Untitled Linux Show 224 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.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:00]:
Hey folks, this week we're talking about Ubuntu's big release and the fact that they happen to break flat packs. We're talking about the Qualcomm buyout of Arduino. Intel is maybe taking a step back from open source and Plasma is about to knock it out of the park with 6.5. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Rob Campbell [00:00:21]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:30]:
This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 224, recorded Saturday, October 11th. No poetry was harmed. Hey folks, it is Saturday and that means it's time to get geeky about Linux. It's time for the Untitled Linux Show. We're going to talk about some software and some hardware, all kinds of stuff. It is not just me today. We've got Jeff and Rob with us and, well, there's been some stuff happening this week, not necessarily news stuff. We'll get to the news here in a minute.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:00]:
But Jeff was telling us in the background, in fact, he was hurried. We're going to blame him for being late because he was hurriedly installing Google Chrome on his desktop.

Rob Campbell [00:01:10]:
What's up?

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:11]:
What almost went wrong or did go wrong?

Jeff Massie [00:01:14]:
Well, you know, telling everybody I've been using cache for a while and it kind of took a left turn there. It first started, you know, if I tried to do an update and reboot, it would kind of hang on the reboots for a while. It would take a bit to actually reboot, but then one time it come up partially and right before it was supposed to go into plasma, I just had a little cursor blinking on the upper left hand corner and I couldn't fix it. I couldn't drop to a console. I couldn't. I mean, it was, you know, I probably could have got another machine, maybe ssh DIN or something, but, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:51]:
Do you use an Android phone? Well, the app exists on both. I have multiple times over the last few years ssh from my phone into my desktop to trigger a reboot or try to fix something or whatever. It does work.

Jeff Massie [00:02:06]:
Yeah, well, and I've got the server too. I could have just server and a lab. I could, I could have easily went in. But you know, and I, I also tried going, oh, I got the snapshots. I'm just going to roll back. Yeah, that didn't work so well either because I could into the operating system, but I couldn't do an update or do anything. It was, it was, it kept giving me the repositories were Mismatched and versioning issues and it was just freaking out about it. So I couldn't do anything when I was in the snapshot.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:39]:
I bet there's some way to make the snapshot your current file system.

Jeff Massie [00:02:46]:
I probably could. And to answer the question from Ash Potato, no poetry was lost this time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:53]:
No poetry was harmed in the formatting.

Jeff Massie [00:02:56]:
In the making of this. So I just. Well, part of it too is the beauty of Linux is the quick reinstall. So I just grabbed my Ventoy stick with my latest ISO on it, threw it on. I mean, within five minutes I was up and running. So I didn't. This time I didn't do a clean total wipe. I just did a reboot of the home or of the root.

Jeff Massie [00:03:22]:
So I, I formatted it reinstalled like normal home. I just said, don't, don't format it just mount from home. So it came up. But it came up a little different. So at first it came up and it just had my. It had a default plasma screen. And I'm like, what the heck is going on with that? Because previously using like Kubuntu, it comes up with your right wallpaper and all your settings. My taskbar was not where it should have been.

Jeff Massie [00:03:52]:
So I thought, oh, but I, you know, okay, let me try reinstalling the wallpaper. I right clicked and it knew it was there. It was like, oh, there's your wallpaper. So I just had to go click apply and it was there. You know, of course, moving the taskbar was no big deal. Then I thought, did I lose other things? But I opened up Firefox and it came up with the previous tabs I had open. I mean, so everything else worked. The fish shell had all my default things, things in there.

Jeff Massie [00:04:25]:
So it was, it was just kind of weird.

Jonathan Bennett [00:04:27]:
But I've seen KDE do that if it thinks that you've plugged in a different monitor, because it does per monitor, backgrounds per monitor, but all of those configuration things. So where you have the bar, what your background is, it saves that per monitor. And I've seen those get confused. If it thinks that it's looking at a new monitor, it'll give you a default session. That's probably what happened there.

Jeff Massie [00:04:53]:
Oh, I bet that would explain it then. Because, yeah, then everything else was there. And, you know, I had to like reinstall obs because it's not part of the default package. But of course it comes up and it had all my settings and so kind of like what you'd expect. Normally it's like, oh, I had to reinstall a program because it lives on the. On the root partition. Once I installed it, it had all the defaults and settings in the home partition. So it came up like normal.

Jeff Massie [00:05:20]:
So you know my tolerance for. And we have, we have for shenanigans. Yeah. Well, and to. For Mashed Potato, I had. When he says I have to use Control Alt F3 on my arch machine to get it unstuck sometimes I couldn't. None of them were working for me. I couldn't get out of that blinking cursor.

Jonathan Bennett [00:05:44]:
So I've seen a machine do that before that had an Nvidia video card. And sometimes after an update, the DKMS module would just fail to build and it would do something very similar. I'm guessing that is an Nvidia machine.

Jeff Massie [00:05:59]:
It is an Nvidia. It is Team Green.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:01]:
I would guess that's what it was.

Jeff Massie [00:06:03]:
Yeah, I couldn't even use the resub keystrokes. Nothing worked. So I. But you know, my tolerance for fixing things, especially on a play machine like this, you know, and okay, I'm running cache. Cache is kind of cutting edge. I mean, it's. You gonna probably have a few hiccups once while, but it's so fast to reinstall that I could really figure this out or I could just reinstall it in five minutes and be done.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:32]:
Yeah. And you've got kind of a bit of homework now to go. Look. How do you take your snapshot and make it your current default so that you can then try updates? Because I think if you could have done that, it would have gotten you out of it. But you're right, it was faster to just reinstall than to go do the research to figure out how to make that happen.

Jeff Massie [00:06:52]:
I have to do that. Yeah, I thought about that. I'm like, I know there's. And I know I'm not hardcore into my knowledge level into the art side is, you know, Debbie. And I know a lot more on that side than the art side. So I'm still learning and kind of a noob on the. On the art side.

Rob Campbell [00:07:11]:
But I'm proud of you for trying, though.

Jeff Massie [00:07:14]:
Hey, I'm learning, you know, it's pretty fun. And that's. It's the beauty of the machine I'm on now is, oh my gosh, what happens if you totally trash it out or wipe it? Just reload it and go up, continue on. This machine is designed to play with. That's what I built it for.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:31]:
Yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, there is news other than just us keeping up with our machines. And we're going to let Rob lead us off. We're going to talk about Ubuntu. There's something pretty big that happened with Ubuntu and they broke something. We're going to let Rob pick it up and talk about that right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:07:49]:
Hey, everybody, it's Leo Laporte. You know about MacBreak weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:06]:
It's an easy subscription.

Leo Laporte [00:08:08]:
Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Mac Break Weekly or visit our website, Twitter TV mbw. You don't want to miss a week.

Rob Campbell [00:08:16]:
Of Mac Break Weekly, right? So Ubuntu 25.10 is an interim release where Canonical likes to go all out, push the limits and test new technologies. Rusty.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:30]:
Make everything rusty.

Rob Campbell [00:08:32]:
Make it rust.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:32]:
Sure.

Rob Campbell [00:08:33]:
For future LTS releases. And with this, you know, sometimes you break things. Well, they seem to be going all out on this release. First it was reported that, you know, Rust core utils were breaking some things. There is some concern about Rust sudo potentially breaking some scripts not quite working right under some scenarios. But this time the latest bug does not involve rust. The latest bug involves flat packs. What? Flat packs? On uitsu they don't want you to do that.

Rob Campbell [00:09:10]:
You should be running snaps. What's wrong with you guys anyway, right? That's. That's what canonical things. What's wrong with you guys? You know, and, and maybe that is why they broke flat packs. Well, before getting into the conspiracy theory, let's dive into what is going on. So this issue isn't caused by Flatpak itself. It's Ubuntu's app Armor that's to blame. So AppArmor is Ubuntu's built in security tool that restricts the app restricts what the app can access on your system.

Rob Campbell [00:09:44]:
In Ubuntu 2510, the App Armor profile for Fuzer Mount 3, a tool FlatPak depends on, is missing the permissions it needs to do its job. So when you install a FlatPak app, Fuser Mount 3 mounts and unmount certain temporary file systems. But right now AppArmor is blocking it from accessing key files like run mount utap. Without that access, the umount process fails and that's what causes Flatpak to crash? So no on mount means no Flatpak installs, and this affects everyone on Ubuntu 25.10, whether you upgrade it or start it fresh. So how this happened, was it because Canonical only wants you to run snaps? Well, in a way, yes. Because their focus is on snaps, which means they don't really care about flatpacks at all. At least not enough to actually do some testing on this common Ubuntu use case. So they either did think about it, or they just take care to think about them.

Rob Campbell [00:11:01]:
Either way, Ubuntu 2010 or 2510 is one of the most ambitious updates in recent history, packed with new features, underlying changes, and a lot of breaking changes. Ubatu is made up of hundreds of moving parts, each maintained by different teams. And you know, Flatpak, you know it isn't. Isn't part of Ubatu's default install. So when Apparmor's rules were updated, no one realized those changes would block Fuse Fuser mount three axis. So it's probably not sabotage, but a complex dependency bug that, you know, I guess kind of happens when systems evolve at once and your team doesn't care about testing things outside of what they care about. But you know, the funny thing is, the funny thing is this. This was actually reported back in early September, like roughly close to a month before the final release of 25:10.

