Untitled Linux Show 204 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, this week we're talking about the Wayland future. Yet again, gnome's documentation problems, a Pipewire update, mozilla killing, pocket kernel announcements this week in Plasma, steamos, cacheos. It's a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
00:19 - Leo Laporte (Announcement)
Podcasts you love.
00:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
From people you trust. This is twit. This is the untitled linux show, episode 204, recorded saturday, may the 24th, the scrolladex. Hey folks, it is saturday and you know what that means. It is time for the untitled linux show. We're gonna geek out about linux and open source, some hardware, some software. We're probably going to talk about wayland and video cards, all the normal stuff we talk about. But what's going on this week? I've got the regular crew here with me, and welcome to the guys. I am on location for those of you that watch. Maybe for those of you that listen to I may sound just a little bit different. Borrowing a different mic on location in somebody else's office has been graciously loaned to me, but that's all right. The show must go on and we've got a lot of fun stuff for today. Starting off, we've got Rob, who is going to talk about, I think, wayland, right? Yes, that desktop environment enablement technology from the future, the one that we're all running now. Everybody's running wayland, no, holdouts once again.
01:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Once again we're saying goodbye to x11 and hello welcome to our new wayland world, our wayland only world. That is all right. So I know I feel like I keep saying this on here over and over, through one story or another. You know, we just keep progressing forward, you know, with the continued growth of Whalen and the continuing demise of X, x11 that is, don't get that confused with the different X. So this week the Fedora engineers and steering committee have signed off on having the next version of Fedora 43. That's Fedora 43 to be fully Wayland only and completely removing the GNOME X11 packages. This changes in keeping ahead of GNOME's plans as they plan to drop X11 in a couple of releases, in Gnome 50. And right now they're on 48.
02:31
Gnome has taken the first step this week by removing X11 sessions by default in the Gnome Display Manager to be merged in their upcoming Gnome 49 release. This means that the underpinnings of X11 are still planned to be upstream Gnome 49, but won't be available as a default option or as an option by default unless you go on and modify your GDM in your system to support X11. And then also, in their own words, quote this is the first step towards deprecating the x11 session. X11 has been receiving less and less testing. We have been defaulting to the wayland session since 2016, which really surprises me. Back to the quote, and it's about time we just we disable and eventually drop the x11 session completely. Um, so it really surprises me that it's been that long that they've been defaulting to it, but, uh, yeah, they're finally. You know, 10 years now making that step. So so, though, now, with Fedora moving ahead to completely remove X11 from its next release, there is some talk that Gnome might progress the removal of X11 a little quicker, at least a release earlier, to align with the Fedora removal, but we'll see what happens there.
04:07
But I know there's still X11 diehards out there. For you x11 fans, you can still enable x in uh gnome by adding or uncommenting because it should already be on there. Uh, the line that says x orgable equals true. Just make sure that's uncommented or set to equal true. Whatever you want to do in your gdmcfg file, and you can still have your X. And for those worried about your old X11 apps not working, well, suck it up. They just need to get ahead. Give it a chance. There is still X Wayland. It's still going to be the shim there available for suck it up. They just need to get ahead, give it a chance. No, I'm just kidding there. There there is still x whaling. It's still going to be the shim. They're available for those. Um, you know along until until those things, those apps you're using, get updated or replaced. For now I mean eventually. Eventually it's not. But so if you have an app that requires it, push those devs to get that thing updated, come on.
05:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I went into the KDE Fedora chat room because, famously, there is still the KDE X11 packages, against the KDE special interest group's wishes, but the packages still exist, because a different Fedora developer yeah, a different Fedora packager said no, no, I'll keep making them, fine, I guess. So I went in and I'm like so, with gnome dropping it, does this mean that you're finally going to go murder those packages? And they're like no, we can't do that yet, okay fine. And they're like no, we can't do that yet, okay fine. So you know we've talked about this before, but I just I want to mention it real quick again.
05:51
So KeithSess512 says ah, this news is annoying, and I think he's saying this slightly tongue in cheek, but still, I thought Linux was about being able to do things the way you want to. You should really use X11. This is not a dictatorship. Who do you think? You are Windows, and you can still run X11 if you want to.
06:09
The problem is that nobody's working on X11. There's nobody maintaining it. There's maybe one guy maintaining it, and he is not the one that wrote it and so does not know the code base all that well. And so let's just say that the next time they find terrible vulnerabilities in X11, there's not really going to be anybody there to fix them and maybe there's not anybody there, you know, looking for them out in the public and what you're eventually going to find what you're quickly discovering, actually within the next release or two of all these major distros is distros are just going to stop shipping the X11 server, not X-Wayland X-Wayland is going to be around for a long time, but the actual X11 server. They're going to look at it and go. This is unmaintained. Therefore, by our rules, we are not allowed to ship it, and so I would say, within two years, none of your major distros are going to ship the X11 server at all.
07:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
For that reason, but if you're a diehard X11 fan, you can download it and install it yourself.
07:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, sure, I mean there's going to be boutique distros for years, maybe decades to come, that are similar to we don't ship systemd, we don't ship Wayland you can run X11. So if you want to, you know, if you want to have your Linux experience from the aughts, then you can have your systemd free Wayland, free sysv init plus X11 Linux experience.
07:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, there are still. There's still plenty of vulnerable old software you can install and download anytime you want. So as long as someone has the code out there, you could still use it just like anything else. But yeah, with with everyone moving away from it the developers, the distros there's just a lot less testing on it and to be to something to be uh worry of well, I was gonna say saying someone's maintaining even one person is pretty generous.
08:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There is one person that's added a couple little niche features for their particular use. Basically it's it's pretty much unmaintained but, like you said, there's going to be those boutique distributions also known as welcome to my operating system hackers.
08:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, the front door is open well I mean so running, running x11. It's not like it's available on the network it is. X11 is good for um escalation of privilege because it generally runs as root um, but it's not really all that useful for actually getting into a system. So it's it's not like it's the end of the world to run it Um. One of the other interesting things here that's kind of part of this is that a red hat just went general availability with red hat 10, and red hat engineers are actually a big part of what was keeping X 11 sort of on life support with uh, with patches and fixes, and so with them you know sun setting the previous version and moving into red hat 10, like you're, you're literally you're losing the few engineers that were uh that were doing the development on it.
09:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and for we we've talked about this previously, but for anybody that wasn't around, or you know, in our earlier days that wasn't around in our earlier days, the people that were maintaining and working actively on X11, they're the ones doing Wayland now, so that's where they went.
09:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. Well, let's talk about something that is not at all controversial, and that is the Linux audio subsystem, because nobody's ever hated on any of the replacements for that.
09:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Audio and video subsystem. Oh, and this week we hear from two of my favorite reporters, marius Nestor and Barbie Borosov. They both wrote about the Pipewire Project's latest release of Pipewire 1.4.3. It brings support for correctly writing MIDI streams, better error handling, support for sending custom commands, support for using the default value of filters, default value of filters and many NetJack 2 improvements, including fixes for the drive manager roles For users and developers who dig into diagnostics. The pw-mididump tool that I went over a while ago now correctly debugs UMP sysrt messages, making troubleshooting MIDI data flows easier.
10:49
At the core pipewire level, the update introduces the ability for all commands to be directed to the node, unlocking the potential for sending custom commands and providing greater flexibility for developers and power users alike. I know we've got some of those power users out there. On the modules front, beyond NetJAK2 fixes, improvements to filter graph state management within the filter chain translate to more stable and predictable audio processing chains. The SPA or Simple Plugin API component receives several targeted fixes as well to include raw format buffer handling in V4L2, and it's optimized to avoid dropping important hitters. Alsa support sees enhancements particularly around audio channel validation, helping to ensure more accurate audio device integration. There are still more details in Marius and Bobby's articles that I haven't even touched on.
12:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, interesting. So I have to go back every time we talk about, uh, either, pipe wire, obs. I have to go back and look at the uh, the, the different patches that are out there for making, like, the pipe wire, virtual camera work in OBS. That's the thing that I'm waiting for, like that's when all of this is really going to get interesting and get cool.
12:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um, but you know, know, obviously we we do all kinds of stuff with pipeware for audio when I went down the rabbit hole looking into this uh article, it looks like we're getting closer a little bit, yes I'm definitely waiting for it because right now, if if anybody watching my green screen's a little funky, it's because my OBS I started the show and it went about two minutes before it locked up and crashed on me and it just loses connection with the camera and I need that pipe wire video so I can get rid of the loopback device.
13:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I'm looking forward. I'm looking forward to being able to do all the things with video that we can now do with audio, with pipewire, where you know people start writing video plugins and you can just drag and drop and, you know, have virtual cables to wrap things around. Um, yeah, interesting people people are talking about. Yeah, like you said, ken, it's getting closer.
13:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah interesting People are talking about. Yeah, like you said, ken, it's getting closer Yep To the point where you've got pipe wire options within OBS for capturing video.
13:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, so that's kind of the new thing. That's interesting Libcamera is all about. Let's just not even use V4L2. Let's just go straight to pipe wire for capturing some of these new webcams. And that's kind of a big deal because then all of a sudden, the browsers had to. You know, running a browser on Linux, you've got to support Pipewire as an input. Firefox does it very well at this point, from what I understand, and so, yeah, now it's just the. We just now need to get to the point to where your video handling things can do kind of raw pipe wire output streams, and that's sort of what we're waiting on for for things to get fun.
14:30
I got a feeling it may be easier in the interim to create a virtual V4L2 device or pipe wire device to capture your OBS output and then have that streamed into Chromium. Yeah boy, that's a fun. That's kind of a mind trip for what you're doing. There. You have an adapter to an adapter to a virtual device, whatever works. All right, let's talk Plasma, which, interestingly, just just a little plug I've actually got, uh, nate graham, who I think jeff is going to talk, to talk about. We're talking with him on floss weekly this upcoming tuesday. Oh wow, who's your co-host? I don't have a co-host yet, so that's why I went ahead and mentioned it anybody out there want to volunteer?
15:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I was kind of thinking.
15:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was kind of thinking that maybe we should get Rob to do it, because he's not running KDE and he's kind of a KDE skeptic, maybe a convert.
15:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Maybe we can get him to convert. All right, jeff. What's the story? I'm already preaching the KDE gospel, with Rob discussing GNOME this week. We can't overlook what's happening in KDE. With Rob discussing GNOME this week, we can't overlook what's happening in KDE and most of us are probably using Plasma 6.3.6 or a similar version somewhere in the 6.3 stack. There In his blog, nate Graham highlights KDE's focus on bug fixes and preparation for Plasma 6.4 release, which is scheduled in about three weeks.
15:46
While the priority is stability and a few features have been introduced, you know little tweaks here and there just to make things even better and add a little extra polish before 6.4 is released. Such a tweak is time of day wallpapers, so these automatically switch between light and dark versions based on the daylight cycle, and these are special wallpapers, so when you look to install them, they will be indicated as dynamic, and this would be in the wallpaper manager. Another notable UI improvement is in Discover, which is KDE's graphical interface for installing programs. So when you're searching, wallpapers and other add-ons are now excluded from results unless you specifically request making the searches, because then it makes the searches more relevant. You know, personally I found it frustrating to sift through excessive add-ons and wallpapers when trying to locate a specific program. So in this change it's going to be a welcome improvement and just help find what you actually want to find.
16:52
Looking ahead to Plasma 6.4, the audio volume widget is receiving a refresh to make it less cluttered, particularly for users with multiple audio devices, and while the changes aren't groundbreaking, they help smooth out the rough edges, making the interface more streamlined and organized. I know I've got quite a few on mine and it sometimes can get a little confusing. You've got to really pay attention to what's going on so you know what's happening, and I looked at some of the screenshots. The new interface and I think it makes it look a little cleaner and a little more organized so you can better find what you want. I won't go into great detail yet, but several UI improvements are also planned for Plasma 6.5.0, but we'll cover more of those when it's closer to release. We haven't got 6.4 yet, so let's tackle that first.
17:40
In the meantime, plasma 6.3.6, the latest in the 6.3 series. They included some bug fixes, so they included a KWIN crash fix when disconnecting multiple KVM-connected screens. Screen tearing settings now apply immediately without requiring a restart. The removal of a brief graphical glitch that appeared along the edge of the screen during login, but it was before Plasma's splash screen or the desktop loads. They also improved X-Wayland's app behavior, ensuring they open on the requested screen and it more reliably matches the one that they wanted. So that'll help the lingering X stuff out there.
18:26
You can find a full list of bug fixes in the show notes, including performance for improvements across various Plasma versions. And when I say performance improvements it was like there's some like little clipboard things that open quicker now, and so not overall desktop performance, just a few little pieces going better. Quick status update the number of high priority plasma bugs has decreased from four to three this week and the count of 15-minute plasma bugs has risen from 22 to 27. Now, while bug numbers fluctuate, many issues are actively being resolved. So as new ones come in, they're moving other ones through the pipeline and solving them. So don't think these are very static. It's it's when you, if you look at the show notes, you'll see there's a lot of bug fixes going on. So it's it's a pretty dynamic list or number number of bugs here. Check out the article linked in the show notes for full details on all these changes, bug fixes and performance enhancements and everything kde very cool.
19:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I am, uh, I'm very tempted when I get back home to to go ahead and update to fedora 42 and run the kde64 beta, just uh, just to see, to give it, give it kick the tires, as it were, and see what's going on there. They've got some really interesting stuff that they've done and I want to play with it.
19:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Go ahead. I was just going to say, as you implied earlier, I'm not a KDE user these days. I have been a user way back early 2000s for a long time and I just had to give GNOME some love and try it out. I like it. But the one question I do have, jeff, because I haven't kept up with it, not really since before KDE 6, is where on their Wayland you know, gatered X11, have they disabled X11 sessions by default yet?
20:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Wayland's the default option. You can still switch. There's a little switcher in the bottom left corner that you can use to go back to X11. So it's the default choice. But it's not like it's really hidden, it's just a toggle.
20:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's where GNOME is now, right before this next release. It's getting there.
20:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now are you talking about the KDE Distro?
20:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, the desktop, You're thinking KDE, neon.
21:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I know, I know what Ken's getting at and that is isn't that really a distro choice, whether it's going to default to x11 or wayland?
21:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
um, really, I, I suppose it could be, but I mean, yes, the, the six, the six series, yeah, because the six series is designed by kde. So I mean you could, you could have a distro force gnome you know X11 into gnome and still say well, it wasn't the default, you know it's. Kde 6 was planned to be plasma first, so that's they've been dumping, or I mean into Wayland first, so they've been dumping everything into Wayland and I'm going to KDE 7, that's going to into Wayland first, so they've been dumping everything into Wayland, isn't it?
21:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
KDE 7? That's going to be Wayland only.
21:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That I don't know, I don't remember.
21:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Which means that if it's Wayland only and your distro has the option to switch back to X11, what desktop is it going to use? Not KDE.
22:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I do want to expand on my yes or no comment. Just to clarify though yes, in that a desktop environment has their defaults. They set them, that's what they are. But yes, and also that the distros should have the ability to modify those defaults as they see fit. So yes and no.
22:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But it doesn't mean you'll make good choices all the time.
22:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Going distro agnostic. Gnome and KDE are moving forward to Wayland only.
22:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Looks like KDE 7. Whenever KDE 7 is released, that is when they will drop the X11 support. I wonder how many lines of code they're going to be able to get rid of when that happens.
22:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But once you've picked, a distro, then that distro may modify it to whatever they're currently using as a default.
22:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Sure, yeah, but yeah, there's going to be a lot going away. And now this is just going from memory, but I think, based on the timeline, we probably would see KDE 7 end of the calendar year-ish first of the next year, because they usually only go to about 6, maybe 0.7, before they rev to the next whole number.
23:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If a distro wants though I mean they don't even have to use X11 and Wayland they can use. They can make their own and use that, they can use.
23:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I know there's something else out there, there's a couple of others and they can use those too, even though it's not made for it.
23:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You can do whatever you want.
23:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's something that's not X11 or wayland not popular but yeah, I'm curious what this is that exists. That's not either of those two. That's not just, you know, curses on the terminal. Well, I'll say a bash cell. Yeah, uh, I I guess there for a while with kde you could run it with a frame buffer direct and it wasn't using any of those things. I don't know if that's even still a thing. That was for, like KDE on embedded systems.
24:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Arcane was that.
24:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't know. There is also Micro XWin DFB.
24:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Y Fresco and Zynth, basically stuff nobody uses.
24:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's my whole point. What I'm really curious about with all of those is like are any of those actually maintained by anybody? Is this a 15 year old project that's nobody's touched?
24:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
the uh list I pulled up doesn't say whether or not they're maintained uh-huh because when you have a something like x, you're going to replace or wayland, yeah, we're going to do it better and we're going to do it right until they go. Oh my gosh, this is so much work. We had no idea that this was like 12 full-time jobs to do this.
25:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Or they're hobby projects.
25:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
DFB, by the way, is a display server that was developed by Dell.
25:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Okay, interesting, probably for running inside their BIOS or something like that. Anyway, there is another big company that is not Dell, somebody else that just released some open source. I saw this story, rob. I'm not surprised that you're the one that picked it up.
25:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, I mean it's, he's on it All over it. I knew it was going to be Rob. So this week, not canonical, not right at, but microsoft, microsoft. So they had their big developers conference called microsoft build. And and what else would we expect from a microsoft developers conference? But more open source news. Unfortunately, this isn't the big news that some of us have been waiting for. You know, windows being open sourced or Microsoft releasing their own Linux distro oh wait, that already happened. But what is in the news this week? It's still pretty cool.
26:23
So first on my list is that WSL is now open source and available for all on GitHub under the MIT license. The act of open sourcing allows Microsoft to close WSL's very first GitHub issue github issue from 10 years ago. Way back on april 6th 2016, uh, surinath opened an issue saying quote hopefully bash on windows will be open source. I believe bash on windows is what they first called it. The response response at that time wasn't I mean mean. It wasn't completely negative, but it wasn't positive. All they said is quote we have no firm plans as yet, but we're not averse to open sourcing some of this tech. And look where we are now, 10 years later WSL is open source. With this, microsoft is hoping to get some community involvement, you know, up helping make it even better. So if you're interested, there's something for you.
27:31
Next on my list and I bet you thought it was the end of new command line tools like, uh, command line text editors on Windows. Well, it isn't, because Microsoft announced a new open source command line text editor for Windows and it's written in Rust. So you know, think of it like the Nano or Vim Vi, whatever for Windows, whatever for Windows. It's still in early development stages, but if you want to contribute to that, that's also open source under the MIT license, I believe it was. Third on my list is they announced they will be open sourcing, the GitHub Copilot in VS Code.
28:24
Not much to say about that. But hey, there's another one. But finally, I don't want to get into too much about AI on this show because I don't want any more hate mail. Just kidding, I've really only had like one message. It was even close to hate mail. It wasn't hate mail, it was just a critique. Anyway, the final major contribution Microsoft contribution is to the Mesa 3D graphics stack. They have contributed 62,000 lines of code introducing a new Gallium 3D front end. 62,000 lines of code. That means they actually have some real developers working on this stuff. They're paying them. Anyway, microsoft's main interest in Mesa appears to be getting more API implemented atop Direct3D 12 hardware drivers, as well as where it ties into their Windows subsystem for Linux or WSL, as I mentioned earlier. As we all know, it's obvious here, microsoft loves Linux and open source because they just keep on contributing.
29:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know it's kind of a meme and you're kind of joking, but at the same time I have been very impressed with the streak that Microsoft is on with actually doing things that are useful. Now they don't hit it out of the park every time, because there is also Microsoft. Recall is a thing that is happening, and my words have not been warm for that.
30:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Let's get away from Recall a minute and focus on WSL again, because it's been an exciting year for WSL. Yeah, fedora can be set up, arch Linux, and it's also already got its first GitHub issue closed.
30:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yep, why is that? A nine-year-old one, ten years 2016. It's 2026 now.
30:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Here's an alternate case.
30:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Never mind, it's 2025.
30:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh wow, I don't know what year it is. Rob is living in the future.
30:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Good, Rob. Thank you for coming back to visit us.
30:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Jeff, here's an alternate take. Microsoft is offloading some of their development to the open source community so they can take those developers and dump them into AI and their cloud, I mean that's not entirely wrong.
31:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm sure that's fine, though I would prefer something to be open sourced so that I can go in and fix it or the thousands of other people like me, rather than it being closed source and having to depend on sometimes less than stellar microsoft engineers to fix it. I'm okay with.
31:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I accept your terms they're, they're they're driving force might more be economic than goodwill. And I mean, yes, it is good that they open sourced it, but it could be that it's. You know, they know they've got to stay on on Linux if they want any development to be done on Microsoft, since most of the heavy duty infrastructure runs on Linux, and so that makes them relevant. And then they get to have the win of offloading. But you know, I'm kind of cynical.
32:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't. I don't even say that if a company looks at it and they decide that they would lose by open sourcing something, they probably shouldn't do it. Open source is such a powerful thing and it makes so much sense for that very reason that you get fixes and security enhancements and all the other advantages that open source gives you from the community and all the other advantages that open source gives you from the community. I don't. I don't think that idea of open, of goodwill, necessarily even has to be part of the part of the equation.
32:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think, I think they're utilizing open source and completely um, I don't know, not not contributing not paying, not doing giving anything back to the community, Like what Amazon? Has been, has been uh, uh, you, you can uh, you can uh uh, whatever the word is. Not say anything about this, but you know like Excuse yourself from this conversation.
33:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There we go. That's the word.
33:06 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, rob, I think I've actually got a article down in the rabbit hole that touches on this.
33:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, you have to pull it out and tag it onto this particular conversation.
33:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You have to pull it out and tag it onto this particular conversation, but I think it helps to improve the return on investment.
33:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah, but I guess the one thing I was trying to get is you know, some software things have tried to change their licenses because of how certain big companies had treated them, which didn't necessarily go well for them either. But it's a lose-lose kind of thing Usually doesn't All right.
33:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, speaking of big companies trying to watch their bottom line that we have been watching for years now, it feels like Ken what's getting killed at Mozilla this week?
34:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Don't play the trumpet yet. We've still got a little bit of time, but we can thank Bobby Borisov, michael Larabelle and Joyce Nilden, because they all wrote this week about the end of Pocket. Who remembers Pocket? I first knew of it as a Firefox extension called Read it Later by Nathan I hope I'm saying this correctly Weiner, in August of. We're going all the way back to 2007,. Folks. Now, weiner's intention was for the application to be like a TiVo directory for web content and to give users access to that content on any I repeat, any device. I still remember using it to store web pages that I then transferred to my Palm devices. Oh my.
35:02
Now, in 2017, mozilla was gracious enough to acquire Pocket and then integrated it into the Firefox web browser. You no longer had to worry about it being an extension. It was built into it. This past Thursday, mozilla announced Pocket will shut down July 8th 2025. Now, users can export saves anytime until October 8th of this year, after which their data will be permanently deleted. Now, if you also use the fake spot extensions, mobile apps or website, effective July 1st of this year, it is no longer available. Now, the fake spot feature within Firefox, known as review checker, will shut down on June 10th 2025.
36:08
If you're going, what is Fake Spot? It was basically an application for checking reviews. Now Joey asked why kill Pocket? Mozilla said and here I am quoting from their blog the way people use the web has evolved, so we're channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs. While Pocket is shutting down, we will continue to invest in this promise through the new tab experience, our email newsletter and more Well. I just want to say goodbye Pocket. I do recommend reading the articles linked in the show notes, especially on how Mozilla is handling paid subscriptions. Yes, there were paid subscriptions for both Pocket and FakeSpot.
37:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Interesting. I never knew anybody who used them. So, I got to ask.
37:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No opinion. So is this Mozilla trying to follow Google steps, killing everything, or are they just focusing on what's important, like we continually always say they need to do?
37:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Or are those the same thing? Okay, no, they're not.
37:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Okay with Mozilla. They could be the same thing With Google. No, they've killed good things, very good things. If they want to focus, they have a lot more things to kill that they shouldn't start.
37:46 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Google doesn't have focus, I would argue, but Mozilla, yeah, they got too spread. I don't know where some of these ideas came from, where they're like this is going to be a great idea. I'm like in what little fishbowl were you coming up with this? No, just make the browser really good, that's it. And then make Thunderbird really good. I'm good with that.
38:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm going to take a risk and step out on this crooky limb and say Mozilla probably acquired a bit too much over the years.
38:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I think, well, I think that's one of the same. Both of these things were projects that existed outside of Mozilla that they bought. If you really love Pocket, it sounds like Ken actually uses it. Ken is the only person I know that actually ever used Pocket.
38:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Used.
38:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
When you have all that Google money, you have to spend it somewhere.
38:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And even then I was using the free form of it.
38:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Right, right Until.
38:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I found out about Calibre's news feeds.
38:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. So for the three people worldwide that actually still use Pocket, here's the good news for you it's open source. It was originally an extension. I am sure it will come back as an extension. It can happily live outside of mozilla, and uh yeah, so nothing. Nothing was lost.
39:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Convert it to a plug-in for caliber and I was gonna, yeah, sure, I was gonna say and that's not a creaky limb that you were out on ken, that that was a, a steel reinforced wood floor that just had a little little noise in it yeah, that's ken's kind of risk.
39:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I I kind of I kind of hinted at this during the the the segue there, but I think we're going to see a lot more of this, because mozilla has brought in a new ceo who is not a shaman, and what is the thing that the new CEO said, like his very first blog post, that he wrote we're going to go back to fundamentals. So I very much anticipate seeing lots of this from Firefox, lots of let's shed all of this weird crap that we've picked up over the last few years, try to get back to fundamentals. Here's what Firefox is really about and this is what we're going to work on.
40:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Even though this may have been a very, very small source of income, we're spending more maintaining it than we're making Get rid of it.
40:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's not a source of income, even if they were making money on it, even if they were making profit on revenue, revenue.
40:26
Even if they were making profit on it, I I would still maintain that the the ability to um, narrow the focus internally, but also just the um with the outside world, the perspective of the outside world on Firefox, being able to say this thing that you know all three people use and all three of them paid for it, but it doesn't matter, we're going to ditch that and get rid of it. It's bringing about conversations like these, which is a good thing for the Firefox brand, because what is the one thing that everybody wants Firefox to do? Focus on what's Mozilla to do, and there's focus on firefox and thunderbird, and by killing a product like this, what are they? What is the signal that they're sending to the world? They're focusing on firefox and thunderbird dang it, and they're getting rid of all this extra stuff. So it's a huge win.
41:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's a great idea yeah, they're getting out of the city and going to the country.
41:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't.
41:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I don't understand it. Now you're on the creaky limb, ken, with that Segway, oh goodness. Oh, he's talking about SteamOS. They're riding a Segway. Yes, we're riding a Segway out into the country. I guess Jeff save us. What's going on with SteamOS?
41:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, the new version of SteamOS comes with a steel guitar and a fiddle, so it's known as Go. No, I'm just kidding. So this next story actually made big waves in the mainstream tech press because it signals an opening up of SteamOS, signals an opening of opening up of steam os. Now the big news steam os 3.7.8, known as go country, has officially been released. Some key updates in this version include a newer arch linux base, linux kernel 6.11, updated mesa graphics drivers and plasma 6.2.5 for desktop mode. Now, in addition, steamos now supports frame limiting with variable refresh rate displays, both internal and external, and a noticeable improvement is the addition of a battery charge limit control allowing users to set maximum charge level for their Steam Deck. Why does this matter? Well, limiting the charge to 80%, for example, can extend battery health over the long term, especially for devices that are frequently plugged in or rarely depleted. Now why did the mainstream tech press take notice of this release? Steamos has now officially added support for the Lenovo Legion Go S, while also improving compatibility with other AMD-powered handhelds, like the ROG Ally from Asus and the original Legion Go. Now, this update also includes an improved SteamOS recovery image for repairing the Steam Deck and the Legion Go S, and it also makes it easier for users to test the SteamOS on their own AMD-powered handhelds. And while this might seem like a limited to existing hardware, the reality is that most handhelds today are powered by AMD CPUs with integrated GPUs, meaning SteamOS could become a common choice for future devices.
43:48
You know, for example, attempts have been made to release windows-based handhelds, but those devices have struggled with poor reviews. Or the ones that actually work pretty well, they were exorbitantly priced. I mean, I mean the one I can think of that got rave reviews. It was costing several thousand dollars for a handheld. Yeah, it was like okay, this is just nuts. To me it doesn't fit with the idea of a handheld, which should be at least a somewhat affordable device. But I digress.
44:20
While many of the latest fixes and improvements specifically target the Legion Go S and other AMD handhelds, this release isn't just about handheld gaming. It also includes significant graphics, performance and desktop enhancements, along that features aimed at developers. So you know, looking ahead, steamos could see a widespread adoption across more handhelds. But a bigger question remains how close are we to seeing a full-fledged SteamOS desktop experience? You know, a modern one, not the old one that's out of date now, you know. And if more handhelds embrace SteamOS, what could this mean for gaming as a whole?
44:59
At this point it's unclear whether mainstream developers well, I think it's pretty clear that mainstream developers are not going to start developing Linux games, but we might see an increasing trend of games designed to be proton-friendly, basically Linux emulator-friendly, because DirectX 12 provides a stable development interface, avoiding some of the fragmentation that Linux can sometimes face. I mean, even Linus Torvalds has said in the past he had a dive application that they didn't make for Linux because he talked about the fragmentation of Linux. While everybody has choice, it's hard to write a program and especially if you don't have a development team that's used to having a lot of Linux history and skill set to make it work across a wide number of distributions. So, overall, the future of Linux gaming looks brighter than ever and maybe just in a few years we'll see Linux reaching low double digit numbers in the Steam survey. You know, here's to hoping.
46:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's interesting to see it. I would be. I will be curious to see if anybody does any SteamOS powered desktops or SteamOS powered conventional consoles that are not intended to be portable. I think those are really fascinating too.
46:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And this would tie in with last week's story where we talked about the AMD AI Max Plus chips, which, yeah, I know I'm leaving out a whole bunch of letters and numbers in there.
46:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I was going to say that's not the whole name.
46:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No no we don't have time for that Right no-transcript.
47:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Here's a a nice little console, you know, and especially maybe it comes in like a knuck style form factor. You know, one of those little tiny form factors.
47:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You don't have a physical drive, you run steam on it, it's all right there, you just and you don't have to worry about having problems where it thinks your super NES controller is hooked up when it's not.
47:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That is true. They did fix that. I mean now I should mention, you know, take a look at the article in the show notes, because there's a lot of details that I left out of. Things they fixed, they corrected. There was a lot of good updates. But I just wanted to kind of catch on why the mainstream tech press took kind of sat up and took note of this that it uh, they're predicting a lot of future handhelds coming out.
47:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've dmos I've also seen some speculation online wondering, you know with with our end of 10 discussion last week, uh, speculating, wondering if like valve, if they, if they may like release a desktop. I haven't, we haven't heard of any leaks like that. Maybe they should in time for like the end of a windows 10, something to kind of fill that gap as a gaming desktop that would.
48:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That would be pretty interesting actually, if if it was hey, your windows 10 machine. I can just imagine this pop-up next time somebody starts steam. Your windows 10 machine is about to go to be obsoleted. Click here to upgrade to steam os. Oh wow, that's like playing the uh the windows uh pop-up game on them no, if they did it, if they did it windows style, it would just do it automatically well, yeah, you don't force it.
48:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But but.
48:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I mean it's okay, so I guess we'd get a warning.
48:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's more like using ie and google saying hey, upgrade to chrome or would you like to get to google faster?
49:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
click here to upgrade to chrome?
49:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
yeah would you like to get to your games faster.
49:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I could see it. I mean, who knows? I could see SteamOS. I could see Valve jumping on the end of 10 bandwagon and becoming part of that.
49:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Sure Now SteamOS. Does it support the Arch64 option chips?
49:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't think they have an official ARM64 image.
49:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think they do have some support, but I don't think it's official yet Right. I thought I remember reading that they did have it. It's just not quite ready.
49:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's something they've been working on, I think.
49:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, it's not quite ready for primetime yet. Yeah.
49:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
When that gets to where it's ready for prime time, I bet you see a lot more game consoles come out that are arm 60, the pro.
49:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So there's two problems with that. One so far we don't have arm 64 chips that have quite the horsepower that an amd 64 does, and the other is that we don't have games that are being made for arm 64 and so all of these are having to do like just-in-time cross-compilation to to run those um amd 64 pro compiled games on the arm 64 and that that is part of the story that we talked about in the past, so yeah, I mean you can do it and people are having reasonably good success for some of these titles, but it's not like you.
