Untitled Linux Show 233 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 Cosmic is finally here and we also talk about Pair OS and Ubuntu if you're interested. There is a palm sized mini NAS and a palm sized really impressive ARM computer. Both we take a look at. We don't have on our desks yet, but there's also interesting stuff about Cache, about Rust in Linux and gnome's take on AI. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Rob Campbell [00:00:29]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:39]:
This is the Untitled Linux Show. Episode 233, recorded Saturday, December 13th. Tiny Tater Tots. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show. We're gonna geek out over some software and some hardware, the kernel stuff, desktop environments, all kinds of fun things coming. It is not just me, of course. We've got Rob and Jeff.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:05]:
Our friendly neighborhood Ken is still off on, shall we say, Christmas and holiday related activities. He should be back sometime after the first of the year. But welcome guys. Good to have you both. Hello.

Jeff Massie [00:01:19]:
Good to be here.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:21]:
Jeff. Your office is really coming together. You got some lighting going on and it looks really nice.

Jeff Massie [00:01:29]:
Yeah, I'm not all washed out today. I've got things a little more sorted. It's going to be a couple months before I have a bookcase back here. It's on order, but there's still more little things coming. So it's not complete yet. There might still be a little even echoey, but we're getting there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:48]:
Yeah, no, it's great. It looks really good.

Jeff Massie [00:01:52]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:53]:
So let's dive into some news. We've got something that we're going to talk about that we've talked a lot about over the past few months. I think some of us have even done some trial runs of this. We're going to let Rob take it away and tell us all about that. But first, this.

Leo Laporte [00:02:13]:
Hello everybody. Leo Laporte here. You know what a great gift would be, whether for the holidays or 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/clubTWiT. They'll really appreciate it and so will we. Thank you. TWiT.tv/ClubTWiT.

Rob Campbell [00:02:41]:
So one of my big predictions for 2025 has finally come to pass.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:46]:
You really squeaked this one in there just in time.

Rob Campbell [00:02:51]:
I told you it was coming and here it is. Popos 24.04 LTS I didn't specifically say that, but with the first stable release of the new Cosmic Desktop is now available and the Cosmic Desktop specifically being in a first stable release is what I predicted. So yeah, we've been talking about Cosmic for over a year now, even even demoing the Alpha and I think a beta release on the show but you know, always with the warning that it wasn't ready for production use. Well now it is. At least they say it is. Cosmic is built from the ground up with rust and from my test it's it's a very snappy desktop environment. Default in the just released Popos 24.04 LTS Cosmic is default, but it's also available in many other distros like Arch Fedora, Obitsus, Tumbleweed, Nixos and more and even stretching into BSD and Redox OS. So Popos 24.04 LTS ships with a newer Linux 6.17 kernel series Mesa 25.1.x and an Nvidia 580 driver option and pops Hybrid Graphics is story is getting even better.

Rob Campbell [00:04:26]:
Apps that request discrete GPU can now use it automatically and you can still force a GPU choice per app. So I know 24.04 seems a little old with 26.04 Ubuntu just around the corner but you know they are in production mode with this and I expect they will be keeping up a lot better now in the future since the first release of Cosmic is out of the way so I haven't had a chance to give it a full bare metal run yet but I do have it in a VM right now and those watch and you can see it behind me but according to other reviewers it isn't quite perfect yet and you know though my recollection of the alpha was is really good even with this in the vm. One problem I had today is I had this running already and I don't know if it has a problem with the going into standby in a VM or what it was, but when I came back as a black screen I couldn't wake it up, I had to reboot it. So next time I rebooted it I turned all the power settings to you know, never suspend, never shut off the monitor and all that stuff. So really what do you got to turn that off for in a VM anyway? I suppose suspend could be handy maybe, but.

Jonathan Bennett [00:05:51]:
I've always turned suspend and hibernate off on my Linux machines. They just they it Always has been buggy. It's been, it's buggy on Windows too.

Rob Campbell [00:05:58]:
I agree.

Jonathan Bennett [00:05:59]:
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:06:00]:
And any Windows, anything. I've always, I've always turned off hibernate, suspend and hit and miss. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Usually I do. I never use it. If I want to turn off, I'll turn it off.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:10]:
Okay, Turn my computer off my own self.

Rob Campbell [00:06:14]:
But anyway, from the other reviews, from the other views, you know they are, they are saying there's rough edges, you know, as like some audio routing weirdness, occasional dock icon glitches for new pinned apps and OBS screen recording still being finicky for some people. But you know, none of those sound like stop the world unless, unless you're streaming. Then OBS could be an issue. But you know, more like, you know, these are things that hopefully we're going to see polish now that they have a release, things will tighten up quickly and the 2604 should be just amazing. And if you want to try it now, There are multiple ISOs, you know, there's a standard image, an Nvidia focused image, even an ARM image, including ARM with Nvidia 4, the Thaleo, Astra. And if you're on Pop!_OS 2204, upgrade prompts are expected to start showing up in January of 2026. For those watching in some other year, you know what I'm talking about. But anyway, so if you're the type that doesn't want to wait, you know, to do just, you know, wipe, reload, back up all that good stuff and install it and give it a shot.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:35]:
Yeah, so I've kind of got a bit of a race going on here as to, on this POP OS machine whether I'm going to get the prompt to do the update or if my new Framework laptop is going to come in first. So I'm in one of the December batches. It's supposed to ship sometime in December and we'll see if that actually happens.

Jeff Massie [00:07:58]:
Yeah. And you know, and like, like you said, Rob, I mean this is, this is, you know, 1.0, this is brand new versus, you know, wow, KDE is so much smoother. Well, it's on, you know, it's got a 20 year head start. It's on 5 or 6, 5.4 or something, you know, so they've had a long time to polish and massage and this is brand new.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:22]:
People have had years to yell at the devs over these things.

Rob Campbell [00:08:25]:
Yes. Yeah, a little bit. I actually used it, you know, besides that suspend or whatever the issue was, I was seeing things still seem to work pretty. Pretty smoothly. Pretty snappy.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:37]:
Mm. Yeah. I am real curious what it would be like on, you know, one of the new popos machines.

Rob Campbell [00:08:47]:
I'd like to see the ARM one on the Thaleo.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:49]:
That's true. Yeah. It'd probably do very well there too. Probably would. All right.

Rob Campbell [00:08:56]:
You know, hold on. Maybe that's my premium ARM laptop that I really didn't think came out this year, but maybe that is it and we just didn't touch on it enough.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:11]:
Didn't talk about it enough.

Jeff Massie [00:09:13]:
Yeah, you're reaching.

Rob Campbell [00:09:14]:
Oh, come on. With the whole ARM, you're calling a System 76 laptop. ARM laptop. Not a premium one. All they make is premium stuff.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:25]:
Is it even a laptop? Isn't the dealio that you're just.

Rob Campbell [00:09:28]:
It is a desktop. You're right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:31]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:09:32]:
I forgot.

Jeff Massie [00:09:33]:
Rob's got a really big lap.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:36]:
Just super glue a monitor onto it and then, you know, jam a power supply UPS in there and anything. Look, Ma, it's a laptop.

Jeff Massie [00:09:45]:
Yeah, well, they have those CPU coolers with LCD screens. You just pop the side panel off and use this.

Rob Campbell [00:09:52]:
It should be a laptop. They should have a laptop.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:56]:
They may. They may eventually. All right, Jeff, you've got. You've got something interesting here.

Jeff Massie [00:10:06]:
Yeah, I. I have something I think.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:08]:
What is this? Do you actually have one of these?

Jeff Massie [00:10:11]:
No, but I'm like, I think I need to get one of these.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:14]:
Oh, well.

Jeff Massie [00:10:15]:
And I think Rob and Jonathan need one of these. I got something that they might want to spend their money on. So what we're talking about, It's a small NAS, and small meaning five and three quarter inches by 3.8 inches and just one and a quarter inches thick. Sorry, I didn't convert to metric. I'm sure several of you already guessed that this is a small form factor. So it uses NVMe drives, four of them to be exact. And I have a couple links in the show notes about this item, but I do want to point out an error in the how to Geek link. It says it only supports 1 TB NVMe drives, and that is not correct.