Rob Campbell [00:12:05]:
So was it really just a slip up that got missed? I mean, seems like enough time, but I'm sure there's a lot of. Must be a lot of bugs that got missed. It could have been just this one. But the good news, the good news is Canonical has confirmed the bug and marked it as critical. So a proper fix is on the way. No word exactly when, but it's being prioritized, they say. So until then there is a workaround. It's listed in the official bug report on Launchpad and it and I have tested it out.

Rob Campbell [00:12:39]:
Now it may not be recommended for everyone as it involves manual app armor tweaks that could weaken the security if done incorrectly. But you know, if you need to configure this workaround, you can check out the show notes or wait for the tip section of the show where I'm going to demonstrate. I'm going to show you the problem that the crash that happens when you try to install a Flatpak and then I'm going to show you how to fix it. So the workaround, it can get you by temporarily, but if you can wait it might be best to hold off for the official fix or stick to an LTS if it really matters.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:20]:
Yeah. So like, there's probably this. Does it. Is it broken for doing an upgrade? I suppose that's a question to ask that I don't know the answer to.

Rob Campbell [00:13:30]:
If you upgrade Ubuntu.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:31]:
Yes, yes.

Rob Campbell [00:13:32]:
That affects them too.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:33]:
Okay.

Rob Campbell [00:13:33]:
They can't install Flatpaks either.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:37]:
If you have Flatpaks already, do they break trying to run?

Rob Campbell [00:13:41]:
That is one scenario I'm not sure. I didn't try.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:44]:
Um, that seems like. That seems like that's the one that's going to get people that are doing the upgrade.

Rob Campbell [00:13:49]:
Um, yeah, but it's clear. I mean, it doesn't even install. When you try to install it though. When you try to install a Flatpak, you can install Flatpak and a repository.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:00]:
But not the actual images.

Rob Campbell [00:14:02]:
Yeah, yeah, an actual image. So it just errors all over the place.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:07]:
Yeah, I can make sense.

Jeff Massie [00:14:11]:
You know, when they lean into security so hard with everything it almost turns into, are we better off just going, you know, if you want really secure. Just saying, you know what, we're just going to have an immutable system. I mean, yeah, you lose some of the flexibility maybe, but you know, it. They're trying to be. Lock it down so hard but not go immutable.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:35]:
I don't know it.

Jeff Massie [00:14:36]:
A lot of complexity there.

Rob Campbell [00:14:39]:
I wonder, you know, Apparmor is kind of the, the Debian security, Debian Ubuntu security product. While if you're on the red hat side, you got Selinux. I'm not sure what the other, the other niches out there use, but I don't know. I kind of want a comparison if, if, if one's actually better than the other. You know, is, is there a reason to only do what only, you know, use the.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:07]:
I mean, they're, they're, they're just different. They come from different sources. Like Selinux actually was written by the nsa. And so I'm sure that there's a group of people that look at that and go, I don't want that running on my system. And I understand that.

Jeff Massie [00:15:20]:
Fair.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:21]:
And I don't remember where Apparmor originally came from. Who originated that project. I do, I think it. There's also been some work on trying to get the two of them to work, to run at the same time, because historically, you know, you've just not been able to run them together. I think I saw a story a week or two ago about some work trying to get them to play nice together.

Rob Campbell [00:15:41]:
Yeah, I gather. I don't think this is specifically app armor issue. Like if you had app armor on another distro that I just, I don't think it necessarily caused a problem. I'm thinking it's Ubatu's profiles of what they have set up. But I could be wrong because basically the fix is to disable app armor for Fuser mount.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:05]:
Yeah, makes sense. All right, shall we talk about Qualcomm? Qualcomm and Arduino? These are not things that we normally talk about on the show, but this is such a big change and a big deal. I figured it really made sense. Qualcomm announced last week that it is buying Arduino and boy, for hackers and makers, Arduino has been just part of the landscape for a long time. Really kind of kicked off a lot of, I guess my generation's tinkering with electronics and so Qualcomm does not necessarily have the best reputation. And so there are some people that are very afraid of what this is going to mean for the Arduino ecosystem. And for anyone that says, oh well, there are no actual Arduino products that I use all of the time, so this doesn't affect me at all. The other side of this is that the Arduino sort of API has just become one of the absolute standards for programming microcontrollers in the projects that I work with.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:08]:
You know, none of these are Arduino chips, but it still uses the Arduino API. Like the Arduino framework you could call it is just the sort of the standardized way to work on a lot of these different MCUs. And then along with this, and this is really interesting, Qualcomm has announced that they're going to be releasing the Arduino Uno Q Q standing for Qualcomm. And that is going to be a single board computer with a Qualcomm Dragon Wing QRB2210, which is a quad core arm Cortex A53A Qualcomm Adreno 702 GPU. It's got Wi fi, it's got Bluetooth. I don't see how much RAM it's going to have on it. But this is, you know, this is very intentionally a Raspberry PI kind of a. It's the single board computer.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:03]:
It's Qualcomm trying to use Arduino to break into that single board computer market that's still quite hot. Everybody loves the Raspberry PI and Then you've got, you know, Orange PI and a whole bunch of other groups that are doing similar things. And what I worry about, knowing some of the things that Qualcomm has done in the past. I sort of suspect that Qualcomm is trying to tap into that Raspberry PI goodness. But they don't understand anything about what makes the Raspberry PI really great. It's not the hardware. It's not that the Raspberry PI has such amazing hardware. Although with like the PI 5 and the PI 500 and the PI 500 plus, we're actually getting to the point to where it's pretty decent hardware.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:42]:
It's not the hardware that makes it good, it's the, the fact that it's supported well for a very long time and that there's such a really good ecosystem and community around it. And that's what makes the PI special. And I just don't know that Qualcomm, even with their acquisition of Arduino, if they're going to put that kind of support into it. And so the thing that I really fear, that I anticipate, is that there will be a release of some flavor of Linux with a very customized kernel. It may be open source, you know, likely they'll do like, what the license requires. Okay, here's the sources for it. Here's this one, this one distro, you know, Arch or Debian or maybe Fedora or Mint. I've seen all of them.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:28]:
I've seen companies do this with all of them. Okay, here's your distro. This image has this, the kernel packed into it. Everything is customized just right. Use this image and it'll work. And worst case scenario, when you run updates, it tries to pull a new kernel down and everything falls flat on its face. Or when you run updates, it just blacklists the kernel and you never ever get kernel updates for it again. And this is sort of the limbo that a lot of these SBCs fall into.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:59]:
And then you have other companies that do a really good job, like Raspberry PI, of keeping their images up to date, you know, giving people an update system that works and also pushing things upstream into the Linux kernel. Sometimes that doesn't happen as fast as we would like, but you still, you see evidence that it's going on. So, yeah, I've had talked with several people over the last week that have looked at this news. One guy I'm working with, he's an electrical engineer, he's like, it's not good, man. It's not good.

Rob Campbell [00:20:29]:
I mean, at least it's not Broadcom.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:33]:
It's true. It could be worse. There are worse companies that could have bought Arduino.

Jeff Massie [00:20:38]:
And for those that don't know, Qualcomm is a pretty big player in the semiconductor world.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:44]:
Yeah, they do a lot of wireless stuff.

Jeff Massie [00:20:46]:
Yeah, they're just based on market cap. They're like number 11. So I mean, they're, they're in the top 20 semiconductor companies in the world. Yes, it's just one of those that companies that you don't hear, I mean, we hear some of, but we don't fully hear everything they do because a lot of it just goes into background things that, you know, they're selling chips to a lot of companies and industries that outside of the consumer market.

Rob Campbell [00:21:15]:
Yeah, you know, maybe, maybe having a, you know, a big company like Qualcomm take them in, you know, it, it could be really bad or, you know, maybe it could be good. Maybe they could kind of play off of the Raspberry PI success and kind of get into that crowd if they, if they do things right. You know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:36]:
I mean, it boils down to what happens at every other company. Right. If you put somebody in charge of it that has a clue, it's going to go well. If you put a bean counter in charge of it, or in this case, somebody that just has no idea how the open source ecosystem works is not going to go well. And so it all, it all boils down to who they put in there as management.

Rob Campbell [00:21:52]:
Yeah. You know, some people are, are all out there for the open source ecosystem and others have been and are kind of pulling away. But we'll talk more about, about that in a second.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:03]:
Yes. Did either of you guys get your start sort of with Arduino? Was that in your past? Okay. For the longest time I had an Arduino board setting here and now I clean my office and I can't find anything. But I have like an Arduino de Milova board that's around here somewhere.

Jeff Massie [00:22:24]:
If I find I'll date myself a little bit. My dad kind of got me into some of this just with some old Heath Kits candy bar like Heath Heath kit used to be a big do it yourself build like tube testers and radios and. Yeah, I've got a, I've got a radio that picks up everything that my dad built with tubes and whatnot. And so I've helped him work on that and other things.

