. 7th I regret my Decisions hey folks, it is Saturday and that means it's time to geek out about Linux. It's the show about hardware and software, the desktop, the server, all the things that you want to know about Linux. It's the Untitled Linux Show. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we've got Rob, we've got Jeff. It is the trio, the Three Amigos. We're probably not going down to Mexico to fight the infamous Lo. What's his name? The infamous from the Three Amigos.
- [02:34]
Rob
Yeah, I don't remember.
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Jeff
I don't remember.
- [02:36]
Jonathan Bennett
El Guapo. That's it. Probably not heading down to Mexico to fight El Guapo, but we're gonna be entertaining all the same. And first off, there was a thing. Several things happened this week, but one of the big ones was that we finally got A little bit of a peek at the Steam machine and there were some big YouTubers that got their hands on one and we got some pricing and there's this thing going on called the AI craze that I think messed with the pricing a little bit. Rob's got the full story. I will stop stealing his lead and let him get to it.
- [03:11]
Rob
Yeah, so since Jonathan pretty much covered it all, I'll just end it right there and go on to the next one.
- [03:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Hopefully you had more than that.
- [03:19]
Rob
Yeah, so. So we have been waiting for the Valve for Valve's new Steam machines for quite a while now. And I think a lot of us, you know, had a number in our heads. I don't remember if we predicted anything last, you know, January 1st, December whenever we did our production show or not, but I know some of us at least since them had had some numbers and you know, maybe not cheap, but maybe we're thinking somewhere around 7, $800 as I recall, something more expensive than a, a console, but still close enough that you could call it a living room gaming box and not feel completely ridiculous. But Valve has finally announced the pricing and pre order detail details and the short version is, it is real, it is coming. As you know, Jonathan said some people got their hands on some, but it's, it's not exactly cheap. The so the base steam machine with 512 gigabytes of storage starts at $1,549 and these are US dollars that I am quoting here for anyone wondering. The two terabyte model jumps to $1,349 and if you bundle in the Steam controller you are looking at $1120 or $1428 depending on the storage option. So if you compare this to a PlayStation or Xbox, which the Xbox I hear just announced a price increase to $800. The price looks a little rough, but that's a Series X Xbox for those wondering. But you know, even with console prices rising, it doesn't really quite fit into that range very nicely. But if you compare against a gaming PC, it gets a little more reasonable. Valve is not really selling this like a traditional console. They're selling it more like a compact gaming PC for the living room. And when you look at it that way, the price starts to make a little more sense. You're getting a small form factor PC with a semi custom AMD Zen 4 CPU, rDNA 3 graphics, 16 gigs of DDR5 memory, 8 gigs of video memory, NVMe storage, micro SD expansion, Wi Fi 6, Bluetooth, Ethernet and SteamOS. Could you build a bigger gaming PC for less? Probably. Could you buy a standard gaming desktop around the same price that beats it in raw performance? Yeah, I think you could. But the Steam Machine is more like a console sized gaming PC with the Steam deck experience moved into the living room. You pay for the small size, the integrated hardware, the control support, the quiet coach gaming experience. You know, a lot of those desktops people make aren't that quiet and the fact that it just boots into SteamOS instead of dropping into Windows or something like that. And for Linux fans you are paying to support the Valve push to make the gaming experience a first class gaming experience on Linux. The bigger story is that Valve is still pushing linux gaming forward. SteamOS is no longer just for handhelds, it's becoming a full living room platform. Hopefully if this takes off, that price may slow it down a little. But you know, even if Steam Machine itself ends up being a niche product, the idea behind it is still important. You know, no, this is not going to be the affordable Gabe Cube many of us hope for. But as a compact Lynx gaming PC for living room, the price is at least easier to understand, even if still a little hard to love. And I am still hoping to get my hands on one. Partly just to throw my support in for Valve and all they've been doing for Linux. But if anyone wants to help me, you can donate to the cause and you know, maybe you don't have, don't, don't want to spend the whole thousand plus on one, but you want to support them, you can help support them, donate to me and I'll chip that towards my Steam machine.
- [07:46]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I think it's probably the right call. There is that. Think of it as a small gaming machine rather than a powerful console. There's an interesting point. Keith's 512 makes it here that you could buy it and upgrade it. Like this is not a framework you can't do. You know, you can't expect to get new motherboards in the future, but if you want to put 64 gigs of RAM and so like particularly this makes sense if you look at the world right now and you go we're in the AI craze but that bubble is going to pop, things are going to get cheaper. Well you can buy the cheapest one and then in six months from now maybe you can afford to put 64 gigs of RAM into it and a bigger solid state drive or what have you. So it is more of a computer computer than it is a console, it is upgradable, which, that's cool.
- [08:37]
Rob
So maybe I gotta go for the cheaper model now and just plan to upgrade it later.
- [08:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's, I mean it's not a terrible idea. You know, you'll eventually be able to
- [08:45]
Jeff
do it or upgrade it. Now I haven't looked at all the prices, but sometimes it's just cheaper to upgrade it yourself.
- [08:53]
Jonathan Bennett
Right, that's true. They, they, you know, you figure Valve wants to make a little bit of money on the upgrades too. You know, one, one of their versions might be a lost leader and, and they want to make money on the upgrade. So it might be cheaper to do it yourself, maybe.
- [09:08]
Rob
Yep.
- [09:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Interesting stuff. I, I tell you the thing I'm really most interested in. Not, not this. I'm waiting for the Steam frame. I think that's going to be interesting. I think that's going to be the fun one.
- [09:22]
Jeff
I haven't heard that one.
- [09:24]
Jonathan Bennett
So that's the VR goggles.
- [09:26]
Rob
Did. Were you gone for that?
- [09:29]
Jonathan Bennett
How did you not hear about this, Jeff? We talked about it.
- [09:32]
Jeff
I must have been gone.
- [09:33]
Jonathan Bennett
He must have been out in the desert riding the ride of the Indian. They made a movie about Jeff, didn't they? Riding an Indian motorcycle out in the
- [09:39]
Jeff
desert world as fast as any.
- [09:41]
Rob
Yeah, we had this on the show last fall sometime. I don't remember.
- [09:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, the, the Steam frame. That one is particularly interesting because it is a Snapdragon. It's going to be standalone, so you can, you can run it one of two ways. You can either run it and I think they're talking, they're doing a wireless link. So either way it's going to be sort of standalone, but you can do a wireless link to your desktop to get like the full graphics and full frame and experience. Or for some games, like, you know, you think about your games that are a little less graphically demanding, like maybe a VR chat, that sort of thing. It'll just emulate and run right on the Snapdragon. And so like there's some, there's some pretty, that's going to be pretty interesting like to untether your, your VR experience, go run around on your backfield, your backyard with it or what have you.
- [10:30]
Rob
Well, for, for reference, like, like the Oculus Quest, you can do the same thing that's already untethered, but you can hook it up to the PC and play Steam games and, and get a higher end experience. But for, for Jeff, like, like, you know, some of the things we implied here, the Steam frames, that's on a Snapdragon. It's Linux on a Snapdragon, though, which, you know, wasn't necessarily implied. So that's going to be some VR, a VR headset running Linux on a Snapdragon and connected to a Linux Steam box, if you want.
- [11:10]
Jeff
Honestly, I thought Steam Frame was like, oh, Framework was going to come out with a dedicated Steam machine. That would.
- [11:17]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, that too would be cool.
- [11:18]
Jeff
That would be really cool. Big collaboration.
- [11:23]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, so Jeff, you've got a story here about the Academy Software Foundation. Are we winning Academy Awards or are we talking about Wayland here?
