Untitled Linux Show 230 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]:
This week we're talking about plenty of Linux on ARM news, and particularly about Qualcomm and some potential fallout from Qualcomm's purchase of Arduino. And there's plenty of news about Valve and Steam. And oh yeah, Blender 5.0 is out. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Rob Campbell [00:00:19]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:28]:
This is the Untitled Linux Show. Episode 230, recorded Saturday, November 22. Bake the Man a pie. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for some Linux. We're gonna get geeky with software and hardware, probably some gaming, all kinds of good stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett and I have got two of the regular guys with me. We've got Rob and we've got Jeff.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:54]:
Welcome each of you to the show.

Jeff Massie [00:00:57]:
Love being here.

Rob Campbell [00:00:58]:
I am the good looking one, Rob.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:02]:
You know, I was thinking about it. I don't know that it's fair to call either of you regular guys. We're all a little off the beaten path in our own ways.

Rob Campbell [00:01:10]:
Okay, let's not get too deep into that.

Jeff Massie [00:01:14]:
No need to get pedantic.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:17]:
Indeed. All right, so there's been some things happening this week and we were talking about this a little bit before the show. Rob had a story and I stole it from him. So we're going to talk about that here shortly. But there's some interesting news with Qualcomm, of course, Qualcomm making big moves in the open source world. Rob, what do you have that Qualcomm is up to?

Rob Campbell [00:01:40]:
So there is quite a bit of Qualcomm news out this week. Some good, some bad and some ugly. For those who don't know or maybe know but are unsure, maybe you're confusing Qualcomm with Broadcom or some other comm out there. Qualcomm, they are the ones that brought us the arm based Snapdragon X1 Elite processors along with other Snapdragons before that and stuff. But the chip, this is the chip that is supposed to compete and maybe be better than than some of the Apple M series processors according to some. But. Well, it's kind of hard for me to get a good feel for it as officially there have been only been Windows based X1 Elite devices released. I mean there is some Linux support there, but I mean nothing being sold on the market and I don't know how how ready it is, so.

Rob Campbell [00:02:40]:
But still, that hasn't stopped me from being excited about, about the opportunities in our future. So, you know, with that. Last year we announced that Tuxedo Computers teased plans for releasing an X1 Elite Linux laptop. I did because I thought this was awesome. They had warned us but then after that they warned us earlier this year that, that they, there, there have been some obstacles slowing them down. But even as recent as just earlier this month, in November they posted the latest Linux DT patches for their ARM laptop. You know, and with things looking like, you know, looking like things were still moving forward. So, you know, it seemed like it's all going to be all good.

Rob Campbell [00:03:26]:
But this week they announced they're discontinuing the project, noting challenges with the architecture. The, the first gen X1 not being as suitable for Linux as expected and you know, just not seeing the benefits as you know, we kind of thought with arm, you know, things like, you know, when you have arm, you think long battery life and a. Apparently that just really wasn't there for them. So I guess it's Goodbye to the X1 plans. But they have left open the possibility of an X2 in the near future. And, and you know, the fact that X2 was just announced I believe in September and coming out soon, the fact that that's already coming pretty soon was another reason like, you know, I, it's, it's just time to just discontinue this and maybe we'll try again with the next, you know, iteration. So, you know, it seems this time around, you know, they're, they're not going to make this one, maybe X2. But now Qualcomm itself seems to be off to a good start with, with their X2 maybe making the X2 a little more of a Linux contender, you know, because as already they've been upstreaming initial GPU support for the Snapdragon X2 Elite in the Linux 6.19 kernel.

Rob Campbell [00:04:51]:
The pull request also brings Arduino 612 GPU support, quad pipe support in the DPU driver code for allowing higher resolution displays, display port improvements and other changes. So, you know, that's kind of there. There's also some, some good news about. Dell is releasing a laptop this week with the MPU actually releasing this laptop with Linux on it before they're releasing the Windows version. Other than that, I didn't, I'm not going to go too deep into that story. I didn't, I was going to, but afterwards I decided it didn't seem all that as exciting as initially. But it's nice that they're bringing something to Linux before Windows. So anyway, that is the good and the bad.

Rob Campbell [00:05:43]:
But I can't even talk about the ugly, so it's just too much for me. So I'm going to leave that part of the story for Jonathan.

Jonathan Bennett [00:05:52]:
Yeah, we're going to talk about the ugly and how ugly it may or may not be here in just a minute. The Tuxedo computers thing with the Snapdragon X1, I got to say this is almost directly tied to how quickly and how well the Snapdragon is supported upstream in the kernel. Like that's almost entirely what this is. And it's just kind of a sign, hopefully this is a trend, that you can't just release a device and throw some patches out there for a 10 year old kernel and expect everybody to be happy with it. It's not going to work. People want to be able to run their mainstream distros and their modern kernels and the old approach to this is just not. It doesn't work, it's not tenable, nobody wants it. So if you.

Rob Campbell [00:06:43]:
Sounds like they had problems with just getting it to work. Right.

Jeff Massie [00:06:48]:
Yeah, they actually called themselves on it and said, you know what, this is a dead end. We can't keep going down this path and didn't. Didn't try to release some subpar product. So I mean it's maybe not happy news that it's not coming out, but it's at least, hey, we, we're adhering to certain standards.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:08]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:07:08]:
Otherwise it could be like the first round of Windows on ARM devices that totally flopped.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:18]:
That went well. Yeah, but I mean, so the Tuxedo thing. So let's look at it. What are they talking about? Well, long battery run, the batteries are not lasting long enough. Okay, well that's directly tied to how efficient the computer is and how well it handles sleep states. Both of those are how well the processor is supported on Linux. BIOS updates. We know that there are ways to do BIOS updates.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:44]:
It's just apparently missing for either this particular chip or ARM in general. Good USB4 transfer rates. Again, probably not a hardware limitation. This is probably a driver limitation or the bios.

Rob Campbell [00:07:57]:
I suppose maybe Qualcomm isn't maybe providing the means to have it through Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:07]:
Yeah, it may be a licensing issue there. Right. So this is not a. In my mind at least, this is not a problem with Linux on ARM necessarily. It's a problem with Qualcomm support for Linux.

Rob Campbell [00:08:23]:
And hopefully, you know, with their jump on the x2 stuff, maybe that means they're gonna, could try a little harder next time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:30]:
Could very well be a different story there. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about the ugly with Qualcomm. You may have seen got called out by Adafruit Industries, who I'm a fan of. At least I like their hardware. I've done a lot of work with their hardware over the years. But this is a story from its foss and it is the as we put it on the Twit network. The Inc.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:54]:
Certification of Arduino says Ah, the insertification of Arduino begins, Qualcomm starts clamping down and it's all about changes to the Arduino Terms of Service and privacy policy. And what, what is changing? Well, the new policy introduces sweeping user license provisions. It broadens data collection, particularly around AI usage, and it embeds long term account data retention. Continue reading the article section 7.1 of the new Terms of Service grants are to we know a perpetual irrevocable license over anything you upload. Your code, projects, forum posts and comments all fall under this. This remains in effect even after you delete your account. Arduino retains rights to your Content indefinitely. Ah, if you can't, if you if I'm not being sarcastic enough for you to point out to pick up on it, I think we're a little overblown here.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:59]:
So I did something. This is radical. Actually went and read parts of the Terms of Service.

Rob Campbell [00:10:06]:
Nobody does that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:07]:
I know, and it's not as bad as it sounds. Okay, so the 7.1 the actual publishing of Content what it actually says without prejudice to any ownership rights of User of Content which is defined below which user publishes so the Content which user publishes for the purpose of allowing the functioning of the Platform and the Services, which includes the Forum and the Project Hub User grants to Arduino the so here's the grant the non exclusive, royalty free, transferable, sub licensable, perpetual, irrevocable to the maximum extent allowed by applicable law for the duration of intellectual property rights and without detriment to user statutory rights Right to use the Content published and or updated on the platform, as well as to distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish and make publicly visible all material, including software libraries, blah blah blah blah or other data collectively the Content that user publishes, uploads or otherwise makes available to Arduino throughout the world, using any means and for any purpose, including the use of any username or nickname specified in relation to the Content. Should the Content be software should the Content be software created by the user pursuant to the Contributor License Agreement. Such content shall be subject to the terms of the contributor license agreement. User expressly acknowledges that content may include user's personal data, where applicable, personal data of minors for whom the user is legal guardian. And if you are not familiar with actually parsing legalese, yeah, that may sound terrifying, but this is really sort of just boilerplate for, hey, we are running a cloud service. You give us data that is intended to then be publicly viewable. We want to make sure that our license says that when you give us data, you can make it, we can make it publicly visible.