Rob Campbell [00:22:53]:
My starts with the little breadboard and you put like a light here maybe A fan. Fan here and connector here.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:02]:
Yeah. So one of the first sort of hobbyist electronics things that I ever did was I got one of the original Arduinos, one of the ones that had a USB port on it. And I punched that into a breadboard because the spacing on the leads are just right, that you can actually just take it and drop it into one of those breadboards. And then onto that I put a couple of relays and I then used the Arduino to control lights in my bedroom growing up. And, you know, then I, you know, I had it connected over usb. And so I was using the computer to send the commands via serial over the USB to turn them on and off. And then I created a web page that, you know, you would click on the link and it would make the light go on and off. And that was, you know, that was 20 years ago.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:47]:
More than 20, probably about 20 years ago. That was my first experience, really, with a lot of the tinkering stuff, getting. Getting hands on. It was the first time that it was like I made something on the computer actually do something in the real world. And that was. That was kind of a cool moment. So I started with Arduino 1.

Jeff Massie [00:24:06]:
I started with really playing by myself, was it. I had to look it up. It's called a Gakken EX system. I put a picture in the discord, but it had these little blocks with circuits in it that you could just plug into a grid and it would, you know, it's one of those, you know, it had a kit. You could make radios and flashing lights and do all sorts of stuff and.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:30]:
Oh, that's really cool. I've not seen this before, but that's really neat.

Jeff Massie [00:24:35]:
Yeah. Then it used Denshi blocks is what they called it. So if anybody wants to look it up on the audio, it's G A, K, K, e, n space, ex dash. And then I think it was 150. I might have had maybe it was 100. But that. That'll at least get you into what it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:59]:
The GAK and EX system is a series of educational electronics kits produced by Gakken in the late 1970s.

Rob Campbell [00:25:06]:
So you can't get them anymore?

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:08]:
Probably not. Some of these. These ideas, at least people are reproducing and starting to sell. So you can get something similar. I bought for my kids not too terribly long ago. A similar idea is simpler than that. But it was like a plastic base. And then you had almost like Legos, except they were circuits.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:30]:
And so, you know, you would have one that's a battery and you plug it in, you plug another one into. They sort of snap together. And so it's the same, roughly. Basic idea. It is cool to see this kind of thing, though I've never seen this one in particular. It's neat to see it.

Jeff Massie [00:25:46]:
Oh, yeah, it was. It was. And then around the. It's for those that can't see. It's kind of a. It's got a grid that you can plug these blocks into. Each block has a circuit, and along the outside of the grid they've got, you know, you've got different power supplies. And then off to the left, they have some, like a coil and some other stuff that you can tie into your circuits.

Jeff Massie [00:26:09]:
And, you know, like I said, it came with a book of all sorts of, you know, flash or make a little. It had a speaker built in that you could tie into to make noise.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:21]:
And I'm sure the Dash 150 meant that there were 150 different experiments that you could do with it. Yeah, it's usually how those worked. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:26:30]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:32]:
Let's see. There are books about the GAC and EX on Amazon, but there do not appear to be any of the actual. Nobody's remade it yet.

Jeff Massie [00:26:44]:
Well, the wiki said there was a reissue in like 2000. I closed it, but it was like 2002 or something. And then somebody else had something that was compatible with it in 2011. And so it's had some life beyond the 70s.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:59]:
Yeah. Yep. Very cool. All right, let's talk about.

Rob Campbell [00:27:05]:
Oh, well, before you do, there's one on eBay for $95. There's others. There's more than one, too. There's. They're on ebay. So if you really, really, really want one, check out ebay.

Jeff Massie [00:27:18]:
I might have to look in the old my parents house closet. Maybe it's still in there.

Rob Campbell [00:27:23]:
I don't know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:24]:
It's very possible.

Rob Campbell [00:27:25]:
Make 100 bucks off it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:26]:
All right, so Rob was talking about intel and Jeff, you have an intel story. It's not the one Rob was thinking of.

Jeff Massie [00:27:34]:
No.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:34]:
What's going on with Intel's P state driver?

Jeff Massie [00:27:38]:
Well, intel engineer Rafael Wysocki has put some patches in for Intel CPUs which should help simplify the P state driver. The P state driver, which for most CPUs have a ver. Most CPUs have a version of. Decides what the performance should be for a cpu. So, for example, if you're playing the latest AAA game or doing some heavy rendering and calculations, the driver placed the CPU in Full performance mode. But when you're doing something like typing in a document, there really isn't much for the CPU to do. And Intel's case and you know, an efficiency core, also known as an E core, can easily get the job done at a low frequency and power state. So this saves energy and it's really important especially for laptops and other battery devices, so a user can get more out of a charge.

Jeff Massie [00:28:22]:
You know, that's how you make your battery last longer. So when Raphael was looking at the code and you know, he makes note specifically to call out the, the hybrid ultra, the hybrid core ultra systems coming out and you know, the current ones and the upcoming Panther Lake, there seemed to be some unnecessary complexity. Now here's what Raphael had to say with, you know, I, I put some small readability tweaks and explanations in here, but he said the new energy model uses less memory and it introduces less overhead into the scheduler, mostly due to the reduction of the state's table size. Now it has a performance independent cost coefficient is introduced for each CPU type. Now he's talking about power cost. Here the number of states in each power delivery state is reduced to two and it's not necessary to use more of them because the cost per scale invariant utilization point is not depend on the performance level anymore. This is, this is me adding, he's saying that it doesn't need to be more than two power states because anymore doesn't really change anything from the two existing defined states. So your, your high power, low power, it's good enough, you're not gaining anything with more granularity.

Jeff Massie [00:29:41]:
CPUs without L3 cache. So LPE cores, that's what they, what they call efficiency. Core without L3 cache that are expected to be the most energy efficient ones are prioritized over any other cpu. And when he says cpu, he means core the CPU type value from CPU id. Again he's saying cores. Now easily accessible through a cpu. Data is used for identifying P cores and E cores instead of hybrid scaling factors which are less reliable. So rather than try to look at the scaling factors, things like that, it's like let's just ask the system because now it reliably reports exactly what's in each cpu, how many E cores, how many P cores.

Jeff Massie [00:30:29]:
Now E cores are preferred to P cores and the cost coefficients for different CPU types can appear in hybrid systems. So P cores, E cores and LPE cores that are effectively e cores without L3 cache and with lower capacity. So again that's, it's a Cut down. An LPE core is a cut down E core and they're chosen in accordance with the following rules. The cost priority of LPE cores relative to E cores is 1.5. The cost priority of E cores relative to p cores is 2, which means that the cost priority of LPE cores relative to p cores is 3. So the really short version of what he was saying here is they made a simple change to have high power, low power states with three types of cores. In some chips, not every core, not every CPU will have all three chips, but most will have at least two.

Jeff Massie [00:31:26]:
And they always prefer lowest power first until there's a real need for higher power cores. The ratio helps them determine when to jump up or down in the cores used. So this has been put in for the kernel, but this is not in the 6.18 kernel. So it will be found in the 6.19 kernel whenever that pull request window opens up. So it'll be a bit before we see it. And they might refine the code a little more. But that's the idea of just making it simple and more direct on how to choose which kind of core and how much power your CPU is going to use. If you take a look at the article linked in the show notes, they'll have more details.

Jeff Massie [00:32:09]:
You can, you know, see the pull request and really get into the code if you so desire. But it's looking good.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:16]:
Yeah, it's, it's good to see intel working on open source. We've talked about this a little bit in some previous shows. They are, there's, they're, they're. Well, Intel's going through a rough patch and they are starting to rethink some things. But good to see this. Let's go ahead here in just a moment and we're gonna let Rob take it away and talk about his intel story, which is going to be the other side of the coin. And we will turn it over to him and let him do that right after this.

Rob Campbell [00:32:51]:
Hey, everybody, it's Leo laporte.

Leo Laporte [00:32:53]:
Are you trying to keep up with the world of Microsoft? It's moving fast, but we have two of the best experts in the world, Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. They join me every Wednesday to talk about the latest from Microsoft on Windows Weekly. It's a lot more than just Windows. I hope you'll listen to the show every Wednesday.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:10]:
Easy enough.

Leo Laporte [00:33:11]:
Just subscribe in your favorite podcast client to Windows Weekly or visit our website at TWIT tv. WW Microsoft's moving fast, but there's a Way to stay ahead. That's Windows Weekly every Wednesday on Twitter.

Rob Campbell [00:33:24]:
Yeah, so somehow Jeff was lucky enough to come up with a positive open source intel story. But a couple of weeks ago I shared some stories that highlighted my concerns and others over intel and their open source stance in the industry. Their hardware, you know, it's had its ups and downs over the years. It's mostly, mostly been pretty positive. But the one thing that stayed steady was their heroic support for open source. Michael at Pharonix even called it legendary. But he has now written a long article sharing his concerns over Intel's new direction. They were a driving force, contributing extensively to the Linux kernel, compiler, tool chains and countless community projects.

Rob Campbell [00:34:22]:
Their engineers were known for constant innovation and collaboration, often setting the standard for Linux performance and hardware support. However, following major corporate restructuring and layoffs, Intel's once dominant open source leadership is fading. Many other top Linux developers have departed. Projects like Clear Linux that we brought up before that's been discontinued and several intel maintained drivers are now unmaintained. During the Intel Tech tour in Arizona, Kavork Kashishin, Executive VP and GM of Intel's Data Center Group, stated that the company will begin focusing its open source contributions in ways that provide a competitive advantage to intel rather than benefiting benefiting the broader ecosystem and its or its rivals. He emphasized the need in this quote, quote, the need to, quote, find a balance where we use our open source software as an advantage to intel and not let everyone else take it and run with it. Later reaffirming that intel remains proud of its open source work but wants to ensure, wants to ensure it and another quote they say wants to ensure that it gives us an edge against everyone else. So they're only open source goals now appear to be for them and to give them an edge and not to really care about anyone else.

