Untitled Linux Show 263: Getting Back With My X

Summary

Untitled Linux Show 263: Getting Back With My X

Recorded: July 18, 2026 | Host: Jonathan (on location), with Rob and Ken
Main Theme:
A lively, pragmatic roundtable on the intersection of Linux with trending technologies: AI in open source, Blender’s latest release, the future (and promises) of X/Twitter’s code, new hardware and desktop developments, AI policy on Flathub, and tools for Linux users.

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Episode Overview

The hosts dig into how Linux projects are deliberately reshaping their stances toward AI, highlight tangible new software and hardware for Linux users, debate policy and philosophy around open source stewardship, and share both hands-on tips and personal anecdotes from the tech trenches. This episode’s title is a playful nod to the question of “getting back with my ex”—referring to the topic of X (formerly Twitter) going open source.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI and the Linux Kernel: Linus Torvalds Evolves His Stance

Timestamps: 02:59–10:30

• Linus Torvalds' Position:
  Rob shares recent statements from Linus Torvalds clarifying that the Linux project is not anti-AI:

  “Linux is not an anti-AI project. … Open source gives [everyone] a choice, you know, fork the project or walk away.” (Rob, 06:44)

• Linus draws distinction: AI can be a useful tool, but human responsibility remains—AI can't sign off on patches; questionable AI patches, hallucinations, and legal/ethical concerns remain managed risks.
• Historical Perspective:
  Jonathan and Ken compare AI’s arrival to other revolutionary shifts (assembly to C, printing press, electricity, internet):

  “It's considered less of a revolutionary, more of an evolutionary change.” (Jonathan, 07:42)

2. Blender 5.2 LTS: Major Feature and Performance Boosts

Timestamps: 12:24–17:17

• Ken outlines highlights from Blender 5.2 LTS:
  • New built-in geometry and physics tools (hair, cloth), improved memory use, faster start times, HDR and wide gamut color space support, and more.
  • “Circle Space Evenly and Flatten Loop tools” now built-in; enhanced sound options.
  • Improved rigging/animation, more flexible frame/playback, and general refinement.
• The hosts discuss dreams of using AI to generate Blender assets and note Blender as a shining open source success story.

3. Will X/Twitter Really Open Source Its Platform?

Timestamps: 17:45–25:06

• Musk’s Promise:
  Rob breaks down Elon Musk’s public pledge to release X’s whole platform code “with no exceptions,” with third-party code verification, citing both promise and skepticism:

  “I'll believe it when I see it on the GitHub repository.” (Rob, 17:48)

  • Previous ‘open source’ dumps have been incomplete or dead repositories.
  • Some real releases: X’s For You algorithm and XAI’s Grok 1 model.

• Motivations and Community:
  Discussion on why Musk would open source X (reduce costs, crowdsource improvements, foster transparency), with skepticism about actual community involvement or benefit:

  “He could in, in effect gain thousands of free developers … maybe he could let go of some of the ones he's paying today.” (Rob, 20:52)

• Network Effect Caveats:
  Jonathan:

  “So, you know, you can imagine the scenario where they released enough of the source code that you could fork it and run your own Twitter. But, like, what good is it to have a Twitter when it's just you?” (Jonathan, 25:24)

4. Cosmic 1.3: Rust-Based Linux Desktop Reaches New Levels

Timestamps: 29:02–33:15

• System76’s Cosmic Desktop:
  Ken summarizes the newest stable release, with its long-awaited “Frosted Glass” effect (polished blurred transparency), improved GPU monitoring, translation updates, and quality-of-life fixes.
• Panel Debate:
  • Is Cosmic destined to replace GNOME or KDE as a default?

    “I would love to see Cosmic ship as the default in certain places … if you really want to, you can install GNOME. I'd be okay with that.” (Jonathan, 33:41)

  • Origins: Cosmic started as a GNOME theme; forked due to GNOME making life harder for downstream themers.

5. Flathub’s AI Ban: Is It Fair?

Timestamps: 33:55–51:18

• Backstory:
  Flathub banned “AI-slop” (AI-generated, low-quality, or abandoned apps). Joey Sneddon’s research: 120 “AI-slop” projects, only 32 still active.
• Hosts’ Arguments:
  • Rob critiques the policy as possibly self-fulfilling—no opportunity for user feedback or bug reports means more abandonment:

    “Flathub closes that door and now people are pointing at the developers who walked away as evidence that the door should have been closed.” (Rob, 38:56) “Software … doesn’t need constant updates simply to prove that they are alive. Some applications are simple utilities designed to do one specific job.” (Rob, 39:01)

  • Jonathan shares a real-world anecdote: despite their project leveraging AI, Flathub permitted Meshtastic Desktop because it’s established and actively maintained.
• Exception Handling:
  • The difference is community trust/recognition and proven support. For new/unknown projects, Flathub is more cautious.

6. Other Rapid-Fire News & Tools

Timestamps: 52:33–87:16

• Vysor: New graphical UEFI boot manager—mixes Grub’s speed with ReFind’s polish, supports Secure Boot.

• Valve Steam Frame & Hollow Core:

  • Valve releases ARM64 Arch Linux base (Hollow Core) for their wireless VR headset.
  • Collabora’s work means early open-source access—portends broader SteamOS on ARM devices.

• Clonezilla 3.3.3:

  • Now supports reverse connection network cloning, new tools, and utility updates—better for golden image deployment and disaster recovery.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI and Open Source:

  “As I have said before, Linux has always been about taking useful tools, improving them and placing responsibility on the person using them.” (Rob, 06:02)

• On progress:

  “I thought the Internet was going to be the big change and that changed everything. Now AI has come along… maybe the two of them will be talked about in the same breath.” (Jonathan, 07:42)

• On Flathub’s “AI slot” ban:

  “Let's not pretend inactivity in such a short time span means literally anything at all.” (Rob, 40:10)

• On Cosmic’s frosted glass:

  “It sort of resembles another glass interface—reminds me a lot of Aero on Windows 7. It's kind of a throwback.” (Jonathan, 33:33)

• On open sourcing X/Twitter:

  “Open sourcing X would not automatically fix the platform, restore trust, or reverse every questionable decision ever made since Musk bought Twitter, but it would allow outside developers and security researchers to replace speculation with evidence.” (Rob, 22:15)

• On AI-powered scripting:

  “What I've been enjoying with AI is being able to write scripts, preferably bash… what would take hours, now I can get a working prototype in minutes.” (Ken, 47:34)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Introduction & AI in the Kernel: 00:00–10:30
• Blender 5.2 Release Features: 12:24–17:17
• X/Twitter Open Source Debate: 17:45–26:34
• Cosmic 1.3 & Desktop Landscape: 29:02–33:51
• Flathub AI Ban & Real-World Anecdotes: 33:55–51:40
• Boot Managers & UEFI News - Vysor: 53:33–59:09
• Valve Steam Frame OS Released: 59:31–66:12
• Clonezilla New Features: 68:11–73:54
• Command-Line Tips:
  • memReady (RAM reporting tool): 74:46–78:22
  • mountpoint utility for verifying drives: 78:22–84:24
• Outro & Personal Plugs: 85:50–87:16

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Show Tips & Recommendations

• Rob’s memReady Tool:
  • Modern, AI-assisted tool (in Go) to view memory configuration from the CLI—handy for upgrades or troubleshooting.
• Ken’s “mountpoint” Command Demo:
  • How to check if a directory is a mount point, automate checks in backup scripts, and combine with other utilities.
• Jonathan’s Plug:
  • Meshtastic Desktop now on Flathub—a case study in “established” AI-assisted open source projects being accepted.

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Final Thoughts & Tone

The hosts maintain TWiT’s signature blend of practical geek talk, policy skepticism, personal storytelling, and in-jokes—with frequent meta-references to the Linux and open source communities’ history and foibles. The conversational tone is light, but the insights are nuanced, particularly on community trust, the real impact of open sourcing platforms, and the pragmatic approach many leading projects are taking toward new technologies.

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For more details, code links, and articles referenced, check the show notes in your podcast app.

