Untitled Linux Show 185 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This week we're talking browsers, from the latest servo update to the news with Chromium and maybe some repercussions for Chrome. We talk about desktop environments in Wayland, of course, we talk about the new Raspberry Pi's 16 gigabyte version, a new release of Linux Mint and some interesting news with Sid Meier's Civilization and Linux of all things. It's a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 185, recorded Saturday, january the 11th. The Butterknife Edge. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with Linux, open source, all kinds of good stuff. The Butter Knife Edge. Do you think you guys are going to go today? And I said, well, let me put it this way, there's four of us and I've brought two stories as well. And she's like oh, okay, I won't see you for the rest of the evening. Okay, that's fine, so try to get done before midnight.

01:14
Yes, and the interest of not going too late after midnight we're going to dive into it and Rob is going to start us out. You've got a story about the servo browser and the important things, and I'm not sure how much sarcasm there is in there, but I have a feeling that there is at least some of course it's my story.

01:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
uh, doesn't matter what it's about. Uh, you know there's gonna be a little sarcasm and you know everyone's in technology on tech podcasts. You know we've talked about making a web browser, web browsing engine. Is it's? It's hard, it's not, it's not easy. And today, you know, we're limited to a few browsing engines, as as ones used in chrome, firefox and safari, but and I don't know why anyone used that one but uh, they are.

02:05
Uh, you know, and these, these have all been around for a long time and you know they've been able to grow gradually with the web standards. Starting from scratch today would kind of be a nightmare. Well, the servo browser engine Servo Browser Engine is attempting to do just that. We've talked about them before and I even tried it out and I probably demoed it on the show. Briefly, or maybe I talked about my experience. I know I've tried it out and we should also probably keep in mind that when I call Servo a new browser, it actually started over 10 years ago it already is like 2012 by the Mozilla Foundation and it's developed in Rust. So, you know, ideally, if they actually get the thing off the ground, it maybe could be a more memory-safe browsing alternative. But with all this, they keep chipping away at it and making a usable browser engine and probably in the drive to be the first usable Rust-based browser engine. And in fact, with their latest release, you are now able to log into Discord and read messages, but you still can't send messages. They're making improvements there.

03:30
The latest release provides many other improvements, such as improved You're going to need to know maybe some web technology lingo to understand what I'm going to say here for most of these Improved Shadow DOM support lingo to understand what I'm going to say it here for most of these uh, improved shadow dom support. Uh, enough, xpath support is implemented now to get htmx working. Uh, sure, servo shell nightly builds are now up to 20 percent smaller than they were before. So more efficiency there in the coding, it sounds like, or the compilation, I don't know how, but they're smaller Improved performance, which is always good for our future web browsing engine and CSS transitions can now be triggered properly by script. But even with all these big improvements being worked on, they still have the time to target the really important stuff, likely the feature so many people have been screaming about, because people love this feature in pretty much everything they use.

04:40
I'm not a fan. Some love it, some aren't so much, but this is a feature. The Servo browser has been missing and now Servo now supports dark mode, and we'll respect the OS platform dark mode within the Servo shell. So all I got to say about this update is it's good to see they're getting the important features out of the way, the things that you just can't live without with a web browser, even though I've lived 20 years well, I've lived like that, but I've gone 20 plus years with a web browser and no dark mode. So, uh, I don't know why this was a top priority dark mode is a big deal for some people.

05:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, for a certain group, it it really is a big deal, and part of it like part of its eye strain right, that is part of the part of legitimate deal, especially those of us that have a tendency to just let the room get dark around us as the sun goes down and we continue doing whatever we're doing. Uh, the, the less eye strain of dark mode is kind of a nice thing. So I I get it.

05:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I see I understand why people really like it and consider it important yeah well, monitors keep getting brighter and brighter with you know the hdr specs and whatnot, so that bright white background just keeps getting brighter and brighter I would tell you, one of the first things that I did, when I got my HDR monitor set up on KDE and it actually started working and giving me all the controls, is I went into the SDR slider.

06:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm like let's go all the way down with that, and so I kind of have my own dark mode set up, just because SDR is dropped in brightness as well, I like brightness.

06:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
but even for those who like it, I don't know. Let's just get the browser working. First Get it usable. Yeah well, but for those of you who do like you said, like to start in the day with a nice bright screen or whatever to match the world and then go down to darkness when it gets dark out, I have a tip for that later, at least for the kde users, the kda users are you gonna say something like sunglasses? Yeah, they have transitions now yeah, yeah I've got a pair of those.

07:02 - Ken McDonald (Host)
They don't adjust for the blue light.

07:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, jeff, let's talk about Lenovo and, interestingly, the Jeff is bringing the NVMe story. He is our resident NVMe expert.

07:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Maybe not expert or I can't talk to an expert level all the time, but in the context of this panel of the four of us, you are definitely the NVMe expert.

07:28 - Ken McDonald (Host)
You're definitely the hardware expert.

07:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, so a recent finding of an issue within Linux is what this story is about, and we have some Gen 5 NVMe drives have encountered specific issues, and this has happened since June of 2023. And, I should note, this only occurs in very specific situations. But what happens is a Gen 5 drive which normally runs at 32 gigatransfers a second would negotiate down to 2.5 gigatransfersa second. Now, though, for those who may not be familiar with an NVMe drive, these are sometimes referred to as gumstick drives due to their small rectangular shape, and they function like an SSD, but use an M.2 interface, which is essentially a special small PCIe interface. These drives come in various sizes, with the smallest being a 2230 drive. These drives come in various sizes, with the smallest being a 2230 drive, and it tells you the physical size, because the first number representing the width in millimeters and the second represents the length in millimeters, so 22 millimeters by 30 millimeters in the case of the small drive. There, the longer the drive, the more flash memory it has on board and therefore the more storage capacity it'll offer. In general, there's different densities of NAND storage and whatnot, but we're talking generalities here. Typically, these drives are mounted on the motherboard beneath a heat sink. So changing them on a consumer motherboard involves opening the case, usually using a tool like a screwdriver, to remove the heat sink, placing the new drive in position and then restoring the heat sink. So this means that in general they're not hot swappable.

09:16
Now I bring this up for a reason. So the issue I'm addressing today was discovered by Lenovo and it became apparent when drives were hot swapped, a scenario much more common in enterprise and industrial settings than in consumer hardware. So Lenovo issued a series of patches to rectify this issue and to quote JW Sun of Lenovo and I'm sorry if I mispronounced that from the kernel mailing list, he said, and I quote when we do a quick hot add, hot remove test with a PCIe Gen 5 MVME disk, there's a possibility the PCIe bridge will decrease to 2.5 gigatransfers from 32 gigatransfers a second. The issue is caused by commit. Now I'm going to skip over all the hex number and just give you the text version of what it is. It's a workaround PCI link training failure. And he goes on to say although commits correct error reporting with the PCI failed link retraining patch and the patch revert to the original speed after PCIe failed link retraining. So that's another patch.

10:29
Have tried to fix similar issues, there's still a window for triggering the issue within a one-second hot add, hot remove test. So besides commit and then of course add PCIe, set target speed and that's the name of the commit introduces two potential issues that might cause the removing of the 2.5 gigatransfers downstream link speed restriction to fail. Was intended to address link speed training issues, inadvertently introduced further problems. So the Lenovo fixes targeting the hot plug testing code and it fixes reading a wrong register fields during the retraining function. So there's a couple little things going on here.

11:25
It sometimes wouldn't negotiate the speed properly and in the hot swap sometimes it would read the wrong register fields which would cause the drive to fail negotiation totally Again in these one second hot add, hot remove situations which in enterprise can happen because people are shucking drives in and out for whatever reason, at a high rate of speed, trying to be as efficient as they can and get as much work done as they can. So for more details and a link to the original Linux mailing list email, please refer to the article linked in the show notes. But soon we should see a patch so that even if you are hot swapping NVMe Gen 5, now that's another important point here's Gen 5 drives. Then you should be cleared up in the next kernel release.

12:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting and, as I liked what Quippy said or what Keith512 said, what this means in English was the drives reducing the PCIe generation from like PCIe 5 down to a lower level like PCIe 3. And yes, that is the much simpler way to put it. Now, the important point here is this was only when hot swapping right. So, like this isn't something that we were going to see on Lenovo laptops, we're running Linux on. This is what I first thought of when we introduced the story.

12:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And that's why I wanted to specifically call out what NVMe drives are and how they're used in consumer motherboards, because a lot of times they're underneath graphics cards or they're not easily to get to places, so this is not something that you would encounter in for for people outside of enterprise or industrial applications so you don't think I'd have to worry about it with my uh 2009 lenova think center no, and you're not running pcie 5, gen 5 on that.

13:21
Either yeah or nvme or anything like that at all not, unless I change out the motherboard that's probably like still ide oh no, I know it, you actually could run in there because the the nv, the m.2 slot is basically pcie it's it's smaller and but it's basically what it is. And you have a simple adapters to go from nvme to like u2 and u.3 uh drive interfaces and you can. You can plug in boards into piece into regular pcie uh slots that you can hold several m.2 drives in it, so so they're very compatible. I mean, they're pretty much the same standard.

14:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't think anyone's doing a show story on it today, but did anybody else see what else Lenovo has announced this week?

14:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, so this week is CES and I know we didn't get a whole lot of CES stuff into the show notes. Rob, go ahead and let us know what did you see Well, the Legion Go, which is the.

14:26 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Steam Deck competitor.

14:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
except for, unlike the other Steam Decks, this is actually going to have SteamOS on it, so it's the first third-party device that's going to have SteamOS.

14:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so we talked about this. We covered the made for SteamOS I think that was what the badge is and we sort of speculated that someone would come along and have one of these. We thought it might even be more like a smart, you know, a htbc sort of hardware, um, but it's another handheld which is interesting yeah, so another, another steam deck um, I don't have the specs in front of me, but 699, looking for a release date of October.

15:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So we'll talk more about that later on in the in the year. Yeah, I'm sure we will, all right.

15:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ken, we want to talk about.

15:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, jeff. Oh, I was just going to comment on that and say I think almost all the handhelds coming out I bet 90% in this coming year are going to have steam OS versus windows, just because the windows seem to flop.

15:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, did not do well.

15:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That'd be a big win for Linux gaming.

15:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It would be a very interesting niche. That would be a very interesting niche for Linux to have. We've talked for years about the year of the Linux desktop. The joke has been that it's come in the form of Android. It's a very interesting niche that Linux is doing so well on mobile platforms.

15:50 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I know two things that I will put on. One I'll cover later, but if you want to, jonathan, I can give her the other one now.

16:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I guess Of course it's Calibri.

16:03 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I think it's Calibri. Ah yes.

16:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think it's Caliber, isn't it?

16:09 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Didn't we get?

16:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
in trouble for calling it Calibri.

16:12 - Ken McDonald (Host)
And I still slip into that occasionally, when I'm thinking or not thinking.

16:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Stop thinking that.

16:20 - Ken McDonald (Host)
But let's go ahead and hear what Mari Esther wrote about developer COVID Goyles. But let's go ahead and hear what Mari Esther wrote about developer COVID Goyles announcing the latest stable version of the powerful, cross-platform, free and open source e-book management software that should be called Calibre. In this case it's version 7.24. Now, calibre is also one of my favorite applications, as I'd already mentioned, and version 7.24 introduces several new features to include the ability to create rules to transform e-book series names, which you can experiment with in the bulk metadata editor and also through preferences metadata download.

17:09
Now the new Calibre version introduces a new option to show a button that gives you quick access to all available actions from the status bar with a single click, which you can enable in preferences look and fill main Interface Show Actions button.

17:29
In answer to feature request, we now have a button to export the currently displayed list of words as a CSV file in the spell check feature of the edit book component and the ability to choose the ebook cover as the format to save when saving single format to disk, and a checkbox to automatically convert obsolete ISBN 10 to ISBN 13 in the Add from ISBN feature. In the Add from ISBN feature, calibre 7.24 also improves the e-book conversion feature by automatically setting the page progression direction for e-books that don't have it set and have their primary language as either Arabic or Hebrew, and improves the content server's book details view to make caliber colon slash slash show dash book and caliber colon slash slash view dash book urls work in the comments. As always, I recommend reading Maria's article that I have linked in our show notes to see what I didn't cover and follow the links if you want to get a copy of Calibre.

18:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, calibre is cool. I've pulled it down and I've used it a little tiny bit Not a whole lot, because you know I don't do a whole lot of e-book reading. Um, not a whole lot Cause you know I don't do a whole lot of ebook reading. Oh, I don't do a whole lot of ebook reading, but if I do, it's not generally going to be at the desktop either. Um, but it is cool, it's out there.

19:12 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I don't use it for reading. I use it more for managing all the ebooks I've gotten.

19:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I started back at least 2012 using it so it was managing ebooks from for the palm ebook format what do you do with all those ebooks once they're managed?

19:36 - Ken McDonald (Host)
it makes it easier for me to put them onto my phone or, in the past, on onto my Palm PDA.

19:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You read an e-book on a tiny little phone screen.

19:50 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I even also use it to put it on my Chromebook.

19:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I could see that, believe it or not, rob, you can actually read an e-book on a tiny little phone screen. It's kind of a pain. One word at a time. I know you've done it.

20:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Just why would you want to?

20:13 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Because you don't have the physical book with you.

20:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Sometimes that's all you've got If you needed something to quickly reference, but I'm not going to kick back and enjoy a good book on a tiny little phone screen.

20:25 - Ken McDonald (Host)
The e-book reader I've got allows me to sync between my Chromebook, my Kindle and my phone. Cool, and it also gave me the capability of putting books I'd borrowed temporarily from the library onto of them and then delete them once I was done.

20:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's actually handy.

20:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and a lot of times you know you're doing what you can with what you got right now.

20:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yep, I'm just not reading right now.

20:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Then, I guess. All right, rob, let's talk about something that is happening right now, and that is the shakeup at Chrome and therefore the shakeup with Chromium.

21:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, so, with the servo browser engine that I talked about in my last story, you know that became a Linux Foundation project back in 2018. But today, in 2025, it seems that the Linux Foundation is going to be backing financially, backing another browser. It's you know, and it's always good to hear when an open source project finds new ways to secure funding and to move development forward. But, you know, in this case, I do feel a little like we're giving money to billionaires who already have a lot of money. I don't know, maybe not. Here's a story. So, as the Linux Foundation, well, they're partnering with the behemoth Google to create the quote supporters of Chromium-based browsers unquote fund. So it's a fund, you know. This fund will provide money to open source developers working on Chromium-based open source projects and because, apparently, google didn't have enough money to support what is essentially their project, they're getting other people out. Now, today, google is responsible for around 94% of the contributions to the open source Chromium project itself project itself and then, to a much smaller extent, microsoft, samsung, opera, gali and others are also in there. But the hope is the new fund will bring in other developers from outside of these big corporate walls to help out in the development, get some funding for them so they can do some good work on this, even though I think these big corporate people could pay for that too. But it's good to get some non-corporate money. I don't know who's going to donate to it either. Maybe it's just going to be these big corporate people anyway. But anyway, it's sad.

23:21
Google loves to kill things that it creates. Maybe this is their way to shield the project that they have been thinking about killing off. You know, maybe they're thinking it's about time they get rid of google chrome. And so, uh, somebody's like hold on, let's find a way to save it. So it's not gone. I don't know.

23:41
Um, or maybe, with the us justice department calling for the breakup of google, this is their way of showing they aren't in control of chromium and therefore it isn't theirs to sell off. I don't. I don't know what the reason is. Maybe they just want to be benevolent, get some funds and and help some developers. Yeah, all potentially good things. There's some cynical views there, but money for developers is good. So, with things as they are, maybe this will protect the Chromium project from the turmoils that Google brings. And the fact is, chromium is just it's the biggest player out there. You got the Firefox browser engine and you know who knows what their future is either, with potential of Google money going away and other struggles in that area. We don't want Safari to be the only one left. That would be horrible. I have to quit browsing the web.

24:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So, rob, I'm going to be more cynical than you are. I'm going to say that this is 100% a response to the US Treasury Department or Justice Department, excuse me, the Department of Justice threatening to break up Google and threatening to make them sell the chrome browser and spin it out from google. I am convinced that this is 100 a response to that um start, but it is the beginning of the process of moving the chromium project to the linux foundation, and that that gives well, one that gives google some cover against the. No, we don't completely own and control the browser ecosystem. Look, look, we're just a part of this Linux Foundation project, and I think it also sets them into a better place if they do indeed need to try to sell the Chrome browser itself. It's just one less way that it's tied to them. So I think this is directly related to all of that.

25:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, probably.

25:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't know what it will change, though really, I mean it's kind of a paper move. I mean, what is Chrome support that Firefox can't? Now, there's some things they don't, but is there any proprietary stuff that Electron apps?

26:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean there are other ways to build Electron apps without using Chromium. There are some features in Chromium that have not landed in Firefox yet.

26:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But they could right PWAs.

26:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
If this isn't the end of.

26:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Firefoxfox. No, it's not the end of firefox, not yet. No, they're going to keep firefox. Google will pay a lot of money to keep firefox going, not if they don't own google anymore.

26:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If they don't own chrome anymore or chrome chrome, I mean well true, what do they care?

26:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah, that's, that's been part of the uh. Part of the prediction is that, uh, you know if, if google is forced to get rid of chrome, then google is going to stop paying firefox money to exist.

26:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And yeah, that's an interesting one of my biggest beefs with uh, the firefox uh browser engine or whatever maybe it's the firefox web web browser itself is is the fact that they and it's a port for pwas. You know the future's coming like we don't like the future that might be coming back.

27:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
By the way, they, they in our conversation. This has been several weeks ago, a couple months ago maybe. We had a couple of guys from firefox, from mozilla, on floss weekly and uh, we, we had uh it was, it was, um, it was me and uh, david were on there and david says what about pwas? Why did you guys kill him? And the guy's like there is a reason, but we've opened the door to maybe bringing those back. And I think there was even a bug report that he told us to go to and like, if you feel really strongly about PWAs, go and let us know at this bug report and we're going to see what we can do. So that might be coming back to Firefox.

27:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'll need to find that bug report because I'd like to throw my name in.

27:58 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah.

28:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What are PWAs Progressive web apps? Do you need me to explain further? I guess we could explain for the audience.

28:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Give it a two-sentence explanation.

28:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Two-sentence explanation. It's basically turning a website into more of a desktop app.

28:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's installing a website so that it behaves more like an application. Yes, um, I will tell you something else that firefox is working on that is really, really fascinating to me, and that is there is a patch set bouncing around inside the firefox um bug tracker right now that adds hdr support for linux. Now it's bug, and they've got some other things. They're like well, this really needs to land first and that really needs to land first. But it's very possible that Firefox is going to have working HDR support before Chrome does. I find that hilarious. That would be, cool, yes.

29:02
So I tell you something else that's cool. I think it's cool and some people out there think it's very not cool. That is the Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi 5 16 gigabyte edition. This just recently got announced, in the past few days, by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and it is on sale. The Pi 5 16 gig is on sale for 120 dollars and various people have different opinions on that.

29:33
I have heard some people say that that is ridiculously too much money. I have seen people say as a result of this well, I guess the last pie I bought was the last pie I'm ever gonna buy. I've heard people say well, you can get one of those little tiny Amazon it's not the Nuke, it's not the NUC branded, but little tiny Amazon Intel-based computers for this price, and I get all of that. But at the same time it's all kind of silly. So if you either cannot comprehend why someone would need a 16 gigabyte raspberry pi or cannot comprehend why someone would willing to be to pay 120 for it, then the fact of the matter is that this is not the machine for you. It was not made for you, you were not the target market for it and that's fine. You really don't need to get angry over the fact that there is a market. There is a market for this, I promise you. There is a market for this and the Raspberry Pi Foundation is 100% within their rights to try to make a machine for that market. And so let's talk about the market, and there are two big ones that come to mind.

30:45
The one that Raspberry Pi themselves talked about is those that are using a Pi 5 as their desktop computer, and having 16 gigs is handy. It is nice to have the full 16 gigs of memory for using it as a desktop. That is one market. Arm64 compile target. They want to be able to do something like run GitHub runners on it or some other place where they want to be able to compile a bunch of things. And the fact that it's four core, it makes sense to try to do four compiles side by side, and there are times that eight gigs is not quite enough for that, so pushing it up to a 16 gig memory, it makes sense there. Jeff Geerling covered this and he was also talking about things like if you're using the Raspberry Pi to serve websites, which is a totally legitimate thing to do, sometimes those websites take a lot of RAM for each of the individual sessions that they pull up, and so if you have more than three or four people trying to pull up the same site at the same time, you need to be able to give it more RAM than just eight gigs.

32:01
So there are reasons, and there are legitimate reasons why this thing is going to sell. People are going to want it. It may not be for you, and that's okay. I was just blown away Like I saw so much hate from people like, ah, they've given into corporate greed and you know the corporate. That's why they become a corporation, that's why they're charging so much for this. Uh, it's, it's actually fairly simple, like there's a, there's a really really simple um algorithm. So it's like the. The base thing is is it $40? And then it's $5 per gigabyte? It's something like that yeah, it's $40 plus $5 per gigabyte of RAM and that is the price for the entire Raspberry Pi 5 line.

32:44 - Ken McDonald (Host)
And the base one's 2 gig starts at 2 gig.

32:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I don't think they make a 1 gig Raspberry Pi 5. Yeah, I don't think they make a one gig Raspberry Pi 5.

32:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, when I saw your title that said about the new Pi 16 and why you shouldn't be upset, I'm like what who's upset? That's awesome.

33:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
People are upset, it's more there.

33:09 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Of course it's going to cost more.

33:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I thought maybe people were upset because they didn't have enough memory on it. Yeah, it broke $100. That's people. Just the Raspberry Pi is now $100.

33:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean, I get it was awesome when the first original one was $35. That was awesome.

33:26 - Ken McDonald (Host)
And how much was the memory then A week Like baby 512?

33:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, 512.

33:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And the cost of the memory Like baby 512? Yeah, 512.

33:34 - Ken McDonald (Host)
512 megs and the cost of the memory.

33:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think it was DDR3, too.

33:43 - Ken McDonald (Host)
And this is going to be DDR4, correct? I think so, darn, not DDR5.

33:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's what I'm mad about Nope, not yet, not yet.

33:54 - Ken McDonald (Host)
You've got to get mad about it. Get about it being ddr4, not ddr5, right?

33:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
yeah, I love it in the past.

34:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Come on no, I'm mad because this doesn't have two 10 gig network ports on it even one?

34:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
does it have one?

34:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it's not 10 gig no, no, I think it's just one gig network ports. It's got the exposed pci Express, though, so that you can put.

34:18 - Ken McDonald (Host)
A two and a half gig connection to the PCI Express.

34:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, and I think the Pi 5 or even 4 and 3 probably can actually support the full one gig, whereas I know the one and maybe two couldn't. Actually, you could never actually achieve a gig or even half that.

34:36 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I think back when those came out. Did you need more than a gig?

34:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
no, I couldn't even. You couldn't even achieve a gig there.

34:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It was more like four to six hundred megabits per second so loquacious, let's, let's, uh, let's, let's deal with this, loquaciousacious says for some reason. I thought the Raspberry Pi was designed so that impoverished people would have access to computing. It was designed to give educators a platform to be able to put computers in the hands of school kids. That is what it was made for. The original Raspberry Pi was sold for $35. You can right now, if you can find it in stock you can get a Raspberry Pi 4 model B with one gigabyte of RAM for $35. It is still out there. That is still a reason. That is still a thing that you can do, and the Pi 4 with one gig, you know, as long as you're not trying to watch uh, you know 4k video on it, you know you're not trying to compile on it, it is still a, a serviceable machine for fooling around and understanding what, um how computers work, to learn like you could still, you can still emulate, um, the oregon trail on the pi 4 with one gig, yeah, and those are all still available, yeah, but so what?