- [11:34]
Jeff
A little of both. Maybe not winning Academy Awards, but we're involved. Okay, so the Academy Software foundation announced the formation of a new working group to help Wayland adoption for artists. To break this down, let's first start with what the Academy Software foundation is. It's an industry standard nonprofit created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you know, the same organization behind the Oscars, hence why we're in the same Venn diagram and the Linux Foundation. So its mission is to support, develop and standardize open source software used throughout the motion picture, animation and VFX industries, or special effects. If you've watched a modern animated film or a blockbuster visual effects sequence, you most certainly benefited from ASWF projects. They're kind of everywhere, just not always in the very forefront. Some of the technologies they've had a hand in are OpenVDB, which is the industry standard for volumetric effects like smoke and clouds, Open Shading Language or OSL, used in production renders for material and lighting, Open Color IO, which is a cornerstone of color management and film pipelines, and Open exr, which is the high dynamic range image format used across studios. They do other things, but that's just kind of an example of what they do. Now we talk a lot about X11 going away and things moving to Whalens. So I won't go into the detail here on why that's happening, but what I will say is that the working group has been created to make the transfer easier. Nick Cannon, Chair of the VES Technology Committee and SVP Production and Technology at Walt Disney Animation Studios, had this to say about Waylon for the Wayland for Artists working group. As the Linux desktop is evolving to replace its underlying aging X11 display system with Wayland, the goal of the working group is to explore and understand the impact this shift will have on the professional workstations used by many studios and artists in our industry. Right now, our industry doesn't yet understand the full Impact of the transition on high end content creation applications, whether open source, commercial or proprietary, as well as high performance remote access solutions. So critical modern workflows. This working group will bring together stakeholders from across the community to better understand this evolution and plan the best path forward. So the Academy Software foundation further went on to explain the Wayland for Artists Working group will explore the range of industry specific areas that may be impacted including graphics, tablet support, window management, input focus, key key bindings, desktop customizations, remote access solutions, GPU acceleration, color management, high dynamic range displays, and compatibility with commercial, open source and in house applications. Or in simple terms, its mission is to ensure that Wayland fully supports the needs of professional animation, digital art and special effects workflows. Now keep in mind that a lot of the high end and professional software, it moves a little slower. So, you know, a lot of it hasn't made the jump to Wayland right away. In high end production environments, people are not swapping out kernels as the latest one comes out. You know, think of enterprise like server software. So take a look at the article in the show notes. It also has a link to the ASWF announcement and from there you can discover a lot more details about the foundation.
- [15:16]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, this is cool. We've looked at them. I've looked at them before. I thought about trying to invite somebody from there to FLOSS weekly to talk about this kind of thing.
- [15:23]
Jeff
Thing.
- [15:24]
Jonathan Bennett
What, what I didn't realize is that apparently I, I knew things like Blender were used pretty widely in the, you know, the motion effects industry. I didn't realize that so many people were running Linux underneath, but apparently that's fairly popular.
- [15:38]
Jeff
Yeah, and I didn't realize when I was doing the story, all the, the standards and stuff that, you know, we might not know about, but it's, it's like standard at studio level, professional level.
- [15:49]
Rob
I didn't realize that they cared what was underneath. I thought they just used it and just, I don't know, went on with their day.
- [15:57]
Jonathan Bennett
No, I mean, you got to think about it though. They need either really accurate or at least really standardized color grading so that every time they look at a monitor they're looking at the same colors. You want to make sure that your workflow works the same way in every place. I think color grading is probably the biggest thing that they would really.
- [16:16]
Rob
Right. I knew they wanted that stuff. Stuff. Just did not really associate that. Associate it with Linux and Wayland and X and it's like, you know, just run whatever display server is there. I don't Know what's the display server? I'm just dealing with my colors, my color work. Good.
- [16:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Very, very dependent upon your display server.
- [16:37]
Rob
Very dependent on it. But no one knowing that
- [16:42]
Jonathan Bennett
if it's, I mean, if it's broke, people pay attention. Or if it changes, all it has to do is change and people notice.
- [16:48]
Jeff
Yeah, you know, a lot of this, it could have naturally went to Linux because back in the day, you know, like companies like Silicon Graphics, you know, which was Unix heavy into the studios and graphical industry.
- [17:06]
Jonathan Bennett
Absolutely.
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Jeff
So a lot of that, hey, we're going to run Linux. Hey, Studio saves money because it's free. It's pretty close to the same operating. It's in the same area.
- [17:19]
Jonathan Bennett
Same family.
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Jeff
Yeah.
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Jonathan Bennett
In the same family as a Unix. Yeah.
- [17:22]
Rob
Every Unix like.
- [17:24]
Jonathan Bennett
Absolutely. All right, we have more to come, but first we are going to take a quick break and then we've got some security stuff coming up after this.
- [17:34]
Jeff
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- [17:35]
Jonathan Bennett
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- [17:47]
Rob
Yes.
- [17:48]
Jonathan Bennett
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- [18:33]
Rob
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments.
- [18:47]
Jonathan Bennett
But that's weird.
- [18:48]
Rob
Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [18:55]
Jonathan Bennett
of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com so this week we've got the announcement of Ackwright. It is the new working group from the Linux foundation but you also have Amazon and anthropic and OpenAI and Nvidia and Microsoft and Red Hat, IBM, Google, Ericsson, JPMorgan Chase. Just about everybody is interested in this. The Rust foundation is in there. Goodness. So many different, so many different backers on this. It is, it is pretty incredible. And this is essentially a working group, a project to deal with AI bug reports, to put it simply, to put it in a single point. That is what they are looking to do. The statement says that they are establishing a shared security incident response team and a single standardized, coordinated vulnerability disclosure process built on confidentiality first principles and industry standard tooling. And so that kind of reads like this is going to be another sort of like a bug bounty or bug reporting platform. But the really interesting thing here is that, well, they talk about confidentiality and they want bug fixes to flow back into the project's original homes. But, and here's the one that caught my eye. I think this is real fascinating. Where a critical package has no active maintainer, AC rights will serve as a maintainer of last resort. So fixes to the latest version reach everyone in a timely fashion. The initiative will also coordinate with government efforts, so public and private defenders move together. And that's real fascinating because we've talked about this. There's the famous XKCD cartoon of all of the modern infrastructure stacked on top of each other. And then you've got the one little pillar holding everything up and it's, that's one guy in Kansas, which for a few projects it's literally the case, right? And then the question happened, the question comes like, what happens when that one guy in Kansas is no longer maintaining it or is unavailable for something. And, you know, there's been a few, few times where either you have to fork something or someone else steps in. And this is as far as I can remember, this is the first time that we've sort of formally stepped into this, where there's now a group that says if one of these things is important, there's no maintainer. We will step in and essentially fork it, is what they're saying. If they've got access to the infrastructure, maybe they'll just take it over directly or fork it. And then they kind of have this agreement that the rest of the software world will use these releases, which on one hand, this is a very powerful thing that they're looking to do. And I kind of have the wise words of Uncle Ben going through my mind. Where there's great power, there's also great responsibility. Um, but Also, like, this is kind of a needed thing. I'm surprised that this, thinking about it, I'm surprised that we haven't like formally done this yet. When we say, you know, if an open source project is not being maintained and people are using it, here's the process to step in and get patches out. Yeah, it's real, it's real interesting and a lot of different, a lot of different groups coming together on this one to get an incident response team. So you know, we'll have to, we'll have to watch and see. Like, I'm sure at some point they'll, they'll really release some information about how this goes in the real world. Some actual incidents that they've responded to and we'll have to see how that goes. But it's pretty fascinating to me. It's probably a needed step, I think, for open source as a whole.
- [22:47]
Rob
Yeah, they could have jumped in and take all those abandoned AUR packages.
- [22:53]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't know. The AUR packages were critical infrastructure. But that is sort of a valid example of the style of thing that apparently this group is looking to do.