Jonathan Bennett [00:12:15]:
This pushes back against a couple of things like the right to be forgotten. I personally have opinions. I am not a fan of the right to be forgotten because that's not actually the way the world works. And it seems that the new management at Arduino is attempting to take that same stance. And then there's second, There's a second part of this that people really might look at and be really, really worried about. There's a, there's a clause that says that users are not allowed to reverse engineer or attempt to understand how the platform works. Okay, now what is the place? Here's the question. If you read this, here's the question that you have to ask yourself, particularly if you actually click through and look at this.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:04]:
Because in the terms of service, that word platform is capitalized how the platform works. Well, in legalese, when you see a word capitalized like that, that means it is a special word that has been specifically, it has been specifically defined somewhere else in the document. All right, so if you actually go back to the beginning of the document and you ask yourself, what is this platform? Well, it will tell you. It is the Arduino Forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino user group, the Arduino. It is their web platform. It's not talking about the platforms of the, you know, the individual pieces of hardware, it is their online services. And so the terms of service says you don't get to reverse engineer the Arduino online platform. And duh, I think that's already illegal in a lot of places.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:01]:
But it's also just bog standard terms of service with the publishing and the ownership rights. So here are two, here are two things to think about with that comes down to licensing, open source licensing. The first thing to think about is this, at least in the United States, when you write something and you don't put a license on it, do you know what the copyright terms are? By default, all rights reserved. By default, you get copyright on it. And so if Someone does not put a license on it, technically, then Arduino is not going to have the rights to reproduce it. And so there has to be some sort of copyright grant. There has to be some sort of licensing that by default will allow someone to, that will allow Arduino to even publish these things that people give them to publish. The one thing in reading through this, I took a little bit more time in reading through this one question that I have.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:01]:
One thing that it seems to do is if you publish something under the gpl, this seems to remove some of the restrictions that the GPL would put on it. It would make that more permissive than the GPL would because it gives Arduino the rights to use it. Aside from. So essentially it's dual licensing is essentially what's happening. If some user uploads code, it's under the gpl, you upload it to Arduino, you then give them this separate license, dual license code. Arduino has more rights than anyone else using the gpl. The question that I have about this is how does that work when one user uploads code written by a second user that is GPL'd? Because I do not have the right to relicense someone else's code. That's not the way copyright works.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:54]:
Nor does Arduino have the right to relicense that code. And I can't make this grant. So a lot of this is, again, it's just legalese boilerplate that I'm sure the Qualcomm lawyers, their legal team said, oh, this does not sufficiently protect us. We need to strengthen the copyright, the licensing stuff in this. But I'm not sure how that works with the gpl, with other code. Like, I don't think it does anything. Obviously there's more in here. I've not read the entire Terms of service and there are things in here I'm sure are not amazing, but I don't think it's quite worth the pearl clutching that we've seen so far.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:38]:
It seems to be a little bit blown out of proportion. As I, as I said when discussing this with a buddy of mine before the show, I call it 50% fake news. What do you guys think?

Rob Campbell [00:16:48]:
I'm glad you read that, because all I heard was blah, blah, blah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:54]:
All right, if you, if you zoned out with the actual legalese, you can, you can come back now.

Jeff Massie [00:17:01]:
I, I read through a lot of corporate contracts and yeah, there's, there's a lot of. I mean, it sounds pretty boilerplate to me and I'm not intimate with all that stuff. But it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:14]:
There.

Jeff Massie [00:17:15]:
There's a lot of terminology that sounds really terrible. And it's like, no, no, here's what this actually means, you know, and it's. It's pretty. Pretty standard protections.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:27]:
Yeah. So the way this goes is like, if you were to put it into just normal English, then a lawyer could take it to court and sort of rip it apart. Like, they use these particular terms on purpose because they have actually stood up in court. That is how these terms come to be. Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:17:47]:
I think they should change that. They should fix that somehow. Stuff should be readable.

Jeff Massie [00:17:52]:
Good luck. Yeah. Well, it kind of is the same with audit standards. If I'm auditing Jonathan and I tell him, you should do this, that's totally optional. But if I say you shall, it's not. And it's like a whole separate language of what words mean. And you say, oh, it's xyz. And it's like, okay, this is not what it means in, like, the audit world or the legal world here.

Jeff Massie [00:18:21]:
We say this in the real world, but it doesn't, you know, you have to kind of translate because it's a. It's a partially different language.

Rob Campbell [00:18:29]:
Yeah. Not a Linux Pro. Not a Linux problem. But I still think somebody should do something about this. I don't know what, just something. I mean, they're supposed to be smart people. They go to years and years of college. Somebody should.

Rob Campbell [00:18:43]:
Well, that's what they're doing. They're protecting their years and years of college.

Jeff Massie [00:18:49]:
Wait till the AI lawyers hit, though.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:52]:
They've already hit. Basically, not a week goes by that there's some story about somebody, some lawyer getting rebuked from the. You know, from the bench because they. They sent in, you know, some sort of writing. They sent in. And it's either obviously AI or it's just straight up hallucinating court rulings. Like, oh, well, according to Johnson v. Capernaul in 1932, that doesn't exist.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:19]:
Oh, sorry.

Jeff Massie [00:19:20]:
Yeah, well, but I mean, that's. That's. Now, give it a few more years and that stuff's gonna start. And it wouldn't surprise me. In 10, 20 years, we have, you know, for. Oh, I'm trying to do this basic thing. Oh, okay. Here's your AI lawyer.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:40]:
There you go.

Rob Campbell [00:19:40]:
Here's your 20 years. So you heard of here first. Kids don't go to school to be a lawyer.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:49]:
Oh, that's not what we said. That may be the advice to give, but for very different reasons. Oh, goodness. All right, Jeff. Let's talk about something a little bit more. One, interesting and two upbeat and happy rather the terms of services and legalese. Let's talk gaming. What's going on there?

Jeff Massie [00:20:10]:
Yes. So Steam has just got a brand new legal contract. No, I'm just kidding. Steam has just released a major update and they're switching to the Debian 13 libraries for their runtime. Now, before we fully unpack what that means, let's talk about how Steam works at a high level. You know, when you look at it, Steam needs to run in a lot of different environments, from an old Ubuntu LTS to Bleeding Edge architecture. It does this by having a set of libraries it uses which are not dependent on the base distribution. The special library stack that Steam uses is the Steam runtime.

Jeff Massie [00:20:48]:
Basically it's a kind of a container that games run in. Now, old games have older versions of the runtime and newer games run in newer containers with the newer libraries. Basically kind of matches when the games came out to the libraries that were in use when at the time. You know, and I know some are asking how does Proton fit into all of this? The answer is Proton runs inside the latest runtime environment to translate the Windows games to Linux commands. And I'm only saying commands to keep it simple because they're low level kernel and graphic commands and API translations and you know that it all happens but it isn't the focus of today's article. We'll just leave it commands. Now, now that we know how the pieces fit together, we can get to the story which is Steam released version four of their runtime. Now this is a pretty big jump in library versions and this is why it caught my eye.

Jeff Massie [00:21:46]:
Runtime version 3 was based on Debian 11. Now runtime 4 is based on Debian 13.2. So this means there's a four year jump in the libraries and there are several which have gone 64 bit only and you know, as more and more as Debian steps away from 32 bit. So it's just the natural progression of the libraries over the years. Because of this, some libraries have a new SO name for breaking API compatibility. SO name so S O N A M E is a field of data in a library which is often used to show version backwards compatibility. For instance, if version of this library 1 through 1.9, you know of the we'll say LIBX shared library provide identical interfaces. They'd have all.