35:58
What has happened here, though, is all of the rest of us that are not a part of education. We have looked at the raspberry pi and we've said this thing is amazing and for some of us it's because it's got, you know, gpio. For some of us it's because it's it's this big in comparison to, you know, a normal computer. There's a bunch of different reasons why people just have gone nuts over it. It's good hardware, it's got good support. So I don't think there's any shade to be thrown at Raspberry Pi for also building units that make sense for these other use cases.

36:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, you don't have to buy that model. You can stick with the lower-end models.

36:37 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Yeah, I've got the Raspberry Pi 5 8-gigabyte model because they didn't have the 16-gigabyte at the time.

36:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You would have bought the 16 if you could have. Yeah, yeah, oh, all right.

36:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
My gaming system only has 16 gigs of a Ram in it, and I realized today that I think I need to update that or upgrade that but, it's it works fine.

37:01 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I think what people are forgetting that 16 gigabyte is for people who won't Lots of Chrome tabs, lots of Chrome tabs.

37:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, they want a cheap computer or they're using the Raspberry Pi for something very specific, that's, you know, it's not general purpose computer, but someone that's compiling, someone that's working on ai stuff. It might be there, um, but the the the biggest thing that I would say is the existence of the 16 gig model, for the higher price does not in any way change the availability, the pricing of the cheaper models, like it is entirely unreasonable for that to offend you if you're concerned about the educational element that's raspberry pi has always been for and I wouldn't.

37:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I would disagree, ken. It's not for people who want that cheap. It's not for people who want that cheap computer because you can already get other options, like many people pointed out at that price range for a cheap computer like my, pine book was 125 dollars, but it's lower specs and I bet you anything that this is a step to that.

38:11 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Uh 500 Pro that Jonathan wants.

38:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That is possible. There is a little snippet in here that apparently this was partially possible because Micron gave them maybe a custom piece of hardware, but I'm sure we won't be able to get the details on that, at least not at the moment. That would have to come from like Raspberry Pi or an official Micron statement, and they don't tend to make those about these kind of things.

38:43 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Early next year sounds like it's time to get the. Who was it from Raspberry Pi you had on FlossWiki?

38:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Evan Evan Upton.

38:53 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Get him back on.

38:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We might do that. We could see about doing that. Before then, though way before then, it will be time for Jeff to tell us about KDE Plasma 6.3.

39:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes. So last week we touched on this topic, but now it's official. Kde Plasma 6.3 is out for beta testing Now. This coincides with KDE Gear 24.12.1 and KDE Framework 6.10. So we've discussed in the past how these three kind of components Plasma, gear and Frameworks work together to create the entire KDE environment. However, today we're only going to focus solely on Plasma. Each of those have updates and improvements as well, so everything's up leveling.

39:46
So what's new and changing in 6.3 Plasma? Well, let's dive into the details. And we have now the ability to clone a panel and the ability to set a keyboard shortcut to move windows between custom tiling zones based on directionality. There's also support for remembering the active virtual desktop per activity and the option to prefer screen color accuracy within KWIN. Additionally, we can now have low battery notifications for wireless headphones that will properly expose the battery information, and you can also configure your touchpad to be automatically disabled when plugging in a mouse, which I personally love. I hate it when I plug in a mouse and I have to manually go in and set the touchpad to be off. We have now even better fractional scaling, so that's continuing to get improved. Widgets placed on the desktop are now slightly translucent, and when you have a network hotspot that you set up with your system, it will assign a random password for extra security, so you don't have a default basic password that people could guess. It's always going to give you something randomized. I mean you can change it if you want, but the initial out-the-gate security is going to be improved because people can't automatically know that you're using password one or whatever the default used to be.

41:11
Kde Plasma 6.3 also takes advantage of a kernel message, which we've talked about this before on previously, on the show how the kernel supporting this better. But now KDE hooks in and it will better prompt a user when the system terminates an app because it's running out of memory. So rather than just kill it and you're like what happened to my Chrome or my whatever, now you're going to see that, hey, the system was severely running out of memory and it killed the app so that it could keep the system from totally crashing. Another security enhancement is that Discover Package Manager will show when apps are directly packaged by their developer or by a verified and trusted third party. And if you're downloading an app that's packaged, like Flatpak, the installation progress will be more accurately shown and will take into account when any new runtimes must also be downloaded. So this will all be calculated in the progress. So you're downloading a flat pack and rather than getting stuck someplace you're thinking what's going on? It's going to better show you that, oh, it had to download all these runtimes and dependencies with the flat pack that were that the flat pack would be dependent on, because it would all be packaged inside inside, but the uh other things to make it run, that'll, that'll uh, be calculated correctly now.

42:48
Now take a look at the article linked in the show notes for more details, because I skipped over several updated items and by following the link in the article you can go to the official announcements page and see the change log, and there are hundreds of updates that have been made. So the article only covered a small bit and I only covered a small bit from the article. So there's a lot of changes in KDE Plasma 6.3. And, in case you forgot, we should see the final release of 6.3. So it's in beta now. It's going to go officially released on February 11th, you know, barring any major issues. And if you're a system integrator, tarballs will be available a week earlier, on February 6th, to give maintainers, you know, a little bit of time to integrate them into their distributions. So I'm excited for KDE plasma 6.3 and I can hardly wait.

43:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I, I do. I too am looking forward to it. There's some neat things that landed there. I bet in Fedora it's not going to land until Fedora 42. So I may do the thing again where I grab the KDE packages from the next version of Fedora. I've always had that work reasonably well, Live a little dangerously there.

44:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I've been playing with the nightly builds of Kubuntu and they haven't updated yet, but I'm thinking it should be soon now. It wouldn't surprise me. The beta hits in and we can try it out.

44:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If you want to keep up to date with the latest KDE, there are distros specifically for that.

44:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, but what kind of fun is that if you're not running a nightly build? You got to have a little excitement of it. May or may not break every update.

44:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's true. The problem with the one that Rob is talking about is that it's going to be running at the moment not too terribly old version of the Linux kernel. But give it a few months, about a year, and it'll be a terribly old version of the Linux kernel and all kinds of things are not going to work because of that.

44:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Okay, quit Dyson Human 2.

44:54 - Ken McDonald (Host)
It's so hard Actually.

44:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Ubuntu.

45:00 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Studio 2410 is running KDE Plasma version 6.1.5.

45:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, but 6.2 is out.

45:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, so you're behind, you're behind.

45:14 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I'm on Ub ubuntu, but it's closer than it used to be that's true, doing better.

45:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah, because we talked about last week, uh, ubuntu in general. Their canonical is trying to push a little more cutting edge. Maybe. Maybe it's not cutting edge, maybe, you know, because you're not going to bleed as much as certain rolling distributions. You're just kind of on a bruised edge. You know you take a few bumps and stuff, but you're not going to. Really it's like the butter knife edge. Yeah.

45:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. Well, what about Linux Mint? What version of KDE do you run if you get Linux Mint?

45:54 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I don't think you do. You run Cinnamon, don't you Rob?

45:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, Cinnamon is or Aramate.

46:02 - Ken McDonald (Host)
And Rob, this one is for you. Thank you. In fact it's coming from NeoWin journalist Paul Hill, just for you. Paul wrote about Linux Mint 22.1 Zia undergoing final testing of its ISO before the stable version is made available for everyone. According to the Linux Mint website, the Cinnamon, mate and Xfce editions are all undergoing testing right now and if they pass, they will start to filter out to the Linux Mint mirrors before an official announcement is made. A couple of days later, paul states despite the fact that Zia is only a point release in the Mint 22 series, it is still a substantial update. Zia comes with new power modules, nightlight integrated into the settings. Rob, are you looking forward to Cinnamon 6.4?

47:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm looking forward to its sweetness.

47:05 - Ken McDonald (Host)
As well as new artworks and other improvements. Improvement is Linux Mint's modernization of the app dependencies by transitioning to AppKit. And, captain, didn't you talk about that a couple of months ago, rob?

47:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh yeah, that was quite a while ago, but yeah, that did come up with their change they were making there.

47:32 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Thank you, but AppKit is replacing AppDaemon, providing a streamlined library for package management operations with updated functionality, and Captain unifies the features of GDEBI and AppDurl into a single easy-to-use utility. For those not familiar with Linux Mint, utility For those not familiar with Linux Mint versions 22, 22.1, 22.2, and 22.3 will all be based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and receive updates until 2029. Unlike other operating systems, it's not necessary to stay on the latest point release if you're happy with version 22. You can stay on that until 2029 with no issues or nagging, though I bet Rob will hop to another distro before the end of the year. You'll have to give us a review of AppKipton hop to another distro before the end of the year. You'll have to give us a review of AppKipton Captain after you try them out.

48:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, your distro hopping idea is a safe bet. I have installed Linux Mint. I'm starting to work on it. I'm looking forward to seeing how the upgrade process goes.

48:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that should be interesting. Back, one of the last times I worked with Linux meant there was no upgrade process to go from one release to another. It was just like, oh, I guess you get to reinstall it. Do they actually have an upgrade process now?

49:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think so, paul.

49:14 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Hill didn't go over anything about that, but I'm sure Rob will be able to tell us how that goes.

49:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I know Zorin did not have an upgrade process until like last year, I think, but I thought Linux Mint did.

49:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It hasn't came up in any of my uh, anything I've ever looked into see, rob doesn't ever stick with the linux gesture long enough to have to upgrade it yeah, time to upgrade.

49:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That just means reinstall something new yeah, he's. He's on the, he's on the hop upgrade path that's why I was on a rolling distro for so long. There was never a point where I had to upgrade. That's why I stayed at Arch for two or three years or whatever it was.

49:58 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I've got a suggestion on one that you might want to try. After Linux Mint it's Orion Orient Mint or Orion Linux.

50:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm thinking of trying. I think it it's 10, 10 box, or 10, 10k and linux. 10k and linux is what I'm thinking of trying out yeah yeah, is that based on linux from scratch?

50:27
no, I I just saw, saw it go across my feed. I have not dug into it this week it looked like a very it looked like a very minimalistic. Um, I don't think it was any of the mainstream desktop environments, but other than that I didn't get a whole lot further into looking at. But there was something, something on reddit about it, about get updated or no, somebody somebody was just making it. I think he just released it.

50:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. So, Rob, are you going to look for a Budgie desktop when you go to a new distro?

51:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know, budgie has always been an interesting looking one, even if often forgot about and missed from my mind. Um. So, as predicted, wayland continues its domination. Um and replacement of x, x11, x or whatever version of that you want to call it. So you know, and as seen in another, other desktop environments this week, a desktop environment that you know, this is a desktop environment that I often forget even exists. I don't know why. I've tried it. It's good, but this week Budgie announced version 10.10 should be released this quarter.

51:57
And so for the rest of you who also aren't familiar with this desktop, this niche desktop environment, it came out of the Solus Linux distribution project, which is it's not based on anything, that's one of its own built. I've tried that too. Maybe that's why I tried Budgie. Its own built. I've tried that too. Maybe that's why I tried Budgie. It was pretty nice, but I don't know if it's got legs to last long term. It's kind of dipped sometimes and came back. It seems to keep going at it. But anyway, just to continue. It has been developed by Joshua Strobel but is now available in other distributions, such as there are spins and flavors of Ubuntu and Fedora, and it's probably in other places too. I haven't really looked that hard.

52:47
So the guys there at Budgie, they have been working hard. The guys, the guy I don't know if it's just Joshua or what he's at least the main guy. He probably has some contributors, but anyway they've been working hard to integrate and it's been an option in some versions of 10.9. But with 10.10 they are planning for budgie to be whalen only and will no longer support x, x11x or it's. It's no more x, x is gone. Been saying this for a while, get out of here. X.

53:26
So the current whalen support is done through the popular lab wc, lab wc compos, which I know we've mentioned in various contexts before. But it's one of those guys that works behind the scenes so that LabWC compositor is what they're using today. But they are working on their own compositor that should show up, I don't know, in one of the future releases, maybe in 11. You know, it's kind of amazing for such a small team. One of the future releases, maybe in 11. It's kind of amazing for such a small team to be doing so much work. But Joshua must be a pretty smart guy.

54:03
Anyway, in addition, budgie 10.10 will come with updated keyboard layout nightlight for those who like tweaking your desktop for nighttime instead of getting blasted by light, tasklist and WorkSpaces applets, as well as the implementation of the display configuration batch system. Budgie 10.10 will be the last release in the 10.X or 10. Series, with the next release after this being Budgie 11. On Budgie 11, joshua says quote here while we have already been working on some aspects of the experience that will already apply to Budgie 11, we have not yet started on Budgie Desktop itself. And make no mistake, we will show it off as we work on it, and when we have something that you can start messing with, we'll have a way for you to do it too. So, budgie 11, just another tree domino.

55:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, there we go, another domino, falling to my prediction of wayland domination well, I mean it's, it's inevitable, right, there's, there's, no, there's no other outcome. Um, there is all of one developer that is seriously working on x11, and that is not even for the linux desktop, that is for the bsd desktop. Um, it's, yeah, of course, everything's going to go to wayland yeah, even these little niche guys, you know.

55:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Access ce man cinema that's the case.

55:50 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Who's going to continue doing maintenance on x wayland?

55:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Who's going to continue doing maintenance on X Wayland. That's different. That's a translation layer.

56:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And Wayland is still the same team as X, Wayland and X. I mean it's all under the same umbrella.

56:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What's interesting is X Wayland is actually, I believe, the actual repository. It is part of the old X11 repository. So something that you might actually see here before too long is X-Wayland getting spun out into its own project and it does not live inside of the X-Wayland repository, or that does not live inside of the X11 repository and really the one serious person working on it's more bug fixes and things.

56:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know things like that. It's not major feature upgrades or anything like that. And actually as time goes on, x wayland is becoming going to become less and less important as more every more and more things become natively wayland it's going to have a very long tail though oh yeah, yeah, very long, I mean it's probably as long as uh the x x org's life well.

57:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I mean there are like so you think about this? Like there are going to be their proprietary programs, like there are video games. Let's just talk about video games. There are video games that have ports to linux. Those are always going to be X those, you know. There are some of those that are just they're set in stone, they're never going to get another update patch, they're never going to go to Wayland, and so X Wayland is the answer for that. You might eventually see a project come along that replaces X Wayland to do the same thing. Know something almost like wine? Or the um, the sdl compat. I could see x wayland eventually making its way into the sdl compat library. Um, because that's the only place where it really comes up anymore. Is is like old games, so I don't know it's, but it's going to have a very long tail.

57:50 - Ken McDonald (Host)
X wayland will be around with us for a very long time and I think we're going to revisit this question again after my last article we can do that well, and I was gonna.

57:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was gonna say, unless the game is also in windows, then it might be better just to run it in proton and say don't worry about x, and we'll just run the windows version and it's all taken care of sad but true, the the only compatible api for linux is windows you know, if a tiny little niche desktop environment run by pretty much one guy can progress and move it to all Wayland, any of them should be able to Should be able to.

58:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Sometimes there's an inverse relationship between the number of people working on something and the amount of work that can get done quickly.

58:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Doesn't always work that way but sometimes does.

58:41 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Yeah, there there are some hurdles.

58:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There are arguments that way exactly yeah, they're not hurdles that they should be, there's ways to overcome them. It's, it's possible. There are struggles, but it's definitely possible.

58:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, possible, there are struggles, but it's definitely possible. Yeah, all right. So I've got a story, an interesting story here, and that is that the LGPL got tested in court in Germany, and this is something that we that I at least pay a lot of attention to when these sorts of stories come along. And so a couple of things here. One there is this sort of nightmare scenario that open source people sort of worry about, and that is that a license like the GPL will go to court and a judge will look at it and say because this license has this problem, the entire thing gets tossed out right, and that has repercussions everywhere. That hasn't happened. It doesn't look like it's going to happen.