- [23:04]
Rob
You know what else Uncle Ben does?
- [23:06]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, makes rice.
- [23:08]
Rob
Rice
- [23:12]
Jonathan Bennett
indeed. Yeah, but I mean, you think about it and you've got different groups, different open source projects that are struggling under just the load of AI vulnerability disclosure. So for example, you've got Curl and Daniel Stenberg came out this week or last week and said that they're going to take a summer of bliss. The Curl developers, they're going to take a summer off, a month off, and essentially they're going to say, you can send us security bug reports, we're going to be at the beach. Sorry, if you pay, then we'll take a look at your bug reports. But if you're not a paying customer, we're at the beach. We'll get to you next month, we'll see how that goes.
- [23:56]
Rob
But I think this does sound like a good thing. In fact, I think it kind of really aligns with something I've said in previous episodes, that the Linux community needs to figure out how to work with these bug reports rather than fighting against them.
- [24:12]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, well, so, yes, I don't think the problem is that people want to fight against them. The problem is that we're coming to the point where there's just so many of them, it's just overwhelming. Right.
- [24:27]
Rob
I'm not saying they wanted to, but I said they got to find a solution, which is what this is hopefully aiming to do.
- [24:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Right, Right. Well, I mean, you either have to hire more developers, like pay people to do the maintenance work or you do something like start automating the response, using AI to automate bug fixes, which understandably so people are hesitant to do and people hate the idea or some of us do, at least to some extent. I mean, I don't want to let, I like using Claude to write code. I do not want Claude to write code without any, without a human watching it.
- [25:03]
Jeff
Like.
- [25:04]
Rob
Yeah, I mean maybe it doesn't need to, you know, accept and review and patch the request, but maybe what it can do is analyze them, review them, filter out what needs to be brought to a person. What just needs to, you know, get discarded.
- [25:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, kind of that, that first level of triage, although apparently that's what Microsoft was doing and they, they ended up taking off a developer and that didn't go so well for them. So yeah, you know, the pros and cons.
- [25:34]
Jeff
Yeah, but if you can screw it up, they'll find a way.
- [25:37]
Jonathan Bennett
No, that's true. Yeah, that's Murphy's Law. Absolutely. There's a way to mess it up. Somebody will.
- [25:45]
Jeff
And I just one little thing to add is I think sometimes even these dumb little programs that people use and you just think, oh, it's just a simple little thing. It can wind up being a lot of work and a lot of support for just a little thing. And usually people aren't grateful. They're just fix this garbage, I need this now. Do all the work for me.
- [26:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. And you've got things like the Cybersecurity Resilience act in Europe that sort of leads to that too because now companies are going to use some of these software packages. You suddenly have to have a bill of material. Software bill of materials and you have to have all these assurances about the underlying software. And so in some cases they're going to open source maintainers and they're like, we need this to be able to keep using your software. And a lot of these open source maintainers, like we're just doing it for free for fun in our spare time. We're not going to be able to do that. And so I've said several times on several different shows that, that open source projects need to get used to, they need to get comfortable with. We will be glad to do that for you. Here is our fee. And you know, if open source is going to become a more sustainable thing, then yeah, there's got to be some money change hands because even open source developers have mortgages to pay and got to buy groceries so anyway, let's move on and let's talk about the speaker, the smart speaker from Pine. Rob, what is the Pine 64 speaker?
- [27:19]
Rob
So Pine 64 is getting into the smart speaker space, but thankfully not in the quote, let's put another cloud microphone in your house because Jonathan definitely doesn't want that. Actually, most of these many, many of us in this community, I'm kind of agnostic, whatever, but this is not that kind of speaker. Anyway, so their, their, their new device is called the Pine Voice and It is a $49 smart speaker designed around Home Assistant instead of Alexa or Google Assistant. And, and that's where it gets kind of cool for privacy focused Linux users because this is not trying to be another Amazon Echo clone. It's not really meant to be a full general purpose speaker either. Pine64 describes it more like a voice satellite for home assistant. In other words, it is the thing sitting in the room listening for a wake word, capturing your voice and passing it along to home assistant. And as a pretty big home assistant fan and user myself, this one immediately has my attention. I am probably about 99% sure I'm gonna get one of these because this is exactly the kind of smart home device I want to see more of. So the hardware is very Pine 64 ish. It is a budget friendly, developer friendly and maybe just a little bit weird in in the best way possible. Inside. It comes with a Buffalo lab that's a BL606P RISC V chip with a 480Mhz 64bit T head C9.06 core plus two smaller companion cores. It has 32 megabytes of PSRAM, 16 megabytes of flash storage, WI Fi, Bluetooth, a dual microphone array, a built in speaker, physical volume buttons, and most importantly a hardware microphone switch. Not the highest specs if you're going to run a whole desktop on it, but for this I'm sure it's fine. The last part is worth calling out the muted switch part, because when you're talking about a device whose entire job is to sit in your house and listen, a real hardware mute switch is something privacy focused Linux users can appreciate. The wake word detection runs locally using Microwake Word currently with a hey Jarvis model from ESP Home and then it talks back to Home Assistant using the Wyoming protocol, which is what Home Assistant uses for their voice satellite devices. Now there are some caveats. Pine 64 is being pretty upfront that this is still early stage hardware and software. Wake word detection may not be perfect and this is probably not the kind of device you buy for somebody who just wants to plug it in and never think about it again. It's, it's probably going to take a little tinker and you have to connect to the home assistant, whatever that's going to consist of. So but for Home Assistant crowd, you know, we're used to tinkering, you know, like myself that, that may be just fine, kind of what we're used to and maybe it's even part of the appeal. This is for people who want local control, you know, nothing in the cloud, open firmware, self hosted automation and a smart home that does not depend on Amazon, Google or Apple deciding what features you get next year. The smart home market has been dominated by these big cloud platforms and Alpine Voice is a small reminder that it does not have to be that way. It is cheap, it's hackable, it's risk five, all things we like so far. And it's built for Home Assistant. That may not make it the best smart home speaker for every everyone but for people like me who are already deep into Home Assistant, this is exactly the kind of device I'm going to waste some money on this year.
- [31:42]
Jonathan Bennett
So I've done a little bit of poking around on this already and Pine is using Codeberg to host their source code for this and as of 33 minutes ago, Codeberg was completely down. So you know, your mileage may vary. It's a cool looking little device. I am humored that they're using the Buffalo Labs chips. That is a quirky little mcu. I do know that one or two of the people that work with Pine really like the Buffalo devices. So I'm not terribly surprised to hear that. I do have sort of questions about what the software support is going to look like for the long term because this is, this is something that Pine has done before is, you know, they, they make things, they make really cool hardware and then they just sort of. Well, I want, I want to say this carefully and charitably. Not always does a community form around the hardware and create software for it in the way that one might hope, let's put it that way. Well, I've heard that said even less charitably than that. I will be a little bit more careful here on the show.
- [33:00]
Rob
I feel like the requirements for this are probably somewhat minimal. I mean you have to, as long as you can update the OS and the drivers, keep working for the hardware on there, the rest kind of just works with what's already in Home Assistant. Home Assistant is A very strong project. I think the functionality, the real functionality behind it is going to be what you do in Home Assistant, I think.
- [33:27]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [33:27]
Jonathan Bennett
So the operating system is essentially what I'm talking about. And probably the trickiest thing there is going to be the Wake word. Getting it to really reliably understand that wake word and wake up when it's supposed to. And then all the other stuff like programming MCUs is not trivial. There's lots of pitfalls to fall into.
- [33:50]
Rob
And that wake word isn't their own software either though. That's, you know, stuff that's.
- [33:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, I mean, it's implementing a library inside of their own os.
- [33:58]
Rob
Sure.
