Untitled Linux Show 195 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 it's finally here. Yes, we're talking about GIMP 3, but there's also Blender 4.4, the Raspberry Pi image generator, fedora 42 goes beta. We talk about the other big, amd Ryzen release and GNOME 48. Lots more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
00:19 - Leo (Announcement)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit, linux, goodness and geekery.
00:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is the Untitled Linux Show, and of course, it's not just me here to talk about what's going on in the news. We've got sort of our regular crew. Rob, ken and Jeff are here and boy, it seems like there's a lot going on this week. There's a few things going on this week that we've been waiting for for a very long time, and Rob is sort of going to lead out in that, because there's something that we have been waiting for for. Has it been a decade? Has it been?
01:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
a decade, rob.
01:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, we'll get to that it's been, really it's been a very long time. Yes, it half-life 3?
01:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
nope, maybe it's the cosmic desktop. Okay again, sally. No, looks like. Looks like I'm gonna be waiting a little longer for those things. But this week released just this week.
01:42
After give or take of waiting, the release candidates have all been tried and played around with for quite some time now. Okay, without further ado. Release this week is GIMP 3.0. So I mean, how long have we been waiting? So I mean, how long have we been waiting?
02:13
Saurav Rudra at ITS FOSS says GIMP 3.0 was announced 10 years ago, in 2015. Now if you look at Joey Sneddon at OMG Ubuntu, he says GIMP 3.0 is a result of seven years of development. So I guess they did nothing for three years there. I don't know. But Michael Larable at Pharonix says he has been writing about GIMP 3.0 for some 13 years. So I had to do a little digging myself to see what's going on. How long have we been waiting? So what I found? A little bit of my research. Obviously this was all in my head at one point and you know a long time has gone by, but GIMP 2.0 was released in 2004. And you know, for me, once any major version of anything is released, I'm kind of already waiting for the next one. So I'd have to say we've been waiting for over 20 years for GIMP 3.0. I mean, once 2.0 is out, you kind of know 3.0 is coming somewhere. But looking at the GIMP website itself, it was announced 10 years ago, in 2015, like Rudrov said, but they didn't start working on it until after GIMP 2.10, which was released in 2018. And I can only guess that Michael Larrabeau must have been speculating on the future of GIMP 3.0 long before it was ever announced, which must bring it to his 13 years, and I don't know what happen about the other seven years before that. But anyway, I guess the real question is how long have you been waiting for a gimp 3.0? 20 years for me.
03:55
So highlights of this new release include a much refined interface written in gtk3 a little behind since we have gtk4, but yeah, we'll get there and it allows use of the mouse scroll wheel to flip through different dockable dialogues tabs, along with a new slash screen and logo uh, as splash screen, not slash, uh. As well as improvements to the legacy icon theme to uh, look great on high dpi screens and you know, I think it looks pretty good. Uh, you know, let me just switch something over here for those watching. I have played with it a little bit, but I think it looks pretty good. But if you read a lot of the comments, especially on omg ubuntu, you would kind of think the new ui is rather horrible. There's a lot of people complaining on there, but I don't know. I assume it's just a bunch of adobe fanboys or something, I don't know. I think it looks pretty nice. Um, not like this 1990s interface like some people refer to, but decide for yourself. I like it. I think it looks pretty good.
05:05
Other features though if you're, if you don't care about, the ui just has to work right. Who cares if it looks old, which it doesn't, but anyway, you can exchange files with more applications, including bc7, dds files, as well as better psd, which is photoshop's native file, a better psd export and many other new formats. You can set your paint tool to expand layers automatically as needed. Uh, pro quality text got easier that's their words because you can style your text, apply outlines, shadows, bevels and more, and you can still edit your text, change font and size and even tweak the style settings. Organizing your layers has become much easier with the ability to select multiple items at once, move them or transform them all together at once. Move them, uh, or transform them all together. Color management has improved again, as, as their long-term project to make give an advanced image editor for all usages that's what they say uh, they updated to the gtk3 for modern desktop usage which, um, you know we're on gta4, but desktop usage which, um, you know, we're on gta4 but and a big one for linux users, big one, big one for that.
06:33
We're fans of native wayland, yeah, with high dpi support, which I mentioned above. That the dpi support, but on linux, you kind of you really want wayland for that, so, and it has native support. So, boom, and maybe one of the biggest improvements. I saved this for last. It was the first on there, and you really want Wayland for that, and it has native support. So, boom, and maybe one of the biggest improvements. I saved this for last. It was the first on their list. I saved it for last Because it's really something that a graphical editor working with layers really wants and that's non-destructive editing for most commonly used filters. And I know we brought that up before, but you probably don't pay attention to every word I say and you probably forgot. I mentioned this in one of the release candidates several years ago, but and there's a lot more in there too. This is really just the highlights, and I'm looking forward to doing some graphic work in GIMP again myself. I don't do as much as I used to, but it looks pretty good to me.
07:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know, I've been running GIMP 3 for a while now because some distros like Fedora just said basically I'll forget this, we're just going to go ahead and ship it. We're going to ship it now. Yeah.
07:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And I'm going off memory here, but if my memory serves me correct, even though they're on GTK3 now, the conversion from 2 to 3 kind of paved the way to make future conversions a lot easier.
07:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that was definitely the idea.
08:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
From some of the articles I read, it sounds like some of them were going on the possibility that GTK3 may be forked instead of going to GTK4 so that they stay with it.
08:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting. That's a very interesting thought. We'll see if that happens. Well, there was another big software release. Do we want to talk about Blender? It's not exactly as monumental as the 3.0 of GIMP, but there's something new there isn't there.
08:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
There's always something new with GIMP or Blender.
08:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Both of them.
08:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
apparently, there's not always something new with GIMP, but there is. This week, marius Nestor and Theodore McKenzie wrote about the much-anticipated major update to the popular jack-of-all-trades 3D software Jonathan mentioned I'm talking about Blender, in this case version 4.4. It brings a wealth of new features and improvements across its animation, modeling, sculpting, rendering, geometry nodes and other tool sets. According to Marius, it introduces support for integer sockets in the compositor, a much more accurate, fast Gaussian mode of the blur node, a revamped glare node for greater control and a better user experience, and support for rendering videos using the H.265 or HEVC codec. Now, according to Theodore, the highlight of Blender 4.4 is the rewritten CPU compositor, which brings significant performance improvements in certain node configurations, better caching of static resources like images and reduced memory usage in node setups with many pixel modes, making the compositor generally faster. This version is the first release to use Vulkan for displaying the rendered result of cycles. The Blender Foundation says that the process has been re-implemented using a new threading model which results in the same performance compared to when OpenGL was used. They also state the Blender developers doubled down on quality instability, fixing over 700 reported issues, revisiting old bug reports and addressing unreported problems during their group effort, which they referred to as the winter of quality. Since I've only touched on some of the improvements, I recommend reading Marius and Theodore's articles or watching the at CG underscore cookies.
10:53
Jonathan Lampel's 21 minute video presentation. I've got links to all three in the show notes.
11:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool.
11:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Speaking of which, rob, I'm surprised you didn't provide a link to Brody Roberson's video on GIMP.
11:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm sure that would be good, but I had not watched it yet, so it was not a reference for my material this is the kind of thing he likes to cover, though that would be a good reference to go look at.
11:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'll go ahead and put it in the Discord so that anybody in the Discord can watch it later.
11:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Blender is one of those things that is on my punch list of. It would be good to take a few days and sit and go through some of the YouTube, like. There's plenty of information out there about how to use it, but I just I've never sat down and taken the time to go through it and okay, so this is how it works. Oh, that's what that button does. These are the tools that I want, right, and I, I figure two days and I can, you know, get to the point of being at least comfortable enough with the interface to go and do so you can open it pretty much.
12:00
Yeah, you can open it and actually know where the tools are to be able to use them.
12:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I know enough to be able to open it. Import a STL file that you'd use with a 3D printer, do some tweaks to it, then save it back out as an STL file so I can use it to 3D print.
12:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I can do all of that, except the actual making tweaks to the model, the actual thing that you want to do with Blender, that's the part that I don't know anything about.
12:33 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's where those tutorials came in handy.
12:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I didn't really think about Blender for that use case. Oh yeah, a lot of people use it for that.
12:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It works good because there's a lot of models out there Like you can even just take the BMW model and I've done a bunch of playing with it where you can follow along with like YouTube videos and just how to do things, and you can take those existing models and tweak it and then re-render and see what kind of changes happen when you know what the original is supposed to look like.
13:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So that way you're not starting from ground zero yeah, I guess, without ever having used it, the use case, I've always thought of it, with which being aware there's plenty of other things like benchmarking, but it is like just uh, graphics for games and and cartoons, I guess yeah it, so it.
13:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is more of a 3d modeler like its. Its original use case was more about 3d modeling than it was the actual rendering and video editing, um, but they've added all that stuff to it and now you've got flow the movie there's been several movies done in blender, actually, yeah, um, over the years, quite a few of them.
13:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
About once a year or so, I think, they come out with another one, a project.
13:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, something like that that they highlight with all the cool stuff you can do in Blender. Yeah, no, it's pretty neat, all the stuff you can do with it. Lots and lots of options there. All right, speaking of options, there is an announcement from the guys at Raspberry Pi where you can have plenty of options in the exact image that you get. So this is the Raspberry, the RPI dash image, dash gen.
14:16
It's the Raspberry Pi image generator, and this is intended to be an end user solution for getting custom file systems that you can burn onto an SD card and boot on a Pi, which you can sort of do like. You can do this by hand and people have done it and don't have problems with it, but that you have a tool to do it now is going to make this a lot easier for a bunch of different use cases. And if you think about it like so, there's been projects that I've been involved in and one of the things as soon as we supported the Raspberry Pi, somebody's like we should make our own distro, and I said no, no, we should not. That is a bad idea. We do not want to make our own distro, and he's like what I really mean is that we should spin our own version of Raspberry Pi OS. That's a thing we could think about doing. With this tool, we now have a much easier way to do that because you get actual Raspberry Pi OS. It's going to get all of their updates, but you can also do your own stuff on top of it or you can pull packages out of it if you want to.
15:15
All kinds of options here. It's based around some YAML config files and if you follow the link, they've got a whole flowch chart on all the stuff it does, which is pretty interesting. But you, you run it through this and at the end of it it just gives you here's your dot img flashed onto your sd card, and away you go. Um, you've been able to do some configuration with, for example, the, the raspberry pi flasher itself. It'll let you go in and you know, set up a user, change your root, root password, set up your Wi-Fi, stuff, like that.
15:47
This is kind of that same thing, but much, much more comprehensive, lots more changes you can make, and we've talked about this sort of thing for other distros. There's some tools to be able to get your own kind of dedicated tool set, a dedicated tool set to make your own ISOs for, like Fedora and Ubuntu and those, and so that brings this to the Raspberry Pi and you know it's going to be great, for if you have multiple Raspberry Pis and you want to have kind of a stripped down image, there's just the tools you want in it, or if you want an image that's got, you know, everything turned on if there's a specific tool set you want, it's going to be great for that. It's also going to be really good, like on the kind of more commercial, industrial side, so that people can have their own custom spins and, you know, easily push them out to however many thousand Raspberry Pis they have running stuff. So, good move, good move from Raspberry Pi. I think this is a this is a great tool that's going to help all of us that work with the Raspberry Pi. So I'm excited to get my fingers on this and actually play with it.
16:50
Anybody else have enough Raspberry Pis that this makes sense for them. I know, ken, you were running one as your main desktop there for a little while. Ken's a Pi guy. Ken is a Pi guy, all right. All right, well, let's move on to. Let's move on to the ryzen 9, the new x3d, I think. I think he may be way behind us in audio. I I'm not sure. Anyway, jeff, let's talk about the Ryzen 9. I think we'll have Ken disconnect and reconnect to the call and that way we can know that he is right up with us and not running a few seconds behind.
17:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I was listening to the wrong audio feed.
17:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There it is. So yes, you were running several seconds behind.
17:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
There are technical issues and there are technical issues of your own making and, as Linux geeks, we are very familiar with both Always making our own technical issues so we can correct them, but I'll probably be touching on a distro later that may have used that.
18:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Cool, yeah, look forward to that. Let's go to Jeff and talk about the Ryzen 9, the new X3D chip.
18:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, and, side note, I always tell people with Linux my problems are self-induced, just because of what I do. But on with new hardware and, as Jonathan covered, last week AMD released the 9950X3D processor and the 9800X3D processor. Well, a little before that, but you understand. But quietly, alongside those, AMD launched the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Now Michael from Pharonix conducted extensive benchmarking on this new chip and today we'll dive into the results and I'm also going to share my editorial thoughts on the entire x3d lineup what I recommend people buy and what to avoid and why so. Just first a quick refresher. The 9900 x3d is a 12 core, 24 thread processor featuring two ccds, which means six cores have the extra 3d cache while the other six do not. Now, historically I've always been wary of mixed core settings, setups like these, where you know some cores have cache, others don't. I also said this on previous Intel. You know, historically, where you know you had the performance cores versus the efficiency cores, historically, where you know you had the performance cores versus the efficiency cores. But you know I'm changing my tune because you know Linux scheduling has improved significantly and this is no longer a concern, and in this, in the case of this chip, both Windows and Linux and the entire X3D line tests confirm that the previous headaches, like needing to reinstall from scratch or dealing with core parking, are basically now resolved. I mean, you can do it but you don't need to. It's not like the 7000 series. They've got the software down. That extra time to mature really helped.
19:54
Michael's review also includes comparisons with a range of the chips. You know he's got the 7000 series CPUs. The X3D and the non-X3D models are in there, two Intel chips the Core Ultra 5 245K and the Ultra 9 285K. Now with over 400 benchmarks and results, I won't go through them all here. We'd be here forever. But let's take a look at the geometric mean across the tests. Now, if you remember, previously I've stated geometric mean helps kind of get rid of it wasn't eliminate flyers, but it helps reduce the impact of a flyer bit of data on the overall average. And so you know the 9900X3D is slightly faster than the standard 9900X, which lacks the extra cache. That being said, if you're deciding between those two chips, you need to focus on specific benchmarks, because certain tests heavily favored the extra cache, while others saw the 9900X come out ahead. Overall, the 9900X3D edges past the Intel 285K, you know over the geometric mean of those four, over 400 tests or benchmarks. And you know, unsurprisingly, it's faster than the 7,000 series of processors. You know, hey, there was a generation generational gain. You know, imagine that. So it it definitely. Uh. Well, I shouldn't say that because Intel stepped backwards, but you know what I mean. Amd went forward, so it's all good. Michael's evaluation summaries make it easy to compare the 9900X against the 9900X3D. So if you have a specific workload in mind, these summaries will quickly show you which processor performs better for your needs. He has a big vertical chart comparing those two chips, and he's got one with the 9900X3D, with the 7900X3D, and he lists all the benchmarks in there and it's in a nice little format showing whether it was faster or slower than the competing chips. So you can quickly decide what you need.
22:08
Now for my editorial on the X3D lineup. My honest opinion unless you snag a fantastic deal on the 9900 X3D, I would skip it. Now let me explain this. Now let me explain this Consider your workload. Are you a gamer? If so, opt for the 9950 X3D instead.
22:52
With this processor, the 9950, you get the full eight cores of cache, like the 9800 X3D, and an additional eight cores without cash. So you get kind of the best of both worlds when you combine them and it's like I said, it's so much more seamless than it was in the past. The 9900 X3D, on the other hand, sacrifices two cores of cash for gaming. So now you're gaming like a was it a 9600 x3d or, soon to be released, the six core version and you're losing two cores for productivity. So it's like a middle of the ground chip, but it stumbles, especially at its price point. For context, context, as of today, the 9950X3D is $699. That's United States dollars. The 9900X3D is $599. So there's $100 difference and the standard 9900X. So it's no extra cash, just the 12 cores. It's $409.
24:07
Now some of you might point out that I personally use a 7900X CPU, and you would be correct. However, mine lacks the cache and I snagged it at a steep discount. It fits my middle-of-the-ground productivity needs, although admittedly, there's better gaming chips that were available. Even at the time when it came out it was. It was not setting any records anywhere there. I was looking more at uh power, availability and price. Like I said, I got a pretty screaming deal on it and it wasn't anything insider, it was just. I found a heck of a sale at a major retailer and jumped on it. Now let me be clear. I don't think the 9900X3D is a bad processor. It might shine in specific niche scenarios, you know, maybe, whether it's power efficiency or excelling at certain tasks, because there was a few that the 90, the 9900 X3D really rocked at, but they were very niche. I mean, you're very specific in what you're doing. If you're looking at that, you know. But in terms of value, I believe there are better options, you know, depending on your needs, you know.
25:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Basically, I'm saying spend wisely and choose based on your real workload so you're saying uh, if you're a gamer, extra cash is a good thing yes, cash or cash yes, c-a-c-h-e.
25:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, the, the, the 9950 is not really for gaming. There are some benchmarks that show it's slightly faster, but it's one of those. It's statistically faster, not realistically faster. You know, okay, I could take a little longer if I'm compiling or doing other productivity stuff. Just just save money, get the eight core, dump it into that extra money into, you know, more memory, a faster drive, a better GPU, better power supply, anything else better audio gear exactly, yeah, anything.
