Untitled Linux Show 256 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:00]:
This week we're talking about big surprise, more AI showing up in more places around Linux. But then there's also the Alma Linux Entertainment Edition. Fedora is ditching Deepen, Bitwarden is making changes, Google is killing yet another product. And we talk about some new and really interesting hardware coming up too. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:35]:
This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 256, recorded Saturday, May 23: Cash Aware. Hey folks, it is Saturday and it is time to get geeky with Linux. We're going to talk about the newest stuff in hardware and software and I've got the whole crew with me today. Kind of a special weekend for me, getting ready to go off to the Ubuntu Summit. It's all I'll have to make sure and say nice things about Ubuntu and Canonical for this week and then I'll get back to normal next week after the summit.

Rob Campbell [00:01:05]:
And even special of a weekend for him, he has all three of us

Ken McDonald [00:01:09]:
close to normal as possible.

Rob Campbell [00:01:11]:
Yeah, even specialer weekend for him. He has all three of us here.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:14]:
We have all four of us all together again. It seems like it doesn't happen very often these days, but yeah, we're here, we're ready to do a show. We're going to have some fun and we're going to.

Jeff Massie [00:01:24]:
Well, it's show 256 also it's highest number that you can count with eight bits if you don't start your arrays correctly.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:32]:
But we started this show at zero, so we are now entering our 16 bit era.

Jeff Massie [00:01:38]:
This is true, but I wanted to make sure for the people that don't start their arrays at zero, they understood.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:43]:
Apparently there's some languages that do that. I don't remember which ones, but yeah, not any of the ones that I've ever worked with.

Ken McDonald [00:01:49]:
Some versions of Basic, I think. Yeah, yeah, it could be Microsoft basic,

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:55]:
maybe some of them, I don't know. Anyway, speaking of all this math stuff, there's kind of a thing going on right now with AI you guys may have heard of. Seems like everywhere you look somebody wants to put AI in something else. And yeah, it's coming to a Red Hat distro near you. It's also coming to Fedora. I saw some stories about this, we'll probably get into that too. But Rob's got the story about Red Hat first. So Rob take it away and then we will talk about it.

Rob Campbell [00:02:26]:
Yeah, so we've talked about Ubuntu going all in on AI just a few weeks ago and I'm pretty sure everybody knew it was not going to stop there. Well, now the other major enterprise Linux player is joining in too. As with everything else Linux, it seems to be canonical and Red Hat always going back and forth with each other. You know, whether it's their long term support, who's going to be the longest, who's got AI first and well now Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 along with RHEL 9.8 and one of the headline features is AI assistance at the command line. The new optional tool is called Goose, which in some ways it really reminds me of the show the Untitled Linux Show. Leo had his thoughts in his head that it remind him of the untitled Goose game and, and I don't know. Anyway, anyway, so, so I, I just feel somehow, I don't know, tied to that. But anyway, it's, it's being positioned as a command line AI assistant for power users and administrators.

Rob Campbell [00:03:43]:
It is available through the extensions repository. So this is not something being forced onto every RHEL server and yet, but, but, but it, it's still pretty clear signal from Red Hat that AI is becoming part of the Linux admin workflow. And I think we all knew this was coming. AI is already showing up in developer tools, search documentation, help desk, cloud platform security products, everywhere. It's there. The terminal. Well, it's there because, as some would say, everyone's just trying to force AI into everything, even if it doesn't need it. But the terminal was always going to be next.

Rob Campbell [00:04:27]:
Well, I say next, but there already was the Warp Terminal out there, which recently we touch on. But I, I don't think that actually became fully open sourced itself recently. The Warp Terminal, if anyone missed that story back to Red Hat. For regular, regular AI users, the idea makes sense. Instead of digging through documentation or trying to rem the exact syntax for a command you only use twice a year, you can ask the AI assistant for help. Red Hat says the goal is faster problem solving and helping administrators get answers more quickly. But there's also the obvious question, do you really want AI anywhere near a production Linux server? Well, we can all, we can always easily pop over to Jet Chat, GPT, Claude or whatever without it being built in the system. But I, I, I figure here, as long as it isn't actually also going to make changes to your systems, maybe we'll be all right.

Rob Campbell [00:05:30]:
But that is where admins need to be careful. On AI assistant, it could suggest a command explain an error point you in the right direction, but it should not replace an actual understanding of what you're actually running and doing on the system. You still, you still should have that knowledge of. Of what you're doing. It can and does make mistakes. I. I've even shared a story of my own how I blindly followed AI and it deleted one of my cloud VMs. But thankfully I have good backups.

Rob Campbell [00:06:07]:
Backup high cheat. Anyways, RHEL 10.2 and 9.8 also include plenty of normal enterprise updates, including developer tool updates, image mode improvements, bootable container work, security improvements, and preparation for post quantum cryptography, which, you know, some of us thought, you know, the, that that the quantum computer age was going to be our next big thing. And here we are with AI before quantum computers. Anyway, the bigger story is the direction. Enterprise is no longer just about being stable, boring and reliable. Red Hat is also trying to make it more interactive, more automated and more AI assisted. Some will love it, some will hate it, but we know it's here to stay. So we could either learn to take advantage of it or let someone else do it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:02]:
What I want to know is if you use AI to help you do system administration, if it is going to dive down into the needless detail and you know, the correct way to solve this problem is this 5000 line system DE initialization script that you need to run like, no, here's the one liner to do that thing.

Ken McDonald [00:07:24]:
I'll show you a way you can point it to that one liner after it installs. The 5000 liner.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:31]:
Yeah. Just today I've been working on something and trying to get the synthetic colleague to help me with it and I finally had to say, look, dude, simplify this radically. Because it had gotten to the point there was like a 500 or a thousand line source code file and it's like, we need to simplify this radically. And that seemed to work. It was like, oh, okay, well we can take this out. We don't need that. And finally, you know, it gave me just a few lines afterwards. I'm like this, this is more manageable.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:56]:
So we need.

Ken McDonald [00:07:58]:
Wonder what kind of output you'd get if you told it in one line. Give me all the commands I need for doing this.

Rob Campbell [00:08:07]:
It'd be 4,000 characters long,

Ken McDonald [00:08:11]:
but it'd be in one line, right?

Rob Campbell [00:08:13]:
Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:16]:
That's hilarious. Yeah. So there's also a bit of news around Fedora that they are doing a. I'm not sure if it's a spin. I look briefly at this, but they are Adding the AI developer Desktop objective. And so this is something that got voted on in the Fedora Council. It passed unanimously. This is something that they're doing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:40]:
And, you know, there was a bit of blowback because obviously there is a certain group of people that just really don't like AI in anything. But I think it's, I think it's inevitable. And so, like, it's, it's, it's not terribly surprising that Fedora is going to have a spin dedicated to doing AI stuff. It'll be useful for those that want to, that want to mess with it. So, you know, the real place that I would have a problem with this, both on Red Hat and on Fedora and Ubuntu and everybody else, it's like, if I don't love the idea that it's installed by default, but like, if there's no way to turn these tools off, that's when it really becomes a problem. But so long as there's a reasonable way to either opt out or turn it off or not install it to begin with, then sure, let the desktop writers, let the Ubuntu guys, let the Fedora guys experiment with this, because there's going to be some of these things that are going to work really, really well, or there's going to be a subset of users it's going to work really, really well for. And so I'm not old and crotchety enough yet to go out and yell stay off my lawn with your AI stuff. I think it'll be neat.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:51]:
And some of the things that we're already seeing where Vibe coding is sort of becoming a little bit more palatable through some different ways people are using it.

Rob Campbell [00:10:01]:
Companies are working on it, the future Linux command line. Maybe this will replace Bash, not replace, be an alternative to Bash, like Fish or whatever. It's going to be fully AI. You don't need to know CD or LS or any of them. You just type in there, go to this directory and I'll just go there and like, show me what's in here. It's natural language. That'd be interesting. I don't know if it's.

Rob Campbell [00:10:25]:
It's good, but it'd be interesting.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:28]:
Yeah, people have tried to do that before. You could absolutely do it right now with, with LLMs. They're good enough that you could, you could do like a natural language to bash interpreter, live interpreter. That would be totally doable.

Rob Campbell [00:10:41]:
You could, but to an extent, painful. Today, right now, LLMs make mistakes. So now if you're giving it a natural Language thing and just trusting that it's going to interpret it and run that command for you. It's a little risky.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:59]:
There was a comic restore story, this is from years and years ago, that there was some interpreter that had automatic spell check built in for commands and the punchline was like they were going to tape the, you know, kidnap the guy that wrote it and tape it to a chair and type in a misspelled command into his computer and it would RM RF his entire hard drive. I wish I could find the source for that because it was quite humorous. But yeah, you get the same thing. You would get these scenarios where you typoed and the AI is like, oh, you want me to change your language to Swahili?

Rob Campbell [00:11:38]:
Sure, I could do that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:40]:
Well, no, that's not what I wanted, actually.

Rob Campbell [00:11:44]:
You wanted to remove this drive. This, this folder called Drive, and it's like, oh, you want me remove. To remove your entire drive? You erase your entire driver.

Jeff Massie [00:11:54]:
Well, but there now, but it Devil's advocate, there is stuff you can do with like an agent where you, you make it really strict. Don't guess if you're not sure, don't do it. You know, verify commands before you run them or you know, things like that where you can, you can tune it so it's a little less random.

Jonathan Bennett [00:12:14]:
Yeah, absolutely. While we're, while we're all talking about AI, I guess we have another AI, at least one more AI story. But something to watch is the price of running AI tooling is set to increase dramatically. So this is something that I've been watching.

Ken McDonald [00:12:31]:
It's set to jump up that cliff balloon.

Jonathan Bennett [00:12:37]:
Yes. So specifically in GitHub, companies that are using GitHub for their AI source, there is a billing change coming the first so here in just over a week that it's going to change how things are billed. And so they have a preview. You can go in and do an export of your current usage and then import it into their new tool to be able to get a preview of how much your billing is going to be. One of the organizations I'm with, we did that. And right now we had an expensive month. We spent like $600, I think, on AI usage because we used it to do a big documentation rework and we plug that same thing in to the tool. And so if we do the same thing next month, it's going to cost over $6,000.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:24]:
I was like, we can't do that. Nope, nope. Cannot, cannot do. Wow.

