Untitled Linux Show 270 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 Ubuntu security questions, bottles on ARM, some surprising news out of Switzerland, SCO may be coming back from the dead for one more round, and LemonAid, and a whole lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love.

Rob Campbell [00:00:22]:
From people you trust. This is TWiT.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:29]:
This is The Untitled Linux Show, episode 270. Recorded Saturday, September 12th. Bet on heat death. Hey folks, it is Saturday and it is once again time for the Untitled Linux Show. That's where 4 of us nerds get together and we talk about hardware and software and all the things going on in the Linux world. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, but I've got the crew with me. We've got Rob and Ken and Jeff. Hey guys, how we doing?

Ken McDonald [00:00:56]:
I'm feeling better now.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:00]:
You're done with the sprint, eh? Or were you sick? Were you down sick, Ken?

Ken McDonald [00:01:07]:
Last week? No. Combination of they added some extra time to my schedule and then having to do some other things during the day.

Rob Campbell [00:01:20]:
Well, you had to ship out my books, huh?

Ken McDonald [00:01:22]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:23]:
Yeah. We were comparing notes in a couple of—

Ken McDonald [00:01:26]:
Actually, I think I did see one of those go through.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:29]:
You may have. So I bought one and Ken is close to where I'm at. So it is very possible that Ken packed up my book, which that's a little weird.

Ken McDonald [00:01:36]:
I may have also packed up Jeff's if he ordered through there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:39]:
That could be.

Jeff Massie [00:01:40]:
I did, but I'm coming out of probably a different distribution center.

Ken McDonald [00:01:46]:
Distribution center, yes. Fulfillment center, it could still be where I'm working.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:52]:
Do they, do they actually print books there?

Ken McDonald [00:01:55]:
No, but they may have brought a whole bunch in to cover the parts of the country that we cover.

Rob Campbell [00:02:02]:
Yeah, I'd love to pretend there's a whole bunch of them printed to bring in to cover the whole country, but it's not quite like that. I'm sorry. It could be with your help out there.

Jeff Massie [00:02:19]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:20]:
All right. Well, hey, let's get into some Linux stuff. And we got a lot to cover. Rob is actually up first. And Rob is just sort of, he's been Mr. Pessimist last week and this week. Last week we were talking about the kernel and all its CVEs. I think that was last week, maybe 2 weeks ago.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:37]:
But Rob was talking about that.

Rob Campbell [00:02:38]:
And that really wasn't a pessimism necessarily.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:41]:
I know it, Rob. I'm trying to set you up for the story.

Rob Campbell [00:02:44]:
Okay, go for it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:45]:
Anyway, now he's talking, now he's a pessimist. Now he's a downer on Ubuntu. What is going on in Ubuntu, Rob?

Rob Campbell [00:02:54]:
Yeah. So this week I discovered something about Ubuntu. Many of you already knew, but about Ubuntu security updates that I kind of heard was happening, but in passing, but I thought it was an exaggeration or incorrect or somebody misunderstanding it when really it looks like it was me who really misunderstood how this stuff works. So it started with a vulnerability scan. The scan reported that an Ubuntu server was vulnerable to CVE-2026-24425, a flaw in the Twig PHP template engine that can allow an authenticated attacker to escape its sandbox and execute arbitrary code. So, you know, we have scanners going on to Find vulnerabilities and make sure we're secure. So our scanner, for some reason, it said it was a 9.9 severity score. But when I looked it up, the public CVSS scoring puts that at 8.7 or 8.8, depending on which version of CVSS you use.

Rob Campbell [00:04:05]:
Ubidoo, however, rates its own priority as a medium because exploitation requires a particular tweak configuration and some ability to submit templates. So no, this is, it's not an unauthenticated worm that instantly compromises every Ubuntu server, but arbitrary code execution over the network is still a serious vulnerability. So when I got that scan, I logged in on a server and I checked for updates, you know, apt update. And The server itself was running 26.04 LTS, which I knew that, the recent one. And when I checked it, it said it was fully updated. Yet, php-twig wasn't listed among the available updates. Oh, what's going on here? At first, I assumed the scanner was wrong or my package metadata was stale. So I dug into more, you know, the installed version actually was vulnerable and Ubuntu had already produced a patched package.

Rob Campbell [00:05:14]:
The problem was that the patch was only available through Ubuntu Pro's ESM apt repository. You know, running Ubuntu Pro's profix command confirmed a fix existed, but the machine needed an Ubuntu Pro subscription to receive it. Now, there's some important context. Pig— oh, I keep calling it Pig. PHP-Twig is an Ubuntu University— Universe repository. Canonical's standard 5-year LTS security commitment officially applies to packages in main. Ubuntu Pro expands that coverage to Universe, which contains tens of thousands of additional packages. Maintaining all that software, yeah, I get it costs money and companies should get paid for their work.