26:23
Uh, you know, if you really want productivity, productivity, if you're already into $600, it's not that much to go. You know what go $700, and you're going to have a chip a lot faster than the 9900.
26:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So I'm staying with my AMD Ryzen 7 7700 for now. Oh yeah, that's still a solid chip. So I'm staying with my AMD Ryzen 7 7700 for now.
26:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh yeah, that's still a solid chip.
26:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah, and I'm sticking with my 7900. Now if you're looking at just the 9900X, okay, maybe you're saving some money because you're stepping down from the 9950. And maybe there's some power concerns, but you're not giving up really gaming. You're not the best gaming processor, you're just stepping back from a productivity so you don't have that fight between oh, I'm stepping down from gaming and I'm stepping down from productivity, because most games almost exclusively use eight cores or less. There's a few exceptions, but eight cores will do you for quite a while and a lot of people game on, you know, six core CPUs.
27:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What if you're a streamer and gaming is productivity?
27:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's actually a legitimate question. That's that was one of the things that I thought of where chips like this and the 9950X3D might make sense If you're gaming and streaming from the same machine at the same time, or if you're a game developer and you need to be able to have Blender open, working on a model and the game open and running at the same time.
28:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And streaming both via OBS to whoever you're working with.
28:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's when you need the 9950X3D.
28:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, step up to the 9950. Or if the you know, I'm just kind of something off the top of my head. You know, if the 9900X3D, if you could get it for maybe 500, 450, something like that, where it's significantly cheaper than the 9950, then I could make an argument. But realistically, the general consensus and this is across multiple reviewers, across multiple operating systems is that just avoid the chip. The value is not there.
28:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So the question is is AMD going to drop the price on it, or is the 9950 going to become unobtainium?
28:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I bet you they drop the price on it. That's how I got mine. I didn't get mine at launch or anything like that. It was later in the cycle and they weren't selling that great. So I'm like, oh, I could save a couple hundred bucks off of 99.50.
29:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So wait six months a year or just before the next one comes out.
29:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Maybe not even that long If they're going to change the price. I could see it happening in two to three months.
29:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, but I mean realistically, how many people listening are really serious about productivity? Be honest with yourself. If you're not making money with productivity or you're not spending many hours every day, you can probably get by with the 9800X 3D just fine, you can probably get by with the 9800X 3D just fine.
29:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Better question is how many self-employed people that would be using it for productivity would be waiting.
29:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, get to make the choice themselves. Yeah.
29:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And if you're using it for productivity, get the 9900X. You're saving a little money and, yeah, your gaming performance isn't great, but it's not bad. I mean, it's not like it's not going to play your games, it's just like, okay, you're going to drop a few frames. But the other thing to consider is, if you're running 4K, well, you're probably bottlenecking your GPU and not your CPU. Even once you get 2K, depending on what your graphics card is, the game you're running, it means less. And the other thing is what is the frequency of your monitor? My current monitor is 120 hertz, so I'll see you know. Look, I can run 400, or this is 450. And well, anything above 120 is meaningless to me. Well, anything above 120 is meaningless to me.
30:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
For me, productivity means email, some text documents and a web browser. I mean, I think a Chromebook does productivity just fine.
30:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I guess I should have said unless you're doing really heavy calculations, simulations.
31:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Like in GNU Cache.
31:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, we're talking like a workstation build where you're doing stuff.
31:08 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
In other words, Rob does everything through Firefox.
31:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So, speaking of Firefox, I'm going to interject here before Rob takes the story and say I claim credit for this. It was me and David on a Floss Weekly interview with a couple of Firefox devs and as we were getting ready to end you know, david, do you have any questions you want to ask? And David's like, please bring PWA back to Firefox. And the two guys were like, oh, I guess we could think about doing that. So, rob, you tell us the story, but I got to say we did this.
31:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well then you can claim the results. So yeah, I mean followers of the show may know that one of my biggest criticisms, also of Firefox, besides the CEO pay and on the lack of focus on their core product and we don't have time for the whole list, rob it's?
32:06
it's their lack of support for PWAs or progressive web apps, for those not familiar with with the term. So a PWA, it's essentially a way to make a web page into a desktop app and and there are apps that, uh, do customizations to make themselves specifically work for this purpose and there's specific integrations with the desktop that this feature usually allows. So typically, you know, it's kind of like, it's like an electron app where the browser gets hidden away and it just runs the app as a PWA and it can have all the integrations that an app has Well, maybe not all, but a lot of them that a typical website doesn't. So, for example, teams Microsoft Teams that is used to be an Electron app, but they got rid of the Electron app. On Windows. They went to, I don't know, c sharp or something I have no idea. But the official method to run teams on Linux now is a PWA, which you couldn't really do in Firefox, so you had to have a Chrome browser or something if you, if you want to do that, if you want to do that. So they announced that they are bringing PWA support to Firefox 136. But they plan to do it just a little different from at least how the other browsers are doing it. You know where other browsers get out of the way and let the PWA act like its own app.
33:44
Firefox plans to keep the experience more like a website or, as product manager David Rubino says, the aim is to offer features that help you get a more app-like experience for any website you choose, when you choose, but without users feeling like they're not using Firefox.
34:07
So they really want to keep Firefox front and center. For example, he says web apps and Firefox will not use a minimal browser window but will continue to show a main toolbar with the address bar, extensions, bookmarks, though the new tab button will be replaced with a button to open a normal Firefox window. He says web apps are still websites and web browsers, so the goal will be to fully maintain access to features that help with the website itself, while de-emphasizing features that are about managing multiple websites. So I don't know what actually makes this PWA support. It doesn't sound like much, or like Joy Sneddon from OMG Ubuntu puts it, firefox proposed approach reads more like a minimum viable product with minimum of effort than innovative spin on the concept. So I'm not a fan of their initial approach, uh, to progressive web apps. Hopefully they go further, you know, maybe make it an option to actually work like a real progressive web app, but at the very least it's a step in the right direction, more than they had before.
35:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, well, you know, oftentimes with stuff like this you get kind of that minimum viable product and then if people start using it, then more and more resources get put into it. So there's a very good chance that this will get better as time goes on. It's nice that they've gone in and actually made it happen again.
35:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think I actually would enjoy being able to have all the tools that Firefox gives you for going to other websites available while you're treating that one site as an application.
36:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, but really a progressive web app is still just a website, but they try to make it. The other browsers try to make it run more like an application, whereas this, like most progressive web apps, like teams for example Microsoft Teams, you could still use teams in the web it's not really much different from the PWA besides the integration. So I don't see I don't see a whole lot that with this what they're getting out of it than just going to the website itself.
36:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Anyway, Well, I think there's some extra APIs that are part of, like the PWA spec, the integrations. Yeah yeah, there's some of those that just aren't going to be available as just another browser tab. So that's the sort of thing that they've gone in, I believe, and have actually added back To see how it works. Yeah, give it a test. Go grab Firefox Nightly and give it a test. Run on your favorite PWA. I have no idea what progressive web app.
36:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I would even try to use, Well obviously, Teams. I keep saying that right.
37:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go, if you really want to run Microsoft. Teams on your Linux desktop if you really want to do that.
37:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Lacker you. Well, if you're going to run Teams, don't just run the conversation. Get in and go with the scheduler. Get in and run all the other stuff you can do in there.
37:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Video and Are you talking about SharePoint? I mean SharePoint kind of is in.
37:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Teams, but that's not much of a feature of it, it's kind of an acronym. But anyway, it is in the nightly build but you do have to enable flag at this time. I believe is what I saw.
37:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But how many of those PWAs are designed to work offline?
37:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's an interesting question. I'm not sure.
37:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, there's not many if it's a website.
37:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There's some, I believe there's supposed to be. Pwas are supposed to. I don't use any. I've never used any PWAs that would be used offline, but I believe they're supposed to kind of have some of that functionality.
38:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Just wondering, because I've had occasion where I was able to continue working on a Google document on my Chromebook offline and it did sync back up once I got back hooked online.
38:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, Speaking of working on documents, there is an update to Calibre right, Ken.
38:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, there is an update to Calibre, right, ken? Yes, there is. In fact, marius Nestor wrote about the Calibre developer, covid Goyle, releasing a major update to this open source, free and cross-platform ebook manager, viewer, reader and organizer. I do use it for managing and organizing my ebooks. Occasionally I'll use it to view one, just to make sure I don't have any DRM in it. But the latest release, according to Marius, is caliber 8.0. But when I went to look at the what's new, it said 8.0.1.