Rob Campbell [00:36:00]:
These remarks mark a departure from what Intel's long standing open collaborative philosophy has been. One that historically sought to strengthen Linux and the wider x86 community rather than using open source strategically to help pace competitors. And since AMD and intel are both x86 64, this is kind of, this kind of limits what they can, you know, their open source contributions to projects that will only benefit intel and it could severely limit what they could contribute to in general because a lot of what they could contribute to intel wise would benefit amd. So it really narrows that down. By choosing the limit contributions that might benefit competitors, intel risks weakening the very foundation of collaboration that helped drive success in Linux and open development for decades. This shift could slow innovation in areas like compiler optimizations, kernel improvements and cross platform performance gains that have historically benefited everyone using x86 hardware. So now, with fewer engineers and projects now open source, the community may lose one of its strongest industry partners, potentially creating gaps in Linux support, slowing the ISA adoption and eroding the trust that once made Intel a cornerstone of open source progress. For those looking for long read, check out the show notes for the link to one of the longest articles I've ever seen written on the Pharonics website.

Rob Campbell [00:37:47]:
He really goes into how horrible this is really for me. I long ago dumped Nvidia for AMD when it comes to graphics because of their better open source support. And now it looks like I'm going to be fully dumping intel for AMD in the processor space. All in on amd. Please don't disappoint me. Next amd, I'll have nowhere else to go.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:17]:
I think it might be a little too early to dump intel over this.

Rob Campbell [00:38:21]:
But I mean there is another great alternative. So it's really doesn't take much.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:28]:
Well, you know, you're gonna go to PowerPC.

Rob Campbell [00:38:31]:
AMD. I mean, AMD's still there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:33]:
Even another.

Rob Campbell [00:38:35]:
No, not another one. Like I said, if AMD is gone, it's like, what am I gonna do?

Jeff Massie [00:38:40]:
Well, you know, and I take some of this with a grain of salt because yeah, there's a lot of them, you know, a lot of the open. You see a lot of developers have been leaving intel, but there's also a lot of them that have, you know, oh, I've been doing this for 20 years and so I kind of wonder how much that was like, you know what, now's a good time just to go. You know, they might have already kind of been thinking about it anyway or felt stuck in a rut and not saying totally. I mean there's still a lot that got the ax because intel, for those who don't know is they are in a heap of trouble right now and trying to get back on their feet and it, they've had to take a lot of drastic measures and they've shut down fab projects, They've, they've laid off thousands of people. They, I mean it's, it's a major how do we turn this ship around? And so it, yeah, so you can.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:40]:
Make, you can make the point. And I think this is essentially what Jeff is trying to do, that there is a worst possible outcome for intel at open source and that would be intel having to enter bankruptcy proceedings. Like that would be that would be a worse outcome for all of the open source things that intel works on.

Rob Campbell [00:39:57]:
You know, I could see, you know, if you have to back off a little bit on financial expenditures on this, on, on open source while you tighten the belt to, to get yourself moving forward or whatever it takes, I can get that. But to say that our, this is our part of our strategic plan to improve ourselves, to be better is to back off. Our strategic plan is to back off from the community. You know, like Michael Pharonic says, I, and I agree with them. I think the strategic plan they've had in the past of helping and being there for the open source community is one thing that made them strong and I think this weakens them to, to strategically back off. You know, if you're just saying, you know, we got to step back just a little bit, we gotta, you know, maybe take a few months of some, some time off and, and save up a little money. Okay. But to say, you know, we think this is strategically good for, for us and our product.

Jeff Massie [00:41:02]:
Well, the, the other point though too is there I saw another article talking about intel still wants to back open source, but they want to make sure they're not enabling their competition. They've been.

Rob Campbell [00:41:12]:
Maybe that's what he said here too.

Jeff Massie [00:41:14]:
Yeah, too broad of tools and you know, maybe they're just going to work on the hardware drivers and less on the things that for example, AMD or RISC V could leverage for their products. I mean they're, they're taking a hard look at everything they do right now, trying to figure out how do we do more with less and how do we become more efficient and lean and unbeencounter themselves, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:44]:
Yeah. So the thing that sort of comes to mind is well, let's cut back on open source. That sounds like a very bean counter y thing to say. Right. That's the really scary part here. I do have to say though, and somebody pointed this out to me in a totally different conversation in a different context. But like, and the guy I was talking to, he pointed me to a DHH or a blog post about this David Heinberhansson, however you say his middle name. Anyway, the blog post, it's titled Open Source is neither a community nor a democracy.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:15]:
Open Source is a license type. And that's an interesting thing to keep in mind. I think it's a useful thing to keep in mind. A lot of these open source projects, they do get run in a certain way and so we have sort of come to an expectation out of intel that they are going to run their open source projects in a certain way that they will continue doing things open source but there's not really an onus on them to do that like. So there is under the licensing terms.

Jeff Massie [00:42:46]:
Right?

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:47]:
I'm sure they will continue to abide by the licensing terms but other than that, like there's nothing that says that they have to run these projects in the way that they have been. And you know, I sort of said it as a throwaway statement at the beginning but I think it's worth reiterating like it is better for intel to continue doing some open source and stay afloat than for them to go all in on open source while the, while the ship is going down.

Rob Campbell [00:43:15]:
I mean they've never been all in. Well, it's just been very strong.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:20]:
They've been very strong.

Jeff Massie [00:43:21]:
But if you think about it on the consumer desktop, open source is not a big deal for them. We get bleed over from the enterprise because big infrastructure runs on Linux as much as we say, well you know, year of Linux, it's been the year of Linux for a long time, just not on the desktop.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:42]:
Right.

Jeff Massie [00:43:42]:
Linux basically won everywhere else.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:44]:
Yes, absolutely.

Jeff Massie [00:43:45]:
So that's why there's so much code being written for stuff that you know, and I, I've got a story later talking about memory improvements in Linux that a lot of it's geared towards, you know, big enterprise and things like that because, and some of it is the desktop is such a simple case that there's not a ton left to do or you know, little tweaks here and there, but it's not needing major overhauls.

Rob Campbell [00:44:14]:
Well, my last machine is already amd. My next machine will just be AMD and I don't know, I, I, I, I'd like to see AMD step up and be, be the next legend.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:30]:
Be the next legend.

Jeff Massie [00:44:31]:
I don't know. You know, supposedly the next intel chip. Rumor has it the next batch of Intel CPUs is supposed to be a lot more amazing than the kind of flop we had before if they hold true. And now AMD is supposed to really come out swinging as well, which is good for us, the consumer that they're really in a knock down, drag out fight. I could switch to intel if they've got a better chip. I, you know, I've gone back and forth over the years who's, who's got the better chip and I've had both.

Rob Campbell [00:45:06]:
Yeah, mine's usually a full cost benefit analysis because I'm usually not buying the best chip there is out there.

Jeff Massie [00:45:14]:
Well that's best defined how you, you know, cost analysis cost the value, you know. Yeah, most of us are. I, I don't buy the top, top end CPUs and because a lot of times you don't need it or at least I don't. I'm not doing enough compute, but I do. I'm like what's my performance that I can get for the value? And this last time I almost bought a 14 or the 14 gen. The 14 700k, that's what it is. I almost got it came down to that in the 7900 and I was going back and forth the, the decision for me at the time because they were just about the same price they, you know that intel was slightly faster on certain things but it was the scheduler that they had the different cores and it just, I wanted to have at the time the scheduler wasn't as good in Linux and so I just said I'm going to go with just all the cores are the same. So I went amd.

Rob Campbell [00:46:19]:
I'm going to put this one more way. I mean obviously if intel is just way, way better at the time, I probably will still. But when this comes on my score sheet it's like one point for amd, one point blur until at least one more point for AMD or one point away from intel at least. Maybe it's not a point for amd, but it's, it's right. It's at least one more point leaning me that way.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:46]:
Yeah, yeah, that's fair, that's fair. I'm curious if they have some projects that they really like. Some of their open source things that they really have in mind when, when one of their execs comes out and makes the statement like is this just sort of a blanket, this is kind of the new way that we feel statement or is this. I have these seven open source projects in mind that we've been funding that have been, you know, detrimental to our bottom line.

Rob Campbell [00:47:12]:
To me the quote sounded like statements you make to stockholders.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:17]:
I had that thought too. Yeah, yeah, we promise we're going to stop spending your money on open source. Really?

Jeff Massie [00:47:24]:
Trust us.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:25]:
Yeah, I had that thought as well.

Jeff Massie [00:47:28]:
Because in the stock world they're like, oh, open source is not a major revenue generator. But in the real world the engineers are going oh this is great, I can tweak it. I'm going to buy these chips because I have control of the code and I can fix whatever. So it is a revenue generator. It's just a business world. Business world does not get the technology, engineering world. They just don't understand it as much as I've studied it for years. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:47:52]:
You know, a tenth of it. You have no idea.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:55]:
Yep, Yep.