- [33:59]
Jonathan Bennett
So, you know, like this is, this is not necessarily a trivial thing to do. I mean, I understand that we live in a world now where you could just say, hey Claude, please write for me an operating system that runs on this MCU that gives me uses microwake word. And it will probably do it. It's just, you know, there's got to be a human there at some point to answer the bug requests and fix things when they're broken.
- [34:24]
Jeff
Well, and how many times have you been sitting around and I know everybody's at least experienced it once, where somebody's like, oh yeah, so when you're making chocolate chip cookies, make sure you cream the butter. And then your phone assistant or whatever starts going, oh, hello, what am I? It's like we didn't, did you want
- [34:40]
Jonathan Bennett
to search for creamed butter?
- [34:41]
Jeff
No, it just goes, hello, how are you? Yeah, it's like I didn't say anything near your, your activation voice and something triggered.
- [34:52]
Rob
Yeah, well, I think, I think a lot of that's just software like you can, you can make one of these yourself essentially. So as long as, as long as, you know, future distros keep working, I think the rest of it, somebody can, can go in there and keep working.
- [35:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. To be clear though, that this Buffalo chip, you're not running Linux on it. It's not a Linux distro that you're putting on here? Oh, I don't think so. We're way down in MCU territory. What we're talking about on the specs
- [35:23]
Rob
on this thing, I suppose at that small. It's got a,
- [35:30]
Jonathan Bennett
it's got 32 megs of PSRAM, 788k of SRAM, it has 788k of RAM on it. You know, you're not running the Linux kernel. You're running some kind of little real time operating system like maybe Zephyr or maybe just Bare metal, like Arduino style stuff, which, I mean that's not a problem. That's not the worst thing. I do a lot of programming on that kind of stuff, what's now my day job. But just understand you're not running the full Linux kernel on this. That's not what it is.
- [36:05]
Rob
So anyway, that makes it interesting since a lot of the things they do is Linux. But I guess their little watch wasn't either.
- [36:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Indeed. Yeah, the Pinetime wasn't. The Pinetime was cool. I always liked it. I have it around here somewhere. I've not worn it for a while but you kind of had the same problem there. Like the software support, while it was cool, what it would do, it just never quite got to the point to where it was really good. There was always a few things that you wanted it to do that it was missing.
- [36:35]
Jeff
So just to be clear, you're still interested, Rob?
- [36:38]
Rob
Well, I mean you're making me think, but I will.
- [36:41]
Jonathan Bennett
On the other side of it, I will say it's only 49.99.
- [36:44]
Rob
Yeah. And a huge part of the functionality is still going to be in home assistant. So as long as that could keep talking and it doesn't get some vulnerability, I guess and it's still on my network, I can isolate it or something.
- [36:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's interesting. All right, we are going to talk performance next, but before we do that we are going to perform a little the show here and we'll be right back after this. When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns. With Grainger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place. So nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call 1-800-granger click ranger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [37:38]
Jeff
I have two stories about hardware improvements and while they're interesting, I think they're even more interesting together. So my first story is how Linux cache Aware scheduling has had a large improvement in things like MySQL and Hackbench. Why did this happen? Cache aware scheduling tries to make sure that all the tasks are run on the same LLC or last level cache. Now if it isn't, then there's a miss because it needs to pull data from somewhere else and that somewhere else will have more latency built in because of the extra steps to get the data to where it needs to be. You know, whether that's another cache, ram, a disk, wherever, it's going to take longer and it's going to slow things down. Now what this series of patches does is to take even more topology of the hardware to make the cache aware go beyond just the last level cache. So what if the workload needs more cores and not all the cores can be on the same last level cache or the size of the workload changes dynamically. Now the cache aware scheduling can better handle that. Now the headline does say when you look at the article in the show notes, 360% improvement. That's cherry picked number. And most of the results are not that big. But it is for MySQL using 64 threads and only 64 threads. Though you know there, there are other big improvements. The very smallest improvement when using 256 Threads was only 6% improvement. And I know only 6%. It's still big when you're running heavy workloads and when you're looking at little fine tuning improvements, a lot of times we're talking, you know, 1% or half a percent, 6% for the lowest. That's, that's still pretty good. There was a lot of them that were in the high teens. We had some at like 136%, you know, and it was all based on the number of threads. It, it really mattered how many threads you were using at the time. And if you're wondering this is going to show up in the 7.2 kernel when it comes out. The second story is about the GCC compiler getting a 12% improvement for modern intel and AMD CPUs. How did they make this improvement? And it's only in one line. By changing the weight of a branch prediction miss, they increased the miss by 3 the rating in GCC by 3 and that gave a 12% improvement because the compiler took a miss possibility much more seriously. Now modern CPUs they have a much deeper pipeline of instructions, which means if a branch prediction is wrong, then all those instructions which were evaluated no longer are valid and the state of the code goes back to the branch and the pipeline needs filled with the proper branch instructions. The longer the pipeline, the bigger the time hit. What GCC does with this miss weight is determine how it handles a code. It becomes more conservative about keeping the branches and instead of doing things like just tuning branch, it does things like instead it turns branch code into branchless code. And there's other things it can do too. There's other mitigations it can do to kind of get rid of the branch or mitigate some of the misses in a branch prediction. Now, I do want to say this is only going to happen for the normal X8664 compiling, and it's not when you build natively against a specific CPU. So if you're running just the basic x8664 instructions, that's where this is going to kick up. Now why did I bring up these two stories? The optimization, you know, of the hardware, you know, like the kernel gcc, you know, the Linux sphere, you know, it's really now getting into the specifics of the hardware and architecture of the system to extract the most out of the hardware. You know, to me, it shows a very mature ecosystem and it shows that performance out of the hardware is getting very specific. You know, in both cases, the architecture tuning is where the performance came from and looking at bigger and bigger chunks of that architecture to get more out of it. So instead of just saying, oh, let's just keep all this on the same course, let's keep expanding that view so we can optimize every level of the architecture. Take a look at both articles linked in the show notes for full details and further links to the pull requests and the merge requests and all the good stuff. And for those wondering, the GCC update will be out in next year's GCC17 stable release. So that one's a little further out, but happy benchmarking. Yeah.