Ken McDonald [00:13:29]:
Not in the budget.

Jeff Massie [00:13:30]:
Yeah, that's what's going to be the, that's going to be the tempering factor to AI is when you, you know, oh, this AI is great. Yeah. But when you actually have to pay for what it costs.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:39]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:13:40]:
It's when the bubble's gonna burst.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:42]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:13:42]:
I don't think, like I said, I call it the balloon. It's gonna get, let the air out. It's still gonna be around, but it's gonna be a little more judiciously used where it's not gonna be the fire hose AI everywhere. It's gonna be, here's where it can really help and we'll get actual value out of it and get our roi. And because it's just gonna be more expensive, venture capitalists are going to go get tired of just dumping money into these projects going, you know, we should get, we should get a return on this. It should make some money.

Rob Campbell [00:14:13]:
I, I agree. But you know, I wonder like what's, and I've always, I've kind of questioned this. Like, obviously it costs way more than they're charging, charging us right now. You know, they're front loading it and, and, and you know, trying to get everybody in on it. And then now they're gonna try to charge more what it's worth. I don't know what I was gonna say. I was gonna say that, you know, they're building all these data centers thinking it's just gonna keep growing and growing and growing, whereas all of a sudden now they're charging us what it's worth and how much is that gonna drop off?

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:50]:
Yeah, yeah. There's a real question, is that, you know, how many companies have way overbuilt their data center capability? And so it's going to be a, to some extent it will be a, you know, a bubble that bursts at least on the business side.

Rob Campbell [00:15:04]:
Yeah, I've been happy to pay chat GPT 20 bucks a month for pretty much unlimited use. And you know, I was like, yeah, it's 20 bucks, that's fine.

Ken McDonald [00:15:13]:
I think that unlimited use is going to stop.

Rob Campbell [00:15:15]:
I, I try, I tried, I've tried others and you know, I asked it like five questions like, oh, well, you need to upgrade your account. I'm like, I, I'm already paying you 20 now you want me to pay you 40amonth? Like, well, okay, let me just try this next one. This is, this one's just a little bit more. If I do it for a three month, I'll try it and then I ask like five more things. It's like, oh, you're up. Do you want to upgrade to this? I'm like, no, I. I'm just done. I'm.

Rob Campbell [00:15:40]:
I closed my account. Like, I think that was Jim. I don't know which one that was. This was very specific.

Ken McDonald [00:15:46]:
You know who I think's going to get hurt as the price goes up? Those of us that were using it for free?

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:55]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Campbell [00:15:57]:
I think we'll just have to. I think that's going to be a reason to move it more local.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:03]:
I've seen some people saying, suggesting that, and I think that may be the case. As things get more expensive, it's going to be more and more interesting to run on your local hardware.

Jeff Massie [00:16:13]:
Yeah, well, that's where you get the little agents that they don't need this monster pool of tokens with all knowledge that they can funnel into them. When you're like, oh, I got this programming one and it's specifically for Rust, for example. Okay, we feed it all the Rust stuff, but we don't need all the other, you know, it doesn't need to know about the Roman Empire, you know, it only works with Rust.

Ken McDonald [00:16:38]:
You know, it sounds like it's going to start getting painful then.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:41]:
Yep.

Rob Campbell [00:16:42]:
I think my AI tip, my AI tip for people right now. You know, if you're not a heavy user that can afford to pay a whole bunch, get in there now, use as much as possible. Get your use out of it, because you may not be able to afford in the future.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:55]:
Rob says get addicted now while it's cheap. All right, Jeff, what about the kernel? What are they doing in kernel land? Are they addicted to AI over there?

Jeff Massie [00:17:06]:
Yeah, somewhat. So we've talked a ton about AI and the kernel, and one of the things I think most of us agreed on for the kernel was that AI can be a useful tool when used properly. That's the big key there, properly. Linus Torvalds has told us more about his thoughts on, you know, on this, which coincide with the Release of kernel 7.4, RC4 or 7 should be 2. Man, my fingers got fat. When he announced this release, he took a little time to add a few thoughts about AI and his role finding security issues. So a lot of the problems they're seeing right now are duplicated bugs as people use AI, especially LLM models and hammer away at the code, the kernel code. They're also finding things which have already been fixed, or it could be really old drivers and other old code which doesn't apply to users in the current year anymore.

Jeff Massie [00:18:06]:
They're not real good about filtering and organizing this Stuff. Now this is not the first time that Linus has said anything. A few months ago we covered where he posted his quote, AI slot. The AI slop issue is not going to get fixed with documentation, end quote. So his thoughts on that were, you know, it's going to take more than just documentation to use AI, get people to use AI correctly. But later on though, there was a document released which covers responsible use of AI in the kernel. Now here is what Linus had to say here just recently and he kind of talked more about it. He says this is a quote from him.

Jeff Massie [00:18:54]:
Some of the documentation updates might be worth highlighting. The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools. People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying that was already fixed a week, a month ago and pointing to the public discussion, which is all entirely pointless.

Ken McDonald [00:19:23]:
Churn.

Jeff Massie [00:19:23]:
And we're making it clear that AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret. And, and treating them like some pri, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved. And it only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports. So meaning there, if I have a piece of the kernel, Rob has a piece of kernel, Jonathan, Ken each have a piece of kernel. If we get a report sent to one of us because we're focused on our little corner of the kernel, Rob can't see that a bug he's got that's identical, you know, that we've got duplications going. So that's kind of what he means there. He said. Now Linus goes on to say AI tools are great, but only if they actually help rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make believe work.

Jeff Massie [00:20:18]:
Feel free to use them, but use them a way that's productive and makes for a better experience. The documentation may be a little less blunt than I am, but that's the core gist of it. So just to make it really clear, if you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too. If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch as well and add some real value to go on top of what the AI did. Don't be the drive by quote, send a random report with no real understanding quote kind of person. Okay, now, yeah, and I agree with that. So looking at the comments, there's a lot of hate for the AI stuff. But you know, a Lot get the issue is just people who throw code in an LLM, find an issue and send it off.

Jeff Massie [00:21:13]:
They don't do any research or work with the maintainer at all. They're not, you know, they're not doing their due diligence and I'm sure most are well meaning. But a lot are also looking to say hey, I've fixed kernel bugs on their resume, all without ever really learning to code or at least not to the level needed for the kernel. And I'm sure they're going to, you know, and for the kernel developers, I'm sure they're going to figure this out and maybe put in a more single entry point for the bugs so they can maybe have their own AI filter through it so they can decide what is real, what's fluff or duplication. Well take a look at the article linked in the show notes for more details and links to the mailing list post. And remember kids, only you can prevent AI slop.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:02]:
Yeah, one of the real interesting observations that Torvald's made, I've seen this in other places too is there's not. People are not finding things in an isolated way but instead and an update is happening. You know, a new AI model is coming out and then that model is suddenly good enough to find the new vulnerabilities. I think that's a pretty interesting change. It's different than it's been for the longest time where it was, you know, whoever it was the cleverest was the one that could find the vulnerabilities.

Rob Campbell [00:22:35]:
You know I, I did post about this exact story earlier in the week on social media. I mean essentially what I said was this isn't an AI issue but an issue with people using AI. And you know, additionally you kind of mentioned it but you know, maybe it's kind of a somewhat of a. Or a. Contributes to it. Contributes to it. You know, how bugs are managed through a mailing list rather than like modern systems like GitHub. And you know, you kind of said maybe they could use AI to filter through them.

Rob Campbell [00:23:07]:
I think, you know, once our systems mature to handle this, it's, it's actually going to be a huge benefit, you know, once they're able to filter out and duplications. I, I think, you know, if the good guys don't use AI to stay ahead, the bad guys are going to use it to get ahead and you know, things like are going to, I

Ken McDonald [00:23:24]:
thought they were already using it.

Rob Campbell [00:23:26]:
We are using it, but very little.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:28]:
So there was actually Google had a big Story about how they had found, they had found AI use in some piece of malware. And it's like, well, I mean, of course, but it, that's just now beginning.

Rob Campbell [00:23:39]:
Well, yeah, and, and I mean they're using it, I said to get ahead, but to get ahead. You know, if we're, if, if we're using AI to, to stay up with them, at least nobody's getting ahead. You know, they're just kind of staying like this. But if one of them stops is just going to keep going up. You know, things like Anthropics, Mythos and, and now Google's code mender. It's, it's kind of here and you know, we can't really just ignore it. We kind of have to learn to live with it. You know, we, we all miss the good old days, but you know, we live, we, we live here where we are.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:12]:
So we all miss the good old days.

Jeff Massie [00:24:15]:
Well, and you know, one, one advantage though too is you, you know, I know people are going to say, well, you know, Microsoft, they're running, you know, LLMs on their, their code as well. But the difference with the Linux kernel, you probably have thousands of people hammering away at various parts of it, looking at different, with different models, different. They're doing such a thorough scrubbing versus what just a company can do themselves that. Yeah, we see a lot of stuff now, but it's going to get to the point where it's going to get really solid. That's, that's my belief anyway.

Ken McDonald [00:24:50]:
That's the advantage to open source. Everybody can pick it apart.

Jeff Massie [00:24:54]:
Right? Yeah, and, and I agree with Linus. I mean it's, you know, it's great, but it's the people or even what Rob said, you know, because, you know, you might have the best fry air fryer in the world, but it doesn't mean you can't burn your french fries if you don't know what you're doing.

Rob Campbell [00:25:09]:
It's fair.

Ken McDonald [00:25:11]:
You don't walk away from it, that's for sure.

Jeff Massie [00:25:13]:
No, yeah, I mean it's, it, there's like anything, if you don't use it correctly, you know, it's not going to give you good results.

Rob Campbell [00:25:22]:
I don't know if you're talking about AI or the air fryer, but I'm not going to stand there in my air fryer for as long as it takes to cook my fries. I'm going to walk away from it.

Ken McDonald [00:25:31]:
Just like with the AI, you're going to occasionally check on it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:35]:
Don't walk too far away from it. I think maybe that's the.

Jeff Massie [00:25:39]:
Use it, use it responsively and appropriately.

Rob Campbell [00:25:43]:
I'm not going to put the fries in there and go to the store, I guess.