Jeff Massie [00:11:00]:
The rest of the specifications for the NAS Disk include an Intel N150 quad core CPU and it runs at 3.6 GHz. But it's designed to be a low power option, though you know its standard speed, you know when it's not boosting is 1.6 gigahertz and it will only pull about 6 watts even when it's under load. So you can keep this thing on the network all the time without making a big dent in your power bill.

Jeff Massie [00:12:06]:
Something that's pretty cool is that it also comes with two 2.5 gig gigabit ethernet ports. So they're, they're not, you know, they're, they're not able to keep up with the PCIe 3.0 drives. So that's why, you know, even if you're thinking, well, I need PCIe 5, well, you're limited by your ethernet port, but 2.5 gig ethernet, that's pretty good. It can transfer about 18 gigabytes per minute. So even if you have an enormous amount of data to back up, like say you had a phone with 300 gigabytes of pictures, you're looking at less than 30 minutes. So it's not bad for moving quite.

Jonathan Bennett [00:12:59]:
A bit of data.

Jeff Massie [00:13:00]:
Now it does come loaded with Open Media Vault, you know, standard, which is a Debian based load. But it's designed to be NAS specific because it's, because it's Debian, you can use tools like Rsync, Cron and so on to schedule backups and do all sorts of things. It supports many RAID levels such as 01, 5 and 6 and all the others. So if you want to get fancy, you can do the 10 and 01, but realistically, you know, set it on 5 or 6 and just be happy. You can use this as a router or you can even use it as a low end PC if you have light tasks which you want to do with it. You know, it's, it's four cores and it's.

Jeff Massie [00:14:05]:
It's not super powerful but you know, some light browsing and things like that. You can use this like a mini PC to see what you're doing it. It has the HDMI ports and the Type C output as I said and it can Support up to three 4K displays. The system is built by UE2. It's Y O U Y E E T O O all one word. And it could be found in places like Amazon for purchase. I looked today and the price is $219 US on Amazon. There's other local retailers for other countries as well.

Jeff Massie [00:14:45]:
Or you can purchase it directly from UE2 website as well. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for more details. And they have direct links to the UE2 website for the Nest Disk, Mini PC, NAS and Jonathan. Think this is going to wind up under your tree?

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:03]:
Probably not. I've got a full size server already that is sort of my data storage place. It is really interesting for 215 bucks, particularly if someone needed a little server. And yeah, I could see why this would be very interesting. I find it fascinating. I was thinking about this the other day that we're starting to use USB C for power. USB C with power delivery for so many.

Rob Campbell [00:15:39]:
Everything.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:40]:
Yeah, for so many different things. Like things. Things that used to. You would either have a dedicated power adapter or you would run AC power into. I remember at one point people were talking about this like we need some sort of DC power standard. And it's. It just occurred to me the other day like USB C with power delivery has become that standard.

Jeff Massie [00:16:04]:
It'd be nice when USB C just takes over everything.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:07]:
I mean it kind of already has. Kind of.

Jeff Massie [00:16:11]:
Well, I mean they already has get rid of HDMI and other things.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:18]:
Yeah, well, I mean you can. You can already do DisplayPort over USB C with DisplayPort alt mode.

Jeff Massie [00:16:25]:
Yeah, we just need audio through DisplayPort.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:28]:
That's true. That's one of the things that doesn't work yet, isn't it?

Rob Campbell [00:16:31]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:34]:
Well, yeah. This is a really interesting little box though. If you get one, make sure and let us know how it goes. It'd be fun to do sort of a review of it.

Rob Campbell [00:16:43]:
Oh yeah. I'm not looking for anything now, but maybe if mine dies ever. It's been around for probably a decade now. So if that ever dies, maybe this will be next on my list. Hopefully it doesn't die now we've cursed it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:02]:
All right. So I actually found something sort of similar this week. I Came across the orange Pi6 Plus. And no, I don't actually physically have one of these but I found a review with benchmarks over at Linux Links and it's really interesting. So it is a ARMV9 processor on a board. It's a 12 core CPU and it comes with either 16 gigs, 32 gigs or a whopping 64 gigs of memory. It's got HDMI out. This one also has dual Ethernet.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:43]:
I think they run at 2.5, I'm not 100% sure. Also USB or. Yeah, USB Type C power supply. This one, what really fascinated me about it, the two things. One was the benchmarks and if you actually go to the link and you click through to the benchmarks of the fellow that did this, Steve Ems, of all of the things that he benchmarked it was like basically twice as fast as so closer to three times faster than the Raspberry PI 5 in a lot of these benchmarks. In fact it did so well that he went and grabbed a couple of intel i5 based boards. And so he's also got on here the i5 10400 and the 12400 that's 10, 10th generation and 12th generation. And in this particular benchmark it's really pretty close to the performance of that I5 10,400 which is really impressive for an ARM board.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:49]:
And then there's one other sort of really odd element to this and that is its cores. So it's got 12 CPU cores but they're not all the same. In fact they're quite different. So it has, it's a quad core, Cortex A720, a quad core Cortex A520 and a quad core looks like also a Cortex A720 large. So it's broken up into three different banks of cores. And some of these are, their performance is really, really bad. But one of the things that that's intended for is to be able to turn off the other cores if you're looking for memory efficiency and run on those small cores. Really, really interesting little device here and I had fun sort of poking through and reading about it on this article.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:01]:
Now it doesn't come with a case. It look bare board but really fascinating to see. Sort of the, the, the newest thing and really kind of makes me think about, you know, Certainly the Raspberry PI 6 is being worked on. I wonder what it's going to look like.

Jeff Massie [00:20:18]:
That's amazing with these little boards can do now and what they come with.

Rob Campbell [00:20:22]:
And man, I know the orange pie itself isn't new but this must be a new version.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:30]:
Yeah, Orange PI is basically the brand name at this point. That's like. I don't know if it's a company named Orange Pie or if that's just the branding they use but you know it's, they make pretty good products. It's one of the more popular alternatives to the Raspberry PI. Really? Apparently it's got a, it's got a GPU in it that supports, actually supports some ray tracing. I don't know what the ARM Immortals G270MC10 GPU is, but it's apparently fairly impressive the whole thing.

Rob Campbell [00:21:08]:
What's the price on this compared to a PI, A raspberry?

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:10]:
I mean, you know, I was looking for that and I don't know that they've got the price on it yet because I wanted to mention that at the time of writing the Orange PI 6 Plus with the cooler fan handseek is available on AliExpress for 247 pounds. I don't know, I don't know what that is in real money but that's a joke. That's a joke. Guys. Don't, don't at me, don't cancel me on Twitter.

Jeff Massie [00:21:42]:
I think the conversion rate's pretty close. It roughly one.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:49]:
Oh it is on, it is on Amazon already. The 16 gig version for 245.

Rob Campbell [00:21:55]:
According to Google, 247 pounds is like 330 US dollars.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:59]:
So and here's this on Amazon, the 32 gig version for 299 dollars.

Rob Campbell [00:22:04]:
Ah so definitely, definitely more expensive than a raspberry.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:08]:
Definitely more expensive than a raspberry.

Rob Campbell [00:22:09]:
So you're getting what you're, you're paying what you're getting. Paying for what you're getting.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:13]:
Yeah, yeah. One of the other cool things about this is it's got looks like three. Well they're not all NVMe. Two of them are NVME and one is for WI fi. It's got the, it's got three slots on the bottom. You know the NVME style slots. I never, I never can remember exactly because you know the key is in a different spot. That'll tell you what the thing is actually intended for.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:39]:
I never can remember what that, which keying means what. But yeah, it's a fun, it's a fun looking little board.

Rob Campbell [00:22:47]:
Yeah, I just try to shove stuff in there and see if it fits.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:50]:
Yeah, yeah, that's honestly that's what I do too.

Jeff Massie [00:22:55]:
Biggest problem with those boards is just having, having the projects to run with them.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:00]:
What am I gonna do with board? Well, it looks like it's actually five gig Ethernet. That's really impressive too.

Rob Campbell [00:23:08]:
I used to have great projects, but most of them have been replaced now with my home server in a VM and Proxmox or. One of my other projects was a little gaming machine. I gutted a Nintendo years ago and put a Raspberry PI in there and wired everything up so it looked native almost. But now we got the Steam deck and I don't know, I don't need any of that.

Jeff Massie [00:23:34]:
That's my thing is the server kind of took over a lot of stuff.