50:26
You know running in ultimate mode, the newest thing. So like you're not, you're not going to be running. You know you're not going to be running doom, dark ages or whatever they call that, and on, you know, ultimately high graphics and all of that.
50:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's just I think I think that makes more sense for handhelds, possibly, but for consoles that you're plugging in and you have all the power in the world, I mean, it's not like Xbox or PlayStation or any of them are using ARM. So I don't think it makes sense for any other console to really use ARM yet at least.
51:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What's in the?
51:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Nintendo Switch. The Switch is ARM, I believe, but again, that is a portable With NVIDIA graphics. It's a docked portable. Yeah, so it's the NVIDIA Tegra, which is an arm, and it's got NVIDIA's fun arm-based stuff on it. Yeah, I've got a buddy that does development on this stuff, not for Nintendo. Nvidia uses some of his stuff. Hasn't ever paid him for it, but that's. That's a whole different story, whole different story. He tried to get a job at nvidia and they're like probably not, but we'll take your, we'll take your code, though you still want to keep open sourcing that yeah, I, uh, I, I think I think the end of windows 10, you know, is going to cause a bump in linux.
51:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know, I bet you, you know of the people that are going to switch. It's probably like 3% would go from 10 to Linux, but it's still going to be, I think, a sizable number. And I think, with you start including that you including the handhelds are going to be coming out because, hey, they don't have to license it. With microsoft it's easier to do. A lot of this is already just plug and play. Then that's going to start getting a big enough percentage that I think more game manufacturers are going to say, hey, we're not going to write this for linux, but let's make sure it's proton compatible, or maybe, oh, it's not, let's add this patch to proton so that it will be compatible and we'll have more of that going forward, or just write it for Proton, not Windows.
52:35
Well, that would be DirectX 12 or 11.
52:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Or 10. That's an interesting thought. I don't think there is a dedicated Proton API, but yeah, you could totally do that. You could write something for, write it for windows and then test it on proton the entire time and, uh, make that sort of your uh, your targeted API.
52:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And if you're a triple a house, you're going to be able to call up steam and go hey, what? Give us some documentation of the? You know what protocols do you fully support? What don't you support in direct X 12, for example? And they would do it If you're, if you're, a triple a house oh, absolutely.
53:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Would they even need to in proton open source?
53:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It would just make it easier to have the documentation Then you don't have.
53:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You don't have EA developers, let's just say EA. You don't have EA developers, let's just say EA. You don't have developers at EA that know the ins and outs of getting something to work on Proton the way that they do getting something to work on Windows.
53:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, they could spend lots of time and lots of money learning and digging in like open source developers. But there's no reason when you can just talk to the experts.
53:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So I can just see this conversation. Ea calls Valve, Valve says hey, Crossover, what would they use?
53:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah for sure. Right, it's the Crossover guys that do a lot of this. It's not the only ones. There's some other companies out there that Valve has hired to do this. But I mean, that's part of what being a company like Valve is all about is having this Rolodex, which, for you kids out there that was before we all had cell phones we would put people's names and numbers on pieces of paper, and a Rolodex was this neat thing that you could roll and the papers would flip automatically, and so you could flip through the list of people that you know, whereas nowadays we just kind of scroll through our contacts.
54:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's the same thing scroll through our contacts. It's the same thing, and when we did start transitioning to smartphones, one of the first apps was called Rolodex.
54:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Now we should call it a scroll-a-dex. Scroll-a-dex.
54:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yep, yep, val has a deep scroll-a-dex and, as Harold Finch in the chat says, proton is probably the best thing that's happened to Linux gaming. For sure, and I would tend to. I would agree because all the feedback I've read from people that do native development of games on Linux it's just the APIs change and everything. It's just very hard to say it's going to run on Arch, fedora and a Debian distribution and just keep up with it, and not even counting all the unique ones like SUSE.
55:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And what's good for Linux gaming is good for Linux in general.
55:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, speaking of which, what would really help would be getting some help with documentation.
55:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I knew it was coming. Are you looking to help open source, as Microsoft has been doing, and be part of the community? Gnome could use your help and be part of the community. Gnome could use your help. So the Gnome release team is issuing a call for help, as Gnome help and the associated Gnome documentation are much in need of some assistance. That's what they say.
55:57
So documentation, you know it's one of those things that people often ignore, forget about, don't put a lot of effort into, but it's also one of those things that almost anyone of any skill level can help and contribute to. So you always want. Lots of times people are like how can I contribute? I don't know how to develop, I don't know how to code, I don't. I don't know how to do graphics, what can I do? Here's a thing you can do, but you know, if you are more into the development side, the GNOME help viewer called Yelp, which it's kind of weird not to be confused with the online review website, yelp also isn't actively maintained. So while GNOME is using, for example, while GNOME is using, gtk4, yelp is still stuck on GTK3. Like GIMP, I guess. But anyway, contributing to the struggling documentation is the software also uses a niche mallard format that relies on its own tooling and is not actively maintained itself. So there's a lot of issues here with their documentation. So what we're looking at, you know, is an out-of-date insecure. Also it's had some vulnerabilities Help viewer utilizing an obscure niche help format built on top of an old version of JTK.
57:30
All right, here's what the solution is. I think this was I don't know, I think this is kind of obvious someone. You know, I didn't really read anybody saying this, but maybe it did, maybe I missed it, but you know it's going to be a lot of work but necessary for long-term success. I I believe If you want to have good documentation, which everybody should want, one develop or find a new help app to use for GNOME help documentation. Two, use a format that isn't niche or proprietary to that app.
58:02
This will make it portable and easier to maintain. You know, maybe something like Markdown or HTML or you know whatever, something that's standard, common, you can use outside of that app itself. Three, then you got to migrate the current documentation and new system. That may be some of the hardest work, depending on what format you do, and I don't really know about this mallard how hard it is to migrate. Probably maybe someone has to make a migration tool once they figure out that converts it. If that doesn't exist, I don't know. Four, finally update, add and actively maintain the documentation going forward. So if this is something you're interested in, gnome could use your help.
58:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Has Gnome offered to spend any money on this? Are they going to hire anybody to help them do it?
58:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I haven't seen that yet and we all kind of know where their financial situations are At least. Last time we did a story on that. Maybe things have improved Pay volunteers you can Believe it, or that maybe things have improved.
59:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Pay volunteers you can Believe it or not, that is an option you sure can Maybe.
59:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'll volunteer then.
59:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You sure can, you sure can.
59:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I just got to find some time to volunteer.
59:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's the trick.
59:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You can always retire.
59:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Hmm, what's that yeah?
59:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So what about Questing Quokka, Ken? If you're going to volunteer, maybe you should volunteer to help test Questing Quokka for Ubuntu.
59:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I just may. I just may, but. But they're talking about Linux 6.17 kernel and switching over to Crony by default. This will be replacing the systemd dash time sinkd. Now Crony utilizes network time security. I'm sure Jonathan can give us more details on that. I'm just going to basically say that the NTS standard is more secure than NTP and can prevent spoofing and avoid possible man-in-the-middle attacks. And for those that don't know, ntp was network time protocol.
01:00:44
Now, saurav Rudra wrote about the Questing Quokka roadmap, revealing two new applications. I'm not even sure how to pronounce this one. It's spelled P-T-Y-X-I-S, I'm going to say Ptyxis, and the other one is Loop, which will respectively be the default terminal emulator and image viewer on Ubuntu 25.10. Ptyxis has been designed with a strong focus on providing container integration and an intuitive user experience for both developers and power users alike. Some of its interesting features include integration for container tools like Podman, distrobox and I don't know if this is a mistype in my notes, but I've got ToolBX and Terminal Inspector for debugging issues when writing terminal apps. Similarly, loop is a Rust-based modern image viewer for GNOME, replacing the aging eye of GNOME image viewer. It takes advantage of GTK4 and Libidwada to offer a sleek and responsive user interface that doesn't feel clunky. Michael and Sarav's articles have more details and links If you are interested in other plan features or how to set up crony now or to just go down the rabbit hole with.
01:02:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so this is in addition to like the rust stuff that they're doing, that's, that's all landing in 25 10 as well, isn't it? Yes, yeah, it's going to be quite the adventurous update for them, for Ubuntu Really stretching their legs and getting everybody outside their comfort zones.