39:05
Now, according to Marius, highlights include much improved Kobo support, with the ability to natively edit, view and convert K-EPUB format files, and automatic EPUB to K-EPUB conversion when sending books to Kobo devices. Support for new firmware for the latest Tolino devices and a new option in Book Details to suppress author search links. This release also supports connecting to a folder like it would with a USB-MS based device, which may be useful for Chromebook users. I will definitely find that useful when USB devices appear as folders rather than the actual devices and introduces the ability to move multiple selected items in the table of contents. Version 8.0.1 fixes a failure to start on systems where the user had previously installed the Kobo Touch extended plugin and disabled the built-in Kobo Touch driver. It addressed multiple bugs, including a bug in the e-book viewer not closing on the interrupt signal. I recommend reading Marius' article for more details about Calibre 8.0.1 and following the link to what's new through the caliber website.
40:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Or if you're dorks like us, you can pronounce it Calibre. We got some hate mail for that.
40:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I've been trying to say caliber since then.
40:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yes, yep, it's a neat project and a neat program.
40:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And it was started off as a way for COVID to teach himself database management.
40:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, interesting Fun, all right. So there's some news in Fedora world, fedora land, and two things in particular that I wanted to briefly touch on, and that is that the Fedora 42 beta is out. So if you're feeling adventurous and want to go run a beta version of the best distro out there, fedora 42 beta is available. With Fedora 42, we've got something really interesting. That is, that the KDE spin is not a spin anymore, it is as official as the GNOME workstation. So there are now two editions of Fedora workstation there's GNOME and KDE, and I believe that landed with 42. And so for those of us that actually use it, it's not going to be a whole lot of change. But there is the possibility that it's going to change some things about the way it's marketed and maybe even the way that funds are distributed for the KDE version to be an official version of Fedora. But the beta is out. It's got some neat stuff in it and you can go check that out and, of course, with the beta for 42 coming out, that means that they're already thinking about the new stuff that's going to be in Fedora 43, and there's one.
42:14
There's one thing there in particular that really caught my eye, and that is that they are going to set the expectation that packages are all done with reproducible builds. And so this is, this is the idea that the actual, like the, the individual, the contents of a package, right? So you know, when we say package, we're talking about the actual dot rpm file that you use to install all the software from fedora. Um, they are now going to set the expectation, starting with 43, that the actual, the collection of debt, in that package. You've got a time stamp for when it was built, you've got a signature that's going to contain some random information in it, because cryptography, those things, of course, are going to change every time it gets built. The actual files, the contents of it, other than those things, what, what sort of special thing would a package have in it?
43:28
And the only thing that I can really think of, think of, is if one, for some reason, like, went out and got random noise, you know, pulled from slash, dev, slash, random during the build process, and I I still I'm not sure why a package would need to do that. So I'm not sure why a package would need to do that. So I'm not sure why. But they talked about, like 99% of the packages they're hoping to get to be completely reproducible in this way.
43:51
But the reason that we're trying, that Fedora wants to get to this point, is that's going to make it a lot easier to verify that a package like is good and then do offline verification to make sure that a package wasn't tampered with, um, so you know, being able to find the places where someone could try to hide malware, that sort of thing. Um, this is one of the directions that security in linux and open source overall is moving is to be able to do reproducible builds, um, and, uh, looking to do that with door 43. So, uh, definitely don't go run rawhide yet, um, but the door 42, the beta is out, and, uh, if you're feeling just a little adventurous, it might be worth giving a shot.
44:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I like adventure.
44:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I know, and honestly, with Fedora right now, I would not be too too scared to run the beta. In fact I'm very tempted to install the machine behind me. I just did an upgrade to the latest Fedora 41, and it went ahead and pulled down KDE 6.3. So that was almost more of an adventurous update than going to the beta would be.
44:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But I can't switch to anything on my main desktop. Yet I'm stuck on Mint. Well, I shouldn't say stuck, it's not bad. I am on Mint, though, for at least a couple more months. It's not bad, but I don't want to give it away yet, and somebody did donate extra money for me to go to four months, so I'll go to that full four months.
45:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Rob's Linux-only fans, coffee-only fans and months rob's linux only fans coffee only fans.
45:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And how's your ap amd gpu working with it?
45:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't want to give away anything but, um, I don't have great monitors, so I'll just leave it at that ken was trying to segue.
45:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
He was Ironically, Ken was segueing to the one of us that has the AMD story that doesn't have an AMD video card.
45:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's just not right, jeff, just yet. Oh, okay, okay, well, they've turned around quite a bit. Things are better, yeah, and NVIDIA has been falling down a lot. Things are better, yeah, and NVIDIA has been falling down a lot. But you know, just following up on a story from a couple of weeks ago about the Radeon 9070 graphics cards on Linux, you know we discussed the code was already in the kernel, so there was no need for any special Git tree pulls or advanced code merges, or you know, things were just working Well. Now we've got the next evolution in the graphics card arena.
46:28
Amd has officially released their AMD VLK Vulcan driver with RDNA4 GPU support. That's the 9070 cards. So today we're diving into the RADV, you know, know the community driver versus the amd vlk driver for performance on the 97, 90, 70 series of cards. I say series because there's a 90, 70 and a 90 70 xt. Now, unlike a lot of benchmarks, that focuses on production, scientific workload, performance stuff. You know, this is all about the games. It's the ultimate question for gamers what's the best driver to run? And it's with most things, it really depends on what you're playing. For the majority of tests the drivers were neck and neck, trading blows back and forth. However, one area where the amd vlk driver pulls ahead is Vulcan ray tracing. Amd's official Vulcan API driver demonstrated a significant advantage in Vulcan ray tracing benchmark that was conducted by Michael Larable over at Pharonix. That's the link in the show notes.
47:41
So kind of bottom line. If so, if you're not running ray tracing, it doesn't matter much. Either driver, either driver will provide excellent performance. Just look at the games you play and see if one of the other comes out on top. If you're someone who likes to dip their toes or dive head first into ray tracing, then the official amd driver is your best bet. It delivers an overall better experience for those ray tracing heavy videos. Now I should note too, when it comes to power consumption since it's the same hardware, only a different driver the difference was negligible. The RADV drivers showed slightly lower average power usage. It had a little lower idle state, but it falls into the. It wasn't really worth hardly worth noting. I mean just a sliver difference. And so, now that we've got our CPUs chosen, we got our new graphics cards in place and we looked at the data, we got our right driver installed. Looks like there's a bright future ahead for gaming on Linux.
48:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You say that we have our graphics cards in place. I just did a search and in the two weeks since we they've been out like two weeks now. I think it was two weeks ago. We covered it Unavailable. You're not getting it for under $97 979. If you're lucky, you might be able to find it for that at like a best buy.
49:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So they are they are still not good luck in your hands I have seen some come through now, a little more over msrp, you know, versus the reference cards. They're also restocking and there was there, was it? They kind of got debunked. But there sounds like there's some data behind it where they said lisa sue from amd said they sold um, was it 20, 20, 000 cards in that first initial launch. Then then they said well, no, it didn't actually come from amd, it came from another third party that was estimating how many cards because based on how many they've had go through and but overall consensus that they they've shipped a lot of cards and there's a lot more coming. So they're, they're, uh, they're expecting stability in the in the pipeline in about three weeks, maybe four weeks, you know, mid-april-ish, end of April-ish, and I've personally kind of kept an eye on them and I've seen some come through.
50:17
I mean, you can if you watch, they're not. You know I look for the NVIDIA cards. As far as I can tell, they're all unobtainium. I never see an opportunity to go oh, I could buy that one if I wanted AMD, I could. There's windows in there where like, oh, here's one right here and ones that are priced higher, $50 higher. You know, some of the it's got super big, cooler, and it's flashy colors and rgb and you know all the stuff they tack on. But did?
50:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I hear you say there's windows in there I wondered about that.
51:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Caught that too.
51:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I had that thought well, so you can have little graphic displays. Haven't you seen that, like even on the aios, you can have a little I think he said windowing uh, no.
51:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So yeah, that's that is definitely interesting something to keep our eye on, um, and then I do have one question jeff, yeah, should I try to put some money aside for to get this for myself for Christmas, instead of just continuing with the integrated GPU?
51:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I would. Right now, if you said I want to buy a GPU, I would recommend a 9070 XT. I would not get the 9070. Not get the 9070, I would get the xt because, kind of like we talked with the 9900, the xt has got the. The step up has such a major jump in performance for a little bit more money.
51:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, makes sense then I'd have to upgrade my monitors of course, of course you would.
52:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You would be forced to upgrade your monitors. Yes, definitely.
52:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know I need to upgrade my monitors seriously. So, jeff, why don't you do a thing on monitors next week? Just do a thing, jeff. Make it happen. Do a thing.
52:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Do a thing on monitors.
52:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
A story I don't know why I couldn't think of that word A story on monitors next week.
52:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Might be a little outside of the linux realm.
52:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, come on, people are using monitors, aren't they?
52:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
they're not all headless, uh so this is usually where I would segue by telling the next guy with the story, to save us from rob's blathering about doing things and forgetting how to say story. But rob has the next story, so the blathering continues. So the blathering continues. Yes, but rob, what is up with asahi linux? And, uh, that that person involved with it, asahi lena yeah, so I mean after good news?
52:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I hope, yeah, well unfortunately not, because after all the rust in the linux kernel drama, uh, leading to things, things such as Hector Martin stepping down from the Asahi Linux project, it kind of was starting to feel like things were starting to get back to normal. Well, I mean, and Asahi, you know they planned to continue moving forward with the great work they've been doing with Linux on Apple Silicon. But this week Asahi Linux has had more bad news, as Asahi Lina is pausing working on the Apple GPU drivers for Asahi Linux with the open source DRM kernel driver, as well as Mesa contributions. She was also contributing to Asahi AGX, gallium 3D and Honeycrisp Vulkan drivers. And Asahi Lena had worked closely with Alyssa Rosenzweig. So I mean, hopefully, hopefully we could keep her around.
54:11
And you know I don't think this pause had anything to do with the recent Russ drama, but I don't really know because the details are mostly unknown at this time. You know what she posted. She posted this in blue sky and this is all she said. She said so quote here for personal reasons I am, I no longer feel safe working on linux gpu drivers or the linux graphics ecosystem. I've paused work on apple gpu drivers indefinitely. I can't share any more information at this time. So please don't ask for more details, thank you. So I mean we could speculate, I don't know. Is Apple doing something crazy? Or is it with the Rust drama? I don't know. It's probably best at this time unless somebody knows more than what I've found to just let it be at this time. Uh, until more information, if more information ever comes out. But it isn't looking that good for a sigh right now. Uh, I'm kind of glad I never spent any money on an M one, m two for Lennox.
55:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have a different. I have a bit different take. Um, I always thought it was interesting that we had a sahelina, but like, let's, let's keep it. Let's keep this straight Asahi Lina was someone's alter ego. This was never a real person. This was a VTuber that was streaming themselves writing code and like code got written. Apparently good code got written, so like that's cool.
55:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Good, rust-based code.
55:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It was. It was rust-based code. Yeah, so, like, I always thought it was an interesting kind of social experiment, um, but let's not lose the details that, like, at some level, this is not a real person that we're talking about and, uh, I could take some guesses about the person behind the account's real identity. Um, I don't know for sure. I have a, I have a hunch. It doesn't. It doesn't take, like it's not too hard to read the tea leaves and go to go. That's interesting timing. Yeah, there's, there's a pretty obvious hunch as to who this was. Uh, I will say, as far as that goes, it doesn't really matter. Um, and it, you know, it sort of. It sort of just is what it is. Um, there are enough people that are still excited about Linux on the in-based max and enough work was done. Uh, I have a feeling that that project is going to continue and is going to remain healthy. Um, it is unfortunate to see people leave it, but I don't see this as being the end of the world.
56:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know, I, I always knew it was a, that their identity was covered. I, just because they're, they're a VTuber, like you said, I never really put it together that it very well is probably possibly an alter ego of maybe somebody we already know, maybe Hector Martin, like mashed potato, yes so that's, that's the obvious.
57:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Guess, right that that asahi lena was the alter ego of hector martin? And again, I don't like, I don't care, it's, it's just something fun on youtube. Um, and I don't know for sure that's who it was. It could have been somebody completely different. I, I just hope Alyssa Rosenweg.
57:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I hope you apologize for mispronouncing that.
57:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Rosenzweg.
57:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Alyssa Rosenweg Rosenzweg.
57:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Rosenzweg Swig.
57:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But I hope she doesn't leave also, Otherwise we're going to lose two of the best developers that were working on the apple lumix gpu graphics stack if I remember correctly, rosen swig is actually doing it professionally like is part of a company and is getting paid for doing it more power tour then
57:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
yeah yeah, yeah, you know, the fact that it's an alter ego does make make my my mind crank like if people don't even know who you are, what what? What is a safety thing? I, I don't know. Maybe there's something, legitimately, and it's. It's not hector, I, I don't know, it's it just really makes now, now that you, I never even put that together, that that's somebody's alter ego, I just never did. And now, like, my mind is like cranking rob, this is how vtubers work.
58:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's almost always a guy, not always, but it's almost always a guy not always, but it's almost always a guy running their voice through like 27 different vocal plug-ins to make themselves sound different. And then they wear some sort of rig so that you know the camera can trace where they are, and then they jump up and down and they have the animated puppet that jumps up and down for them. That's how the internet works these days, man I'm out of the loop on vtubers completely.
58:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm I. I don't even watch much youtube. I go to youtube if I'm looking for something very specific. It's not my, you know. I don't just sit there watch playlists for hours and hours you mean you don't go straight to brody's?
59:04
uh, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a comment on that. I know it's gonna be a long show, but but you know, brody was on floss on the episode. I was on and and I, and after the fact it kind of felt a little bad because, uh, you asked me, jonathan, if I'd heard of him and I said no, I hadn't, and and then he kind of did this and you know what afterwards. So one of the sites that I look at that that uh pulls in a whole bunch of linux news. One of the things is brody, like he's on the page that I look at every week and and like after that show I'm like, oh wait, I know who Brody is.
59:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So the point of the story is no matter how big and famous you are, Rob will still put you down.
59:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I feel better Rob.
01:00:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, well, let's talk about Kali Linux. Then Ken has this story with the newest Kali Linux release.
01:00:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, Actually, I got the information from Lawrence Abrams and Marius Nestor. They both wrote about the latest release from Offensive Security of their Debian-based distribution for ethical hacking and penetration testing. Yes, we're talking about Kali Linux 2025.1a and I'll tell you toward the end of the story why it's a 1a. Following tradition, this year's first version has new visual effects, including updates to the boot menu, login screen and a stunning selection of desktop wallpapers and desktop environments. The KDE desktop is upgraded from Plasma 5.27 to Plasma 6.2. Not 6.3,. Jonathan, their default desktop environment, which one I've enjoyed for years, is XFCE, has also had a minor software bump from 4.18 to 4.20. Lawrence notes the strange version number is because the developers stated they found a last-minute bug in 2025.1, which required a fix and rebuild. This led to the release of 2025.1a as the first I repeat, first release of 2025. According to Marius, Kali Linux 2025.1.8 comes with a new tool called Hoax Shell. You can read about it and other updates in the articles I have linked in the show notes.
01:01:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I was just thinking. I've been fiddling with Kali Linux and Backtrack before it for a very long time, like probably 20 years now. Yeah, about that, about that. The first Backtrack release was back in March of 2013, and it was not long after that that I became aware of it.
01:02:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And the funny thing is it's still not as long as we waited for gimp. If you're going back to the 2.0 day, yes, yes, oh, that's great uh, so how long before we do see gimp 4.0?
01:02:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it depends. If it's on a linear curve, we got another 20 years. If it's on a logarithmic curve, you're talking about the heat death of the universe first I should still be alive I hopefully.
01:02:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Like I said, if I remember correctly, it should be quicker, so maybe five years seven are they working on gtk5 yet?
01:03:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
probably, probably somebody is so when gdk5 released, that's when they'll start on it.
01:03:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go, all right. Well, let's talk for just a minute about a funny little security thing that is getting fixed in Linux 6.15. And so this is the slab tool, which is one of the memory allocation tools, and in that pull request there's a randomization thing that happens in the kernel and essentially it puts multiple copies of the caches in memory and will randomly pick one when it goes to use it. And the idea is that if an attacker has the ability to overwrite some memory and can put their payload into one of these caches, you don't want to have a guarantee that you're going to pull the one that has been tampered with. So it's considered a security hardening thing to randomize this, pull the one that has been tampered with, and so it's considered a security hardening thing to randomize this. The way that this randomization works actually is that program execution jumps into this function and then to get the random value, the function actually looks forward in its own code to the return address, and that return address is what it's going to pull to do the randomization. So it uses that value as its random seed. It was discovered that in at least one case the return address that works if that function is what's called inlined, which basically means that it gets replicated in memory multiple times because the functions that use it just sort of, they use it directly. We'll say, without going into a lengthy explanation of what inlining means in programming, it uses it directly in the code. It's not jumping. This particular use case, though, it was being fully exported as a symbol, which means it only lives one place and it only ever lives in that one place in memory, and so, regardless of where it got jumped into, that return was always going to be the same. And so this whole randomization function was essentially one big no-op. It was always returning the same seed and so it was always jumping to the same place.