- [42:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Ironically, I had, I had two stories as well that I was going to talk about and one of them was that that one line change just, it was just, just a tuning tweak like let's, let's correct all of this by 3 and makes quite the difference. The other one that I've been following when it comes to performance is the new Raspberry PI kernel. And this one was sort of a mixed bag. Raspberry PI OS went to Linux 6.18 LTS and as you, as you flip through, I've got the link to Michael's article on it as you flip through, like there's multiple times that he makes the statement. Like it came in as a surprise that there were slowdowns observed. And you know, it came as a surprise that this did not do. There were about half of these that there was actual slowdowns, performance regressions found. And what I found really interesting if you actually click through. I don't always recommend this, but in this case it's interesting. Click through to the comments. There is, there is someone There that has a link off to a GitHub issue because Raspberry PI has a GitHub organization and that's where people can open bug reports and they're generally really responsive there. By the way, I've reported things, gotten them fixed. And so there's a bug report there where someone has sort of predicted that this slowdown was going to be a problem. And the guys from Raspberry PI have done the tests and multiple times done benchmarking and it's basically been it works on my machine. And so there's been some back and forth as to like why exactly things are are slower in some cases. On 6.18, one of the obvious possibilities here is more mitigations because we've had more hardware problems found and so you have security mitigations against it, but apparently you could turn the mitigations off and you still see some of these slowdowns. The going theory right now is that it is, as we just talked about, scheduling is a big deal. So apparently the scheduler has changed in the ARM world and that affects some things on the Raspberry PI as well. So something to keep an eye on there to try to figure out what's going to happen next. Will these get fixed or is this just going to be sort of the way the PI performs with these few quirks? I mean, it's not like a huge loss of performance, but for certain workloads it is really a problem, particularly with the Raspberry PI. You're talking about things like because it's got i2C ports and spy ports GPIO on it, certain things that you would do, you may run into real problems if your scheduler changes and suddenly you can't support a 40 MHz spy bus because your GPUs or your CPU is not running fast enough, it can't wake up fast enough to talk. You do run into some bits of oddness like that. So that's the performance side of it. And then we had a real interesting question that we've talked about a little bit, but not for a couple of weeks. A really interesting question from the chat room. And I'll go ahead and bring the other guys in and then we'll show the question. And it's lavabing asks any conversation yet around the news of the supposed HDMI 2.1 support? This is something that I think we talked about a couple of weeks ago, but it's worth touching base on again. Something happened, something changed and the AMD guys are pushing out HDMI 2.1. And in fact it's in the pull Request for kernel 7.2, which is the merge window is open there. I think that's landed. Once you get kernel 7.2 and then you know, the surrounding bits that go with that, HDMI 2.1 is supposed to start working. And so that's going to be like Fedora 45, Ubuntu 2610, sort of the, you know, the releases towards the end of this year. It's not all the pieces are not quite there yet. I will keep an eye on this though, and I'll try to watch it because I am currently running. In fact, I was messing around with my desktop earlier today and I killed my screen for a little bit because I am running a DisplayPort HDMI adapter just to get the essential HDMI 2.1 capabilities to my monitor. You know, the ability to actually do variable refresh rate and 120Hz and 4K display without doing like chroma subsampling, which just looks terrible in some cases. This was the only way to do it until the AMD stuff lands. So I am also very, very much looking forward to that. I think it's going to be a much nicer setup for my system at least to be able to just plug HDMI directly in without having to mess with the dongle. It's a little flaky sometimes. So. Coming. Coming soon.
- [47:39]
Jeff
And I believe you mentioned before that your display does not have DisplayPort. So you.
- [47:44]
Jonathan Bennett
That's why HDMI is the only game in town for me. Yes.
- [47:47]
Rob
Yeah.
- [47:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Because otherwise, yeah, I would just throw a DisplayPort like I think DisplayPort is probably the better solution overall. I just don't have a DisplayPort on that because it's a TV. It'. It's actually an LG TV that I'm using as a. As a monitor, which has worked great. It's beautiful just as HDMI only. So there is that.
- [48:08]
Jeff
And isn't it off by default right now? You can. The HDMI 2.1. You have to. If you load.
- [48:18]
Jonathan Bennett
It's not landed upstream yet. So I don't even know how that's going to. Whether it's going to be turned on or not. But like it's not. It's not even fully landed yet. It's still just in the. It's in the merge tree kernel.
- [48:32]
Jeff
Next.
- [48:33]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so they. They think it's going to land at 7.2, but you know, you're. You're kind of reading the tea leaves there. I'll see if I Can, I'll see if I can find the link that I was looking at and if I could find it. I'll get that. Here we go. I'll get that dropped into, into the show notes as well. All right, we are going to take a quick break and then when we come back we're going to talk about browsers and yeah, that'll be fun right after this.
- [49:05]
Rob
This episode is brought to you by Fox 1.
- [49:08]
Jonathan Bennett
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Rob
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Jeff
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Jonathan Bennett
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Rob
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Jonathan Bennett
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Rob
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Jonathan Bennett
See fox.com for complete terms and conditions.
- [49:34]
Rob
On Linux, we're pretty much used to fending for ourselves. Windows usually gets the best supported versions of an app and you know, we gotta figure it out. You know it gets, it gets the big commercial release and you know, we get this, whatever's left, the installer that works the way the company intended, you know, and, and then on Linux, you know, we either get ignored, get the community version or we get to spend a Saturday afternoon figuring out how to make it work. And that, you know, that that's not always the case, but it's common enough that we know the routine, so it's kind of fun when the situation is flipped around. Brave the web browser Brave has launched something called Brave Origin. And this time Linux users are the ones getting the better deal. Brave Origin is basically a cleaner, stripped down version of the Brave browser. It removes a lot of the extra stuff some people do now want in the browser, like the AI assistant. Brave rewards the crypto, wallet and VPN features, but keeps the part Brave is probably best known for. And that's built in ad and tracking, blocking. So you know, which is even more critical with I believe the, I believe Chrome. I didn't do a any read on this, but I believe Chrome is like finally updating their extensions now. So like Ublock Origin won't even work. I believe I saw something about that. But anyway on, on a Brave so this, you know, with all these things moved out, removed, it's not Brave Light in the sense of being less secure, less maintained. It's more like Brave without the things that make some users turn away and find something else. Especially you know, the typical privacy focused and minimalist. Minimalist fans that many Linux users are. And here's the fun part. Brave origin cost $59.99. That's US dollars for. For those wondered, it costs that on Windows and Mac os, but Linux users get it for free. And that's not something we get to say every day. It kind of reminds me a little bit of of Ardor. You know, Ardor is free and open source and on Linux a lot of users can just install it straight from their distros repo. But on Windows, you know, if you want the official ready to run build, you're you're generally going to pay for the download anyway. It's not exactly the same situation, but it's another one of those rare cases where being on Linux is not the compromise, it is the advantage. Now anyway, Brave does have a reason for doing this. Some Linux distributions already offered Brave builds with certain features disabled. So making Origin free on Linux gives Brave a more consistent experience across Linux world. And to be fair, Windows and Mac users can still disable or hide many of the unwanted features in regular Brave without paying. But we all know the average Windows user isn't typically smart enough to figure out how to do that. Still, the optics here of having it free for us looks good for once. Linux users are not the afterthought. We are not waiting around for a port or using the almost good enough version. The best version available to us. Linux users get the cleaner paid version of the browser for free. And I think we can all appreciate that when Linux gets the best deal.
- [53:32]
Jonathan Bennett
Sorry Windows users, I mean there's a lot of things out there that you can either only run on Linux or you can only run on Windows with pain and suffering. Goodness, you want decent command line tools. Have fun with doing an emphasis 2 install on Windows. You want a web browser or excuse me, a web host, a server server side, you want to run Apache or NGINX on Windows. I mean, good luck. There's a reason that Microsoft went out of their way and built WSL2.
- [54:05]
Rob
Well, now core utils are coming.
- [54:08]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, but it's been a lot of work to make it happen. We've had all of that good stuff on Linux just natively for forever.
- [54:14]
Rob
Yeah, and I guess really this is more related to pretty much the desktop apps, the desktop user world. When it comes to anything deeper than that. Yeah, we got it all. That's why we rule the server world.
- [54:29]
Jonathan Bennett
For sure. It's true. Or maybe it's the other way around. We have all the toys because we get used in the server world.
- [54:36]
Jeff
Well, and Microsoft had a. It might be about seven Years ago now, eight years ago, when they decided, well, we're gonna, we're gonna run NT and we're gonna use that, we're gonna compete against Unix and Linux. And yeah, it didn't go well at all. They basically had, they had to fall back to.
- [54:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it was, it was, it was difficult, it was a challenge. I've heard, I've heard horror stories about trying to run things. Somebody was telling me just the other day that, that Microsoft built a, that stripped down version of windows that was 64 bit only. No, no, no, no. It was like it was a server side thing that didn't have a GUI and it was 64 bit core. Yeah, yeah, server core. That's what it was. And he's like, so many people thought it was the greatest thing until they tried to port their software to it and realized that they had a 15 year old 32 bit dependency in there that they didn't know about. It's like everything just blew up when you try to run it on.
- [55:36]
Rob
I didn't realize it's 64 bit only, but I had played with that before and well, I tried to play with, I was like, I don't know Powershell that well.
