Untitled Linux Show 197 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)
Hey folks, this week we're talking about the start to April, with one package to rule them all, more news on the Steam survey, then there's GNOME and KDE, plasma, wayland benchmarking, jeff has some notes about Kubuntu 2504 Beta and we talk about Firefox and Thunderbird getting some big updates. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

00:25 - Leo (Announcement)
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00:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
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00:30 - Leo (Announcement)
This is Twit.

00:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 197, recorded Saturday, april the 5th, you Linux fool. Hey folks, it is another wonderful Saturday, although it's a little bit cold here, but we're going to put the cool weather to the side and we're going to celebrate some Linux. It is the Untitled Linux Show. We're going to geek out over open source, the Linux desktop, all kinds of fun stuff. It's going to be a great show. It is not just me. We've got the full crew, the regulars here, rob, ken and Jeff are with us. And it is now april and our first story is sort of about that. We're gonna let rob kick it off and, uh, why? Why does one package have anything to do with april?

01:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
well, it's time for those april releases. And one and one big complaint people often have about Linux is the fragmentation. You got Debian with your devs and the apt and Red Hat with your RPMs and Yum and DNF and Arch and all those packages. It's all over the place. So the fix they made a fix was to come up with a universal package manager, and that's what they did. In fact, now we have at least three that I know of AppImage, flatpak and Snaps, you know, with the canonicals, beloved Snaps, because that's, we need to have a universal package manager. Well, we got three, so still not ideal. There's good news, as Abishik says, mark this date as I reveal, the most shocking development Since Linus Torvald smiled at a conference, so at the Linux One conference this week in April, well, at the end of March, april, whenever it was, I don't know the Linux community has agreed to adopt a single package manager called OnePackage. And some quotes from the story.

02:48
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, appeared visibly disoriented when asked about abandoning snaps. He says, quote I feel strange like thousands of forum complaints suddenly went silent. Linux creator Linus Torvalds issued his typical measured response. It's about expletive time. Now we could focus on what really matters, telling people their code is garbage, but, constructively, the roadmap expects full adoption around 2055 or whenever they get to it. It says but that's what's on the roadmap, uh, but.

03:33
But you know what else happened around the world the start of april, and if you haven't figured it out yet, this was an april fool's joke brought to us by the it foss or it's foss, uh, folks. So I hope you figured it out, maybe a little quicker than than I did. Actually. I skimmed and I'm like wait, what did I just read? I tried to figure out what are they even talking about? What's? How come? I was confused.

04:05
I then checked the internet. I'm like, well, I always look for supporting information for my stories. I, I don't. I try not to go just off of one person's word on things, and I found some links similar like uh dot one package formats that someone wasn't able to open, windows that I didn't even dig into because I'm like I don't care, care, I'm not looking at windows, it's got to be something else. And I really couldn't find much out there. Then I noticed the date on the article was April 1st, and that's when it all hit me. So this is your annual warning for any news you read out there this week, check the date and always view anything released on april 1st or around it with a bit of skepticism.

04:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So with that said, april fools I like the continuation of the article. It is we're looking forward to the unified desktop, gde or Canome.

05:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That was taking it too far. Plus, I got to add when I was confused about it, I had not read that part either. That part would have had to have been a giveaway, of course. Maybe it was a better giveaway.

05:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Actually, the link I posted in the Discord chat gave it also. Gave it away, of course, because it starts off. A little humor doesn't hurt, right?

05:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
uh, yeah, yeah. No, this is fun. Like I, I've I've always enjoyed the most of the april fool's stuff and it seems like the internet sort of let us down this. Uh, this year not very much april fool's stuff going on, we had this one.

05:45
This one was good nothing came out on the first, except this article yeah, I know everybody was kind of kind of done with the april fool's thing I guess. But, like I have, I have very fond memories of, say, the old think geek. Who remembers think geek being a thing, the old think geek site coming out with their new april fool's products. Uh, and other done it, but ThinkGeek is really the one that comes to mind. And then the thing that's the best is, like some of their products people legitimately wanted, and there was more than one ThinkGeek product that became a real product. That started as an April Fool's joke.

06:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean, that's exactly what this is. This is a product people want, right.

06:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We don't want the fourth universal package manager, though, which is what it would be. Yeah, see, that's the thing. It's the XKCD comic, right, and I posted that too. It's comic 927. You know situation there are 14 competing standards. 14? How ridiculous. We need to redevelop one universal standard. Next thing you know situation there are 15 competing standards. This is what happens every time, every time. So what is next? Next, we have speaking of Canome and GDE. Jeff has a story about Wayland on these. What's up with Wayland? What's up with Wayland? What's new with Wayland?

07:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and I will first preface this saying you might not see my lips move because my camera froze, but luckily you've got a decent picture and the audio still works.

07:19
We'll get to that, yeah, there's a reason behind this, but it's the third story, so you're going to have to wait a little bit. But Michael Arable over at Phronix? Yeah, there's a reason behind this, but it's the third story, so you're going to have to wait a little bit. Michael Arable over at Phronix is known for his extensive benchmarking, but we don't always get the chance to cover everything he publishes. Last week, for example, he tested GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 for gaming performance on Ubuntu 25.04. After reviewing the article, I decided not to cover it, because the results showed GNOME and KDE on Wayland were nearly identical in performance and KDE had a slight statistical edge, but nothing significant, While it was notable. What was notable, however, was that KDE and GNOME on Wayland outperformed their X11 variants Well, the KDE variant, In fact. Gnome couldn't even run properly under X11 for proper benchmarking, but KDE was slower under X11 than Wayland. Now that brings us to this week's article, linked in the show notes. Some of Michael's readers speculated that the Wayland advantage in GNOME and KDE might come from these desktops neglecting X11 optimizations or simply being too bloated. So Michael decided to test a couple more desktop environments and in this latest benchmarking roundup he added XFCE 4.20 and LXQT 2.1, both running on X11. Now this week's article presents combined data, so the Wayland and X11 results for GNOME and KDE from last week, and then adds in the X11 performance of XFCE 4.20 and LXQT 2.1. Now these desktops are the latest available packages for Ubuntu 25.04. And these tests were conducted on the same hardware as last week a Ryzen 9 9900X 3D processor paired with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. And, of course, like I said, the system was running Ubuntu 25.04 with Linux kernel 6.14 and Mesa 25.0.1 for the graphics driver.

09:33
Now let's talk results, because they may not be what you expected. The fastest desktops were KDE Plasma 6.3.3 on Wayland, followed very closely by GNOME 48 on Wayland. When comparing X11 environments, KDE LXQT and XFCE performed at about the same level, you know. Interestingly, KDE, you know, I think, even appeared slightly faster than the two lightweight desktops. Now keep in mind, however, the differences across all environments were minimal, so small in fact, that users wouldn't notice any impact on daily performance, and some of the results may even fall within the margin of error.

10:15
There was one clear takeaway, though when comparing Wayland versus X11 on the game Strange Brigade, Wayland demonstrated a significantly better performance over X11. On the game, Strange Brigade, Weyland demonstrated a significantly better performance over X11. Now I'm just going to note here that that was the one standout. The rest were very, very close. I don't know what was going on with Strange Brigade, why it ran away on Weyland versus X11, but just take note of that. So what's the bottom line? Some might say KDE and GNOME are bloated, but they hold their own or even outperform lighter desktop environments. And you know, side note, I have seen some data showing that they're not really that much lighter than KDE or GNOME. My advice pick the desktop that feels right to you, because performance differences are negligible in everyday use. So happy desktop hunting yeah, I.

11:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm curious about one thing with this, and that is the version of wine he was using. Did it have the native wayland stuff in it, or was wine running into x wayland and then into Wayland? I'm not sure. I didn't see that in the article. I don't know, but Because at least some of the games he was benchmarking were running on wine.

11:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, so those lower end or lighter desktops. What they would probably say is, of course, kde and GNOME is going to be faster. I mean, if we were using that much memory too, we'd be faster.

11:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure there's some way to spin it.

11:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I think you should buy more memory, buy all the memory you can afford Micron memory.

12:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Brought to you by no, I'm just kidding, let's not get that rumor started.

12:08 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Here's a question I have. Was he using the minimum memory required for testing these?

12:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, probably not, I'm sure he's got a rig with a bunch of memory on it. Yeah, it was like 62 or 34. I forget what it was. Quite a bit of memory. It was not the minimum, it was at least 32.

12:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so you may run it. You may run into those, those lighter weight desktops. They may actually perform better with less memory.

12:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
that might be a thing yeah, well, yeah, I mean now that you say it like that that's probably way more than maybe xfc could even use. So maybe if they were more on, like all on 8 or 16, maybe it, maybe it would have been. Uh, maybe xfc would have performed comparatively on the lower memory.

13:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Try going down to four gigabytes of memory.

13:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, I haven't done that for like a decade. This is 2025.

13:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I don't have anything that old that would have that low of memory.

13:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, what's really sad is you go to the usual places and they're still selling laptops and desktops with four gigs of memory. It's like it's really not enough these days. Uh, your browser uses that much by itself, doesn't it?

13:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
especially if it's chrome especially if it's.

13:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But um, all right. So ken has a story about that other browser out there, not chrome or chrom, but Firefox. What's new with Firefox?

13:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, actually I'm going to give you a bit of old and new, because I've actually got two articles about Firefox. The first is a blog post by Jennifer and I do apologize if I mispronounced the last name. I'm going to say Bo Basky about how we can help improve Firefox through Mozilla Connect. Now, mozilla Connect launched in 2022, where Firefox users and builders could share ideas, feedback and feature requests. Now, before Mozilla Connect, there was a platform called. Does anybody remember Ideas at Mozilla?

14:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, not really.

14:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, people could submit suggestions, but the tool wasn't set up for honest, interactive dialogue. According to John Sidaway and here I am quoting him we needed something better a place where people could not only share IDs but also get updates, participate in discussions and feel they were heard. Right after Mozilla Connect launched, users jumped in with some big requests vertical tabs, tab groups and better ways to manage profiles. Fast forward to today, all three are either being built or already starting to roll out. Mozilla Connect becomes a tool for every phase of the product cycle, from exploring ideas to testing prototypes to validating decisions.

15:26
The second article comes from Marius Nestor. Marius writes about Mozilla promoting Firefox 138 to the beta channel for public testing. It looks like a smaller update, promising only support for copying links for background tabs using the tab strip context menu on Linux and macOS systems, as well as an improved address and credit card autofill feature that better handles dynamically updated forms. Firefox 138 Beta adds more tab grouping features, such as add tabs to new tab group and remove from group right-click tab menu entries. It also promises to revamp the previous color settings into contrast control settings, allowing users to use the same colors across websites for improved readability. If you feel adventurous and this is for you, jeff then try Firefox 138 Beta and provide your feedback via Mozilla Connect. I've got links in the show notes for both of these articles.

16:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Interesting stuff. I could be on it. I got a lot of betas running right now it's showing.

16:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Just stay away from alpha.

17:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, sometimes that Venn diagram, those lines blur a little if you're looking for an alpha, you could be running the cosmic desktop, the whole thing already you could be?

17:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
um, I'm trying to. I don't see it in here. I think, um, firefox 138 may actually ship with a hidden option, so you know you've got to go into the flags. It'll turn on HDR for some of the Linux desktops. That may actually be a thing that's landed now. It's obviously still very much in progress. I've been messing with it with the nightly.

17:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think I saw that.

17:37 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I'm only on 137 right now.

17:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
For Firefox on 137,. I'd have to look and see what I've got for krobian that I'm currently running, since, uh, the latest update to chrome broke the obs. Uh, virtual camera usage yeah, that's very weird.

17:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I gotta dig into that and figure out what's going on with that. I will eventually. I will eventually get hit by that too, when we go to do floss next week, um, but uh, I'm sure there's a way to get it back figure out what's going on with firefox and the obs virtual camera I would assume that it's the same thing um I, I'm guessing there's probably some security yeah maybe the, the the virtual, um, the the virtual camera plug-in, though, is a linux thing and it just shows up as an extra like v4 l2 device, so that seems a little odd.

18:34
Uh, what we really need is obs to get on board and actually give us, uh, pipewire outputs, but we're not there yet not with 31.0.3. Yeah, I know there are people working on it, but it's not there, not there quite yet. All right, well, let's move along to the Steam survey. Rob, I remember about a month ago the sky was falling. There were hardly any Linux users. We were back under 2%. What happened? We have the rest of the story now, right?

19:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah. So this month, on the Linux Steam survey, it's gone back on its trajectory, inching closer to my 2025 prediction, which was 2.5%, and my stretch goal, which we'll see. We still have many months to get there was 3%. This month we have a new record on Linux, on Steam, at 2.33%. So, as Jonathan hinted at, this number goes up and down all the time. It's the trend that you really got to pay attention to, because last month there was a 0.61% drop and then this month there's a 0.88% increase. So anybody who's plotted things out on graphs, it's the trend that you got to look at. Those individual plots are just data points, so you know, digging into these numbers, it's a lot of the same.

20:14
You know, sales of the Valve Steam Deck clearly help these numbers, with about 35% of these Linux users or Linux gamers, I guess, appearing to be running SteamOS. And since you know the SteamOS isn't released for users to officially install, people have figured out ways, but it's not officially out there, so there's probably not many people doing it. So most of these that we're looking at are probably actually Steam Deck users. So 33, 30, 35% of those are likely to do a Steam Deck. But you know the Steam Deck.

20:53
You know another thing on there the Steam Deck, being based on AMD, also boosts the AMD over Intel numbers, with 70% of the survey users using AMD and 30% Intel approximately. There's the point. Stuff here and there, but keep voting on the survey because no matter what distro you're using, steamos, even if these are 50% Steam Deck, as we always like to point out what is good for the Steam Deck and gaming on Linux is really good for all of us Linux users, because it's only going to help bring developers and improve things further for us in the whole ecosystem. So, boat, this is one place I don't want you paranoid penguins to be hoarding or afraid to share that data. Let them know you're here for all of us.

21:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's great. Yeah, the Steam survey has always been a little well. It's always been a little weird, right? So you get, things will happen. Something will change in the way they count or in what machines get counted. Um, there, you know, there's been things like they do re-images. So in in asia they have the net cafes right where you can rent a desktop for an hour and apparently a bunch of those had some system where they re-imaged every time and that resulted in the steam survey happening a lot for those devices. We had something sort of in that same ballpark this time where there was like a 20.8% increase in the simplified Chinese language and, you know, maybe that's a change was made in the great firewall, letting more of these machines stuck to the internet.

22:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Um, you know, it's hard to say, but whatever it is, it seems to have been rolled back and we're back into the numbers, into the ballpark that we expected yeah, you know, also, as I said, you gotta look at the trends because the the survey is it's random, so statistically, at least over time it should kind of show you where things are at. But right, also, it really you know it's luck of the draw, so it could be one month. Just more windows users in a ratio get it, then then linux. Uh, overall I should balance out.

23:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But yeah, you figure the, the, and. So here's one of the things about this. Right, we do not have very good visibility into the STEAM survey, but you figure that the more respondents like the overall, the bigger the numbers are, the more the noise floor drops and you get better data out of it, which is kind of the way statistics work.

23:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, the one piece of missing information we don't have is absolute numbers, exactly, yeah, that's kind of.

23:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's kind of what I'm getting at Right. We don't, we don't know how many survey respondents there were altogether, and if we knew that then we would have a better idea of you know what's going on Like. So you see, 20% more simplified Chinese, chinese. Well, it was there also a. Was there 20 000 more survey respondents? We don't, we don't know, we just can't. So we're sort of reading the tea leaves, trying to figure out.

24:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think, uh, I think like once a quarter, once a year, once half year or something. They should just make sure everybody gets it, because it's been a long time since I've seen the survey. I bet it's been close to two years since I've seen the survey, even.

24:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's an interesting thought. Yeah, that could be useful.

24:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And in the past I've had it like once and then again, just maybe a month or two later.

24:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But basically you can say there's seven out of every 300 Steam clients that are Linux, our own Linux.

24:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah Well, and the AMD? Just side note too. The AMD numbers don't hurt, because not only all the Steam Deck and we've got future Steam Decks come, or Steam-like Decks coming Steam Machines.

25:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Are we calling them Steam Machines this time around?

25:05 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't remember yeah, steam machines, steam like deck something.

25:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I mean all those lights yeah consoles, pcs, handhelds that are going to be running steam os.

25:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, well, at least handhelds. Steam os deck yeah but also it doesn't hurt that amd is kind of running away with the video card sales right now, and right now their processors are flying off the shelf too, it'd be a good time to own amd stock yeah, yeah, although apparently it's a good time to own AMD stock, yeah yeah, although apparently it's a good time to own Nvidia stock too, for different reasons.

25:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But anyway, especially if you'd bought it 10 years ago.

25:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh well, I mean, that's the best time to buy any stock.

25:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, Every, every stock that's around today. The best time to buy it was 10, 20 years ago. Yeah.

26:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
When nobody had any money. Yeah, that's how that works, oh man. But but I mean what? I have distinct memories of thinking. Oh man, this bitcoin thing is great. I wish I had a hundred dollars to be able to buy one of them yeah, well, it's back back then.

26:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You didn't know well with every stock yeah, not so much to buy it, but to mine it yeah, well, they would have been more than 100 bucks to be able to buy in and get a minor rig.

26:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But yeah, I know, I, I was aware of it and I thought it was the coolest thing before, even before many people really started mine, before you could buy dedicated miners right and so 15 years ago maybe yeah, somewhere around there.

26:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But but the whole problem is, even if I remember when it was like two bucks a coin, all right, I bought you know a hundred dollars worth. Hey, it went up to where my investments now worth five hundred dollars. I'm more than doubled. I more than doubled it. I'm gonna sell, you know yeah, yep, that's true.

27:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I guess that's really the same thing with stocks you don't know high it's going to go. Nobody knew that eventually an individual Bitcoin is going to be worth $100,000. So really the way to do it was to buy it when it was nothing and then forget about it and 20 years later rediscover the hard drive and pray that it still works, yeah, but then you forget too long and it's worth nothing again.

27:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah yeah, or you end up just losing it completely because it goes bankrupt.

27:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, we shall see if that ever happens, if Bitcoin is the long-term tulip or if it's going to stick around, no clue. All right, let's move on to speaking of Valve and the Steam Deck. Was that an attempt at a segue that I totally missed? Not for me. Anyway, jeff is also going to continue this Valve-centric conversation and talk about the Steam client.

27:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, steam released a client update on April 1st and no, it wasn't an April Fool's joke. They even made a point to clarify that this update was necessary to fix a display issue on the game details page for titles with queued updates. So ideally they wouldn't have released it on April 1st, but a patch was needed. Beyond that fix, this update brings some great improvements for everyone, linux users. For linux users, download speeds have been improved, meaning games and the steam client itself should install faster. Valve has also enhanced the accuracy of download progress and time estimates. So the more and the more you use steam, the better these estimations will become. Additionally, the consistency and clarity of the download install update UI has improved and also byte counts refer specifically to the number of bytes to download. Progress bars and percentages now reflect the overall progress of an install or update, which includes covering the work before, during and after the download. So it takes into account all the disk usage and everything else. The exception is the top blue progress bar on the downloads page which shows the bytes downloaded, and I should mention that part of the. The more you use it, the more accurate it's going to be. They're looking at having a previous data and it's going to keep. So it learns your system, learns your network, so it can better estimate over how your system and network reacts over time. Time remaining estimates apply to the entire installation update process. Now again, it's just learning on your system In.

29:50
Another fix is if you encountered the rare issue where non-Steam Proton versions, such as Proton Glorious Eggroll, were incorrectly assigned the wrong compatibility tool, this update should resolve that. But that was pretty rare, but it got fixed. Another Linux specific fix addresses the initial positioning of dropdown menus and the UI no longer incorrectly applies compatibility tool filtering to shortcuts. This update also resolved issues such as notifications displaying incorrectly in certain games and the update news window being obscured by the steam client at startup. Now I had that one. It kept it would pop up that uh, you know the little news window with you know. Oh, here's the latest sales or whatever. They would always hide it behind. So that that has been fixed. There are additional fixes for remote play, steam input and the fine friends who play feature. But for the full breakdown, check the article linked in the show notes, where they also have links to the official steam announcement. So happy gaming very cool.

30:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, I have to make sure and go grab that and then run through my series of tests for the various fancy things that I try to do with steam and see how many of them work. Um, you know, there there have been things that historically you have to go into um the uh, what, what do they call it? Um, the steam compositor? I forget what they call it. It's what runs on steam deck. You can, you can boot directly to it. Uh, I can't, there's a name for it, it's just totally escaped me. At the moment, anyway, there's some fancy things that you can do in steam on linux you've got. You've got to like go directly into that and not have kde or gnome running underneath it. Um, but they have been, you know, slowly over time, working towards making all those things work with the uh, with the regular desktop managers. Yeah, very brave of them to do an April 1st release though.

31:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and they specifically made sure to note that no, this is not a joke in any way.

32:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What was that Ken?

32:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Just thinking about the fact that yesterday I did the update to the Steam client. Oh, and it did load up quick. I turned around to get a drink back and it was already done. Cool.

32:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool. All right, ken, you've got a story here about another Linux distro that I have never heard of. What is it, nitrix?

32:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes.

32:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What is this?

32:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I thought we'd covered it. It's been a while.

32:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I can't even remember what episode off the top of my head I was going to say just the fact that we've talked about it here doesn't mean that I'm going to have any memory of it.

32:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
True, sometimes I have trouble remembering what we talked on the previous episode.

32:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.

32:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But I can thank Mario Snister, since he wrote about Nitrix developer Yuri Herrera's recent announcement. He released the latest ISO snapshot of Nitrix. In this case it's 3.9.1. It's 3.9.1. Now, nitrix is a Debian-based, immutable and systemd-free GNU Linux distribution using a highly customized KDE Plasma desktop environment by default. 3.9.1 introduces Linux kernel 6.13.8, a huge MAUI kit, maui kit frameworks and MAUI apps, update the latest MESA 25 graphics stack, amd RockM open software stack and a new convergent web browser called I'm pronouncing it FIERY. It's F-I-E-R-Y Now. Fiery uses a QT web engine and was built using MAUIKit. The release announcement includes some of FIERY's known issues and missing features, including how to close the browser. Apparently, the X at the top of the screen doesn't close it.

34:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's the VI of browsers.

34:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Nitrix 3.9.1 still uses the KDE Plasma 5.27.11 desktop environment, while updating some KDE frameworks packages to version 6.8.0 and the QT components to version 6.7.2. It's running right on the edge, isn't it? 2. It's running right on the edge, isn't it? The Nitrix Update Tool System, or NUTS upgrade utility has been updated to version 2.2.2. You got to love that acronym. How would you pronounce that NUTS? If you want more details, check out marius's article. It even has a link to the uh announcement, the release announcement, so you can see how to close uh, that browser I'm trying to figure out what the fiery browser is.

35:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, apparently so google. Google searching finds it as like a Google app or an Android app.

35:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I found I ended up getting more information by using the link in Marius's article.

35:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, interesting. Is it just a reskin of Chromium? Probably.

35:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Does Chromium use a QT web engine?

35:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's a complicated question. The answer is sort of Is it Chromium, a fork like multiple years ago of Conqueror, which probably is based on the qt web engine?

36:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
browser history is weird just, I just definitely no, I think it is a fork that I know chromium is a fork of conqueror from, or.

36:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know if it was called conqueror, but it was the kde web browser from years ago. Yes, I just don't know if that means it's based on the qt engine these days I was getting confused with firefox.

36:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Which kind of has different netscape but yeah, but there's a bit of a gap in there because they got so far with the netscape code went this is garbage and then redid it that's what windows did too.

36:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They got to windows 8, so this is garbage and kind of went back to windows 7 like code.

36:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean that's kind of what.

36:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's kind of what happened, uh, with windows, not emmy, the one after emmy, vista, yeah maybe no, it went emmy, and then it went xp, yeah, and then it went in Vista.

37:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, xp was based on the NT, whereas ME was based on the Windows 3.1 code yeah, XP was the first consumer one based on NT.

37:15
Yeah yeah, that was a weird rabbit trail to go down. Anyway, are we getting on Windows? I have no idea. So I do have some interesting stuff in here about Fiery. Apparently it is their browser. It does not have a plug-in system. It's based on QT Web Engine. I'm going to have to look into this a little bit more. The whole idea of a new web browser just always intrigues me, because so much of the world runs on Chromium, and so when someone says we've got our own web browser always intrigues me, because so much of the world runs on chromium, you know, and so when someone says we've got our own web browser, it's like it's a reskin of chromium, right. So to have one that's not is just very fascinating well, yeah, I mean it's having a new web engine.

37:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That would be fascinating.

37:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There's many skins around other web engines indeed yeah, well, I remember steve gibson talking about it and just saying part of the problem is the. The web code is so complex. It's kind of haphazardly grown over the years that to fully be compliant with today all the web standards it is so hard that that's why most people don't write their own engine but.

38:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But there is one. There's at least one new engine.

38:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Lady Bird. There's Lady Bird and there's Servo. There's the two that I'm aware of.

38:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They're not new either, but new in web engine terms.

38:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Lady Bird is pretty fascinating. We did an interview with the guy behind it, whose name I can't remember at the moment, back on Floss Weekly, andreas Kin't remember at the moment Back on Philosophy Week, andreas Kinning. That's right Back on Philosophy Week several months ago. Very, very interesting project there.

38:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Since all your videos have been freezing today, I changed my background to kind of match.

39:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We'll get the rest of the story on that here in just a minute, all right, so, rob, it is it the time. Is this the year for big updates to package managers? Right, because we have dnf5 which is amazing, by the way and now we've got apt3.

39:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
yeah, everyone seems to be hitting major milestones over this last year with their package managers but, unlike one package, this isn't an April Fool's joke. So the Debian project has released Apt 3.0 this week with nice new visual features. Visual features on a command line you say well, I'm not talking about. But there is still quite a bit you can do to make command line output output look better with app 3.0 providing a new, concise andid-out command line output when you're updating, installing or removing packages via the Terminal Emulator. So with that, new features, including things like a column display that will make it easier for users to scan for a package name, new color support for removal or red for removal and green for all other changes, so you can more quickly at a glance just take a look and kind of see what's going on instead of just all this scrolling past you. There's also a smoother install progress bar that uses Unicode blocks and, like I said, scrolling all the stuff going on. This app 3.0 has is now less verbose and offers more padding to make it easier to separate sections and extract the relevant information. And then there's also a new solver, so using the dash, dash solver option. So this new solver, it allows apt to fall back to non-candidate versions and makes auto remove more aggressive, keeping only the strongest automatically installed packages. So Debian users, who are really looking forward to this, can expect to see App 3.0 as a default in the upcoming Debian Linux 13 or Trixie operating system, which is due out in June or July around there 2025.

41:50
But if you want it even sooner, be an Ubuntu user, because Ubuntu 20.05 is expected to have that, which is also expected to release later this month, and you also, I believe. I feel like I tried out a beta of this, but maybe it was DNU 5 or something. But I feel like I've seen this already before this announcement and demoed it, but maybe not Either way. I can't remember. So me being refreshed. Looking at it again, it looks pretty slick Because I am an Ubuntu user on my servers. So they're still on 2204. But if I decide to upgrade them to well, I like to keep them on LTS, so I guess I don't know, I probably won't see it for a little bit, but it still looks pretty nice.

42:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting. I am very interested by their new solver. I will add this blog post to the show notes, where apparently one of the devs is talking about what exactly it means that there's a new solver and it is the code that manages dependencies and figures out what needs to get installed to satisfy all your dependencies. And if you think about that for a little while, that's not a trivial problem, particularly when you have things like three or four. A single dependency could potentially be be provided by different packages, right, and that gets really, really complicated. And trying to sort all of that out to where it does indeed give the user the choice that they should have and not give them a choice when they should not have one, can be really difficult.

43:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, a good example would be something that takes maybe FFmpeg and then it takes a specific version of LibC and then LibC has got libraries, it's based on it. Just yeah, you could many, many, many deep.

43:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Or are you looking at, like, the Debian version of LibC or the Ubuntu version of LibC? The ubuntu version? That's gonna be one of them yep, yeah or or so.

43:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Something we see in fedora quite a bit is you can install I think ffmpeg is available from the fedora repositories, but there's a bunch of the codecs that are disabled because of patent issues, and then you can go get um, you can go get other versions of FFmpeg, install them with DNF and then so you might have multiple potential installs of FFmpeg. So how do you sort out which one you need? How do you do updates when that's the issue? Circular dependencies.

44:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I always forget that you can also install deb packages with apt. So, they would be in that uh bundle.

44:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yup, yup, so cool stuff in there. I like it. Bless you, thank you Um.

44:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I hope you're not having the same problem, steve. Last it links Link us had who this uh latest uh version is. This latest version is being dedicated to I hope not.

44:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't want anything dedicated to me yet, not like that.

45:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Maybe in another 50 years. Yeah, 70.

45:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So one more thing I'll point out If you want to. There is a side-by by side screenshot at the top of the linked article and I've got to admit like the new apt three output is way better than the apt two output, much easier to look at and understand what's going on.

45:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's very similar to the output from Nala.

45:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, we won't need Nala anymore.

45:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, I mean you think about it and like that is the sort of the ultimate um win, if you would like. Oh well, a package or a program, an application became irrelevant because all of its best features got pulled in by the one it was trying to replace.

45:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, it's basically acting as a front end, yeah a wrapper just to make it prettier for you.

45:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And well, now it's pretty enough all by itself. Exactly, exactly.

46:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But it doesn't replace top grade.

46:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, let's talk about Jeff continuing to freeze Well.

46:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I should now.

46:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
He's good now.

46:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah.

46:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So what is going on, man? We tease this all throughout the show.

46:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You have to work more on your timing. This is when it should have froze.

46:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I had to kill OBS because it just was dying on me and, if you notice, my screen looks. I look a little different, I seem a little choppier because I'm going only through restream. So it's. But we got some movement. I'm at least partially running here.

46:47
But astute listeners of last week's show will recall that I talked about updating to the Kubuntu 25.04 beta, Since I really liked the KDE desktop and this version comes with Plasma 6.3 and Wayland updates, I wanted to give it a try and share my experience. Well, it didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd hoped. So I originally planned to format and reinstall my operating system, but at the last minute I decided to try an inline upgrade. Just see how it would go. You know, my plan was just do it, do an upgrade now and when the official release came out, redo the desktop. Because you know, you know, just because of the show and because I enjoy experimenting, you know I thought what the heck? I'll throw caution to the wind, you know, and I played around with all sorts of alpha and beta software, downloaded a ton of different things and generally caused chaos on my system. You know, that's why I was going to reformat and reload and I should note, any stability issues I run into are, frankly, 99% my fault. So if you stick to normal software and packages, Linux distributions tend to be rock solid overall. So I fired up the terminal, ran update desktop-d you know it saw there was a new version available, proceeded with the installation.