Jeff Massie [00:47:57]:
All right, back to your abacus.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:59]:
Go back to counting beans.

Jeff Massie [00:48:01]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:02]:
So I saw a. I saw another story this week that really reminded me of Jeff, and that is the Amiga 4000. You were an Amiga guy, right, Jeff?

Jeff Massie [00:48:15]:
I was. I always wanted a 4000, but I could never afford it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:19]:
Yeah. So now you can go buy a 4000 and you can run Linux on it. And there's now finally a PCI driver for it.

Jeff Massie [00:48:28]:
Oh, wow.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:31]:
Yeah. This was why it surprised me and why I keyed in on it. David Palmer. Daniel Palmer, excuse me, Daniel Palmer sent in a patch to the Linux kernel mailing list. It is. It is a driver for the Mediator 4000, PCI Bridge for the Amiga 4000. And it's really interesting to look at because this is old stuff, this is old hardware and it is now the patches out there for it. It's a set of five patches and it's interesting to look.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:05]:
I always enjoy this when Michael over at Pharonix, when he links one of these, I always really enjoy going in and reading through the feedback that people give, because sometimes the feedback is, oh, my goodness, why would you do this? This is ridiculous. Get off the lkml. In this case, it's all technical, like, hey, this is really interesting, but I think you probably need to do this. And then the response was, I did that in the fifth patch. You need to go look at, you know, patch five out of five, two. Oh, sorry, I missed that one. Okay, here's some other feedback. And the other response was the same thing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:34]:
It was technical feedback, like, yeah, this looks good, except you probably ought to do this and this and this a little differently. It kind of makes me think that there's a really good chance that this is going to wind up in the kernel. It probably is going to need another revision to fix the things that people pointed out. It's just so interesting to me, though, that Amiga 4000 hardware is going to get better support inside the Linux kernel when that's hardware from the 90s.

Jeff Massie [00:50:00]:
Well. And back in the day, it did things that intel couldn't. Couldn't do. I mean, it was a great platform. It just had horrible leaders. It.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:13]:
Right.

Jeff Massie [00:50:14]:
Basically they had a couple guys that Prudential, they were high up in Prudential, the insurance company, and they. They wound up buying Commodore and they're like, where do we put these guys?

Rob Campbell [00:50:25]:
They.

Jeff Massie [00:50:26]:
We can't just outright fire him for whatever reason. And so they put them in charge of that and they just. It survived because of the engineering in it, not through any actual good business decisions.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:38]:
Right. That's the ultimate in putting the bean counters in charge of a technical company.

Jeff Massie [00:50:43]:
Yeah, yeah, they ran it in the ground, but yeah, this and this just. I think the Amiga 4000, I'm going off memory, so I might be wrong, somebody can correct me, but I think the 68040 CPU was the latest, greatest it ever had. I know you could get accelerator cards. It came with 68,060 processor and there were some PowerPC accelerator cards when it was still the joint venture between, was it Motorola, Apple and IBM, back when Apple had PowerPC chips as well. But then they broke up. So. Yeah, it. Interesting times.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:29]:
Yeah, I, I just, I found it really fascinating to see this come across. 1992 to 1994 is when they sold them.

Jeff Massie [00:51:37]:
So always, always wanted one back in the day, just never could afford it because they were several thousand dollars.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:44]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:51:45]:
Have you checked ebay now?

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:47]:
I bet they're still expensive. Maybe not quite as much as they.

Rob Campbell [00:51:50]:
Were, but they probably are.

Jeff Massie [00:51:51]:
Yeah. Well, I had, I had a 1200 for quite a while. What? Yeah, I got more money.

Rob Campbell [00:51:59]:
Jeff has more money now, so he can afford it now. As long as you can find one.

Jeff Massie [00:52:03]:
Yeah, but there's some of that. As much as I love it, you know, it's sometimes it's best to just let the memory shine and it plays better.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:12]:
It plays better in your nostalgic memory than it would actually on your desk.

Rob Campbell [00:52:15]:
Yes, there are lots of things like that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:18]:
I've discovered that the hard way with some things. It's like, oh, I remember this TV show, it was great when I was 12. And you go back and watch it.

Rob Campbell [00:52:25]:
And like, that's why I don't go back and watch them very often anymore.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:30]:
What's really fun is when you do that. So, like, we've, we've picked up some DVDs and Blu Rays of the cartoon that my wife and I grew up with. Some of the cartoons that we grew up with and we play them for the kids and some of those have aged very well and that's always fun. But I don't know that the Amiga 4000 would have aged well.

Jeff Massie [00:52:46]:
Yeah, I remember watching Land of the Lost when I was like five or six and just love the show. And then, you know, Maybe it's probably 15, 20 years ago now I saw an episode of it and I'm like, oh, that is so terrible.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:00]:
Indeed. I don't remember what it was that I went back and watched. But yeah, it did not age well. Some of them do. But whatever that was, it didn't well.

Jeff Massie [00:53:10]:
And the biggest thing honestly with the Amiga would be it's great other than okay, what do I do with it? Okay, I'm playing the games at the time. But. And they had web browsers, but they were for standards that are so old that you maybe could try to port something over or see if you could take the Chromium browser and report it or something. But I mean, otherwise you're kind of like, all right, it works. Now what?

Rob Campbell [00:53:38]:
You know, that sounds like a challenge. You get Chromium running on there now.

Jeff Massie [00:53:43]:
Good luck, rewrite it and rust while you're at it. You know, whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:53:46]:
You.

Rob Campbell [00:53:47]:
Maybe one of those newer open source browsers like Ladybird or the other one.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:54]:
Servo.

Rob Campbell [00:53:55]:
Servo, maybe they're lighter and I don't know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:00]:
Yeah, I think the biggest problem is that the APIs that they talk to didn't exist. I don't know. Like, could you, can you run. I guess if you run Linux on it, you can run x11. But if you're talking about the original Amiga OS, like it's not going to have X11. All kinds of problems. You got, you got problems on top of problems. All right, so let's, let's move on from our Amiga nostalgia and talk about the modern state of the best display environment.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:32]:
What's up with KDE Plasma?

Jeff Massie [00:54:36]:
Well, so now while this segment's mostly going to be about Plasma 6.5, there are some important improvements coming in 646. So this is all from Nate Graham's Plasma or KDE blog and you'll find a link in the show notes and he talks about they had a fix for a crash that would happen in Kwin when it would try and look at a device's orientation. So you know, think phone or tablet when it needs to know the direction to display the screen. The second most common crash in 646 was when using a weather report widget and it would display information from the Environment Canada source. So that would. It just did not like that source caused a lot of crashes. There are also fixes that made screen lock colors or screen colors not look quite right in HDR videos and that was corrected and they fixed some an issue when you had vector content and you copy it to apps like Inkscape or Libreoffice draw, they would get unnecessarily and destructively rasterized. So that was, that was taken care of in 646.

Jeff Massie [00:55:47]:
Now the majority of his blog though, deals with fixes and changes coming in 6.5, which is coming out soon. Things like Discover now fetches flatpak information while it's starting up, so it'll improve launch speed and responsiveness of flatpaks. There's now an easier and more stable way to version control your config files because the information about the size of the folder selection dialog is now stored in the state file and no longer in the settings config file. So this will keep the settings from changing when transient states change. So basically every time your folders change, it's not going to cause a difference in your config file. So you won't think, oh, there's a new config file now. No, nothing in your config that you care about changed. It was, it was in file information.

Jeff Massie [00:56:37]:
There was an issue where dragging files or folders would cause Kwin to crash. And now this is one of those where we've talked about this, we talked about this last week where you can do a lot of automated testing and it won't catch anything. So that's why you go to beta, so you can throw it out there and you get people doing things that you didn't maybe think of. So they fixed a case where plasma could crash when you tried to create a new folder inside a subfolder pop up from a folder view widget on a folder on the desktop. So it's like, well that causes the problem. Well maybe you didn't think to check that in your automated testing. But again this is just beta so this is what it's here for. Hammer this stuff out.

Jeff Massie [00:57:23]:
There was an issue where X Wayland apps would flicker on some GPUs and automatic screen rotation will now work. If you found that you suddenly had a lot of CPU and memory usage, it should be gone now as there was a bug where Krunner if you used krunner to search specific things and then press the page up key right after that they would cause this behavior. It just start using tons of CPU and memory. Well this has been patched. There are a few other fixes that have to do with the display of windows and icons and how they should be placed and you know, they all behave normally now. They had different windows and pop ups that were floating where they shouldn't have been and appearing where they shouldn't have been. So you know that it basically took care of all that. Several fixes there.

Jeff Massie [00:58:13]:
I'm just summarizing a few. It's now possible to reselect table columns after clearing the selection by clicking the empty area below the table in the task. Not Task Manager but the Linux KDE's equivalent, their information system given the Clipboard. Even the Clipboard got a fix where text copied to the clipboard in an X Wayland app would get lost when the window focused immediately like so you had to be, you know, immediately on, it changed afterwards. So that's now taken care of. And finally the biggest cause of crashes in 6.5 was fixed. It was actually because of third party code and using it in the wallpaper engine they. They said they had over 5,000 crashes in 90 days because of this code and it turned out to be because an out because of an out of range error.