Jeff Massie [00:22:36]:
They'd all have the same so name. So it'd be like libx so1 if the application binary interface of a library changes in a backwards incompatible way. The SO name would be bumped or incremented so our it would go from libx so 1 to libx so 2. So you know it there there because of the huge jump there's some interface we'll say hiccups, I won't say maybe total breakage but there's some things they've got to. They got to iron out a bit. And when I say a lot of libraries have gone 64 bit only the only libraries which remain 32 bit in this runtime are the ones needed by Proton or other Steam tooling. You know the article linked in the Show Notes actually comments they hope that this soon leads the way to 64 bit only version of Steam. And you know, personally I think it's coming as more and more libraries drop 32 bit support.

Jeff Massie [00:23:42]:
I mean it's 32 bits going away now we see this as a large release in the GitLab release notes which are linked in the Show Notes article does say that games require this branch can't yet be released but they do say there's a procedure which is going to be similar to the Release of version 3. I won't go into all the details but in that GitLab they talk about how to backport. There's a guide for game developers and a lot of the under underhood documentation. So while we're not going to see games running in version four just yet, it's coming and we should see more in the coming months. So take a look at the article linked in the Show Notes for more details and for a link to the release notes. From there you can see the wiki with an overview of the different versions and how the entire Steam stack works and what they use native and what's in the runtime. And I just got to say I love gaming on Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:42]:
Yeah, it's great that it works as well as it does so name or so name comes from the so the shared object files. So it's the shared object name. That's what that stands for. A couple other interesting things. Yeah, what is going to happen with the entire back catalog of 32 bit games when Steam and all of our distros go 64 bit only?

Jeff Massie [00:25:08]:
Well the way it's working now is they just run on an older runtime so they have that runtime frozen at certain libraries. So when you have all this old 32 bit game yeah it's got to run on Steam runtime version one or two so they should still work. Everything should be fine. It's just that it's in that container, and I use the term container loosely. It's. It's probably the best way to think of it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:35]:
It's like. It's like half of a flat pack.

Jeff Massie [00:25:38]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:40]:
And.

Jeff Massie [00:25:40]:
And there are libraries that have to run native and, and I'll talk about that in my next story. But for example, one of them is anything related to the kernel, like a GPU driver because it's so tied to the kernel. You can't have a frozen library because then you can have incompatibility between really old driver and really new kernel. The APIs could have, could have had a change in there. So that's. Certain things have to be native.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:09]:
That's part of where things like that SDL2 compat comes in. Because SDL, one of the things that SDL does is it handles some of those talking to your video card drivers, but also it handles input and output. And that's one of the things it does. It gives you this layer so the games written against that older stuff can run against newer things. Yep, Pretty. Pretty useful. All right. Do we want to move on? Actually, no.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:37]:
We're going to move on here in just a second. We're going to talk about Windows, ARM and Linux, but we're going to do that right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:26:45]:
Hi, I'm Leo laporte, host of this Week in Tech and many other shows on the Twit podcast network. Can you believe it? 2026 is around the corner. So this, my friends, is the best time to grow your brand. With Twit, nobody understands the tech audience better than we do. We love our audience and we know how to effectively message to them. We develop genuine relationships with brands, creating authentic promotions that resonate with our highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. You know, over 90% of Twitch audience is involved in their company's tech and IT decision making. Can you believe that 90%, 88% have actually made a purchase based on a Twit post read ad? No one comes close.

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Rob Campbell [00:28:31]:
Really well for our products.

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Rob Campbell [00:29:34]:
More Linux on ARM news this week comes from the Crossover team. And in the show notes I call this what, the Windows ARM of Linux or something like that. So anyway, thanks to people like Jeff, Jeff Massey here, our very own Jeff Massey on the panel. Being a paid subscriber to crossover or contributor pay, I know how he pays. He pays him something. He says. I've heard him say that to I'm.

Jeff Massie [00:30:01]:
A, I'm a paid subscriber.

Rob Campbell [00:30:03]:
Paid subscriber. I, I, I was can't remember how their paid contributions work, but thanks to people like Jeff Matt, who is is a paid subscriber. Crossover has been able to do some amazing things with wine, or at least their crossover version of wine, which, which makes it a wine eventually anyway. You know, honestly I don't find much use for wine anymore these days as there are so many good alternatives. But you know, sometimes, sometimes there isn't. Sometimes you gotta, you gotta use it to get something done. So for those moments, Wine has been there to run Windows apps on Linux, but that was only for like AMD intel users, you know, the X8664 guys, for those in the ARM world, we didn't really have a lot of options. All we could do is find alternative alternatives.

Rob Campbell [00:30:57]:
And even that was a struggle sometimes if, if, if you didn't have the source and it wasn't compiled for arm. But codeweavers has been building up Wines ARM support well, for quite a while now. Wine 8 laid out the groundwork. Wine 9 added support for native Windows ARM binaries and emulated 32 bit code. And early next year, Wine 10 takes the next big step, emulating 64 bit x86 code. So I'm playing basic language. That means a lot more Windows software and games can be run on ARM machines under Linux. So to see what their code could really do, codeweavers tested on a beast of a machine.

Rob Campbell [00:31:46]:
They tested on a system 76 Thaleo Astro with 128 core Ampere Ultra Max CPU. That is an ARM CPU with an Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti. And on that rig they saw Cyberpunk 2077 run around 120fps and, and Hads 2 and Path of Exile to around 60fps and Ghosts of Tsushima around 50fps. You know, now that doesn't mean you can, you know, take Ken's dusty old Raspberry PI and Suddenly it's a 4K gaming rig. But it does show that ARM Linux can be a serious game gaming and workload platform, you know, when paired with the right hardware. And gaming's only half the story. Codeweavers is also targeting enterprises. They want to move Windows workloads to Linux for better security and less bloat, without rewriting every app from scratch.

Rob Campbell [00:32:55]:
You know, for companies buying high end ARM workstations, powerful compatibility layers like this can make that transition much more realistic. And you know, hopefully someday for those not buying these really high end machines, it can be useful for us too. You know, as announced last week, Valve is coming out with their Frames, which is an ARM device. It's going to run Steam, so you know, there must be something good going on there. So anyway, with more capable ARM laptops and desktops arriving sometime in the future, hopefully Linux has a real chance to ride that wave. And with better ARM support of its own from, from Ubuntu's generic ARM installer to this evolving WINE crossover stack. You know, if, if you already own crossover like Jeff and have an ARM64 Linux machine, I don't know what Jeff has, but if he has one. He could try.

Rob Campbell [00:33:58]:
He could. He could sign up to test their preview build. And so can you. If you have these. If you fall into these conditions and help shape what Windows on ARM on Linux looks like. Next.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:13]:
Fun.

Jeff Massie [00:34:13]:
I do not have ARM hardware.

Rob Campbell [00:34:16]:
Not even a Raspberry PI.

Jeff Massie [00:34:18]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:34:19]:
Really?

Rob Campbell [00:34:20]:
Get the PI 500 and try this out.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:22]:
Yeah, we got it. We got to send Jeff a pie of some sort.

Rob Campbell [00:34:24]:
That's like about the same price as your crossover subscription. Anyway.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:29]:
Bake the man a pie for Christmas.

Jeff Massie [00:34:34]:
I like pecan pie.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:37]:
Yeah, I'm sure. All right, so there is. There's a bit of related news that I've got. Why are all my stories related to Rob's stories? We did not even plan this, but Igalia. Yeah, that's where we're at. Igalia actually has a blog post up that pulls the curtain back just a little bit and lets us see the man behind the curtain that Gallia has been doing a lot of work on. These Valve announcements that we just got. So the new Steam controller, the Steam machine, the new Steam frame as well.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:14]:
I believe that's what they call it, the goggles. Igalia has been doing some of the things for that. And one in particular that caught my eye is Turnip. Turnip is the driver for that Qualcomm Aldrino gpu. And they have been working on Vulkan support for that. And I think. Did we call this one. I can't remember if we talked about this back when it first happened.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:45]:
The guys may be able to help me remember back when we talked about Turnip last time. Did one of us say, oh, getting support for it? Valve must be planning something. That seems like a thing that we would have said.

Rob Campbell [00:35:56]:
I don't remember Turnip specifically, but I know we've said a lots of times on the show that Valve must be planning something.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:03]:
Yeah, it's been pretty. It's been pretty obvious. Well, this is another one. I don't know if we read these particular tea leaves or not, but we get a little look behind the curtain here that Igalia did the work to make Vulkan happen on these GPUs specifically because this was coming from Valve and I found it pretty interesting to read through.