Transcript

[Jonathan]

This week we're talking about AI in the kernel and a Blender release and the possibility of X going open source. Cosmic has a new big release with Frosted Glass. Flathub defends its ban on AI and I have a story from Trench on that one and a lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

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[Ken]

podcasts

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[Ken]

This is TW.

[Jonathan]

This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 263 recorded Saturday, July 18th. Getting back with my ex.

[Rob]

Hello everybody. It's Saturday and you know what time that means it is. Why am I here? Because Jonathan's having some technical difficulties. He is here, but I'm just opening the show for him to get us started. So here we are in the Untanalytics show. Let's We've got Ken and Jonathan here with us.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I am on location at Open Sauce. I am here repping the meshtastic booth but I didn't want to miss Uls. I'm having some technical issues with my Framework laptop talking to my Bluetooth headset. Who would have thought audio. Bluetooth audio on Linux is a problem. I've never heard of that.

[Ken]

Why?

[Jonathan]

It's always been perfect. But anyway I'm here. But I may be mostly color commentary for the show, but I didn't want

[Rob]

to miss it and neither will you.

[Ken]

And I'm here. I'm always color commentary for the show.

[Rob]

Yeah. So to start us off, I guess I have the first story and you've all heard the saying that drove many Linux users crazy. And that one is Microsoft loves Linux. Well, now it's time for a new one. And that one, maybe I'll drive some of you. Crazier is Linux loves AI, okay? And I know, I know that one's going to upset many of the many of you out there in the Linux community. AI has become one of those topics where everyone has a strong opinion one way or the other. And to many in the Linux community, it's negative. People say it's unethical, it's hype, it writes bad code, keep it out of the open source. And you know, even this week I heard a. I heard it compared to the way a compiler can inject malware into a program saying that AI can also inject malware into code apparently hidden so that nobody can see it upon review. I don't know about that, but maybe, maybe not. Anyway, this last one, this last comment I heard was actually in response to this week's story about Linus. Linus Torvalds, that is the great Linus Torvalds and his current position on AI. So Linus Torvalds was, has always, Was always, wasn't, was not always AI cheerleader. In fact, back in 2024, he described the industry as roughly 90% marketing and 10% reality. But instead of permanently planting his flag, Linus tried the technology and his opinion has evolved. Sounds a lot like somebody else we know on the show here for this following along. Now, now, now. He's not Vibe coding the Linux kernel yet. The kernel has guidance for AI assisted contributions, code must still meet licensing requirements and AI cannot sign off on a patch. And a human developer remains responsible for what gets submitted. But Linus has vibe coded an application before. His Audio Noise side project experiments with digital audio effects. Linus wrote much of it himself, but says its Python visualizer was basically written by Vive, coding with Google's Anti Gravity. That's not what I'm really familiar with, but he joked that rather than googling examples and copying them, he just cut out the middleman himself and let AI built the visualizer for him. And now Linus has gone further, responding to anti AI sentiment around kernel development. He said Linux is not an anti AI project. He called AI a useful tool, said nobody is being forced to use it, and told those who, who cannot, cannot accept. Who can't accept it. You know, others using IT in open source. That open source gives them a choice, you know, fork the project or walk away. That does not give AI a free pass. Bad patches, hallucinated bug reports, licensing questions, and extra work for maintainers, you know, are real problems. And Linus himself has criticized low value AI assisted submissions. But those are problems to manage, not reasons to pretend the technology does not exist. As I have said before, Linux has always been about taking useful tools, improving them and placing responsibility on the person using them. So maybe Linux loves AI is a little bit of an exaggeration. But Linux clearly is not afraid of AI and according to Linus, it will not become an anti AI project just to justify the loudness Loudest people in the room. So I'm definitely glad to hear this. Based on earlier stories this year about being overwhelmed with AI bugs, it was feeling rather anti AI to me. So I kind of feared that the Linux project and I made it known on the show, kind of, I think at least implied it, you know, that the Linux project was going all in on this anti AI direction. Thankfully for Linux, I was wrong.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I saw an interesting take on this that compared it to the move from like assembly language and RAW C to some of the more modern languages. And you know, I thought that was an interesting take on it, that like, it's considered it to be less of a revolutionary, more of an evolutionary change, you know, that that may be, that may be a fair way to look at it. It's always interesting to think about these things, these big changes that we go through that we get to see firsthand. And like in 100 years from now, how will history treat it? Or a thousand years from now. You know, I thought the Internet was going to be the big change and that changed everything. And nowadays AI has come along and it's like, well, maybe the two of them will be talked about in the same breath or considered the same thing. Definitely change the way we all work when we write code. Yeah.

[Rob]

In the long run, they're kind of close together. I mean, in our lifetimes they're not that close. But when you're looking out 100 years, they almost pop up at the same time.

[Ken]

I saw how much computers changed everything.

[Rob]

You did?

[Jonathan]

Yeah.

[Rob]

Yep.

[Ken]

Absolutely, I'm sure.

[Jonathan]

All right.

[Ken]

My grandparents saw how much phones changed everything.

[Jonathan]

Yeah.

[Ken]

And electricity.

[Jonathan]

I mean, there's, there's big changes in every generation. Right. But then there's some changes that you look back on, like the movable type printing press. Right. That was such a revolutionary change. It changed everything. It changed the entire world. It's, you know, when you're in the midst of it, like I said, it's hard to tell exactly where you're at in the timeline and how history will remember it.

[Ken]

Well, we are scary how many different changes I've actually seen in my lifetime. Computer Internet.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, I think it, it really boils down to, though, the people at the kernel are pragmatists. They, they care about the code and they care about the code being right, and they see this as another tool to try to achieve that. And, you know, I can't, I can't blame them. I've come to treat it as basically the same.

[Rob]

Glad for that.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, for sure. I, I also think that, like, I know there's questions about, like the eagle, legal issues around open source and the ethical issues, but I had a lawyer on Floss Weekly back not, not Tris, but before that, several, several months ago. And he made the point that the genie's out of the bottle now and you're never, ever going to be able to put it back. And that's kind of become my, my approach to this. Like, even if in theory there are legal problems, the genie is never going back in the bottle. All right, let's take a quick break. I know we've got other stuff coming up. In fact, Ken is going to be up next with a news of some release of Blender. We'll get to that right after this.

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[Ken]

And Jonathan, this week, as you were saying, we've got Michael Larabel and Marcus Nestor writing about an update to my favorite open source, free and cross platform 3D computer graphics software suite. Yes, I am talking about Blender. This time it's version 5.2 and it's a long term support version. It now has the circle space evenly and flatten loop tools built in instead of installing as extensions as we've done in the past. Blender 5.2 also provides a big update to the geometry node including a new physics system that focuses on hair and cloth. A new sound socket type has been added that uses an imported sound to output the amplitude as a float. Blender 5.2 also received some long awaited features in draw mode to include updating thumbnails for brushes and having a texture brush pack available after enabling online access. Now the rigging and animation updates in this release provide some nice quality of life improvements to include more options when spawning bones and a new head or teller slider for adjusting positioning along a bone when using bone parenting. Blender 5.2 adds a new allow pre row option in the playback popover, allowing Blender to playback frames located before the defined playback start frame. Now according to Marcus, Blender 5.2 LTS Improves memory use and faster startup time on texture heavy scenes add support for snapping to the lattice objects, support for interpolating vertex custom data when merging verti vertices or vertices. I don't know if that's be a soft or long eye vertices and support and support for HDR and wide gamut color spaces to scopes. Now you can find more details in Michael and Marcus's article or you can watch the 36 minute official overview video that I also have linked in the show Notes.

[Rob]

Which feature are you most excited to try first, Ken?

[Ken]

It's a tough decision there. There's some that I didn't discuss that I really am looking forward to playing with

[Jonathan]

others.

[Ken]

Find out about those when you read those articles.

[Jonathan]

They've got a release page here with multiple like showcase reel and recap video and all kinds of fun. Just showing off some of the different things it can do would be really interesting to look through. All of those looks really cool.

[Ken]

I still got to finish watching the official overview that they put together.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I didn't realize it was that long. That's quite the. Quite the overview.

[Ken]

Aren't you glad I didn't go that long into describing it? I suppose that's been half the show there.

[Rob]

Yeah. Blender's not anything I've ever really played with though. Definitely.