01:05:38
And you might think, oh well, sure, this is a theoretical thing, nobody would ever actually use this. No, so if you go to, I've got the link to the Pharonix article. If you go to the third paragraph, and it says, the Google engineers discover that's a link. This is actually where Google security researchers found a problem in NF tables where they were able to, like, double freeze some memory, and to be able to exploit that they had to overcome this bit of security hardening.
01:06:08
And while they were researching how to get around the security hardening. They realized that the security hardening wasn't working at all because it only ever hardened in one particular place. That's how it was discovered. So it's a hilarious little bit of security errata for the kernel um, neat to see it get fixed and a pretty interesting look into how these things can go wrong, particularly when you're doing clever, clever things like let's use the return instruction as our random seed, because surely that's always going to change and it doesn't always change fun, fun, little bit of stuff here yeah, the randomizer wasn't yes, not the not so randomizer yeah, I just use you.
01:06:54 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You know, the universe is a randomizer now yeah, you got to get that.
01:06:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You got to get the outside of the computer into the inside for that to work, though.
01:07:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All right, a lot of ways people do it, it's true.
01:07:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, one of the one of the funny, the craziest that I remember is apparently at some big company I don't know if it was like Sun or IBM, one of the a large company they had cameras pointed at lava lamps.
01:07:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That was. Oh, I know who you're talking about too, yeah yeah, I want to say it's.
01:07:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a software company, I think yeah, it's a pretty big name if we said leo likes telling this story, if I remember correctly what microsoft was it? No, I don't think so that's. That's too out of the box thinking for microsoft oh, out of the.
01:07:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Does our discord know, I bet?
01:07:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
google does.
01:07:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, the cloud flare, cloud flare has could be when I google searches lava rand in production is to collect this data.
01:07:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Cloud flare has arranged about 100 lava lamps on one of the walls in the lobby of the cloud flare headquarters and mounted a camera pointing at the lamps. The camera takes photos of the walls in the lobby of the Cloudflare headquarters and mounted a camera pointing at the lamps. The camera takes photos of the lamps at regular intervals and sends the image to Cloudflare servers and it's called LavaRand and.
01:08:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Mashed Potato had it.
01:08:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go. That's great. Good job, mashed Potato, on coming up with that when we couldn't. Yes, it is a difficult problem to get the randomness of the universe into the computer, because computers are, by definition, not very random.
01:08:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And I know there's one of them that's I'm drawing a blank today, but it was like one of the disk encryption systems that, like it took the time how often you were moving your mouse.
01:08:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
TrueCrypt.
01:08:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
TrueCrypt used to do that. Yes, often you were moving your mouse random true crypt used to do that yes, yeah, you gotta create.
01:08:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You go to create a new uh, a new, uh, encrypted volume and it would be like all right now, move the mouse erratically and tap randomly at your keyboard for a while. When you feel like you've done that enough, click this button.
01:08:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It was great and it was, and it was like a known feature it was and it was filling in all sorts of other, you know like the random noise from various things and internet protocol packets, and what was the time from the last packet reset? Yeah, just to bundle that chaos.
01:09:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, well, it's actually quite a problem on particularly embedded devices like routers in particular really have this problem of when you first turn them on and it's time to get a random seed. How do you get an actual random or even, you know, appreciably random seed to start with, because by default, especially on those little routers, their random seed is going to be the same every time. Or it might be based on the system time, which is going to be the same every time, or it might be based on the system time, which is going to be pretty predictable. It's actually a pretty severe problem that folks like OpenWrt have had to work through and try to figure out how to fix it. So yeah, randomness is hard. All right, jeff, do you want to talk about GNOME real quick? Gnome 48? I never can remember. With Gnome, I'm sure there's an even-odd rule. Is it the even releases that are the good ones and the odd releases that are terrible? They're all good, they're all terrible. We're talking about Gnome, rob.
01:10:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
They're all good and they're all terrible.
01:10:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So we show a lot of love to KDE on this show, and you know, for good reason. Kde is going through some big evolutionary changes right now. But today let's shine the spotlight on another desktop environment that deserves attention. On Wednesday, gnome 48, codenamed Bangalore, made its debut as the latest version of the GNOME desktop. So we'll just dive into some of the highlights of the features of this release, which there's, like we always say, you know there's a ton more in here. We're just skimming the tie points here. First up, we have dynamic triple buffering, a feature that's designed to boost performance on low-end GPUs like Intel integrated graphics or even Raspberry Pi devices. You know the real low-end stuff.
01:11:08
Gnome 48 also brings improvements to Wayland's color management protocol support, enhanced HDR dynamic range support and a new well-being feature. This well-being tool tracks your screen time and sends you friendly reminders to take a break, stretch or go outside and touch some grass. But there's more. Gnome now features on-screen desktop notifications for when you connect headphones. It has a new display control system that lets you view and modify active monitor configuration, and for that, for the monitor configurations, changes can be made through the command line arguments as well, so you don't have to use your GUI to change your monitor configurations and, by default, new windows you know, something that you don't have previously configured will now open centered on your screen. The Nautilus file manager has also been upgraded. It now supports removing bookmarks directly from the path bar and you can load thumbnail information separately from other file information. In addition, you'll see improvements in directory loading performance and grid selections.
01:12:16
Now for Team Green, which we haven't talked too much on this show, but for NVIDIA GPU users, gnome 48 offers better support when an NVIDIA card is your primary GPU. It does this by. It improves DMA buffer support for headless sessions and optimizes frame rates for monitors connected to secondary GPUs in copy mode. In Wayland-only setups, x-wayland is no longer required thanks to updates in the GNOME Display Manager. So previously you had to run X-Wayland even if you were not running any X programs. Some app-specific upgrades include GNOME Music, which now supports high DPI album covers, so you can see the high resolution on those better, and the remote desktop app receives support for zero copy rendering via vulcan and va api.
01:13:16
Even the gnome text editor has been updated. Its search bar now appears at the bottom of the text area. Uh, you know, that's not all of it. Like I said, we're hitting the high points. Gnome 48 comes with countless other updates, bug fixes, changes. So if you're interested in the full list, check out the linked article in the show notes, where you'll also find a link in there to the official release notes, so every single item that you can dig into and find out what's changed. It is worth mentioning that GNOME 48 will be the default desktop environment for Fedora 42. On the GNOME side, they also run KDE, just so you're aware, and Ubuntu 25.04. For those using a rolling release distribution, you can expect to see it arriving very soon. Until then, happy computing.
01:14:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool.
01:14:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So it sounds like our Wayland-only future is getting really close. Gnome doesn't need X-Wayland and GIMP 3.0 is native Wayland now, so it's a lot closer than I thought.
01:14:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think last week we talked about how KDE is moving their X11 support down to. You know, no new features being added, and in the next version I think in 7, they're going to finally yank it. Yeah, a little behind, get home, but.
01:14:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
They're splitting it, so you got a x11 version and a wayland version, aren't they? Yes?
01:14:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yes, but that is only. That is only going to be maintained through, like the next, really the next major release, and then after that it's just not. Even the split version is going to be there, it's just going to go away so it's kind of one of those.
01:15:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
If you were going to running something really really old, it's oh, I gotta have this. It requires x. You're just gonna have to run. You're just gonna have to run some older version of kde and probably just stick on an older uh distribution xis works, though through x wayland.
01:15:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You can run xis under wayland, that's just it.
01:15:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Pretty much everything works at this point yeah, but we're getting rid of X-Wayland soon. No, we're not getting rid of X-Wayland. Gnome doesn't need it anymore, gimp doesn't need it.
01:15:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It doesn't need it if you're running only Wayland applications.
01:15:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's my point.
01:15:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So if you've got an application that still requires X11 and you want to run GIMP or GNOME or KDE, you're going to need to have the X server running.
01:15:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's the same thing we tell people who say but I need that Windows app, you don't need that Windows app. If it doesn't run on Linux, just don't use that app. So now we're getting a little more into the future here. If it doesn't run on Wayland, you don't need that app. Get with the times.
01:16:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So we need to start listing the Wayland alternatives.
01:16:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go.
01:16:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, most things should be anything really supported, should be converting to Wayland and and there is going to be a time where x Wayland is probably going to not support certain things or they're going to wind up changing the API in Wayland and might break something, or I mean not it's, it's going to be probably, you know, a few years away, but at some point it's x is going to be so old that they're like no, we, we're not supporting this anymore there's too many security risks with it now well, yeah, actually actually running x11, yes, yeah, um, which usually is on x wayland too.
