Untitled Linux Show 245 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, this week we continue to cover the age verification apocalypse that may or may not be coming. Uh, EA is talking about anti-cheat for Linux. There's a reason everybody hates Ubuntu, but maybe not a good one. Firefox is previewing unintentionally Nova. Wine 11.4 is out. And Linux From Scratch number 13 has made some changes that not everybody is in love with. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Rob Campbell [00:00:28]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:33]:
This is TWiT. This is The Untitled Linux Show, episode 245, recorded Saturday, March 7th. Not a supernova. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know, as always, what that means. It is time for The Untitled Linux Show. We're going to talk about Linux hardware. We're going to geek out over it all. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:56]:
Glad you're here with us. It is not just me. We've got the whole crew, our normal guys. We got Rob, Ken, and Jeff. And we're going to have some fun today. I'm going to start by saying that right after the show, I am going to shut everything down and pack everything up because first thing tomorrow morning, I am heading out and getting on a plane and I'm going to Embedded World in Germany. And that's where I will be this next week. So when you guys, if you watch on the download, when you see this, I will be there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:25]:
So if any of our listeners are at Embedded World, come and check out the MeshTastic booth and say hello. Would love to chat. Chat with you. Other than that, we've got a full week's worth of news. We were talking to the Discord beforehand, and one of our loyal listeners said, man, it's been kind of a boring news week in Linux news. I was like, no, there's some stuff going on. At the very least, I know there's fallout from the age verification stuff, and Rob has been all over that. And we're going to let Rob take it away and go through some of the some of the various responses that we've seen to this new California law.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:02]:
Rob, what's the scoop? All right.

Rob Campbell [00:02:05]:
Well, to start off, I will not be in Embedded World this week. I will just be in bed in this world this week. So anyway, last week we talked about many of the new age verification laws popping up in places like California and potentially coming to other areas like Colorado, and I don't, I think New York happened after last week, but that's another one that's potentially coming our way this week. Let's talk about what some of the distros are saying. The theme across the board is that this is vague. It's messy. Nobody in the Linux world is excited about turning the operating system into an age-checking gatekeeper. I'll start off with System76.

Rob Campbell [00:02:56]:
You know, they've probably been maybe the most direct about this. CEO Carl Richel argues these laws are easy to work around and miss the real problem entirely. In his words, effectiveness is lost with the California and Colorado style approach. And with New York, broader proposal, liberty is lost. His point is simple. If a kid wants around an OS-level age setting, they probably can. You know, they can use a virtual machine, reinstall the OS, or find another workaround. System76's broader argument is that this becomes more about control and data sharing than actual protection.

Rob Campbell [00:03:45]:
And a quote from a blog post of his. He says, if there is any solace in, in these two laws, it's that they don't have any real restrictions. There is no actual age verification, kind of somewhat what Jonathan I think was saying last week. And he says, to go on, whoever installs the operating system or created the account simply says what age they are or what age they want to be. You know, they can lie. They will lie. They're being encouraged to lie for fear of being restricted to a nerfed internet. Um, you know, I myself, I've told my kids, and when he's like, couldn't get on something, he was like, in my opinion, what it was, he's old enough.

Rob Campbell [00:04:33]:
I'm like, just change, just change your age. Just put your age as this. Anyway, Carl's sentiment really kind of mirrors what I said last week that these laws don't work, not the way they're designed. Ubuntu's response has been much more cautious. Canonical says it is aware of the California law and is reviewing it with legal counsel. But right now, there are no concrete plans for how or even whether Ubuntu will change. This is a pretty important signal. You know, one of the biggest Linux vendors in the world, is not rushing to announce compliance.

Rob Campbell [00:05:13]:
It is basically saying, we hear this, we're studying it, but we don't have an answer yet. Fedora, also cautious, but in a slightly different way. Fedora project leader Jeff Spalata said he wanted to avoid speculation until he had a chance to sync with legal help. And later added, this has ecosystem-wide impact. You know, the big guys want legal help. Makes sense. Goes on. You know, that really gets to the heart of it.

Rob Campbell [00:05:47]:
You know, this is not just a Fedora problem or an Ubuntu problem. If the law sticks, they could ripple across distros, app stores, desktop environments, and software repositories. And, you know, there's always a slippery slope. Argument. And then there is MidnightBSD. I've never heard of this one, but they have a nice, nice, a blunt— they have the bluntest reaction of all. Instead of building a compliance system or finding ways to, you know, get around it or make it work or whatever, you know, it just says California residents are not authorized to use MidnightBSD for desktop use starting January 1st, 2027, because the project does not have the development time or a plan to deal with the law. So, eh, you guys just can't use it.

Rob Campbell [00:06:50]:
So right now, the distro world is landing in kind of three camps. The legal review, the uncertainty, or the complete open resistance. And there's probably some out there that aren't responding because it's like, yeah, whatever, it's a bunch of big nothingness. But, you know, obviously those people aren't saying anything because it's a bunch of big nothingness to them. And, well, I guess that's where some of them stand. I don't know who it is, but, you know, many, many are also just hoping the dumb law gets overturned at some point in appeals or somewhere else. And that's been a sentiment from some of them too. So, you know, they're all looking at it, all thinking about where they're going to go.

Rob Campbell [00:07:34]:
And we'll see what happens.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:37]:
Yeah, I think it's useful to keep in mind that like even worst case, these laws, I've not looked at the New York law, but the California law, it's not doing anything like you must take a picture before you can create an account, hold your ID up and take a picture. And like there's some online services where that's what you get to do. That's not the way this would work. I had another thought and it's gone.

Rob Campbell [00:08:00]:
An interesting thing about System76 also is, you know, the law potentially coming to Colorado, System76 is based in Colorado. So it may be harder for them to avoid as they could with other states potentially.

Jeff Massie [00:08:22]:
Yeah, I watched Lunduke. He said that Omarchi basically, I won't repeat it, but that distribution basically told them to go pound sand.

Ken McDonald [00:08:35]:
And I'd love to see how they're going to track everybody that's actually working from a Linux from scratch distribution.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:44]:
Yeah, I guess that's the really interesting thing. Would this apply to the kernel itself? They have a California Nexus.

Rob Campbell [00:08:53]:
The Linux kernel is not an operating system.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:57]:
No.

Ken McDonald [00:08:57]:
Anybody can add the kernel to their own.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:02]:
I know that and you know that, but there's no guarantee that a judge or a DA would understand that.

Rob Campbell [00:09:08]:
We'll all be going to H.E.R.D., I guess.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:12]:
I will just say real quick, this is the thought I had that it flew away and then it flew back. The response of, we don't have any statement on this. We are currently working on it internally with legal counsel. That is absolutely the sort of thing that you get from a corporation who knows that, you know, the moment you open your mouth and you say something before your lawyers have responded, you're going to get yourself in trouble because, you know, the corporation will be held accountable for that potentially. And so that's just, that's a very common thing. I have no comment until we hear back from legal. That's what I would say.

Rob Campbell [00:09:46]:
No comment.

Jeff Massie [00:09:48]:
Exactly.

Ken McDonald [00:09:48]:
And as an end user, all I can say is, I'm not going to give you my age. I don't want you to know how old I am.

Rob Campbell [00:09:57]:
They don't have enough numbers in there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:59]:
I was going to say, we already know, Ken, you're old. It's fine.

Jeff Massie [00:10:03]:
You're going to miss out on a lot of things.

Ken McDonald [00:10:04]:
I just put OLD. OLD.

Rob Campbell [00:10:09]:
I'm looking forward to that senior discount on Linux, though.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:12]:
Yeah, there you go. Senior discount Linux. All right, Jeff, why do we all hate Ubuntu so much?

Jeff Massie [00:10:20]:
What's the secret? Well, you know, most of the time on the show, we talk about factual articles, what's happening in the kernel, what new revision of software is out, or, you know, other factual things. This time, my first story, it's, you know, it's simply an opinion piece. And the opinion piece is on why so many Linux users love to hate on Ubuntu. Now, the author does begin with the history where the beginning, it was, you know, for a long time considered the easiest Linux to set up. And it was the first Linux that pretty much worked without too much fiddling around in the command line. You know, it lived up to its old slogan, Linux for human beings, and being simple and polished and easy to install and drivers worked and the interface felt friendly. And, you know, you could just, get on with your life, you know. And so, you know, side note by yours truly, you know, I still have it as one of the best distributions for a brand new user.

Jeff Massie [00:11:18]:
And I remember the first time I used it, I was sitting down, I had my drink and my snacks because I was used to other versions of Linux that, okay, I'm going to spend an afternoon configuring files. And I installed it and it just worked, you know. This was 6.04, I think, or maybe it was 7.04. It was, it was bad, it was back a ways. Now, you know, so the article then goes in, where did things start to fall apart? Now, the author doesn't point to a single thing, but kind of a, a few different choices. So it's kind of a conglomeration of things. Now Canonical is the parent company of Ubuntu. And so Ubuntu is both a community project and a Canonical product.