48:06
Everything seemed to go well until reboot time. Upon restarting, I was greeted with a Grub command line prompt, which I found really odd. A bit of Googling told me I needed to type exit, which would drop me out of the command line and into the normal Grub menu. From there I could proceed. Odd, but okay. Next I reached a login screen, though something seemed very off. There was a session drop-down in the upper left-hand corner that. I reached a login screen, though something seemed very off. There was a session drop down in the upper left-hand corner that I couldn't interact with and below that my username and password field. I could find that, but when I tried entering my password, a massive tablet-sized virtual keyboard appeared. So it covered about three-fourths of my screen and while I could type my password, I couldn't actually press any enter or go anywhere from there.

48:57
Well, thinking maybe something hadn't booted up correctly, I restarted my system, you know, hoping a second reboot would fix things, because you know I have had that happen in the past. Unfortunately, I ended up back at the same spot. Just to make sure nothing was stuck, I did a full power down and reboot, but then again same result. Well then, I thought it was an issue with the NoVu driver, because I've had issues in the past. So I dropped to a command line prompt, installed the NVIDIA drivers, reboot no luck.

49:28
At this point I figured something must have gone wrong. You know, after all, it is a beta. So, using another point, I figured something must have gone wrong. You know, after all, it is a beta. So, using another machine, I downloaded the ISO, put it on a Bentoy USB stick and proceeded with a full format and fresh install of the operating system. And I decided to be adventurous. I selected full install with updates enabled during installation. Everything seemed fine until at the very end, when I got an apt can't execute error, which was odd. Long story short, it was completely borked, totally broken and wouldn't boot. So I started to wonder, you know, am I going to have to go to back to 24.10 and wait for some fixes to land? I did another clean install, this time without enabling updates during the installation, and I selected the normal install. I figured that would at least give me a solid base and this time everything came up fine and it was fine from then on out.

50:28
So what happened? First? The grub issue Turns out this one was on me. I have another drive where I've experimented with different operating systems and done a ton of installs Somewhere along the way. My BIOS was set to boot from that drive first, which also had a grub instance on it. Well, that drive had an old Gen 2 install, but I tinkered with it until I broke it and unknowingly corrupted Grub in the process. Once I pointed the BIOS to the correct drive, everything worked fine. So what would happen is it would go in there. Grub was broken. You hit exit. It then would fall through the tree to the next Grub instance which was on the other drive, which worked fine. So that's why hitting exit worked. It took me out of that grub and into the proper one.

51:19
I also spoke with someone who works with the Kubuntu maintainers and discovered that having Steam installed can wipe out the Kubuntu desktop. And that's exactly what happened during my upgrade from the existing OS. They told me that dropping to the console and running sudo app install kubuntu-desktop fixes it, solving this issue, and, as of today, it might already be fixed. This was about three days ago when I did this, so it's probably already fixed, but if you happen to run into this, that's that's what you need to know. And just for context, removing kubuntu-desktop package removes both SDDM and all the KDE packages, so that explains why my desktop essentially disappeared. The second issue was related to enabling updates during installation. When you do this, the kernel gets updated, but the correct image file doesn't land in the slash boot slash EFI directory, leading to a kernel panic at boot. There's already a bug report on this and developers are working on a fix which, again, may already be done. The good news is that all my issues have been reported. They're either already fixed or actively being worked on, and, that said, I do want to set expectations.

52:53
This is beta software. Now, while the last few releases have been surprisingly stable you know, usually installing and working perfectly, running beta means there's always the possibility of running into hiccups like these. Ideally, if you're testing beta releases, you're pretty comfortable with Linux and reinstalling or dropping to a command line isn't a big deal. So the recap, you know. I hope it helps anyone out there who's testing Kubuntu 25.04 beta. You know I'm coming at you right now from the 25.04 beta and I did have in the notes.

53:27
So far it's solid. Well, not everything is solid. It has fixed some little graphical glitches that I had on 2410 with Wayland, so that was good. So it has been improved. 6.3 so far is mostly good. One final note on beta. You are going to get updates, and a lot of them every day. So be aware that if you decide you want to try beta, keep on top of the updates as they pound out a lot of them every day. So be aware that if you decide you want to try beta, you know keep on top of the updates, as they pound out a lot of fixes at a pretty fast rate. So you know, happy upgrading if that's your desire.

54:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think my servers might be waiting for the LTS, like I hinted at just earlier.

54:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's probably a good idea, if you could serve.

54:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Waiting for 2604.

54:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, you don't want to be running servers on a beta.

54:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, I wasn't going to do it on the beta, but the final release of 2504 is expected to be out pretty soon already.

54:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I need to look at upgrading the one I'm using as a file server from 2004 to 2204.

54:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's about time why not 2404, since that's the most recent lts?

54:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I just want to see if it'll even run 2204 it's also a valid question whether Ubuntu supports jumping that many versions. I'm sure they support going from one LTS to the next, but skipping an LTS in the middle and jumping four years, yeah that's a lot.

55:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You've got to do it sequentially.

55:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's the way most of them work. Yeah, but you can get there. Yeah, that's the way most of them work.

55:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, but you can get there. I found that out when I was trying to upgrade from 1204 to 1604, after I duplicated to another computer.

55:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That was a long time ago, though.

55:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, don't remind me.

55:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That was a decade ago almost.

55:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh ouch.

55:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right, Maybe, maybe it's a maybe you did it a few years after 1604 came out.

55:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So, jeff, are you having enough problems with Kubuntu that we're going to convince you to try Fedora, kde?

55:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Not yet.

55:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Or regular old Ubuntu with gnome but, definitely I would.

55:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I would go fedora before I went, uh, regular ubuntu, but I I tried, uh, I forget which one, it was 41 or whatever, and it was solid. The biggest thing is just learning the package manager but I do definitely recommend installing Chromium. I run Firefox 99% of the time, Other than doing this show. I don't use Chromium.

56:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's why I say install Chromium just for this show. Get away from Chrome. That way you don't have that O virtual cam issue I think it was obs.

56:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It was freezing, not chrome well, my case.

56:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All I had to do was launch a chromium, and I was able to get it to work, so that, even with that even with that high-end system you have jeff I.

56:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean I imagine you must have a ridiculous amount of memory and just like the top-end cpu, uh last, last gen cpu well, that's pretty good compared compared to the stuff I get all right, save us from this measuring contest and let's talk about Mozilla Thunderbird's new release. Ken, what's new in Thunderbird?

57:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, let's ask Boreas Nestor, and when I did, he wrote about the latest release of the open source email calendar, address book, chat and news client. Yes, that's Mozilla Thunderbird 137. Chat yes, chat and news client Now. It doesn't introduce any new features apart from a splash screen to encourage users to donate to help keep Thunderbird's development alive. Now, if Thunderbird is your daily email driver, please consider supporting it.

57:56
This release disables the system tray icon in Linux systems until it gains functionality and adds support for using file names when storing mail folders on Windows systems. Thunderbird 137 fixes RSS feeds to let users use the spacebar to scroll the message like it does in emails. It also fixes missing edit menu entries when selecting the group header in the grouped by sort view, improves the threaded search view to update correctly when the results are sorted by date, and addresses an issue with in-app notifications failing to display correctly when using the high contrast mode. Starting with this release, mozilla Thunderbird 137 is also now possible to cross-post news articles. If news groups are on different servers, that'll be nice. Some visual and user experience improvements have been added as well, along with other bug and security fixes. Since I have only highlighted some of the changes, I do recommend reading Mario's article for more details.

59:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And again, if you, can afford it, please donate, All right. What's this chat feature you're talking about?

59:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's got some chat in Thunderbird. Who do you chat?

59:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
with? I mean, is it only with other Thunderbird users, or do they have their own protocol?

59:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Depends on whatever chat service you're set up with.

59:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So it's got support for IRC Jabber. So the Xmpp um it used to work with google talk. I don't think it does anymore because google changed the way that works is this still around google talk? I mean chad, google, chad, but it's their own. It's their own uh sort of proprietary um format to do it. But yeah, there's some instant messaging support inside of Thunderbird.

01:00:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Okay, so it's not their own, it's just a client for other.

01:00:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Right, I mean. I would imagine, though, that Mozilla has a server somewhere it may even work with Mozilla Connect.

01:00:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It might you know? One other thing you mentioned on there was the removal of the uh, the system tray icon which at for a second there I was like upset for a second. And then I realized you know, 10, 15 years ago I would have been upset because I always like things like mail in my, in my system tray, because I could, so I could quickly see how many. But then I kind of realized I don't use that anymore, I don't have anything in my system tray, I don't really even like that anymore. But there was a time when I liked things like the mail client, at least chat clients, in the system tray, just so I could quickly see. But I guess for a second, there I was, I was a little upset about that.

01:01:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
but uh, thinking about, I'm not anymore yeah, so there's, uh, there's one outstanding feature that thunderbird I don't think it has yet. Uh, I know they are working on it and that is being able to use thunderbird with exchange with the native exchange protocol. Um, it's, it's getting there, but I don't think it's ready for prime time yet. When I talked with the thunderbird guys on floss again a few weeks ago, this was, this was their big, big outstanding to do, and it was like they knew they had to get this done if they wanted Thunderbird to be really usable, especially in the business world. 139.

01:01:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I wonder, and maybe nobody knows, but is the Exchange I don't know API or whatever, open enough for Thunderbird to utilize and connect to, or do they have to kind of hack it to make it work?

01:02:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I believe they had to reverse engineer it, think better word reverse engineer yeah, you can. Uh, you can do a little googling and find some things like. Blogthunderbirdnet has a story from about this time last year talking about trying to bring it in. Uh, they're building in rust. Their, their exchange support is built in Rust, interestingly enough.

01:02:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not aware of any third-party ones that really have consistently at least, worked with Exchange over the years. Even Windows-owned built-in Windows 10 mail client, I think only fairly, relatively recently, started to support it.

01:02:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think they do Yep, yep, yep, yep, it's coming.

01:02:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's too bad, but I guess they don't want. I mean, it's too bad that there's not just an open here's how you work with our systems, but that kind of would eat away at their higher-end licenses possibly.

01:03:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I want to say actually that they've gotten a little bit of support from Microsoft on this, like not officially, but I I'd have to go back and listen to the episode where I talked to talk to the guy about it but I believe they've gotten some patches sent in by Microsoft folks, if I remember correctly.

01:03:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Some of their engineers that want to use Thunderbird. So yeah, basically correctly. Some of their engineers that want to use Thunderbird, yeah, basically.

01:03:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Then again, you know I say it would eat into their own, which it would probably. You know their own apps, you know their own outlook that you had to pay extra for if you're on 365, but they've kind of already started doing that with their own windows. I can say 10, but I guess that's 11. They're more current one with the built-in app. So I mean, if they're already doing it, might as well let someone else do it Actually.

01:03:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
isn't Microsoft wanting you to go with the web-based version of 365?

01:04:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm sure they want you to.

01:04:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, you don't have to pay extra for that, though that just comes with the lowest tier of Office 365. I'm sure they'd much rather have the paid Outlook tiers.

01:04:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So if you want to use Exchange on Thunderbird, you have to use a beta or daily build and then you can go in. Exchange Mail Support is enabled by default starting with the July 11, 2024 build of version 130 on daily builds.

01:04:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
so go in for a daily or a beta um must still be, uh, kind of not ready for prime time if it's been in the beta for that long and not in the release I mean, it is an extremely complicated thing to add this new, not entirely well documented, uh, email exchange format.

01:04:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So they don't, they don't want to roll it out broken and that makes a lot of sense to me.

01:04:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
My fear is that, uh, microsoft will change something and then I'll be broken again so yeah, it's interesting.

01:05:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You mentioned that apparently microsoft has two different things. They call it like ews and flock. No, not flock. I I read and said the same thing. I read and didn't mean to graph. Graph is what they call it. The EWS is going to replace my graph and, uh, the Thunderbird support is for EWS, and I don't know if they've started working on the graph support or not yet. So, yes, yes, that is exactly the thing. But the other thing Microsoft tends to do is, when they do a version rev of a protocol like that, they tend to just reuse things, and so that's just a few more things you have to add to it.

01:05:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean even using their own products. Every year after year they're older. Unsupported products of Outlook get harder and harder to function with it.

01:05:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
They've got unsupported products? Well yes, harder to function with it. They've got unsupported products? Well yes, I thought everything had backwards compatibility built into it.

01:05:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, have you ever tried to get support for microsoft products?

01:06:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
they're kind of all unsupported yeah, but I mean like they don't even have updates anymore for, like uh, outlook 2013 or 12 or whatever.

01:06:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's not true.

01:06:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You can find plenty of third parties that will support Microsoft. My biggest fear is they're going to force the new Outlook or force web Outlook, because both of them are just so terrible.

01:06:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Then it's obvious they will.

01:06:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I could rant for an hour on them. Just all the things they don't support. They're broken. Their layout is horrible.

01:06:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right. Why don't you save that for your Windows show? Okay?

01:06:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You'd be better off going back and using Excite.

01:06:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's just a lot of profanity. That's all. My Windows show would be just a lot of profanity.

01:06:53 - Leo (Announcement)
That's all my Windows show would be.

01:06:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
A lot of profanity.

01:06:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh, you're talking about Windows Weekly, yeah.

01:07:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, let's get into command line tips. Rob has it first, and Rob is talking about flock. What is?

01:07:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
flock. What is flock? So I was on my more utils series that I was going to do and with that I was going to do a tool called LCKDO. But this is being deprecated since the util Linux package now has a program called flock that does the same thing. So I decided to bounce over to flock, kind of being in the vein of covering what things in the more utils does.

01:07:46
So flock or F lock or file lock F lock it's a file lock, so it's used to lock a file and this can be used in a script to lock a file, make sure multiple processes don't try to write to the file at the same time or corrupt things. So for those watching, I got on my screen. I have two console windows. There are terminal windows. I'm going to demonstrate here the first one. I have flock space, just a random text file. I made space dash, dash, command space quotes, sleep space 10 quotes. So what that does is it runs flock on that file and then it runs whatever command you have after it. So in this I just have it sleeping for 10 seconds and what that's going to do is, while whatever command you have in there is running, that file is going to be locked. Once that command stops running, the lock will get released. So I'm going to run that and then we're going to go over to the second one, which is the same thing, but it's going to echo lock is removed. So I have flock space, the file space, dash, dash command space, quote. Echo space lock is removed, quote. Quote. Echo space lock is removed, quote. So that's going to demonstrate when that lock is up. So if I hit enter on this first one and I go over to this next one, hit enter, well, nothing's happening because the first one still running the slave for 10 seconds and the second one is waiting for that lock to be undone. So boom, right, at the same time, you see, the lock went away and then the second one came up.

01:09:35
So now, just for example, if I run the second again because it's not locked, I could just keep right on running that. So that is like the base way to do that. I mean, that's just a demo example, but you could do this in scripts. Now there are other flags you can use. So if you use the dash U flag, if I use that in the second one while it was locked, dash U will unlock a file. So I could lock the file and then basically ignore the lock and just and just take it. Then there's also a dash S which will do a share lock. So what this will do is if I add the dash S and it locks the file for write access, but it allows action to take place that's only going to read the file. Now if it writes the file it's, it's gonna wait until the lock is free and then there's also a "-n" and that will just stop if the file is locked.