Rob Campbell [00:23:38]:
Yeah, I got a handful of pies, Raspberry PI sitting around doing nothing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:44]:
Unfortunately, I do too. I have some of them still doing things, but some of them are pretty idle at the moment. This thing's got some. It's got some real horsepower, though. You 3D print a case for that and you can make a really nice router out of it.

Rob Campbell [00:24:02]:
Oh, did you say two network ports?

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:04]:
It's got two NICs. It's got two five gig NICs on it.

Rob Campbell [00:24:07]:
Oh, nice.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:08]:
Yeah. Pretty impressive.

Jeff Massie [00:24:12]:
Time to get the LAN up to five gig.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:14]:
Yeah, Time to upgrade. All right. Rob has a. I don't know. Is it a review? A story about a different os. And we're going to talk about that right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:24:28]:
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Rob Campbell [00:25:16]:
So I don't think we've ever talked about Pair OS in the past on the show, but I have checked it out myself. I'm pretty sure I've installed in a VM before. Years ago, I may have even installed a bare metal. I never really ran with it for very long, but probably one of those times when I was just trying different things. But it also makes a lot of sense that we haven't talked about it on the show, as it's kind of been somewhat of a dead project for a while. Well, it's back. Pair OS is back. But before I get into that, let's go into the backstory.

Rob Campbell [00:25:53]:
So the original spark of Peros began back in the year 2011 when French developer David Tarvars built Peros on top of Ubuntu using Gnome and a very intentional goal of making Linux feel more familiar to people who loved the Mac OS desktop. Then it got complicated. There was a Debian edition renamed to commas comice os, then back again. And in 2014 Tarvis sold the distro to an undisclosed company. I didn't know you could sell these low distros. I. I need to. I need to get into that business anyway and and around that time, public downloads effective effectively disappeared.

Rob Campbell [00:26:45]:
But Pear never really completely stayed gone. The idea resurfaced later as pair OS capital p lowercase ear, capital o capital S. And now it's been re energized again, this time by Romanian developer Alexandru Balin. Balin under pair OS and that is spelled lowercase pair uppercase o and s. So it's a lowercase p this time. But again the guts of the distro have gone. Also gone a different direction. Strangely, it seems like a lot of distros lately have been rebasing on this core distro lately.

Rob Campbell [00:27:35]:
Well, now, pair OS. Nice. Core 25.12 is built on Arch Linux and it uses a heavily customized you guys are going to love this KDE plasma desktop to chase that modern Mac OS look and feel, right down to the glossy animated design language that the project calls Liquid Gel. And because it's based on art, you know. The pitch is the classic rolling release promise. Install once, keep it updated forever. Which is not very macOS like, but no big version jumps, no reinstalls, just continuous updates from the Arch ecosystem with pair OS styling layered on top. Another odd change is the installer.

Rob Campbell [00:28:28]:
So nice. Core is the first Pair OS release shipping a brand new installer built with Electron and Node JS wouldn't be my choice in 2025, but it's also clearly a work in progress. The project describes it as a beta and warns it may still be unstable while development continues. Per OS isn't just another theme packed pretending to be a distro. It's a full attempt to answer a real question being what if Linux felt Premium and familiar right out of the box for macOS refugees without giving up the freedom and flexibility underneath. Sure, you can customize most desktop environments to look like macOS, but just like Linux Mint is often recommended to Windows users for, you know, the Windows like style out of the box from Windows converts. Pair OS could be that for macOS converts. You know what I think would be interesting is to see pairos team up with the Asahi Linux guys.

Rob Campbell [00:29:35]:
So you can like change your Mac, you know, your MacBook or whatever into a Linux machine with very little interface change. You know, you have a Mac book one day, your MacBook doesn't change much, but underneath you have the power of Linux anyway. I would say go download it now, try it out yourself. I mean, I guess you still can, but you may be waiting a while to actually try it out. I've been downloading it all day at a stupid slow speed measured in kilobytes. Last I looked, I think it was like 200 some kilobytes. I killed my download, tried downloading somewhere else. Everything else works fine.

Rob Campbell [00:30:15]:
But their download says it's going to take close to 24 hours. So I don't know if this news story just went boom and everybody's trying to get their hands on the new Pair OS and he's on a. A slow DSL uploader or what, but. Which is why I have not been able to show you what it looks like. But it looks a lot like Mac os. That's what it looks like. Looks like Mac os. In fact, the screenshots I've seen, the little icon in the bottom left of the tray.

Rob Campbell [00:30:52]:
MATT CALLS FINDER I think it looks almost too much like their icon. It's a little different, but it looks too much like their icon to stick around there long in my opinion. But yeah, it's pretty slow right now. So if you want to try it next week and start downloading it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:15]:
Did they not. Did that. Is there not a torrent option?

Rob Campbell [00:31:18]:
No, not that I saw.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:21]:
Man. This is why distros distribute their ISOs with torrents. This is the very problem.

Rob Campbell [00:31:28]:
Well, maybe they figured out this is just a little distro. You know, it's just a little hobby thing. I'm gonna have one person seating it. It's not gonna speed anything up. My FAST server will do better.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:38]:
Yeah, it is. It's. It's blown up a little beyond that.

Rob Campbell [00:31:42]:
Yeah, apparently.

Jeff Massie [00:31:43]:
Yeah, it's still it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:47]:
It's interesting. You know, I. I am always a little dubious of these niche distros. Not that they, you know, not. Not that they don't have great intentions. And in many cases they have really. They do really interesting things. But like, probably don't start with this.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:05]:
At least. At least not until it's got a few more miles under it. Go use, Go use Asahi if you're coming from Mac or Go Fedora or Ubuntu.

Rob Campbell [00:32:14]:
Well, you're not. You're not going to be installing this on an M1 Mac on M2 today. They don't have that with the SAI anyway, so.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:24]:
Yeah, well.

Jeff Massie [00:32:25]:
And we did a story, I think about six months ago about the number of distributions that kind of people like, this is great, we're going to do this. And then the amount of work involved to keep a distribution going. There's a lot of it that kind of like, oh, this is. You know, they like the making of it, but the maintenance drags people down or they just get burnt out because if it doesn't hit that critical mass where you have a whole bunch of people helping you, stuff starts falling behind.

Rob Campbell [00:32:52]:
And.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:54]:
Some of the stuff is just not very fun, like dealing with CVEs, that sort of thing. It's just no fun. The fun, sexy stuff is making it shiny and pushing that first ISO out there and then everything else after that is. It's kind of boring and turns into work. Turns into work. All right, Jeff. There is a thing that is getting boring and it's.

Rob Campbell [00:33:22]:
Jeff.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:23]:
No, it's something Jeff wants to talk about. I think something in the kernel is beginning to get boring and maybe that means it's working.

Rob Campbell [00:33:32]:
Yes.

Jeff Massie [00:33:34]:
So there's a new patch out for Rust from Linux lead developer Miguel Ohella. Sorry. And it's to conclude the experiment of Rust being in the kernel, it's over. The experiment's done now. This was discussed in Japan where there was a Linux Plumbers conference just this week. Kind of like it sounds, the conference is where Linux developers get together to talk about the plumbing layer of the kernel. The plumbing layer is the glue layers which make the kernel and the interface to the user land work together. It's kind of the core infrastructure.

Jeff Massie [00:34:10]:
You know, when we talk about KDE and we mentioned Framework, it's kind of the same thing. It's the pipes that connect them. More importantly though, what has come out of the conference and one of the items was Rust is going to be in the kernel and is no longer experimental. Miguel had this, this to say in the kernel Linux mailing list. The Rust support was merged into 6.1 into the main line in order to help determine whether Rust as a language was suitable for the kernel. That is worth the trade offs technically, procedurally and socially. Now that socially comes because there's been some existing maintainers that didn't like certain things about Rust, and there's been some heated discussions in the kernel mailing list about Rust, but I digress at the 2025 Linux kernel maintainer Summit the experiment has just been deemed concluded, thus remove the section now. He doesn't specifically say it, but he's he's referring to the Rust experiment part of the documentation in the in the code.