Jeff Massie [00:59:12]:
Now like I said, this is exactly why we have the beta test, so that things like this can come to light before the full release. Nate thought it was a good sign that the biggest cause of crashes was not even caused by KDE code at all, but a third party bit of code, you know. Yes, there shouldn't be any, but getting several of the top crashes repaired went a long way to stability. And Nate's swearing that6.5 is going to be the most stable release of the 6 series yet. Personally, having used KDE from the very early days, like in the 1 to 2 transition and so on, I can say in my experience that if someone was worried about stability, I let them know that the 0.5 release is normally where things are really solid. You got things hammered out by then, you know, historically that's what I've always found. Take a look at the article in the show notes for fixes that I skipped over. There's link to the bug reports, you know, the full list of bugs.

Jeff Massie [01:00:06]:
You know all the information in that link. So take a look at it. Nate's blog is always good to read. And you know, personally I'm looking forward to when 6.5 lands.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:17]:
Yeah, it should be. It should be a good one.

Rob Campbell [01:00:21]:
Yeah, the task manager is fixed. I think your windows were starting to show there a little bit.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:29]:
I'm trying to remember if Fedora 43 is going to get KDE. Nope, looks like Fedora 43 is going to be KDE 64, not 6.5. It may or may not get the bump to 6.5 while it's out. So I may have to live on the edge again if I Want to try the newest kde?

Jeff Massie [01:00:52]:
Go back to Rawhide.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:53]:
Will not be the first time that I've pulled KDE from Rawhide.

Rob Campbell [01:00:56]:
I thought that one bug was interesting with KRunner where if you search for something and then push the page up button, it caused memory to go way up. And you know what? I literally never use the page up button for anything almost.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:12]:
So I could.

Rob Campbell [01:01:13]:
See how that got missed.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:14]:
Yeah, well, page up Page up has really been replaced by the scroll wheel on the mouse.

Rob Campbell [01:01:19]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:01:20]:
Yeah. I still use it once in a while, but yeah, not. Not very often. What I thought was funny one was the. You have a pop up that you open a window, you make a subfolder in the folder with the. It's like, oh my gosh.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:36]:
Yeah, it's. It's like towards the end of football season, particularly like in the college brackets, you'll get people. They're like, our team can still be in the playoffs. All they have to do is win this game and this team has to lose and this team has to tie. And you know, you, you get like, you get into this at some point and it's like you've got two or three pages of things that have to happen for your team to get to the playoffs. So it's really reminded me of, I.

Jeff Massie [01:02:02]:
Like to see rain on Tuesday and it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:04]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:02:05]:
A scenario where that actually happened. Has it ever really happened?

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:08]:
There have been some long shots. There's been some long shots that have got. That have made it, but not very often.

Jeff Massie [01:02:14]:
Which would be the definition of a long shot would be that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:17]:
Yes. Definition of a long shot. All right, Rob has got one more story for us. He's going to talk about email. His inner sysadmin network guy is going to come out and he's going to school us all on some email. And we'll pick it up with that right after this. Hello, everybody.

Leo Laporte [01:02:33]:
Leo Laporte here. You know what a great gift would be, whether for the holidays or at just any time, A birthday, A membership in Club Twit. If you have a Twit listener in your family, somebody who enjoys our programming and you want to give them a nice gift and support what we do. Visit TWiT TV club TWiT. They'll really appreciate it and so will we. Thank you. Twit TV Club Twit.

Rob Campbell [01:03:00]:
So it feels like every month or so we're talking about the same theme. Governments ditching proprietary software, embracing open source. And that's a great trend to be talking about. Just over the last few months on The Untitled Linux show we've covered France moving away from Microsoft products, Denmark's government ditching Microsoft and going Libre, and how the EU has been investing heavily in open source infrastructure. Each time the conversation has been about independence, transparency and control values at the very heart of open source. And this week that story continues with yet another big step forward coming out of Germany. The German state of Schleswig Holstein, yes, the same region that made headlines last year for replacing Microsoft Office with Labor Office, is back in the news. This time it's their entire government email system that's gone open source.

Rob Campbell [01:04:08]:
So as of October 2, 2025, Schleswig Holstein has officially completed its migration from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to Open Exchange and Thunderbird. This wasn't just a pilot project, it was a full scale transformation. Over 30,000 employees across the state administration made the switch, including the state chancellery, ministries, courts and even the state police. In total, more than 40,000 mailboxes and 100 million emails and calendar entries were successfully moved to the new system. The project took about six months and and wasn't without challenges. The state's digitization minister, Dirk Schroeder, admitted there were some hiccups along the way. Things like downtime, slow email during the transition. You know, while those emails are going in there, it's, it's going to slow down bottleneck, especially when there's that many of them.

Rob Campbell [01:05:16]:
But in the end, the migration was completed successfully and the systems are now fully operational. This move is part of Slushwick Holstein's long term strategy to free itself from dependence on major US tech companies and take control of its digital infrastructure. Labor Office replaced Microsoft Office last year. Now Open Exchange and Thunderbird have replaced Exchange and Outlook Minister Schulter Schroeder. Schroeder called the project pioneering, noting that there's hardly a comparable project of this magnitude anywhere in the world. He said in a quote, we are real pioneers. We can't fall back on the experience of others. But our success means we can help others who want to follow this path.

Rob Campbell [01:06:12]:
So that's the beauty of open source. When one organization figures it out, everyone else benefits. Shashweikh Holstein's story isn't just about moving away from Microsoft. It's about providing that large scale secure open source deployments in government aren't just possible, they're happening right now. And that's another win for Open Source.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:36]:
Yeah, you love to see it. I'm slightly conflicted because we do all be Americans here, but I think there's definitely a lot of wisdom in making sure that all your eggs are not in the basket of a foreign country. I think there's wisdom in the places where Americans are trying to do that for their manufacturing and there's wisdom in other companies trying to do that for their software. And I think open source is particularly on the software side is the obvious solution. It's the obvious way to go to get away from that dependency.

Jeff Massie [01:07:09]:
But didn't they pick Red Hat as their distribution?

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:15]:
I mean Red, Red Hat will persist on some level even if, even if IBM goes down. Right?

Jeff Massie [01:07:24]:
Well, but I mean Red Hat's an American distro and you could have had like SUSE or one of those that is European. I just, I just remember seeing that. I found that was kind of funny. I mean I get it's open source so everything's, you know, out there.

Rob Campbell [01:07:37]:
But, and I don't know if that's specifically, if this place specifically shows Red Hat.

Jeff Massie [01:07:45]:
Oh, maybe it was a different country.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:46]:
I don't know if they specified that or not. I mean who knows, maybe they're running Open Exchange on their old Windows servers.

Jeff Massie [01:07:54]:
Well, you know, I kind of wonder what kind of benefit we're going to get out of here because if you say okay, they get, they got rid of say 30,000 licenses, you could hire, you know, say probably easily 20 programmers to do whatever you need to tweak and adjust and all right. Need feedback into the system and with this many people kind of making it mainstream, I kind of wonder how much, you know, are we going to benefit from that and see the results of their working on the code to make things smoother and better.

Rob Campbell [01:08:25]:
I wonder if they're on premise Exchange. That's what kind of I read like. But maybe they were referring to Office 365 exchange online as Exchange. You don't know that for sure but yeah, that's you know, at the office365 rate that's over a million dollars a month.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:45]:
Yeah, yeah, you know it's, it's very possible actually that they are paying some of that now towards Thunderbird because Thunderbird now has a pro offering and they may have entered into an agreement with Open Exchange. And so it may be that some of that money is actually getting funneled directly to those open source projects.

Rob Campbell [01:09:03]:
You know, I've, I've been involved in a lot of email migrations. Nothing even as big. Yeah, I would say the largest I've done is, I don't know my math, 100 of the size take off to take off 2 zeros from that and you're about where, where I've been and, and that is quite, quite a job. I can't imagine what like 10.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:31]:
So they did 30,000.

Rob Campbell [01:09:32]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:33]:
And you've done like 300.

Rob Campbell [01:09:34]:
Like 300.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:35]:
300 is still quite a bit. Yeah, that's. Yeah, yeah. Did you do that single handedly?

Rob Campbell [01:09:43]:
No, I mean I did a lot of the back end stuff, but yeah, there were people, others supporting.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:49]:
I tell you the worst thing about doing email migrations is, is that you've got to go to everybody's desktop and then you also have to ask everybody for their phone.

Jeff Massie [01:09:59]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:00]:
Now nowadays, Yes, I guess it wasn't that bad before smartphones were a thing, but now it's like, all right, it's on your desktop. Look, you're checking. Let me have your phone so I can fix it there.

Rob Campbell [01:10:10]:
Oh yeah, that. Okay. I was thinking mfa, which is pretty much always a thing.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:14]:
Oh no, I wasn't even. Yeah, there's that too. But no, I was thinking of, you know, setting up the new email address on the phone. Cause everybody wants to be able to get their emails on their phones.

Rob Campbell [01:10:23]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:26]:
Yep. All right, let's see what is up next. System 76. System 76 has done a thing and it really surprised me.