Rob Campbell [00:06:04]:
But I thought the packages in Pro were things that weren't available other places, that Ubuntu was packaging these ahead of time or making the fixes themselves. You know, like for example, something like, If Canonical patched and packaged themselves, you know, before it was offered and long after it was officially supported, you know, if this was like 5 or 8 years out and the software provider was not patching anymore, but they patched because— but Ubuntu patched it because they, you know, they promised support and there was a vulnerability. So I thought it was situations like that. But in this case, the fixed package is available in free Debian repositories. So if I were running Debian, this would have been patched without an issue. I would have never even known it was ever a vulnerability because the updates just would have caught it. But in my case, you know, also this wasn't a 5, 10-year-old Ubuntu release receiving extended maintenance. This was Ubuntu 26.04.

Rob Campbell [00:07:23]:
That's this year, 26, 2026. You know, it was just released in April and is already holding back security fixes. Ubuntu's own advisory says that a community fix might become publicly available in the future. In the meantime, an administrator can run every ordinary update and see nothing pending. And, you know, if you run apt update and you see nothing, you're like, oh, well, I'm secure. I'm up to date. But even though Canonical knows you're not, you're not necessarily secure and up to date. You know, charge businesses for support contracts, charge for compliance tooling management platforms, all that stuff.

Rob Campbell [00:08:03]:
But, you know, those are valuable services. But once a serious security patch exists, I don't believe access to an already available upstream patch that, you know, they had nothing to do with making really besides, you know, repackaging it for them. I don't think it should require a subscription, especially when you're on the latest LTS. Unpatched systems do not create risks for their own users. Compromised servers become infrastructure for attacking everyone else. Maybe not necessarily this vulnerability, but vulnerabilities in general. You know, security across the Linux ecosystem is a shared responsibility, making critical fixes broadly available benefits the entire internet. Linux has always been about sharing improvements, protecting the commons, and giving everyone the ability to run secure software, not just those who are actively paying a subscription.

Rob Campbell [00:09:01]:
Ubuntu Pro may be a reasonable product. I know it's free for up to 6 devices, I think it is. I've supported in the past. I thought it was great. But withholding a ready-to-install security update, you know, I don't know. So anyway, something to take away from this. If you are running Ubuntu fully updated, don't assume it's secure and actually fully updated. Don't even assume there aren't known vulnerabilities that are patched.

Rob Campbell [00:09:36]:
for other distros. You know, that just doesn't feel like the Linux way to me and why my future servers are, I don't think they're going to be Ubuntu.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:48]:
I'm confused about one thing. So Twig was patched upstream in 3.26 and they're all the way up to 3.28 now. What version is installed on your Ubuntu machine? Oh, is it like, is it a really old version of Twig that's on there?

Rob Campbell [00:10:09]:
It's, I don't think it was really old, but it was a vulnerable version. And yeah, it wasn't really old because older ones—

Ken McDonald [00:10:18]:
I'm going to say that it's 26.04 since I'm showing that 24.04 and earlier are not affected by this.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:29]:
No, I want to know what version of PHP Twig ships in 26.04 if you don't have Pro.

Ken McDonald [00:10:35]:
3.23.0-ubuntu-0.1.

Rob Campbell [00:10:42]:
That sounds right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:45]:
That's a straight leap forward.

Ken McDonald [00:10:46]:
But the patch is in 3.23.0-2-ubuntu-0.1. The same character we use for the home key, ESM1.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:04]:
Yeah, ESM is their extended security stuff. Yeah, I just, I'm curious why—

Ken McDonald [00:11:10]:
Which is applications that are available through the universe repository.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:16]:
Yeah, yeah, but why is Ubuntu still running the like 4 versions old version of Twig? That's the thing that I don't get. Is Ubuntu just not, does it just not bump versions as quickly as things like Fedora does?

Rob Campbell [00:11:32]:
No.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:33]:
Okay. See, this is, this is just kind of weird to me because like in Fedora, we would be running 3.27 or 3.28.

Ken McDonald [00:11:41]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:41]:
Like here, let me, let me try to install Twig on one of my Fedora machines. Let's see what I get.

Jeff Massie [00:11:47]:
Well, I'm surprised.

Ken McDonald [00:11:48]:
I don't have Twig installed because I just tried doing a twig --version. And it came back, command not found, but can be installed with sudo snap install Twig.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:58]:
Yeah, let's see. Let's see what we get here. Go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff Massie [00:12:01]:
I'm just surprised with Pro that I always thought it was like, oh, I'm running 22.04 and it's end of life or whatever. And okay, Pro will get me, you know, another few years of support, not anything current. You know, I happen— I just checked my server I have is running Kubuntu, but it is on the pro, you know, the free pro option. But yeah, I kind of just did it because we had it as a command line tip one time. And so I thought, oh, okay, let me do this. And hey, I'm signed up. And I didn't realize it had any real use for me because I stay fairly current on the LTSs.