Jeff Massie [00:35:21]:
It's not fully true already anyway, meaning it's kind of past experimental since there are several uses of Rust in production out there, some well known Linux distributions enable it, and it's already in millions of devices via Android. Obviously this does not mean that everything works for every kernel, configuration, architecture, tool chain, etc. Or that there won't be new issues. There's still a ton of work to do in all areas from the kernel to upstream Rust, GCC and other projects and in fact certain combinations such as the mixed GCC/LLVM builds and the upcoming GCC support are still quite experimental, but getting there but the experiment is done. Rust is here to stay. I hope this signals commitment from the kernel to companies and other entities to invest more into it I. E. Into giving time into their kernel, giving more time into their kernel developers to train themselves in Rust.

Jeff Massie [00:36:24]:
Thanks to the many kernel maintainers who that gave the project their support and patience throughout those years, and to the many other developers, whether in the kernel or in other projects that have made this possible. I had a long list of 173 names in the credits of the original poll that merged the support into the kernel and now such a list would be way longer, so I will not even try to compose one. But again thanks a lot everybody. So the article is linked in the show notes and does go on to say that the Rust code in the kernel isn't built by default, but that should change in the near future. Things like the Nvidia Nova driver are written in Rust and will soon be included in the kernel for everyone. We talked about this before, but Nova's still in the Nvidia's open source driver is still currently in an experimental stage. Take a look at the article in the show notes for the full details and a link to the Colonel mailing list. And as the band Megadeth said, Rust in peace.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:22]:
Oh my. Yeah, it's been interesting to see how controversial that has Been, you know, it's, it's something that should be so boring and people have had some weird opinions about it, but. Well, it has, it has been fascinating. It has been fascinating to see the security problems that have shown up in Rust based programs and Zip Go based programs and sort of, you know, there is the reminder that writing it in Rust or in Go or whatever is not a panacea. It does not fix every security problem, it just fixes one of them.

Jeff Massie [00:38:06]:
But anyway, yeah, and some of it I think is people get used to how, you know, some of the maintainers were used to how things worked and now I got to learn another language because I don't understand this. So to maintain it, you're adding more work and in the, in the comments, in the, in the article just quickly turned political and just kind of went nowhere. So there wasn't really any valuable commentary in the comments or anything that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:36]:
Yeah, I don't, and we don't have to talk about this for long, but I don't understand how Rust became. Well, I guess I do. How it became a political thing. I actually, I do because what it is is there's, there's some personalities that have strong opinions about it both on the pro side and the against side. And so unfortunately some of the politics of those personalities have stuck and made things stink from both sides. I think there are some stinky personalities on both sides from what I've seen.

Jeff Massie [00:39:12]:
But anyway, yeah, it just kind of became into a manure slinging fest and it was like there wasn't really anything talking about the technical. Yeah, yeah. The only, the only thing that maybe had merit is some people said that, you know, this, this will close up some of the security holes and some of the, some people are saying governments aren't super happy about this. But as you said, it's not the panacea. So it's not like, oh, it's now in Rust, everything's great and you know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:49]:
Yeah, yep, absolutely.

Rob Campbell [00:39:51]:
I think there's some valid points to having to maintain another language for people who don't know it. But it reminds me of a question I saw somewhere. It might have been Reddit, I don't remember where it was. The question was what is going to happen to Linux when all the old C developers are gone?

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:15]:
That's a challenging question. That is actually a question that keeps the Linux guys like, they think about that a lot. That's one of the reasons why they have some of the outreach things and they try to get people, new people into the kernel.

Rob Campbell [00:40:29]:
My answer to it was. The new C guys will take care of it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:34]:
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's true. You have to make sure that that pipeline is working the way that it's supposed to. All right.

Jeff Massie [00:40:44]:
I think they made, they've made some steps to try to ease the entryway because it used to be, it was kind of almost elite and it was. I mean, I mean, it still is, but I mean, was kind of people put up artificial walls to try to.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:59]:
You know, oh, you, you're not a developer, you gotta, you know.

Jeff Massie [00:41:03]:
And the problem is then they get high enough and nobody can make it. And, oh, maybe we better put some steps in here because we're, we're killing our youth. New person feeder.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:20]:
That's actually a real tricky thing to get the balance right because you do want some walls. You don't want just everybody, particularly as maintainers, but you don't want to have to look at everybody's code. We've got a story about that here in just a second.

Jeff Massie [00:41:37]:
Yeah, you don't want me throwing code in the kernel. Right?

Rob Campbell [00:41:40]:
Not good.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:41]:
Yeah, I mean, same. I am not at the level yet of writing code for the kernel. That would take some time to get there. Yeah, it's a delicate balance to strike to make it the right amount of difficult to start adding code to something like the kernel. Okay, so that's actually an interesting segue. I did not even plan this one, but that's a real interesting segue to this news about Nick gnome. GNOME says no more AI. No more AI.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:15]:
Specifically, in GNOME shell extensions, there's a new rule in the guidelines that says extensions must not be AI generated. And he goes on to say that it's not prohibited to use AI as a learning aid or as a development tool like code completion. Extension developers should be able to justify and explain the code they submit within reason. Submissions with large amounts of unnecessary code, inconsistent code style, imaginary API usage, comments serving as LLM prompts, or other indications of AI generated output will be rejected. And I read this at first I went, that's interesting. I wonder why they're taking that stance. You know, is it a. Is it kind of a moral stance? Is it a legal stance? And then I went and looked and no, no.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:10]:
GNOME actually reviews the code of all of those extensions before they accept them into the extension core, the extension store. And the poor guy that does it is sick and tired of looking at everybody's bad vibe coded extensions. And so he's just now saying, nope, no more. If I can tell it's Vibe coded It just gets rejected right away. That's pretty, that's pretty fair. Yeah. If you could tell it's vibe coded, you probably just need to. You need to kill it then.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:39]:
This is, this is part of also the this Week in Gnome and I've got a link to this to that as well. There are a couple of other interesting things in there. Some third party projects that they talk about and then they cover that review. Some other stuff going on in Gnome, like adaptive brightness. Working in GNOME 49 with the brightness stuff there. They've got some internships going on and an event coming. Some fun stuff there in GNOME World. And then for completeness, I've also got the link to the this Weekend plasma.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:17]:
Talking about KDE and there's a couple of interesting things there. One of the big, big ones. Let's see if I can find it. Two big ones here. There's now better support for screen mirroring under Wayland in kde. You know, that's one of those things that people have complained about with the move to Wayland that certain things don't work well. One of these things is now marked off the list and screen mirroring works again. And the other one that's really interesting is that K Screen doctor that's sort of the under the hood tool that KDE has for doing stuff with your screen screens.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:55]:
It now will let you add custom screen modes which this has been a pain to do for a long time. You used to be able to, I think you still can like boot your kernel and give it custom EDID stuff. But now you can just turn on a different screen mode and KDE will instruct the video card to output that screen mode whether the device on the other end thinks it can support it or not. Which does let you do some really interesting things like potentially overclocking a 60Hz monitor to 70Hz running at weird resolutions and. Or weird clock speeds like say 48 hertz, which you go, why would you want to display at 48Hz? Well, if you're playing 24Hz video, then you might want to display it at 48Hz. Some other really interesting things like that that, you know, you wouldn't necessarily think about all that. You might need it, but there are places and times where some of these oddball behaviors really is what you want it to do. And so have support now for that inside of kde.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:13]:
So all kinds of fun stuff going on in the desktop environments.

Rob Campbell [00:46:18]:
I'd be curious to see how bad some of these vibe codes are. That it's, that it's that big of a problem.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:25]:
But so I've seen we've gotten over in Meshtastic, we've gotten some vibe coded Vibe coded pull requests and yeah, some of them are, some of them are okay. Some of them are real special though. Like I'm trying to remember one of them in particular. The vibe coded commit. One of the things that it wanted to do was change the name of the project. The guy was like why won't you pull my commit? Oh boy, another one it was here's a new data structure and it was just the most over complicated data structure to save a certain type of data. And it's like it's going to be so much more efficient and it's like you've got the same amount of data and the same amount of ram. It's not going to be a thousand times more efficient like you think it will.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:22]:
This is just not how computers work. I don't care what your AI agent tells you. So yes, there's some weird vibe coded pull requests out there. And the problem is a couple of problems. They tend to generate lots and lots of code because you can just tell.

Rob Campbell [00:47:43]:
The like old front page websites.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:47]:
Well yeah, every time you tell the AI agent work on this problem, it generates more code and it may eventually work but you're going to have thousands and thousands of lines of code changes and then also it does some of these weird ridiculous things that the, you know, the, the type of human that you actually want working in your project would never think about doing. The, the, the AI agent has no shame.

