Untitled Linux Show 199 Transcript

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

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This week we talk about Ubuntu and Fedora, both releasing, and then Git, believe it or not, turns 20 years old. Cosmic is absolutely everywhere these days, framework really impresses us with an AMD laptop and Thunderbird is rolling out Thundermail. It's a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is twit. This is the untitled linux show, episode 199, recorded saturday, april 19th. The older you get, the less time you have. Hey folks, it is saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with linux and open source uh, hardware and software, all kinds of stuff. Today it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with Linux and open source, hardware and software all kinds of stuff. Today it is, of course, not just me. We've got the regular crew Rob and Ken and Jeff are here, and we are going to start by talking about Ubuntu, which is not my favorite distribution, but it is some people's favorite distributions, and Rob is going to bring the story of well, 2504.

01:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Either hate it or you love it. So, yes, this is a moment we've all been waiting for, except for Jeff. He couldn't wait because he's been running the beta, I think, for a little while. But for the rest of us, the moment we've been waiting for is here, and that's the Plucky Puffet is now available for download, and if you don't know what a Plucky Puffet is, well, I don't know what the animal is either.

01:36
But as far as canonical is concerned, it is UBIN2 2504 release, so UBIN2 25.04 is powered with the latest Linux 6.14 kernel. There is now a generic ARM64 desktop ISO targeting virtual machines, acpi plus EFI platforms and Snapdragon-based Windows on ARM devices, as well as initial hardware enablement for the Snapdragon X Elite platform. The installer has features to improve dual booting for Windows, so that way, jeff can more easily dual boot Windows and Linux more easily boot dual boot Windows and Linux. It's now including a focus on BitLocker protected Windows systems, allowing users to install Ubuntu alongside existing BitLocker partitions. It has network enhancements, such as NetPlan receives support for WPA, psk, sha-256 Wi-Fi connections, so some better encryption there. There is support for configuring routing policies on the network manager backend and there's support for new functionality in SystemD NetworkD in systemd networkd wait online to wait for DNS servers to be configured and reachable before considering an interface to be online. So before the interface says it's online, it has to be able to get to DNS. We also see improvements with AppArmor and NVIDIA. Dynamic boost is now enabled by default on support supported laptops with NVIDIA GPUs, so Jeff will definitely like that one too.

03:34
All the core apps under the hood are updated, such as the new GCC 15, which I believe GCC 15, 15.1 just came out, but they have 15 on there, uh and the exciting new apt 3.0 package manager that I think we just talked about last week maybe it's the week before, but that's a one you definitely want to get up, get your hands on. And then ubuntu 2504 also includes the new GNOME, or GNOME whatever you want to call it. I like GNOME 48. And all the great features that that includes, like notification grouping. And then there's also a new digital well-being panel in settings providing screen time tracking features and controls similar to what Apple provides, so you can get scolded when you're in front of the screen too much.

04:30
And a feature Jonathan would love is HDR support, kind of you know, for the apps that support it at least, and it's not enabled by default. You have to go on there and you have to get down enabled. But it's there. And there are a lot of other new features in here, like preserve battery health mode to help prolong battery capacity, and okay, I think I'm just going to stop right here. No one wants me to list off feature after feature, for you know the rest of the show we all want to get out of here and you know well, for me I want to play some games, but who knows what?

05:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
the rest of the show is going to be Try out Ubuntu 25.04.

05:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know, today I mostly use Ubuntu on servers and you know I didn't really see anything interesting too interesting in there for 25.04 for me, for my servers. So I think I'm still gonna wait for the next lts, like I normally do. But it does, it looks. Looks pretty great, uh, for the desktop.

05:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So maybe when I'm done running mental, give ubuntu another try on the desktop someday one thing is if you're running 24.10 kubuntu with kde going to 2504, you are now on the 63 kde version, so you're a lot of updated uh, plasma and frameworks and all that into the future yep yep, I think I'll wait till next month.

06:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
two reasons one to give myself time to back up my current desktop, just in case, and number two to give it time for some of those updates that you'll probably end up having to do for the next couple of weeks, to go ahead and get rolled into what I actually install.

06:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Shouldn't your nightly backups cover that first one pretty easily?

06:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, that should just be done when you wake up in the morning so I've got to know does ubuntu intentionally pick animals that nobody's ever heard of?

06:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think they just kind of ran out of things uh to do with, uh their lettering scheme I know they intentionally pick animals a lot of them are based out of Africa, I believe.

06:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, which is where the Ubuntu name comes from as well. Yeah, so it's kind of on brand. I did know essentially what a puffin was. I could have told you it was a type of bird. It's a cute little, almost penguin-ish thing. So I mean, I approve, it's a cute little bird thing.

07:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So I mean, I approve, it's a cute little bird, it's. It's a better or more recognizable name for me than, uh, some of the more recent ones, which I can't remember what those were either, but I knew there were some that I just had no, never heard of 2510 is going to be called questing quokka.

07:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a. It's a cute little critter for fuzzy critter that looks like it's making the whelp face. That's what I see every time.

07:29
I see it well it's a sound pac-man makes when he's eating dots oh, for those of us on the other side of the fence, fedora 42 is now out this past week and we told you about that last week on the show. I've not updated to it yet, but as soon as life settles down and I don't have anything else, that's absolutely pressing. So you know, in a couple of years here I'll eventually get to it.

07:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You got any hardware that you're going to put it on the desktop behind me? It'll go to Fedora 42. Got any hardware that you're?

08:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
going to put it on the desktop behind me.

08:06 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It'll go to Fido 42.

08:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Weren't you getting a relative a laptop or building a laptop for him? So I, I, I did. I purchased a framework for my parents a while back and they have enjoyed that, and I have been considering a framework for quite a while. Ken, there's something new with the Framework 13, isn't there?

08:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, there is, and I want to thank first of all Michael Larabelle for doing a review of the Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300. Or is it A1300? Strix Point SOCs Now quoting Michael wow, what an upgrade. I've spent the past week testing out the Framework 13 with the AMD Ryzen AI9 HX370, and it's been terrific. Framework 13's modularity continues to pay off and allows easily upgrading to the new Strix Point-Bearing Motherboard with AMD Zen 5 CPU cores and the Radeon 8 shape and paired with great performance for delivering a great 2025 Linux laptop option. About bringing the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series to the Framework 13 this month.

09:47
The new laptops, or just upgrading the motherboard for an existing Framework Computer 13, are available for pre-order via Frameorg. There are options for the Ryzen AI 5 340, ryzen AI 7 350, and Ryzen AI9 HX370. Now don't be surprised if you find that your order won't ship until June, since the first batch or two have already sold out Ryzen AI9 HX370 since last summer and found that the Framework 13 delivers even better performance than what he saw out of the Asus ZenBook S16 that he was using for the StrixPoint Linux benchmarking. According to Michael, you'll want to be running as new a Linux distribution as possible to get the most out of StrixPoint. He found that Fedora 41 with all available package updates provides a nice experience, though you may find it even better with Fedora 42. He found assembling the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop was quick and easy.