- [55:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, Microsoft has tried this a couple of times now where it's like, let's do the Linux thing in Windows and man, Windows is just not architected.
- [55:52]
Rob
I think, I think it'd be great. I think that would drastically improve Windows for the server world. But they need to have the command line stuff there. You know, maybe Core utils, that's a good step.
- [56:04]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, it is.
- [56:05]
Rob
Maybe that's what they're doing.
- [56:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Core Utils is a great step for us.
- [56:08]
Jeff
Microsoft just needs to go the macOS route and just go, okay, you know what, we're adopting Linux. We'll just put our own little GUI on top of it and just call it a day.
- [56:16]
Rob
I agree, but if they don't do that, you know, Windows Core with core utils and WSL just like built into like command line, no gui. That's kind of cool.
- [56:29]
Jonathan Bennett
I will say either of those ideas are much less impossible now than they used to be. They used to be unthinkable and now it's like, probably not.
- [56:40]
Rob
Well, you know, now Microsoft loves Linux. Before they thought Linux was a cancer.
- [56:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, well that's definitely an upgrade.
- [56:48]
Jeff
Now they probably run more Linux than they do Windows because they're on all their, you know, it's run Azure.
- [56:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, absolutely. Linux makes them a lot of money these days and not just from patent agreements.
- [57:00]
Jeff
Yeah, they just, if they just port office 360 over or office 365 over.
- [57:06]
Jonathan Bennett
There you go. That's the one that's missing. All right, Jeff, let's talk about, let's get out of the Linux, out of the Windows world, back to Linux. Let's talk KDE and the Plasma system monitor. What is new there?
- [57:21]
Jeff
Yeah, I'm not going full Rob. I'm in the Linux world here. So, you know, we talk a lot about KDE and the upgrades and changes that seem to be coming out all the time. You know, just last week we talked about new version of Plasma. This story though, I thought it would be nice to highlight some of the customization that could be done. And I'm going to use the System Monitor as an example. Now, all the applications can't be customized this much, but if you have something you know, you use and you don't think it's the best layout or style or the information displayed is quite right, you know, it's worth taking a look to see if you can change it. There are a lot that you can have quite a bit of configuration on if you so desire. So the KDE Plasma System Monitor is like it sounds. It just gives information on your system, how much your CPU or memory is being used, you know, what's the network use overall or per application, is the GPU being loaded, or, you know, a ton of other information, just like you would expect from a system System monitor. Now, to begin, it's helpful to understand how the system monitor organizes organizes information. The interface is built using a layered structure. At the highest level are rows. Within those rows are columns, and within the columns are sections. Each section contains widgets which which are the individual components that display the system information. When you enter edit mode, hovering over different parts of the layout reveals which layer you're interacting with. This structure matters because each layer offers different configuration options. For example, selecting a column allows you to add additional selecting a column allows you to add additional columns, while selecting a section allows you to add or rearrange widgets within that section when you first open the application. It also has four default pages, but you can add pages of your own and you know, basically you're starting with a completely blank canvas if you so desire. The article linked in the Show Notes talks about and shows how to convert the default widgets into a horizontal bar that shows the CPU load for each, each and every core. And you know, KDE exposes a wide range of sensors including CPU usage, temperature, disk activity, GPU load, memory consumption, and Network throughput. You know, selecting the appropriate sensors is the key to building a meaningful dashboard. If you have an active sensor, you can use it and display the information, both instant and historical type on a display. Another example is a pie chart and this, this is in the article that is used to for available ram. Another example involves adding a color grid widget to represent additional system metrics. After, you know, say you're playing around, after the layout's complete, you can save your custom page and have it load automatically in future sessions. And you can also designate a custom page as your default startup page. And, and if you decide later you no longer need a page, you can delete it or simply hide it from the page list if you think maybe you want it in the future. Or, you know, you can just hide it for a while. There's also community created pages. Users have shared many custom dashboards and those can be browsed and installed directly from within the System Monitor. While it's always wise to exercise caution when installing community content, these pages can, if nothing else, even serve as an excellent starting point or sources of inspiration for your own design. And finally, you get that page exactly how you want it. You got that customization done and you work across four machines and you're thinking, now, now I got to do it all over again on each machine I use. Well, the System Monitor has the ability to export and import pages. So you have that perfect page or multiple pages, whatever it is, you can send it across to multiple machines and then you can load it into each and every one. So you just design your dashboard once, export it as a file, whatever system you want it on, then you just import it and it matches across all the machines. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for a lot more step by step instructions. There's a lot of pictures and diagrams in there as well. So when they're leading you through the instructions, it's, you know, click here, see this, you know, and, and lots of arrows and boxes and where to click and drag and pull and makes it really simple to follow along. The capability and power of the System Monitor, you know, goes well beyond what first appearances would show. So have a look and play around and don't be afraid to experiment. Happy monitoring.
- [62:06]
Rob
I was a little worried before you mentioned there were pictures. I feel much better now.
- [62:11]
Jeff
Yeah,
- [62:14]
Jonathan Bennett
yeah, lots of fun stuff happening in kde.
- [62:20]
Jeff
I played with that before. It's pretty cool. All the stuff you can do with System Monitor and some things it's like, oh, I want to see the usage of all my cores. Oh, sometimes if you play around and put too much and you're like, whoa, I've got a eye chart going on here.
- [62:34]
Jonathan Bennett
I regret my decisions.
- [62:37]
Rob
I week wet.
- [62:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes. All right. There is another desktop that's got a new shiny system monitor. And more than just that, Cosmic has released Epoch 1.1. It's their six month update to the Cosmic 1.0. And it's a lot of bug fixes and various little things, little tweaks, but one of the big ones is the new Cosmic System Monitor. And it also is really, it's pretty snazzy looking. It really looks pretty nice. And it's got all the stuff on it that you would want. You can monitor your disk usage, your processes, your CPU usage, your RAM usage, all the things that you would want to be able to watch. It's got applications versus processes. It sort of feels like the Windows System Monitor, but of course with that nice Cosmic spin on it. And then the full epoch 1.1 has, like I said, some bug fixes. It's got a particularly useful fix for a RAM leak. But the other big thing that they're doing there is instead of just making it 1.1, it's Cosmic Epoch 1 1.0, which I think means that they're going to try to start shipping some smaller releases more often, rather than just waiting and doing it once every six months or once a year, something like that. But it's good seeing the Cosmic system coming together and getting a little bit more mature, a little bit more ready for business and all of the things coming, including the system monitor. It kind of makes me want to run Cosmic someplace again. I've not done that. I don't remember if I ever ran that on one of my main machines. I ran it on a virtual machine for a while. Rob, you ran Cosmic for a little while, didn't you?
- [64:32]
Rob
Yeah, I like it.
- [64:33]
Jonathan Bennett
Do you still run Cosmic?
- [64:34]
Rob
Yeah.
- [64:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Have you gotten the 1.1 update yet?
- [64:38]
Rob
I haven't updated yet, no.
- [64:40]
Jonathan Bennett
You have to update it and let us know how it goes. Apparently it fixes a bunch of things. Like minimizing is no longer stuttery. It minimizes butter smooth. And some fun stuff like that. It's neat to see the new desktop environment come along. And some of these things we've had in KDE for forever. They're getting them now, you guys, you poor guys are getting them in, in Cosmic. But it's just. I like it. It's fun.
- [65:02]
Rob
Came out like a year ago.
- [65:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Exactly. I mean, that's the point. That's what I mean. It's just, it's neat to see something new being done rather than just the old. The old two main desktop environments continue to putter along. It's interesting. We're talking about KDE and Cosmic and that other one's just. Oh yeah, there was that too. There is GNOME too.
- [65:26]
Rob
I guess the speed of Cosmic, though, from a aesthetics point, it's. It's definitely closer to the default GNOME than it is the default kde.