Rob Campbell [00:48:17]:
Yeah, I, I, I mean I'd have no problems with AI helping but I guess if it's so obvious that you could tell that AI wrote it, that makes sense. And, and you know I threw in the, the front page thing. You know I, I've been, I don't do a whole lot these days but I've been doing since the late 90s, you know, pure HTML writing in you know, pico pico back then and, and notepad and I, I, I remember hating seeing somebody's front page, you know design in Microsoft front page or any of those WYSIWYGs at the time they were horrible. Like, like to, to do a little page that maybe just said hello world on it. It would have had just pages and pages of junk in them. And I guess that's kind of what this reminds me of when you say that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:13]:
I remember a place where I went to school for a while, their website. This was in the early 2000s. Their website was a Macromedia Flash thing and the entire website was one Macromedia Flash application. It was, it was not pretty. Very similar to that, just worse.

Jeff Massie [00:49:36]:
I was gonna say, I know the professional coders that vibe code that I know use it for, you know, like writing smaller functions and it just spits it, you know, like, oh, I need to read a file into this kind of data structure. And they go, okay. And then you look it over real quick and it, it's not a.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:53]:
Well, that's, that's the difference. Somebody that really knows what they're doing looks at what the AI agent spits out and understands what, what the code does. It can fit the guy, then can fix it or go back and, you know, put another prompt in and say, you did dumb here. Go fix your code. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:50:09]:
And they're, they're using it for more bite size chunks. They're not just saying, oh, program this to do this in this big thing and a complete package. It's very much a. I want you to do this one or two step part. Go. And you know, something manageable. So it's speeding up the coding process without trying to shove too much complexity into the AI.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:36]:
Yeah. Part of it also is people ask the AI to work miracles for them. They don't understand why what they're asking it to do is either not possible or not practical. And the AI does its best to do what it's asked to do because that's the way we've programmed these things. And sometimes, sometimes hilarity ensues.

Jeff Massie [00:50:55]:
We, we haven't properly defined the question. That's probably part of the problem. Another Douglas Adam reference.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Rob has got yet another. Are you only doing distro reviews today, Rob? That's all you bringing to the table. Rob's only good for distro reviews. That's the only reason we have him on the show.

Jeff Massie [00:51:19]:
So eat at Rob's table.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:21]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:51:22]:
As we wrap up the year, there's just so much we need to discuss with the distros as. All right, distros are coming out and new ones are getting ready to come in and.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:33]:
All right, we're going to let Rob talk more about distros right after this.

Rob Campbell [00:51:37]:
Hey, everybody, it's Leo laporte.

Leo Laporte [00:51:39]:
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 and to talk about the latest from Microsoft on Windows Weekly. It's Not a lot more than just Windows. I hope you'll listen to the show every Wednesday.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:56]:
Easy enough.

Leo Laporte [00:51:57]:
Just subscribe in your favorite podcast client to Windows Weekly or visit our website at Twitter TV ww. Microsoft's moving fast, but there's a way to stay ahead. That's Windows Weekly every Wednesday on Twitter.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:12]:
All right, Mr. Distro man, take it away.

Rob Campbell [00:52:16]:
All right, so Ubuntu 2604 LTS okay, it's still a few months out, like April 2026 is when we'd be expecting it, but some changes are coming and they're already making some waves. First up, I know Jonathan's already talking about Gnome. Well, let's talk about Gnome again. And in this case it's with Ubuntu. So it's going to be Gnome, but more Gnome like. So Canonical's Yaru team is refactoring the Gnome shell theme so Ubuntu stops maintaining a structurally custom style sheet and instead leans on upstream Gnome's default styling layering Ubuntu specific overrides on top of that. And you know, I personally always appreciate a more vanilla experience. In most cases at least sometimes some tweaks are nice, but you know, I, I like, I like vanilla lots of things.

Rob Campbell [00:53:18]:
So anyway, with the, with the UMA 2 specifically, the branding stays, the typography stays, the iconic orange stays, which I've never been a big fan of that but because downstream theming drift, you know, which is a thing that kind of happens out there, causes problems, you know, when you're constantly patching around upstream changes, you know, to fix little visual mismatches, they're creeping in and you end up spending community energy fixing little things like spacing and popover quirks instead of improving the overall experience. You're maybe wasting your time somewhere you shouldn't be. So going more vanilla should mean fewer weird inconsistencies and a cleaner ride and can into gnome 50 for UBA 2.26.04 now the part that is going to make the Linux community, you know, make their eyes twitch and spaces turn red and get all worked up about is telemetry. Canonical is moving toward UBA2 insights, becoming the default telemetry tool and 26.04 replacing the older UBA2 report path. It's store, it's still opt in, you know, it's still just system specific focus, but with a big behavioral change, Insights can send a report monthly instead of the old, you know, one time and you're done before after you installed it. Now it could do it every single month as it, you know, sends what your system is every single month. I guess, but, you know, but, but you can inspect the JSON locally and there's even work towards more transparency, including open sourcing the server backend that processes the data. So you know, I guess that'll make it easier for us to set up our own telemetry servers, which could be fun, huh? Anyway, even if, even if it's voluntary, anonymized and boring hardware stats.

Rob Campbell [00:55:35]:
A Phone Home Monthly isn't quite the headline Canonical wants, you know, because it's, it's, you know, it's not just about what's collected now, it's, it's about trust optics, how fast opt in telemetry turns into what else are they doing? So you know, I just find it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:56]:
Ironic that we all get excited when we get the Steam survey pop up.

Rob Campbell [00:56:01]:
Well, you know, you're counted something different in the Steam survey pop up. You're counting Linux users, which you are when you get it, versus Windows users here you're just, you're, you're voting your hardware, I guess because they want to know what hardware you have. But you know, in, you know, you know, like I said, it turns out, you know what else they do, you know, canonical, Canonical does a lot of great work, but sometimes, you know, sometimes it just feels like they don't quite read the room and understand the Linux community as a whole. You know, as these little, little things become PR mishaps kind of way too often with them, you know, really individually, my opinion, most of them really aren't that big. But there's always some optics to them that like they're just not thinking about ahead of time before they, they do something. Or maybe they do and they just don't care. But anyway, that's not the end of the Ubuntu news. There's one other, you know, final, final thing I'm going to touch on here and, and, and it could be a bummer or maybe it's nothing.

Rob Campbell [00:57:15]:
So the UBA two technical boards, current LTS approvals for 2604, well, they're missing a couple flavors. Ubuntu Mate and Ubuntu Unity are missing from that list. Meaning as of now, they're not slated to be LTS releases in 2604. Now that doesn't mean they're dead. They can still release non LTS builds, but it does mean fewer guarantees, fewer hands, a lot more fragility for smaller desktop communities. And quite possibly it really just might be a sign of things to come for these flavors of Ubatu. It's kind of tough when, when a distro or a piece of software, you know, a flavor relies on such a small group of people. And you know, we just talked about the, the Unity remix version recently.

Rob Campbell [00:58:14]:
How, how Rudra Saraswav, I think his name is, you know, he's busy doing other things with school now and isn't maintaining it. And the other guy, I don't remember his name, is looking to keep it going but needed some help. So that's kind of the thing that can happen when you, when you have a, a real small team and yeah, I don't think it looks good. I believe if I remember Mate, I think that's Popey, I think, or I could be wrong, but yeah, I don't know, I, if maybe there's some future predictions around, around these distros to be had or flavors.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:00]:
Yeah, you know, some of these desktop environments are quite niche and they almost exist. I don't know, it'd be me, but they almost exist as toys. You one could ask, do they, do they really deserve to have a flagship level release inside of Ubuntu?

Rob Campbell [00:59:21]:
I mean, Unity just got its flagship status a year or two ago. I don't know, it wasn't very long ago.

Jeff Massie [00:59:27]:
Pretty recent.

Rob Campbell [00:59:28]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:29]:
Yeah. Makes me wonder if that was the right call.

Jeff Massie [00:59:32]:
Well, there's talk in a discord where people are saying, you know, I'm not the fan of Ubuntu I used to be. And you know, some of this is they, they swim upstream too much, you know, when they, when they made mate and they got Unity and just stick with Gnome. Well, we don't like what Gnome's doing. Just go behind kde. Just stop trying to do all these offshoot things on your own and just innovate in real places, not just, well, these kind of half hearted things and then abandon them.