[Jonathan]

I have not either. I. I certainly want to. I. I like the idea that I've just. I've never found the time. I wonder how many people are now starting to do things like, you know, use the AI to create blender models and blender scenes. It's got to be a thing people are playing around with. I know. In fact, here at Open Sauced, there is. There's at least one booth where people are using AI to make circuits. And I was sort of surprised that that was working as well as it was. But he had a physical device. He's like, I had the robot design this thing for me and then I got it made and it works. So it's taken over all kinds of places.

[Rob]

Yeah. One of the things I was thinking about is, you know, the time limitation. And first you got to learn and figure out what you're doing. And, you know, I almost thought that maybe using AI now might be a way to jump into it fast, to just to learn, you know, have it guide you and help you.

[Jonathan]

Like, hey, this is the thing I want to do. Give me a step by step guide to do it. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting use for sure.

[Ken]

Yeah. Some playing around with it. Basically just following some of the tutorials. One for creating Gus, another one for creating a castle, a shark modeling at and yellow submarine.

[Jonathan]

Do we all live there?

[Ken]

I think that's what the Beatles said.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, that's what they said. That's cool. Yeah. Blender is a real open source success story. There's another potentially growing open source success story. Is that the way we want to pitch this? There's A company out there that's talking about open sourcing a lot of things at least, and to their credit they have open sourced some of these things. I'm not going to give. Yeah, I'm not going to give the punchline away. I'm going to let Rob talk about it. Who, who is this that's out there open sourcing stuff?

[Rob]

Elon Musk. You know one of the other tech shows talk a lot about Elon Musk. I don't. We tend not to too much, but here we are, we got a story with him. So Elon Musk says that Twitter or X, I guess X is going to open source X. And this is one of the stories. You know, I'll believe it when I see it on the GitHub repository. Even though, yeah, I guess, you know, they have open source some things. But according to Musk, once the company finishes reviewing its software for security vulnerabilities, it will release the platform's entire code base with no exceptions. He also says third party reviewers will be invited to compare the published code against the software actually running in production. You know, companies sometimes release a carefully selected portion of their software, call it open source, and leave out the pieces people are most interested in examining. Pretty sure Microsoft has done some of that anyway. Allowing independent reviewers to verify that public code matches the that matches the production platform would provide a much stronger level of transparency. IcoLite researchers examine how content is ranked, how moderation decisions are implemented, how advertisements are selected, and whether certain accounts or opinions receive preferential treatment or that they don't. But again, this is currently a promise, not a release. Musk has made open source promises before with mixed results. You know, Twitter released part of its recommendation System back in 2023. Maybe it was X and whatever, but that that repository received relatively few updates and was never a complete, easily runnable copy of the platform. There have also been some legitimate successes. X published a newer version of its 4U recommendation algorithm in January 2026 and delivered a significant update in May, including a runnable inference pipeline. XAI also released the Grok One model weights and architecture under the Apache 2.0 license in 20. On the other hand, Musk said Grok 3 would become open source in about six months after Grok 2.5 was released. That deadline has passed around back in February 2026, and Grok 3 still has not appeared. There's also no public date for this complete X release. You know, after we finish the security review could mean next month, next year, or never. You know, maybe they'll never finish it. And then when the code appears, we need to examine the license. You know, posting source code where people can read it is not necessarily the same as releasing genuinely open source software that people can modify, redistribute, redistribute and build upon. Open sourcing X would not automatically fix the platform, restore trust, or reverse every questionable decision ever made since Musk bought Twitter, but it would allow outside developers and security researchers to replace speculation with evidence. But my big question is why? Why would he spend billions of dollars just to give it all away? Well, you know, I have a few ideas. You know, one, he wouldn't actually be giving away the service, just the code they use to provide it, which is a much different story. You know, code doesn't give you four followers as, as discovered on many other platforms that have come out since then. Though I have quite a few followers comparatively on other accounts. You know, speaking of other accounts that, you know, didn't really become much. Anyone remember threads? I still see ads for it, so I guess it's still out there, but I don't log into it. Anyway, Musk is always trying to cut costs, especially you know, with this money pit called X. And, and if the code goes open source, you know, he could in, in effect gain thousands of free developers that contribute to the project. And you know, maybe he could let go of some of the ones he's paying today. Or, you know, if not that, you know, maybe, maybe he, he could at least have a better Twitter X. Anyway, anyway, it would be a cool step and maybe, just maybe, if Musk releases the entire thing, uses a real open source license, and proves that it matches production, maybe I'll finally stop calling it Twitter. Maybe it might even earn X back a tiny little bit of my respect.

[Jonathan]

Rob is getting back.

[Ken]

Well, Rob got. That's. I thought Musk bought that as a tax write off.

[Jonathan]

No, get it. Getting back with your ex. Rum.

[Rob]

Getting back with my ex.

[Jonathan]

There's your shirt right there. Yeah, so I went and looked at the Twitter X GitHub repository and there are like 102 repositories there. Like they have pushed a bunch of code out. Unfortunately, as you noticed, most of it is sort of dead. Like Last updated in 2023 or 2024. There's a couple of them that are kept up to date. Personally, I think Musk likes the idea of making things open source, but I think he just doesn't have the bandwidth to stay on top of it, to continue to push people at the companies to keep up with It. So, yeah, I don't know. I would love to see Twitter be like a better open source steward and part of the community, grow an actual community around their code. We'll see if it happens.

[Ken]

He tried to get people to volunteer to help improve it for him.

[Jonathan]

I mean, when you look at the repositories, that's not what they're doing. I don't think anybody's doing pull requests. I don't think they're pulling any of that code back, honestly. I think it's more that Musk likes the idea of things being transparent and people being able to look into it, and this is a way for him to try to accomplish that.

[Rob]

I think getting people to help

[Sponsor Voice]

would

[Rob]

be a great use case, though.

[Jonathan]

Sure, yeah. I mean, that's part of what makes open source so cool, is that people get to help and fix bugs that annoy them personally and you build a community around it. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to see that with Twitter. I think that would be really cool.

[Ken]

And it definitely gives us the option to fork some of that and go off in another direction from what MUX has been doing.

[Rob]

You know, you say that, but, you know, you're talking about Twitter. There's already clones that are, like, so close to it. I mean, what's missing is maybe the algorithm used for stuff, but, I mean, what more would they really want in, say, Mastodon or Blue sky or.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. I mean, so much of Twitter is the network effect. Well, yes, you could theoretically fork it. Like, so, you know, you can imagine the scenario where they released enough of the source code that you could fork it and run your own Twitter. But, like, what good is it to have a Twitter when it's just you? Yeah. The network effect is what makes it not.

[Rob]

It's like if Walmart open sourced the design of their building. All right, everyone else takes the design of their building, but

[Ken]

I think several companies have done that.

[Rob]

Yeah, because it's easy to clone something like that. Just like it's not too hard to clone something like Twitter.

[Ken]

Would this having the source code open give those clones the capability of interfacing with Twitter for that transfer? Communicating between the clone and if they allowed it.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. I had a pipe dream for the longest time that Twitter would introduce the ability to connect to the Fediverse via Mastodon. But I don't think anybody else thought that was a good idea. I was sort of alone on that island. Oh, well.

[Ken]

Somebody asked you what you had been smoking.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, something like that.

[Rob]

Isn't that the hopes or what they say? Blue sky is supposed to become. Isn't there something like that?

[Jonathan]

I don't know. I've not actually looked too deeply into

[Ken]

that's the hope for Blue Sky. Mastodon. I thought when the Facebook came out. Oh, thread.

[Rob]

Well, I thought who was the guy who came off Blue sky? Which is this?

[Jonathan]

Was it Jack Dorsey?

[Rob]

Jack Dorsey is the same guy who started Twitter. I thought that was like something he actually said. Maybe. Maybe I'm hallucinating. Maybe I. Maybe.

[Jonathan]

Maybe Elon Musk is not the only CEO that makes these pronouncements and then figures out later it was a bad idea and walks him back.

[Rob]

Maybe.

[Jonathan]

All right, let's take a quick break and then we're going to talk about an up and coming desktop, something everybody here is excited about. We'll be right back after this.