- [65:37]
Jonathan Bennett
No, that's fine. Like, I don't, I don't hate it for looking a little bit like Gnome. Let's work. That's sort of what it was inspired from. Right. Because Papa west ran GNOME for the longest time and they just, they had their vision of where they wanted it to go and that it was not the Note GNOME vision and the two sort of went their separate ways and Cosmic's what came out of that. So, I mean, it's not, it's not surprising that it's very Gnome as far as that goes.
- [65:59]
Rob
All the desktop environments look a little like each other one way or another.
- [66:03]
Jonathan Bennett
So ever since Xerox Park.
- [66:05]
Rob
Right.
- [66:05]
Jonathan Bennett
They sort of. They sort of figured that out the first time.
- [66:09]
Rob
Yeah.
- [66:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. I don't know.
- [66:10]
Jeff
CDE looks a lot different.
- [66:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Cde. I should know what that is, but I don't.
- [66:16]
Jeff
Common desktop environment. Oh, like old unix. It's pretty funky looking.
- [66:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh yeah. It looks like Windows 3.1. Sort of a 3.1 or 95, but it works way different. Oh, I'm sure.
- [66:32]
Jeff
No, they look a lot alike. But you know, the problem with GNOME is they've had a lot of people and organizations. That said, I don't like the direction this is going. We're kind of taking off and doing
- [66:44]
Jonathan Bennett
our own thing and yeah, Gnome, we talked about this a little bit last week too. I think GNOME has had some problems on the biggest business organization side of things too. Yes, it did not go super well and now people are starting to talk about that. Yeah, we don't have to retread all of that, but yeah, we'll see what happens.
- [67:05]
Jeff
I always pull for new desktops because I'm a big KDE fan, but it doesn't mean they don't learn from other ones and other ones learn from kde. And true. It's kind of like ships in the bay. When the tide comes in, we all rise together. Absolutely.
- [67:20]
Rob
It amazes me a little bit though how like KDE financially seems to be doing great relatively. And Gnome doesn't, considering that GNOME is used by default on more commercial. Definitely commercial distros and a lot of others, too.
- [67:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [67:39]
Rob
You think that should trickle down, huh?
- [67:42]
Jonathan Bennett
There's just some problems there. Well, I'm. I'm not going to go into my thoughts on the problems, but not. Not on the show, at least. But there's some obvious problems with the management there at gnome.
- [67:52]
Jeff
Well, but if you look back, I mean, KDE had their misstep. They had the three series, which everybody loved, and then they went to four, and that was a rough ride.
- [68:01]
Rob
That was so long ago. Let's. Let's not do.
- [68:04]
Jonathan Bennett
I think that's a. I think that's a fundamentally. I think that's a fundamentally different sort of misstep, though, right. With KDE 4, that was just a big technical change. And yeah, they may not have handled the technical change well, but the things happening at GNOME are more like business. Yeah, they ejected people out of their ecosystem. I don't think anybody got permanently banned from KDE for not liking KDE 4. Well, no, but not to dive into all of that.
- [68:38]
Rob
Which one was the first plasma? Was it five or so? Four.
- [68:42]
Jonathan Bennett
Four Kitty four was when plasma.
- [68:44]
Jeff
But that's where Neon came around is because somebody wasn't. Oh, I guess they got kicked out of Ubuntu for. It doesn't matter. But I guess I was going back to like. No, I think it was GNOME three when they first redid all their interfaces and it broke a lot of stuff and it really. I was leaving the political stuff. I was going just on the technical
- [69:10]
Rob
shifts because people didn't like it.
- [69:13]
Jonathan Bennett
I couldn't leave it there. I couldn't leave it out.
- [69:16]
Rob
But. So KD4 was. KD4 was the one with the widgets, right?
- [69:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes. Sniper blue on. On YouTube says, I still remember KDE for. Yeah, me too. It was such. It was a wild time to be running kde. Well, and they screwed up because it started working. What happened is they released the KDE 4.0. They said, this is 4.0. Don't anybody use it because it's the dot. Oh, it's still broken. And all of the distro shipped it and they're like, no, it wasn't ready yet. It wasn't ready until like 4.2 or 4.3.
- [69:52]
Jeff
Yeah, it was like 4 or 3 or something like that. I was going to guess 4.4, but it was like they treated it as a beta before then, but nobody else got the memo. So everybody just jumped on it and went, this. This thing is broken. And it's like, which.
- [70:06]
Rob
Whichever version I started using, I liked
- [70:08]
Jonathan Bennett
it at the time. Yeah, I remember running, you know, Fedora. What would that have been? Like 18 or something? And 17 somewhere around there, it seems like I'd have to go back and look the exact number. But like, you would run one Fedora and KDE would be so broken you would pull the packages from the. In the being developed. Next version from Rawhide is what they call them. Fedora. You pull packages from Rawhide because they were more stable and more featureful than the KDE that your version of Fedora came with. It was a real wild time to be a KDE user. Fun times. All right, I think that is it for the show for the news part of it at least. We got some command line tips. We got some fun stuff coming. We are going to dive into those and then wrap it up. But first off, we're going to take a real quick break and we'll be back deck Lava being asked, is there any reason why major version releases don't do negative minor version numbers when still in beta? That's a cool idea. It would break so many things.
- [71:05]
Rob
Oh yeah.
- [71:06]
Jonathan Bennett
So much automation. So much automation software would just lose its mind with a negative number.
- [71:11]
Rob
Well, you know what though, maybe it wouldn't be bad because, like, the system would be looking for an update for a higher version and it would see negatives. Like, well, that's not higher. I'm not upgrading to that.
- [71:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Half of those systems looking at that would see the negative number and go, go, hey, look, it's version 65,535. This is the one we want to go to.
- [71:32]
Jeff
Or they'd go, hey, it's an EM Dash. Oh, okay. This is the new version.
- [71:38]
Rob
AI.
- [71:39]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep. All right. Rob, what is Harold, Are they singing?
- [71:46]
Rob
Yes. Hark the Herald. So I haven't gotten too deep into this one, but I've been playing around with this a little bit. This Herald is a TUI application for email. So it is a. Get this right here.
- [72:06]
Jonathan Bennett
It's an inbox.
- [72:08]
Rob
Yes, yes. So this is not my email. They actually have a demo flag so you can do Dash Dash demo and actually just look at the A demo. So one thing to note, if you try this, it seems like the directions on the page are actually for installing with Brew on Mac os. I tried to install with Brew on Linux. Didn't work. With some help from one of my good friends.
- [72:40]
Jonathan Bennett
One of your. One of your good friends on the Internet?
- [72:42]
Rob
Yes, one of my good friends on the Internet, yeah. First name Chat, last name GPT.
- [72:49]
Jonathan Bennett
That's the friend I was thinking of.
- [72:51]
Rob
It helped guide me that I can install it with go. So I included the GO install link also in the show notes. So you can do a GO install and it seems to work just fine then on Linux, even though apparently Linux was not what they had in mind. So anyway, this is a. It's just a full email client in a tui, you know, with the full directories folders on the left and your email on the right. So you know, you can go and pick an email and read it and escape back. And at the bottom there's Enter to open Control N if you want to. If I want to do a new email. Okay, that's not.
- [73:40]
Jonathan Bennett
You broke it. You broke it, Rob.
- [73:44]
Rob
Yeah, so anyway, you can do a new email with a control and Control R to reply Dell delete.
- [73:53]
Jonathan Bennett
So one of the. One of the other fun things about this one is it's got mouse support too, right?
- [73:58]
Rob
It does have mouse support. So I am testing it here in. It's in a. An LXC container. So this is not even a gui. So quite often when. When you have a tui, mouse support usually doesn't work directly in the console, but here it does.