11:03
Michael said after putting together the new Framework 13 components it was off to the races with Linux. Ubuntu 25.04 with the Framework 13 paired with the AMD Ryzen AI9 HX370 has been working out great for compatibility and performance. In my week so far of testing out the new main board, there haven't been any issues to report on around Ubuntu 25.04 usage with its Linux 6.14 kernel and Mesa 25.0 graphics drivers. Now, instead of my putting you to sleep reading a lot of graphs to you, I'll let you follow the link in our show notes and read them yourselves. Jeff, could this be your new laptop?

11:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Very possible. You know, I'm kind of at a dead heat between Framework and System76. That's kind of my top two contenders and System76.

12:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's kind of my top two contenders.

12:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, the advantage to Framework is every couple of years you can just replace that nameboard.

12:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
If you're very nice to the rest of the computer.

12:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I am pretty good about being nice to the machines.

12:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I too have been looking at the frameworks, the framework 13. I'm also pretty interested in the framework 12, looking at what all they put in that. Um, I would, I would actually find it really fascinating if they put an lte modem in the framework 12. I don't know if they're going to or not, but it's, uh, it, that would.

12:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That would be very interesting to me can't you put whatever you want in it? I mean mean that, make the module, but there is somebody that is working on it.

12:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was looking at that. There is somebody that's working on making an LTE module that will fit into the framework slots, it's. It was still a work in progress last time I checked, so it wasn't quite ready to go. But yeah, that is a thing that there's a community member working on and you could do it yourself honestly. But yeah, between the Framework 12 and Framework 13, I want to know what's up with this goofy name of this processor, the Ryzen AI9HX370. Somebody needs to go beat someone at AMD's marketing about the head and shoulders for calling something well, for putting the name AI in it at all.

13:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and there's some like HX, hx Extreme, ai, hx Extreme or something. There's like about four of them that are about the same name. They just keep tacking things on and it's just like somebody got fired from the usb consortium and they got naming convention over at you know, amd. Yes, hey, if it's 35 syllables, it'll be easy to remember yeah, no, no, that's no, they just put ai in there to show that AI came up with the name.

14:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Maybe it's like a signature.

14:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I guess it makes as much sense as AI does.

14:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or is that an A1?

14:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, it's an AI. It's AI.

14:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It was worth a try. They want to show it off.

14:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, all right. Well, if we don't want to use amd, but want to use the other team, particularly when it comes to video cards, what is, uh, what's new, jeff?

14:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
well, in case you haven't been keeping up with the latest hardware news, nvidia has released its rtx 56 ti graphics card featuring featuring 16 gigabytes of gd, dd, gddr7, but it also comes in another variant with eight gigabytes of DDR7 memory. Michael Larable over at Phronix has been testing the 16 gigabyte version, and today we'll be diving into both compute benchmarks and gaming benchmarks. But first a quick note. Reviewers across the Internet have been urging consumers to avoid the 8GB cards, as a lot of people believe that the 8GB of VRAM will have a much shorter use. Frame generation, sometimes called fake frame generation that process also consumes VRAM, so you're not.

15:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So they're not saying that the cards are going to burn themselves out. They're saying they're just not going to compete in the market for long.

15:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Right. Once you hit, yeah, once you hit eight gigabytes of VRAM and you're using it, your frame rates just drop. So maybe you're playing it. Well, let's just say you're playing at 60 frames a second, you run out of VRAM, you're probably at 25 frames a second or maybe even slower, because now you're swapping out of normal system memory, popping out of normal system memory, and not only is it not as fast as the GDDR7, now you're transferring it. It's got to go either through the CPU or, if you have direct memory where it can dump it into RAM, ddr5 is still slower than the GDDR. Plus the interface, the overhead, transport. It's just bad news and that's why, also, even I want to make note that, using the frame generation, it also uses VRAM. So you think, well, I'm going to have a lower overhead because now my resolution is smaller and it's got upscaling, but it takes RAM to make that happen.

16:46
But enough of that, let's get rolling with the benchmarks and we'll begin with the compute performance. That was the first batch of testing. Now, these tests were conducted using the NVIDIA 570-133.07 driver. Now the gaming benchmarks, however, were held back until the arrival of a new driver, the beta 575.51.02. So now this new driver brings several enhancements, including the extension of the NV underscore, disable underscore, explicit underscore sync behavior to GLX and Vulkan applications, along with various bug fixes. That addresses crashes in several different games and it also introduces NVIDIA's Smooth Motion, which is an AI-based feature designed for the GeForce 50 series cards to improve gameplay fluidity by inferring additional frame data between two rendered frames, so it's kind of a frame smoothing in between rendered frames, part of the additional frames that sometimes they could put in. For those interested, the driver release page is linked in the articles included in the show notes so you can see everything that was done in there.

18:01
But going back, let's take a closer look at the compute performance. So Michael Arable tested both 50 series and 40 series NVIDIA GPUs and although AMD cards and older NVIDIA GPUs were not included these, though, I said not although, though, amd cards and older NVIDIA GPUs were not included in these benchmarks, but we do know historically AMD is not doing so hot on compute right now. They're still working on their Rock M to get it fully loaded and running for the new generation of cards. So where does the RTX 5060 Ti stand? Essentially right between the RTX 4070 and the RTX 4060. Michael did note a couple of limitations in his tests, including the absence of a 4060 Ti, which he doesn't have, and the fact that his RTX 4060 lacks a power consumption sensor, so there's going to be some gaps in the power data because he just couldn't measure for the 4060. But overall, the results align with expectations. Nothing too surprising. Now, shifting to gaming benchmarks, we have a similar comparison of GPUs, but with the addition of AMD 7000 and 9000, 7700 XT, which, in turn, are bracketed by the RTX 4060 and the RTX 4070. However, it is important to note that Vulcan-based ray tracing performance was significantly stronger on the NVIDIA cards compared to AMD's 7000 series offerings. The 9000s do have better performance. They do have better ray tracing. It's taken quite a big step from the $7,000 to $9,000.

19:55
Now comes the big question should you buy one as of now? The biggest challenge is the price. These cards are fluctuating anywhere between $420 and nearly $600. And, thanks to scalpers, supply constraints, other market factors. If you can, I'd recommend waiting a couple more months to see how the situation evolves. Even concerns about tariffs are uncertain, as they change frequently. With new exceptions and additions constantly being introduced, plus the overall numbers going up and down, the future price of these cards is hard to predict. They could go up, they could go down.

20:32
Ultimately, I'll leave it to all of you to check out the articles linked in the show notes and to decide for yourself, personally, given some of the ongoing NVIDIA issues. You know there's still power connector issues. There's other chip issues, driver issues. You know, if I was purchasing a graphics card today because I really needed one, I would honestly opt for an AMD 9700 XT or even a 9700. Because if you desire and want to feel like tinkering with it people have been driving with firmware updates and other tweaks they can get 9700s up to 9700 XT levels. But you need to be able to have confidence. You can go in and play under the hood. That said, even those cards have unpredictable pricing. Amd's not immune from that either. So I do wish everyone the best on their GPU journeys, whatever path you're going to take.

21:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So you're not looking for a new GPU today. Jeff, you got some good frame rates with your GPU.

21:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I do. I do have good frame rates.

21:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You probably need a new camera, though, because your webcam was like one frame per 10 minutes, there One frame per story.

21:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I need to get OBS fixed is my problem. Obs keeps locking up on me Fine.

22:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Maybe step back a version.

22:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I already did. I uninstalled 31 and now I went back to the 30 point something, but it totally crashed on me. Something's not happy, yeah, but it runs fine on uh restream, so that if anybody sees my background, uh, quivering a little bit or quaking, that's just restream. It's nervous playing with my green screen. Yes, yes, we're making more realistic fire background.

22:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yay, flickering flames yeah, so there was. There was something interesting that I saw in the the benchmarks that you linked to there in your second story, and that was that the, the rx 9070 xt, the new top level amd card, um does not do great in comparison in some of these, and there's actually some news about that that I've got. It's also a Pharonix article. When you're talking about Linux gaming and frame rates, that is kind of the place to go to. The RDNA4, that's what the 9000 series cards from AMD is based on, that is, their chip is AMD4, or, excuse me, rdna4,. It is very new and therefore there are things that are not as performant as they could be.

23:20
And so we've got here a story about the stuff in Mesa 25.1, which that is the version of Mesa that's just about to release, where the various developers have been adding stuff to it, and so we've got um, a. A part of the driver is going to enable compression. Um, we've got some other things here. Uh, you've got merrick. If you've been following linux graphics card stuff for a while, merrick is a name that will come, it will be familiar, his work will be familiar to you, um, and he is working on tweaks and performance and fixes, uh, to be able to get various games to work a bit better, and those should land in 25.1. So you know, if you have or get one of these cards, you're going to want to look for a distro that's going to ship with, or at least update you to, mesa 25.1.

24:12
But then there's also work on ray tracing for rdna4, which, again, if you look at the benchmarks that was a little bit down compared to some of the others. It was a little lower than you might expect, and there is work that's being done there as well. And there is actually a new format uh, it is bvh8. That is a new format that is supported in these cards, in our dna4, but was not wired up yet in mesa, and so they're just now getting merged the ability to turn that new format on, which will give you better ray tracing performance, um, but that is going to take a while and that stuff is probably going to work. They're going to land in 25.2.

24:59
So the uh, the second release of mesa from the year, um, probably in august, is when that will come out as stable. So fedora 43, ubuntu 25, 10 is really where these cards are going to come into their own and really be performant, and that might be about the time that they really start showing up available all the time at MS, at or close to MSRP. I got to looking for one of these the other day and sort of gave up in just a few minutes going yeah, they're not really available yet, not for any of the prices that I would be interested in paying. But anyway, work is coming and it looks like the 9070 in a few months here is really going to be a compelling choice for Linux gaming too.

25:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What distribution would you recommend running to make sure you've got the Mesa version that you'd need to support those Fedora?

25:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Arch Fedora yeah, or you know, depending on the release cycle, one of the Ubuntus could have it as well. Yeah, yeah.

26:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ubuntu is better now than it used to be. It used to lag much worse than it does now. But Fedora, so I would say you're going to get decent support out of it with either Fedora 42 or Ubuntu 25.04. And then the next version of both of those is going to be even better.

26:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Or Arch.

26:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Or Tumbleweed, tumbleweed.

26:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But forget LXQT.

26:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Probably.

26:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, that's not what I'd call cutting edge, but they had a release, though, didn't they?

26:41
they did and you know they are moving forward. In certain ways. I always say I'm often under talking about how everyone needs to be with Wayland. Wayland is the way, and even LXQt or LXQt whichever you want to pronounce it LXQt is how I'm going to say it is on board. So you know LXQt, known for being a lightweight desktop environment and maybe a little slower to update like others, like XFCE. But they have released version 2.2 this week with even better Wayland support. Lxq 2.2 brings better multi-screen support on Wayland, among other features. Q 2.2 brings better multi-screen support on Wayland, among other features. Uh, work to make the Wayland or other features working to make the Wayland environment uh, better supported. Don't worry, Ken X 11 is still on there for people like you. Uh, the Alex cute Wayland session will also continue working gracefully with all the latest stable versions of the different Wayland compositors. It can be paired with, Because with LXQt and Wayland you can use a number of compositors.

28:06
The LXQt panel can now be configured per monitor. When using the Wayland session. The drop-down queue terminal window has been improved under Wayland Monitor settings for KWin Wayland will now work if one or both screens are scaled. Lxq 2.2 also brings support within PCMAN FM-QT for custom options for terminals, fixes, QTerminal, around text rendering and support for PPD power profiles within LX Q Power Management. Unfortunately, UBITU users, or I should say LUBITU or LUBITU users you're going to have to wait a little bit about another six months before you can do that, because you won't see this version until LUBITU 20.10, now that 20.04 is out and I'm not really sure what distros will be shipping this first. I'm not aware of a lot of uh, um, lx cute distros, but uh, if you really want to get your hands on you can always compile it from source I.

29:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't think you mean 20.04 and 20.10 um, is that what I said?

29:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
no, let's, let's change those 20s, do a set.

29:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, I meant 25.04 and 25.10 all I can picture is robin williams with the beard and the long hair. What year is it?

29:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I even have it written down 25.10 it. It's not like my notes have it written wrong it just I don't know what year it is.

29:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It just happens, yep, have you ever run LXQt on your primary?

30:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Never as my primary, I don't think. I have tried it out, though.

30:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm trying to think. I know for a while, distros like backtrack used to ship with uh, I think that was xfce, but you do get. You get some of these niche distros every once in a while ship with these by default. Um, I'm trying to remember if there is anything that ships, you know, besides lubuntu, that ships with lx cute by default.

30:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know if there is yeah, I really couldn't find anything when I was looking into it. I wanted to to see who would be the premier LXQt distro and I really couldn't find anything. A lot of them have that as an option, but it's not their flagship ever.

30:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I wonder if someplace like LXQt, do they even have numbers? Do they have an idea of how many people run their desktop? I'm just curious. I don't know. I tried it. It's, uh, it's.

30:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm sure it's perfectly serviceable lightweight this is not quite what I'm looking for. You know it's kde ish in a way. You know it's it's got that cute uh, cutie uh stuff in the background and it's like lightweight kde without all the uh configurable features.

31:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But the whole thing of it was it was supposed to be lightweight and back when I know KDE was version three and version four it was a lot smaller. But once they hit version five I've seen tests where they it's not really much difference. Kde now is pretty lightweight versus what it used to be and compared to other desktops.

31:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's yeah, they're both using cute, so you can't uh, you know, expect one to have better, uh, better light weightness for that.

31:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So yeah it, it really anymore. I think is more it. If you like, if you like, have the preference, go for it, but you're not gaining resources back, really, or nothing, nothing noteworthy, yeah back in my day when I want a lightweight desktop.

31:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I just ran x and you had like these cross, cross hatch pattern, all the way across.

32:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You just stole my line back in the old open vms days.

32:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know running these kids and their desktop environments get out of here with that all you need is that and somewhere to run a command, and you can run anything just directly on x back in my day.

32:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
If you can lift a computer, it's not a real computer.

32:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, Ken, let's talk about OpenSilicon.

32:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I'd be more than happy to, but first I want to thank Marco and I do apologize if Google misled me on how to pronounce the last name I'm going to say Fioretti for sharing his opinion via FOSS Force. Marco starts his article by declaring people can say as much as they want about software eating the world, but software wouldn't exist without hardware that runs it, because what really makes the modern world possible is microelectronics, not source code. He then states in 2021,. Covid-19 and the US-China trade wars caused a severe chip shortage in European car plants. Europe responded with calls to break free from extra European microelectronics trade wars and official searches for EU chip champions. Europe has even blocked chip factory acquisitions by Chinese companies over national security concerns.

33:46
14 European member states prepared a project called you're going to love this one IPCEI ME-CT. Sounds like some obscure command line, doesn't it? But it actually stands for an important project of common European interest to support research, innovation and the first industrial deployment of microelectronics and communication technologies across the value chain. This resulted in the European Commission and Parliament issuing the European Chips Act to foster the resilience of the EU's semiconductor ecosystem and help achieve both the digital and green transition across Europe. Marco feels that any further action should be based on three pillars unity, smallness and openness, from top to bottom. Now it's this third factor that caught my attention, since it refers to open hardware, something we in the Linux community are always interested in. Now, open hardware can help reduce e-waste and prevent intellectual property lock-in. Now, since I don't want to deny you the experience of diving down this rabbit hole like I did, I do recommend starting with Marku's article that I have linked in our show notes.

35:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, this is interesting stuff. So it is just a truism that it is not a great thing that the vast, vast majority of the world's chips are made on a tiny little country that is as close as it is to China, right, I think everybody pretty much agrees on that. What we've not been able to agree on is the proper course of action of how to fix that, and we, of course, will not be able to come to any meaningful solutions on the show here today. We could give our opinions on it, but obviously this is something that the whole world, as it were, is going to have to come together and figure out, as they are trying to do currently, and we are sort of caught in the middle of that attempt.

36:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And here's the scary part it's our representatives that we have elected that are making this decision for us.

36:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Save that for Halloween.

36:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Ken, Save that for Halloween.

36:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is sort of scary to listen to elected officials try to talk about technology. That's just. That's not a republican or democrat, you know, not a conservative or liberal statement. That's just across the board. It is sort of scary to hear elected officials talk about technology. Very, very few times do they have a clue what they're talking about.

36:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Unfortunately, and if I forget in the after show, remind me and I can give some thoughts on this.

36:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I can pontificate a bit, yeah, and Clippy, you're right, that was the worst acronym ever that they came up with.

37:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yes, yeah, this is interesting and it's definitely something that we're watching, keeping an eye on, but, like I said, we're not going to be able to In fact we're not even going to try to pontificate about this much more, because then we get into, like, the partisan politics side of it and I don't find that interesting. I just don't. I don't find it very interesting on the show. So, jeff, so be quiet. Well, we can talk about it after the show. It's a little bit more interesting there.

37:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, but this is and mine won't get into. I don't have to get into politics, it's all the industry in itself, sure.

37:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And y'all can be prepared for a three-hour after show.

37:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think I'll be in trouble if I stick around for that long. Goodness. Let's talk then about version control systems, aka Git. I like SVN.

37:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Out.

37:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Get out of here. I was at the OpenWRT Summit back in like 2000,. What would it have been? 14, 2015, something like that? And they're like so is there anything else anybody else wants to talk about? Can we go from SVN to Git? And everybody else is like, oh, my goodness, yes. And the devs? They were like, oh, I guess we could talk about doing that. It wasn't long afterwards that they switched to get. We're like oh, thank you. Everybody hated svn. Anyway, jeff, tell us about get.

38:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know one thing I'm surprised we haven't talked about yet. Git turned 20 years old on April 7th. Now, if you're involved in software development, chances are you've heard of it, and Git if you haven't. It's a code repository system used to track revisions, manage projects and much more. I mean it's way more than that, but that's a high level. What it does. At its core, though, it's all about making code development efficient and reliable.

38:58
Now, linus Torvalds is best known as the mastermind behind the Linux kernel, and we talk about him all the time on this show, but what's less commonly known is that he also created Git. Now. Git's origins go back to a problem that cropped up during the Linux kernel development, and at the time, the team was using a proprietary version control system called BitKeeper. Things were working smoothly until they weren't BitKeeper accused a developer of reverse engineering techniques to create an open source tool called SourcePuller, which was designed to communicate with BitKeeper. In response, bitkeeper revoked the free license that Linux development team had been using. Faced with this sudden loss, linus needed a new solution. He surveyed the existing open source systems, but found none of them met his needs, so he pointed out that traditional source control systems could take 30 seconds to apply a patch and update metadata a pace which would never scale for the Linux kernel development. So when dealing with 250 patches at once, his solution needed to be lightning fast. So he set an ambitious goal of patching that should take no more than three seconds. Now, beyond speed, linus had three other critical requirements. One don't mimic CVS. If in doubt, make the opposite design choices. Support a distributed workflow like BitKeeper, and include robust safeguards against corruption, whether accidental or malicious. So Linus got to work on April 3rd 2005. Three days later he announced the Git project and by April 7th Git was self-hosting. And just 11 days later the first merge of multiple branches took place. And by the end of April it had already met its performance goals. The team benchmarked Git, adding patches to the Linux kernel tree at a blistering speed of 6.7 patches per second. By June 16th 2005, git was managing the Linux 2.6.12 kernel release. So, reflecting back on Git's 20th anniversary, linus had this to say "'Git was never a big thing for me, it was. I need to get this done, to do the kernel.

41:19
And some are probably asking so what does Git even mean? The readme file in the source code offers some amusing possibilities. One random three-letter combination that is pronounceable and not actually used by any common Unix command. The fact that it's a mispronunciation of get may or may not be relevant. Two stupid, contemptible and despicable Simple Take your pick from the dictionary of slang.

41:50
Three global information tracker. You're in a good mood and it actually works for you. Angels sing and a light suddenly fills the room. Four goddamn idiotic truckload of stuff. When it breaks, and if you actually look at the Git source history, the first comment is the information manager from hell. So, love it or hate it, git is a cornerstone of modern software development and it celebrates two decades of existence and it remains one of the most influential tools in the tech world. Take a look at the article in the show notes for even more information, and they have a link to the actual blog post where they interview linus, which is very long but pretty, pretty interesting and, uh, a lot, a lot of humor, because anytime uh linus is talking, it's always, it's always good, oh yes for me.

42:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Get is just short for get her done.

42:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There you go. Mod the source code, add it in.

42:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So one thing that comes to mind, this idea that Linus did this in all of 10 days worth of work. I think of the idea of a 10x developer. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It's the rock star, the guy that can get 10 times as much done. And I kind of have this feeling that it's not so much that a developer is a 10x developer, but that a developer comes to a point to where they are the ones that are suited to solve a problem and so for that particular problem they are the 10x developer. And I don't know, maybe most of us that are developers will be that guy at one point in our career. But anyway, torvalds was that guy for those 10 days to come up with the first version, the first working version of Git in just over a week Because it got a lot right?

43:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, apparently he needed it so he could help manage all the changes that were being made in Linux at the time.

43:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, yep, that's true, exactly what it was, and that's sort of the way the best projects come about. It's a felt need and you know how to fix it. You just go out and you do it.

44:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's how the best source code projects really come about. And you know one of my, I just always loved the CVS line. You know, whatever they do, don't do that, do the opposite. Do the opposite.

44:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yes, all right, rob. What is this that's spreading? Yeah, is this a new virus? Are we going to lock down again? Is it a new license that's going to become viral and make people at uh, microsoft upset again, what, what?

44:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
is this? So you've all heard of the big bang. Well, how about the cosmic spread? Because the cosmic desktop is continuing to spread everywhere. It isn't even out of alpha yet, but the Cosmic Desktop that was originally designed for System76's Pop OS is popping up everywhere. We've talked about it coming to Fedora. We mentioned, I think, coming to the Arch-based Garuda Linux. I think I'm pretty sure I've seen that it's available on Void Linux also, and I don't even know where else.

45:23
But it's going to show up places. It's coming everywhere, but one place I didn't predict, at least not this soon. I wasn't expecting it to show up anytime soon on cell phones or mobile devices. Well, well, well, it's coming now to a cell phone near you if you wanted to, and you got the right cell phone, but it's coming to PostMarketOS 2025-03.

45:54
So, for those who don't know, postmarketos is an operating system primarily for smartphones based on the Alpine Linux distribution. It extends the free and open source operating system Alpine Linux to run on smartphones and other mobile devices, and that also means that Cosmic is available in Alpine Linux now too. The latest release of Post Market OS also brings the great GNOME 48. It has some Firefox config changes like per site user agent spoofing, making, like, for example, youtube use its proper mobile site. There's initial camera support for has been merged now for the OnePlus 6, if you got one of those and you want to put post-market on there and really just a ton of other improvements and device specific improvements to, so you can actually run a real Linux on your phone. So now Cosmic is going to be one of those.

47:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Cool, you know we talk about. One of the advantages of Cosmic is that they made everything very configurable. It's sort of a toolkit that you can build a desktop with, so it does sort of make sense that it might work on a phone fairly well.

47:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, and it's lightweight, which is also another good thing to have on a smartphone, even though a lot of the smartphones these days are more powerful than a lot of people's computers, but some of them aren't. Yeah.

47:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Hey, don't pick on.

47:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Ken.

47:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, ken finally upgraded. He's got a decent computer these days. That is true, that's true.

47:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But especially, I think a lot of devices people are going to be putting this on are older devices. So having something fast and lightweight you know, speaking of lightweight desktop environments earlier like AlexQt, xfc I don't know if there's been any benchmarks, but Cosmic sure felt like alex, cute xfc I don't know what, uh, if there's been any benchmarks, but uh, cosmic sure felt like a sure winner to me in a lot of those categories, just from from testing it out. It it felt pretty fast. But somebody needs to benchmark that if they haven't I thought I might.

48:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'm just trying to dig back in memory. I thought michael larable did, but I thought there was some issues getting it to run because it was. It was certain certain benchmarks that would crash.

48:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean it's but that was on, and was that on a vm too, because I know the first version of cosmic had problems running on a virtual machine.

48:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah, the first alpha really could have been, because it was, I want to say it was a few months ago. Even so, it was an even earlier alpha than it is now.

48:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So well, rob if you want to pick up a new hobby, you could, uh, you could go start doing some benchmarking that's an idea, yeah I love to do a lot of things.

48:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I just I don't know, Ken, back me up here. The older you get, the less time you have to get things done.

49:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I mean, how did you know that?

49:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We got dark in a hurry, Rob. I realize how that's, I realize how that's, oh goodness, all right, ken, save us from Rob's sudden attack of macabre, and let's talk about Thunderbird and the new thing that they are doing.

49:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, please do. And, Bobby Borisoff, I want to thank you for writing about a possible alternative to Gmail and Office 365. It is a new initiative by Thunderbird called Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail Thundermail. Thunderbird's goal is to take its popular email client beyond the desktop and into territory currently ruled by giants like Google's Gmail and Microsoft Office's 365. We hear from Ryan Sipes, thunderbird's managing director of production, the reasons behind this decision. He said the why for offering these services is simple.

50:21
Thunderbird loses users each day to rich ecosystems that are both clients and services, such as Gmail and Office 365. These ecosystems have both hard vendor lock-ins and I believe that's through interoperability issues with third-party clients and soft lock-ins, in other words, through convenience and integration between their clients and services. He goes on to say it is our goal to eventually have a similar offering so that a 100% open source, freedom respecting alternative ecosystem is available for those who want it. Now Bobby states a major part of this new umbrella of services is appointment. It's a scheduling tool that allows individuals to share calendar availability via a simple link. The next part of this umbrella is Thunderbird Send. It emerges as an evolution of the former Firefox Send project. Are you old enough to remember that, jonathan?

51:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was just trying to figure out what Firefox Send is. I don't remember.

51:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Although the code has undergone significant restructuring, leading some insiders to jokingly call it a ship of theuses situation, the main goal remains consistent to enable secure and private file sharing conveniently. The Thunderbird Assist will also be available. This experimental feature, developed in collaboration with Flower AI, not Al, offers optional information artificial intelligent functionalities for users who want them, while also addressing privacy concerns. Head-on Owned device is robust enough to handle AI modules locally. Thunderbird Assist processes everything on the user's own machines. If you prefer to skip AI services, you can continue to use using the Thunderbird without these extras.

52:40
Now, according to Bobby, the most exciting part is Thunder Mail, an entirely new email service built upon open source software stacks. Open source software stacks primarily stalwart, and he's got a link to a article he wrote about stalwart back in March. That was really interesting, so I do recommend following the links from the show notes here to find out more about stalwart. But the end goal is to provide a modern, feature-rich email system that respects users' freedom and privacy while also matching or outdoing the convenience of big-name providers. Now, if you are interested, thundermail is accepting sign-ups for the beta waitlist at Thundermailcom, again linked in Bobby's article. If you are not actively involved in Thunderbird development or community support. Then definitely read Bobby's article on how Thundermail will support server cost and development.

53:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is very interesting to me. I remember when we had it I think it was Ryan Sipes, I'm pretty sure I had him on Sloss Weekly One of the points that we made. In fact, we made it the show title for that show. I think it was Ryan Sipes, I'm pretty sure I had him on Sloss Weekly, one of the points that we made. In fact, we made it the show title for that show. Please don't add AI slop to Thunderbird, and hopefully they haven't. I've not looked very deeply into Thunderbird Assist, but they are making it optional, which is always a good sign.

54:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I mean they got the coolest name for the mail server.

54:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Thundermail. Yeah Well, that's a not very veiled reference to Gmail. It's like the Thunderbird version of Gmail, right yeah, but it's cooler, well, okay.

54:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, I got Gmail. Oh look, I got Exchange, I got Thundermail. Well, yes, yes, I got Gmail. Oh look, I got Exchange, I got Thundermail.

54:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, yes, yes, I get that, but no, this whole thing, it's very much. It's like they're trying it's trying to be an open source version of the Google Suite business, right, which I mean that's cool. It's really interesting that there's going to be somebody else in that space. That there's going to be somebody else in that space. Yeah, next time I have a, I wouldn't want to start with a customer, I'd want to start with something that was one of my own, but next time I have a project spin up and I need an email address from it, this would definitely be something interesting to look at, just to get a feel for what it's like.

55:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What's interesting, though, is definitely read about stalwarts.

55:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It may give you some ideas on how you may be able to self-host part of that yeah, I've gone with I read mail, uh for my email hosting and I've actually had really good success with that, so I'll probably stick with that.

55:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Um no, maybe I yeah maybe I missed it, I don't know, um, but is so Thundermail the server? Is it just going to be? I'm sure it's going to be more than just a regular, just another mail server. I mean, is this going to be more like Exchange? That would be exciting.

55:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's an open source alternative to Exchange.

55:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know when it actually has the calendars and stuff that can.

55:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so further up in the article they mentioned that a new part of this umbrella of services is appointment, which is a scheduling tool. It's going to allow you to share calendar availability.

56:08 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And Thunderbird sends from what I got.

56:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's very similar to a OneDrive or a Google Drive.

56:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah.

56:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So yes, they are looking to offer a business suite similar to the Google Workspace or the Exchange. So yeah, it'll be interesting.

56:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So if you have voting rights in any corporations or have some way of input, providing input to them as some alternatives that may be cheaper than the current contenders you know, you know, and you, you keep saying, uh, like gmail, and I keep pointing towards exchange.

57:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And why? Why? I think it's more exchange. Like is is because, like well, gmail doesn't have a desktop, uh uh, client, whereas like right, right exchange does and and thunderbird would does. Does I mean they do, and presumably it's all going to integrate nicely.

57:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I could see somebody who could probably appear in the future for partnering with them. Who's that?

57:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
LibreOffice. Yeah, if they wanted to go, the full Office suite version. Yep, yep, yep, that does make sense. You know, I I'm thinking about this. I'm thinking about some of the crazy things that, uh, muzzle firefox have done and muzzle itself as the company has done. You know, we've looked at these things. Go, what, what, what are they thinking? Why are, why did they think that fits with the main, their you know, their core business, whereas with this, I don't know if it's going to work or not, I don't know if they're going to get a bunch of people to sign up for it, but like this at least makes sense with their core business, right? This is not. Well, I agree, we added I don't know, we added stamp collecting to Thunderbird. Some of the Mozilla stuff has been about, made about that much sense. This is at least on brand and on topic.

58:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So, yeah, I feel a little bit better about this than I do. Some of the other things exchange and gmail you know they need an open source competitor that actually has all those features together. Yeah, we haven't had anything we've had. No, obviously we've had email servers, pop and imap, whatnot. But yeah, I wish I would have seen this, caught the story myself. I'd be uh pretty excited about it if I, if it was my story well, and I, I I thought the same thing with uh.

58:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know that. You said, jonathan, like wow, this is like on point. You know for what your core business is and it makes sense and I can see how it has a possible revenue model and it you know. And for what your core business is and it makes sense and I can see how it has a possible revenue model and it you know. And then you could even add features like they have secure mail. Somehow, they implement something so you can't spoof email addresses or whatever and have, oh, if you're using our ecosystem, then it, here's our open standard you now can have secure email, and then it could even force change in other email uh servers or oh, we want to be safe and we want to be okay, we're just going to serve.

59:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, go into the the uh thunder mail ecosystem yeah, I, you know ryan ryan sip is the is the guy there at Thunderbird. He's the product man project manager and kind of runs the Thunderbird project these days and uh, he's like I said, we interviewed him on floss weekly. He is uh, he's sharp and he thinks about these things and um has his head screwed on Right. So I'm I'm not surprised that it's a, uh, you know, a much more uh reasonable offering that they're doing.

59:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Um how long?

59:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
ago was that episode? Um, let's see, I could probably find it. We can just search for floss, weekly Ryan's or actually, uh, ai Thunderbird is going to be the thing to search for.

01:00:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and while Jonathan's looking February 12th, yeah, February 12th but while another possible revenue stream is, you know, we got Google paying for a browser competitor. If someone says hey, Gmail's too popular, you know, maybe they got another revenue stream for you know Thundermail.

01:00:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey, google, you better load us some more money so we're a valid competitor and you're not a monopoly. Yeah, google's been in the news this week for being an illegal monopoly again, aren't they? Yeah, they just got a judgment from a court. You know, doj has taken them and they got a judgment that, yes, indeed, you are an illegal monopoly.

01:01:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But I think a lot of that. They were eating up some competitors and some startups and kind of eliminating competition that way. So I think that got them more in trouble than the actual size.

01:01:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Jeff, wouldn't you rather talk about something more interesting than that?

01:01:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Like what yeah?

01:01:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Do you have a suggestion.

01:01:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Ken. I bet he's suggesting KDE.

01:01:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Plasma.

01:01:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes so Nate Graham's weekly blog. He highlights some exciting new features coming to both Plasma 6.4.0 and Plasma 6.3.5. Now, just to give everybody a reference point, we should expect Plasma 6.4 to arrive around mid-June, with the official release dates currently set for June 17th Though, as always, that's subject to change. You know, push or pull a little, but usually they don't pull. They usually push, but that's where they're targeting. Plasma seems to be pretty good about their release dates, though. The Plasma 6.4 series, then, should continue throughout the summer, leading up to the final release on September 9th of this year. So, again, subject to change. But meanwhile Plasma 6.3.5 is scheduled to come out on May 6th.

01:02:21
So now first let's talk about what's new in Plasma 6.4.0. The system monitor applications page now neatly groups background services into a dedicated background services section, so it makes it easier to track how the non-application parts of your system are being used. So no more switching between pages just to see this information. The Bluetooth symbol on your taskbar can now show the number of connected devices at a glance, and for those who prefer modern measurement units, you'll be able to swap out archaic ones like furlongs and rods. So no more memorizing that one rod equals 5,029.2 millimeters. Plasma 6.4.0 also brings a couple of performance improvements. The Wayland protocol now supports single pixel buffers, increasing efficiency for apps that use them. Plus, the system won't waste energy checking for screen rotation while the screen is off, so that's really useful for mobile devices. Bug fixes include making sure dragging items to the application launcher's favorite area no longer causes accidental launches, and, in Wayland, screen mirroring now properly handles differences in aspect ratios between the screens, and when using Wayland, the task switcher preview will now appear in the correct location.