Jeff Massie [00:36:22]:
Well, you know, it makes a lot of sense because if you think what has Valve really gotten into? Not. I mean, yeah, they're of course, the desktop computer, but they're getting a lot into like the handhelds, the glasses, the small, the small stuff, x86, way more powerful, but it Sucks a lot of juice and you just can't. It's not a good fit for these little handhelds. And if you think well okay, you have, you know, 720 screen or maybe a 1080 screen, you're not needing, you know, super power. And if you say well we don't need 300 frames per second, we can run on these little handhelds, sell a bajillion of them, which Steam loves because it opens them up to a lot more market share and it's good for Linux, you know, for getting out in the hands of more of the general.

Rob Campbell [00:37:16]:
Public, you know and, and you know, you say that, you know, they don't need that power so soaking up because the X86 takes more. I still think today, at least most of the time maybe we're starting to finally pull away. But I, I think most of the time when they do build an ARM system that's actually has the power of an X86, the power usage tends to go up pretty close to the same. But I think maybe we're starting to pull away with that a little bit finally.

Jeff Massie [00:37:47]:
Yeah, I mean it, I, I see, I see a couple, couple things here because one is the, the powerful ARM systems like the one in, in your story, Rob. I mean that's a lot of cores and you have to have software specifically written to take advantage of that parallel computing, which a lot of software isn't. You know, it's designed for four cores or eight cores, maybe 64. I mean a lot of software is not designed for you know, a hundred plus cores at once. And the other thing is, I know and I have mentioned this before, intel and AMD see this problem coming where they're, they're trying to make their CPUs more efficient and we're going to have to see if the next, you know, this next generation isn't, it's, it's too soon. It's already in silicon. They're testing it but you know, on the roadmap three to five years are they going to start cutting things out to that's there better compete is that.

Rob Campbell [00:38:45]:
They'Re these big core, little core idea.

Jeff Massie [00:38:48]:
Partly well and getting rid of 32 bit code and just go, you know what we're going to streamline. Then we had, we need less silicon for all these, the interpreters because a lot of Times now the CISC x86 instructions complex instruction set is interpreted down to RISC reduced instructions instruction set commands in, in the core. And if you start going, you know, we're not going to support as much takes complexity out. And then you say, well, you know, we're not going to have hyper threading. That makes them simpler. You know they, I've seen, I've seen some papers saying that they could make x86 power wise efficient like some of these ARM chips and. But they have to cut some things out and make it more like a.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:42]:
Yeah, well, I mean in a very real way, x86 hardware, it's not x86, it's emulating the x86 instruction set. Like that's, that's true on a fundamental level now. So.

Jeff Massie [00:39:52]:
Yes.

Rob Campbell [00:39:53]:
Yeah, AMD and Intel would have to agree on this. Right? Or one would be moving away and it'd be different and it wouldn't. They wouldn't be the same competing things anymore.

Jeff Massie [00:40:03]:
Yeah, they would, they would agree on it. There's actually a, and we did a story, I think it was about a month ago or so two months ago. There's actually a consortium to map out the future, the X86 and you know, like Linus Torvalds is on it too. There's other big companies in there to go. Okay, we need to make changes and map out the future of this.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:21]:
I'm glad they have somebody on the board that's willing to tell them they have stupid ideas but, but one of.

Rob Campbell [00:40:26]:
Them can't just one of those guys like intel can't unilaterally say we're just doing this. I mean they can, but it would.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:33]:
I mean that's where x86 64 came from. Or AMD came along and said, Man, intel, your 64 bit platform is stupid. We're just going to go make our own. And they did so well with it. Intel eventually came along so we want to make those too. Forget the Titanium, we're going to make that too.

Rob Campbell [00:40:47]:
But if they cut those out, like the OSS would have to be made for that. And then. Yep, yeah, yeah, obviously.

Jeff Massie [00:40:58]:
But I mean Linux is already going that way. We're getting rid of 32 bit anyway.

Rob Campbell [00:41:03]:
Yeah, we could follow along pretty good, which is I guess all we care about.

Jeff Massie [00:41:06]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:09]:
Other guys, yeah, I mean they tried to compile another kernel, they tried to.

Jeff Massie [00:41:14]:
Do a Titanium, but part of the problem there was it simplified the chip, but the compiler was so complex and how it ran, it just, it had a lot of issues, you know, I.

Rob Campbell [00:41:23]:
Guess one of them could easily just do it and say this is our new thing, it's. It's better. And you know, just come on, Microsoft and whoever else just compile for it and you'll have a much better world I think.

Jeff Massie [00:41:37]:
But they're too evenly split and you would just, you just bisect the market. And I don't think either company wants to be on the losing side of that and try to play catch up. So I think they're going to work very hard to say, you know what, we're competitors, but we have a bigger threat looming on the horizon with the, you know, the ARM and chips like that.

Rob Campbell [00:42:02]:
Intel could offer both. And then obviously, and then if it's really that great, ARM's going to say, or AMD is going to say, well we want to do that too. And then.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:13]:
Couple things. One, Rob, that is very, very bold of you to put intel in the leading spot in that discussion.

Rob Campbell [00:42:21]:
I just picked one for, I don't.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:23]:
Think intel is going to be the lead on that one. Intel right now is just trying to gather, trying to hold on to anything they can.

Jeff Massie [00:42:30]:
Uh, but adding another chip like that, that's a whole, you, you have to have a whole complete design team doing it. All the testing, the layouts, the it, you know, it's like, oh well, they could just feature another one that's millions and mil, like a hundred million dollar probably.

Rob Campbell [00:42:50]:
Is that different than just changing to it though? I mean what, they have to do all that anyway? If they changed over to it, they would.

Jeff Massie [00:42:57]:
But if you have the old style and the new style, every rev has got to go through all designs. They're probably shrinking things so they're doing new and different layouts and tweaking the layouts, optimizations of the layouts. Then you've got to build it, fab it and then, oh wait a minute, we designed it this way, but we can't actually physically build it without some tweaks. It's a big deal. And then all the testing you've got to do to find out, well, we say it can do this speed, can it really do it? How much overhead do we have? And then you do advanced degradation testing. So I would say let's get it.

Rob Campbell [00:43:35]:
I would think if one of them, let's say AMD thought that this was just going to be better, that you know, maybe they would want to do that because they figure if we get a jump on this, that's going to be our competitive advantage and you know, Intel's not even gonna be able to catch up.

Jeff Massie [00:43:52]:
It's possible, yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:53]:
But then huge gamble though.

Jeff Massie [00:43:55]:
Yeah. So, so they're, they're trying to do this lockstep so that they can compete against each other and while crushing the competition, you know, it's, it's kind of Pepsi and Coke going forward and saying, well, we don't always agree, but we got to make sure, like RC Cola and Shasta just don't get their time in the sun.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:17]:
Yeah. All right, so there's one more thing from this Sigalia article that's really interesting that I think maybe some more. Some more Valve Tea leaves. We can read in the first paragraph here. It talks about the three new devices coming and then it says successors to the highly successful Valve Index and Steam Deck. These devices are set to be released in the coming year. I don't think any of these three devices are successors to the Steam Deck, no. So I think I Galia knows something here that they are not intentionally telling us.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:54]:
I'm thinking about this and there was a comment from a Valve engineer that said that they've looked at doing a new Steam Deck and they've not yet found anything that gives them the leap in battery performance that they were looking for. So I suspect. Let me put it this way, I would not be surprised if yes, the next Steam Deck was an ARM device probably very similar to the Snapdragon that's going to be running inside the new Steam frame. I could see a rev of that as a new Steam Deck. So there you go. You heard it here first. Only reading the tea leaves, no inside knowledge, just looking at what's out there.

Rob Campbell [00:45:39]:
But prediction episode is coming soon.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:43]:
Yeah, for sure.