01:10:45
So, for example, if I ran that first one, locking the file, and the second, if I had dash n, it would go to run and see that the file is locked and then it would just exit out and not run the program at all. So obviously not something you're going to run, unless you're, I guess, maybe want to lock a file from from other systems. But mostly you use this as a script to have have locking control of a file. So that way, you know you don't have all kinds of processes writing and messing things up, and you know I could have used something like this years ago, long, long time ago, in my early days. I remember doing websites. I mean, I've done websites for years, but making a counter on a website and this was before my my SQL days, I'm talking. So I didn't even have a database and I would just have a flat text file.

01:11:44
That was basically a counter and I don't know if you guys remember 25 years ago all kinds of website had visitor site counters on them and I would have this text file and I would find that if multiple things were visiting the site, sometimes it would hit that text file at the same time and it wound up resetting it back to zero, because basically I would read it and and then add one to it and if one was in the process of, of, of of its action, the next site thing would come along. It's like oh nothing here, okay One. So obviously that's more specific to PHP that I'm talking about and not a command line. But you know I could have executed it. Or if there was something in in PHP but something like that in your scripts could be useful.

01:12:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Definitely.

01:12:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But that was a big improvement because before even the counter, Rob had to just sit there and watch the incoming traffic with a hand counter. Click, click, click.

01:12:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I just went through the logs and I counted. Let's see One, two, three, okay, three visitors yesterday. Update the web page.

01:13:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, Jeff. What is your apt-related tip so?

01:13:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I've got apt modernized sources. Now, this came around as part of my upgrade and doing some of this because I didn't update right away. I loaded the operating system and then I went, okay, let me apt upgrade. I loaded the operating system and then I went, okay, let me apt upgrade. Well, I ran across the message. It says notice, some sources can be modernized. Run apt modernized sources to do so. Well, what does that mean? Should you, shouldn't you?

01:13:48
So basically, in January Debian Unstable released a new source format, the sources, which mean the different repositories that your system will reach out to to get the software and see if there's any updates and load them. And there's some information in there of what they are and what they support and things like that. Well, now it went to multiline. The extremely oversimplified explanation is this format addresses the file length, duplication and machine parsability issues present in the one-line style format. So the first link in the show notes is a high level view of using the apt modernized source command. It's got a bunch of different apt things in it, of different commands and whatnot, but it's right towards the top. You'll see modernized sources is in there Now the second link in the show notes goes into deep details on the new format. Now. I should mention, though, that when I say deep, I don't mean hard to read, so if you've ever messed with sources lists, you'll easily be able to understand the new format and the reasoning. They also give examples of the new and old format so you can compare the differences.

01:15:26
And I also used it to implement a fix to a message I was getting with the apt update command. So I ran I just you know, at this point I'm throwing caution to the wind right I run my apt modernize sources command and then after that, every time I did an update or I mean an upgrade, I would get the following message I mean to upgrade. I would get the following message Notice skipping acquire of configured file main slash binary, dash i386 slash packages as repository. And then, basically, google Chrome slash dev space stable in release doesn't support architecture i386, which is just like it sounds. Chrome doesn't have an i386 package.

01:16:19
So what did I do? In my slash etc. Slash app, slash sources, dot list, dot d directory? I edited my.

01:16:31
Now it's this this is what it's called my google-chromesources file, and I added the line architectures, colon AMD64. That removed the message I was seeing, because now I said for Chrome to use only the AMD 64 architecture and don't try to pull in any others. So now the message I was getting before wasn't an issue, other than it bothered my OCD, so I didn't have to fix it. I don't have to go in there, it's nothing bad. It's just saying, hey, chrome doesn't support more than one architecture, but I wanted anybody else to also have that OCD going. I want to get rid of this messaging. This is the fix, and the second article, because it lists all the different flags and options in there, will help you fix any issues you're going to have. So be aware this is coming for anyone on Debian-based. It has a Debian-based distribution, so it will be coming whenever, as things trickle down and SID becomes or the unstable becomes stable I guess not S Sid, but it's eventually going to hit all the regular non-beta distributions.

01:18:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, very interesting. Good to know you figure that when it's a non-beta update, that the update script is going to take care of that for folks.

01:18:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't know because maybe In this case it just didn't specify an architecture for Chrome, because certain things still take the I386 libraries, i-386 libraries and albeit it's not a lot, but because they didn't specify it, it still tries to grab it in there. Because I have the i-386 set, because I think it it either pulls it in because of steam or because of wine.

01:18:43
one of the two is still pulling those or both or both could be, and that's why it was just confused. If I didn't have that, I don't think I'd ever see that message and I'd never even know. Well, I guess I would still get the message to modernize it, just wouldn't have thrown the can't pull yeah yeah, all right, good to know about, uh ken, what is pw, dash dot and also what is dot.

01:19:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, let me go ahead and explain pw-dot and also what is dot.

01:19:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, let me go ahead and explain pw-dot first. That's Pipewire's dot graph dump command. We talked about pw-dump a couple of episodes ago, but today we're going to talk about PWDOT.

01:19:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And it's got a few commands to it. You mirrored it. Your screenshots are mirrored. Yes, it is. Let's see, here we go. I fixed it for you.

01:19:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I got it I got you Thank you file that you would put a dot after, and it contains basically a script that could be used by a graph, is command dot to create a ping file. So that's why I'm covering both of them today. That's why I'm covering both of them today With McKenna Analyzed. I'm starting off by showing you the PWDOT, the standards, the dash H, the dash dash version, and there is the dash R, of course, in case you want to work with a remote daemon. But with PWDOT I'm not going to worry about that, since I'm having too much fun with the local pipewire daemon. Now, the next command that I do is I just ran PWDOT with no flags, and what it does by default with no flags is create a pwdot file and, as I said, that's just a script of commands that the GraphLayoutProgramdot uses. It's in the DOT language, in fact, which could become a whole other series of commands by itself. Yes, but when you run that, as I did here, it then turns around With the DOT.

01:21:42
I use a dash capital, t, p-a-n-g to tell it that I want to create a png file, then dash O to give the output name of the file, in this case pwpng, and then I list my working directory and it shows that you've got the pwdot and the pwpng. Now what good is that png for? If you've got an image editor, you can bring it up. Gimp would work In this case. Just for viewing, I use a GwinView and that lets me bring it up. And here I have the PWDOT and what you see is it shows all the nodes that my pipe wire instance has. So it's a quick way to do that. Now you do have some other commands that you can use with the pw dot. I'm going to quickly run through those. One is for giving the output file that you want to go to. You do a pw-dot space dash o, and in this case I said space basic, dot dot.

01:23:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Somebody had too much fun with that.

01:23:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, I did.

01:23:17
And then again I used that file as the name for the DOT command and in this case I changed the output file name to basicpng or basicping, which would really be confusing. And then I also used the dash A command which tells it to run for all the nodes, and I did it to a basic dash all dot file and brought it out and here's what the output of those look like. This is showing the basic dash all PNG and you'll see there that I've got two other png files in the folder that I'll be going over in a minute. So, and here's the basic-allpng with all the nodes and you see, there it's showing well with the screenshot I didn't catch it all the way to the far left, but it's showing all the nodes and how they connect with all the way to the far left. But it's showing all the nodes and how they connect with all the information to the different factories that were used to create certain adapters. And then I went and did you see a basic dash D option along with the dash O to get more detailed information. And there's all the detailed information. So it's a quick way to take a snapshot of your Pipewire instance so you can look into it to get the information you may need for reviewing certain things. Get back up here. There we go. And then of course there's another option that is dash-sh or dash-smart and that lets you just. It just looks and does anything that's got links to it.