Jeff Massie [00:12:09]:
And ultimately Canonical makes the big calls. So over the years, some of those calls rub people the wrong way, such as the Amazon affiliate search results during the Unity era, uh, the closed source backend of the Snap Store, which You know, they have been opening some of that stuff up, some of the Snap stuff up, uh, choosing Snaps over Flatpaks, AppArmor over SELinux, and other decisions that they kind of felt like the not invented here syndrome. It's like Canonical just couldn't handle anything that they didn't invent, you know. Now, even though Canonical's reversed course on some of the controversial choices, you know, the distrust has been hard to shake. You know, but, you know, there's still people that say Ubuntu has settled into what some, what some people are calling boringly stable. For, you know, many people, that's exactly what they want. You know, some people just don't care about the latest thing. They just want the thing to always work.

Jeff Massie [00:13:09]:
Uh, the author does go on to say one of the biggest reasons also they got mocked today is Snaps. And, you know, he does point to some faults in Snaps, but he also points out that Snaps have improved dramatically. Startup times are better, integration is smoother, and for many apps, Snaps offer easy installation, automatic updates, and simple rollbacks. So it's not as bad as it used to be. And most importantly, the author calls out Ubuntu doesn't force you to use Snaps. You know, Flatpaks, native packages, other formats. Do what?

Rob Campbell [00:13:41]:
I said it kind of does, but I'll comment on that later.

Jeff Massie [00:13:44]:
Okay. But you're not forced. You can still get around it. The author does admit that Ubuntu isn't the perfect distribution, but you know, which one is? You can always find something to nitpick about. You know, use case dictates code need. For the final thoughts, you know, they wrap up by saying Ubuntu gets a lot of backlash because it's a visible, familiar, and you know, a lot of people started their Linux journey there and it's an easy target. But despite the memes and criticisms, Ubuntu continues to do the quiet, unglamorous work and keep the Linux ecosystem moving forward. Now, that's the author saying that.

Rob Campbell [00:14:24]:
I'm not—

Jeff Massie [00:14:25]:
my personal opinion, but I, I would vacillate a little bit on that one. Uh, it may not be perfect, may never reclaim its early days of glory, but it has— it's earned its place among the giants and still proving its value every day. And, you know, he says maybe, maybe it doesn't deserve all the hate. But take a look at the article linked in the show notes as I summarized it ton of the article and left out a lot of details. So to look for all the full points of the author and see if you agree, have a look and happy reading.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:58]:
You know, there's one thing that you didn't mention. I'm not sure I saw it in the article either. And I think it's worth pointing out is that is we Linux folks, we tend to be a hit back at the man kind of mentality. And once Ubuntu became like The man, the man. Yeah. He became the man. Then, you know, some, some percentage of us just couldn't put up with that anymore. And we had to go, we had to go be more on the edge somehow.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:25]:
And so I think like legitimately, I think that's part of it.

Rob Campbell [00:15:29]:
So also let me, let me touch on that forcing. Okay. So maybe forcing kind of isn't the right word. They definitely are tricking. When somebody does an apt install, you're expecting the native Debian-style package. And when Ubuntu redirected certain packages, I think it was Firefox or was it Chrome? It's probably both now.

Jeff Massie [00:15:56]:
I don't even know. And there's a few others, but yeah, Firefox.

Rob Campbell [00:15:59]:
So I think Firefox was the first one. And, you know, when you go and apt install, You know what? If you don't want me to get it native, supply it natively, just tell me this is not available. Would you like to install as a Snap? Don't all of a sudden install it as a Snap and then boom, I have Firefox installed as a Snap and I did app install. And you know, as far as forcing, there was even, I think it was Poppy who had an open source project called unsnap, I think it was. And I was following that. I wanted to have that as a show tip at some point, but it kind of didn't really go very far. It maybe kind of worked at the beginning, but I, and I tried it later on. It had problems.

Rob Campbell [00:16:50]:
Anyway, I think what that kind of almost tells you is somebody who worked at Ubuntu in the past for Canonical, had a hard time setting up a project to rip snaps out of it. That's pretty— I mean, okay, it's not forced. There's always a where on everything, but it's pretty heavy-handed. Yeah, pretty hard.

Jeff Massie [00:17:17]:
I would give you that they're heavily suggesting you use snaps, and it's a lot of the defaults, like the mafia.

Rob Campbell [00:17:26]:
Heavily suggest you pay your share.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:31]:
That's a nice computer you got there. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Ken McDonald [00:17:35]:
Exactly.

Jeff Massie [00:17:35]:
Those are some pretty nice knees you got.

Rob Campbell [00:17:40]:
Yeah, it's pretty close. There's always a way around everything. Like if and when they get the age verification, nobody will be forcing that because you can always get around it. It's Linux. Nothing's forced anywhere. But yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:17:53]:
Very well, and, and I'll be honest, one of the reasons I did leave Kubuntu on my gaming machine was because Firefox, it with the Snap and stuff, it started, I was running into the firewall or the internal sandboxing. Yeah, and it was like I had problems getting the hardware acceleration working, and rather than go, oh, let's, I thought You know, Rob was egging me on to try something else. So, so I jumped and I'm still here. So I've got, I've got my main server still on Kubuntu LTS. And then I've got my main system, you know, I'm doing cutting edge.

Rob Campbell [00:18:35]:
That all said, I still use Ubuntu on my servers and I still recommend it to new users all the time. Doesn't mean I don't like things about it.

Ken McDonald [00:18:43]:
Which version are you recommending to them?

Jeff Massie [00:18:48]:
The latest stable.

Rob Campbell [00:18:49]:
Oh, you mean like Kubuntu, Ubuntu?

Ken McDonald [00:18:53]:
I say it as well as the, do you recommend they go with an LTS or the latest bleeding edge?

Rob Campbell [00:19:00]:
Oh, I always recommend an LTS. I say Ubuntu. If you really like the Windows interface, do Kubuntu as it's more Windows-y by default, but they're all configurable.

Jeff Massie [00:19:12]:
I recommend the latest stable just so that they get the more up-to-date hardware drivers because I'd hate for them to load LTS and then find out the current, you know, oh, that kernel version didn't have the latest hardware.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:25]:
True. All right. Well, speaking of Windows, Ken, there's a sort of a bone thrown to Linux users that want some Windows compatibility. What's new in Wine?

Ken McDonald [00:19:38]:
Well, we can thank Bobby Borisov for writing about the Wine project releasing version 11.14— or excuse me, 11.4. Now, according to Bobby, a key update is the reimplementation of the SAX reader in the MSXML. Now, this modernizes XML parsing using Microsoft's XML technologies. Wine developers also improved audio performance by optimizing resampling in DirectSound, increasing efficiency and reducing overhead when processing audio streams. Now, Wine 11.4 also lays the groundwork for implementing CFGMGR32, what's also known as the Windows Configurations Manager API, which enables applications to interact with hardware and system settings. Wine 11.4 improves Unix timezone matching, which is going to really be handy for us that actually depend on that clock that appears in our panel on the screen. Wine 11.4 release notes also list various changes since 11.3, including updates to Lithuanian and Polish translations and resolve issues in Bluetooth testing protocols for Windows 10 64 bit— excuse me, 64-bit versions of 1507 and 8209. I'll let y'all look up to see how old those are, by the way.

Ken McDonald [00:21:17]:
Now, you can always read Bobby's article for more details, to include the, uh, links to the, uh, change notes, so you can see the date of those, uh, versions I mentioned.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:31]:
Been around for quite a few years, eh?

Ken McDonald [00:21:35]:
Yes. Well, considering Windows 10 has finally reached end of life, I would say so.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:41]:
Yep. I'm looking through the actual changelog here, trying to see if there's anything that really sticks out. Looks like just a lot of little things. Not so far, at least no huge changes have popped out at me.

Ken McDonald [00:21:55]:
No, that'll happen when they start trying to incorporate Windows 11.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:01]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:22:03]:
I just hope they don't incorporate the requirement to set up a Microsoft account.

Rob Campbell [00:22:10]:
I saw somebody post that Windows 12 is going to be based on Linux, but locked down so you won't get the benefits of Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:18]:
Yeah, I'm sure.

Ken McDonald [00:22:20]:
I'm sure. So does that mean you can build, do a Windows from scratch eventually?

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:25]:
I mean, if you're willing to run an old version of it, you can build Windows from scratch now. They released the What was it, Windows 98 source code?

Ken McDonald [00:22:33]:
95?