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[Rob]

here for Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment

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[Rob]

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[Ken]

and Jonathan Rob this week, Bobby Borisov, Michael Larabelle and Marcus Nestor, we have three writers writing about Linux hardware vendor system 76 releasing the latest stable version of their Rust based desktop environment for POP os. Clint it's and as we all remember, it's called Cosmic this time it's version 1.3. Now Bobby, Michael and Marcus all talk about the long awaited Frosted Glass effect arriving. So here we're trying to blur some lines, I think. Now according to Bobby, the feature brings a soft, blurred transparency to COSMIC's windows and interface components. Instead of making services transparent and letting the wallpaper distractingly show through, it diffuses the background behind them, creating a polished layered appearance while keeping text and controls easy to read. According to Michael, Cosmic Epoch 1.3 also brings translation updates and other minor refinements. And according to Marcus, this release improves fractional mouse wheel scrolling in the Cosmic Terminal emulator, improves frame pacing of embedded applet popups, and adds an option to preserve panel or dock style on window maximize in cosmic panel. COSMIC 1.3 also updates the new Cosmic Monitor app with support for collecting GPU memory usage for Intel GPUs, the ability to show GPU power and total VRAM in the dashboard, the ability to suspend Nvidia GPUs and support for calculating power usage for AMD or Intel GPUs. As always, you can get more details by reading the articles by Bobby, Michael and Marcus. You'll find the links, of course, in our show Notes so Rob, when's the last time you tried Cosmic?

[Rob]

I use it regularly. I do.

[Jonathan]

Are you running Cosmic? No. That's cool.

[Rob]

I need to upgrade to it though.

[Jonathan]

I saw people talking about the Frosted Glass and a few comments people made about it was one it sort of resembles another glass based interface that someone else did very recently. And then in the Pharonics comments there are people talking about it. Reminds me a lot of Aero on Windows 7. It's kind of a throwback. This is the thing that people have done over the years with desktops like oh, we have GPU power, let's do translucency effects. Which, I mean it's cool, it's fun to look at for a while. You maybe eventually get tired of it. It depends upon how well it's done. I need to actually pull up a Cosmic install somewhere and take a look at it

[Ken]

now. I'm sure there's somebody that where you're at that might be running it.

[Jonathan]

There might be. I mean I've seen a lot of Framework laptops around and a Lot of people nod at me when I talk about Linux. I've seen people wearing hats with tux on them and, you know, all kinds. All kinds of fun stuff. Yeah, a lot of Linux nerds here. It's pretty cool.

[Rob]

Yeah.

[Jonathan]

What do you guys think? Is Cosmic going to be the new gnome? I mean, that in the best possible way, not the worst possible way.

[Rob]

Like to replace it and be the better.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And not be. Not be a dumpster fire the way GNOME seems to be these days.

[Rob]

It's very gnome like.

[Ken]

Well, wasn't it.

[Jonathan]

I think it's possible.

[Ken]

Wouldn't GNOME the inspiration for Cosmic?

[Jonathan]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, Cosmic was at one point just a theme on top of gnome. And then GNOME sort of decided they wanted to change some things to make the life of the system. 76 engineers harder doing the Cosmic theming. So they did it not because it was easy, but because they thought it was easy. They decided to run their own desktop environment.

[Rob]

You know, I don't think Gnome's going any away. I mean, there's plenty of niche desktop environments out there. But, you know, maybe if Cosmic. The real success of Cosmic would be if it replaced kde. No GNOME as. Because, like, a lot of distros have GNOME as their default desktop. So if Cosmic became a default, I

[Jonathan]

would love to see Cosmic ship as the default in certain places. Or maybe KDE is the default and Cosmic is the second option. And then, yeah, if you really want to, you can install gnome. I'd be okay with that.

[Ken]

If you want to really slow down your system. Install gnome.

[Rob]

Yeah,

[Jonathan]

yeah. If you want it to look exactly like the GNOME developers think it should, give it a little insolent. All right, so the flathub ban on AI, I have, I have some notes on this from the trenches. We're gonna let. We're gonna let Rob tell the story and then I will tell you my anecdote because we. My project just recently shipped a flat pack. So, Rob, take it away and then I'll jump back in and we'll talk about the. The details of how this actually went down in practice.

[Rob]

All right, I love to see your or hear your anecdote afterwards, but let me give you my update on this and. And my strong opinion on it. So a few weeks ago, here's the backstory. A few weeks ago, we talked about flathub effectively banning newly submitted applications created with AI. Now, Joey Sneddon at OMG Ubuntu has followed up with an article titled flathub's AI Slot Ban. Looks like it was the right call. The argument is based on research by a Linux developer, Evangelos Paterakis, who examined 120 projects that had received flathubs and AI slop label. According to his review, only 32 still showed signs of active development, while 88 appeared to have been abandoned. But I don't think that proves flathub was right, you know, in fact, flathub may have helped produce that very result. Now you know, being being used to justify its decision. You know, how, how many also I like to know how many non AI applications were also abandoned in that time period or maybe mistakenly rejected or who knows. But you know, I feel like there's, you know, more metrics to this than what's led on here. You know, for, and also, you know, for independent developers, getting an application onto flathub provides exposure, users, users and feedback. You know, when you remove one of those prominent ways for Linux users to, to discover an application, you know, fewer people are going to install it. When nobody is using your software, reporting bugs or suggesting improvements, it becomes much easier to lose motivation and move on. I know, I've been there. You know, developers are often motivated by knowing that somebody is actually using what, what they created. And having users to file bug reports, feature requests lets the dev know that updates are needed and to keep working on it. I've thrown things out there and like, oh, nobody's using this, I'm bored and I've abandoned them. So it has nothing to do with AI abandoning it also. So flathub closes that door and now people are pointing at the developers who walked away as evidence that the door should have been closed. I don't know. There's also questionable assumptions that software without commits for like a two or three month timeframe is abandoned. Programs don't need constant updates simply to prove that they are alive. Some applications are simple utilities designed to do one specific job. Once the program works, has no known vulnerabilities and, and has no outstanding bugs, development may just be finished. You know, that's not abandoned where that's, that's just completed software. The, the developers, you know, even like Twitter are all those, is all that, all that code that they put out there that hasn't got updates as it abandoned. I mean, I don't know, maybe it is, but anyway, the developers may just be working on other projects, you know too while this really simmers out there. You know, they may be waiting for some reports to come in or, or some free time to come back or waiting for someone to actually use and see, is anyone going to use my stuff? Should I keep going at it or just move on? I don't know. So fortunately, even Patrickis acknowledges that commit activity cannot definitively determine whether a project is maintained and that some software simply does not require further changes. Flathub has, you know, sure, they have the right to stop automated submissions, direct developers who refuse to communicate and protect its volunteer reviewers from spam. They could do whatever they want. But you know, I think those problems should just be addressed directly rather than this very indirect report approach, which I've said much of this before. You know, judge applications by their security functionality and whether a real person is willing to support them, not by whether that person used AI to help them create.

[Jonathan]

Create it.

[Rob]

You know, a lack of GitHub activity after being denied access to a major audience does not prove the application was sloppy and may simply prove that developers need users too. I have an application on GitHub that I released several months ago. I've had no bug reports or reports of any kind. It just sat there out there for a while. It wasn't abandoned. I probably have no users, I don't know. But anyway, it wasn't abandoned. I just worked on some other things for a while and then just this week I updated that project with some new features. Things don't need to constant updating. It's like we have, you know, our ADHD with screen time has transferred over into our need for updates into every project out there. So anyway, let's not pretend inactivity in such a short time span means literally anything at all come back to me in a year or so and tell me where we're at with these stats and bring some non AI numbers with to compare. I just need more.

[Jonathan]

I think that's an interesting point, asking about what the non AI numbers would be, how many of those are inactive in the same period and therefore would be considered abandoned.