Jeff Massie [01:10:36]:
I like it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:37]:
I think it's the right move, but it did surprise me. So System 76 has a new flagship laptop that they are making available and It's a cool $2,599. So definitely flagship. And it is the Oryx Pro and it is shipping with Cosmic. It's shipping with Popos 24.04 LTS beta with Cosmic. I believe that is what they're doing. Yes. Which you know, Cosmic is.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:17]:
It's still in beta. There's not a full release of it yet. And it just, it interests me a lot that they're doing this now. They make the statement that when you're in beta with software like this, the scariest part, the most, the buggiest part is support for all of the random different hardware. Like somebody has a piece of hardware that you didn't get to test with, that's where the bugs are going to be. And so the guys there at system 76, they basically make the case that because they know exactly what hardware this is going to ship with, they can make sure it is a very good experience. And so they are not afraid of shipping. Cosmic with is a reasonably.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:01]:
It is a nice laptop. It's got the AMD Ryzen AI 9HX370 which is the fastest thing that System 76 ships now on a laptop. It does have the Nvidia RTX 5070 embedded graphics, which, you know, we're not a huge fan of that, but I guess one out of the three of us are fans of that. It's got a big 2K 240Hz display, which is pretty nice. It comes with up to 8 terabytes of storage and up to 96 gigabytes of memory. I don't know what it ships with by default, but it's got USB C and usb, a HDMI micro SD, and a headset jack. They had the courage to include the headset jack. It looks like a nice laptop.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:45]:
And it's just so fascinating to me that they are shipping it with the Cosmic Beta. What do you think, Rob? You gonna run out and grab one? You gonna buy one?

Rob Campbell [01:12:55]:
It's so fascinating to me that they have a headset. The auxiliary port on there.

Jeff Massie [01:13:01]:
I love it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:03]:
I mean, it really makes sense on a laptop. I would not want one without one.

Jeff Massie [01:13:08]:
It makes sense on a phone.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:11]:
Yes, it makes sense on a phone too. But when you're, you know, the ultimate that you want in your phone is for it to be thin, then I suppose it makes sense to get rid of it. But I don't actually buy my phones for how thin they are. I buy knives to be thin. I buy phones to be useful.

Jeff Massie [01:13:30]:
Well, I think one of the other Twitch shows talked about, oh, this phone is new and thinner. And I think it was Leo said, is anybody asking for that? And the guest was like, no, nobody is. Nobody cares anymore.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:42]:
It's not, man. It's not thin for phones. It's not thinness that people really want. I've talked to several people. They're like, I wish it was a little smaller so it would fit in my pocket. My wife tells me that multiple times. Like, I need a new phone. Get a small one.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:56]:
I don't want one of those big ones that falls out of my pocket when I sit down in my jeans.

Rob Campbell [01:14:00]:
I think it's just the futuristic ness of it, like you think of. I don't know, you make it so there's almost nothing there. It's like, wow, look, you couldn't do this 10 years ago.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:11]:
I. I guess. I guess it is something to.

Rob Campbell [01:14:13]:
I'm still waiting for something, like on the Expanse, the transparent phone, like, things for anyone who's watching Expanse. I've seen similar, similar things on other shows, but I am.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:26]:
I am kind of fed up with the state of the mobile market right now. So I Went looking for a 7 inch Android tablet. Nobody makes them. You cannot buy a 7 inch, a decent 7 inch Android tablet.

Rob Campbell [01:14:40]:
The hologram on my watch where the hologram will just pop up and well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:44]:
Okay, you're, you're, you're off in sci fi.

Rob Campbell [01:14:47]:
I mean if we're trying to be futuristic, let's, let's get, let's go all the way.

Jeff Massie [01:14:51]:
No, let's look at the real future. That phone is thinner, so now you can lose it in new and exciting places. I didn't know my phone could fit underneath that place there and now I can't.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:02]:
You know it bends easier when you sit down on it.

Rob Campbell [01:15:04]:
I can hide it under the entry carpet now. Entry welcome mat now.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:09]:
Yeah, I'm also a little annoyed that Huawei is the only company that's making a trifold. That makes sense. I think I've ranted, I think I've ranted about this before. Well, they're making a trifold that actually only has one screen on it. And when you fold it, the two displays fold opposite directions so the whole thing collapses down. And so you have one third of that original screen is then your screen. And then when you unfold it, it's the same screen, it's just bigger. As opposed to everybody else.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:42]:
Like a book, everybody else, they have two separate screens on it. So when you fold it up, you've got the smaller screen on one side and then you unfold it and you've got a two totally separate screen on the other side. Why? So I'm annoyed by the mobile market for multiple reasons right now. Hire me as your CEO of your phone company and I will tell you how to make better phones.

Rob Campbell [01:16:05]:
That's why I still have a, I don't know, at least a five year old model right now. I think it is, yeah, 4 or 5.

Jeff Massie [01:16:12]:
I'm still on a Google Pixel 6 and the only reason I have the 6 is because my one finally just died.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:19]:
How's your battery doing so far?

Jeff Massie [01:16:22]:
It's real good, solid. Oh good, good. But see I'm, I'm kind of a Luddite when it comes to this stuff because what do you use with your phone? I've got, you know, texting, calling. I got an HP 48 RPM calculator on it. I, you know, I don't, I don't use it for that much stuff.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:41]:
You occasionally ssh into your desktop to unbrick it.

Rob Campbell [01:16:44]:
You know what if we really want a phone in the future, I want a Linux phone. That's the phone of the future. I want.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:51]:
I mean, if you're running Android, it's kind of all Linux.

Rob Campbell [01:16:54]:
It's based on Linux, a little more.

Jeff Massie [01:16:58]:
True to the core.

Rob Campbell [01:16:59]:
They've morphed it a little far away from the Linux core than I prefer.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:07]:
Well, the real problem with Android phones is that so much of the functionality now is just part of the Google library that runs on top of it. It's all, it's all built into Play Store rather than in the kernel. That's really what you run into when.

Rob Campbell [01:17:21]:
I get a Linux phone. Like one of the key reasons I want it is so I have control over it and can make it how I want. I know you had a story about how they were even taking control away from sideloading. I want to go beyond sideloading. I want to be able to change my, my display manager. Anything I want to do, I want to. If I want to try to do it, if I want to break it, I want to be able to do that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:47]:
I mean, I get you. I feel it too. I don't have time to fiddle with all that stuff on a phone though. I kind of need my phone to just sort of work.

Jeff Massie [01:17:55]:
And I have my little, my thumb adapt my thumb drive adapter into the USB C. I plug it in, I just reload my operating system and away I go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:07]:
Yep. Yep. All right, let's talk about memory management. Let's talk about 6.18. Where are we at in the, in the kernel? March the 617 to 618. Who thought.

Jeff Massie [01:18:22]:
I'd be the guy to talk about memory, huh? Okay, 618 is going to have some memory improvements which are an overall general uplift, you know, not focused in one specific area other than just memory. So this is kind of a grouping of various patches. Andre Morton submitted a lot of the changes for the 618 kernel and this article, linked in the show notes, covers some of the highlighted patches. So this isn't even all of them in the article. You have to go links in the article to see the deep down details of everything. There's an improvement to the cluster scan strategy for the swapping code. An engineer found that for a kernel build test with 96 jobs and 10 gigs of ZRAM with 65 kilobytes of MTHP. Now that's multi sized, transparent, huge pages, which is a memory management feature that allows memory and blocks larger than the standard page, but smaller than the traditional huge pages.

Jeff Massie [01:19:21]:
Basically this allows for more flexible and efficient memory allocation, leading to performance benefits like reduced page faults, lower overhead compared to using only standard or full size pages. So think enterprise. Back to the kernel build test though the engineer found that the system time was cut in half and had a much lower swap file failure rate. Like I said, this isn't something for home users. This would be large systems with shared cluster memory improvements to the K exec handover functionality, which this one you could use at home, which when first entered the kernel in 6.16 and the handover function is to save the state of the kernel when patching or changing to a new kernel. This would be for live patching when a system can't go down and uptime's the utmost importance, which you could do at home. So this could be something you could use. It just makes sure that the new kernel that comes in or the patch kernel is in the same state as the previous one.

Jeff Massie [01:20:22]:
So everything would go seamless and you wouldn't realize that any updates or patching has taken place. There's been some tiny optimizations which have been added for large read operations to enhance the paid cache read path. And there's also initial code to have swap tables work like swap cache. We've also had improvements to the out of memory killer. Now we've talked about this a while back and was introduced to keep systems alive when they run out of memory. The out of memory killer tries to shut down programs which are taking huge amounts of resources, such as something, maybe something has a memory leak or a program's trying to access more data than the system can handle. While it will, you know, it will keep. It'll shut, it'll kill the program, it keeps the system from crashing, taking everything down.

Jeff Massie [01:21:12]:
So it's. It's a choice of either, well, you're going to lose the program and what it was doing, or you would lose the entire system. So it tries to prune the offending programs or even just ones that are. There's just too much going on and keeps the system alive. Because of the Mo Novu and Nova drivers, the Rust Allocator gets some love in the way of enhancements. Now there are now rust abstractions for maple trees. Now maple trees are a type of data structure that's designed to store and efficiently manage different ranges of data. It's kind of like a B tree that's optimized for cache efficiency, among other things.