- [74:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Nice.
- [74:24]
Rob
So anyway, super cool.
- [74:28]
Jonathan Bennett
It was cool till you broke it.
- [74:29]
Rob
Until I broke it, yeah. So it's got contacts, calendar, memories at the top. So, yeah, contacts, calendar, memories.
- [74:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Nice.
- [74:44]
Rob
Anyway, yeah, there you go. If you want a full email client in the command line. As I said, I've only really just been kind of playing around with it. I just found it playing around with it, seeing how it works. It seems to work fine. When I had it going with my. One of my Gmail accounts, it seemed to work fine with that. But yeah, there you go.
- [75:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Neat. I like it. Might have to go play with that one. All right, Jeff, you've got something that makes me think of a C programming and I don't think it's the same thing. We're not doing Sling Streams here, are we?
- [75:21]
Jeff
No, we are not. My command line tip for the week is SS or Socket Statistics. It's the modern replacement for the old netstat command. And if you're still using netstat, it's time to make a switch, as SS is faster, more detailed, and is available by default on most every modern Linux distribution. Now, why is SS faster than netstat? Netstat works by reading and parsing a large text file in proc, which on a server with thousands of connections. That'll make it go slow because it's got a big file deployment parse through. Now. SS communicates directly with the Linux kernel via the NetLink socket interface using a binary protocol that only retrieves the data you actually ask for. So on a busy server, netstat might take several seconds. SS returns the results almost instantly. At its most basic, just typing SS with no arguments dumps a list of all current network socket connections, showing you the states, the state send and receive queues, local address and port, and the remote peer address and port. Of course, if you like almost all Linux command line tips, the powers and the flags. So if you use SS T it shows only TCP connections. U shows UDP L shows only listening sockets, meaning services that are waiting for an incoming connection. You can combine them like SS TL to see only listening TCP sockets, which is great for, you know, quickly checking which services are running. You can add, then add a dash N to skip hostname resolution and just show off raw IP addresses and port numbers. Add P and you get the process name and the pid attached with each socket. So you can immediately see which application owns which connection, which. Which can be a lifesaver when you're trying to figure out what's going or what's using a particular port. For quick High Level Overview, SS Space-S gives you a clean summary of total socket counts broken down by type and state. You can also filter by port. For example, if you do an SS space dash T space sport equals colon 22, it shows all TCP connections on the SSH port and SSH UL lists UDP listening ports. You know, handy if you're checking some services like DNS or ntp. Another one is tlnp, which shows listening TCP sockets, skips DNS resolution and includes the process info all in one shot. So take a look at the article linked in the show notes and also your Local man page for more information on a bunch of other flags and ways you can use the SS command. So happy listening.
- [78:24]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, very cool. I've got a command here that brought back all kinds of old memories. My command is relayd and it comes from actually a hackaday article that I think it was Al Williams. Yeah, Al wrote about putting open WRT on an old router and working some magic with it. And he mentioned relay D and the problem that you would solve with this. And then it kind of sent me down the rabbit hole of like what all can you do with relay D? And the answer is a whole lot. So the problem here is trying to bridge two ethernet networks over WI fi. It's like the old problem of I've got a network here and then over in the next building or whatever, I've got a couple of computers and I want to be able to wire them together but have the whole thing share over WI Fi. And a lot of us have had a problem like this at some point or another. And you might just ask the question, well, can't you just bridge it with WI Fi and then connect the network together and everything just works? The answer is no, you can't. And the reason is that wi fi is a 3. The headers and wi fi have three Mac addresses. It has the original source Mac address, it's got the access point Mac address and then it's got the destination's Mac address, but it doesn't have room for a fourth one in the header. And so if you have multiple devices on the other side of that destination WI Fi, the Mac addresses conflict. And so you've got to do some sort of special magic to be able to put multiple devices downstream on that one WI Fi. And there's, you know, this is sort of an old, old problem. There's new ways that WI FI networks fix this, but one of the ways to fix it is to use something like Relayd, which gives you a. It essentially does that magic. It does that. It's almost like a nat. It's almost like network address translation. It's more like a Mac address translation. But Relayd will do it for, for you. And so I've got a couple of links here about how to set it up. One to the Hackaday article and then one also how to set it up. But you can do it really surprised me. There's a lot of things you can do with Relay D. Like you can build a. You can build a proxy, you can do apparently some like round robin balancing. Yeah, load balancers. That's the term. Load balancers. Use Relay D internally. You can do transparent proxying with it. All kinds of fun stuff. And in fact I'm probably going to start playing around with this because I'm doing some proxying for a different project, doing it with SSH and I might be able to skip a step if I use Relay D instead. So something to be aware of. It's one of those Swiss army knives on the Linux command line for doing networking stuff. And definitely something to have in your bag of tricks for WI Fi if nothing else. Rob, have you ever fought with that 3Mac address problem with WI Fi?
- [81:35]
Rob
No.
- [81:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's fun. You see all kinds of weird stuff out in user networks. And that's one of the ones that just is odd. Sometimes what you will see, you've probably seen this. You pull the list of devices on the network and you have multiple IP addresses that are listed under the same Mac address. That's what it is.
- [81:58]
Rob
Oh, yeah, okay.
- [81:59]
Jonathan Bennett
That's exactly what it is. It's that same problem. All right, well, that is it for the show. We got a little geeky there at the end, but that's all right. We are comfortable getting geeky. We're gonna let each of the guys plug whatever they want to. I know Rob is going to beg some donations to be able to buy that new Steam machine. We'll let him get started with that.
- [82:20]
Rob
All right, for those who wanting more of me, you can find me at robertpcampbell.com link at the top. For those watching and always during the whole show, it's. It's right there at the bottom. Anyway, for those watching, it's there. For those listening, listen very closely. That's Robert P. As in Patrick campbell, like the soup.com. and on that page there are links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Blue sky, my Mastodon and all important place. The place you can help me get a Steam machine right here, a little cup of coffee where you can donate in $5 increments. Now that's a thousand dollar machine. So that's lots of coffees, please. Thank you.
- [83:06]
Jonathan Bennett
Lots of coffees, please and thank you. All right, Jeff.
- [83:11]
Jeff
Nothing much to go over. So another haiku. Yesterday it worked, today it is not working. Windows is like that. Have a great week, everybody.
- [83:25]
Jonathan Bennett
I like it. Thank you guys. It was a blast to have you both with me today. All right, if you want to find more of me, there's of course hackaday. That is where Floss Weekly lives. And we have had a lot of fun past couple of weeks. We had Tris last week talking about the law and the big Craig Wright bitcoin suit that was really cool to talk about. The plan is this Tuesday to have a RISC V sort of show talking with the president of one of the RISC V associations and definitely looking forward to that as well. Don't miss it. Otherwise, we appreciate everybody that's here. Thank you so much. Whether you watch or listen, get us live or on the download, we appreciate it. And we'll be back next. No, not next week. Next week's fourth of July. We are taking a week off. We'll be back in two weeks on the Untitled Linux Show. Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery
- [84:26]
Rob
and setup are as easy as a
- [84:27]
Jonathan Bennett
few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. A brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too. Alright, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life
- [84:45]
Rob
gets a little easier.
- [84:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app. Wayfair Every style, Every home. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets?
- [84:56]
Jeff
Yes.
- [84:57]
Rob
Good.
- [84:57]
Jonathan Bennett
This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in, loyal, invested. They're called fans.
- [85:06]
Rob
Fans don't just listen to music, they
- [85:08]
Jonathan Bennett
feel seen by it like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to.
- [85:14]
Rob
And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo.
- [85:17]
Jonathan Bennett
So are you ready to talk to fans?
- [85:19]
Rob
Spotify advertising.
- [85:20]
Jonathan Bennett
You're among fans.