Ken McDonald [00:25:45]:
Yeah, that's not a good idea.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:49]:
This does bring to mind another conversation I had with someone. This is specifically about GitHub and some of the problems that we are seeing with the AI stuff on GitHub, particularly because it's where you interact with people. And Buddy made the comment that GitHub is a social network and Microsoft has very much resisted treating it like a social network, but in reality that's what it is. It's a social network for sharing code, but it is still a social network with all of the problems that you get from social networking. And so he was making the comment there that Microsoft really needed to step it up and give us better tools for controlling like spam and deleting things permanently. It's really, really difficult to permanently delete like a pull request or bug report on GitHub. I think the only way to do it is to send in an email and contact GitHub and be like, for a reason, XYZ, this needs to get permanently deleted. And it's like, no, no, this is a, this is essentially social media.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:53]:
And so we need those tools, the same tools that you need to run a Discord server or to run a Facebook account. You basically need the Same Things on GitHub to be able to do it. Success.

Rob Campbell [00:27:04]:
You know, quick little tangent, tangent story about going to the store when you're cooking something. I did start some hard boiled eggs on fire once because I put them on and I just forgot about it. Went to the store, came back, my smoke alarm was going off and I had the eggs kind of blew up and were sitting on top of my stove and on fire. Just a little fire.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:26]:
I was gonna say if you, if you've not figured this out, do not microwave eggs. Not the way to cook them.

Jeff Massie [00:27:32]:
In the shell anyway.

Rob Campbell [00:27:33]:
In the shell.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:34]:
Correct.

Rob Campbell [00:27:34]:
Okay.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:36]:
All right, let's move on from the untitled cooking show. Well, we're going to talk about Alma Linux and entertainment, but we are first going to take a quick break and so we'll be right back. Let's get Ken to tell us about what's new in Alma Linux And Jonathan,

Ken McDonald [00:27:55]:
this week Marcus Nixter and Michael Larabel wrote about almalinux introducing a new version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux derived Linux operating system built specifically for media and entertainment use cases. Now this is really intriguing me. Michael is interested in what the Almalinux OS foundation come up with and how it differentiates from the main almalinux builds as well as against other Linux distros. According to Marcus, the Almalinux OS foundation will host almalinux day on July 18, 2026. It's going to be a one day free technical event for enterprise Linux and visual effects professionals at which the ALMA Linux OS foundation plans to unveil a new Almalinux Edition built for studios. It will leverage the almalinux Creative Installer to easily deploy creative apps on Almalinux. Now the Almalinux Creative Installer is a community built one click tool that drops over 30 professional creative apps onto Almalinux without a single terminal command line. What's the fun in that? These apps include Gimp, Krita, Inkscape, Blender, freecad, davinci, Resolve, kdenlive, Obs, Ardor and Audacity.

Ken McDonald [00:29:38]:
Now it is built by kernelchief, supported by the Almalinux Media and Entertainment Special Interest Group, and aimed at freelancers, indie studios and students who need their pipelines to work. If you want more details about ALMA Linux Day, I do recommend reading Marcus and Michael's articles for all those details as well as some of the links that give you a lot of good information.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:07]:
You know, I saw this headline and I didn't take time to dive into it and I imagined something totally different. I was thinking about because I'm about to fly. So I was thinking about that like the seat back entertainment computers and every once in a while you see when those reboot they're running Linux. And so I was thinking that Alma Linux and their Entertainment Edition, surely it was. It was for like that. Like the, you know, the head units and cars and the seatback computers and airlines.

Ken McDonald [00:30:32]:
Who knows, it could be.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:36]:
Yeah, I guess. I mean I'm sure some of those things do run on almalinux, but yeah, not what this is about. This is more like your Studio edition, Ken.

Rob Campbell [00:30:45]:
Yep, man.

Ken McDonald [00:30:48]:
So I'll have to definitely give it its spin when it comes out.

Rob Campbell [00:30:54]:
We need like a Linux version of like CarPlay or Android Auto. You know, you got the Android Auto for Android, CarPlay for Apple and you need one for Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:04]:
So it's interesting.

Ken McDonald [00:31:06]:
There is one, isn't it?

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:07]:
Some of those cars. Have I told you guys the story of my 24 hours of owning a Miata?

Ken McDonald [00:31:15]:
I vaguely remember it, but let's hear it again.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:18]:
Back a few years ago. I'll give you the very short version because we need to get moving. Back a few years ago I had some Money coming in and I didn't have the money yet, but I knew it was coming, had a contract signed and in my youth and infinite wisdom I decided I was going to go and buy a Miata, which I'm like 6 foot 4 if you don't know. So it just not a great fit. Anyway, I went and I bought a Miata, got it on credit and drove it home, drove it to my first work stop for the day, really enjoyed it. And Keith, no, it's not a midlife crisis. I've always wanted a fun car. And then I got the call from the guy at the auto dealerships like well, we tried to get your loan and we couldn't verify your income and so I had to drive it back later that day and give it back.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:05]:
So I owned a miata for about 24 hours. Hours. But that Miata it is the head unit is a Linux machine. And in fact it was fairly well known that you could just take a USB keyboard and plug it into one of the USB slots and hit like control alt F1 and you get a terminal.

Rob Campbell [00:32:23]:
Is this really the whole reason why you got it? Just because of that?

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:29]:
Maybe, yes.

Rob Campbell [00:32:32]:
That sounds like a good reason.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:34]:
I mean being able to hack Linux on your car is pretty cool. No wizardling. So it was, I believe it was white or like a cream colored. Don't buy red sports cars. You get more tickets in a red sports car. Anyway, let's move on. This is not, this is not an auto show. We're talking about Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:54]:
Let's talk Deepen and it's upcoming demise. Rob, what's up with Deepen?

Rob Campbell [00:33:01]:
You know. Quick comment. We've talked about a lot. We've talked about cooking, we've talked about math, we talked about autos. Now let's get back to Linux with how Fedora is officially pulling the plug on Deepin on the Deepin desktop environment. Not actually one we've talked about very much, but Deepin has always been one of those Linux desktops that looked really polished. It had a very modern clean design for people who wanted Linux to feel a little more like a slick computer operating system. Deepin had a lot of appeal.

Rob Campbell [00:33:35]:
But Fedora's engineering steering committee has now voted to retire all Deepin related packages from Fedora's repositories. And this was not just a random cleanup of old software nobody was using. Funny. Right before the story came out, I saw someone on social media ask how come I haven't heard anything about Deepin for a while? Is it still being maintained and, and I said, it's still there. Like the next day the story dropped. But anyway, the reason why, you know, this was a mix of security concerns, broken packages, and maintainers who were no longer keeping up with the work. So I guess it kind of wasn't there. The story really started last year with OpenSUSE.

Rob Campbell [00:34:22]:
Their security team reviewed Deepen and found some serious problems, including unsafe authentication behavior and and debus interface issues in some Deepin components. After that, Fedora started looking at its own Deepin packages and asked a pretty obvious question. If opetsuse found all these problems, what does that mean for us here at Fedora? And the answer was not great. According to its foss, Fedora had been shipping these packages without a meaningful security review. On top of that, the packages were already falling apart from maintenance state. From a maintenance standpoint, Core Depot packages were failing to build across Fedora 42, 43 and 44. The DeepID desktop had already been removed from from Fedora spins because some of the essential pieces simply wouldn't compile. And then there was the maintainer problem.

Rob Campbell [00:35:24]:
The Deepin desktop inside Fedora had lost many of its original contributors over time. One of the remaining people touching the packages reportedly was not responding to bug reports, direct emails, or maintainer pings. In some cases, when Fedora's automated process orphaned broken packages, they were simply reclaimed without actually being fixed. So the Fedora Engineer Engineering Steering Committee finally drew a line. The committee voted to retire the Deepen packages package set, and Fedora release engineering was told not to bring them back unless they go through a a fresh review first. Linux distributions are built on trust. If somebody is in the official repositories, users often just assume it has at least some level of review, maintenance and accountability behind it. When a desktop environment has unresolved security concerns, build failures, and no responsive maintainers, it probably does not belong in a major distribution repo.

Rob Campbell [00:36:39]:
That doesn't necessarily mean deep and is gone forever from Fedora. If a new maintainer steps up and the packages go through review again, it could come back someday. But for now, Fedora is saying polished looks just aren't good enough. It got me on the show. But anyway, if the code is not maintained, does not build, and has unresolved security questions, it is out. And in the Linux world, that's probably exactly how it should work.

Ken McDonald [00:37:11]:
Yeah,

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:15]:
it's kind of inevitable for most of these pieces of software that there's a lifetime to them and eventually that lifetime ends. I have trouble imagining when we're going to have the death of kde, but at the same time it's eventually going to happen.

Jeff Massie [00:37:32]:
Well, it's for software that hits a critical, because you either hit a critical mass and you can kind of keep it going or you have a few maintainers and then after a while they're like, man, this is a lot of work and I'm just kind of tired of it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:47]:
Yeah. Deepen was always kind of a niche desktop environment, wasn't it?

Rob Campbell [00:37:51]:
Yeah. And there was other concerns, at least things that people were concerned about whether or not they were real or not, because it is a Chinese based maintained desktop environment. So some people had concerns about the supply, supply chain, potential issues there. You know, I don't know if there's ever anything actually there or if it's just people, you know, being concerned, like, oh, it's made in China, I'm afraid.

Ken McDonald [00:38:27]:
Covered when OpenSUSE reported security issues with Deepin.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:34]:
I mean, it's all open source. Point the robot at it and ask if there's anything weird in there.

Jeff Massie [00:38:38]:
Yeah, but I think this is, this is kind of also something too. And we've talked about other distributions that show up and then kind of go away. And when someone says, I'll just fork it. It's a lot of work to maintain a major project, a distribution or a desktop environment or something like, you know, if you got a little widget and all it does is makes a little stick figure dance on your screen. Okay, it's not that bad. But I mean something like a desktop where you have multiple integral pieces or something like, you know, complex software, it's, it's a big deal. It's just, you know, just fork. It turns into a full time job and if you're not ready for it.

Ken McDonald [00:39:19]:
Yeah, but you got to update that widget to support Wayland now.