Rob Campbell [01:00:08]:
To be fair, it's not Ubuntu, it's not Canonical themselves creating these flavors. It's. It's individuals out there like Rudra Saraswave or like I said, Popey I think is mate. And then they get pulled in so they can use their resources.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:23]:
Right.

Jeff Massie [01:00:24]:
But the desktop wouldn't have even existed without Canonical, really. These spins wouldn't exist without Canonical going, yeah, we gotta, we're going our own way. Kind of seem all over the place lately. It's like they've lost their way and don't have a, a clear direction. Yeah, yeah, I mean now I, I would still recommend them as one of the distributions for somebody new. Just because there's so much stuff out there, it's so easy to find stuff that them and Fedora, that's the ones I say if anything's built anything's directions out there, it's going to have those two distros. It's good place to start. And then after you get your legs under you, okay, take off whatever direction.

Rob Campbell [01:01:09]:
You want even you're not using Ubin2 anymore right now. But I do want to clarify.

Jeff Massie [01:01:14]:
I have one server.

Rob Campbell [01:01:15]:
Okay, yeah, I still have it on my servers. But it, it is Alan Popey and Martin Wimperis who, who are the maintainers. I think Popey, maybe both of them used to actually be official Ubuntu employees, Canonical employees at one time, but I'm pretty sure neither of them are anymore.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:36]:
You talked Rob, about the sort of death by a thousand cuts of their missteps in PR and such and I kind of think that a couple of things. One, Canonical is a company and so they've got to think about some of those decisions a little differently than just a open source project would. But also they're so popular and so well known that basically any decision that they make, somebody is going to be. Is going to not like it in one way or another. And so there does. When you, when you get to that point trying to do like open source as a business, you have to get to the point to where you sort of. Not that you stop caring, but you grow a little bit of thick skin about somebody is going to not like this because if you spend all of your time trying to make sure that you're not going to tick off anybody in your, in your user base, you're not going to do. You're not going to be able to make any decisions at all.

Rob Campbell [01:02:33]:
But you also need to make sure you're somewhat catering to your core.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:38]:
That's true. But I think the people that are actually core to Ubuntu really don't care about the opt in the ability to opt into a monthly telemetry check.

Rob Campbell [01:02:50]:
It's probably more the people that are paying for a Ubuntu services don't care.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:57]:
Well, even normal users like I don't. I don't care. Now I may go in and turn off the telemetry, but I don't care that there's an option to check in monthly as opposed to only once after install. Like I just, I have so many other things that matter. That is just a non issue to me.

Jeff Massie [01:03:21]:
I don't care a lot of times because to me, no, I do. I opt in because I'm helping the open source project a little bit and it's just, you can see what it is and it's just like okay, it's some hardware stuff. It's not snooping my emails or something.

Rob Campbell [01:03:39]:
I agree with you. I'm usually one to be like I'm an odd Linux person as I don't really care too much about privacy. Like some, some people I know, like I, I game with them online and they're like, you're just out there everywhere. You're web, you're easy to find your websites there. Anybody could just dox. Yeah. And find you and it's like yeah, whatever. So I, so I don't think I, as far as privacy goes, I don't think I am your typical Linux user but, and I like my voice to be heard on those surveys but I just, at least traditionally these are lots of things that have been a big concern to your typical Linux user, at least the stereotypical Linux user.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:26]:
There you go.

Jeff Massie [01:04:27]:
Well, and some of that being out there is like realistically we're not as famous as a side character in a B tier cable show. It's like nobody cares. We're below small potatoes. Yeah, we're tiny tater tots.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:45]:
We're just tater tots. All right Jeff, speaking of food, Cashios is eating Arch's lunch. What's going on there?

Jeff Massie [01:04:58]:
Yeah. Now, okay, this one's going to have a lot of caveats in it so I need to preface the story about these Linux numbers. Now this is coming from the Proton database and it's totally gaming focused. So that's why you're not going to hear about enterprise focused distros such as rhel, Red Hat, Enterprise Linux. It could be in the data, but it's so low it's down in the noise. So the data isn't taking into account. This is not enterprise, it's not normal home users or if you game on non Steam platforms, this is not going to include you. If you look at the article in the show notes and you know, you'll even see that one of the distributions is Flatpak and you might wonder what's going on.

Jeff Massie [01:05:40]:
Well, when Steam is running in Flatpak it reports that the distribution is flatback and because the platform, it's platform independent, it's not like there's a single distribution that that percentage can be attributed to. So it's left in there as Flatpak. So okay, with all those caveats out of the way. Let's get on with the story. Over at Boiling Steam they have an article which shows different distributions over time and their share of the gaming segment. It starts in about 2019 and continues to present day. Now Arch is the biggest percentage share, but Cashios is in second place with 18.2% versus 15.1% respectively. If you look at the graph over time, a couple of years ago Cash EOS was almost non existent and now it's number two.

Jeff Massie [01:06:30]:
Not only is it cutting into Arch as the Arch percentage is dropping over time, it's, you know, Cashios is growing at a very fast rate. The other big distribution growth case is Bazzite not growing now, it's not growing at the rate of Cash eos, but it still has a nice growth and currently sitting at 7.9%. Now if you look at the past, at the time scale, say for just even the past three years, Mint has had a small growth, but it almost looks flat if you look at the percentages. I mean, basically you have to look at the percentages to see the growth because on the, on the scale it's like, it's pretty flat. It's number three at 12.1, so it's just kind of hanging in there. Fedora had a slow growth and it's at 9.8% while Ubuntu is losing market share at 8.3%. There's several others with small growths that are staying flat or you know, very small decline. You know, it just very minor shifts.

Jeff Massie [01:07:31]:
But in the decline, the big shift is Monjaro. It has lost a lot of gamers and it's sitting at 2.3%. You know, like a couple years ago, three years ago it had a pretty, pretty sizable chunk, but it's dropping like a rock. Popos was on a major decline for the past couple years, but the numbers now show a small growth, which I think we can explain that because they were putting a lot of time into the Cosmic desktop for a while they were, and because of that they were stuck on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based version of their operating system. So that's all there was. Now we've had to release Cosmic. They updated to Ubuntu 20, 24.04 based OS. So they, they tweak it.

Jeff Massie [01:08:21]:
It's not Ubuntu 24.04, but they, they throw in their own spin on that and we can, you can kind of just this last time chunk, I think it's the last quarter Maybe it's a month. They don't really say what it is. It's. It's got a little gross. So I think. I think cosmic or the POP OS is now coming into its own and going to start increasing again. Now I do want to point out that the article does say that, you know, people will mention Steam OS and. Oh, it's.

Jeff Massie [01:08:58]:
That's part of Arch. No, the SteamOS is not included in Arch because the SteamOS reports itself is Holoiso H O L O I S O. Now, I didn't see the numbers listed for that in the charts, but there's several bars which are smaller and don't have numbers or names to them, so I can't tell you what they were. All I can say is it was under 2.3% based on the chart. That's the lowest they had things labeled. Take a look at the article in the show notes so you can see the full graphic and make your own conclusions for everything over time. And you know, keep in mind though, there's a lot of caveats on this data and it only represents Steam Linux gamers.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:49]:
Yeah, interesting though. It's fun to see the. What is. Is that called a waterfall chart? What exactly is that kind of chart called? Do you know, Jeff? Stacked chart, stack chart. There you go.

Jeff Massie [01:10:00]:
It is stacked bar.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:01]:
It is interesting to see kind of that visualization how things grow and shrink. The most striking thing there was that how dominant ubuntu was just 5 years ago and how not dominant they are now.

Jeff Massie [01:10:16]:
48.

Rob Campbell [01:10:16]:
I wonder if those PR mishaps are actually causing some real issues in that.

Jeff Massie [01:10:24]:
You know what? I think it was honestly, for a long time Ubuntu was running really old kernels, really old library. They were trying to be enterprise. And so everybody was like, oh, the new drivers out. I can't get it on Ubuntu. I can't. So everybody was jumping to more. That's why, I think that's why Cashy's rolling so good, is because it's polished Arch and it's optimized for your hardware. And I'm already on the latest kernel and it was released what, two days, three days ago?