[Rob]

Yeah, I've created many non AI applications that I just got into Activity. I was like, ah, whatever, no one else wants these. I'll just, I'm done.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I sort of think, and I think this bears it out, that really what flathub is doing here is they want to have a sign to tap and you know, they'll make exceptions. I know firsthand that they'll make exceptions, but they want to have a sign to tap when one of these projects comes in and it's like, I really don't think that's a good fit. Or you know, we. Let's be honest, that is a happens right People vibe code something and it's really interesting, it's really exciting. The price on their preferred model goes up or, you know, they lose access to the free trial or whatever. And then, yeah, some of those things do get abandoned.

[Rob]

And by flag to tap, you mean an excuse, right?

[Jonathan]

You know, it's, it's the whole, you know, don't make me tap the sign meme. Right. I think that originally came from the Simpsons or something. And the bus driver had the sign that he tapped. Anyway. Yeah, it's okay.

[Rob]

Gotcha.

[Jonathan]

Not, not necessarily an excuse, but just a simple way to make the explanation that, look, you know, some of these things we reject the right to refuse. And this is why, you know, But

[Rob]

I say, you know, you know, like you said, they make exception. And you're. Yeah, you're telling me that they're gonna. They make exceptions. Okay. So you're also telling me that there's other times when they just. Just tap the sign and say, AI, get out of here. If they're looking at that project and there's a problem with it, why don't they address the actual problem with it? You know, this is bad.

[Jonathan]

Well, because the actual. But not even that it's undecipherable, but like it has all of the signs of the AI wrote it and we don't see any human fingerprints on it. We don't necessarily know who the person is that's submitting it. And we don't want to have something in flathub that's going to be abandoned. And, you know, six months from now, we're going to have to have the conversation about pulling it back out. I think that's what they're trying to avoid. So I have the story here that we worked on the meshtastic Android app, and James, our developer there, just did a knockout job. He made it Kotlin Multiplatform, he turned into a KMP app. And so therefore it runs on the desktop. And one of the things that we wanted to do was get it out as a flatpak. Made that work. And then we want to get it out on flathub. So we made the application of flathub. Here's the thing, the message desktop. It works. You know, we've got the ducks in a row. And they, they did what the flathub guys go. They do. They came back with a whole bunch of nitpicky changes that they wanted us to make. You know, and this is pretty typical for anytime you want to get software uploaded somewhere, they've got their, you Know they've got the way that they want things to work. It's like, well this name should be capitalize this way or you know, you should make this change upstream. You know, a lot of things that to us seemed really, really picky to them it was pretty normal. And then we, we went through all that and then they put the tag on it. It's like blocked because AI, because our Android guy used AI a lot to do the conversion from the old school Java stuff over to Kotlin multiplatform and the comment on it was blocked because AI, however, I'm certainly willing to do the, I forget what he called it. Not a workaround, not exclusion. Basically I'll give you a pass because you guys are an established project and obviously there's work continuing here. And you know that sat there for a couple of days and then somebody went in and hit the button and we got uploaded to flathub and you can, you can go get Mistastic Desktop now on flathub and it's, there's a few little problems because not run on the desktop before now. So there's some things that will still need work as one would expect. But you know, it was a reasonably painless process. And they obviously like, they, they want good software to get uploaded when they know that somebody's going to maintain it. And I legitimately just think that what they're trying to avoid is to have, you know, dozens and dozens of abandoned projects where somebody got real excited, made the thing work and then ran out of tokens.

[Ken]

Well, I've got to agree with Joy and Tom Haroda, who Joy references in his article, that yeah, what we're seeing is not dedicated coders going in there and playing with this, it's people saying, oh, I've got this idea. They have the AI put something together for that idea, then something else catches the mind so they turn, start looking at that and forget about that one.

[Rob]

I mean that's fair that that doesn't mean that every AI application obviously and Jonathan's point, but so I just wonder, you know, where's the cut off?

[Jonathan]

I just wanna, I just want to take a second and stop and say, hey, isn't it so cool that you could have an idea and use an agent to build something as sort of a, you know, somewhere between a mock up and a prototype. You can essentially get a working prototype just by asking the agent to do it. Like I understand that makes some people salty and I get that. But at the same time it's so cool that we Live in a time where you could do this.

[Rob]

You know what? Just this week alone, this week alone, there is a tool, I guess I'll call it without going too deep, that I always wish I had at work. And I've looked for stuff and I found open source that were. Was really close, but I just couldn't get it to work. I couldn't get to work. And I'm like, this week I'm like, what can I do? I'm like, oh, I've always wanted this. And it took me a good probably eight hours playing around with maybe not even four to six hours probably playing around, getting exactly how I wanted it. And you know, I've been looking for this tool for probably years and it's like, you know what? Here it is. And I'm actually not even in the department anymore that would utilize it or tie it in, but I made it and I tested it, it works. And then I sent it over to the guy. I'm like, hey, back when I used to run your department, I always wish we had this. So here you go. I gave him the code. And then I'm like, wait a minute, I'm going to put this on GitHub. And my name I used was maybe a little initially was. Could have had some copyright issues. So I'm like, but let me come up with a name for it first because it's very generic and whatever and. And so I came by the name of like an hour later, I'm like, here, here's my GitHub. Like, so I mean, something I wanted forever, that I could not find. I tried to make. I just, I couldn't get to work right. In the past and you know, an afternoon. I got it. It was awesome.

[Jonathan]

Is this afternoon project going to show up again after we close this. The. The stories for the day?

[Rob]

No, this project is, it's. It's not a window. It's not a Linux application, actually.

[Jonathan]

Okay, okay.

[Rob]

It was more for the MSP side for, for a lot of people running Windows. So it is a Windows application.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it.

[Ken]

What I've been enjoying with the AI being able to write scripts, preferably bash, is I can throw it the what? I would take hours to get all the logic worked out of, find the different options I need for certain commands to, to specifically do what I want. Just, yeah, say I want to back up this group of subdirectories onto this external drive and in a few minutes it's got a working prototype. That's what I'm going to call it. Yeah, I can then dig through and personalize even more and oh so But I remember where it would take me days playing around trying to get something to and where I could sometimes make painful mistakes while playing with.

[Rob]

So to get back to this flathub thing and no one's going to have this answer, but you know, let's just say I got more time. I know programming, I'm not an expert in many languages. I'm, I'm a novice. But with AI, you know, I can, I can make stuff and I can go and I can understand the code and make manual adjustments and know what's going on. But. So I just wonder like at what point if I made something and something I really want to maintain and get out there, what would I need to do to be considered established enough to, to get their good graces?

[Ken]

I, I'm just start putting features that you don't really need into it.

[Jonathan]

That's it. That's an interesting question. I think that's a question for the Flathead guys. It would be very interesting to ask them. I, I would say that it probably is going to boil down to continuing to support the program. Now how, how long do they want to see that support before they consider it to be like a well maintained establishment? I don't know. I don't know what, I don't know what the answer is going to be on that.

[Rob]

And you know, I also like, I mean you say continue to support it, you know, right now let's just say I make a small thing. Maybe I have five people using it. Continue to support. Does that mean I just have commits going on it for, you know, few years or whatever that time frame is? Or does it have to be something that people have actually heard of like Meshtastic? I mean people. Maybe not everybody is. A lot of people do, do.

[Jonathan]

Obviously that's how we made it in. Right. We, we have that name recognition. I get that there's something to be said for like you, you shouldn't be judged just by whether you have name recognition because there's lots of, there's lots of excellent projects out there that nobody's heard of or that very few people have heard of because they're, they're new or they're a niche or they've just, they've not gotten that, that lightning in the jar yet to sort of enter the public consciousness.

[Rob]

So I partly wonder how much of yours was. Was name recognition.

[Jonathan]

Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure that's what it was. They've heard of it?

[Ken]

75% name recognition. Yeah, 25. At least 25% perseverance. Nothing. That's probably going to be the, what's going to be the tiebreaker is whether or not you keep coming back and say, how about now?

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I think that would probably be the way to approach this.

[Rob]

Really.

[Jonathan]

It's like, you know, you do the submission of Flathead, you take care of all the things they say and they're going to say, well, it's an AI application. Application. First off, first off, make that clear up front. If you've written an application almost completely using AI, just put it in there. Like, hey, I understand it's make it denied because of this, but I would eventually like to make it into flathub. Making the application now. I intend to keep updating it. Give me some guidance on what we need to do. Right. And that would be the approach that I would take.