Rob Campbell [00:39:22]:
Yeah, I mean, look how long it took Cinnamon to do it. I mean, they still haven't done it yet. But speaking of a fork of a

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:29]:
desktop, I wonder if that's going to be the death of a few of these different desktop environments in the next few years. All right, speaking of things changing and people being worried, Jeff, stuff's going on over at Bitwarden.

Jeff Massie [00:39:44]:
Yes, it is. Now this article I'm going to talk about is about Bit warden. And I want to say right off the bat that this is somewhat of an editorial, but it is based on facts. So while on the surface there isn't anything to panic about, I think the author does make a good point that we need to keep an eye on things and be aware what I'M referring to is, you know, Bitwarden originally became widely adopted as a Password manager after LastPass's problems. I won't go into LastPass, but let's just say it fell from grace and Bit Warden was there to catch several of us, you know, who fell fell away from LastPass. There's others, but you know, Bit Warden grew quite a bit during this time along with others. Now In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandall moved from the CEO role to an advisory position. The company did not publicly announce the change, but but the transition was visible on Crandall's LinkedIn profile.

Jeff Massie [00:40:48]:
Now Michael Sullivan succeeded Crandall as CEO. Sullivan's prior roles include CEO of Aquila Insight Software, and his background emphasizes mergers and acquisitions and work with private equity firms such as HG, Vista Equity Partners and TA Associates. Now Bitwarden's CFO also changed. Steven Morrison left in April and Michael Shenkman, formerly of Invision, replaced him. Again, these executive changes were not officially announced by the company. They just kind of happened for, you know, people that were paying attention noticed. Now Bitwarden's product page previously labeled the Personal plan as always free. That wording was removed mid April and restored sometime after May 14.

Jeff Massie [00:41:41]:
A Bitwarden employee on the R Bitwarden subreddit attributed the removal to a marketing oversight. Now Bitwarden's stated company values, summarized by the acronym grit, were historically defined as Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion and Transparency. The values were still listed that way on March 14, 2026, but were later changed to Gratitude, Responsibility, innovation and trust. Now 2020 a 2022 blog post by Michael Crandall that originally explained the GRIT values was edited to reflect the new wording, but the explanation explanatory paragraph further down in the same post still describes inclusion and transparency, indicating an incomplete edit. CEO Michael Sullivan published a blog outlining his first hundred days and he stated the free tier will remain ruled out a trial model or a bait and switch, and emphasized the open source auditability and self hosting which distinguishes Bitwarden from competitors. Said that's sticking around. He also acknowledged that changes are coming and that they would be explained now. The pattern of unannounced leadership changes and quiet rewrite of stated values has created ambiguity around Bitwarden's direction, and for users of a security critical product, those developments are cause for concern.

Jeff Massie [00:43:19]:
At present, Bitwarden's public comments include keeping the free tier and maintaining open source access unless the company takes a drastic step such as eliminate the free tier or otherwise materially change the access or auditability of the source code. There's no immediate action required beyond monitoring future announcements. Now this is my personal. This is not the article. My thoughts are, you know, I don't like unannounced changes. It seems a little odd that, you know that they did that. That's something that normally there's a lot of press around. Kind of like changing of the guard, you know, lots of pomp and circumstances.

Jeff Massie [00:44:01]:
One person leaves and the new one comes in and none of that happened. It kind of just happened. Now I'm. I'm a bit word user. I'm not planning on going anywhere for the time being, but I can say if a venture capital entity purchases bit warden and they take some sudden shifts, I'll be out of there. Not sure right now where I would go, but I would be looking. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes and log on to the discord and give me your thoughts of what's going on in your general feel of the situation. You know it nothing to panic about now, but it seems like stuff is shifting and not so, so thrilled about it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:43]:
A couple of things. First off, I do need to make sure and mention Bitwarden is a sponsor of Twit. That doesn't really impact any of our viewpoints here because, well, we don't see any of that directly. We don't work with it directly. But just for complete transparency there, Bitwarden is a sponsor.

Ken McDonald [00:45:02]:
Is KeepAsseXe also a sponsor?

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:06]:
I am not sure if KeepAssXC is or if it has been.

Ken McDonald [00:45:10]:
That's my favorite password manager.

Rob Campbell [00:45:12]:
I don't think it is.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:13]:
I don't think so, no. And I don't know if they have been or not. I don't have the entire list in front of me, just the current sponsors. I will say I've seen both sides of the open source thing. I've seen it from the inside of the business perspective before. And also of course I've seen it as somebody on the outside looking in. Sometimes there's things that happen, like business decisions that happen that just not everybody needs to know about. You don't necessarily want to watch the sausage get made.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:45]:
You just want something tasty at the end.

Ken McDonald [00:45:48]:
And if you want to enjoy that sausage, don't watch it getting made.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:53]:
Exactly.

Jeff Massie [00:45:56]:
I don't know. I don't.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:57]:
I don't see anything here that terribly concerns me. Particularly if the. If the source of everything is still available, it's still open source, then you know, nothing.

Ken McDonald [00:46:06]:
After the break, I may have something that will well and concern you.

Jeff Massie [00:46:12]:
And that's why I said I'm not going anywhere right now. I, I don't think it's to panic or anything like that. It's just keep an eye on it. And I even said if a venture capital buys it and then there's sudden changes because not every venture capital purchase is bad. And for example I ride motorcycles and one of my motorcycles I have a Indian Roadmaster Polaris who owns Indian recently sold a big chunk of that to a venture capital company. But that venture capital is known not for salvaging companies, tearing them apart and scrapping them out, but for long term support and running them. And you know it's, it's a good venture capital, you know, not just a

Ken McDonald [00:47:02]:
salary, such a thing as good venture capitals.

Jeff Massie [00:47:05]:
There, there are, I did some research the community so I just want to use that as an example of venture capital doesn't necessarily mean bad and can

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:16]:
but and there, there is, there is no venture capital involved here at this point. It's just looking at, looking at the new CEO's background. That is what, that is what some people suggest could be coming.

Rob Campbell [00:47:26]:
And I.

Jeff Massie [00:47:27]:
Right.

Rob Campbell [00:47:27]:
You know I do have a few, a few takes on this. I am also a bit warden user. Love it a paid subscriber because I do like some of the paid features. But you know I think I, I did read the story in the week I saw the headline like oh, what's going on here? I read is like ah, you know it's business changes. I feel like you know they, they know what they got. I think if a venture capitalist came in, I think the way to make money is to somewhat do what they're doing. Maybe they can improve on it. But it's open source.

Rob Campbell [00:47:53]:
You know I don't think there's a whole lot to gut and sell being open source. You know it's, it's kind of the people and what they're providing. So I think there's that, you know and a couple other thoughts. You know it's open source like Jonathan mentioned. So I think if anything really bad happens I think there are options and hopefully enough people that love it they'll, they can fork it and make, make another one and like you know and one other small piece without getting too political. You know, I think the grit change may kind of be a sign of our times. You know with the word inclusion somewhat going out of style in some, some, some ways. So I think they maybe just want to avoid that, that pulp potentially political word wording and just going from to trust.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:52]:
It kind of falls under the same category. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:48:55]:
And that's why I hope I made it perfectly clear now I am also a paid Bitwarden user that I'm not going anywhere and I'm not really fond of the changes. But there's nothing right now that signals any issue with the changes. And I think to me it was just a let's just keep our eye on this. Let's just see what happens. They mentioned changes are coming in the future. Let's see what they are before we panic. And that's why I said it's a little there. This article in the Show Notes is a little editorialized.

Jeff Massie [00:49:30]:
You know, there's a lot of facts in there, but take it with a grain of salt. Let's just see what happens.

Rob Campbell [00:49:36]:
If someone wants to be prepared, you know, maybe fork this now and just be there and ready for us. Because if something big happens, we're gonna need you and we'll give you. We'll give you our money

Ken McDonald [00:49:50]:
or Looking to keep sxc Nah, that's all right there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:55]:
There are indeed options. All right, let's, let's take a quick break and then Ken is going to try to terrify me with things going on at Go Google. We'll be right back for that after this.

Ken McDonald [00:50:09]:
Well, Jonathan, this week one of your favorite reporters, Christine hall, wrote about another Google product getting canceled. According to Christine, Uncle Goog's gone and done it again. It's abandoning Gemini CLI, the open source AI powered command line assistant it released last summer. On May 19, Google Group product manager Dimitri Lyland and principal engineer Taylor Mullen wrote on June 18, 2026, Gemini Coi and Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions will stop serving requests for Google AI Pro and Ultra as well as those using it free of charge using Gemini Code Assist for individuals. It's being replaced with a similar proprietary project called Anti Gravity cli, which was officially unveiled this week at Google I O. According to Christine, a community has formed around the Gemini CLI project and has been writing software to support it. These have primarily been extensions, integrations and contributions to the cli. If you use Gemini CLI or Google's ID extensions via a Code Assist standard or Enterprise Linux.

Ken McDonald [00:51:44]:
Good news. Or if your organization uses Gemini code assist for GitHub through Google Cloud, basically. In other words, if any of you've got any of the paying product options, you will still have access. Google will offer a freemium version of the proprietary Anti Gravity cli. Christine states Google is talking about the importance of having a unified platform. Now, I'm going to stop here and recommend reading Christine's article to learn her opinion on this recent change, especially her opening remarks, because otherwise I'd just be repeating all her words if I continued.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:28]:
Yeah, the old bait and switch. You know, Google, Google is famous for this. Like they, they, they kill their products, they kill their things working. And I've, I have been told that the way to, the way to make it to get ahead inside Google's like, corporate structure is to build new things, not to maintain things that are existing. And so they just kind of have, for whatever reason, they have that built into their, their kind of corporate DNA.

Rob Campbell [00:52:57]:
I don't think as horrible as the initial headline and, and starting phrase says. I mean, they're not, they're killing it, but they're replacing it. I, I don't know what that's going to be in the long run. Probably the worst thing is integration.

Ken McDonald [00:53:12]:
Google CLI was open source.

Rob Campbell [00:53:15]:
Yeah, I guess that's.

Ken McDonald [00:53:16]:
Yeah, it had a GitHub that you could look at. I haven't seen a open GitHub project for anti Gravity.

Rob Campbell [00:53:25]:
I guess you did say Anti Gravity is proprietary, but I did not realize the current one was open source. So for, for us, that, that is a negative. But for most people, maybe they don't care. I don't know.