Rob Campbell [00:45:46]:
Don't forget that one.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:47]:
Indeed. All right, so here in just a second Jeff is going to tell us about some next gen GPU stuff coming from yet another player. We'll get to that right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:46:01]:
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Leo Laporte [00:46:40]:
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Jeff Massie [00:46:49]:
So in the last story I was talking about Steam runtime versions and I mentioned some things are in the runtime container and some things are native. One of the items that are the GPU drivers because how they're tied to the kernel and they don't want to get a conflict with different kernel versions. This leads us to the next story where AMD is getting their driver ready for the next generation gpu, whatever that might be. Now I say whatever it might be because a while back we covered how AMD went to a block by block enablement strategy. The way this works is new features are put into the block and I mean just that in a conceptual way, like a little function or block of code. And when the driver boots the GPU says what features it supports and enables the blocks it needs. Now just because a feature block is there doesn't mean the GPU is going to use it. Part of this was done to simplify the driver stack and make it more universal and the other was to add a new features well ahead of hardware release.

Jeff Massie [00:47:56]:
But we don't know and more importantly, their competition doesn't know what the new GPU is going to do feature wise. So now the article mentions that with the new patches going into the code, into the driver code, we don't know if this is going to be an RDNA 5/UDNA or an RDA 4 refresh. And you know, no matter what it is, the code is starting to flow. So am AMD's taking, preparing for the next hardware. Like for example the PSP PSP block was updated which is the platform security processor. Basically the updated, they updated the code which handles a lot of the security related tasks. The interrupt handler also had an update and this controls interrupts for the gpu. The graphics memory controller got some love along with the Graphics Hub GFX Hub where it went to 12.12.1.

Jeff Massie [00:48:56]:
Now here's where it gets funny. Version 12 is for Rdna 4 GPUs. So a 0.1 could mean, could mean a refresh for Rdna 4. You know, it's only a 0.1 bump, but that's just speculation on my part. But and the new, the new COMPUTE cards though, like AMD's AI industrial type cards, they only need version 9 of the block. So maybe there's going to be a new block with more compute silicon silicon on it. And here's where my theory, or you know what, what I envision kind of falls apart if we look at versioning history though rdna1 was version 10, rdna2 was version 10.3, and version 11 was rdna and version 11 was rdna3. So you can't read too much into the patches because we've had major revisions with a 0.3 and major revisions with an entire whole number increment.

Jeff Massie [00:50:07]:
Now the article does go on to say, because of the way the new blocks are chosen by the gpu, we really don't know what's coming. When they use the code names of the past, we could determine by which code paths were enabled, what the card would do, and have a good idea of its use case. These patches are not going to make it into the 6.19 kernel. Hardware rumors have the cards coming out in about a year, but that's Internet speculation, so take that with a big grain of salt.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:35]:
Though, really.

Jeff Massie [00:50:36]:
The timeline kind of does make sense. If we get into a release kernel in January, you know, if it makes it, then that would give AMD and their partners time to test the, the hardware and the software to find any bugs. So when it's finally released they can have a spotless launch. But, you know, testing times will vary on how much of a change the hardware and software is going to have, how confident they feel in their testing, meaning that they think they need a lot of. A lot or the process is slow, or they feel confident and don't need a lot of time. And in that case we'll see the hardware a lot sooner. Take a look at the article in the show notes for full details and links to the patches so you can see the header files for yourself. For yourself.

Jeff Massie [00:51:18]:
I say header files because a lot of the code is auto generated and too large for the mailing list. There are there pas you can go to see the full code, but it's, it's big. More and more, you know, hopefully gaming goodness coming our way in the near future.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:35]:
Yeah, interesting stuff. We have switched places. It's Rob's fault. It's Rob's fault.

Jeff Massie [00:51:44]:
I don't know what happened.

Rob Campbell [00:51:44]:
It just dropped for like two seconds.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:47]:
Yeah, I heard, I heard the donk that you came back.

Jeff Massie [00:51:52]:
Yeah, there's a show title.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:54]:
Oh boy.

Jeff Massie [00:51:57]:
Someone capture that please.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:59]:
Yeah. Oh, I was thinking the, the something about the, the code flowing that. Yes, the code must flow. That one, that one came to mind too. As a show title. Yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting to look at this and try to figure out like how far in the future each of these things are and what exactly they represent. It also made me wonder, like, are the RX9000 cards actually available for purchase now and it looks like some of them are.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:26]:
I'll have to look a little bit closer at these and see if any of them are worth it, but they're in stock in a few places. It's beautiful.

Jeff Massie [00:52:34]:
Yeah, the speculation is, well, it's threefold, right? It's a refresh of Rdna 4. It's Rdna 4 with an APU in there so they can do more AI stuff. Or three, it's Rdna 5 or Udna because they're going to the Unified. Unified Device Architecture, whatever. Whatever they're calling it. So it's, they're, they're combining their paths with the compute cards and the graphics cards into kind of one driver stack.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:06]:
Yeah, yeah. Time will definitely tell. All right, Rob, it looks like you want to talk about Wayland. Yeah, Rob always likes to talk about Wayland.

Rob Campbell [00:53:19]:
I do.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:20]:
It's his thing. The letter W. This show brought to you by the letter W. So, yes.

Rob Campbell [00:53:29]:
I have another Waylon success story. And yeah, listeners of the show will know that I am a Waylon advocate and love to bring Wayland success stories to the show, even if sometimes they can be translated into maybe whaling weaknesses. So I'll just get out front because unfortunately remote desktop solutions like TeamViewer, Any Desk, Rust Desk have been one of those weaknesses up until now. So, you know, Wayland's been their weakness. But Rust Desk has been carving out a space for itself as the open source answer to TeamViewer and AnyDesk. And its latest move really leans into that reputation, especially for Linux users living in the Wayland world, which is everybody, I hope, everyone should be on Wayland. So at its core, Rust Desk is a remote desktop tool written in rust under the AGPL 3.0 license. And it runs pretty much everywhere.

Rob Campbell [00:54:34]:
Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS. But the newest nightly build brings something that's been a long standing pain on Linux and that is proper support for multi monitor setups with different scaling factors on Wayland. So, you know, I guess if you've ever tried to remote into a remote machine, you know, with say a 4K display at 200% scaling and next to it is a 1080pmonitor at 100%, you've probably seen the chaos. You know, the mouse pointer doesn't line up with the, you know, where you're clicking, input lands in the wrong spot and the whole experience quickly goes from remote desktop to remote frustration. So for a lot of people, mixed scale monitor setups on Wayland have basically been unusable. For serious remote work, Rust Desk developers say they've cracked that their implementation now handles these mixed scaling monitors configurations correctly. And they're claiming to be the only remote desktop solution that does this on Wayland right now. That puts them a step ahead of the big commercial players like TeamViewer, a paid product at least they really try to push under for commercial use any Desk, splash stop, you know, and the rest like that have all been pretty slow to tackle Wayland, you know, Wayland's quirks especially you know, once you throw in like high DPI and multi monitors into the mix.

Rob Campbell [00:56:15]:
So for the moment, this support lives in Rust Desk's Nightly builds on GitHub where the latest code lands every day for early testers. Once it's been, you know, hammered on, tested out and proven stable, the mixed scale multi monitor support is expected to roll out to the regular stable builds. And you'll find on Rust Desk official site making life a lot nicer for Linux users with modern Wayland desktops. And one less reason for you guys out there to say I'm not going to Wayland yet.

Jonathan Bennett [00:56:54]:
One less reason. Yeah, I, you know, they're there for a little bit. I was a little concerned about Rust Desk. There was some rumors about like what they might be up to, but I think it's fairly safe to say that they are, they're good players at this point. The fact that it's open source makes it at least more trustworthy than any of the closed source alternatives, you know. Yeah, the team viewer and all those guys. It's like you don't know what's going on under the hood there. At least with Rust Desk you have a, some semblance of a guest, you can figure out what they're, if it's doing anything weird.

Rob Campbell [00:57:24]:
Yeah, I mean you can use their server for the proxy or whatever and I guess in that case you don't know what's going on. But you don't have to use their server. You can put your own server.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:36]:
Absolutely, absolutely. All right, so up next we're going to talk for just a bit about, well, open source at Microsoft. A bit of unexpected open source news and we'll get to it right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:57:49]:
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Jonathan Bennett [00:58:08]:
Easy enough.