[Rob]

Is there like an application then where you fill out like stuff and like put that in?

[Jonathan]

I think it's a, I think it's actually a pull request inside GitHub.

[Rob]

Oh, okay.

[Jonathan]

It's how that's actually done. So yeah, there's, there's a field there where you can put notes and that's, that's the way that I would approach. But like, hey, this, yes, this is vibe coded, but yes, I intend to keep it updated. I would like to do this for the long haul and I would like to see it on Flatpak. Would love some guidance on what we need to do to make that happen.

[Rob]

That's my new goal. Have something in there.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, there you go.

[Rob]

And that's a good goal.

[Ken]

Years ago, flathub saying, well, we'll look at it in six months.

[Jonathan]

That may be exactly my video. I don't know.

[Rob]

Years ago I had a, I had an application in the Lindo's Click to Run app store. Obviously it was a very basic, very basic tool, but I mean that's Rob's

[Jonathan]

claim to fame right there. World renowned by people who run Lindos and look through all of the applications. World renowned in that group of people. All right, let's talk about UEFI here in just a second. We're going to let Ken talk about a new boot manager. But first we're going to take one more quick break. We'll be right back.

[Rob]

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[Jonathan]

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[Rob]

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[Ken]

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[Jonathan]

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[Ken]

And Jonathan this week Bobby Borusoff wrote about another entry to the growing list of Linux supporting Boot managers and boot loaders. It is called Vysor and is a new open source UEFI boot manager for Linux that combines the speed and efficiency of Grub with the polished icon driven interface of ReFind. Now. It's written primarily in C now and is capable of booting Linux either EFI stub kernels, unified kernel images, or even chain loading other EFI executables including Windows Boot Manager.

[Jonathan]

Now.

[Ken]

According to Bobby, it is set apart from similar offerings by not using a scripting engine or numerous generated configuration files. That sounds like Grubby's comparing it to there. Instead, Vysor relies a sing on a single boot conf file stored on the EFI system partition. Now if your system firmware provides a compatible pointer device, which I believe mine does because of able to use my mouth when I'm in my bios, then you aren't limited to the keyboard but can select and launch entries with a mouse, touchpad or even a touchscreen. There's also a text based menu available as a fallback when graphical rendering is unavailable. Visor even supports Secure Boot when launched through Shim v. Vizor uses SHIM's verification protocol to check Linux kernels, the UKIS, Windows Boot Manager or other PE format EFI images that before execution. And of course if verification fails while Secure Boot is active, Vizor will not start the image now. For more information I'm going to recommend reading Bobby's article. It does have a link to the visor's GitHub where you can look at that if you want to dig through the code itself, see exactly how it's doing. Jonathan or Rob are either one of y' all going to play around with this?

[Jonathan]

I don't know, it looks pretty interesting. You know I would have to look into doing UEFI inside of like a kvm. Last time I tried to do that, it was a. A very complicated procedure to try to make that work. Hopefully it's easier now.

[Ken]

The reading through subreddit that dealt with this, the author of the program said he actually copied his EFI partition into a VM so he could get the images that he was displaying.

[Rob]

I like the, the graphicalness. I saw the headline this week and I did not read the article. Is it like it's got. It's configurable. Like, so can you like. Do you know how configurable? Can you like really make your own graphical stuff any way you want or is it limited to that almost Apple look that, that I see on the screenshot?

[Ken]

I'm thinking this may be what I use at hp, the laptop that I was gifted for playing with.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, you know, I, I see people complaining that it's got the anime style background. And the, the response to that is you can change the background. So I know you can at least change that if you don't want the anime style eyeball looking at you from the middle of your screen.

[Ken]

Yeah. Basically you're just putting a group of icons or images that you want.

[Rob]

I'd love to see something like, as configurable as a, a web page or like a GUI IDE for application where you could just. If I wanted to put Windows icon up here and, and you know, cash us down here and something else here and just be all goofy and weird and stupid, you know, to my heart's desire. I don't know, I'd love to see something like highly configurable there, but.

[Ken]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Rob]

It look, it looks.

[Ken]

Probably what I'll end up doing is installing it on that HP and playing around with it there.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, that'll be fun. Let us know how that goes. It's always, it's always nice to have more options. And you're right, it is. It is prettier than, than Grub.

[Ken]

Have either of y' all ever used Refind?

[Jonathan]

Once or twice years ago back when. There's a. There's a. When we first started doing UEFI on real hardware, I tried to support a laptop that was just buggy buggy under Grub. And I think Refined was what we ended up using that made it boot.

[Rob]

You know, I'm pretty sure you can make Grub prettier than it than the current default. I used to customize it more back in the old days probably.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, you probably can. But I would lose if it was something other than white text on a black background.

[Rob]

I mean, you got Grub customizer, which some say don't work.

[Ken]

It might be easier now that you've got an assistant to help you.

[Jonathan]

True. Rice my grub.

[Rob]

Next week I'm gonna have my own bootloader for y'.

[Jonathan]

All. That's a bad idea, Rob. That's not a good idea. No, that's AI Sloth. Get out of here with that. Oh, goodness. All right, let's talk VR. This is something that I've been eagerly awaiting. What's new with the Valve VR headset? Rob?

[Rob]

Yeah, so we've all been excited about the new, all the new Valve hardware, the whole hardware lineup in general for a while now. And we finally have another tangible sign that one of those products is getting closer to being ready. Valve's upcoming wireless VR headset, the Steam Frame, not to be confused with anything that Jeff was confused and thinking the frame was a few weeks ago. It's their VR headset anyway, has just had an important piece of its Linux foundation released publicly. Valve has been working with the open source consulting company Collabora on something called Hollow Core. This is a pure ARM 64 port of arch Linux that will serve as the foundation of the operating system running on the Steam frame. Now, for the first time, Collabora has published the project source packages, compiled compiled binaries and development container for people to explore. This is necessary because the Steam Frame will run on a Qualcomm ARM processor instead of the traditional x86 processor used by the Steam Deck and most PC gaming standard. Arch Linux does not officially support ARM64, so Valve and Collabora have had to build much of that infrastructure themselves. Even though Hollow Core currently contains only the software needed for the Steam Frame development and image creation, that limited collection still includes several thousand packages and their dependencies. Collabor also has created a repeatable build system capable of following Arch Linux constantly changing rolling release repositories. You know, now this, now this is. It's not a complete Steam Frame operating system, and it certainly is not a downloadable image that will magically turn your random ARM device into a Valve headset. But it is kind of a behind the scenes infrastructure that has to exist before Valve can ship the real product. It also gives the open source community an early look at Valve's work to bring SteamOS beyond the x86 hardware that could eventually matter for far more than VR. The same foundation could help SteamOS reach arm powered handset and laptops or other gaming devices in the future, most importantly, code is harder to dismiss than rumors. Valve still has not given us a final Steam release, Steam frame release date or price, but this project is clearly moving beyond prototype and private development. The Operating System foundation is being built, tested and now open for outside experimentation. We still do not know exactly when we will be able to buy the Steam frames, but every time Valve releases another real piece of platform, it feels a little less like future hardware and a little more like hardware that is actually being prepared to ship. I believe they were saying 20, 26 rough or rough time frame. So we're halfway through. If they, if they, if they keep on that maybe I could be wrong on that date. But, you know, 6ish more months to go, so hopefully we'll see something this year. I know this is something you're maybe even more excited for, Jonathan.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I've been watching this. I think it's a pretty cool idea. I'm gonna. I'm gonna blow your mind and tell you that we don't have six months left of the year. We have like four and a half.

[Ken]

They may have it out in time.

[Rob]

July already.

[Jonathan]

Five, six.

[Rob]

Five and a half. I think that means get ready.

[Jonathan]

Get your Christmas spirit ready.

[Rob]

Yeah, they'll be out in stores before you know it.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, go ahead, Ken.