01:03:40
Now, something more recent that we're going to see is Plasma 6.3.5, which got some love too. So when adding a new printer, the UI now lets you set it as the default printer right away, even if it's the only printer you added. Now you're thinking what, what does that matter? Well, this helps if you plan on adding another printer, but you want the first one to be the default. A pesky issue where the GPU reset could cause a KWin crash has been fixed, and if you use multiple screens, the activity switcher will now be properly positioned instead of appearing in the wrong place.

01:04:19
Now there's plenty more improvements and fixes in both versions, so I recommend checking out the full details in the article linked to the show notes as of now, just to keep track. There's one very high priority plasma bug which is unchanged from last week and the number of 15 minute plasma bugs has gone up slightly from 20 last week to 21 this week. But that doesn't mean bug fixes have stalled. Rather, as some are resolved, new ones are emerging. So KDE 6 is undergoing active development and keeps improving every day and major improvements. So looking forward to the next full release.

01:05:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I am this is KDE has another one of those issues that I am threatening to myself that I'm going to have to dive into the code and fix. I'm running, I think, KDE 6.2 on the machine behind me and they have a brightness slider that does one thing, and then in 6.3, they changed it to where that brightness slider affects everything and it just drives me nuts, and so I uh, I I don't have the time to do it, but I so want to dive in I've. It's actually been suggested to me that I should do it as, like, an extension. Uh, if, if it's possible, if it's possible, if the right things are available and they're going to be able to do it as an extension. We'll see if I ever get that done. It's kind of preventing me from going to the newest Fedora too, because it's like I don't want to make everything bright, I just want to make the videos bright and I don't want to you know, my windows, the white backgrounds on the other windows. I don't want to feel like I'm looking into the sun.

01:05:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Don't look into the sun.

01:06:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, don't do that no.

01:06:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
See, that's a new fancy monitor. If you had some real old one, then everything would be dim, no matter what, that's true.

01:06:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You're right, that is exactly the problem.

01:06:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's exactly what the problem is Check out this 50 nit monitor. I can look right at the white screen.

01:06:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, I have no idea what the nits actually measure on this one, but uh and 50 nits would actually probably be almost black.

01:06:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'm guessing, really, really dark.

01:06:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Anyway, it'd be really dark. You're probably talking about some of the old plasma displays from the 80s on laptops where you could just barely see them. You're probably in that range ones today. Uh, rob, you were up first as he scrambles to get it ready.

01:06:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Uh, with vitter or vider, or vider or vider yeah, I was actually scrambling to find my uh restream because I realized I was on mute when I commented and nobody said anything oh, that would be why I'm like, oh no, where's my mute button?

01:07:13
because, uh yeah, I don't think there are really very lappable laptops in the 80s. But let's move on to VITR, vitr, whatever it is. So I am continuing on with my more utils, the extension of core utils, my more utils series, utils, the extension of core utils, my more utils series, and BIDIR is the command I'm going to do today. So what this is is you can edit a whole bunch of, like a whole bunch of files in a text editor, like the file names. So, for example, if I type V-I-D-I-R, so I could do V-I-D-I-R, one path, multiple paths I want to do multiple. Or I could do no path at all if I just want to do the current directory. So I'm just going to do no path at all. This is just going to be my directory. I'm in now, and you know I'm also going to do no path at all. This is just going to be my directory. I'm in now, and you know I'm also going to do a dash V. That's optional, but it's verbose, which means or I can do a dash, dash verbose, which is going to tell you what it did at the end. So I'm going to do that and now you can see.

01:08:28
For those watching the video, you can see a list. It's like 001 and it has the, the dot, slash, dot, bash history and it's got all the way down to 17. There's a couple files that well. I've already played with them, renamed them. I had file one dot txt last week. I kind of renamed them already. So anyway, when I ran biter it opened up the directory in a text editor, nano, by default, which is kind of ironic since I think Vyder meant the text editor of I. I'll get into how you can do Vy or Vim later on, but so for here, if I want to change a whole bunch of file names, I want to get these back. I want to get you know, know, change the 14th file down to remove this extra stuff I put on there. And another thing I'm not going to do it, but if I were to change, say, this music and this uls, uls, these are actually folders, not files. If I change the number at the front, like I put this to 13 and this to 12, it would rewrite. So the ULS folder would be renamed music, music would be renamed ULS. So anyway, here I renamed my 14, 15, and 16 files and I am just going to exit and save and you can't see that far. So I'm going to enter this up so you can see that, because I don't have it on the screen. But since it was verbose, it told me what it did. It renamed file.1-start to what I had it and so on. It renamed all those files.

01:10:09
If you want to re-edit the names of files, folders, in a directory, that is a quick way to just open it up in a text editor. Now, if you want to use a different text editor, you could set an environmental variable editor. You could set that globally or you can just run it at that time. So if I run editor equals VIM and then I type VITR, it's going to open it up in VIM. And now I don't know how to get out of here. No, I'm just kidding. So you could change that. And since I didn't actually set that environment or export that environmental variable, next time I do it it's just going to be the default. But for those who don't know how to create an environmental variable and export it, there's another episode for that, I'm quite sure, but I'm not going to get into that today. So that is a Vider, vider, whatever you want to call it. Oh, wait it quickly. Edit all the stuff in the directory.

01:11:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Nice V Vider. I'm going to go with Vider.

01:11:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Vider.

01:11:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yep, All right, Ken, you've got a it looks like a quick pipe wire tip today. That's what I'm hoping, so I'm going to start off slowly, but the tip is going to be for pw-mon, or as I like to call it, pw-mon. It allows you to monitor objects on the pipe wire instance. Now you have, of course, the ever-present dash h or dash dash, help dash version and, of course, the dash r or dash dash, remote options. Now, by default, pwmon uses automatic color output when you don't give it any options at all. But if you do want to control the color, you can do a dash capital N or dash dash no colors, or dash capital C dash dash color equals never. That will, of course, disable the color output. That will, of course, disable the color output. If you do want color, you can do a dash capital C or dash dash color equals always, or have auto in place of always, and that would give you a color output that you can use. Now, as I said, pwmon by default will let me get to the. There we go.

01:13:04
But for those of y'all listening, I've got my terminal up displaying the outputs from PWMon-open PWMon-version. Now I am going to display PWMon with nothing after it, and you just saw a whole bunch of information roll through and to give you an idea of how much information that is I'm backing up, you an idea how much information that is I'm backing up. And what it displays is all your monitor objects along with their properties and parameters that are set up and as I'm talking, it's even updating as we speak. At the very end for those of you who are listening again, it's just sitting there waiting for me to make any changes in my Pipewire system. Right now I'm just going to move my mouse or cursor and run it up across my panel and, since this is KDE, anytime I hit an application that I've got running and it opens a window underneath it. You're seeing where it creates objects for that and then removes those objects as I move away. So I'm going to cancel out of that.