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:57]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:10:58]:
So you have the latest greatest all the time.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:01]:
Yeah, I mean, that's essentially what Bazzite is, but just with a Fedora base. In fact, Bazzite is quite close to Fedora. It just has like the Nvidia drivers installed by default and it gives you the option to run a. Is it the Licorice kernel? They have a custom Kernel that you can run on Bazite too.

Jeff Massie [01:11:23]:
And it was the second biggest growth.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:25]:
Yeah, it's done real well.

Rob Campbell [01:11:28]:
Yeah. With the popularity of Cashy and now with popos having their cosmic out, I'm a little torn which one to get. But now I just thought about, I know what I'm gonna get. I'm gonna get Cashy with a cosmic desktop.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:45]:
Oh yeah. If they offer that combination. Yeah, cool.

Rob Campbell [01:11:49]:
They do.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:49]:
There you go. That's the way to do it.

Jeff Massie [01:11:52]:
We also have Wizardling saying here, I'm here using Debbie Debian Happy live happily living in the past. Debian has started increasing their versioning a little faster as well. And they're better for gaming now because they. You can get the Nvidia drivers. They're not. They've kind of softened their stance on the only open source drivers. I honestly, when it's time to update my server, I might just go straight Debian and not go Kubuntu anymore.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:25]:
Yeah, might as well. All right, so I've got a bit of a security roundup. Just some stuff that I saw through the week that was interesting to me. And one of the things is Hornet. This is originally a Pharonix article based out of the Linux kernel mailing list that Blaise Basaki of Microsoft and Microsoft's Linux team have published patches adding the Hornet Linux security module, which essentially it tightens down the signing and authorization of EBPF extended Berkeley packet filter programs. Those are, those are runtime programs that get loaded from user space into kernel space and they run in that EBPF virtual machine in the kernel. It's super useful. You see some really interesting code run there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:19]:
That's where some of the Linux security vendors run their code. It's also, you started seeing some malware running there. And so the folks at Microsoft are interested in trying to ratchet that down a little bit. And then one of the other. This is just about the worst story. Like I literally face palmed when I understood what was going on here. Gogs, which, that is the Go git service. It is an alternative to GitHub, GitLab written in Go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:52]:
And there is a vulnerability that is currently actively under exploitation. There are 1400 of these. If you use a tool like Shodan, you can find about 1400 of these gogs instances exposed to the Internet. And it looks like about half of those, about 700 servers have gotten popped as a result of a CVE. Well, the thing is that the company that discovered that this bug was being actively exploited discovered it back in July and reported it to the GOGS project at that time. And it has still not been fixed and these servers are still getting, getting compromised. And I, you know, I wrote this, I wrote it up for Hackaday on my security column. And I sat there, I did the, I did the math.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:45]:
It's like July, August, September, October, November. That's been around for like six months. And so, you know, the GOGS project claims to be maintained. It claims it has a maintainer. At this point I think you just have to conclude that it is effectively not a maintained project and nobody should be using it. There are a couple of active forks that have fixed this specifically. Forjo and Gitia are the name of the two forks. And so if you are on gogs, go run over and use one of those and get rid of your gogs, get rid of your GOGS install because it's not a maintained project, effectively it's not a maintained project at this point.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:31]:
And then the other bit of big news from this week in the last couple of weeks is the REACT to Shell exploit. And this is a problem in the REACT server, which is used for a bunch of things, but it had a problem where essentially you could send data to it and get it to execute code. And so any place where that was out there exposed to the Internet, it potentially was compromised. This one was interesting because the folks at React2Shell, I think they found it, they made the announcement that there was this big RCE remote code execution vulnerability that they were going fix. But they didn't, you know, obviously they didn't put the details out there right away. And so you had a whole bunch of people that are trying to figure it out. And, and there were some vibe coded attempts. It's kind of funny, there was one, one in particular was a distro where someone had like tried to vibe code their, their way into the exploit and news news places covered it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:37]:
Like there's a known exploit available in the wild. It's like this doesn't work. This is just AI slop. Guys, come on. So there are now exploits in the wild. People are, it is under active exploitation. So you know, if you're, if you run something with REACT in it, one, you should know better than exposing it to the Internet. But two, go get that fixed.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:58]:
So that's what's going on in that world this week. Lots of fun, lots of fun stuff.

Jeff Massie [01:17:08]:
Update and stay aware. That's all you can do.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:11]:
And don't put stuff on the Internet that don't need to be there.

Rob Campbell [01:17:14]:
Sometimes it's Use a fork, I guess.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:18]:
Yeah. Don't. Don't run. Abandoned. Where? That's, that's the. Yep. All right, well, we are, we're about to hit some command line tips. We're gonna let Rob go first right after this.

Leo Laporte [01:17:31]:
Hey, everybody, it's Leo laporte. You know about Mac Break 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 Inocco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:48]:
It's an easy subscription.

Leo Laporte [01:17:50]:
Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Mac Break Weekly or visit our website, Twit TV mbw. You don't want to miss a week of Mac Break Weekly.

Rob Campbell [01:18:00]:
All right, so this week I have a really simple command line tip. But it's, it's very fitting because like I was telling Jonathan before the show, it's very cold here. Looking at. Well, you know what, I'm just going to show you the tip for those watching and I'll tell you afterwards how cold it is. So my tip is Starlet S T A R L I T. And this is a Python program. You can saw these at the Pipex. And it's real simple.

Rob Campbell [01:18:35]:
All it's going to do is. So I've already configured it and it's going to show my temperature. And as you can see here, it's well about zero degrees Fahrenheit or which for those in the metric world, that's about negative 18 degrees Celsius. And you got the sunrise when humidity, precipitation and other things. Well, a few other things. So it's a real simple way. And this uses, uses Open Weather Map, which also I was interested to learn about because so I did have to get an API key. I was going to show you how to edit this, but I guess my API key is in there.

Rob Campbell [01:19:20]:
But if you do edit, Starlet Space Dash Dash Edit. But when you first do it, you have to do dash dash setup. But anytime you want to change after dash Dash Edit, all you gotta do is put your location in there, which I put one in there. And your API key, which you have to get from Open Weather Map, which is free for a thousand API requests a month. I guess I didn't see it said a thousand free, but which is plenty for this. But I also found it interesting because I feel like I could have some other uses for this API now that I know that exists. And again, I'M not going to show you that because my API keys in there and I guess I could just delete it and start over, but heck, I'll just do it. It's a simple API key which I'm going to delete after the show.

Rob Campbell [01:20:17]:
A location units you can have disable animations and have the date time show. Can't the ASCII show or not? There's that message. If you saw that there emoji and I'm zoomed in too much. But there's also a couple, couple colors you could set and label color that's below the stitcher. That's all. That's all you're missing. Just a couple color settings that you could set things in. So really that's it.

Rob Campbell [01:20:51]:
Just starlet simple way to see the current weather in wherever you have it configured and open weather map if you want to use a weather API for some other purposes. Can anyone else hear Jonathan?

Jeff Massie [01:21:24]:
I cannot hear Jonathan.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:25]:
Hey, I'll unmute myself.

Rob Campbell [01:21:28]:
We're both just staring there like, I'm.

Jeff Massie [01:21:30]:
Like, is is my audio out?

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:33]:
This is. This is also why. This is also why you were not responding when I was poking at you and reading your key while you were going through that. I was sitting here mumbling like E54567ED.

Rob Campbell [01:21:48]:
Like I said, I'm gonna be like, yeah, nobody heard you. And then all of a sudden your lips are moving and I think both of us were thinking like, oh, it must be my audio. Jeff's not saying anything. And Jeff's like, oh, it must be my idea. Let him talk.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:01]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:22:02]:
I'm just thinking, oh man, I'm up on the next command line tip. I don't know when I'm gonna go. Hopefully he zooms the screen and I.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:10]:
Just, oh, well, yeah. Anyway, Jeff, why don't you go ahead and take it away and give us that command line tip here. I'll zoom your screen so, you know, this time.

Jeff Massie [01:22:21]:
Okay, there we go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:22]:
Everything's okay.

Jeff Massie [01:22:24]:
Now, this isn't so much of a command line tip, but rather a best practice for system admins. So, you know, while a lot of admins monitor, you know, uptime, CPU load, memory use, you know. But the article in the show notes that I have linked in there says there's a lot of failures that can be attributed to disk usage. And one of the directories which might not normally get monitored but should is the var directory. Now the var directory is where a lot of logs, database caches, spool files and run states are kept. Now log Files can grow faster than a person realizes and just say it does, then. Well, what happens if you fill up var? Well, logging stops working, you might have database failures. Some applications can become unstable and while things like SSH still works, there's no logging or access logs.