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:33]:
95 or 98, yeah. You can build the old stuff. All right, well, enough about Windows. Let's get back to Linux. Rob, you've got a piece here on the next version of GNOME, and we're going to jump to that right after this.

Rob Campbell [00:22:51]:
GNOME 50 is almost here, and the release candidate has now landed ahead of the full release that is planned for March 18th. That's, uh, not too far away. That means one of Linux's flagship desktops is just about ready for primetime, and this update looks focused on the kind of improvements that make the whole desktop feel more modern. And I always love a modern desktop. Some of the biggest changes are under the hood, but they are the kind that kind of matter. Mutter is bringing better NVIDIA performance. So Jeff, you'd be happy with that one. Better HDR support.

Rob Campbell [00:23:37]:
Who wouldn't be happy with that? And a new SDR native color mode. GNOME Remote Desktop now supports explicit DMA buffer synchronization and enable zero-copy Vulkan and VAAPI rendering by default. There is also HDR screen sharing support, WP Color Management V2 support, and other core improvements that continue pushing GNOME toward a more polished and capable desktop experience. And it is worth pointing out that if you want the full benefits of GNOME 50 and where GNOME 50 is heading, Wayland is a necessity. All these features like performance, HDR, you know, it's just a requirement for a modern desktop. And a lot of, uh, the most important work around display technology, graphics, and desktop responsiveness, responsiveness is happening there. And GNOME continues to build with that future in mind. They know where the future is and they're building to it.

Rob Campbell [00:24:49]:
Beyond the deeper platform changes, there are also some nice user-facing improvements. GNOME Calendar now supports arrow key navigation in month view. GNOME Software remembers its window size between restarts. GNOME Maps improves transit transitions. And Orca gets updates that should make reading long pages and following chats smoother for screen readers. There is one notable delay. Session save and restore has been pushed back to a future release. So that long-awaited feature, uh, we'll have to wait a little longer for another day.

Rob Campbell [00:25:28]:
Even so, GNOME 50 is shaping up to be a strong release, a beautiful milestone in, in their progression towards the future. And the focus here is clearly on performance, accessibility, graphics, and modern desktop capabilities. And with the final release just around the corner, GNOME 50 looks like another solid step forward for the Linux desktop and our Wayland feature.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:00]:
Does the session save and restore work on X11? Uh, I think it might.

Rob Campbell [00:26:11]:
Let's, uh, cut that out.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:16]:
This is, this is one of the, this is one of the irritations that a lot of us have with Wayland is that, uh, there are some things that are needed to make features like session save and restore, and the gatekeepers of the Wayland protocol have consistently gone no. Either no, you're not allowed to have that, or sure, we could do that, let's spend 3 years fiddling through all of the minutiae about how to make it work. And, uh, you know, there are pull requests over on the Wayland, uh, protocol that have been open for years.

Rob Campbell [00:26:48]:
I mean, who shuts down their desktop session anyway?

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:55]:
Well, the reality is that it crashes, and it'd be nice if the very things open back up after a reboot after a crash.

Ken McDonald [00:27:02]:
Okay, that's pretty rare in my experience, but Usually that's what caused the crash is what was open.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:10]:
Well, yes, because we're fiddling around doing something.

Ken McDonald [00:27:13]:
Though, just curious, this is GNOME 50 we're talking about that's going to be coming out soon. How old is GNOME actually?

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:24]:
When was the first GNOME release?

Ken McDonald [00:27:27]:
Oh, the first official initial release was March 3rd, 1999. For GNOME 1.0?

Rob Campbell [00:27:35]:
I told you, late '90s. And Ken, why did you ask the question if you already knew? How rude of you.

Ken McDonald [00:27:42]:
To lead into it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:43]:
He's like a lawyer. Never ask a question if you don't know the answer. The first thing they teach at lawyer school.

Ken McDonald [00:27:49]:
Now, the development of GNOME started back in August of 1997. So that's a long, gestation period. Is that the term to use?

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:01]:
That'll work. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:28:03]:
Well, I'm just thinking GNOME 50.

Rob Campbell [00:28:05]:
Wow.

Jeff Massie [00:28:06]:
They're about due to totally redo the interface and torque everybody off again.

Rob Campbell [00:28:11]:
I thought they did that every, you know, 10, every 5 years or so.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:15]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:28:15]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:16]:
Yep. Yep. Now, at some point, are they going to give up on this numbering scheme and go back to, you know, the next one's going to be like 6.0. And then after that'll be GNOME 6.1. Or are we stuck with the '50s?

Rob Campbell [00:28:29]:
KDE was released before GNOME was even started development. 1996, about a year before GNOME even started.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:40]:
Yep. Been around for a long time.

Jeff Massie [00:28:42]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:44]:
All right. Let's see now. Debian. Debian and AI. Ooh, Jeff, I saw this story. Interesting stuff going on here. Take it away. Tell us about it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:56]:
And then I have thoughts.

Jeff Massie [00:28:58]:
Well, this is not just AI. So this is a whole set of notes from— basically it was an update on the 5th of March from Andreas Teitel, who's the Debian project leader. And there's several topics which he posted about. It's one gigantic email. The first point, you know, was talking about Debian needing to become more diverse. And to quote Andreas, when we speak about diversity in Debian, we often focus on gender and geographic distribution. Both remain important. A project that aims to serve users worldwide should reflect different backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.

Jeff Massie [00:29:41]:
But diversity also includes generational diversity. We need contributors at different stages in life, people bringing decades of experience and people just starting their technical journeys. A healthy mix ensures continuity, fresh ideas, mentorship, and long-term sustainability. Now, I did say diversity does not happen automatically. It requires awareness, openness, and active effort. It requires us to make space for newcomers, to value different communication styles, and to assure that contributing feels possible for people in different circumstances. Now, Andrea, Andreas then tied this into retaining contributors and the need to thank them better. So he said, in Debian, a changelog entry might feel like sufficient acknowledgement for someone contributing for their first time.

Jeff Massie [00:30:35]:
However, an explicit thank you can make a real difference. Debian runs on volunteer energy, and a few words of encouragement cost a little, but they have a lasting impact. And he also then went in and gave an example where someone made some very good, uh, contributions, code, and other, other cleanups for the very first time. And that's— that made him think of better ways to try to keep those high-quality contributors because they're having problems with getting enough people to contribute. That's why they want younger people. They want, um, they're reaching out and trying to get people to stay to stay longer, keep contributing. The— he then took the discussion and moved it to AI and should those submissions be allowed. Now, he did go into a lot of details about, you know, saying AI is a rather broad term for many different tools and some that the kernel has used for some time, you know, that people think, I don't know, is that AI? But other people say, yeah, they kind of fall under AI.

Jeff Massie [00:31:38]:
So where that line is gets to be a bit fuzzy. And, you know, he talked about several people who were having the discussion on the topic and summarized how some various points they'd each brought up. And, you know, and even talked about how the tools and how code development changes over time. And, you know, not using modern tools doesn't make them go away, but instead limits the benefits of which Debian could get from those tools. And, you know, there was a lot of subtleties in when he was discussing too of, well, what, which tools, you know, how, how, how much can you use them, how, you know, he, he mentioned, you know, sometimes he uses them for translation. Does that make it bad? Does, you know, it's a hard line to draw. And he said his personal thoughts were that were based on a certain principle AI-based contributions are acceptable only if humans remain fully responsible for quality, legality, and review, which I, I, that's kind of where I fall as well. Next, thanks were given to the DFSG team, which is a team which vets new submissions and determines if a package can make it into the Debian archives.

Jeff Massie [00:32:56]:
You know, basically, does it meet all of Debian standards and license legality and they've, they've been doing a really good job. So he, he called them out a little bit that they've been chewing through a lot of backlogs that they'd had. Then they had a summary of the Debian Med sprint, which he acknowledged that the sprint was a success for the work done, but he did say that they didn't achieve the goal of engaging upstream developers and potential new contributors. You know, and all he, he said, you know, acknowledging that certain things didn't, weren't really a success, will also help with making corrections to change that in the future. And, you know, he had a few, a few suggestions on how to do that. Basically, we can't correct a mistake until we admit we have a mistake or we have a gap. Finally, Andreas said he's not going to run for the Debian project leader spot again, and he was encouraging people to step up and take the helm. He mentioned that It's hard work but rewarding, and the turnover in the position is needed to keep the project fresh and healthy.