01:14:26
You do a control C to stop it and make it easier to find the beginning. I'm going to hit clear and some other commands you can use are dash O to hide properties A to hide properties A, to hide parameters and to make it easier to see where each change is separated. Do a dash P or dash dash print separator to print an empty line after every event to help with separating that information on the screen. And there we go again. And just to give you an idea again of how much that is, I'm going to go all the way back to the beginning and, for those of you all listening, there is a slight difference from when I ran it before. You don't have a lot of the detail, nitty-gritty details that it was showing before, but it is a great way to monitor, especially if you've got new devices that you are hooking up to your system to find out how it recognizes them. You can just have this terminal open in one screen, hook up Nexter mic mixer or control board.

01:16:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It looks like the dash P is not available on all distros. It's not available here. I can do the dash O and the dash A, but no dash P here.

01:16:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Which is a shame, because it actually does help make it a little easier, because, for those of y'all listening, I've moved over and it showed me adding those KWIN pop-ups that you've seen in my go ahead and bring up my QTPath. Every time I go over one of those, it creates that in my QPW graph and then drops it again.

01:16:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, very cool, very neat, all right.

01:16:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Jeff, what is G? Well, we've previously covered the LS command, which is used to list files and directories on your system. Well, ls is a solid and reliable tool. There is room for improvement and that's where the tool g comes in now. There's multiple ways to install g. You can use go homebrew, the yay package manager on arch base systems or, if you're on a Debian base system, you can download and install the deb package.

01:17:20
Now you might be wondering why replace LS with G? Well, some things you can do in G is you can add icons or colors to specific file types. You can view file status. You can view file get status, repository status and repository branch directly in your listings. You can customize sorting options, including sorting by versions. You can choose output formats like grid across, byline, zero comma, table, json markdown and tree layouts. You can use fuzzy path matching. You can group files by owner, group name, directory permissions, mime type, character set and more. And additionally, g offers standard features such as displaying file sizes in human readable formats, customizable time formats. You can go ISO, full ISO, locale or relative, and it's got a ton of comprehensive sorting options.

01:18:23
I'm not going to go into all of them, but for more details on how to use G, check out the article linked in the show notes, and it also includes a link to the official documentation, which is much more approachable than the overwhelming wall of options in the man page. If you're wanting to just look, google this and find it, search Linux space, g, dash, ls, and that'll get you to the right place. But, as always, look at the show notes. That's where all the gold is. Yes and then, but, as always, look at the show notes. That's. That's where all the gold is so.

01:18:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, jeff, I think you missed one major benefit to go on from LS to G.

01:19:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What's that? One less character to type.

01:19:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's shorter to type.

01:19:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's 50% reduction in character typing.

01:19:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Until you start adding all those options that it comes with.

01:19:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah Well, actually what the author in the article talks about. Oh, and here is the alias. I have to make it short. So when he types G, he's got about four options that automatically are in there.

01:19:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hmm, yeah, there you go. Or you could just make an alias of G to LS, with whatever options Two, mail orders, or alias of G to LS with whatever options Two mail-in letters.

01:19:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or alias from LS to G, with the most common options you'll use.

01:19:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah. So his or their alias is G space. And then they got dash dash table. Dash, dash tables. Dash style equals Unicode dash. Total dash size dash. Dash size dash dash long.

01:20:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
We don't have all day. Let's move on.

01:20:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, I've got a command linebased user interface. Well, there is one. It's not official or anything, it's Todoist-RS. Yes, it's built in Rust, which means you can install it with Cargo, which is actually pretty cool. It is the Todoist terminal client from a user on GitHub. Illiterate Writer Always bodes well, but it is an active project. The last update was just two weeks ago, the last release was three weeks ago and it's a nice little textual user interface to be able to go through and look at your stuff on your Todoist list, mark them as done, add new things, add new tasks.

01:20:57
There are quite a few things that people have asked for, you know would be nice to have in this. So if you want to go and learn a bit of Rust programming and have something to hack on, it might be also a good project for that. But if Todoist is your thing, then this is really a pretty interesting project. One thing that really comes to mind would be the ability to use it locally only and not connected to a Todoist account, and use its own database. So if somebody out there wants to learn Rust and make that happen, go for it. I think that would be cool. Super quick tip for me and super useful tool. Alright, quippy, says he. And a super useful tool. So all right. Quippy, says he prefers the Taoist. I'm not familiar with that one Other than the Tao, which was one of those distributed financial things on one of the blockchains.

01:21:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'll have to look into the Taoist and see if that's a real thing. When I hear Tao, I think the Tao of poo and the Tay of piglet it probably means something like the opposite to do like doing nothing.

01:22:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know Anyway.

01:22:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If I knew what the word was a simple word that meant to do nothing I would have said I prefer that-ist.

01:22:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But I don't know well what rob is doing nothing, yeah no, just rob just rob. All right, guys, um with. That is our, that is our show, that's our command line tips. We've gotten through the news. I'm gonna let each of the guys get in the last word on whatever they want to, and we will indeed start with rob. Uh, and I bet he's gonna plug it. Oh, something about coffee and something about a website.

01:22:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Take it away for those people who love the untitled next show, I have a great website for you that you need to check out. Check out today this website robertpcampbellcom. That's my website. You can find all kinds of things about me and, if you want to like be in touch, say hi. Um, network, I guess, uh, you can connect with me at uh, there's a little button near the top for LinkedIn, another one for Twitter, another one for blue sky, one for Mastodon, and if you just want to show your love, there's a spot where you could donate a coffee and $5 increments.

01:23:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool. All right, and Ken.

01:23:34
Well, I don't really have much to plug today, so I'll just remind everybody play it safe by backing up before upgrading or doing anything to your system that could damage it. Yeah, I discovered this is not a sponsor. Actually, I need to check before I do that. I will make this a future command line tip and we'll just leave you hanging. I discovered a backup host that was a little bit cheaper, but I need to check who all supports Twit, because if I mention someone that is a supporter, I've got to make that clear.

01:24:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And I don't know what's on top of my head On the Unmetallenic show.

01:24:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Maybe next week we'll dive into an option that might be a little cheaper if you're paying for oh I don't know one of the big ones like AWS. Anyway, I'll skip that for now.

01:24:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes.

01:24:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Jeff.

01:24:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I will just say well, I can start into my ending and say that my offline or off-site backup is SpiderOak. That's the one I've been at. It's encrypted before you send it up. So even if someone gets into the repositories or whatever, it's all encrypted in the cloud. Interesting, Cool. But I've been on it for years because it was limited years ago of what you had for Linux, Cool. But other than that I don't have much, so I'm going to go right into poetry corner. So here's the haiku For line in poem. If syllables line not in bracket five comma seven colon throw fail. Have. Have a great week everybody nerdy programmer jokes.

01:25:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I like it all right. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate it very much. And if you want to find more of me there, there is of course Hackaday. That is where the untitled security column, that is where this Week in Security goes live every Friday morning. That's also where Floss Weekly lives these days and you can check that out there. I will say that if you're not a member of Club Twit, you should definitely check it out. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month. I was going to say per show. No, it's not nearly that expensive. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month. It gets you ad-free access to all the shows and the best way to support. We sure appreciate it. We appreciate everybody that's here that's watching both that get us live and on the download, and we will. We will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.