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Jonathan Bennett [00:58:23]:
All right, so the news is Zork, Zork 1, Zork 2, and Zork 3 have been released as open source by Microsoft. And you may have questions. I certainly did. Like, wait a second, I thought Zork 1, 2, and 3 were already out there and Microsoft. So here's the scoop. The source code for Zorks 1, 2 and 3 were out there, but without an official license attached. So it was in sort of that no man's land of it's available, but nobody was willing to actually package it up, like officially because it doesn't have a license. It was just sort of a wink and a nod.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:03]:
It was released. Well, there's been work to say, let's put an official license on this. And then you have to ask the question, who would actually own the copyright to be able to assign a license? And the answer to that is because of corporate acquisitions, it's Microsoft. So Zork was written by Infocom, and Infocomm was purchased by a couple of different studios. I'm trying to remember who was in between. Activision. Right. Activision was another one.

Jeff Massie [00:59:39]:
I think Activision got them.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:42]:
Activision bought Infocom, and then Microsoft bought Activision. Yeah, that's the way that it went. And so Microsoft ended up with the ownership of the Zork source code, and finally somebody, whoever it was, needed to signed off on it. And we now have Zork 1, 2, and 3 out there under the MIT license. And interestingly, this isn't a. This source code drop does not actually include any source code. It's just the official blessing from Microsoft that says, yes, this is available under the MIT license, which is great. Now, the thing that you'll probably see as a result of this is it'll start to be available in places like Fedora as just being able to install it straight off.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:30]:
There's now no license questions. It's all just in the clear. And open source. It's been out there before now, but for the purposes of playing it, but also just preserving these things, I'm glad to see Microsoft do this. And there's about a million other software titles that this needs to happen to because the statute of limitations, the length of time that copyright lasts for, is just hilariously too Long when it comes to software, it's like 70 years plus the life of the authority, which software is so ridiculously out of date after 20 years. But anyway, good, good for Microsoft for at least taking this step. And like I said, hopefully we'll see it for other titles so that these things don't disappear. And that's really the danger.

Rob Campbell [01:01:22]:
Refresh my memory. I'm pretty sure you've done a tip on this. This is a game, right? These are games, right?

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:28]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:01:29]:
And are they, are these the text based games or.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:31]:
They are. They are text based, yes.

Rob Campbell [01:01:33]:
Okay. I want to make sure that I had that right and everybody else who wasn. So Zork is a text based game.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:38]:
Yeah, it's the original adventure.

Rob Campbell [01:01:41]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:41]:
This is the. You find yourself in front of a house and there's a mailbox. Since that.

Jeff Massie [01:01:46]:
So I, I first played this on a Commodore 64 and the older people. So anybody born, you know, 2,000 later, you don't understand the impact of this. So early 80s, you're playing this game and it just has a prompt. You know, you're standing in front of this house, you could type one of multiple things. It wasn't multiple choice. It was like you were having a conversation. It was, it was like a fake AI. Now they just had specific keywords they went off of.

Jeff Massie [01:02:15]:
So it wasn't like an AI, but it felt like it because you could say, well, I want to open the mailbox, look up, look down, go north, you know, sing a song. And it would have responses to all those things. And it was, it was amazing technology at the time, you know, just, just how you interacted with it. So there's a lot of people, you know, that are older that played these years ago, early 80s, that these were amazing, you know, and this. And that was back when, you know, games were basically 2D, you know, space Invaders, Pac man, things like that. So there wasn't a lot of deep logic in them. You know, there are probably some exceptions, but for most of them they were pretty straightforward. So this one with all the possibilities and it was kind of felt open world.

Jeff Massie [01:03:12]:
It was amazing.

Rob Campbell [01:03:14]:
Yeah. I remember something similar, like a chat base. It seemed like AI where you could chat with something and it somehow had answers for everything. So, I mean, similar alliance has answers for everything. But I wonder, I wonder if I could go to an AI, say chat GPT and say, I want to play a, a unique Zork adventure with you and, and you be my thing and just like play in there. I wonder if you could like somehow Prompt it to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:45]:
I don't know.

Rob Campbell [01:03:45]:
That's real AI, not to even just pretend AI I saw.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:51]:
Oh, dang it. I was going to sign into my Steam and not signed in on the phone either. Oh, well, that was a nice idea while it lasted. One of these Zork games, there's actually a 3D recreation of it and I am not able to immediately find it because I'm not logged into Steam on any of the devices I have in front of me.

Jeff Massie [01:04:12]:
I can tell you that the Zork 1, 2 and 3 are available on. In the AUR and other places too. I played it before, you know, under the wink and a nod type thing. And if you want to get just an Easy on Steam, I think it's on sale now for like about $3. You get Zork 1, 2, 3, Zork 0, Planet Fall. I think there was another one in there. It was like about five or six games for like three bucks.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:43]:
Indeed. I'm trying to remember some reason.

Rob Campbell [01:04:45]:
I think you brought the graphical. What? You showed us a graphical one, I think. I feel like you showed us the text based one and then like the week later showed us the graphical. Unless it was something else, I'm not sure.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:58]:
The one I'm thinking of is like Adventure, the Underground Empire or something like that. I don't know. It's a. It's a fragment of a memory and I can't. I can't bring it up at the moment. Yeah, the Underground Empire. That's what it's usually called. Huh.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:14]:
I don't know why I can't find it on Steam. The. The new 3D version of it. I have it on my wish list too. I just don't have. Like I said, I'm not logged into Steam.

Rob Campbell [01:05:25]:
I was wrong.

Jeff Massie [01:05:26]:
It's the Zork Anthology on Steam right now for 389.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:33]:
That's not too bad.

Jeff Massie [01:05:34]:
No, but you get 1, 2, 3, beyond Zork, Zork 0 and Planetfall.

Rob Campbell [01:05:41]:
If.

Jeff Massie [01:05:41]:
If you want the prepackaged, you don't want to go through any install, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:47]:
Yep, yep, There you go. Yeah, we'll talk here in a bit about some other options to get it if you don't want to go through Steam. Coming. Coming soon.

Jeff Massie [01:05:56]:
All right, Aur. Well, which I know what you're hinting at, and it ties in with mine as well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:06]:
He's trying to steal my thunder here. All right, Jeff, before we get there, there's a pretty big release that just happened. What's the new thing? Also in 3D graphics, believe it or not. What's new there, Jeff?

Jeff Massie [01:06:20]:
Well, now that we have some updates to Steam to play games, we have gpu love coming to play games. Well, maybe, and now maybe we need to make a really cool game and we can do that with Blender 5.0, which was just released. Okay, maybe you need to do some work with it as well. But it's not as fun, I don't know as Blender really needs an introduction. But just in case anybody is not familiar with Blender, it's a free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline. So modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, composing, motion tracking, video editing and game asset creation. It's a one stop shop for 3D.

Jeff Massie [01:07:09]:
Now version 5 brings support for showing HDR colors and a much wider range of colors. So it goes without saying you're going to need make sure, you know, if you're going to want to do this, you're going to need a monitor which can support hdr. You know, you got to, you can output it, but if you can't see it, it doesn't do you any good. You are also going to need to be running Wayland and the Vulcan back end. So this is another switch to wayland that Blender 5 is not going to do you a lot of good on X11. You know, there's a lot of focus on color for version 5 with a lot of different parts of the program supporting hdr, wider color palettes and HDR supported in both static image and in video. So no matter what you're doing, you're going to get more colors and better ways to play them. They also things like revamp the Curves drawing feature which supports the new Curves object type.

Jeff Massie [01:08:07]:
And there's, and there's a new geometry attribute constraint, there's a new cylinder option for displaying curves, which allows for rendering thicker curves and you won't have them look like a flat ribbon. The look of the program changes well because there's a lot of different parts of Blender that had changes, updates and overhauls and they have bumped the GPUs needed to run version 5. So if you're on Nvidia you need 900 series or newer and for AMD you need the Radeon 400 series or newer. Basically for AMD you need GCN version 4 or newer. You know, I'm not even going to try to cover most of the changes because there are way too many. And I really do suggest you take a look at the article in the show notes for more details. After you have read the article, look for the link to the Blender website and you will find where they have version 5 release notes. But in these notes there's a lot of graphical interaction.

Jeff Massie [01:09:03]:
So these aren't your standard release notes. They have several images rendered with a feature on and a feature on in the old way. And a slider so you can drag an image so you can see the changes and how they affect an image. They have a lot of examples to click and drag to get a good feeling so you can really understand it. They have some where you click and you swap between static images so you can see the changes. They have a link in there in. In the release notes to free demo files. So you can have a lot of things to play with if you're just getting started.