01:02:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Jeff, I'm going to let you dive into come bun to 25 10 before I moved to Ubuntu studio 25 10.
01:02:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, moved to ubuntu studio 25, 10. Oh, I'll be honest, you know, uh, but yeah, they're really determined to be a much more cutting edge. They're. They're kind of following fedora in a less rolling or less frequent, frequently release format, but cutting edge on a lot of stuff yeah, that's what this interim release is for cutting, cutting your fingers, oh they?
01:03:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
they still have an interim release every six months, just like fedora has, uh, every six months. It's just, the ubin 2 also has the LTS.
01:03:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Every two years.
01:03:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
For some reason I thought Fedora was a little more frequent than six months.
01:03:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, it's every six months, twice a year.
01:03:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Okay, then I guess it's there.
01:03:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Unless something breaks, then it's sooner.
01:03:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, they don't do major releases sooner. Fedora is also a little bit more willing to ship major updates of components between inside a release. So like fedora 42 right now ships with the kde 6.3 series, they will almost certainly update that to kde 6.4 inside fedora 42 if 6.4 comes out before 43 it's I think it's intended to even if it doesn't, even if it doesn't come out before, they may still I think it's intended to even if it doesn't.
01:04:06
Even if it doesn't come out before, they may still jump to it. It's just the way they roll.
01:04:10
Yeah, mid-june is when 6-4 KDE comes out, so Jeff came to me before we started the show and he's like have we talked about CacheOS recently? And I went and I looked and I'm like, dude, you talked about CacheOS just last week, but it was just some benchmarking numbers and before that it had been like a year and a half. So, Jeff, it was a side note yeah, what is CacheOS? Remind us what's cool about it and what's new.
01:04:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, last week, like I said, we just as Jonathan mentioned, we just we discussed cache us and it was one of the fastest Linux distributions available for the general public when using the AMD mobile chips. See last week show we Michael uh Laravel over at Pharonix had a big benchmark across multiple processors and, and we looked at it, the top was clear Linux, but it's not really a general usage. So Cache EOS is the fastest general usage operating system on those AMD chips. Well, that was nice. But it came across my screen again this week and it's in the spotlight thanks to an article on Boiling Steam, which is a Linux gaming website. Now, according to the article and there's going to be a lot of caveats in here, so before you just say oh no, that's wrong, not right, hear me out they said CacheOS is the fastest growing Linux distribution based on a trend analysis using the Proton database. But they do have several disclaimers, like one, the data set may not fully represent all types of Linux users. Two, it might not entirely reflect the broader Linux gaming community. Three, the results could have biases based on who contributed to the database. Flatpak is listed in there, but it's not a distribution, it's just a reporting quirk from Steam. Feel free to ignore it, it's just how it gets reported, so don't have too much heartache on that. Arch Linux also appears strictly as a desktop OS OS, while Steam Deck OS is reported separately as HoloISO. So claims that Arch ranks first solely due to Steam Deck users are not accurate. That was my first thought. Yeah, it is reported separately, so it is not including the Steam Deck.
01:06:47
And the article linked in the show notes includes a video timeline showing monthly distribution popularity trends over the past several years so you can see how they changed over the last several years. Per month they animate it so you can see the bars go up and down and distributions come in and go out, and it's kind of neat. Now the latest data from the April ranks the distributions or just the top few. There's a lot more, but just hitting the top Arch Linux has 20.9%, linux Mint at 11.4, fedora at 8.7, ubuntu at 8.6, endeavor at 6.7, 8.6, endeavor at 6.7, cash EOS and Flatpak are both at 6.2, nabrara at 5.2, and Bazite at 4.5. And, like I said, there's more distributions, but I just hit the top ones and it's kind of interesting. Cash EOS appeared on this list only a few months ago but has been steadily climbing in popularity.
01:07:50
Now, like I said, the article features video visual growth trends. But they also have a nice image for the same thing, just with a static. It looked like stacked bar charts, basically, just with a static. It looked like stacked bar charts, basically, and you can see how things have risen and fallen over time. For example, manjaro, which once held a significant portion of Linux gaming on Proton, has been shrinking and it seems to be now a minor player Again, with all those caveats. But those unfamiliar with CacheOS, just like Manjaro, it's based on Arch Linux. Now CacheOS does something else. It includes you can get a handheld optimized version. So you know kind of dipping its toes into SteamOS that we just talked about. You know kind of dipping its toes into SteamOS that we just talked about.
01:08:52
Now a few observations. They had on the data set. The author did Arch-based distributions dominate with more than 37% of users in the report. Debian distribution came in second and Fedora-based distributions ranked third. Again, you know, it's a big grain of salt taken here, but worth noting is Cache's OS. Rapid rise is worth noting. It just keeps growing every month. They look at this and it's on a pretty steady, noticeable growth trend.
01:09:23
Now they do also touch in the article on the downward trend for Manjaro and Pop OS and suggesting that both are probably going to continue to decline. Now this is. The author of the article speculates that Manjaro has long struggled with quality assurance and there are better options that exist for users seeking a safe and efficient arch-based distro, better options that exist for users seeking a safe and efficient Arch-based distro. That's the author's words, not mine. And as for Pop OS, its developers have reportedly been preoccupied with other projects, primarily the Cosmic Desktop, so they're leaving left over a little energy for maintaining the base distribution. You know they point out that Pop OS's main download page still offers a version based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, along with a Raspberry Pi 4 image which you know the author notes is about three years outdated. So for full details, check out the article linked in the show notes and see what you think about this up and coming distribution. You know, personally, if I was going to try a distro based on Arch, I might try Cashi. It looks like it might be interesting.
01:10:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It really fascinates me that we see so many of these becoming popular that are respins of existing sort of very old, very well-maintained distros, sort of like what Ubuntu has historically been for Debian.
01:10:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's fascinating. It's interesting how these gaming distros seem to focus around.
01:11:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Arch, yes, well, so okay. So the data set they're working with is ProtonDB, right? So it is going to be a very gamer-centric data set. So that's why it's not terribly surprising that you see these distros that are sort of specifically designed for gaming, like Bazite and Nobara and I guess CacheOS sort of fits into that same category being well represented, maybe a little bit above what you would expect, because it's measuring what the gamers are using.
01:11:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I doubt you'll find any enterprise-based systems in the ProtonDP data.
01:11:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You better not Very few people visiting this from. You know Enterprise Linux.
01:11:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And it even said that's why, even at the beginning they said it doesn't represent all Linux gamers. These are Steam gamers, so there's a lot of gaming that is not represented. It doesn't represent all.
01:11:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Linux users.
01:12:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
A lot of people playing Solitaire out there. We said that yeah.
01:12:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So I think that's a big part of why so many of them are coming from the Arch based, because these are Steam gamers and that is what SteamOS is. So, yeah, it's interesting, super, super fascinating stuff. All right, shall we get into command line tips? Let's do it. Let's do it. Rob's up first. Rob is first. Rob's going to run away with it.
01:12:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right, I am still continuing on my more utils series. I think after this I only have one left. So sad to see it go. I know you're all depressed, but most of all I'm depressed because it means I need to find some more things because I have to work. This one's kept me going and going. I had to think too hard anyway, today my command line tip.
01:12:54
It's another simple one. It is called z run, so let me make sure to get that on the screen for those watching the video. So z run, it's very simple. All it does is it will um uncompress the uh arguments in a command. So, for example, for those watching, I have a filetxt, or file1.txt I guess, and file1.txtgz. So all I did was gzipped the file and made the other file there. So one is gzipped up and the other is not.
01:13:35
So just for example, I'm going to show, I'm going to cat them. So if I cat the file1.txt, it just shows a text. This is an example file. Blah, blah, blah, stuff like that. It just shows a text. This is an example file. Blah, blah, blah, stuff like that. Now, if I were to cat the other one, the gzipped one, I'd get a bunch of garbage. Now, sure, if I had that file, I could uncompress it, run my command against it, and then I'd have all this extra stuff that I either needed to delete later or whatever. If instead I could just do this in line. So if I run z run space, cat space file, dot file, one, dot, txt, dot gz, it's gonna uncompress that and in line and put it right in as an argument. And I'm just doing cat because it's a real simple way to show what is happening there. But obviously you can put any command there and and it's going to decompress those contents or uncompress those contents. So ZRun, second to last tip in the more util series.