Jeff Massie [00:53:41]:
You know, some of the, when you talk about killed by Google, you know, there's been things in the past they killed. And I'm like, man, if that knew that existed, I would have used it. You know, we're killing this thing.

Ken McDonald [00:53:52]:
They killed it before it got enough notification.

Rob Campbell [00:53:55]:
Yeah, it's like I would have paid you for that if you only told me it was a thing. Yeah, come on, you got Google Ads. You should be advertising. Let us know about this though.

Ken McDonald [00:54:05]:
I'm, I'm not going to say anything because I don't want it killed because I use this one.

Rob Campbell [00:54:12]:
I don't use a whole lot of, I don't use a whole lot of Google stuff anymore, so I don't care. But I do have some Google. I do have some Google voice numbers that are in use for stuff, but I barely even use them anymore either. They're kind of forward and just saying. I was like, yeah, it's just to

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:27]:
be able to have something to put on that particular business card.

Rob Campbell [00:54:29]:
Yep, that's exactly what it is.

Ken McDonald [00:54:31]:
And I, I use it for my home phone number.

Rob Campbell [00:54:35]:
I've, I've actually kind of started removing those numbers from things because I just don't Want people to call me anymore anyway.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:41]:
Indeed, that's true. Well, it's true.

Ken McDonald [00:54:43]:
That's why I like Google Voice. I give that number out, it's. And it helps to.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:50]:
It turns a phone call into an email.

Ken McDonald [00:54:54]:
Right?

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:54]:
This could have been an email. We'll give them Google Voice.

Rob Campbell [00:54:57]:
I actually have mine going. I mean one of the. I mind going to like an Asterisk server, so.

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:03]:
Ah, well, there you go.

Ken McDonald [00:55:05]:
But the advantage is that my wife or I either one can enter a home phone number from our mobile phone.

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:14]:
All right, Rob, let's talk about Rust. We haven't talked about Rust in the kernel for a while, but it's still there, just sort of percolating away.

Rob Campbell [00:55:21]:
It's probably been days or weeks, I

Jeff Massie [00:55:23]:
don't know, but oxidizing.

Rob Campbell [00:55:26]:
Last year, I mean, maybe we haven't talked about it because last year the debate was basically settled. Rust is staying in the Linux kernel Now. That does not mean Linux is being rewritten in Rust. The kernels still mostly C for now. Well, it'll be that for a long time. But now Greg Kroll Hartman, better known as Greg Cage, says the kernel needs more Rust developers. Greg is one of the most important maintainers in the Linux world. Linus is number two.

Rob Campbell [00:56:00]:
He helps maintain the stable kernel releases and works on key driver subsystems. So when he says Rust matters for Linux carries a lot of weight, the big reason is security. Now Greg Cage says Rust could help eliminate around 80% of the CVEs or vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel that the Linux kernel generates. A lot of kernel vulnerabilities come from the kinds of mistakes that are easy to make in C. You know, memory safety bugs, missed error handling, lock handling problems, and unsafe assumptions about data coming into the kernel. Rust doesn't magically fix everything, but it can prevent some of those mistakes before the code is even built. That is the real value. Instead of finding certain bugs later in testing or worse after they become CVEs or actively exploited CVEs, Rust can catch some of them at compile time.

Rob Campbell [00:57:07]:
And another related piece being added is a Rust based untrusted Data API. The idea is it's kind of simple. Data coming into the kernel from user space, hardware or other another outside source should not automatically be trusted. It should be treated as suspicious until it has been checked. The new Rust API uses a wrapper type called untrusted that marks the data as untrusted in the code itself. Before the developers can use that data as trusted, they have to validate or Sanitize it. That is important because it makes the safety rule part of the system. It is not just a comment in the code that's added or something a reviewer has to remember to follow up with.

Rob Campbell [00:58:06]:
The code itself helps enforce the idea that outside data needs to be checked first. Rust has been a cool new language for some time now, but it's proven it can solve real world problems and actually improve security. But you know, if Rust can prevent even a fraction, anything close to that 80% number, then it's, it's definitely a good step forward. Now the real question is how much Rust will actually be added into the kernel and, and how many developers are going to step up? Do we have enough Rust developers to really make a difference and take the place of, you know, the Rust Redux kernel? I don't know. But how far is this going to go? Are we going to be all rust in 100 years?

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:59]:
I don't know. In 100 years there may not be any serious writing of code. It may all be done by AI.

Ken McDonald [00:59:05]:
Some AI will use a totally different program or programming language that'll be all assembly again.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:14]:
Possibly, I don't know.

Jeff Massie [00:59:15]:
Well, I'm thinking like with Rust, how long before people start taking some of these Claude code, for example, and go, hey, let's just translate this module and that module and this part of the, the scheduler part of the kernel and the networking part of the current. You know, I mean, start with some

Ken McDonald [00:59:33]:
of the core functions and see first.

Rob Campbell [00:59:36]:
Well, I don't know about core functions. I probably start with the less the ones that are going to break much first. But.

Jeff Massie [00:59:42]:
Yeah, but then you do it and then you run it in the next branch and see how it does and get some, get some testing and

Ken McDonald [00:59:53]:
just rewrite the LIBC library first.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:57]:
Probably not.

Rob Campbell [00:59:58]:
Yeah, why not Just, just get AI to fix the, the C library so it, it is memory safe and all those things.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:04]:
You know, there, there have been some extensions, some, some ideas on how to do that to see they just, they've

Rob Campbell [01:00:09]:
never taken off spilled C from scratch. So it's backwards compatible but, but not

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:18]:
asking for much there are you Rob.

Rob Campbell [01:00:20]:
We got AI to do it for

Ken McDonald [01:00:21]:
us backward compatible to what version of

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:24]:
C. So real quick we got a question from Kytherell. I don't know, he says I don't know much about Rust. What's the overhead of these additional checks? The nice thing about Rust is all of the checks happen at compile time, so there's not really any overhead during runtime. It runs pretty much on bare metal the same way that C does.

Rob Campbell [01:00:43]:
And I believe most benchmarks tend to rank rust as being faster. I, I, I could be misremembering that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:51]:
It's, yeah, it's, no, it's fairly quick,

Jeff Massie [01:00:53]:
at least, at least right in there. So you do take a hit on the checks one time for compile. After that, you're just, just as good as C, if not better.

Rob Campbell [01:01:05]:
Only one time. Every time you compile it.

Jeff Massie [01:01:09]:
Well, you write the code correctly, then you only have to compile it once.

Rob Campbell [01:01:13]:
You gotta add features.

Ken McDonald [01:01:16]:
All right, that's when you break it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:18]:
That's when you break it. Absolutely. All right, let's take a quick break and then we're gonna come back and talk about some hardware. Oh, this will be interesting. We'll be right back after this.

Jeff Massie [01:01:28]:
I just can't stay away from a benchmark article. Michael Larabel's all over it again this week. So to set the stage, AMD recently released the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 dual edition Zen 5 processor that includes very large amounts of 3D V cache. Now, it's a, it's a, we're catching people up. It's a D2 because it's an. The, the 9950X chip has 16 cores, and they're broken up into nodes of eight cores a piece. The 9950X 3D has the extra cache on one node, but not on the other. So eight cores have extra cache, eight cores don't.

Jeff Massie [01:02:18]:
The Dual Edition says we're putting that extra cache across both sets of

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:24]:
clusters

Jeff Massie [01:02:25]:
of eight, so every core has access to this larger cache. Now, we covered last month how Linux benchmark showed an impressive performance. But the question remains, was Linux itself giving the chip an extra advantage? So for those who remember when we talked about it last time, Linux was seeing a lot more impressive uptick than what the other Windows reviewers were seeing. And at the time, we talked about how a lot of Windows reviewers were pretty blah on the chip. They didn't think it was really any advantage to it. Well, for Michael to find out, he tested both the 9950x3D2 and the standard 9950x3D on the same hardware, running both Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The test system used was an ASRock x870e Taichi motherboard, 32 gigabytes of RAM, DDR5 6000 memory, Samsung 9100 Pro SSD, and a Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card. Both operating systems were fully updated and settings were how they came out of the box.

Jeff Massie [01:03:47]:
So there's no special tweaking or anything like that, you know. At first the results were predictable in lighter workloads like a Chess AI test or webp image encoding. And Linux was a bit faster, but not dramatically so. But you know, this is kind of typical. Linux often edges out Windows by just a small margin in, you know, not very CPU bound tests. But things started but things change once the benchmark moved into rendering and creator workloads. Here the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 showed a much larger performance gain on Linux than on Windows. The difference wasn't just between Linux and Windows.

Jeff Massie [01:04:30]:
It was also between the two CPUs themselves. The 9950x3D2 gained more performance over the regular 9950x3D when running Linux than it did when running Windows. Now the pattern repeated across multiple categories. 3D rendering, video encoding and other creator focused tasks. For example, the benchmark, the SVT AVI video encoder ran noticeably faster on Linux with the 9950x3D2 Blender 5.1. And the Indigo render also showed bigger jumps in performance when switching from Windows to Linux. Only a few workloads like LLAMA cpp, basically it's an AI, showed a little difference between the two operating systems. Now, when the benchmark results were combined into a geometric mean, the numbers told the story Clearly.

Jeff Massie [01:05:25]:
Moving from Windows 11 to Ubuntu 2604 gave the Ryzen 9.9950x3D2 about a 15.3% performance boost. The regular 9950x3D also improved on Lytics, but only by 10.2%. And here's the most striking comparison. On Windows, the 9950x3D2 was less than 1% faster than the 9950x3D. So that's why the Windows reviewers said it doesn't make a difference. They were seeing 1%, but on Linux it was 5% faster. So in other words, Linux is better at taking advantage of the 9950x3D2's large cache. Now, Michael in the article also makes note that future kernels are going to have cache improvements such as the upcoming cache Aware scheduling, which should help chips like the 9950X3D2 even more.

Jeff Massie [01:06:32]:
The cache Aware scheduling is where it knows the cache and cores how they're connected. So even though on the 9950x3D2 chip, every, every core has access to all the cache, if you have to jump between your cluster of eight, eight cores. So if it's on, you've got core number one in cluster A, but it's got to hit cache that, that's connected more closely to cluster B. It slows things down because it has to go through this extra infinity fabric is what AMD's terminology. But basically it's extra steps to cross that boundary. So cash aware scheduling should help keep this cache and the cores closer together. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for full benchmark details and happy computing.