01:16:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean lots of times, a lot, not always, but a lot of times they have the same uh cvs uh, sort of the.
01:17:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The big advantage, though, is that x wayland doesn't run as root, whereas your x11 server usually does. Um, no, I, I imagine x wayland is going to stick around for another probably 20 years. Right, because open source things sure are going to go to wayland. But what about your closed source applications? What? What about your games compiled for Linux? Those are never going to get recompiled as Wayland options, just kind of stuck with those on X-Wayland, yeah.
01:17:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But is it going to be a thing that's there by default or something like? If you need it, you can get X-Wayland too?
01:17:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I imagine it's going to be installed by default for a long time to come.
01:17:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We'll see A lot of those old games will be like yeah, just get the Windows version and run it through Wine, and it supports Wayland.
01:17:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, that is unfortunately the case. As we have noted here many times before, the Windows API has sort of become the long-term support API for Linux.
01:18:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm going to predict by 2030, write this down For the moment, before 2030.
01:18:07 - Leo (Announcement)
Before 2030.
01:18:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Write this down. Distributions will be released without XWayland and it's just going to have to be like a dependency if you install something that needs it.
01:18:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's going to be. They're going to be released without it installed by default, by default.
01:18:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, that's probably true.
01:18:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Kind of like the 32-bit support for a lot of stuff, where you're like oh, if you're going to run this, you've got to load your 32-bit libraries and pull them in, you've got to download them and install them. That'll be the signal of when they can stop including it, because they can just monitor the downloads and go gosh. Stop including it, because they just monitor the downloads and go gosh. Hey, we had 10 downloads this year. It's probably not worth the support or the packaging, or you know.
01:18:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, all right. Well, let's get into some command line tips and just tips in general. I know not all of them are command line tips. Mine is not this week. Uh, we're gonna let rob start us off with, if not empty I-F-N-E.
01:19:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's what it is, if not empty. So if any, if any. However, you want to say that Ifny, ifny. So this is. I am continuing my more utils series with ifny, or, if not empty, f n e. So for those watching, I set up a couple files. I did a filetxt and a file2.txt, and on the screen I already catted them both. As you can see, cat filetxt is an empty file. There's nothing there. If you cat file2.txt, I have this is text from file2. Have a nice day. So to get on with it.
01:19:48
So most, pretty much, you're going to pipe things into IFNI and what it's going to do is, if the standard input into IFNI is not empty, it's going to run the command that you have after it and most likely it's going to be used for like scripting and stuff. But there's also a dash N which does the opposite. So first I'm going to show you here I'm going to pipe cat filetxt, which is an empty file. I'm going to pipe that to ifni and if it's not empty, it's going to echo not empty. So that's the command I ran afterwards. So I'm going to do that. Nothing spit out because it is empty. Now I'm going to do the same thing with file2. And it's going to say not empty. Now, it's not that. What's even more useful, really, I think, is the dash end feature. So I'm going to do the same thing, but in reverse, I'm going to cat the empty file, which is filelet text pipe, that to FD, do a dash end, which is filetxt pipe, that to FD, do a dash N, and so that means what it's going to do here. It's going to cat that file and but if it's empty, it's going to run the command which I have saying empty. So I'm going to do that, and hey, it's going to return it's empty.
01:21:22
Okay, so let's do this on the fileto. So cat fileto which has text in it. So it's going to cat that, but if it's empty it's just going to return empty. And this one is probably one of the more useful because it's going to cat it or it's going to say not empty. So here. So when I did the empty file, it just returned empty, empty. So here, so when I did the empty file, it just returned empty. When I did the file that had text in it, it just showed me the cat of that file. So it's kind of a quick way right there where you can do a, do this. But if it's empty, you know, kind of spit out this error files empty or whatever you want. So or your standard and whatever the standard input is, and that is basically that. That is what you do with if any, if not empty, or if empty, if you do the dash end tag.
01:22:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I prefer to say that, if not not empty.
01:22:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I mean, that's so.
01:22:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So if full.
01:22:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They almost just need a second command. You could just alias another one, If not empty and then iffy.
01:22:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's great. All right, ken. What is up with the Pipeware metadata?
01:22:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, that's going to be interesting. It was for me and fun to play with. But this week, as Jonathan mentioned, I'm introducing another command for managing your pipe wire configuration pw-metadata. It allows you to monitor, set and delete metadata on pipewire objects. Its options are the ever-present dash H or dash dash. Help, for those of you all listening, I just switched to the screenshots I took earlier in preparation for this, where it's showing the output of using a dash H as well as the ever-present dash dash version. The dash H listed all the options you can use, such as the dash dash version, dash R or dash dash remote, and I'll go over all the others in a minute.
01:23:38
But first I want to explain how just typing in PWMetadata and hitting Enter will just display all the options, without any options. It will show all the metadata for your default pipe wire configuration or default name. You can use the dash L or dash dash list to list all the available metadata objects. When I did just the PW metadata, it listed for my pipewire setup. It said that the default was default and it had an object ID of 0 with keys, names and values for my audio syncs and sources, as well as my video source. Now, when I did the dash L or dash dash list, the list gave me objects such as settings, schema dash, sm dash settings, persistent dash, sm dash settings, sm dash settings, sm dash objects default again, filters and route settings so that you can use PWMetadata and name the one you want to configure. The example I did was dash in space settings, space zero for the object, and that listed all the metadata for that object and for this one it showed that it found the settings for metadata 32, and the keys were for loglevel clock rate, clockallowed dash rates and in my particular case, for those of y'all listening, it gives the values for that one as 44,100, 48,000, 82,200, and 96,000. 82,296,000. You've all got clockquantum, by the way, if you haven't figured it out yet, rate is basically your sample rate and quantum is your buffer size for all intents and purposes With clockquantum. You've got Clock MinQuantum, that's got a value of 32. Clock MaxDoc-Quantum with a value of 24.88. And then there's a Clock ForceDoc-Quantum which has a value of 1024. That's the default setting for my system and then you'll see, for those of you all listening, the clockrate and clockforce-rate are showing a value of 96.
01:26:56
I actually went in playing with my system and set it to that and the way you do that is by using PWMetadata. In my case I used it to do a dash in space settings space 0, clockrate, and the example I use with the screenshots is going to 48,000. And when I hit Enter, that set the property ID0KeyClock Rate to the value of 48,000. And then I did that again also for the Clock ForceDashRate, and it did the same thing. Force dash rate, and it did the same thing and another. Uh, then I went back and just printed it all out so you can see it in this next screenshot where it's showing that the all the values had been updated to what I just changed it to. You've also got dash m, which allow, or dash dash mon. That lets you monitor your metadata as it changes. I started it off and it started with just five settings defaultconfiguredaudiosync, which was sent to my UMC22 preamp, which it lists as an ALSA device alsa-outputusb bird-brown from ti underscore USB audio codec. I'm going to stop reading there. That's too long to read.
01:28:47
Thank you and I had my system configured at the time so that the defaultconfigureaudio source was also to the UMC22. That's a lot easier to say. But then you've also got audioaudiosync, same thing and defaultaudiosource, and it even shows the defaultvideosource which was going to the V4L2 device In my case my webcam itself, the V4L2 device in my case my webcam itself. Then I went and changed what I was using for my headset to connect to. I moved it so that it went from the UMC22 to the internal audio card for the headset line out connection. That caused it to change the default configured audio sync to the and it gives the ALSA name for that my audio card, for both the configured audio sync and the audio sync. Then I switched it so the audio was going to my TV and it changed the configured audio sync and the audio sync to the ALSA name for the San Diego TV's HDMI stereo out of the TV's HDMI stereo out. And the last thing I did was play around with unplugging and plugging the webcam to the USB port as well as the UMC22.
01:30:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So the last two are showing all the changes that that made that's actually pretty interesting in and of itself being able to plug and unplug with the, the dash m to monitor. I could see that being super useful to understand what happens in your system when you make changes.
01:30:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I like that one particularly yes, that way you can identify what the device is recognized as by your system.
01:31:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, very cool. All right, I've got a shorter tip but it comes with a little bit longer story. So I got hooked on an old adventure game. Actually, I found that I'd already purchased a couple of them on GOGcom and then found the other two for next to nothing. So I now have the complete set of the siberia spelled with a y, so it's s-y-b-e-r-i-a siberia games. It's an old sort of adventure game, sort of in the veins of mist or that sort of thing.