Jeff Massie [01:21:56]:
I won't go into details, just know that it's a data structure. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for even more things being added to improve the kernel and a lot of different aspects of the memory system and there's even links to other things if you want other stories outside of just what's going into memory. And I only covered a few of the items, so many more that are there for you. So happy reading.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:22]:
Yeah, always fascinating to see what is going on in all of the various things in the kernel. Some of that is really deep magic. Oh yeah. Beware all ye mortals that enter herein or whatever they put above the door.

Jeff Massie [01:22:38]:
Abandon all hope ye who enter.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:40]:
That's the one. That's the one.

Jeff Massie [01:22:43]:
Well, there's a. There's a reason why they say, what if you put in it. By the time you put in your third kernel patch, you're going to have job offers.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:51]:
I got a buddy that's trying that right now. It's not working out too terribly well for him, but he's still getting after it.

Rob Campbell [01:22:57]:
He's not able to get the kernel patches in, or he has them in, but he can't get the job still.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:01]:
He's pushing kernel patches in and he doesn't have a job offer yet. His theory is that there is a guy down in Texas that has his same first and last name and similar enough birth date that that guy shows up when doing background checks. So he's working on that. Well, I'll keep you up to date on whether he gets hired somewhere or not. Anyway, yeah, that is it for our. That's it for our news. We've got some tips. We're going to come back and ironically we're going to come back and let Rob lead off with the tips as well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:32]:
Rob's our point man for some today, but we'll come back and do tips right after this.

Rob Campbell [01:23:38]:
All right, so as I said, I'm going to tell you how to get flat packs working again in Ubuntu 2510. So this fix, it's basically all it does is disable the Fuser Mount 3 app Armor profile, which lowers the security and probably shouldn't be done on a production system. But generally you shouldn't be running an interim release on a production system either. So if you're running Ubuntu 2510, we're probably okay to just disable this. But. So in this demo, Flatpak and Flathub have already been installed. If you need help with that part of it, reach out or maybe we. I don't know if I've done.

Rob Campbell [01:24:22]:
If any of us have done a segment on that or not, but we'll help you with that. But in this segment first, I'm going to start by showing you what happens when when you try to install Flatpak on 2010. So Flatpak I'm going to type flatpak install. I'm going to do com.obs and I could do this in the software center, but here you get to see the errors a little better. Project dot studio so I am installing obs. So if I do that. Yes, yes. And if you can't see it's already giving me warning could not unmount revoke fs-fuse file system and it's going to, you know, I'm just going to cancel this out because you don't need to see that it it fails.

Rob Campbell [01:25:24]:
That's what you need to know about that. So all you have to do is disable the app armor or Fuser Mount 3amp armor profile. To do that all you do is type sudo pseudo space ln so I'm going to do is I'm going to link Fuser Mount 3 into disable. So I'm, I'm linking LN S etc/AppArmor D Fuser Mount 3 and I'm linking that to etc slash apparmor d disable. So all right, so I just linked that so that profile is now in the disable folder. And then all I gotta do is sudo apparmor underscore parser dash capital r space etc appar d fuser mount 3. So basically this just reloads it. And now if I were to run that, it will actually install it.

Rob Campbell [01:26:43]:
And I'm not going to go through that because it's a little longer, but I'm going to show you a screenshot of it working. So here you go. There is a screenshot after I went through this process of it actually working. Now, once the bug is fixed, if you want to remove this workaround, you know, when that time comes, all you have to do is do a sudo space rm. All you're doing is removing this etc slash apparmor d slash disable so all you're doing is removing the etc apparmor d disable fuser mount. So once you disable that and then, then you're good. Well, you can redo the parser sudo AppArmor_ parser dash A and that's all you got to do to use flatpaks on Ubunistu 2510 easy easy mode.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:05]:
All right, let's see. I've got a really simple one. It's just, it's print env print environment print env and it just prints all of your environment variables here. I can share the screen real quick and we can run it. I don't think there will be anything too weird in here. We will hope make it a little bit bigger for you. Just run Print ENV and it will go through and show you all of. And there's a bunch of them on a modern Linux system, all of your environment variables.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:42]:
I ran this when I was doing some GitHub hacking, was trying to figure out if we actually had a problem where someone sending in a pull request could run malicious code inside of our repo by just including it in the pull request. And well, what is one of the things that someone might want to do? Well, pull out all of your environment variables to see if there's secrets in there. And I came up with Print ENV is the easy way to list all of them. And we had never covered it here before. So super simple one. But you can run Print ENV to get all of your environment variables.

Jeff Massie [01:29:18]:
Nice.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:18]:
Yeah. All right, Jeff, you've got a tip for us too. What is yours for this week?

Jeff Massie [01:29:26]:
Well, this one's going to be rather self explanatory. It's betterfs Assistant BTRFS ASSIS T A n T so just like it sounds and you know, you've, you've heard me talk, you know, even on this episode, how I've made the switch from Debian side of things, not completely, but to the arch side of things with Cashios. Well, Cash OS has a default file system, among others. There's, there's many others that do too of better FS or BTRFs. And it's different than what I'm used to. You know, for years I was ext4user, which never let me down. But better FS is just a little bit different. You know, it handles things a little differently.

Jeff Massie [01:30:12]:
It's got some features that ext4 doesn't have.

Rob Campbell [01:30:15]:
So.

Jeff Massie [01:30:16]:
Well, I'm just going to go with it and let's see what we got. Well, trying to get my feet under me, I found this tool which you know, makes controlling the file system a little easier. So like I said on the command line, you know, you got to do A pseudo but BTRFs A S S I s T A N T and you put that in the command line and it starts a GUI and it'll list like for example, the different drives you have running BTRFs and it will give a lot of the normal stuff, you know, the status stuff of like, you know, the size of your drive or partition, you know, how many, how many are allocated, what's used, and so on. You know, it has, it has all those kinds of statistic and it also has statistics like how much of your drive is used by data and how much is used by metadata or the system. The GUI has several tabs. One of them is sub volumes, so you can see what your sub volumes are. You can go in and do various things with them, like restore and delete and browse and refresh and other things. You have one for snapshots and it allows many different control and view functions with different snapshots.

Jeff Massie [01:31:24]:
So you can see what's currently in there and you can look at them, you can delete them, you can do all sorts of stuff. And then like, for example, the final tab is for snapshot settings itself. So control is easy to change for like when and how you want snapshots are taken, you know, how many do you want to keep and you know, other functions. So like you said, well, I wanted hourly snapshot. I only want a snapshot on updates. I want, you know, and I want to keep 37 of them or whatever, you know. So I'm not going to go into great detail about each of these functions because it's a whole subsystem into the file system itself. But for those that want, you know, a little better control of your file system and you kind of like the point and click gui, because right now I'm still learning, I got my training wheels on, so I need to, you know, gui's are nice.

Jeff Massie [01:32:12]:
Take a look at the better FS Assistant and it could make your life a lot easier. And I have a link in the show notes to the GitHub page, which goes into a lot more details on the use of the program. So take a look and if you're running that file system, give it a shot.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:28]:
Very cool. I like it. All right, that is the show. I'm going to let each of the guys plug whatever they want to here. At the end, we'll let Rob go first as our dedicated point man for today's show. What you got, Rob?

Rob Campbell [01:32:42]:
And all I have for today is showing you all great listeners and viewers how you can connect with me and how you do that is at my website, Robert P. Campbell.com on the website, there's links to my LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and if you feel so inclined, you can click the little coffee cup and donate a coffee to me. Or I'm also accepting them for Jeff, I for. For those who may be new I. I visited him this summer. I paid him off for what I owed him. So you can start that pool going again right here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:27]:
Or you could.

Rob Campbell [01:33:28]:
You could donate to Ken, too. But I still owe Ken. Jonathan. I think he has his own method.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:33]:
Yeah, I technically have a. Buy me a coffee. All right. And very.

Jeff Massie [01:33:37]:
And he. He did pay that off. He did. We. We hung out and he. He Pa everybody that did donate. Much appreciated. I got it.

Jeff Massie [01:33:44]:
Thank you.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:45]:
Yeah. All right. So what do you have for us? You didn't lose any poetry when your computer.

Jeff Massie [01:33:53]:
I didn't. This week's going to be slightly different. This is going to be a little bit of a tell me what it is at the end, but these are going to be pretty obvious. But let's just go with this. This UI has its IT Pro fans, many apps and installs you command. Some might say that you're screwy because you don't like to use a gui, but use this to type everything by hand.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:19]:
The terminal.

Jeff Massie [01:34:20]:
Terminal, yeah, exactly.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:22]:
It's a limerick.

Jeff Massie [01:34:23]:
Yes.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:24]:
Limericks are fun.

Jeff Massie [01:34:25]:
But thank you, everybody. Appreciate it and have a great week.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:29]:
Yep. Thank you guys for being here. Lots of fun as always. All right, if you want to find more of me, there is always Hackaday. You can go there. It's where Floss Weekly is that. We have a lot of fun with that. That's also where my security column goes live every Friday morning.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:41]:
You can come check that out if you so wish. Other than that, we just want to say thank you. Thank you to those that watch and listen, those that catch us live and on the download. And we'll be back next week for another episode of the Untitled Linux Show.