Rob Campbell [01:07:28]:
I tell you what, Jeff, I'm not going to be buying any of this because not right now because like these cores, I am also cash aware.

Jeff Massie [01:07:40]:
You know, before the show, I think before the YouTube started, before we were recording and everything, and I said, you know, really, if I was buying a system right now, I would look really close at the two seven, the Intel 270, was it P plus or plus whatever? Because I, I have a 12 core system now, it's a generation old and I'm not hitting it hard right now. I'm just not doing those kind of workloads that are really stressing the cores. And I would, I would go for the value because the price on that is pretty damn good.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:17]:
Makes sense.

Ken McDonald [01:08:18]:
Yeah. Better than the cost for the two D2.

Jeff Massie [01:08:25]:
Oh yeah, the D2 is I think about $900. I, I have to look.

Ken McDonald [01:08:30]:
I think that's the price he said in the article. 8.99.

Jeff Massie [01:08:34]:
Yeah, yeah. So if you're, unless you're making money with that now, it's, it's the fastest desktop and it's, it's a good value if you're kind of stepping over into maybe even almost thread ripper loads, but you're not needing a full threadripper. It's kind of an economy version of that. But if you're not making money off that, you know, unless you're, you know, you got money to spare and you're like, I need bragging rights. I got the best one out there. You know, you can go, I'm gonna get something that's maybe 20% slower for like a quarter of the cost.

Rob Campbell [01:09:06]:
You know, someday I'm gonna buy the best of everything for my hardcore gaming, but.

Jeff Massie [01:09:12]:
And then a week later it'll be out of date. It'll be out of date.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:15]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:09:15]:
Here's my recommendation. Don't make money, let somebody pay you.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:23]:
I'm not sure that's how that works.

Jeff Massie [01:09:24]:
Be how you. Well, I make the government plans on

Ken McDonald [01:09:28]:
you making your own money.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:30]:
That's true,

Ken McDonald [01:09:33]:
especially if you start making pennies right now.

Jeff Massie [01:09:36]:
But, but a side note though is if you look at price versus performance, they kind of go up at a pretty good rate and then they kind of flatten out. There's, there's that knee and you want to be right, you know, slightly behind the knee to get your or at the knee for your best bang for your buck.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:56]:
Basically behind the knee. All right.

Ken McDonald [01:10:02]:
Hurts the most too.

Jeff Massie [01:10:04]:
Yeah, I am not rich.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:07]:
All right, let's talk about Collabora and the Flipper one. Ken's got the story. This is something I've been watching too. Ken, what's up with this new device?

Ken McDonald [01:10:18]:
Well, this week Seard Siemens wrote on Calabaro's blog post about partnering with Flipper Devices on building an open Linux platform for hardware hackers. According to Seared, the long awaited Flipper One will be built on the RockChip RK3576. Now, choosing a silicon platform for a Linux first product is a long term bet on software maturity, community health, and the ability to ship and maintain a product without being held hostage to a vendor board support package that goes still the moment the ink dries on the purchase order. We don't see that happen, do we Jonathan?

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:07]:
All the time now.

Ken McDonald [01:11:09]:
Over the past several years, Calabara engineers have invested heavily in bringing the Rockchip ecosystem into the mainline Linux kernel, from graphics and display pipelines to multimedia acceleration and power management. The work has been done in the open, reviewed by the broader community and merged where it belongs, which is upstream. The foundational system on a chip enablement, display stack, GPU, VPU, and so much more of the RK3576 are already upstream or on their way to make a product like the Flipper one viable without a mountain of out of tree patches. That sounds good, doesn't it Jonathan? Now, Flipper One will be built around the RK3576, which is an OCTA core application processor with gigabytes of ram, a MALI GPU with a full open source driver, hardware accelerated video decord, excuse me, decode and an MPU for own device inference workloads. With upstream support in place, Flipperone users and the broader community can contribute, audit and build on a foundation that won't go away. RK3576 mainline support is already in pretty good Shape. All the major components are working right now. Kolabora is focused on power management and the USB DisplayPort, alt mode support and hardware video decoding and the MPU aren't fully working yet.

Ken McDonald [01:12:57]:
And there's still one last binary blob left in the boot chain. The so called DDR trainer. Now I'm going to recommend that you look into Seared's article that I've got linked in the show. Note it does provide more details including a link to Calabara's GitLab repository. So Rob, have you thought about purchasing one of these? RK3576?

Rob Campbell [01:13:26]:
I have not. It's. Thanks for the story. It's the first time I've heard about it. I haven't thought about buying much of anything recently because I'm cash aware.

Ken McDonald [01:13:36]:
Cash aware or cash strapped?

Rob Campbell [01:13:39]:
Ah, I'm not cash strapped yet, but

Ken McDonald [01:13:42]:
I noticed you said yet.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:45]:
Ideally you're cash aware so that you don't get cash strapped.

Rob Campbell [01:13:47]:
Cash strapped, yeah. You never know what the future brings.

Jeff Massie [01:13:50]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:51]:
Boy. This is an interesting. The Flipper one itself is an interesting little device. It's got a little bit of everything in there. This is one of the. This is one of the first things that I've seen. How do I want to put this? It's sort of in the same niche as the Raspberry PI was especially originally, but it's so different from what the PI does. It's really interesting.

Ken McDonald [01:14:19]:
Is it because of the reputation the flipper 0 got?

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:24]:
No. So I know the reputation the flipper 0 got, but I also actually understand what the flipper 0 was and so I understand that its reputation was

Rob Campbell [01:14:36]:
well

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:36]:
deserved and also completely bogus at the same time.

Rob Campbell [01:14:41]:
It's like a lot of tools really in that space.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:45]:
Yeah, true.

Ken McDonald [01:14:46]:
MA Master Technician can do a lot with a hammer.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:49]:
Exactly.

Rob Campbell [01:14:51]:
A hammer can be good, used for good or for evil.

Jeff Massie [01:14:56]:
Just like AI.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:58]:
Yep. Yeah. This is thumb.

Ken McDonald [01:15:00]:
Knows what can happen when you use it the wrong way.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:04]:
Don't. Don't. All of ours.

Jeff Massie [01:15:06]:
Oh, and a side note here. I did look at pricing as of this show. Right now it's the May 23rd. I think it is.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:15]:
It is indeed the 23rd.

Jeff Massie [01:15:17]:
The 9950x3D2 is about $900 roughly. And the Intel 7270 plus is running about 320. So it's about a third the price of the high end chip and you're getting probably 80% of the performance. Yeah. So your, your cost versus performance is much greater with the Intel.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:45]:
Yep, yep. All right.

Ken McDonald [01:15:48]:
Couldn't find any price point for the Flipper one or the Rock chip.

Jeff Massie [01:15:54]:
Not yet.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:56]:
Not yet. I'll keep an eye on that. All right, so we've got one final story that we're going to cover. This one I am bringing, and it's an update to something we've talked about a couple of times, and that is the lawsuit between Visio and the Software Freedom Conservancy. And we've talked about this before. It is finally heading to trial. Now, for those that are not familiar with what's going on, the TV manufacturer Vizio includes the Linux kernel and a bunch of other things in its TVs. And users have requested the GPL source code drop as the GPL license requires.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:37]:
And I think Vizio has put some information out, but has not done a complete source code drop in a way that would actually satisfy the requirements of the gpl. So people have been frustrated over this. They got together and they talked to the folks at the SFC Software Freedom Conservancy, who then took Vizio, launched a lawsuit against Vizio and are now taking them to court, suing them, saying, you are a party to the gpl, we are a party to the gpl. We are requiring you to fulfill your obligations under the contract that is the GPL, and release these sources. Now, I said, I said that very intentionally because there's two things in there that are, that are, have been looked at and will be, I'm sure, during the. The trial itself will be looked at as possible questions. Okay, so, and these are, these are legal things, legal challenges to the gpl. The first is, who are the parties who would actually have standing to be able to bring this lawsuit? And Vizio looks at the GPL and says, well, obviously, the only people that have standing, the only people that could, that could bring the lawsuit are us, the manufacturer and the developer that actually holds the copyright of the gpl.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:00]:
And what this suit is, one of the things this lawsuit is testing is, what about the end users that own the hardware? Do they have standing? Are they party to the GPL or not? And so far the legal ruling has been that, yes, end users are party to the gpl. Now, that's something that is. I don't. I don't think that's been tested in court yet. So this is kind of a big deal for that. And then the other question, and this is something else that you really get into when you start talking about open source, open source licensing. And that is, is it a contract? Is the gpl, a contract that Visio is a party to, or is it just a licensing document? Because the law treats those two things differently. And Vizio has tried to take the tact that, no, no, it's not a contract, it is just a, it's just, it's just a license, therefore there's no contractual obligations.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:07]:
But the court seems to be going in the direction, taking the tact that no, no, it counts as a contract. And there's some, there's some legal details that determine whether or not something is a contract or not. You know, whether or not compensation was given is one of the things that can make something a contract or not. I can't remember the legal term that they use for that. I almost had it anyway, but legal stuff, I'm not a lawyer. I just every once in a while play one here on tv. All this to say, this is finally going to trial. And the, the, the thought is that probably three to six months after the trial ends, we will finally get the final rulings and we will figure out which direction this will go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:59]:
One of the real interesting things here is that Vizio is now owned by Walmart. So there's a lot of money in that corner now. But the lawsuit was started before that purchase. So we will see, we will see how all of those things go. One other interesting bit of legal ruling that has already come out of this is that nothing in the language, I believe the judge made this statement, nothing in the language of the agreements requires Visio to allow the modified source code to be reinstalled on its devices while ensuring the devices remain operable after the source code is modified. This is apparently something that Vizio had complained about and they said the gpl. So they're sort of saying, well, it almost sounds like the GPL says that if people change code, it has to continue to work. And it's like we can't guarantee that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:58]:
And, you know, the sort of obvious conclusion that everyone agrees on here is, no, you, that's not up for you to guarantee. If people want to break their own devices, they can do that. You don't have to make sure that it continues to work. It's sort of a, sort of an obvious statement to make once you, once you understand what they're saying. But yeah, it's kind of a, kind of an odd but interesting legal ruling that's come out of this already, but very, very fascinating to see to watch this continue to happen in agonizing slow motion. But slowly and surely we are getting there. And this, as far as I know is going to be one of the, one of the biggest cases that will test the GPL in a court. And so, yeah, sort of a lot writing on this, but interesting to watch.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:41]:
Sounds like we're gonna get at least a fair shake out of it, you know.