59:41
The GPL and the LGPL were written by very smart lawyers who actually knew what they were doing, thankfully, but still, every time one of these goes to court, we watch it very carefully, because what a judge decides has a lot of potential impact because of precedents in common law, things like that. So the LGPL went to court. It was again, it was in Germany, it was in Berlin, I believe. It was against AVM, a router manufacturer, and the case was brought by Sebastian Steck, who's a German software developer, and he was also backed by the was it SFC, software Freedom Conservancy, sfc and they brought lawsuit and the specifics was that there were things in this router firmware that were under the LGBL, the lesser GPL license, that while the source code was there, the things like the make files and the kernel layout information was not there and so while you could look at the source code, you could not actually compile your own version of it to run on this particular hardware. And they came and they said the lgpl says that you need to do this as well and the according to the article here's an ars technical article that I've linked to um. According to the article, after the like, the lawsuit was filed, um avm, the manufacturer in question, did provide all of those, the additional source code and scripts and things that were asked for um. But for one reason or another and this probably is has to do with the details of the german legal system the suit went ahead and went to trial um and that's been caught like a year ago. It's a couple years ago that that happened. We're just now hearing about it because things are finally making, finishing, making its way through the uh, through the legal system, um and the. The lgpl held the day. There were, no, you know, major hits to it. In fact, as far as I can tell, there weren't any hits to it. Um, it, it confirmed the power of copy left and it, you know, it survived the challenge. Um, so that's uh's actually. That's really interesting, and it's good to see One of our Twitch users, magic Thighs, is reminding me that common law is not a German thing or a European thing, it's just a UK and a US thing.

01:02:09
Yes, yes, that is correct. Common law is UK and US. I am not a lawyer. I do not really even play one on tv. Um, I I just I understand a few of these things, uh, but obviously not all of them.

01:02:23
Regardless, it is good to see that, uh, the lgpo held up in court always good yeah, deserves an applaud now we will see what happens in the I think Vizio case in the United States that is also making its way through court is that still going on?

01:02:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
that's the one where people want to see the source code that they use yeah.

01:02:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So this one, that one, is interesting because it one of the big questions about that case is whether an individual that just bought a TV actually has standing to even bring a court case, to bring a lawsuit, and so far the judges have ruled that, yes, you do have standing, you are enough of a party to the contract or the license, whichever the GPL is. That's one of the things that that lawyers fight over with the gpl is this a license or is it a contract? And that has gotten ruled in different ways, I believe, uh, across the across the years. Yeah, but so far that has been allowed to continue and vizio tried to get it thrown out, I believe, on those grounds there. Well, this person is not a party to this contract and therefore can't sue, and the court so far has said, well, yeah, we're going to let it happen and see. You know where it goes.

01:03:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, and what? What that's about? Uh. To uh put a little more clarity on that is you know, when someone receives open source software, they are supposed to be able to see the source code. And so somebody uh receiving a Vizio TV, you know there is open source source code or open source software in use on that TV, so they're suing saying that they should be able to see their source code. Yes, for those open source projects in use. Yep.

01:04:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep absolutely.

01:04:14 - Ken McDonald (Host)
From glancing through the article you've got linked, it looks like Cisco's also very familiar with this.

01:04:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, so that's some interesting history. That's where the OpenWrt distro of Linux came from, because there were these little Linux routers that was also there was a suit brought and that's how that source code got opened up and then, you know, the OpenWrt project was built off of that. So very, very interesting history. There it is. We have been here for a while. Let's move on and talk about Flatpak and what's new with Flatpak, Jeff.

01:04:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I know me right. You know, I know on this show I might be considered a Snap fanboy. I mean, rob tells me constantly I am, but I've actually used all types of packages and I don't really have a preference. You know, I just like teasing Rob. Just don't tell him that he never listens to my segments anyway. In all actuality, though, I use whatever package the software comes in and I don't really have a preference. You know, really I just use whatever works.

01:05:23
And to prove that, I'm going to talk about what's new in Flatpak with releasing version 1.16. It's been two and a half years since the last major version change, which was from 1.14. So what does 1.16 bring? I'm glad you asked. First, there's a new USB device listing and it now supports KDE search completion. It also supports creating a private Wayland socket with the security context extension allowing a compositor to identify connections from sandbox apps as belonging to a sandbox, although I won't list out the function names because they're a little long and nobody likes here.

01:06:05
And all that. There's better compatibility when running 16-bit executables. In some versions of Wine. There's also an HTTP backend variable that allows projects like GNOME software to detect when they're compatible with the Flatpak library. Additionally, there's support for terminal emulators to detect and display the progress of Flatpak operations on their graphical user interfaces and for sub-sandboxes. So sandboxes started by sandboxes, you know.

01:06:39
If it's started by Flatpak portals, flatpak apps now inherit environmental variables from the Flatpak run command that started the original instance rather than from the Flatpak portal. So now this will fix the behavior of the Flatpak GL drivers environmental variable and similar features. So this way it doesn't. You're basically saying your permissions, you know the variables match with what it was originally started with and don't get changed or reduced because you have, you know, a sandbox of a sandbox. Basically the simple way to say it. Old drivers and other ancillary items will now be cleaned up better when upgrading. The D bus session is reloaded to pick up any exported D bus services when you're upgrading. And, as always, I've just hit a few of the high points of the article, so take a look at the link in the show notes to find out what else is in there, including items that you might find very important that I passed over. So in the not-too-distant future, everyone should be picking up 1.16 through their normal distribution channels and it looks like a very good release. So happy packaging.

01:07:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Can you install Flatpak as a Flatpak?

01:08:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, as long as it's 1.14, because it would be compatible with your system.

01:08:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Is there Flatpak-ception? Is that a thing? Is it Flatpak's?

01:08:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
all the way down. Flatpak is not packaged as a Flatpak, but could it?

01:08:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
be, it's like when the old it's not packaged as a flat pack, but could it be?

01:08:22 - Ken McDonald (Host)
It's like when the old it's not packaged as a flat pack.

01:08:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That'd be like in the old BBS days, when people would say, oh, the new version of LZH is out, but they compress it with the new version of LZH. So then it's like I can't open that. I need an older version or it needs to be an ARJ or zip file to be able to open it.

01:08:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And I know that's a silly thought of Flatpak as a Flatpak. But there are times that you do end up doing things like that. You know, docker and Docker is totally a thing that there are some times where that's really actually what you want to do. There are some times where that's really actually what you want to do. I bet you there is at least some use for packaging Flatpak as a Flatpak. I bet you it's out there. I bet you somebody's doing it or trying to do it or wished they could do it.

01:09:16 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Could you see a Flatpak that contained a complete distro?

01:09:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
to include a Snap? Probably not, probably not, probably not. It would be a lot of work.

01:09:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It would be an app image containing a flat pack containing a snap. Oh my.

01:09:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Some of that you might be able to do. Snaps want to be able to talk to the underlying kernel and everything on a pretty low level. I'd be surprised if you can put snaps inside of any of those others.

01:09:42 - Ken McDonald (Host)
So it would probably be an app image inside a flat pack inside a snap.

01:09:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That might be possible.

01:09:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right, we're taking this too far. Let's keep this show moving.

01:09:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, Ken, let's talk about Civilization.

01:09:56 - Ken McDonald (Host)
You're talking about Sid Meier's Civilization, I hope.

01:09:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes.

01:10:01 - Ken McDonald (Host)
And it's the title for this article that first grabbed my eye. I agreed with Liam Dahl's opening statement of quite a nice surprise. I have enjoyed playing Sid Meier's Civilization games since I played Civ 3. Anybody remember that one Back on the PlayStation 3. Now we have Sid Meier's Civilization 7 from Fire Access Games or 2K, getting the green tick of approval from Valve, as it's now Steam Deck verified ahead of the release that's coming. Liam states this verification was done on the native Linux version too, so we're looking good to go for the February 11th release, or February 6th if you have advanced access from one of the more expensive editions.

01:10:55
We have been getting a lot more detail on Civ 7 recently from the developers through various first look videos and deeper dive blog style posts. Liam even links to the diplomacy influence and trade post on January 8th that gives details on the changes to the diplomacy mechanism compared with the previous iteration. Liam's article also includes links to Fanatical Humble Store and, of course, steam if you're interested in finding out how to get it. Liam ends his article suggesting he may be absent after February 11th. I personally am glad to see a game developer working on a native Linux version and hope this is a hint on the future of gaming in the Linux. On Linux, jonathan, I may not be available for the February 15th show while I do a get prepare a review on Sid Meier's Civilization VII.

01:12:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I see I have played some Civilization in my years. I don't remember which version of it that I played a lot of and really enjoyed. I played a lot of Free.

01:12:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Civ.