Jeff Massie [01:09:40]:
So you get a lot of objects and things like that. Included in this is a human base mesh ass Base Meshes asset bundle, which they've updated with a few fully realistic skeleton assets. So you'll have full skeletons that you can play around. And, you know, so you're. You're not just trying to build a square and do stuff. You have actual things you can play with now. All the assets are public domain, so you can use them in your projects, private, shared, commercial. However, without any issues.

Jeff Massie [01:10:13]:
After you've downloaded those, you can. You can play with them. Keep scrolling because that's not the end of the updates and this release is massive. I suggest people get this update and start playing because Blender can be a lot of fun and, you know, it can even be used to benchmark your system. They have a whole benchmarking suite and places you can upload benchmarks so you can compare how your system does to others and. But most of all, just have fun creating.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:44]:
Yep, absolutely.

Rob Campbell [01:10:47]:
I'd like to emphasize one key point that you kind of brushed over real quickly, and that is if you want the full suite of features, if you want to take full advantage of it, you got to be in Wayland.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:03]:
Is there. Is there new. Is there new Wayland? Only stuff there.

Jeff Massie [01:11:06]:
Hdr, it's. You have to have Wayland and which I did say in the show now, Rob was dope.

Rob Campbell [01:11:14]:
Yeah, I heard you said it. But you can.

Jeff Massie [01:11:15]:
He's at a Tito Sauce.

Rob Campbell [01:11:17]:
I heard you say you just really went through the facts. You got to emphasize the important things like that.

Jeff Massie [01:11:22]:
And. And you have to run the Vulcan back in. So you need Wayland and Vulcan, both of them, to make it work. All right, Live long and prosper you need both of them.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:36]:
Yes. All right, here in just a second we're going to get into our command line tips, but first a quick break. All right, Rob's got our first tip. What are we looking at today? Rob?

Rob Campbell [01:11:49]:
All right, so this tip is for those like Jeff. If you guys noticed, he has some Apple AirPods in his ears. So people like Jeff. Yes, let's. There you go. So for people like Jeff, try to use Apple AirPods on Linux. I've used them in the past, but at one point I was having problems basically connecting to my Bluetooth so I just stopped using. Haven't even tried in a long time.

Rob Campbell [01:12:18]:
Well, this tip doesn't specifically. I mean it may or may not fix that problem. I don't know, but maybe it will, maybe it'll resolve that problem. But Eddie, anyway, my tip is Libre Pod. So for those watching, I made a nice little background. Libre Pods. Well, I made this nice background. So Libre Pods is an open source app that basically frees Apple AirPods Pro from the Apple ecosystem and lets you use their smart features properly on Linux.

Rob Campbell [01:12:52]:
So out of the box, AirPods Pro on Linux works like a play in Bluetooth earbuds. You know, you just pair it with Bluetooth or Bluetooth and you get audio but. But you don't get any of the extras. No active noise cancellation, no transparency mode, unreliable battery reporting and no ear detection. But Libre Pods fixes that. So Libre Pods is a rust based desktop app for Linux with, with an Android companion that reverse engineers Apple's protocols. So it could talk to AirPods the way macOS and iOS do. With it, you could switch between ANSI transparency and normal mode right from the app, see accurate battery levels for each earbud and the case.

Rob Campbell [01:13:44]:
And depending on the model you get extras like ear detection, you know, so if you take one out, it'll know head gestures, conversational awareness that lowers your volume when you start talking and it runs in the background to handle things like auto pausing, like when you take the earbud out like I mentioned and it's still under active development, but AirPods Pro 2 are fully supported. The Pro 3s. I don't know which ones you have, Jeff, but the Pro 3s are, they're almost there. And older models at least get a solid battery and basic control support. I haven't tried this yet. I've only read up on it and it sounds like something I'm going to have to try because hopefully having a companion apps gonna make the AirPods support all. But I don't Even know What kind of AirPods I have? Two or three probably. I don't know.

Rob Campbell [01:14:45]:
But yeah. So for those trying to use it, this app could make things a lot nicer for you.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:53]:
Yeah, very cool. Jeff is busy now looking into it. Like.

Jeff Massie [01:15:01]:
It'S pretty active development. There's a lot of stuff. I mean, it's not just one person hammering on it, it's several people.

Rob Campbell [01:15:10]:
Yeah. And I guess for like Asahi Linux, you can get Asahi Linux on your Mac and then you can just have that whole ecosystem in Linux, Mac, hardware, all Linux. Wow.

Jeff Massie [01:15:22]:
Is it like having a book in Chinese translating into English and then retranslating it back to Chinese or something? No, no, it's. It's pretty cool. I've. Mine, mine were. I've had them work flawlessly with Linux. But yeah, I don't have any of the other features. It's just a basic volume control and stuff like that. I can't see the battery life or anything.

Jeff Massie [01:15:44]:
So this. I'm going to look into this and find out how I get it on. Get it on a cashy.

Rob Campbell [01:15:49]:
Yeah. Let us know next week how it works for you. If I don't get to try it first.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:55]:
Yeah, very interesting. Now I'm. Now I'm down the rabbit hole of looking at earbuds. Not Apple earbuds, not my style, but looking at earbuds. My poor budget, you guys. You guys have gotten me to look at video cards and earbuds. So, you know, that's like $500 that you two have almost talked me into spending.

Rob Campbell [01:16:14]:
This little tip got you into looking at earbuds?

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:18]:
Yes.

Jeff Massie [01:16:20]:
Well, if you buy earbuds or a video card, I'm counting that as your Christmas present.

Rob Campbell [01:16:24]:
So the problem is, Jonathan, all we have to do is like briefly like mention something like what? I don't have that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:32]:
No, no, no, no, no. I am the victim here. Do not put this on me.

Jeff Massie [01:16:38]:
What?

Rob Campbell [01:16:38]:
I don't have that. That.

Jeff Massie [01:16:39]:
All right, Jonathan's wife in the, in the comments is saying, yes, you need to buy this, honey, I love you enough that you need to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:46]:
No, that is not what she is saying. She is saying I love you enough. I'm not going to let you do this. That's what she is saying. All right, let's talk about paru. I hope that's how it's pronounced. Peru. Whatever it is.

Jeff Massie [01:16:59]:
I think paru. That's what I was going with.

Rob Campbell [01:17:01]:
I don't remember what it is.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:03]:
What is it, Jeff?

Jeff Massie [01:17:04]:
So paru. So I'm learning a lot by Going to an Arch based Linux after years on the Debian side of the house. One of them is Paru which is basically it's a new AUR helper. So the Arch and my or Arch distribution and my distro Cash us which is Arch based use Pac man to hit the official repositories but it won't hit the Arch user repository. Reason being, the packages in the AUR are in the package build format pkg bui L D format which is for people to be able to build the program from source code so it'll be compatible with your system. Because anything Arch is changing constantly and you can have different versions of a lot of different things. And because the AUR is user driven, it can have a little more risk than a normal distribution repository. It can be not terrible, but little of your own risk.

Jeff Massie [01:18:16]:
But sometimes though you need the latest greatest program and you need to get it from the AUR or you want it because you know, building is simplified. You don't have to go through and you know, untar it and go through all the steps. It's the package build method is, is fairly automated. Now the article in the show notes shows you how to install Paru, but it comes already installed in Cash OS and this is how I got it because I actually used it. The simplest way to use the program is Paru space program you want. It will then search and install a program if it finds more than one. It will show you the options that you can pick from and you may, may need to do a little searching to make sure you get the right name and the version you want. For example, I used it to install folding at home for my system.

Jeff Massie [01:19:07]:
And as the normal folding at home is packaged for Debian and Red Hat, so I didn't have one I could get from the normal website. So I knew what I wanted and I looked for fah, which is the normal folding at home search term and I found versions I didn't want. I had to look for the full name. Folding at home with no spaces. That's how I got the right version. So I mean there's, there's a little bit of. You kind of got a search and understand and it just comes up with a menu that says, you know, oh, here's three versions, do you want one, two or three? And then it has information of like version and a bunch of other stuff. So you, you can, you know what you're getting.