Jeff Massie [00:34:01]:
He's very much of a, we need some new blood, and it's time for somebody else to take the helm. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes, and in that article, you will find a link to the original mailing list email. And like I said, the actual email is probably 7 times longer than the story I did here. You know, as you can guess, I left out a lot of details and points. So I encourage everyone to read, read the article linked in the show notes and then follow it and read the original to get the full understanding of what Andreas was saying.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:35]:
Yeah, I saw a, I saw a comment on this that actually quite agreed with, uh, and that is, I am annoyed that this call for age diversity is sort of couched in this, and forgive me, but this woke language because, you know, it gets old. But there is actually a need for a project to have both old and young people as a part of it. And so like the, the, the central point there is absolutely true. And it's something that people are thinking about in the kernel. People are thinking about in, uh, in various open source projects because you do need young people to take over the project for when your old people get too old and die. It's just one of the facts of life. So that, I'm glad that they are thinking about that. And that's a very real thing that every project that's been around, we were just talking about how long KDE and GNOME have been around.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:29]:
Every project that's been around for that sort of, you know, you're beginning to measure it in decades. You got to start thinking about that.

Jeff Massie [00:35:36]:
Yeah. And you got to think, you know, the younger generation is the ones coming up with the A lot of times, usage of new tools, new programming methodologies, new, you know, yeah, new dynamics that maybe the old-timers don't have, and there is a better way.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:54]:
Now stay off my lawn with your fancy AI junk.

Jeff Massie [00:35:58]:
Yell at the clouds, yell at the clouds.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:01]:
Indeed. Ah, I, I know that there's a lot that can be done with it when someone is skilled at using these tools, but Man, I'm also, I am face to face on a daily basis with the mess that it makes.

Ken McDonald [00:36:15]:
Don't give an AI to a kid.

Jeff Massie [00:36:19]:
I deal with it all the time at work. And yeah, I mean, to me, it's just a double-edged sword. And I think he really hit it when he said basically someone has to be responsible for the output because I've made it do wondrous things and speed up my workflow tremendously. But I've also had it just do really boneheaded things as well. And you just have to kind of, you know, trust but verify kind of thing, you know, double buddy check it to make sure that the output is real.

Ken McDonald [00:36:48]:
Get a second pair of eyes.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:51]:
I think, Jeff, where you and your company uses it, you've got the advantage that there's some, somebody writes the checks. For these people. And so it may not be you directly, but you can essentially go to somebody's manager and say, look, this kid is sitting me junk reports for 3 weeks in a row. Go tell him to knock it off with the AI. Whereas we have, you know, 500 pull requests come in that are, you know, basically anonymous because we've never heard of any of these people and they're all AI. And it's like, you can go out and say, stop it with the AI. And you're basically yelling at clouds. You've got some accountability and some retribution, some repercussions at a business like where you guys are at that the rest of the open source community doesn't necessarily.

Rob Campbell [00:37:44]:
You know, it's funny how I'm always the person on here saying, yay, AI, you know, and all that and arguing for it. Yet just today or yesterday, I'm on a post somewhere where somebody's like, is it even worth learning to program with AI, with AI being a thing?

Ken McDonald [00:38:04]:
Oh, especially with AI.

Rob Campbell [00:38:07]:
Well, I basically, my response was like, yes, somebody still has to be there to review and check and correct and adjust it. And then I couldn't believe how many people I had arguing with me that, oh, it can, it can correct itself. I'm like, Yeah, it doesn't mean it's always going to.

Ken McDonald [00:38:25]:
I mean, yeah, it's like asking a 5-year-old to babysit a 4-year-old.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:30]:
Yeah. You know, the, that what, that's what it is when you, when you let Rob use AI, even, even the most bullish people that I know about AI still make the point that we're not sure because AI works right now. It works really well as like an intern to junior programmer. But to really get good results out of it, you still have to have a senior programmer running it. And so guys like Randall make this point and then will ask or make the statement, I don't know how future generations will then get from everybody being beginners to like, how do you get new senior programmers if you don't have to go through that junior phase, if AI is doing all of that work for you? And like, those are the people that are bullish on this, that think that it is great. Are still wondering, how do we make this work? So I have, I'm worried about things.

Rob Campbell [00:39:25]:
Even someday, you know, I don't know, 100 years, 200 years, 500 years, whatever it is in the future, when AI can do all this all by itself, it's gonna break and somebody's going to need to be around and know how to.

Ken McDonald [00:39:41]:
And nobody will know how to fix it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:43]:
I've read that sci-fi novel. That's how the human race ends up knocking stones together to make fire again.

Rob Campbell [00:39:49]:
Yeah, exactly. And that really applies to so many things.

Ken McDonald [00:39:53]:
So it makes you wonder how many times we've actually got to the point where we had AI around. I don't know.

Jeff Massie [00:40:02]:
I guess I see it as just, you're going to have programmers that are going to learn to program, but they won't spend as much time programming and they're going to be more kind of doing code architecture. Going in and— because some of it too is complex projects. You still need somebody to go in and go, okay, you can't just say, Claude, here's this extremely complex thing, make it. You got to have somebody in there, you know, we're going to write the different modules and how they're going to interact and how, you know, and like I said, kind of reviewing and overseeing the output.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:33]:
I guess, I guess the hesitation is how does, how does a programmer develop that sense of taste You know, this is something Torvalds talks about a lot, is having good taste as a programmer. How does the programmer develop that without actually having spent the time writing the code?

Ken McDonald [00:40:47]:
And just to get to a more basic question, let's get— I'm going to go and ask, how many of y'all remember when you were in school having to learn the multiplication table, or memorize them, to be more accurate?

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:05]:
I have memories of doing multiplication tables.

Ken McDonald [00:41:08]:
Are they still having kids memorize the multiplication tables?

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:14]:
I think so.

Jeff Massie [00:41:16]:
My kids did.

Ken McDonald [00:41:19]:
Okay.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:19]:
I know my kids are working through their additions right now, but multiplication table, I think— At home. Well, yes. We're kind of oddballs here. All right, let's move towards— something else in the Debian world. But what happens when you put Debian on ARM? And we're gonna let Ken talk about Armbian, but we're gonna do it right after this.

Ken McDonald [00:41:42]:
Jonathan, this week we can thank Bobby Borisov, Marcus Nister, and George Whittaker for all writing about the latest release of Armbian 26.2. It adds support for new ARM boards and chips, including Space MIT, MusePi Pro, Redza Rock 4D, Orange Pi RV 5, 2 Orange Pi 4A, ODROID M2, Lemoda R1, Khadas Mine, Orange Pi 6 Plus. Minisforum MS-R1, Newmaker-IoT-MA35D1-A1, Spaceman Muse Book, Friendly Elec Nano Pi Zero 2, DG SVR 865 Tiny. And RadzaE24C. And if I've completely lost everyone, I do apologize. But RMBN26.2 also introduces board-level extension to mask Wayland desktop sessions. Cinnamon desktop builds for UEFI. GNOME desktop builds for stable targets, Edge branch support to community targets, support for KDE Neon desktop builds, RISC-V XFCE desktop support, and support for Linux kernel 6.18 LTS on stable targets, while the latest 6.19 kernel is now supported on the Edge branch.

Ken McDonald [00:43:45]:
According to Marcus, the RMBN devs were busy modernizing the product's infrastructure and build tools, as well as cleaning up and optimizing RMBN's codebase. According to Bobby, version 26.2 introduces a board-level extension to, as I said, mask the Wayland desktop sessions. And according to George, the release strengthens RMBM's position as one of the most versatile operating systems for single board computers. Now, as always, more details are available in Bobby, Marcus, and George's articles, and you can actually read what I was trying to say for the various boards that I was covering earlier there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:32]:
I just think it's hilarious, the alphabet soup of board names, the various crazy things that they call these, the The naming scheme of some of these guys is just hilarious.

Ken McDonald [00:44:45]:
They're actually easier to read than say.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:48]:
Yes, yes.

Jeff Massie [00:44:49]:
Do they have someone from the USB committee join them for naming?

Ken McDonald [00:44:55]:
No, I just think they were copying them.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:01]:
Uh, so, uh, the most interesting thing here to me is that they're doing KDE Neon builds for these ARM boards, uh, which is pretty interesting if you want to run up-to-date KDE code.

Rob Campbell [00:45:13]:
That is pretty—

Ken McDonald [00:45:14]:
and also, uh, being able to, uh, do that masking for the Wayland desktop sessions.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:20]:
Um, yeah, we had— I interviewed the, the Armbian guys a few months back and talked to them about what they were doing then, and just the number of boards they support is wild. You've got hundreds of them. It's crazy.

Ken McDonald [00:45:38]:
5 pages worth of names.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:41]:
Yeah, a lot. Yeah. And all of them are about as much fun as the ones that Ken just read out for us.

Rob Campbell [00:45:47]:
Depends what font you use, Ken.

Ken McDonald [00:45:52]:
The smallest font possible would get it into 5 pages.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:56]:
Oh my. Maybe the smallest legible font.