Jeff Massie [01:21:44]:
So, Rob. Well,

Rob Campbell [01:21:48]:
you know, somebody might ask what. Why are they so afraid to release this open source software that's already open out there? And I feel like, I think I read in there something about their added stuff for like ads and stuff that they had in there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:03]:
That's one of, that's one of the theories that, well, people will be able to then hack these and not show advertisement. You'll be able to, you know, essentially you'll be able to install ad block and then the Vizio will not make as much money. I think that's partially part of it, but it's also just sort of corporate culture like, no, it's our secrets. We don't want to give them away.

Ken McDonald [01:22:22]:
Yeah. With you bringing this up, Jonathan, have you been following the Bambu Lab versus I'm trying to think of the open source programmer's name, but where he had forked something that was already open source and Bamb Lab Cinema cease and desist.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:48]:
No. Well, I was vaguely aware of that. I didn't know any of the details though. Yeah, that's interesting.

Jeff Massie [01:22:56]:
So what I was going to ask was like, okay, could Visio say, okay, let's just say it's running Ubuntu, could they just release the source code for that and say, oh, here's what we're using. But their module that interfaces with the actual hardware of the tv, could they still keep that? Because that wasn't part of the GPL and it's something they wrote themselves internally.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:24]:
So the GPL has a viral nature to it. And the GPL also talks about needing to release all of the scripts and toolings used to compile. And so when you take software that's GPL and you compile it together into a single executable with any other code, then it's all under the gpl. And so if they, if they took, basically if they wrote those as drivers that were part of the Linux kernel, if they compiled it all together and then they gave that to the end user, then the GPL says that they also have to make the source code available.

Ken McDonald [01:24:02]:
If they base the code that they're using for that interface between the software and the hardware own what was previously open source.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:14]:
Yeah, well, it's whether it gets compiled together with gpl code. If there's a separate application, like a separate binary that runs on the tv, they don't have to release that. Nobody cares about that source code. It's the stuff that gets compiled together with other GPL code.

Jeff Massie [01:24:34]:
Well, what about if they have a module that has to get loaded in so it's not part of the kernel,

Rob Campbell [01:24:40]:
just like a DKMS module, you know, ZFS or anything else that gets loaded in? That's not necessarily so.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:48]:
It depends upon how the module gets compiled and loaded in. If you have to compile it with other GPL sources, then it's under the gpl. If you can completely create it on its own and then load it in in some way, which, I mean, that's essentially what an executable is. It is something you compile on its own, and then you load it into your operating system by executing it, it makes system calls. That's kind of where the line gets drawn on that. And that does get a little hairy sometimes. So what do you do if you needed to be able to put those two things together in a way that does not fall under the gpl and the guidance there has always been, if you want your code to be not gpl, then when you call it, it needs to immediately fork and execute. Like it needs to be a completely separate B that doesn't interact with the rest of it.

Rob Campbell [01:25:39]:
Yeah. So they've had years here to separate that out. And

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:44]:
I mean, this is not a new lawsuit. It's been around for a while.

Ken McDonald [01:25:47]:
Yeah. I think I first brought it up back in. Was it 2021?

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:51]:
That could be, yeah. One of the, One of the other notes that's important to mention on here is that DRM keys, you do not. There's no requirement to release DRM keys or other secrets as part of the GPL sources. It's literally just the code. And so, you know, there are. There are those sort of arguments that Vizio has tried to made and SFC has repeatedly said, no, no, no, no, that's not what we're talking about. Shout out to Chocolate Milk. Chocolate Milk Mini Sip for pointing that one out.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:31]:
That's a great username. All right, got that update. We're gonna take one last quick break and then we're gonna come back and get to some command line tips. We'll be right back.

Jeff Massie [01:26:41]:
Rob.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:42]:
Rob is up first. All right, Rob, what is your command line tip for today?

Rob Campbell [01:26:48]:
All right, so my command line tip for today, everybody knows and love loves a bleach bit. At least those who have seen. I'M pretty sure I've done that as a command line tip in the past. Well, there is a new way to run it. Bleach bit in the past was either a gui, they also had a command line but now they're developing an easier way to manage it via the command line. So if you're running a headless server and you're SSH Dan and you don't want to, you know, run the commands, you want a an interface. But on the command line there is in development. It's currently alpha only testing.

Rob Campbell [01:27:26]:
In fact those watching it it says right at the top this is alpha level software. Please use caution. Now I imagine it's. It's an interface that probably just works with bleach bits. So it's maybe not too dangerous. Maybe it is. I don't know. But be cautious.

Rob Campbell [01:27:43]:
Know that this is coming. So this is bleach bit tooie Bleach bit being a a way to clean your system. So in the TUI here I have this installed on Ubuntu because that's what the directions were is easiest to for me to get it to work on there. I thought about doing on cashier or something but I didn't want to figure out the things. It's quick and easy. So I could sit here and I could select things that I want. You know, just navigate up and down with my arrow. Maybe I want to clean up my my apt stuff.

Rob Campbell [01:28:21]:
You know, I could select something else but I'm just going to keep it simple and select one thing. If I do P I can preview and it's going to show me what it's going to do. 42 files. 200 and it disappeared on me. 246 megabytes. Oh it's right at the top there. 246 megabytes is what that would clean out. Now if I want to clean that.

Rob Campbell [01:28:46]:
This is a demo system so it's okay for testing. I'm going to hit Delete. So delete 42 files. Y for yes and boom. I just cleaned up my app. Now if I hit preview on it it says there's nothing to remove because I clean it up. So you can do the same thing with the bash stuff. I think I had nothing there or deep scan had nothing actually Bash journal D system stuff.

Rob Campbell [01:29:14]:
I know I had a bunch of stuff there that a cleanup. It's just previewing a6 over 6,000 files there. 275 megabytes. Yeah it's a test system. Let's just YOLO anyway bleach bit is a good, you know, if, if you're having. On a desktop, they do have a gui. I mean a regular, a regular old fashioned gui, but this on the tui. Anyway, there you go.

Rob Campbell [01:29:49]:
It's still development alpha, but more to come. And at some point I'll probably be installing that in some of my servers that don't have GUIs.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:00]:
So at some point in the future, in the middle of a show, Rob is just gonna vanish and it was because he was playing around with bleach bit.

Rob Campbell [01:30:09]:
I do seem to remember the gui. I haven't used it for a while. I only use it on occasion, but when I, when I need it and I do think there are some things you could select in there that are very aggressive and I think it, it may, I don't know, I don't remember if I previewed. It's like, oh, I don't want to delete all that. So be cautious. What? Yeah, you know, look at what you're doing.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:35]:
Indeed.

Jeff Massie [01:30:35]:
Testing production.

Rob Campbell [01:30:36]:
It's very, very powerful and can be aggressive. Some of the options.

Jeff Massie [01:30:43]:
All right, Jeff, so I've got Arch Update. Now, I don't know if this is standard in normal Arch, but it is in Casheos now, so. Casheos, it's already installed. Now, by default I don't run the Pac man command. I've been running Update, which makes things a little neater. I don't, you know, I don't know if made it to the show, but before or after chat I talked about how I reinstall my OS because I was playing around resizing my root partition and then the system wouldn't boot and you know, I'm sure I could have made Grub see it again, but I just figured it was faster to install again. And I do have my slash home directory in its own partition, so it saves about 90% of the setup. So it's just like, oh, do I want to have the time to do this or just reinstall? So this time I just chose Reinstall.

Jeff Massie [01:31:40]:
Well, after I did this, I noticed a little icon on my taskbar that I didn't have there before and it launches Arch Update. And now Arch Update is a tool built to make life a little easier for anyone running Arch flavored Linux. Now, instead of leaving you to track down every maintenance task on your own, it keeps an eye on your system and guides you through the important steps, usually accompanying updates. So like I said, for me, it includes a dynamic clickable system tray applet so it fits naturally into Whatever desktop environment you're running, you can click it anytime you want to check for updates. Or about once a day or so it'll check and there's a little red check that'll show up on the corner of the icon so you can see, oh, I got stuff ready to load in, you know. And at its core, Arch Update follows the same maintenance practices recommended in the Arch Wiki. It automatically checks for new updates, highlights anything waiting to be installed,

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:42]:
which, you

Jeff Massie [01:32:42]:
know, even update does that. But something different here, it lets you know when there's fresh news from the Arch Linux team that it might affect your system. So it'll bring up news news items if. If there are any. A lot of times or not. But first time I ran it, it pulled up some old ones and like, oh, okay, things like, oh, if you're going from this version to this version, you might have to reinstall this other thing. Or, you know, it just kind of handy things, but based on what I saw that they're not. You're not going to get flooded with information.

Jeff Massie [01:33:14]:
It's only when something really important is happening. It will also point out any orphaned packages, old cache pass cached packages you no longer need, and any pack new or PAC saved files that may require attention. If a kernel update is waiting and a reboot is needed, Arch Update will let you know. It also keeps track of services that may need to be re. May need to be restarted after an update. So you know it something in your network gets. Network stack gets updated. Well, it will let you pick what you want to update or restart and you can say, oh, it'll list maybe four things or three things.

Jeff Massie [01:34:00]:
You can either select oh, I want item number one or number three, or you can say, you can hit zero and it says, oh, okay, I'll update all of them. Or you cannot update any of them because maybe you're in the middle of something and I don't want to update this just yet. So you have that control. Now, it works with your internal sudo command, but it can use sudo, sudo rs, doas or run parentheses. So basically it can elevate privilege on many different ways. Whatever method you prefer to elevate privilege. If you want to go further, Arch Update can also optionally check for updates to AUR packages through packages like paru, Yay or Pick our aur. It can look at after Flatpak updates.

Jeff Massie [01:34:58]:
It can send desktop notification desktop notifications through Lib Notify and even check the ALHP build queue. And it identify outdated mirrors when used with alhp utils. So take a look at the show notes for a link to the GitHub page where it goes through how to install it if you don't have it. And there's several different ways you can install it across many different arch based Linuxes and they also go through some of the finer details on how to use it. You know how to set it up on the system tray. You can use how you set it up to use a specific shell if you so desire. You know how often it checks for updates, so there's a ton of options to go in and check for this. But it's.