01:26:02
In this case I was doing rent DLC. Yep, this is without any thing linked, so there's nothing out. Then I started VLC with some audio files that were playing and that gave me this and this one. I called, looking back at the command line, vlc-smart, and I'll put that to v VLC-smartping just to keep it better. And you see, I've built up quite a few files in that folder just doing that. But here you've got the VLC media player. It's got the left and right audio outputs showing those being linked to the left and right inputs of the audio sync, which in this case is maintained by ALSA's output. That's the for my Sanyo TV and it's a great way to do a snapshot, see what you've got when you've got are playing around with different links to get information.

01:27:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I find this super fascinating and I played around with it a little bit myself while you were going through that and I discovered something that it's not documented but it works. So for pw, the dash o flag is where you tell it. This is the output file I want. You can use dash to send it to standard output. So pw dash o dash and it'll go to standard output. So pwdash O dash and it'll go to standard out, and then you can use the pipe redirector and pipe that into dot and then you can. You can then use something like dash capital T X lib on my install at least to run it without saving anything to your, your local directory.

01:28:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It'll just generate it on the fly and show it on the screen in another application or yes, so it runs a little.

01:28:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
um, I'm not sure what technically this is. It's graph viz. Yeah, yeah, so it runs a GraphViz instance. It might be Dottie, I'm not sure.

01:28:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I played around with that, but I didn't like the way it looked and I couldn't had trouble managing the output file in it, so I prefer Gwynview for myself. It's what you know.

01:29:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The nice thing about this, though, is, like I said, it doesn't throw any extra files onto your file system.

01:29:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You can just generate it. You can type that right into that frame buffer image viewer. That I did probably a few months ago.

01:29:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's true. Yeah, I'm sure you could do that too. All kinds of fun stuff in there. All right, I've got a command line tip and I've actually had quite a bit of fun with this just in the past couple of hours since I discovered it. I was looking through my list of like oh, what command line tip came up with trash.

01:29:37
And this one is really fascinating. It is essentially the name of the program is actually trash dash, clcli, and it comes. When you install it you get multiple commands for the command line and it essentially lets you work with the graphical desktop's trash system from the command line. So it's like the standard free desktop trash and the whole idea there is when you delete something from your desktop, you know, using your desktop environment, it doesn't actually delete the file in the same way that just an RM does. It moves it to the trash can. And we've probably all been there where we RM'd something and then realized moments later that we RM'd it up, as it were, messed up, and the thing that we deleted when you use rm is gone forever. Uh, so you can use trash instead of rm, just trash by itself trash, and then a file name will move a file to the trash can.

01:30:37
And then there are there's things like trash dash. I think it's trash desk list, um will show everything that's in there, um, which unfortunately it's not sorted very well. This is this. There's a couple of outstanding feature requests in the, the trash cli that I found, because you would think, oh, it's certainly it's. It sorts them by the date you deleted it or it sorts them by name. It doesn't do either of those, it just sort of randomly sorts them. So that's less than great.

01:31:09
But there's also the ability to empty the trash, trash dash empty. Or you can do trash dash restore to be able to get a file back from the trash can. And so there's kind of two main use cases for this that I see. One is having a command line interface to be able to work with. You know your trash can from your desktop. So you've deleted something within your desktop environment and you want to be able to look at that, maybe pull it into a script or automatically restore something like that. It's useful there. But I think it's also pretty useful to be able to trash files from the command line and they're gone, quote, unquote but they're still in your trash can if you ever wanted to get them back. I think both of those are potentially pretty useful things. It's available on both Fedora and my Pop OS machine, so I think it's going to be pretty widely available just to install from your repositories what was it called?

01:32:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
what was it called the repository? Was it just trash, or?

01:32:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
trash dash cli. I'm pretty sure that's what I installed to get it. To get it to working, um, on both fedora and pop os, you can just run the trash command and if it's not installed, it will tell you hey, do you want to install apt?

01:32:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
install trashscli on Linux Mint.

01:32:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Cool yeah, trashscli it gives you the command sudo apt install trashscli. So it's aware.

01:32:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'll just alias that to RM and never make that mistake again, you know that's not that mistake again.

01:32:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know that's. That's not a terrible idea. You could do that. The flags want to be the same, but yeah, well, I don't know, I haven't looked into that. It may try to reuse some of the flags. I don't think there's, I don't think there's many flags actually to, to, to trash itself.

01:33:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, I many flags actually to trash itself. Well, I guess they have the dash R recursive, so I don't know how many other flags do I use with remove? That's like the only one.

01:33:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, not many, and then it's also it has a little note here that some of these are ignored for GNU RM compatibility. So like apparently that is a thing that people actually do is alias RM to trash.

01:33:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
do is alias rm trash just to alias rm to trash dash put uh, you can, just, you can just use trash by itself when I make, when I make a new distro, i'm'm just going to automatically alias that and that's going to be.

01:33:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Actually, I bet trash is just pointing at trash dash put Because it's giving me the exact same. So help, gives me the same thing. No, it's on binary. Anyway, it's cool. Play anyway it's cool. Play with it. It's fun. Hopefully it'll save you from accidentally deleting something that was actually important. But how are you?

01:34:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
going to learn squeak if you don't just totally trash your system every once in a while how are you going to learn to have backups?

01:34:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
yeah, I mean you're not wrong, but it's much better if you learn to have backups when you delete one file than when it's all gone.

01:34:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yes, yes, yes, indeed, all right, it has been fun. I'm gonna let each of the guys plug whatever they want to plug. Get the last word in, and we're gonna start with mr rob campbell all right, just my usual.

01:34:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Come visit my website, connect with me website's robertpcampbellcom. And on the website at the top you can find links to my linkedin twitter. Uh, blue sky mastodon and a nice little cup to donate me a cup of coffee in increments of $5.

01:35:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Robert P Campbell, with the P in there.

01:35:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
R-O-B-E-R-T-P-C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L dot com.

01:35:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Robert P Campbell. That's somebody else.

01:35:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
He exists, but that's somebody else, and we have, but that's somebody else, and we have had coffees donated to other members of the team through that site.

01:35:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Indeed which we will eventually get paid our coffees Eventually. All right, Ken.

01:35:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I'm just going to recommend to everybody, before you try, any of those how-toos that were published April 1st, back up first. Yes, and since Rob stole my main one-liner that I was going to do, and that was April Fool's from Foss Weekly- there you go.

01:36:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All right, and Jeff, one thing to say is I think Ken is right and it is Chrome that's messing up, because I had to like totally shut it down and restart it because Chrome died on me. So you know the wonders of beta, but Firefox works great, just saying Nothing else other than a poem. Laptop had issues. You know the wonders of beta, but Firefox works great, just saying, uh, nothing else other than a poem. Laptop had issues. We knew exec started seeing a few. He can't place a ticket, said that you bricked it Won't fare well at your next review. Have a great week everybody.

01:36:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, that hits a little too close, all right, appreciate you guys. Oh, that hits a little too close at home, all right, appreciate you guys. Oh, the penguin, the penguin. I have a Tux penguin. I have a Tux penguin from ThinkGeek, the old geek store of yore that is sadly no longer in existence. I need to get that out. Anyway, appreciate you guys being here.

01:37:01
If you want more of me, there is of course Hackaday, and you may have seen a little bit of a penguin going by there, because the Floss Weekly is actually in the slider at the top of the page at the moment. So I've got Floss Weekly is there. And then also the security column goes live every Friday morning over at Hackaday. Make sure to follow there for your up-to-date security news. Mostly, well, a lot of it is Linux Flare, but not entirely. But other than that, we just appreciate everybody being here and if you're not a part of Club Twit, you should really think about it. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month and it's the way to support, to show you care, and we appreciate everybody that's there. Way to support, to show you care, and we appreciate everybody that's there. Watch us and listen, both live and on the download. We will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.