01:14:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, very cool. There's a nifty little hack here that this documentation tells you about, and that is that you can link a name beginning with a Z and when the link is executed, this is the equivalent to running Z run space product. So you could write your, you can make your own Z cat command by linking Z cat to Z run and it'll just automatically do what you want it to do. That's very clever. I like that a lot. That's cool. That's real clever. All right, Uh, ken, we are going to take another look at Pipewire and the PWCLI. What do we have this week?
01:15:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, this week we're going to go back into the interactive mode and we're going to be I'm going to be demonstrating using you've probably heard this term Jonathan. Object introspection commands. Let's go ahead and bring up my terminal. Let me resize that a little bit so that we can actually see everything, instead of having the live over it. Just take me a moment here.
01:16:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Just hit enter a couple of times that works too.
01:16:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Unless these are screenshots, then you can't do that.
01:16:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, it's live TV. We're live. We're doing it live and I'm feeling brave on doing it live on the physical computer because I'm just doing inspections. I'm not going to actually be changing anything. It's going to be two commands list-objects or ls. In fact, let's go ahead and type, let's get into the pipewire command line interface.
01:16:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's PWCLI.
01:16:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And yes, I still get that error when I do that. But the first one is list dash objects. Now you can just run that all by itself and, yes, everything goes down. Let me go all the way back up so we can start at the top and what have? Id 0. It gives you the type pipe wire, colon, interface, colon, core, slash 4. That gives you the object serial, which in this case is 0, and the core name, which is pipe wire, dash 0. Now let's go back down to the very bottom and you'll see we've got ID 159.
01:17:51
This one is a Pipewire Interface Node and the client API is Pipewire Pulse. The application name is OBS. The node name is OBS. Media class is stream input audio. Media row is production. And if you glance up you'll see you've got some others that, looking at them, all look like they're dealing with audio. And let's go ahead and just scroll back for a minute because I know we're going to have. We've got QPW Graph for one application name which is a client, then a node which has a media class of stream output video ID 139.
01:18:45
But it's a bit hard to go through and find all that, so let's go ahead and narrow it down by typing what we're looking for. Now you can list the type of object you're looking for, from core to client device, factory, module, node or port. As I said, I'm going to type core first and there is the core object. That's what we saw as 0. Now here's a really interesting one. Is device and is quite a few devices on my machine.
01:19:35
Uh, looking, uh glancing through all the information for those you're listening id48, which is type pipe wire interface device, has a device description of HD Pro Webcam 920 and a D-USB-0-3-1.0. So if you all remember when we went over PW-metadata, you can actually go in and change that device name to whatever you wanted to to make it easier, especially in your QPW graph, if you're running that, you got another device that's using the ALSA API, is my Rembrandt Radeon high-definition audio controller. Sounds fancy, doesn't it? But it's basically just an HD audio generic device. And then I've got another audio device which is called has a description of Family 17H, slash, 19h HD audio controller I think you all've heard me talk about that in the past and that's a Elsa underscore cardpci and I'll let y'all read the rest of that when you watch it those are basically just your H the audio on your HDMI output and the audio on your physical output, right.
01:21:24
Yeah, the line out line in and the headset go through that family one. Now, as we go on down, we'll see I've got another video device ID, number 119. It's got a device api of V4l2. The device description is obsvirtualcamera and the device name it gives is v4l2 underscore device dot, underscore, sys, underscore devices, underscore virtual, underscore video for Linux, underscore video too. So I've actually got that listed in my pipe order so I could actually do something with that if I wanted to make changes. And then, of course, I've got my Behringer preamp that I'm using for my mic down here at the very end. Now, as I mentioned, you can also list clients. What's the difference between a client and a device? What's the difference between a client and a device? Well, the clients give you information like the process ID, user ID and GID, as well as labels and the Pipewire access.
01:22:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Those are programs your clients are your programs that are running, that are talking to Pipewire, correct?
01:23:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, now there's also. Why would you?
01:23:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
want to look for a factory. This is going to give you info, probably about the defaults, of how some of these things are going to come up.
01:23:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Whether it's going through. Here you'll see it's got factory name of metadata spa-device-factory, where the factory type name is a pipewire interface device, or spa-node-factory device. Or spot the dash node down dash factory as a as a type name of pipe wire interface node. That's another. Another one I'm going to go through in a minute and I'm looking for a endpoint, endpoint. I don't see Port. So I'm just going to go ahead and show you the ports. But guess how I'm doing this List, Objects, Port, and here's all my ports and glancing through them real quickly as I scroll back, it looks like a lot of them are audio, though we do have one here which is a video capture port for my HD Pro webcam, and then you've got OBS monitors for audio and then if you wanted to get more information about one of these devices in particular, that's where the info command comes in correct.
01:24:59
Let's take the very last one we've got here, id 157. You just type info 157 to look at that one and there it gives all the information to include the properties. You've got the format dsp 32-bit float mono audio Port monitor, whether that will be true or false. Port group gives you the stream. Port ID 0. Port direction in this case out. Object path it says it's obs colon monitor 0. Port name monitor dash underscore FL. Port alias is obs colon monitor monitor-fl. Port alias is obs-monitor-fl. Then it gives you the node ID.
01:25:53
Now I don't think it does nodes yet, but we could go info. That node ID was 159 and there's a lot of information about that node. One interesting thing is it gives you what the permissions are for the node in this. In this case it's RWXM, which is read, write, execute and monitor, and in this case it says that the state is idle. Client API is Pipewire Pulse. So it's an audio stream. Obviously, application name is OBS. Gives you the icon name as well Media row, in this case production Process ID, user, host and binary Language. In this case it says it's en underscore us dot, utf-8. In other words, english, us version, and it's using the utf-8. In other words, english us version and it's using the utf-8. Now here's the one that's probably going to confuse a lot of people, since I am running on wayland it's windowx11.display equals colon one hmm, that's a little interesting.
01:27:27
And I'll prove to you when I get done here that I am on Wayland the easy way. The easy way Well, actually I don't even have to do that. Y'all remember I was showing KWIN earlier. That only happens in Wayland. But you got all this information that you can use. Where this is advantageous is you could take this and use it to create a virtual device that mimics this node so that you could use it to do, maybe to connect to, before actually connecting to this node. And now, if you really want to get all the information, info has a all option. Actually, before I do that, I'm going to quit and then clear and guess why I'm doing that.
01:28:43
So it's easier to scroll back to the beginning. So it's easier to scroll back to the beginning and I'm blocking it so you can't see it. But the uh uh bar for scrolling way down here is about that big and you see how far back I'm going lots and lots and lots of stuff yeah, so if you wanted to, you could do that from the command line pwcdli info all just run the whole thing.
01:29:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Then you can pipe it around however you want to through grep less or more.
01:29:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm off the center. There we go and now, or you could save it to a file, yep, and that way you could have that as a reference for pulling up that information about all that stuff and then go back into PWCLI and I'm going to show you next week how you can create devices.
01:30:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, Not have to use one of the graphing tools to be able to do it. Yeah, very cool. All right, and let's see, jeff, what is Y Cruncher?
01:30:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, today's command line tip isn't so much of a tip as it is a fun experiment or maybe just a way to push your computer to its limits. Maybe just a way to push your computer to its limits. So Y-Cruncher is a powerful number crunching tool capable of computing pi and other mathematical constants to trillions of digits. So Y-Cruncher is designed for extreme computation. It's multi-threaded, meaning it can leverage several cores and multi-core processors or even multiple CPUs for calculations. It's also vectorized, allowing it to take advantage of advanced instructions like, for example, avx-512 for faster processing. On top of that, it can handle swap space, meaning if your computations require more memory than available, it can offload to your hard drives or even multiple drives. And it's built to be somewhat fault tolerant, so if there's a computational issue or your hardware hiccups, it might be able to recover. You know they specifically said somewhat, because it's not fully fault tolerant. So what can you compute with Y-cruncher? Pi, the golden ratio, e, also known as Euler's number, or, and you can also do Euler-Masaroni's constant. You can do square roots and logarithms of numbers, and if you try to say, well, I want the square root of nine, it's going to come back and say, yeah, that's an exact number. That's boring. Give me something else. You know, and Catlin's constant. Or you can even do custom constants using user defined formulas. So if you check out the article linked in the show notes, you'll find not only this list of record breaking show notes, you'll find not only this list of record-breaking you know. You'll find not only a list of record-breaking computations, but there's a link in that article to a world record run by Storage Review, where Pi was calculated to 202 trillion digits and they go over what they had to do. And there's a link to a video from Linus Media Group or as a lot of people know it as Linus Tech Tips, where they showed their Guinness record of 300 million digits. All of it. And it ties into last week's tip where they specially configured their CPUs to be able to handle the data. So they would specifically have cores just to handle the caching of data and they had to take into consideration the architecture of the machines, take into consideration the architecture of the machines on. You didn't want, you know, data passing between CPUs if you could help it, just to keep things rolling, you know. And so it was really interesting watching the hardware and the software optimizations, configurations and what it took. I mean, it was a beast of a machine to be able to do it and really you could say machines.