Jeff Massie [00:46:02]:
Anyway, it all makes sense in WYSIWYG.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:06]:
I don't know that I've ever ran RMB on, on anything. Um, I don't know if I have or not. I can't say for sure.

Jeff Massie [00:46:15]:
I don't think I have.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:18]:
Um, Raspberry Pi OS on a lot of devices, a lot of Raspberry Pis.

Rob Campbell [00:46:23]:
What's on the Pinebook?

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:25]:
I don't know. I don't have a Pinebook.

Jeff Massie [00:46:27]:
I do.

Rob Campbell [00:46:27]:
I have the original Pinebook.

Ken McDonald [00:46:28]:
Well, what was on it or is on it?

Rob Campbell [00:46:32]:
I don't know.

Jeff Massie [00:46:33]:
Shouldn't you be the one answering that?

Rob Campbell [00:46:35]:
I don't know what it was. It was Linux.

Ken McDonald [00:46:37]:
PineOS. It wasn't FPGA, was it?

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:44]:
No, it's not. Some Pine, they probably called it PineOS and it was probably something else with the skin on it. I don't know. That's the thing. A lot of these don't actually ship with Armbian. That's not, it tends to not be the distro that like whatever company that makes the thing will use. Something else like Arch or sometimes it's Ubuntu, sometimes it's Debian. I've seen Linux Mint before they'll ship with.

Ken McDonald [00:47:07]:
And how old in a version?

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:10]:
Yeah, usually ancient, usually an ancient kernel.

Rob Campbell [00:47:13]:
I should get my Pinebook working again.

Ken McDonald [00:47:15]:
Are they up? Are they starting to see 6.0 at least versions of the kernel coming out?

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:22]:
Well, you know, it depends on which one you're talking about. I've not bought one of these single boards for a while. I have, uh, I've moved my attention on to other embedded devices that have intrigued me recently.

Ken McDonald [00:47:35]:
I'll say it's not communicate.

Jeff Massie [00:47:37]:
Go ahead, Ken.

Ken McDonald [00:47:40]:
That communicate to other devices?

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:42]:
Well, yeah, that's where a lot of my attention has been. What were you saying, Jeff?

Jeff Massie [00:47:45]:
Oh, I was going to say I almost did a story. It's not ARM or anything or RISC, but it's the ZimaBoard 2. They got their little Home Mini server out as well.

Ken McDonald [00:47:57]:
Isn't that got an Intel in it?

Jeff Massie [00:47:59]:
Yeah, that's why I said it's not a risk or ARM. Yeah, no, all right, the small little form factor PCs are hanging there.

Ken McDonald [00:48:09]:
In other words, there's no risk at all there.

Rob Campbell [00:48:11]:
Yeah, there's no risk when you choose Intel.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:14]:
No risk. All right, Rob, what about, uh, what about risk when it comes to gaming? What are we going to do about anti-cheat?

Rob Campbell [00:48:24]:
So as a Linux gamer, one of the biggest frustrations, you know, as you and everybody except for maybe Ken knows, is not performance. You know, it's not the driver support. And as you already said, it is the anti-cheat. Often, you know, Linux players run into the same wall. The game might run. Proton might work. The hardware might be more than capable, except for in Ken's case. But the anti-cheat says no, you can't go on our online servers with Linux.

Rob Campbell [00:49:02]:
You know, and that has been one of the last major barriers really keeping Linux gamers from feeling fully equal. And that's why this new development at EA is worth keeping an eye on. So EA has posted a job listing for a senior anti-cheat engineer focused on bringing its in-house Javelin anti-cheat to Windows on ARM. Okay, that part makes sense on its own, kind of, I guess, especially with, uh, I don't know, more Windows, more ARM-based gaming hardware on the horizon.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:45]:
Um, I know people, a certain group of people very much want that to happen. I'm not convinced that it's going to, but continue on.

Rob Campbell [00:49:51]:
Yeah, but I mean, is ARM gaming on Windows really that big? I mean, even compared to Linux on ARM, because I mean, I know of way more people that have Linux on ARM systems than Windows on ARM. I mean, nobody— anyway, and there's a big, a big company called Valve that's also working on Linux on ARM and gaming. So, you know, that line, the line that should— but the line, okay, so there's that part of that. But the line of this job posting that should get Linux gamers paying attention comes later on in the listing. Where EA says the role will help chart a path for Javelin anti-cheat to support additional operating systems and hardware in the future, quote, such as Linux and Proton. So, I mean, that's kind of the big news here, but, you know, now, you know, that doesn't mean Linux support is arriving tomorrow. Uh, Windows on ARM is strangely the first priority here, um, which is dumb even, you know, as a Windows user. I think that's dumb.

Rob Campbell [00:51:03]:
Nobody's using Windows on ARM. Windows people aren't using Windows on ARM, especially not to game anyway. But, you know, it's still just a hiring at this point, not a product announcement. But it does mean that EA is at least thinking seriously enough about Linux and Proton to put it into a job description. And for Linux gamers, that matters because anti-cheat has been a big, painful sticking point in modern PC gaming. Proton and the Steam Deck have helped Linux gaming grow far beyond where it was just a few years ago, but kernel-level anti-cheat systems have still blocked some of the biggest multiplayer titles. And it's, it's been a blocker for a lot. EA itself pulled Linux and Steam Deck support for Apex Legends back in late 2024, citing security concerns around cheating on Linux.

Rob Campbell [00:52:01]:
But with the Steam Deck releasing more Linux-based gaming hardware, hopefully this year, that's the plan, you would think game developers would start to pay attention to, you know, pay a little more attention. This story suggests that at least one major publisher is starting to see the importance and, you know, look at moving forward with that. I don't know how far off it is, but, and like I always say, though, whatever is good for Linux gaming is good for the entire Linux ecosystem. So, there's no reason it can be done. EA's looking into it, so let's— I, I hope they get it done because more games you can play, the better.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:53]:
Yeah, you know, I'm, I'm trying to think through how anti-cheat would actually work on Linux, because on Windows you've got, um, you've got the Windows kernel that you know is going to kind of be in a certain state. You can run a kernel driver and then talk to that kernel driver and have a pretty good idea that, you know, something is not happening or is happening on your system. Um, with the, with a Linux anti-cheat solution, like to really, to actually make one that would, would actually work, they can't be bypassed. Yeah, that you couldn't just trivially bypass. You would almost have to be do like a secure boot system, which you could do under Linux. You can do a sec— you can do secure boot and run only signed kernel modules. That wouldn't be the worst way to go about that.

Jeff Massie [00:53:43]:
Well, they have, I don't know, it's just easy anti-cheat and BattleEye, which are two anti-cheat methods that they're able to run on Linux. It's just a lot of times game companies don't turn them on. Well, yeah, there's anti-cheat systems that all they'd have to do is flip a switch and say it's, you know, I think the argument is they're not kernel level.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:04]:
Yeah, I'm just, I'm kind of wondering like how effective are they on Linux? How easy or difficult is it to circumvent? Is it easier to circumvent one of those anti-cheat on Linux as opposed to on Windows? I don't know. It's not my area of expertise.

Jeff Massie [00:54:21]:
I'm not a cheater. I don't know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:24]:
I'm not a cheater.

Jeff Massie [00:54:27]:
There's a show title. Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:28]:
That's exactly what I was thinking.

Ken McDonald [00:54:31]:
All right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:31]:
Well, hey, let's talk about browsers then. Jeff's gonna— Jeff is gonna go Nova on us, uh, right, right after we take a quick break. Then we're going to talk about Firefox Nova right after this.

Jeff Massie [00:54:46]:
So Firefox is looking to make changes to its default look. The new design is the Nova redesign, and it, it has more curves and color than we have now. For those unaware, this is not the first time there's been an interface redesign of Firefox. In 2014, the Firefox interface was redesigned under the internal project name Australis, followed by Photon, and finally Proton in 2021. The new, the new Firefox design Mozilla is currently working on, as previously stated, is called Nova. It's not yet known which Firefox version the news— the new design will— where it will debut. Development is still in the very early stages, so that this is, uh, pre-beta. This is, you know, I'm not even sure it's to the alpha stage yet.

Jeff Massie [00:55:37]:
The link in the article has some images to show possible directions, but these are, you know, like I said, early in the process. They're most assuredly— things are going to change, and they're only mock-ups, so they're not even implemented really yet. However, it's reasonable to assume that the mock-ups reflect at least the general intended design direction. So it'll give us some cues where they're going. Now we can take from this how there's a lot, you know, they're, they're really leaning into rounded shapes. Not only are the tabs and the address bars much rounder than before, the, the top area, you know, consisting of the tab bar, navigation toolbar, you know, they form as a rounded unit, as do the sidebar launcher, the website context area, and elements on the Firefox start page. They all look like kind of like floating elements, though I don't know if they actually are, but they're kind of, you know, how they're separated a little bit, so it looks like they could be, but maybe that's simply going to be, uh, visual only. Uh, they do show vertical and horizontal tabs, but you know, something interesting it looks like they're thinking about is grouping tabs.