01:12:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, that too.

01:12:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The open source version that's native to Linux, Of course, with this coming as a native port itself. Well, I may actually go for this.

01:12:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Still not open source, but Indeed, you can't have everything, I suppose.

01:12:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's close enough.

01:12:38 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I don't think you're going to get the majority of the games being open source Indeed.

01:12:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I've never played any of the Civilization games ever.

01:12:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, Jeff, have we got something for you to do this week?

01:12:52 - Ken McDonald (Host)
This comes back to the question, and I didn't see anywhere in the articles or any of the research I did when preparing for this saying whether or not it's going to be using X11 or Wayland.

01:13:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting. Probably I would guess X11 at this point would be my guess, or with it running through Steam, possibly using the Proton. Not if it's native not if it's native, out of its native. Yeah, um, yeah, you know I I'm interested.

01:13:28
I'm go ahead, it's gonna have, it's gonna have either. So when a lot of times, when we've gotten games in the past that say that they run native, what that actually means is that they've got a middleware library by. I think farrell was one of the ones that did this for the longest time. That was essentially just its own, like windows api to x11 api conversion thing that ran in the middle, and so, yeah, it was native. And then it wasn't directly running on the wine or proton code, but it had sort of its own wine-ish thing built into the binary.

01:14:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um, so I don't, I don't know for sure if that's what this is going to be or if maybe their engine actually does support the linux backend yeah, kind of you can kind of think you can think that as a mini Proton or mini Wine, when they just cut everything out except to develop just what to run that game and they don't support anything else. But I'm kind of surprised they have a native version. I've heard from some developers that it's easier to make it work with Proton because the one thing about the Windows API is it's very stable versus Linux. Things change and so it's harder to to develop for versus. Okay, you have DirectX, it's just pretty much always the same. It doesn't have the the variation that there is.

01:15:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
there is one particular problem that has been very difficult to solve inside of proton so far and that is anti-cheat. That's a real problem to do inside a proton, because anti-cheat is looking for some really low level windows apis to talk to the kernel, and you don't necessarily get those APIs in the same way, like you can emulate those APIs, but you're not talking to the kernel in the same way over under Proton. And so one reason why they may want to go with a true native release is if Civilization 7 is going to have a very active multi online multiplayer and they want to do some sort of anti-cheat solution inside of it do you think anti-cheat?

01:15:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
is go ahead. Yeah, jeff first and then rob. Do you think they're going to continue having anti-cheat in the kernel because windows has talked about locking everybody else out of the kernel.

01:16:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think come up with something else to I think what I've heard is that was overblown um as to what was really going on there and that's not really going to affect anything in there, but what I was going to say I mean civ is is like a strategy turn based I don't know of a lot of ways you could really have a cheat on that, because a lot of that can be really all done on the server. It's not like a first person shooter where a lot of it has to be processed locally and you just have to trust that what you, what you're telling the server you shot and hit, you really did hit or whatever you.

01:16:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
you really think that the civilization multiplayer server is going to track how many units and what kind of units each player has, when they can just offload that to the end user machines and then try to protect it with anti-cheat? I do not have nearly as much faith in the developers of civilization seven.

01:17:09 - Ken McDonald (Host)
And what's the civilization games? Not really a reason to cheat because it's more of a exploring.

01:17:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh no, no, no reason to cheat, because it's more of a exploring. Oh no, no, end game for those was always either build the really big things or wipe out the enemy.

01:17:28 - Ken McDonald (Host)
If there's two people playing, there's going to be somebody trying to cheat now, if you have two, two or more people, there's always somebody that's trying to figure out a way to become top dog.

01:17:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yep, which is sometimes cheating.

01:17:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, all right. Well, let's move on to some command line tips, and I believe we have Rob up first and you're going to talk about K-Shift. What is K-Shift? Is that a new kind of transmission?

01:18:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
for cars. It's a transmission for those using KDE. So KShift, it's a small utility to automatically change your KDE desktop theme based on time of day. Or you could set it for more dynamics, dynamics such as things such as sunrise and sunset. K-shift, uh, can change the color scheme, icon, theme, wallpaper, desktop theme, and or you can also have a trigger to run a command. If, yeah, you have some kind of command, you want to run along with that, so you can almost have it do anything.

01:18:41
This is a Python program, so you install it with pip and while running, while kshift is running, you can also apply a theme via the command line. So, for example, if, example, you know you run kshift theme night, to apply the night theme, even if it's, you know, maybe it's during the day, but you want to check your themes out. You want to cycle through them all and test them without waiting for that trigger to hit. You can just do the night, do the day, do whatever other ones you have configured in there, so you can cycle through these. Have a nice dark wallpaper at night, a bright, cheery, happy one in the morning when you wake up, um, so if you are a kde user, like a lot of these other people on this panel are not me these days.

01:19:31
I used to be. I was a kde user from like 2000 to sometime in early 2020. And I hated the other ones. But you know, I moved away, not that there's anything wrong with it, I just wanted to. I want to see other desktop environments. So anyway, if you're a KDE user and you like a little variety in your themes or you enjoy light mode during the day, dark mode at night, check out k shift on github by uh it's, it's by the person's or their. Their handle on github is just, or their user, I guess, is just joking. So if you search for just joking k shift on github, you should find. Otherwise, check out our show notes and there's a link there.

01:20:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, very cool. Who is next? It is me, I am next. I've got a really simple one for you. If you find yourself writing PHP code and you need to run that PHP code and you don't want to set an entire web server up on your desktop to do it, you can use PHP dash capital S to do so. You just go to the directory where your indexphp is at and you run that. You can also tell it. You know localhost, colon 8000, if you would like to, and that'll give you. That'll give it to you on just it'll bind the localhost, and only on port 8000, and you can live, troubleshoot your php code right there. And, uh boy, I've used that pretty extensively for at least one customer that has a php best website. It's super useful if you're doing php development. All right, jeff, how do we stop the bomb and save the world?

01:21:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
yes, uh, this week's command line tip is the tar command and while Ken did touch on it in the previous episode, he focused on like different compression methods and you know he didn't really cover the basics of tar. And even if he, somebody else covered it and we didn't have an Excel sheet. You know it's been a while, so a refresher to our new listeners seems appropriate. Now I have two links in the show notes. The first one lists several examples of basic TAR uses and the second is a link to the XKCD cartoon about writing a valid TAR command line to save everybody, because it's how you disarm the bomb. So after this segment you should be able to save your friends and family because you'll be able to write a valid TAR command without needing to look it up on the internet. Tar was originally released in 1979, which is 46 years ago, and it's used to collect a lot of files into a single archive file, commonly referred to as a TAR ball, and the name's derived from tape archive, as it was originally developed to write data to sequential devices with no file system of their own, such as magnetic tape systems. So now the article in the show notes cover several things you can do with the tar command. But today we're gonna focus on creating a tar file, extracting a tar file and listing the contents of a tar file. You know these are gonna cover the vast majority of tasks that you will perform with tar as just an average user. You know s are going to cover the vast majority of tasks that you will perform with TAR as just an average user. You know sysadmins and pro users are going to get into the weeds more, but if you're just the average person, those three things will cover a lot of what you want to do.

01:22:51
So first we're going to take a look at creating a TAR archive, both with and without compression, and the command line to create a tar archive or tar file is tar space, dash, cvf space, what you're going to call your tar file space, and then path to the file or files. Now, if you'd like to add compression, you can add a Z right where to your CVF option to get GZ compression. Or instead of a Z you add a J, which will give you BZ2 compression. The rest of the command line stays the same. Now maybe you get a tarf file and you want to extract it, and this one's even easier because compression, or easier than the compression, because for both uncompressed, gz-compressed or bz2-compressed files it's all the same command line, so tar will handle it totally on its own.

01:23:58
It's tar space, dash, xvf space and then the file name. And finally, if you want to see what's in a tar file without extracting it, you use the following command, and it's the same thing, compressed, uncompressed doesn't matter, it all is handled by one command line tar space, dash, tvf space, file name. So I'm not going to go into more detail here, but the article in the show notes shows you how to extract single or multiple files, extract files based on a wildcard or remove single files from an archive. And honestly, the article is simplified because if you look at the man page, tar is an extremely powerful command with many, many more options and switches that the article doesn't cover. But you know, happy archiving.