Jeff Massie [01:35:44]:
I've kind of been using it, it's kind of handy just to click on it and it kind of does everything for you. So happy updating.

Jonathan Bennett [01:35:51]:
Very cool. It reminds me a lot of KDE's discover, has a lot of those things built into it. But yeah, neat.

Rob Campbell [01:35:57]:
Yeah. I'll tell you just for reference, it is not part of the vanilla arch install because there is nothing that's part of the vanilla arch install. You just install whatever you want.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:11]:
There you go.

Ken McDonald [01:36:11]:
The only thing that the vanilla arch install ensures you get is the kernel.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:16]:
Yeah. All right.

Jeff Massie [01:36:18]:
And if you. And if you don't have a gui, it runs in a shell, so you don't have to have a gui, you know, you don't have to use the system tray.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:28]:
All right, Ken, if we don't have a gui, but we want some alternatives, what choice do we have?

Ken McDonald [01:36:34]:
We can change those alternatives. In fact, I'm going to quickly introduce you to a powerful command available on most distros. It is Update Alternatives. Now, Update Alternatives is used to maintain symbol links that determine which command is actually running. For example, when you type. And I'm going to use today the Example editor. Let me go ahead and switch over here. So for example, while I'm here, if I type Edit Editor, it launches Nano GNU Nano 8.4,

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:14]:
the best editor, of course.

Jeff Massie [01:37:17]:
In fact, Fresh Fresh is the best editor.

Ken McDonald [01:37:23]:
The command, as I said, that I want to use is Update Alternatives. With Update Alternatives, let me go ahead and use the help first. And it gives you the syntax for using it. You just type Update alternatives whichever options you want to use, and then the command, which is another dash dash that you want to set. And depending on the command, you may need to provide a link name, path or priority. But now I'm going to demonstrate with the Git dash dash getselections command, which lets you list your master alternative names and their status. And as I said, you've got this is the name here. Most of mine are set for auto and there's the link or location that it points to for running that particular command.

Ken McDonald [01:38:40]:
Rob, Jeff, y' all are both aware familiar with aptitude, correct?

Rob Campbell [01:38:45]:
Yes, yes.

Ken McDonald [01:38:47]:
And you see here on my system, it's pointing to aptitude that dash curses. And let's go down here. And here's editor. Right now it's set for manual with Ben Nano as the setting. Now we can display, display that by coming in here and typing display, get rid of that T editor. And it indicates that it's in manual mode. And guess what it says the best

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:27]:
version is Nano, of course.

Ken McDonald [01:39:32]:
And it currently points to Bin nano and the link editor is User Bin Editor. And then it also slaves into where the man pages are for your editor. Now some other options you have are bin/, ed user bin mc edit. I've never even used that. And we have some die hards that would probably like the Vim Tiny. Now if you want to change your from the defaulter what it automatically points to, you can type dash dash config editor and this will give you an interactive screen where I could for example, change to manual mode and you select option four for Vim Tiny. Now do you think that's going to work right now?

Rob Campbell [01:40:39]:
No, because you don't have it installed.

Ken McDonald [01:40:41]:
I do have it installed, but all these are pointing to where you need to be root to do anything. So it gives me a permission denied error which is easily fixed. Right, Jonathan? So now we go with that option four and we run Editor again and now we're in Vim. How do I get out of Vim? Fortunately, it tells me right there on the screen.

Rob Campbell [01:41:20]:
Nobody knows.

Ken McDonald [01:41:22]:
No, it says Q then enter right there on the screen. They've added that. So now say I want, want to change that back. I'm going to show you a way that you can force it to a setting that you want so that if say for example, you were doing a script, you wouldn't have to worry about it. So I'm going to force it back to Bin Nano without even going through the interactive. And now I'm back to Nano. And if you'll remember when I did the get selections, you've got a whole list of things that you can set up like for your X window browser.

Rob Campbell [01:42:26]:
So when you install this, all these autos are just ones that are in

Ken McDonald [01:42:30]:
there by default when your system installs comes with a system.

Rob Campbell [01:42:36]:
Oh, this, this Pro. This program is automatically installed? Yep.

Jeff Massie [01:42:41]:
Oh, on mostly Debian systems, primarily Debian

Ken McDonald [01:42:47]:
though I did notice that OpenSUSE and Fedora both have it available as well.

Jeff Massie [01:42:53]:
I. I do not even.

Ken McDonald [01:42:56]:
You could even go in say and modify your NEO fetch so that if you muscle memory says has you typing NEO fetch, it can part to the latest update for say fast Fetch. Where I find this one particularly handy is with Java where you have multiple versions of Java installed. It can be used to quickly switch between Java version 8 and Java version 11.

Jonathan Bennett [01:43:24]:
I've used it for Java as well actually that's what came to mind while I was thinking, while I was sitting here thinking, while I was rebooting my machine, I was thinking, yeah, Java, I've used it for that. Also going from OpenJVM to the official Sun Java.

Rob Campbell [01:43:39]:
I see that is on my Ubuntu install. I had no idea. It's like on GUIs where it has your default applications and I did not know that was a thing for the cli.

Jeff Massie [01:43:51]:
Yeah, it is.

Jonathan Bennett [01:43:52]:
That's how Editor works.

Rob Campbell [01:43:55]:
I've never, never typed editor. I never didn't even know that was there.

Ken McDonald [01:44:00]:
Yeah, I've got a Nano Java Place application that requires Java 8, so I have to always go find the most Recent version of Java 8 or JD what's the open J? Open J, open Java 8 and install it when I install a new system.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:25]:
Yep.

Jeff Massie [01:44:26]:
I never typed Editor because it it. I got used to that in old sun systems that would dump you to Ed and it was the CDE application

Ken McDonald [01:44:36]:
is like, oh well that's the nice thing is say you've got an application that you've installed. You can create a link group for that and set it up so that you can switch. Use it for switching, say between different versions of Ardor Obs Studio.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:56]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, I've got a command line tip that I'm going to throw in quickly and that is. I think it's pronounced Linus. Linus. I'm not sure Linus pronounced Linus. Yes. I'm going to call it Linus. It is a security tool for hardening Linux systems.

Jonathan Bennett [01:45:15]:
This one's been around for a while, but it's all about doing running an audit on your machine. What do you have installed? What do you have configured? What do you have configured in a way that may not be safe and very, very interesting tool. Very comprehensive, actually runs on all of the major distros from what I can tell. And it'll go through and it'll look. It does some things you would expect. Like, okay, this is the version of the program this is the operating system that you're running on. Here's your host name. But it also goes through and looks for the tools and the plugins that you have.

Jonathan Bennett [01:45:49]:
It checks and sees what all is in Bin, In Bin and User Bin. And then it looks at all of your services that you have either installed and or running. Some of them it will consider to be safe, others unsafe. Basically just a full on end to end audit of your machine. And if this sounds like, you know, maybe a NIST security audit or one of, one of those terrible ugly things that some of us occasionally have to go through, boy, I've got a story about that that I'm not allowed to tell. You know, like if you wanted to get, you know, certification to be able to do something for the government, they also have, they have a company where they support doing that sort of thing. Sisify actually is the name of the company C I S O F Y Not anything else, if something else came to mind. But yeah, so this Linux is security audit tool.

Jonathan Bennett [01:46:56]:
It works For Linux, the BSDS, macOS, Solaris and other UNIX derivatives. And yeah, it's, it's really, it's pretty interesting something to be aware of and so like if you might be really interesting to run on a server that's out somewhere accessible to the public or even if you just want to see what it says about your local machine, might be an interesting tool to take a look at.

Jeff Massie [01:47:21]:
Audits are fun. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:47:24]:
Or if you need, you know, ISO 27001 or PCI DSS or HIPAA audit, the company behind it can help you with that too.

Jeff Massie [01:47:34]:
17 02-516-949, 9001 there.

Rob Campbell [01:47:38]:
Jeff goes with his numbers again.

Jonathan Bennett [01:47:40]:
Yup, yup.

Ken McDonald [01:47:42]:
Now add all that up for us and what does it mean?

Rob Campbell [01:47:45]:
It means it's time for the end of the show.

Jeff Massie [01:47:47]:
I have a job.

Jonathan Bennett [01:47:47]:
There you go. It is indeed time for the end of the show. Let's. We'll let each of the guys plug whatever they want to. We'll start with Jeff and I imagine we might get some poetry out of him if we ask nice enough.

Jeff Massie [01:48:02]:
We do. Even if you don't ask, you're probably going to get it anyway. I just don't have a lot to talk about. But the Dao that is seen is not the true Dao until you bring fresh toner. Have a great week everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [01:48:21]:
I like it. All right, Ken,

Ken McDonald [01:48:25]:
well, let me unmute first. I'm going to recommend that everybody take just a minute or two to read the article. I've Got linked in the show notes that Michael Larabel wrote about FFMPEG introducing Vulcan accelerated decoding for APV video.

Jonathan Bennett [01:48:48]:
Cool. All right. And Rob, all right.

Rob Campbell [01:48:54]:
Today I am going to recommend that you visit my website at robertpcampbell.com. Once you're there, you can check out things about me, my resume, connect with me on the social medias. Like there's a link there where you can connect to me with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon or this little coffee cup is a way to donate a coffee to me or to one of the other folks on the panel here and I'll get that to them.

Ken McDonald [01:49:25]:
Have a good week.

Jonathan Bennett [01:49:26]:
Yep, very cool. I have something in particular to plug and I will throw it in the show notes as well. And that is of course The Ubuntu Summit. Ubuntu.com summit. Go register. You can watch everything live if you're in the U.S. it's probably going to be the middle of the night when I'm at actually there speaking. But that's all right.

Jonathan Bennett [01:49:43]:
You can get it on the download just like you do here. Yeah, that'd be fun to check out. Looking forward to that coming up. Other than that, thank you guys for being here and thank you to everyone that came with us. Whether you watch or listen, whether you get us live or on the download, we sure appreciate it. We'll see you next week. I'll be on location somewhere. We'll see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.

Jonathan Bennett [01:50:05]:
Thanks everybody.