[Ken]

But what I think this is for primarily, is so that before they even get that frame visor launched, they can give developers the option, opportunity to play with that environment and start maybe possibly writing programs or games specifically for that environment.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. Because I'm sure that there will be some dev kits that they send out and I don't know about. Yeah, you know, you talk about. I'm sure there will be games written specifically for it because it's such a. It's a different thing than anything else has ever done. I guess it's similar in some ways to the Quest. Right. Like the Meta's Quest, I think they called it. It was kind of a standalone headset too. It was just so underpowered was the problem. Whereas this is. This is going to be much more of a real sort of Linux experience. And so lots of things are going to just work. I look forward to it. I think it's going to be a

[Ken]

Quest, formerly called the Quest. Before Meta bought it.

[Rob]

No, it had a different name before Meta. I can't remember what it used to be. What was it? Okay, come on, audience, tell us. It was the Oculus Oculus Quest. Too slow, audience. Yes. Yep, yep, you're right. You're right.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah. Okay. I thought those are two different companies.

[Ken]

The article I read about this by Marcus Nestor actually thinks that you see curious developers spinning it up in it, pulling it to put in a container in it. Spin it up with distro box for sure. Using QEMU. QEMU emulation on the X8664 host. And then try building package themselves using the published preview repository that Valves got.

[Rob]

Just put it on a Rancher five.

[Jonathan]

You probably could. It probably would run there actually. That would be a really interesting development environment.

[Rob]

Put two monitors there for the two lenses and I'll just put those monitors,

[Jonathan]

two monitors to your face. Yeah, that's gonna look great.

[Rob]

Perfect.

[Jonathan]

Let's do that. Let's get right on that. Right on that.

[Ken]

Or just go with a single monitor so you can see how that 2D game's gonna fill.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, absolutely. Well, even.

[Rob]

Hold on, even a two day.

[Sponsor Voice]

Hold on.

[Rob]

He says a 2D game though is going to have to be offset because you're going to have two screens. So if you have a 2D game played in a, in a, in a, a VR headset, you, you're gonna have to offset that. Right?

[Jonathan]

I mean you project it, you project it onto a virtual screen.

[Rob]

Yeah, yeah. The system I guess, would, would.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, the system's gonna do it, but you're gonna make it look like. What it does is it'll take it and it'll make it look like it's a big screen TV floating in front of your face, essentially.

[Rob]

Sure. That's how like I've, I've, I've. I've never actually watched a show or a movie or anything in the, in the meta quest, but you can watch Netflix in there and it just makes it look like a 2D screen in front of you.

[Jonathan]

Now what could be really interesting, and I know that some projects, there's been some work done on this, but like a game that runs on a known game engine, there is actually depth information in there. And I've seen people do crazy things like hack the game engine and pull that depth information out real time. And so when you play the game, instead of just projecting it flat, it turns it into a 3D experience. And that's pretty cool when, when that, when that works. Well, I've, I've seen people do that all the way back. NES and Super Nintendo games. The one you projected, it'll do that. It'll make different layers which, you know, it's, it's a, it's a clever hack and it works really well on some

[Ken]

things like the 3Ds.

[Jonathan]

I mean, the 3Ds is kind of cheating. It's already. It's already doing that. All right, Ken, you want to tell us about Clonezilla? What is coming up there?

[Ken]

I'll be more than happy to, especially since Bobby Borisov and Marska Snexter took the time to write about the latest version of and yes, it's still my favorite disk imaging and cloning utility. As Jonathan said, we're talking about Closezilla Vert Live. This time it's version 3.3.3. This latest version is powered by Linux kernel 7.0.14 and based on the Debian. So that's the unstable repository as of July 5, 2026. Fairly recently now, according to Bobby, a key addition is reverse connection network cloning support in the OCS on the Fly utility. In this mode, the remote system initiates the connection rather than the controlling system, which is useful in environments where firewalls, NAT or other policies restrict incoming connections. It allows administrators to perform remote cloning without adding inbound firewall rules. I'm sure, Rob, you've had experience with that. Now, according To Marcus, the OCs on the fly tool now has the ability to handle setups with multiple disks that have existing partitions. And this update also adds the Network Manager TUI package to the Live system so you can use Network Manager's text Mode Interface. Clonezilla Live 3.3.3 also introduces two new tools namely CNVT OCSISO Qcow2 and OCS Check Initrd Module, and improves the disable underscore sudo underscore use_ PTY function in the OCS live dash function store and updates the sup_ boot_ param_ OCS_ live_ extra variable for use with. Net boot clients now. Yes, it was. Now the MEM Test plus memory testing tool is updated to version 8.0. 10 in this latest release, so that alone might be what the reason to get it. Now, even though Marcus thinks this is a pretty small issue, I'm still going to recommend reading both articles for those details I didn't cover.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, absolutely. I like that reverse connection thing. So like, that means you can set a server up in the cloud somewhere with the images you want to be able to put out. Then when you get to your computer, you pop your Clonezilla key and you give it that URL and it'll reach out and grab it and pull it down like that's super cool for doing yes on the fly like in situ cloning of machines. That'd be great. Rob, you guys should use that.

[Ken]

Or for an enterprise, they can have all the images sitting on a central server, get to the remote system as long as it's connected to the local network, boot up and have it automatically just download the image.

[Rob]

Yeah, I've used Clonezilla many times, but it's been a few years since I've really needed it for much. Maybe it's been a couple years since I've cloned a system, but yeah, I don't remember any of those remote network cloning things in there. I don't know if they were not there or I just didn't need them.

[Jonathan]

But that sounds like that's new in this release.

[Rob]

Oh, that's all they were talking about.

[Jonathan]

It's a new feature.

[Rob]

Oh that, yeah, that sounds really cool. I can see a lot of uses for that.

[Ken]

So that way if you've got say you back up your system or even just one of your bootable partitions to say a file server you got, you can then just use the Clonezilla live boot up, pull that straight back down to that system.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I think it's going to be useful for people, admins that do it like a golden image.

[Rob]

Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

[Jonathan]

I've got my Linux or my Windows or whatever operating system you want to run, run. You do your configuration and then usually there's a step where you, you sort of make it a generic install rather than for that machine and then you can capture that and throw it up on a server somewhere and then, you know, just run through your machines and clone them all in, in record time. I think that is, I think that's pretty interesting.

[Rob]

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean my, my backups, I don't use Clonezilla for backups because I, I usually have things with like versioning in it and, and stuff like that. But, but golden image sounds like a really good use case.

[Jonathan]

Although there is something to be said for using Clonezilla as a backup. That way if you're, you know, if it's an important machine, then it goes down. If you get a Clonezilla image, you can, you know, you can spin up a VM of it in no time.

[Rob]

I mean you can do that. You can do the right backup tools too.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah, indeed.

[Ken]

But that's one of the main reasons I use Clonezilla is I'll back up the partition before I do any kind of upgrade system upgrade on it.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I mean that's kind of the paranoid approach. But sometimes paranoid pays.

[Ken]

It kept me being able to go roll back to Ubuntu 20 when I tried upgrading to up to Ubuntu 2204.

[Rob]

You just need a real backup appliance system, like your backup. Go back to episode. I have no idea what episode, but

[Jonathan]

whatever it was, ask the agent, ask Google Chat what it was and it'll tell you. All right, let's take a quick break and then we're going to roll into our command line tips. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

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[Jonathan]

Hey, Meta, any last minute tables for two tonight?

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[Jonathan]

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[Jonathan]

Hey, Meta, am I forgetting anything else?

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[Jonathan]

All right, Rob, what you got for us?