01:24:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, tar is well, tar is just used everywhere. I had I will tell you a story about TAR just the other day. We're working on uploading builds and this one project. We use a weird build system and there's reasons for it. But one of the things that we do is we grab these libraries and we put them in the source code and then to be able to get it to build offline, because a lot of the various build systems online, like the Ubuntu PPAs right, when you go to build something for PPA, it strictly prohibits connecting out to the internet during the build.

01:25:33
So we had to figure out how to make our build system happy with the files and the folders that we put in there, so that it would not try to connect to the internet and come to find out. One of the prep steps for uploading a dev source package is it goes through and it strips out all the git folders, and I needed some way to maintain those. You know they had to stay there and the solution was to put them all inside into the tar ball upload. The thing with the tar ball and then the script on the build side was to untar it before building it and it was really ugly, but it worked.

01:26:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
so tar shows up all over the place well, the funny thing too is, you know, I was looking at the history a little bit because it's like it's been around for forever and there's actually a pax command that was supposed to replace it. But I noticed it's not even on my system and it was basically like it's not used, like tar. Is tar still the majority usage versus pax?

01:26:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah, because it just works yeah, yeah, all right, ken, tell us how you broke your machine yesterday.

01:26:46 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I want to tell you how I fixed my machine today.

01:26:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go.

01:26:50 - Ken McDonald (Host)
But this week I'm going to be covering the Pipewire command that starts a P pulse audio compatible daemon, that integrates with the pipe wire media server or allows you to confirm that it is already running. For those listening in the show notes I have a link, have linked a document containing screenshots demonstrating the various options, so if maybe we should do a art cover how to pull up the show notes for listeners sometime, but you can pull it up and follow along while you're listening that way. The first screenshot that I'm going to show is showing using pipe wire dash pulse, along with the dash H or the dash dash help and, of course, the dash dash version to get the version that you're running Now. The second and third screenshots are going to show the output after using and let's go ahead and pull up that second screenshot. There we go Using the command pipewire-pulse, followed by dash v for verbose, and, as you can see, it starts running, giving you a lot of information on the screen about what pipe wire pulse is loading as far as modules and what configuration files it's reading, and on the third screen it shows the rest of it.

01:28:35
Now, for those of y'all listening, the screen's got green comments, yellow comments and red comments. The green are just notifications, the yellow has a W indicating it's a warning about something. When I did this yesterday, I already had pipe wire running on my system so it was finding that it couldn't do certain things because of that, and the red was showing warnings indicating that the address that wanted to use was already in use in most cases most cases. But to show you why I had problems, I actually ended up trying to start up the audio for my system today and it wasn't finding any devices available through Pulse Audio. I actually had to open up the terminal and launch this command to get it to show them. So this command saved some of the changes I was playing around with yesterday, in addition to trying out this command that is a bunch.

01:30:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Are those individual devices? I'm trying to read your screen.

01:30:04 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Let me expand the. What it's showing is updates as it's, as the Pulse server gets information from Chrome.

01:30:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ah, that's all of your Chrome tabs making noise.

01:30:24 - Ken McDonald (Host)
That's just the one Chrome tab for Restream.

01:30:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, okay. Oh, is that logging for every audio packet that it sends? Yes, aha, cool.

01:30:37 - Ken McDonald (Host)
And that's because I did the verbose when I launched it.

01:30:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go.

01:30:41 - Ken McDonald (Host)
I don't think I can go back to the screen I'm showing.

01:30:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's all right. Okay, very cool. Good to know how to get more information out of PuckedWire. I like it.

01:30:55 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Especially if you're playing around and for some reason your devices disappear and you've got a muted volume indicator on your uh taskbar yes, yes, I'm always playing around.

01:31:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We know, rob, we know. All right. Well, thanks for that. Um, we have covered the news, we've covered the tips, we've got some good stuff. I'm going to let each of the guys get in the last word. I am tempted to try to count that as Rob's last word and just skip him, but I guess I'll be nice and we'll let Rob plug it Whatever it is that he wants to plug at whatever weird social networks he's a part of.

01:31:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right then. So thanks for the donations to get me started on Linux Mint. Or maybe I should say now I'll wait till I get to my review, to to in a couple of months to give you the cinnamon desktop.

01:31:58
that's with the cinnamon desktop that is, with the cinnamon desktop. Yes, because that's actually what I was really reviewing as cinnamon. But linux mint is the best way to um get a good view of this cinnamon desktop, so I've installed it, I'm getting off the ground on it and I'm not going to say any more about it yet. We'll. We'll let you know as time progresses. It's it's too early, it's too early, but um and I'll have some clips, maybe along the way, to share with people who want to see how great or not so great We'll see Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition is.

01:32:44
But until then, or maybe this is where you'll find the clips, who knows? If you're not following me, you're not going to know. But you come to robertpcampbellcom Links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter and my Mastodon. And if you just love what I do and you want me to keep coming back and doing more of it, you click on this coffee cup and you can donate me coffees in $5 increments at a time. So one coffee, that's $5. Ten coffees, that's $50. You do the math if you want to do more.

01:33:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, very cool, all right Ken.

01:33:27 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Well, I want to recommend reading Christine Hall's article on a new conference about everything open that may be replacing Australia's long-running Linuxconfau. I've got a link to it in the show notes for anybody that's got the time to read, so I know Rob's not going to read it. What?

01:33:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Ken, were you talking?

01:33:59 - Ken McDonald (Host)
Let me unmute myself all right, anything else that's okay I don't think anybody wants to hear about what my laptop has all right jeff uh, not much to say, it's uh.

01:34:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Since we're running long, I picked a short little uh poem for today. Roses are red, violence are blue. For the 85th time, stop calling hard drives, cpus.

01:34:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Have a great week everybody oh, I could tell you stories about that y'all, oh yeah, anybody that stopped using the optical drives as cup holders yeah, yeah, all of you that.

01:34:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Why? What else do you need them for? Yeah, today those of you who've done tech support professionally or the family tech support, you know what I'm talking about.

01:34:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, well, I've heard people call their computers their hard drive yep, that's one I've.

01:35:03 - Ken McDonald (Host)
That's one I've heard too I've heard storage called memory and memory called storage I mean, those are a little bit, a little bit more understandable, um yeah, I mean the memory one is is uh often called wrongly I mean they're out of storage and they say, oh, I need more memory.

01:35:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And like I had a family member recently said they wanted more memory for Christmas and so I got them more memory, and then they're looking at their hard drive storage and like so how much is?

01:35:35
this. We haven't put it in yet, but they're like at that time Like, well, how much is this going to be't put in yet, but they're like at that time, like, well, how much is this going to be then? You know, right now, because it's in red, barely anything left, um, and I'm like, oh, you wanted storage, so I have a light christmas present coming for you in a few days yeah, there you go.

01:35:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The one that probably always irritated me the most is the monitor, thinking that the monitor was the computer. That was a classic Alright.

01:36:08 - Ken McDonald (Host)
HP does make monitors that are the computers.

01:36:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All-in-ones are a thing, that's not what this was.

01:36:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Many of the vendors make all-in-ones they're so fun to work on yeah, maybe they're not any worse than a laptop. Many of the vendors make all-in-ones they're so fun to work on yeah, maybe they're not any worse than a laptop, all right.

01:36:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, this has been our new feature segment, tales from Tech Support, but it's done. Now I do want to let everybody know that you can find me primarily over at Hackaday these days. I've got the security column. That goes live on Fridays. I've got Floss Weekly there we record on Tuesdays and that gets posted on Wednesdays. You can check both of those things out. We would love to have you we are so glad that you're here those listening to us live I believe at least most of you are. Well, no, not most of you.

01:36:54
This goes out live to everyone. Everyone should be a part of Club Twit and that is the way that you can give back directly, support the shows that you love. You can get the show video on the download, get access to the Discord, all that good stuff. Take a look at Club Twit. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month. I've been known to say per day. It's not that expensive, it's only a coffee per month, but we do appreciate those that watch and listen live, both on the on the live and on the download, and we will see you. We'll be back next week. We'll see you then on the untitled Linux show.