Jeff Massie [00:56:42]:
Now I don't know if that's even possible now, but it does show an image with a highlighted area which covers two tabs, which also correlate to split screens with two different web pages on them. Now they're in the same window though, so it's a little different than pulling them out into their own window like you can do now. So it's, it's, it's not a separate complete window, it's, it's just they split the screen. Now, you know, maybe this is— this could be just me, my own personal opinion here, But I'm not a fan of rounding, you know, and you're going to say, oh, I'm autistic or something because they said— to me, the computer screen is based on square or rectangular shape, and rounding, to me anyway, generates a lot of lost space. Now again, it's very early, so we'll see what comes out of the redesign, but I at least hope they have it opening to the public at some point for user feedback. While all the surfaces have previously been solid color colors, Mozilla is now using subtle gradients in some places within Nova. The mockups also show a noticeable tendency towards violent tones. However, it cannot be ruled out that the accent color is influenced by the theme or a user setting.

Jeff Massie [00:57:58]:
So example, on the screens, the example screens, they show kind of a mint green Firefox start page with a matching color scheme applied to the browser interface. We'll, we'll see how, you know, are they playing a lot or is that they thinking maybe that's default? I don't know. Now also interesting, Firefox has a compact mode where the interface takes up less space, and you know, it's had that for, you know, many years. However, the feature is no longer officially supported and can only be activated through a hidden option. The mockups explicitly show a compact mode and a visible setting for it, which suggests that Mozilla may officially support such a mode again in the future. You know, personally, I'm a big fan of compact modes. Again, I don't like wasted space. You know, just jam all the data in there.

Jeff Massie [00:58:49]:
So take a look at the article linked in the show notes for more details. And it also has a link to the original German blog, which covers the story. And when I say German blog, it's all in German, but the pictures are— it's got a ton of pictures in there. So you can, you can, uh, see, see a lot of the stuff they're thinking. And let us know what you think on the Discord.

Rob Campbell [00:59:13]:
So Jeff, if I'm, if I'm listening, understanding right, this, uh, Nova design, you're, you're not a big fan. So, uh, in your opinion, it's It's Nova, not Supernova.

Jeff Massie [00:59:28]:
No, it's not a Supernova. You know, I'll be honest. I don't like the lighter colors because I sometimes have a hard time seeing the difference between the gradients. So I like more vivid colors so I can easily pick things out. Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:59:48]:
Contrast.

Jeff Massie [00:59:50]:
Yeah, I need, I need more contrast. You know, the— some of the buttons being rounded isn't that big of a deal, but I, I don't like the general UI direction where a lot of stuff is taking more and more space and they're, they're getting big. I call it like a Duplo blocks interface. And for those who don't know or outside of the country, Duplo is— it's like Legos, but it's for really little kids, so they're super big and they're easy to snap together because they're monstrous.

Ken McDonald [01:00:22]:
I'll bet even after they come out with it, they'll have the option to theme your Firefox.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:28]:
Oh, I'm sure.

Jeff Massie [01:00:29]:
Oh, I'm sure. And if they bring back compact mode, then that takes care of it. It's not spreading so much space, you know, around that. That's just kind of wasted. I don't need, you know, tons of room between my buttons.

Ken McDonald [01:00:45]:
Now, it— I was reading in the, uh, blog that the compact mode is no longer officially supported, but there is a hidden option that allows you to activate it.

Jeff Massie [01:00:59]:
Yeah, I haven't turned it on because I, one, I didn't realize that it— there was the hidden option, and two, when it's unsupported, sometimes, uh, it can be a little funky. So I would like a nice officially supported compact mode.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:15]:
I gotta say, looking at this screenshot, I actually kind of like it. I do not hate this at all. I think it's cool that they're playing around with something different and it's a unique and very different look.

Jeff Massie [01:01:29]:
I don't hate it. I don't hate it. I just, want to make sure there's ways to tweak it a little better. And like I said, some of it could be theming. So if I could get the vivid colors, higher contrast, you know, squish some of those rounded corners together.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:50]:
Squish them corners. Yeah, no, I, I kind of like it.

Rob Campbell [01:01:54]:
I, uh, you know, I think we've said this before in the past that Jeff likes his corners sharp so he hurts himself or something.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:03]:
Something like that.

Ken McDonald [01:02:04]:
Yeah, he likes sharp edges.

Jeff Massie [01:02:12]:
Yes. Hey, when I'm cutting wood with my chainsaw, I don't want those rounded edges. I want good sharp teeth, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:20]:
That's true.

Jeff Massie [01:02:24]:
Um, Well, it just seems like where all the rounded corners meet up, you got a little bit of dead space in there, and everything on the computer's very rectangular and squarish, and it just kind of snaps in together.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:37]:
Yeah, I will say that that little bit of dead space can help your eyes quickly parse what you're looking at though, and particularly good UI design will take advantage of that. It will use that dead space very intentionally. To help you parse what is what.

Rob Campbell [01:02:53]:
I like, okay, so I'm looking at this now too. And it's like very rounded. Like I like rounded corners fine. But this is more like oblonged ovals or whatever. It's more than just a full corner. It's the whole side is round.

Ken McDonald [01:03:11]:
No, a tangle with oval corners.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:14]:
It's not that bad. Oh my goodness.

Rob Campbell [01:03:16]:
I'm looking at the screenshot. From the show, from the blog, from the article. And I mean, okay, right at the top, there's that tab there. Those aren't round corners. That is completely rounded on both sides of that tab where it says long page titles fade off. That is round. That's not like a corner round and a corner round. That is completely rounded side.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:43]:
Yes. Yes, Rob. Thank you. That is a round button, not a I can't take Rob anywhere.

Rob Campbell [01:03:51]:
It's too round.

Jeff Massie [01:03:53]:
I would like—

Rob Campbell [01:03:54]:
Jeff.

Jeff Massie [01:03:54]:
Yeah, I would like to mention WX Roamer who said Jeff is a sharp corner dressed guy. Thank you, thank you.

Rob Campbell [01:04:03]:
Uh, it's not bad, but it's a little too round for me too.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:06]:
I think we're, we're splicing pixels here at this point. I don't— I, I like it. I think it has a lot of potential.

Jeff Massie [01:04:14]:
I think it has potential. And these are mockups, so there's a long way to go yet.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:21]:
All right, Ken, before we drown in Firefox rounded corners, let's talk about the 13th edition of Linux from Scratch.

Ken McDonald [01:04:33]:
Well, that's what I was going to tell you about, especially since Bobby also wrote about the release of Linux From Scratch 13.0 and also Beyond Linux From Scratch, or I got to abbreviate this, BLFS 13.0. Everyone already knows that Linux From Scratch is a project that provides step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system entirely from source code. Or am I assuming too much with that statement?

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:09]:
Most of our audience knows what it is.

Ken McDonald [01:05:11]:
Now, according to Bobby, a key change in this release is that LFS 13.0 is the first version available exclusively as a systemd edition. LFS 13.0 also includes significant upgrades to core components. It features vinutils, 2.46, glibc 2.42, and 36, count 'em, 36 updated packages compared to the previous stable version. The base system now uses Linux kernel 6.18.10 LTS, ensuring the build instructions reflect recent kernel releases. Now, VLFS 13.0 provides instructions for installing a broad range of additional software, including desktop environments such as GNOME, KDE Plasma, XFCE, and LXQT. And as always, for further information, I do recommend reading Bobby's article.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:25]:
The big thing is systemd. What did it, what did Linux from Scratch use previously?

Ken McDonald [01:06:31]:
It gave you the option between systemd and systemd init.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:34]:
Sysv init is kind of bad.

Ken McDonald [01:06:41]:
Have you used that recently?

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:43]:
No, no, that's what I was just thinking about. It's been a long time.

Ken McDonald [01:06:45]:
Do you want to use that?

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:47]:
Not really, no. I remember parsing sysv init scripts and some of those were gnarly.

Ken McDonald [01:06:55]:
If you want systemd init scripts, there's always Chaos.

Jeff Massie [01:07:00]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:01]:
Wasn't there like an official, no, a semi-official fork of Linux from Scratch that was doing the systemd init?

Ken McDonald [01:07:13]:
You could probably go back to the previous version and use it to do that fork if you really wanted it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:22]:
It was, I saw another story about this and I thought it was one of the, one of the previous, one of the other guys that had worked on it was doing a fork. I can't find it now.