01:33:28
It also includes links to mathematical constants and computational methods and, in fact, explaining key details you know, such as why the program runs on a CPU rather than GPU and among other insights. And among other insights In the computational methods, I mean they go over, like some of the equations used, to how you calculate pi and these other constants, so that you can see the math behind it. Now it's going to be, you know, calculus based, so there's a lot of limits, some integrals, things like that. So it's probably geared a little more for engineers and mathematicians and maybe the curiosity inclined. But you know, if you don't have to know the equations to be able to calculate it and but I will say that you know it can take a fair bit of memory and whatnot to be able to calculate really big numbers.
01:34:25
I should also mention and they mentioned this in the article if you decide to use a hard drive, if you have an SSD, be in mind that they mentioned that if you're really making a big number, this thing will thrash an SSD and just basically wear it out. The amount of hitting the drive it will do if you're not just going to limit yourself to memory. So yeah, take a look at it. I did some playing around with it. It's pretty cool. So happy coaching everybody, very neat.
01:35:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It was 300 trillion decimal points, 300 trillion, you said million.
01:35:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I just did a Google and I don't know. The very first article I pull up says 3 quintillion.
01:35:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They listed this 300 trillion. Okay, ditches of pie, who can tell?
01:35:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So you got any computers that can take 500 terabytes of memory?
01:35:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, I do not, it's a lot. It's a lot of memory.
01:35:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Hey, jeff, you want a high crunch pie?
01:35:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
At the restaurant With my teeth.
01:35:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't crunch it, I chew it. There's some pecan pie bars upstairs. I think I'm about to go crunch. Oh, all right. So I've got a quick tip.
01:35:51
This one is, uh, probably not something that you're going to use on a daily basis, but it is something that you might want to know about, and there's actually two of them lsm and chm. Lsm you might get some use out of, because it'll work on your machine and it'll tell you how much memory you've got. But the really interesting thing is it will tell you how that memory is split up into blocks and whether it's removable. So LSMEM and CHMEM are designed for big iron machines where you have multiple banks and multiple rows of memory where you can hot swap that memory, and so, if you're talking about like a super high availability cluster, you might want to be able to go in with CHMEM and turn some memory off, because you know you've got a problem there. Yank a DIMM, yank a stick of memory out, get the new one, punch it in there, run the command with CHMM again to turn it back on and literally hot swap a stick of RAM. Now that's not a thing that most of us are going to be doing on our own systems, but it might be useful to know exactly where your system is putting its memory and some of those things.
01:37:02
So, for example, on this laptop, it shows me that I've got 15.5 gigs total online memory. Those are split up into two different banks. I have a 3.3 gig bank that starts at zero and then the remaining 12.3 gigs start at. You know, it's a 0x0001, 0x0001. And goes off through like 40 FFFF. So that probably doesn't mean a whole lot to most of you, but it is really fascinating to see. And again, this is something that Linux can do, and maybe, just maybe, somebody out there has got a system that actually supports this. But if you run across these two commands, that is what they're for. So I found it. I was looking at commands. It's like, oh, what LS things have we not covered? And this is one that came up. It's like, oh, that's fascinating.
01:37:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That is cool and for those that have never been in like an enterprise server room, it's easy to change memory a lot of times because your servers you can slide them out on rails, pop the top and they've got like a hinge top or an easily removed top. Pull it off. You have your banks of memory. Pull it out, put it in, put the top back on. I mean it's quick, attach, slide it in and you're going yep, spell your coffee. Yeah, well, you wouldn't, you're not allowed to have. Uh, I was just. I was just thinking in a good data center, that's one of the things that you're, it's on the would you're not allowed to have. Uh, I was just, I was just thinking in a good data center.
01:38:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's one of the things that you're it's on the list you're not allowed to bring in. I've been in data centers before where they're like no cardboard. By the way, you have to unbox your server before you get in there because you're not allowed to have cardboard. I'm like why no cardboard? Like it'll get pulled up against a fan and stuff like oh yeah that'd be bad, huh?
01:38:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Even just the dirt and contamination will build up on the coolers. Yeah, that too. Yeah, you treat it like a semi-clean room. Yeah.
01:38:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, cool stuff. I've never cleaned a semi, but I know some people have. There you go.
01:38:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, it is time to let these guys, these knuckleheads, get the last word in. Rob gets to go first.
01:39:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
He heads get the last word in. Uh, rob gets to go first, he gets my better judgment and I can go first. That way, I'm out of here first. You can get rid of me. All right, if you want to know more about me, you can find me at robertpcampbellcom. It's for those watching the video. It's been down there in the corner, uh, the whole time. So, robertbcampbellcom, it's always there on that page. You can connect with me at. Uh, there's little links for linkedin, uh, twitter, uh, blue sky mastodon and, if you really want, there's a spot to donate a cup of coffee to me in five dollar increments. So you're not really giving me a coffee, you're giving me five bucks, or however many five bucks you want to give me. That's $5, by the way, for those. I know we have some people outside of the States too, and I don't even know if it works for them, because I know sometimes sites do weird things on different countries. I have no idea. I've never tried it. Give it a shot, let me know.
01:40:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
When you go on vacation, on vacation rob, outside of the country, you have to go pull it up and see if you can donate a coffee to yourself.
01:40:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I'll be doing that sometime soon here, there you go all right, donate a coffee to the rest of us.
01:40:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, there you go. That's a better idea.
01:40:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, jeff has it right, that's a better idea. Yeah, I'll just give you the money for that, because why pay them the their cut?
01:40:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
that goes it's the experiment and I check it out. That's the whole experiment, man. That is the point.
01:40:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All right, ken well, I just wanted to share a couple of articles. The first is, uh, by liam provement. It's about the foss recreation of a amiga os, of Amiga OS making progress. Amiga OS I love that. That's probably the longest open source OS that represents from the 80s, that you can still run today.
01:41:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Nice.
01:41:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
The second one, I think a mirror or and Travis K, a couple of our discord members may find more interesting. It's a article by Michael Larabelle about FFM peg.
01:41:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I've been watching the FFM peg stuff. I need to. I need to try to get them on false weekly and talk about it too. It'd be fun. Have they ever been on? If they have, it's been a long time. They need to come back Need to get them back.
01:41:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If it's been more than two years. It's probably time for them to come back Definitely.
01:41:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All right, jeff. I was a big Amiga fan, so I'm going to have to check that out. And for the oldest open source, I would say we need to look up when OpenVMS came out. That could beat it. Other than that, you can find me both on LinkedIn, through Rob's LinkedIn and thank you to the people that have actually linked up with me through Rob's page Definitely always love that. The other thing is, you can find me on Floss Weekly this week, so definitely check that out. Very, very good show and closing with a poem Clouds hold your data. Where does your data reside when it's sunny? Have a great week everybody.
01:42:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's great. Thank you, guys, appreciate y'all being here. All right, so I don't have my normal monitor in the background to point at there's no, there's no Hackaday, but you can find me there, hackadaycom. That is where Floss Weekly lives. That's also where my security column goes live every Friday morning and we sure have a lot of fun doing that and hope you guys go and check that out too. Other than that, we appreciate everybody being here those that catch us live and on the download, those that watch and those that listen and if you're watching, you're listening. You want to be able to do it ad-free. You should consider Club Twit. Go and check that out. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month, and yeah, with that said, we appreciate everybody being here and we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