Jeff Massie [01:19:46]:
It's not just, I think it's this version, it, it comes with a lot of details so, so you'll understand what you're getting. Now if you have a very specific program you want, it would be paru, P a P A R U space dash capital S program name. So it will just go, okay, this is exactly what he, this person wants. We're getting it. We're not going to show up the menu and give you options. You're getting this. If you have programs and you want to find updates, it's paru space dash Q, capital Q lowercase ua. You can use capital S lowercase ua to upgrade your packages.

Jeff Massie [01:20:30]:
So the first one find, you know, says, hey, you have these updates. The second one actually does update it. There are options to just download the package, not build it. You know, you can, you can have it find a package and have it only print the comments for you. So you can see if the packet. When you find your package, is there an issue with it? Because sometimes, sometimes there could be because a lot of times it's fairly cutting edge software. So take a look at the article in the show notes and you can see all the switches I gave you most of them, but it basically makes installing from the AUR a lot easier and should handle all your install needs.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:10]:
Very cool. I like it. I like these little tricks and tips for the various distros.

Jeff Massie [01:21:16]:
Yeah, and that's where earlier I said Zork was on there. So if you're on Arch, you can, you can use that to get your Zork fix.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:27]:
If, if you're on Arch. I'm not.

Jeff Massie [01:21:29]:
You're on Arch.

Rob Campbell [01:21:30]:
I'm so proud of you, Jeff, for using Arch based digital for so long.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:35]:
The only problem is he's got to tell us about it every time.

Rob Campbell [01:21:40]:
I use Arch, by the way.

Jeff Massie [01:21:42]:
Yeah, well, I, it's, it's so great because I get so all these command line tips and stuff where, you know, Debian, it's like, oh, we've already covered this or that. And it's like, whoa, there's some fresh ground here for stories that on Debian.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:55]:
Everything just worked on Art, you got to do all these command lines when.

Rob Campbell [01:22:00]:
You run out of tips. What are you going to go to next?

Jeff Massie [01:22:02]:
Yeah, maybe I'll go back to Fedora or something. Suse.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:07]:
Yeah, there you go. Suse. Sounds fun. All right, I've got a command line tip that is definitely tied to the open sourcing of Zork. So I asked myself, oh well, is this available now on Fedora? Not yet. Is the answer, well, surely it's out there somewhere. How do I get it? And There is a c. There's a couple of ways you can run it, but there is a C conversion of the original Zork code, and it's available, of all places, the one that was quickest for me to get, it's available as a snap.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:39]:
So on my Fedora install, I just did sudo snap, install Zork, and then snap, run Zork, and suddenly I was transformed, transported to the field in front of the house with the mailbox, and I opened the mailbo and I got a flyer out, and then I found the slightly ajar window, and I climbed into the. Through the window, into the house, and I got the lantern. And that's about as far as I got into Zork. It's about as far as I've ever gotten into Zork. So maybe I'll just take a few more minutes and play a bit further into it. But it's out there. And that was one of my first real interactions. Installing.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:14]:
Installing something with a snap that I was actually going to use. It just worked. No big surprise there. But, yeah, if you want to get Zork and you don't want to compile it yourself and you don't want to do any of that, it is available as a snap as well.

Rob Campbell [01:23:29]:
And Jonathan using Snaps, I'm the opposite of proud of you.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:34]:
Disappointed. You're not mad, you're just disappointed.

Rob Campbell [01:23:38]:
Yeah, there we go.

Jeff Massie [01:23:39]:
Now that I'm not talking about snaps, Jonathan had to take up the torch.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:44]:
Honestly, the way this went is I just. I googled, like, how do I install Zork on Fedora or Linux? I don't know which one I googled for. And the top hit was, here's the snap. Okay, fine. Whatever works. You know, in reality, I am fairly laissez faire, shall we say. I'm very easygoing. Like, I, I don't have a whole lot of ideology about, like, which way I install a program.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:10]:
I don't. I don't care that much. Appimage, Flatpak, Docker container, whatever. Let's just. Let's just make it work.

Rob Campbell [01:24:16]:
Yeah, I, I don't hate snaps as much as I pretend, but I do like to. I like to poke on it. Canonical and Ubuntu and Snaps and all the things that everybody hates. Everything that everyone loves to hate, of course, pretend I hate them too. Yep.

Jeff Massie [01:24:31]:
Yeah. And to me, it's, It's. I don't really have an ideology other than they're just fine, you know, it's. It, it's. It's not the biggest.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:42]:
It's not that big a deal that.

Jeff Massie [01:24:43]:
Some people make it out to be.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:45]:
It's not that big a deal.

Jeff Massie [01:24:46]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:47]:
All right, well, let's. Now that we're closing the show up, let's let the guys get whatever they want to as their closing words. Get the last word on something, plug something. Jeff, what do you have for us?

Jeff Massie [01:24:59]:
Well, since Ken isn't here, I figured I better cover this. I have three links in the, in the show notes for humble bundles. One of them is Linux Professional. So it covers a lot of the, like, sysadmin stuff, you know, kubernetes, administration stuff, things like that. So this is, this is not geared to the home user. It's geared to the professional sysadmin. There is also a link in there for software architecture. So this is people really designing programs and going in deep to.

Jeff Massie [01:25:47]:
For. For complex software, how you architecture stuff. And the third one, which I really liked and I'm probably actually going to get, is they also have a bundle for data engineering and science. So it goes into the tools you need for handling data.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:05]:
Cool.

Jeff Massie [01:26:05]:
So the analysis part and how you can use certain languages to dissect and mathematical formulas for good data handling.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:17]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:26:17]:
So now you've got some good reading and I hope everyone has a great and wonderful week.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:25]:
Absolutely. All right, Rob, you have anything?

Rob Campbell [01:26:28]:
Not really. So I'm just gonna go with my usual. If you want to. If you like. If you like what you. If you like what I'm doing. You want to know more about me, you want to connect with me on those social medias, you can go first. Go to my webpage.

Rob Campbell [01:26:47]:
Robert P as in Patrick or I don't know what else. Campbell.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:55]:
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What does, what does the P stand for?

Rob Campbell [01:27:00]:
It does stand for Patrick.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:01]:
Okay.

Rob Campbell [01:27:04]:
I was trying to be Lord Dropped. Robert P. Campbell dot com. If you go there. That's my website. Even if you search Rob Campbell Lennox. Robert Campbell Lennox. I.

Rob Campbell [01:27:20]:
I think I usually pop up, so. And you'll find my site. On my site there are links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my blue sky, my master, and a place to donate a coffee, it says. But you're just donating $5. 5 US dollars for those outside. I don't know how hard it is for anyone to donate outside of the U.S. i don't know. Once you try to let me know.

Rob Campbell [01:27:45]:
And since Jeff didn't have a poem for you like he's normally supposed to do, he dropped the ball on that one. I don't have one either. Have a good week, everyone.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:00]:
Let's see.

Jeff Massie [01:28:01]:
I did have a poem. I've got poems ready that I just thought, well, next time.

Rob Campbell [01:28:07]:
You already lost your turn.

Jeff Massie [01:28:09]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:10]:
Let's see. Oh, I'm so. I'm. I'm disappointed that the AI did not try to write a limerick for me.

Jeff Massie [01:28:20]:
Okay, here, I'll. I'll give you a quick one. Roses are red, my server is gray. I'm a computer nerd. Don't expect me to rhyme.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:32]:
That's great. All right, appreciate it. Thank you guys for being here. It's been a lot of fun. All right, if you want to find more of me, there's of course Hackaday. That is where Floss Weekly lives these days. That's also where my security column goes live every Friday morning. Except I think we're going to take a couple of weeks off around the.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:49]:
Around the holidays because I really don't want to have to write a column on Thanksgiving or Christmas. That just does not sound like fun. I love my. My readers, but not that much. But yeah, otherwise we'd love to have you come and check out what we're doing there at Hackaday. There's also, if you want to follow my stuff, there is the Twit D and D adventure. We wrapped up the the second and for the one shot at least the final adventure in that. And I saw that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:19]:
I saw that part one went public on the twit YouTube channel. So even those folks that are not in the club can go and check that out. It was a lot of fun. So you can go and see that. If you want to see more D D from Twit, make sure and let folks let us know. I had a lot of fun with it. I'd be up for more. More.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:39]:
And if you want to see more, let the network know. All right, Other than that, thank you everyone for being here. We appreciate it. Whether you watch or listen, whether you this live or on the download, we thank you very much and we will see you next time on the Untitled Linux Show.