01:31:37
Um, and played through the first one and it went great in wine and went to play the second one and I had two options. With the second game I could either go full screen, which on the big monitor behind me is a little excessive it's not really what I wanted it to do or I could go windowed, but in windowed mode it was only displaying at like 800 by 600. So you know it was, it was this size. The whole game was this size on my TV. It's like I can't see that. So I started going down this rabbit hole of how do you, how do you make this work? How do you essentially zoom in to a video game in wine? How do you, how do you scale something if you don't want it to so. Like, like, if you want it to be full screen, scaling is easy. Generally your monitor takes care of that for you. But if you don't want it to be full screen, how do you scale a Windows application up? And I looked into this for a while. I have used the virtual desktop option in Wine and you can do some of it with that, but that was not working here. Some of it with that, but that was not working here. And as I did some looking around, one of the solutions that people suggested was to use GameScope. And once you hear that you go, oh, of course, that's sort of what GameScope is designed to do. It's running Windows games at lower resolution and then scaling them up. It's bread and butter.
01:33:03
So I've got a screenshot from Lutris. Actually it's the way that I played this and it's super simple. In Lutris you just under system settings for the end of the game, the system options, you enable game scope, you set your output resolution to what you want it to actually be on your screen. So in my case it's 1920 by 1080. That fits nicely into one quadrant. One be on your screen. So in my case it's 1920 by 1080. That fits nicely into one quadrant, one corner of the screen, and then you tell it the actual game resolution, which in my case was 800 by 600.
01:33:29
And then I went in and I told it windowed, and so what it did automatically then is it took that 800 by 600, it scaled it up to fit inside the 1920 by 1080 window and then threw it on the desktop. It was good to go, except with Siberia 2, I ran into a problem. That game has a little splash screen and it's not a full screen splash. I'm sure you guys have seen some programs that'll do this. So you know the game. When it says it actually gets into the game, you know it thinks it's full screen. While it's loading the game it gives you the little square splash screen in the middle of the screen. It's like almost not even a true window, but it's there just to let you know that. Yes, you did really double click on this. We're working on it. That's sort of the point of it.
01:34:15
Game scope was seeing that as the main application, and then, as soon as that splash screen closed, gamescope closed as well, and so the game that I actually wanted to play was then running in the background, and so, you know. I then went down this rabbit hole of well, okay, surely this is not the only game that has this problem? And no, it's not. There's an open bug in the GameScope, the GameScope repo there, and it took me a while to figure out how to do this. I got to looking around in the Siberia 2 initialization files, the settings, and come to find out there is, it's like, a Siberia 2.exe is the application that they intend for you to start. But there's also a gameexe that if you run that, it just skips the splash screen and runs the game straight away. So the solution for that problem was just to go into Lutris and point it to the other binary and then it worked perfectly, exactly what I wanted it to. But the main tip here is GameScope. But I thought the hackery to get Gameexe working was pretty interesting too.
01:35:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The side tip is to look for a second exe if there's a splash and it's not working right.
01:35:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there are other options too for that. You can also go in and delete the image. A lot of times in those old games that splash will be like a PNG in there and so if you delete that image sometimes it won't ever show the splash and it'll do what you want it to.
01:35:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, but you'd actually still run the XE, the wrong XE, though.
01:35:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Correct, even if it doesn't show it Right. But my problem was that, because it was showing it as a window, gamescope was latching onto it and thinking, oh, this is the game application that we want to show inside, which is not what I wanted it to do.
01:35:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So it wasn't because of the splash screen.
01:35:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And then it was because you had two separate executables. It was because you had two separate executables. They were running as two separate processes and each of them was creating its own essentially window, and so GameScope was just locking on to the first application, the first process that created a window.
01:36:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, that created a window.
01:36:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's what it was, but eventually found the solution for that and uh was able to move on. But so in two weeks.
01:36:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I hear about how you fixed it.
01:36:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The bug in game scope no, no, not gonna do it. It doesn't irk me enough. I found a workaround now. If I hadn't found a workaround, maybe, but nope, not gonna happen. Too much on the plate right now there's already a bug report in.
01:36:45
I think you said there's already a bug report. They are. They are aware of it. I may go and list the additional game as another replicator, but other than that, I don't care, I fixed it, fixed it for myself, all right. Uh, we got one more tip, and that is je's and Jeff. We're going to talk. We're going to talk about it.
01:37:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Let's just talk to send you messages. This week we're going to talk about Talk, so this is the program that, one of the programs that ties in with it, and Talk, as the name suggests, is used to talk to another user. The syntax is simple talk space user, where user is the login name of the person you want to talk to. Optionally, there's a dash X flag which allows you to talk to a user with a dot character in their username or a period. You can also include an optional TTY name, which is for talking with a user who has logged in more than once using the terminal name.
01:37:56
There's an article linked in the show notes where that includes installation instructions for both Debian, slash, ubuntu and Fedora, but both are straightforward, requiring just a simple install command from the package manager. I installed it, no weirdness or anything. Some configuration is needed in the slash, etc. Slash xinetdd directory, but after setup it's pretty easy to to use. You just can start a talk session which brings up a basic chat interface where one part of the console is for your message and the other is part is for the reply from the other user. If you encounter issues with someone you know seeing your messages, remember that it might be blocked due to the mesg command settings. So you have to allow those messages to come in. And you know, while there are plenty of modern programs for communication, if you're on a limited interface or need a command line conversation, you know here's a reliable way to do it using a common linux program. So happy chatting very cool.
01:38:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's actually really neat. There have been times. Since skype is going away on linux, we're gonna have to use this right yeah, yeah or I mean going away everywhere man, there have been times I've been ssh to do a machine with somebody else and something like this would have been handy. Like that's that legitimately can come in handy collaboration yeah yeah, all right.
01:39:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I was gonna say you might not always have the GUI or a lot of overhead. You can run and just here you go. It's pretty standard on most Unix slash Linux machines.
01:39:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
If it's not installed, I'm sure you can get it. It's only an apt way, yep.
01:39:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Speaking of GUIs, I forgot to mention when I was covering PW metadata. I did come across two links that I do have in the show notes metadata. I did come across two links that I do have in the show notes. One does cover on how you could write a script to give you a GUI for changing the sample rate and the buffer size using PW metadata, and then this second link talks about how you can configure your pipe wire for using multiple rates sample rates Very cool.
01:40:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, we have reached that part in the show where we let the guys plug what they want to plug. Rob is up first. I'm sure he's going to tell you something about coffee and a website and some other websites. Take it away, rob.
01:40:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You already got it covered, so what's the point? I'm gonna say thank you to aunt pruitt. I totally missed this. About a month ago he did donate a couple coffees to, uh, some of us and I, I don't know. I didn't see the notification. I just haven't gone in there, look, because I didn't think there were any donations. But there has been one a month ago, aunt Pruitt. So thank you, I didn't miss you and otherwise, if you want to donate a cup of coffee, it has been a month since anyone has Aunt Pruitt did. Thank you.
01:41:00
You can go to my website, robertpcampbellcom on my website. There at the top is links to my linkedin uh twitter, blue sky mastodon, and this cup of coffee is where you can donate a cup of coffee to me or do what some others have done. Aunt Pruitt and some others. Tell me who you want to donate to. I currently owe Jeff, I believe two, and Jonathan and Ken, both at least one coffee. It's all logged in there. I plan to go out west this summer, so hopefully I'll actually get to meet Jeff inff in person and and get him his coffees and we'll figure. I'll figure out what the other two yeah, cool you are.
01:41:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You are welcome to oklahoma too, sir. We will, we'll let you in the door. I will.
01:41:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I will be come down there at some point sounds fun.
01:41:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All right, ken anything you want to plug I just want to remind everybody you want to back up. There's definitely several utilities out there. My favorite for backing up my whole hard drive is Clonezilla.
01:42:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, there you go, All right, and Jeff.
01:42:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Not much to go over this week to go over this week. One quick question or reply here is Mr T7 has a question about where should they start. As a beginner, I always recommend Fedora or Ubuntu, just because there's so much stuff on the internet for help and a lot of programs are set up that way. So start there and then, once you get your legs under you, then you can take off to a different distribution. Yes, uh, the other thing is just poetry corner this week, so I'm going to keep it short with haiku, haiku typing document. When OS suddenly crashed, crap forgot to save. Have a great week, everybody.
01:43:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I like it. All right If you want more of me. Of course, there is Hackaday. That's where Floss Weekly is at these days and my security column goes live there on Friday mornings. If you do want to put a little bit in the tip jar, I am at buymeacoffeecom slash jbennett, and that is always much appreciated for those that want to do so. Appreciate all of the guys being here and all of you that watch and listen slash jbennett, and that is always much appreciated for those that want to do so. Appreciate all of the guys being here and all of you that watch and listen, and we will be back next week for more Untitled Linux Show. Goodness, we will see you then. Take care everybody.