Jeff Massie [01:23:20]:
So you don't know who's coming in or out of your system. And it can also affect remote access. And there are cases when VAR fills up, you know, if you have the right circumstances, it can crash the system. So what should you do? Well, one of the first things is to use the DU command to find the biggest space hogs and figure out what needs to be removed, moved or archived to make room. You want to check the overall file system usage to make sure your drive is not overflowing. So you're not only looking for big files, but you have too many little files. Monitor, system D, journal size and limit, you know, check, check those and make sure that the log rotation is working correctly. So that's where after so so long the log file, it append, it closes, it appends a number to it and starts a new one.

Jeff Massie [01:24:09]:
The article does go on to mention that you know and check checking for deleted files which still taking up space. You think what deleted files taking up space? Well, because if a process has the file open when it was trying to get deleted, it's not fully deleted. So then you also want to check the size of your databases service files. Well to make sure things are appropriately sized and behaving and something else is clean. The package manager caches to remove things you don't need anymore. You could have a. Depending on the age of your system, you might have a lot of stuff in there that's just basically collecting dust at this point that you don't need. Finally add simple alerts to the directory and put it on a cron job to keep things all green.

Jeff Massie [01:24:55]:
Now the article in the show notes has examples of the commands used to do all the, all the things I said, you know, like DU and DF or a lot of them. But you know, we've, we've covered all that before and so it's nothing too wild and crazy. Everybody's, everybody's heard this before. So take a look at the article and just get, get your VAR under control and make sure that you're nice and stable.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:20]:
Yeah, good, good stuff. I always like ncdu the, the. I forget what it stands for. Something something Disk usage, but really, really useful interface for checking that out.

Rob Campbell [01:25:33]:
Quick follow up on my command, I was talking about one I've Deleted that key already. So you're all too late. Two it is a thousand API calls per day are free. So it's. Per day. That's, that's a lot of weather calls.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:48]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:25:48]:
And if you go over that, it's 0.0015 USDs. So less than a cent, less than a, almost a tenth of a percent of. For an API call out for that. So you'd have to be a pretty heavy user. I would think so.

Jeff Massie [01:26:05]:
So for everybody, senior key is the concern that somebody would write a script to ping that like a million times in a day.

Rob Campbell [01:26:12]:
And really, I mean I don't have. They don't have my information. So I guess the only concern would be that it would stop working.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:25]:
Yep, that's about it.

Rob Campbell [01:26:26]:
Yeah. I just don't want people to ring up my API calls in my name and tarnish my good name.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:35]:
I mean it's, it's good security hygiene. It's good, it's really good security hygiene to not let those API keys escape out into the wild. This one just happens to be one where there's not a whole lot of actual risk involved.

Rob Campbell [01:26:49]:
You know, maybe I could have like started using that commercially for some thing in the future. I don't know what. Maybe I do. And all of a sudden other people are. Yeah, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:03]:
Yeah. All right. I have got a quick command line tip. This one will be super useful for folks doing some scripting stuff. I needed to know the computer that my script or program is running on, does it actually have a good time source? Is NTP running and working? And I came up with a nice little one liner. Part of system D is Time datectl and if you run that timedatectl status, it gives you a nice little status, your local time, the universal time, the RTC time. It tells you what time zone you're in. It tells you whether your system clock is synchronized, whether the NTP service is active, and whether the local real time clock is running with the local time zone.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:51]:
For what I was looking for there, the important line is the one that has synchronized in it and different versions of TimeDatectl will. That line is slightly different, which is why in what we're doing here, we just pipe that into grep for the word synchronized because both versions of it that I found out in the wild, they both have that word synchronized in there. Then we pipe again, so that cuts it down to the one line. Then we pipe that again looking for the word yes. Because if it's not synchronized it will say no. We do a yes and then dash C with grep is a count. And so this script will give you either a output of 1, which is yes, your time clock is synchronized over NTP, or an output of 0, which means that no, it is not. So a really nifty little one liner to find out, am I running decent time with NTP or is my computer hallucinating and thinks it's back in the 1970s or the 2000-150s.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:57]:
I've seen it go both ways.

Rob Campbell [01:28:59]:
So I just ran that command and there's also a line NTP service. And mine says inactive. So it's a synchronized, yes, NTP service, inactive. Wouldn't that have to be active? Also?

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:11]:
Does your computer have good time?

Rob Campbell [01:29:14]:
Well, this is a. Yeah, it does, but I don't know why.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:20]:
I don't know how either. But apparently what it's telling you is accurate. Your time is indeed synchronized.

Jeff Massie [01:29:27]:
Yeah, at first I thought I did something wrong because I cut and paste that line and it said one. I'm like, that's it, that's it. Did I do something wrong?

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:34]:
That's what it's supposed to do.

Rob Campbell [01:29:35]:
And then you're like, yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:29:38]:
Then you described it and I'm like, oh, okay.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:41]:
So I will say that one of the things that this looks at is actually a kernel call. There is a kernel time call that has some information about whether it's been synchronized and you know what kind of a clock drift it thinks that you're looking at. And because you're running it in a virtual machine, it is very possible that the kernel knows that it has a good time that's getting pushed in from the hypervisor. So that might be why it does not is not actually running ntp but a is actually synchronized. It's doing what it's supposed to. And now you know. All right, well, it has been, it has been a blast. It has been a lot of fun, guys.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:24]:
I'm gonna let each of the guys here plug whatever they want to get the last word in on something. We'll let Rob go first.

Rob Campbell [01:30:35]:
Just usual.

Jeff Massie [01:30:40]:
Don't get too excited, Rob.

Rob Campbell [01:30:41]:
Yeah, blah, blah. No, if you want to connect with more of me, ring that bell, hit that thumb. I don't know what they say. I don't really watch all YouTube. Just go to Robert P. Campbell dot com. There's links to my LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Maston and a place to donate a copy to me. Or if you want to donate to one of the other guys, you can do that there with A little comment, and I'll make sure to get it to them.

Rob Campbell [01:31:04]:
I still. I've paid up, Jeff, already in advance for a couple, and nobody's donated, so. I guess they don't like you, Jeff. And I still. I still owe Ken.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:17]:
Yep. You need to come down to Oklahoma and buy some coffee, man.

Rob Campbell [01:31:19]:
I will sometime.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:21]:
All right, Jeff.

Jeff Massie [01:31:24]:
Nothing too much to cover. So it's Poetry Corner. My computer won't turn on, said the user. I replied. Did you do anything to abuser? I don't know what happened. Oh, wait, I lied. I knocked it over. It fell on its side.

Jeff Massie [01:31:40]:
You killed the hard drive. You date a loser. Have a great week, everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:47]:
Oh, I have memories being at college and somebody brought to me a laptop. Like, it's broken. I don't know what happened. My laptop is broken. Can you fix it for me? And we get to look and open it up, and it's like, you know, it's. It's in pieces and. Did you. Did you drop it? Yes.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:03]:
More than once? Yes. That's why it's broken.

Jeff Massie [01:32:10]:
At some point, you know, you rock. You knock the rust off the discs. It's just. It's game over.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:15]:
Yeah. Yeah. Normally you won't knock the rust. I don't. Not with hard drives. All right.

Rob Campbell [01:32:21]:
Rust is a good thing. Now, Jeff, keep up.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:24]:
Yeah, well, it is.

Jeff Massie [01:32:26]:
It's on the platters. You got to have rust in the right place, in the proper place.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:33]:
I saw a video of a guy trying to make from scratch a floppy drive, and that was one of the things that he was doing, was trying to reapply the iron oxide to the drive, to the. To the surface. It was very. It was very fast. I have to see if I can find that video. Super cool. Anyway, that is it for the show. Appreciate Rob and Jeff being here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:56]:
If anyone wants to find more of me, there is also hackaday. That's where Floss Weekly lives these days. And you are all more than welcome to come and check that out as well. That's hackaday.com floss. It will get you there. Other than that, just want to say thank you. Thank you to everybody that was watches and listens those who get us live and on the download. And we'll be back next week for another adventure with the Untitled Linux show.