Jeff Massie [01:07:41]:
Well, I was just going to add in there. There is a group of people that really don't like systemd and they want to go back to system init.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:49]:
Indeed.

Rob Campbell [01:07:50]:
I know the first time I saw systemd and I was used to the old init, I was a little like, what is this? I don't understand it because I had all those nice simple scripts before. It's still scripts, but it's just more organized to be controlled more centrally better, I think now. It just took me a while to figure that out. And I think there's just other people who are taking a lot longer to figure that out. That's all.

Jeff Massie [01:08:21]:
Personally, I was never deep enough into the OS that it, you know, oh, they changed. Okay, everything still seems to work. I didn't, I didn't care about that. But, but the hard part is when you really like, oh, I like this old system, unless you have a team of people still actively developing and pushing it forward, it just kind of gets left in the dust after a while.

Rob Campbell [01:08:42]:
Like the old system, like I was way more into the guts of Linux probably back in the day then. But, you know, I think you could boot it up into init0, which would be, that was just a root startup and they had all the init levels you could boot into. And I still have that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:02]:
You still have that though. That still exists with systemd.

Jeff Massie [01:09:07]:
Does it?

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:08]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:09:08]:
I didn't know that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:09]:
I've done a boot to run level 0.

Jeff Massie [01:09:12]:
It's been so long since I have.

Ken McDonald [01:09:14]:
Finding that there's a fork from Linux from Scratch where the build method changed right around LFS 9.0. I just post the link to the GitHub for that in the show notes or in the Discord.

Rob Campbell [01:09:32]:
There's forks of everything. Doesn't mean it's going anywhere.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:37]:
No, that's true.

Ken McDonald [01:09:39]:
It's only 4 years ago since the last update.

Jeff Massie [01:09:42]:
And one contributor.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:44]:
Yeah, that's the thing about these.

Rob Campbell [01:09:46]:
That's not a real fork, Ken. That's just somebody that clicked fork on GitHub. I've done that before. It doesn't mean I'm maintaining a new fork of that.

Ken McDonald [01:09:56]:
I've got a fork of a bash file. Yeah, I think Jonathan originally created the Bash file.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:04]:
It could be.

Jeff Massie [01:10:04]:
Well, and we actually talked about this, I think, 2 weeks ago or a month ago, about how there's a lot of people that fork something or start a distro and then realize, oh, it's easy to fork it, it's hard to maintain it, and people burn out. And that's where you get these distributions that just wind up kind of dying on the vine because they it's just like, whoa, there's a lot of work every day to make this function.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:32]:
Yeah, it's a lot of work. It's easy to fork, but it's hard to maintain. Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:10:41]:
I was looking at some of the other projects that the person that did the forked LFS has. He's got another one that's muscle-lfs. Linux from Scratch using Musl as libc.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:56]:
Oh, the, the, the, oh, I forget what that stands for. It's like an embedded libc.

Ken McDonald [01:11:04]:
And then there's a Xinglei built Musl Linux from Scratch that he's got as a fork or as one of the projects he's done.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:17]:
Yeah, I'm looking to see where I saw the Linux from Scratch news to see if I could figure out, what, who it is that I saw was doing a fork of it. And boy, I just can't find it. If I find it, I'll put it in the show notes. It's a newer one than the one that you found, Ken.

Jeff Massie [01:11:38]:
But anyway, 3 and a half years old with 2 maintainers.

Ken McDonald [01:11:44]:
Something like that. But here's a good article for anybody that wants to know why you don't see more people forking Linux versus just copying another distro.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:02]:
Yeah. All right. Let's move into some command line tips. We have one more break to take. And then as soon as we get back from that, we're going to let Rob talk about WayDroid. Not sure this is quite command line or quite Linux, but we'll let him get away with it. And we'll jump to that. Right after this.

Rob Campbell [01:12:22]:
All right, so I don't know what you mean this isn't a command line or Linux. This is absolutely a Linux application that you can start with the command line. In fact, I got a command line terminal up here that, uh, I started with myself in, uh, CacheOS. So my command is Waydroid, and what Waydroid is, is it's the application to, uh, run Android in Linux. So it's not Wine, you know, where Wine is a translation layer. It's, and I don't know if it's actually an emulator or what, but you are running a full Android system. So it's an emulator of sorts, I guess. And one of the key features of this is the word Way in there, which means you have to have Waylander on it.

Rob Campbell [01:13:14]:
Sorry, guys. So anyway, Waydroid. So you— but the default install does not have the Google Play Store. So it makes it a lot harder to do a lot of things that we're used to doing, but it may be the way we want to do it in the future. But the way I did it is with the Google Play Store. And that's just because I don't know, it's just easier to get apps. So for those looking, at the bottom here, I just clicked on the application I already have running. This is WayDroid.

Rob Campbell [01:13:51]:
This is Android here. So I did put some things because it wasn't necessarily easy to get up. I had to install WayDroid and then I had to initialize it with the GApps. I guess that's Google Apps. I didn't even think about that, what that is. Basically a sudo waydroid init -s ga-pps. And that's going to install it with Google Apps and, you know, or the Google Play Store. So for those looking, I got the Google Play Store right there.

Rob Campbell [01:14:23]:
I can open that up. And then I had to do a sudo systemctl enable --now waydroid-container. And then I did a waydroid session start. And then as you saw on the screen, I did a waydroid space show-full, uh, UI. Now initially the Google App Store doesn't work. It says it's not a, um, certified Google device, which it's pretty easy to do. I'm not going to tell you the command. You'll have to look in the, in the notes.

Rob Campbell [01:14:56]:
And really I would find something online to help you with this. Um, but there is a, a command to get, uh, the Android ID out of it. It's a sudo waydroid shell SQLite command basically to pull it out of the database. And then you can go to google.com/android/uncertified and you can register that Google ID and then it's all going to work. Well, also, I also had firewall problems. I had no internet. This is even back further. So I had to go to I had to open up the firewall, which is a CacheOS.

Rob Campbell [01:15:31]:
It's a UFW firewall. But after that, I was able to get it all working. And, you know, I can look at and install whatever Android app from the Play Store I want. Well, not whatever. The first app I looked for, game I looked for, said this will not work on your device. So, There, there are limitations. I was able to install other things and play around, but that's pretty much the way. If you, if you want, need to run Android on your Linux device, WayDroid is the way.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:11]:
That's cool. Uh, that's very cool. Now, I bet it does not have like Widevine, and so DRM stuff's not going to work. So for instance, I would imagine that Netflix would not play.

Rob Campbell [01:16:21]:
Well, I don't know if I will try that, and I will post to my Mastodon and Bluesky if it works or not. So follow me there, and I'll let you find out if it works. I'll put on the Discord too.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:37]:
I was gonna say, you got to put it on Discord. I'm not following you on those other places.

Rob Campbell [01:16:40]:
You already follow me on Mastodon.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:43]:
Yeah, but I don't ever check it.

Jeff Massie [01:16:46]:
And while you guys do that, I have a mess it up. And while you guys do that, I'll just run Netflix natively on Linux.

Rob Campbell [01:16:52]:
Yeah, there's no reason to, but it's still an interesting experiment just to see because maybe there's some other program that I may want it.

Ken McDonald [01:17:01]:
It wasn't that one Android-only application that you need to run.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:07]:
There's some games that are Android only that don't have native ports. I'm thinking of one that I'm slightly addicted to. Neither here nor there. All right, Jeff is up next with, speaking of systemd, journald is part of that. And he's got a journalctl tip for us.

Jeff Massie [01:17:29]:
Yeah, and we've covered journalctl a while. You know, we've covered a couple times over the past, but this one I just covered because this week's command is something I needed. So I was noticing some errors when booting and shutting down, and the errors, it was for USB device that was having issues communicating. It gave me a USB 4 port 2 location, but running lsusb wasn't a help because it didn't match the error. It didn't give me any mapping, and I don't have a USB 4 port. And even the manual for the motherboard was no help. It didn't nothing matched, there was no, uh, hardware mapping. Well, that's when I found the journalctl -f, or you can also put journalctl --follow.

Jeff Massie [01:18:22]:
It's kind of like a tail command to follow the systemd journal, only when the log file is closed and new ones open, this one keeps going. So it's just always giving you the output. Now the follow option will only show the log entries of what the user has permissions for. So if you run it as your normal self or if you run it as root, will give you a little different output. So I ran it as root using the -f, and you know, I— you can, you can also use a vertical bar, which is the pipe option, and grep space error space -i. So then you're only getting the error messages, because sometimes you plug things in and out, you do things, it's going to give you kind of little notifications that there aren't errors, it's just telling you what's going on. So in my case, I did that and I could see the errors, and I could leave the screen up because I was getting an error about every 3 seconds or 4 seconds. Then I could plug and unplug USB devices till I was able to find the offending one and take care of the problem.