[Rob]

All right, this week for your command line tip, I have some AI slot for you. So anyway, little backstory here. One of the tools I used to always like to use when I, when I was buying new memory is, you know, rather than opening up my computer and looking, it's like, what do I have in here? Again, I would go to crucial.com and they had a scanner that would tell me what I had in there, what, what, what type, and, and what my max is and what I could use and all that, and then sell it to you. Well, I'm assuming now that they, you can still buy RAM there. I looked, but I could not find that scanner. And I'm assuming maybe they don't have it since they aren't focused on consumer memory anymore. I don't know. But. And one other downside to that is that it was Windows only, so I had to, if I ever did that, I had to be booted up into Windows. Well, now I decided to create something. Yes, this is my GitHub here. I'm calling this mem ready. And it's a very simple tool that will basically tell you these things. So I'm going to run this memReady. It outputs. So this is one of my ProxMox systems. So it outputs how much RAM is installed, what's visible by the OS. Mac supported RAM in the system, 64 gigs. So it says I have 32 gigs of upgrade headroom. Total slots is four. Use slots are four. You know, when you go down further, it says you know, Dimm slot is eight gigs of this kind of memory in it. You know, 1, 2, 3, 4, they all have the same. You got manufacturer. A bunch of details there. Also points out there's a warning in the notes. Maximum supported memory is reported by firmware and SMB BIOS and should be confirmed with the computer or motherboard manufacturer before quoting an upgrade. So there's a little disclaimer there. It says the data sources, the tools that you use and then there's some actions you can refresh. You can do T to save the text, H to save as HTML, J to save as JSON, C to save as CSV and well cue to quit. So just a little AI slop that I created this week to fill a need that I had. Okay, maybe it's not need, there's ways around it, but it's replacing a tool that I used to like that I, I just, I couldn't find any alternative to this I suppose besides using those built in tools the way that it does it. But it's nicely formatted for you and this is just the initial release. I'll see what I can do to update upgrade it. If you use it and you got some ideas, go ahead and put an issue request. I'll try to get it updated and fix features, whatever it is.

[Sponsor Voice]

Cool.

[Jonathan]

Is it a bash script? Did you write it in Go? Is it written in Rust? You should have written it in Rust. Have you heard about Rust?

[Rob]

It's go.

[Jonathan]

Okay? You wouldn't have all those memory problems if you'd written it in Rust.

[Rob]

Memory problems with memory.

[Jonathan]

There you go. Rust solves all your memory problems, obviously. All right, Ken, what do you have for us?

[Ken]

Well, this week I will demonstrate a Linux command for checking if a specific directory or file is a mount point for a separate storage device or drive. I find it handy for verifying that I have already mounted my USB drive before backing up to it via script. The command of course is mount point and it does just this one function. And probably the most important one to remember is mount points followed by dash H or dash dash help because that would give you how the usage information for it as well as describing the different options such as how to keep it quiet, how to not follow any SIM links, and to get the major and minor device number of the file system or block device.

[Jonathan]

But

[Ken]

now, for those of you that are listening, I have actually just typed mountpoint H and it is displaying all that information. Now, depending on your needs, the dash D or the dash dash FS dash dev number can be used to print the file system's major and minor device number. Let me go ahead and give you a demonstration of that. I can't remember if I've got this mounted or not. I'll find out here in a minute. It is not mounted. So let's go ahead and mount that. I've created a dot image file that I can use to melt. And I found out that with pseudo RS tab will tell it not to echo anything. So there's another tip for you. So let's try that again. So as you can see, for those of you listening, I just did mount point-d dot slash demo folder and it came back with a major number of seven with a colon, then a minor number of 30 for that device, letting

[Jonathan]

you know for sure that there is something mounted there.

[Ken]

Yep. And you can also use the dashek for the device number. Now without that in there, it tells you that that is not a mount to point. But let's go back to the demo folder and what it with that one it says dot slash demo folder is a mount point.

[Jonathan]

That actually makes sense. Your NVME is a block device. It's not where something is mounted, it's the thing that gets mounted.

[Ken]

Right. But where it can be really handy is if you want to test to make something's mounted before you do another command. This time I'm going to use a mount point dot slash demo folder followed by the double ampersand. Jonathan, you remember what that does?

[Jonathan]

Yeah, it's. It's a. It's a small way to do like an if statement and then I'm following

[Ken]

it with the LS command and it's going to LS any files or folders that's in the dot slash demo folder.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, if mount point. If the mount point command returns true, then it will continue to follow the other side of the ampersands and in

[Ken]

this case it is true. So it comes gives us two bits of information. It says that the dot slash demo folder is a mount point and then it lists the lost plus found directory that's inside demo. So if you are doing it in a script but you don't want to have anything cluttering it up, that's where you want to hit enter the dash Q flag and this time it just does the loss plus found.

[Jonathan]

Very cool.

[Ken]

Of course. What do you think is going to happen if I unmount it and then run it?

[Jonathan]

It's probably not going to do anything.

[Ken]

That's exactly what happens.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, super cool. I was musing as I was Listening to this. Is there a way to lock a folder so that you can't write directly to the folder, but when you mount something inside of it, you can write into that? That's yet another way to kind of work around that potential case where you script something.

[Ken]

That's where you can use the mount options that we've covered in the past. One of those is to mount read only, remember?

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I don't mean mounting something read only. I mean the folder where you're going to mount it into. Before you mount it, you can. You oftentimes you can write files into there. You would probably have to set your permissions on that folder to where your normal user can't write into it and then mount this route, something like that.

[Ken]

You have to be careful with that because then when you mount, you may find you can't write into the mount.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, if it inherits the permissions. I don't know. I'd have to play around with that. That's actually a really interesting question. I like using the mount point command to check that though. I've never done that in any of my scripts and I really should. They're all. They're all a little bit fragile because of that, so that's definitely something to think about.

[Ken]

But what you can do is go back to the episode that I did, the fine mount command. It's a bit more advanced so you can actually look at what the permissions are.

[Sponsor Voice]

There you go.

[Ken]

And if you find that the permissions allow you to right into it and you don't want that capability, then you can use the mount command to modify them.

[Sponsor Voice]

Yeah.

[Jonathan]

All right. Well, I have taken a page out of Rob's handbook and I'm going to pitch something that I'm involved in in my show tip and I don't have it pulled up or anything, but I'll just tell you that the meshtastic desktop is now on flathub. They were kind enough to look at us and go, oh, you're an established product, will let you in even though you use some AI. And that is the meshtastic app as a Kotlin multi platform program and now available on Android and the Linux desktop and coming to other places as well. So if you want to get that, it is now out there and easy to go grab. I won't continue on pitching my own stuff though. I'll leave it there. Appreciate Rob and Ken being here. I'm going to give each of them the opportunity, if they want to, to plug something if they, if they come back if they've not abandoned me. I'm sort of solo here on the screen. There we go. Rob's back. We'll let Rob go first. What do you got to. What do you got to plug, sir?

[Rob]

Just my normal. For those who want to connect with me. Find out more. Maybe I should add a link to my GitHub on here, but for now it's not on here. Anyway, you can find me Robert P. Campbell.com which is also always at the bottom of the screen here for anyone watching over here. There we go. Anyway, you get to that website, you'll find links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter. I'm still calling Twitter Blue Sky, Mastodon. And a place to donate a coffee to me in five dollar increments. You know, with. I'm thinking with inflation, I should probably move that up to $6 at least. Huh.

[Jonathan]

For a coffee. I remember when the joke was that Starbucks was more like six bucks. That joke's not very funny anymore.

[Rob]

No, it's not.

[Jonathan]

No. All right, Ken.

[Ken]

Well, in the show note, I've got a link to a article that Abhishek Pavik wrote. And I was going to start off by asking, would you pay $5 for the book Understanding the Linux Kernel by Daniel? If you would, then definitely check out this link because about how you can get not only this book, but 14 others for under $3 each.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, very cool. All right, thank you guys for being here. I appreciate it. It's good to have the guys with us and. Good. I'm glad that I made it. It was. It was real uncertain there for a while if I was going to make it to the show today, but I got, I got in. We just. It found a nice quiet place to record from. The battery didn't die. The WI fi mostly held out.

[Rob]

It's a good day.

[Jonathan]

Everything worked all right. Appreciate you guys being here. If you want to find more of me, normally I would point over my shoulder here at the monitor showing Hackaday. I'll just have to tell you about it. You can find more of my [e-mail] specifically. That's where weekly lives, which, you know, we are continuing on with that and had a lot of fun. We've got some. We've got some more fun stuff coming. I. I sort of poked fun at Rust, but we've got a Rust project Rust program coming up and some other really neat stuff, I would say. We've had some really fun shows here recently too. The one with Tris about open source legal issues was a lot of fun. And then in the past couple of weeks, we've also done the president of the RISC V Foundation, which was a really interesting conversation, too. So go and check those out. Other than that, we appreciate everybody that's here. I thank you. Whether you watch or listen, whether you get us live and on the download and we'll be back location, but we'll be back next week on the Untitled Edition.