Jeff Massie [01:19:29]:
So I just thought, you know, that would be kind of a handy little tip that was very applicable to me this week.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:38]:
Yeah, very cool. Um, with, um, with journalctl, you can also do a -u and then your unit name, which brings you to a very fun command that you have to be careful with, and that is if you want to follow a particular unit, it's -fu and then the name of the unit.

Jeff Massie [01:19:59]:
You wanna explain what a unit is?

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:02]:
That's the name of a service, basically.

Ken McDonald [01:20:05]:
And you can see where we first covered it if you go back and listen to episode 51, episode 51, excuse me.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:14]:
Yeah, we've talked about journalctl quite a bit over the years, but the -f is super helpful. All right, Ken, what is MusicBrainz Picard.

Ken McDonald [01:20:24]:
Well, this week, as you mentioned, I am covering a cross-platform music tagger that I use to update the metadata for my audio files. I use it to organize my music collection. It can rename music files and sort them into a folder structure exactly as I want. You have a variety of plugins that are available to use in assisting you. You can even write your own custom custom plugin if any of the available plugins don't meet your needs. Now, MusicBrainz supports a wide range of audio formats and can also look up an entire CD for you. And let me go ahead and bring up the application so you can see what it looks like. I want to go to the About first.

Ken McDonald [01:21:15]:
This— I'm running version 2.13.3. I've got it installed as via Flatpak myself. But as you can see, I don't know if that's big enough for everybody to read, but it's got a long list of formats that it supports.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:33]:
Basically all of them.

Ken McDonald [01:21:35]:
Any type of audio format. And you've got a help, of course, that you can use to get help, view your recent activity history. A support forum that you can access. You can even report a bug that you may come across from within the application itself. Basically what you do is you take, you've got a directory tree shown over here. And as you can see, I've got a directory tree for going into my albums. I've started ripping some of my comedy albums as well as the album— I want to say it's actually a total of 5 album vinyl records that's part of this album called This Was Radio. And one of them has an audio file called Great Leaders that's about 4 minutes and 33 seconds long where you have snippets from Franklin Delano, President Roosevelt, Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, where you can hear where they're doing various speeches like President Roosevelt's first inaugural address.

Ken McDonald [01:23:08]:
And if you're looking down at the bottom, you can see that it's got tags for title, artist, album, track number, length, and comments that I've entered based on the information off of the vinyl record itself. And you've got the option of where when you do it, you can actually create new tags. I'm going to go to one that I've already done. And here you can see that there's a lot more tags that can be set up. And some of them even indicate that they've got IDs that are used within the MusicBrainz database. Now this is a cloud database that you can contribute to through this application.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:00]:
Yeah. Now, does, does MusicBrainz Picard, is it, does it let you rip, or is this just for managing tags?

Ken McDonald [01:24:08]:
Well, you can, uh, it's primarily for managing tags, but you can go in and read from the CD-ROM for getting the information. You don't actually use it to rip.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:22]:
Okay, so it's just, it's for getting your, your metadata right on your, uh, on your existing library. One of the things I saw that it did here that I thought was super cool is it uses the AcoustaID audio fingerprinting system. And so if you've got a song and you don't know what it is, it can do a lookup in a crowdsourced database of audio fingerprints and try to figure out what it is and then match it and give you all of the correct metadata for it.

Ken McDonald [01:24:49]:
That's super cool. Yes. In fact, you can even say with this one, I can do a lookup in browser. And let me go ahead and bring that tab over here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:09]:
It'll bring you right to the, right to the entry in the MusicBrainz database.

Ken McDonald [01:25:15]:
Cool. And you can even create an account for you to keep your database in. For example, I can, uh, look that up and it's going to— if I wanted to, I could log in, but—

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:39]:
and then what, mark that this is part of your library?

Ken McDonald [01:25:42]:
Yeah, cool. That way you've got a database that you can access from anywhere of what you actually have. Yeah, or what you've got entered so far, right?

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:56]:
Neat stuff. All right, um, I've got a quick tip, uh, not exactly a command line tip, although it's definitely something you work with on the command line. Uh, and this is something that I ran into this week, and that is block devices and character devices. And I had to go and refresh my memory on what exactly those are and how they're different. And these are both files, files, pseudo files that you will find down in /dev. Well, block devices, those are things like your hard drive, your CD-ROM drive, your loop, your mounted loop devices, basically anything that you could mount or that you could open with fsk or fstab. It's those sorts of things are your block devices. And technically, the way this works is your, your driver communicates with these by sending entire blocks of data back and forth.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:50]:
So it reads a block of data off the disk, it writes a block of data to the disk. And then the other kind of device that you're going to find in there, the other kind of file, is the character device. And technically speaking, you interact with those by sending and reading a character at a time. Now, that's not entirely accurate because you'll sometimes send more than— you'll write more than one character at a time, write a whole line. You can write up to 124 characters, but you still, you interact with those character files much more like they were a text file as opposed to the block device, which doesn't show up as anything like a text file at all. And so, you know, block devices, you have things like obviously hard drives, USB cameras will also show up that way, some other things. But then character devices, you have serial ports, parallel ports, sound cards. These are the three examples that are given here in this page.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:41]:
I'll also say that your, your modern GPIO drivers, those are character devices. And, um, coming from the old way that Raspberry Pi used to do it to the new way that everybody's doing GPIO, that Linux says GPIO now, I had to learn a decent bit about these character devices. Um, and so this is a it's a fairly, fairly interesting difference between these two. I think maybe next week we're going to come back and talk about system calls, because that is the sort of the third way that you interact with your system. And it does also interact with these two things, where you might write something to a block device or a character device and then make a system call to do something with it. So interesting stuff, looking around a little bit in the under-the-hood way that Linux works. So there we go. All right, that is the show.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:35]:
I'm gonna let the guys plug whatever they want to. Rob already plugged his Mastodon and Bluesky, so he's not allowed to mention those, but he can plug everything else.

Rob Campbell [01:28:45]:
Well, I never told you where to find my Mastodon and Bluesky, um, and those are on my website first, Robert, at least the easiest way, my website, robertpcampbell.com. And on there, you'll find links to my LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, and a place to donate a coffee if you like. And you know what? I'm going to give you all freebies so you don't have to get on my Mastodon this week. I installed Netflix, installed fine. And when I try to play, it's said didn't work for the device. I tried Paramount Plus, installed fine, um, everything looked like it was working, but nothing played. I don't know. I am also running that in a VM, so there could be something about, um, video acceleration.

Ken McDonald [01:29:38]:
But emulator in a VM on a hard drive within a host?

Rob Campbell [01:29:45]:
Yeah, yeah, that is what it is. So I don't know. Anyway, either way, it'd be cool if you come connect with me. I did get a game installed that is loading up right now though. And it's Battle Cats. It is a game I've played in the past. I know one of my kids likes to play it. And yeah, nobody reads that stuff.

Rob Campbell [01:30:06]:
You just click agree and hit next.

Jeff Massie [01:30:11]:
But you never saw that South Park, did you?

Ken McDonald [01:30:14]:
Okay. You just gave away your firstborn.

Rob Campbell [01:30:18]:
So yeah, anyway, yeah, come connect with me. That's how you do it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:24]:
Fun stuff. All right. And I think we'll go Ken next.

Ken McDonald [01:30:30]:
Well, I've got a link in our show notes to an article by Royne Bertelsen, where he writes about 3 mistakes that even experienced users, including myself, can and do make over time. Go ahead and read it to find out what they are.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:50]:
I see the three of them, and yes, those do hit home. I was looking at one of those in one of my systems just the other day going, where did all of this come from? All right, and Jeff?

Jeff Massie [01:31:02]:
Nothing much to plug other than, hey, I got a new bookcase. If you're on video, you can you can see I've upgraded my set. Other than that, I just have a haiku. Seeing my great fault through darkening blue windows, I begin again. Have a great week, everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:23]:
All right, appreciate you guys being here. Um, I will, I will say that if you want to follow me, there's of course Hackaday. That's where Floss Weekly is at. We're skipping a week this week because I am going to be at Embedded World. And if you happen to be around, we're in Hall 3, Booth 3-652. And if somebody is there from the show, if one of our listeners is there, you absolutely should stop by. And I think I can get you a business card, maybe some swag. I don't know if we have swag or not.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:53]:
I'm not in charge of the swag. But anyway, well, I'll be glad to say hi and would love to meet anybody there. Other than that, just want to say to everybody, Everybody listening and watching, thank you. Whether you are audio or video, whether you get us live on the download, we appreciate it. And we'll be back next week on the Untitled linuX-Show.