Rob Campbell [00:12:46]:
I assume that, okay, you know, if I put Pro, because I do have Pro on some servers of mine, but, uh, you know, I assume just like you that, you know, I'm gonna put that on here now. And now if I have to stick on this version for a while, for some reason, uh, like my sites don't support the latest PHP or whatever, you know, I can run it for a while. I did not think, or I thought maybe they were going to get some security packages earlier than others.

Ken McDonald [00:13:17]:
What exactly does Twig do?

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:21]:
It's a template engine for PHP.

Ken McDonald [00:13:24]:
Then the Twig that I can install by Snap's not the same thing. It says it's a lightweight GTK code editor.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:31]:
Yeah, no, not the same. Actually, it looks like Fedora may not even have Twig. If I go to install it, I'm going to actually get it from a Fedora 41 source, which is kind of old at this point. So anyway, yeah, it's, it's definitely interesting to see, um, the, the nuts and bolts and kind of the, I guess, the fine print of how security updates work on some of these distros.

Jeff Massie [00:13:54]:
And mine was to install it on a Snap from a Snap.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:58]:
That's probably it.

Ken McDonald [00:13:59]:
That's the same one that I, I was talking about.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:01]:
The Snaps, uh, yeah, the Snap is probably not the TwigPHP.

Ken McDonald [00:14:05]:
It's a lightweight GTK code editor. That's published by Harrison Urd.

Rob Campbell [00:14:14]:
Yeah, you know, maybe the caveat here that we're looking at is, you know, NIST and, you know, who published the CVE is like, this is a critical vulnerability. And the OWASP is like, ah, nah, it's medium.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:30]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:14:30]:
No, they have the severity as 8.7 high.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:41]:
Well, but I mean, there's— that's true. Like, there is the idea that NIST publishes it with this severity, but in the, in the way that it gets installed by the Ubuntu package, it's probably not going to be vulnerable.

Jeff Massie [00:15:04]:
What's the official Twig package name?

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:07]:
php-twig.

Rob Campbell [00:15:09]:
Okay.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:11]:
It was discovered that Twig did not properly validate PHP callables when using a source policy. An authenticated user could possibly use this issue to execute arbitrary code. I see why they don't consider it to be terribly important. Yeah, well.

Ken McDonald [00:15:30]:
Because you have to download it from the universe repository yourself.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:35]:
No, because you have to be an authenticated user before you can actually use it to execute arbitrary code.

Rob Campbell [00:15:40]:
Yeah, well, unfortunately, if it's in the CVE repository as a critical or high, well, for compliance reasons—

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:47]:
Oh, yes.

Rob Campbell [00:15:48]:
That gets flagged.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:50]:
Yes, yes, because when you work at a big business, you turn your brain off and you just do the thing that you're supposed to do rather than actually thinking about it. Unfortunately, I'm well aware.

Jeff Massie [00:16:01]:
And I'm sure Canonical looked at it and went, ooh, look, I'm root user. Hey, look, I can run malicious code. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:08]:
Okay.

Rob Campbell [00:16:08]:
Indeed.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:10]:
All right. Let's, let's move on and let's talk about Windows software on ARM devices via bottles. And Ken's got this story. And I think we've talked about this a little bit before, but what is new, Ken, in the bottles world?

Rob Campbell [00:16:26]:
I'm kind of excited about the other part of it too.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:28]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:16:30]:
Well, this week, thanks to Saurabh Rudra, he actually wrote 2 articles about Bottles. In the first article, he wrote about Mirko Bromben, and I hope I'm not saying that wrong or right. I hope I'm saying it right. The creator of Bottles who successfully ran Microsoft 365 on Linux. I don't know why you'd want to run that. I can think of some other software that would probably be more appropriate and easier on your wallet. But Mirko did achieve this with the help of an unreleased version of Soda and Bottles 67.4. He logged into the Microsoft 365 app with his credentials and launched and used MS Word.

Ken McDonald [00:17:19]:
Now, importantly, because 2-factor authentication succeeded, the suite recognizes license, and OneDrive integration worked. Saurabh believes this achievement is significant. Once fully integrated, it could entice more users to switch to Linux, as many hesitate because their preferred office suite isn't available. Now, in his second article, Saurabh highlighted Bottle's latest development. It is expanding beyond the x86-64 hardware. Bottles 67.4 is a test release for ARM64 on Linux and is delivered through an experimental CPack package. According to Surov, the request to add ARM64 or AArch64 builds was made just a week ago. Within 3 days, a test candidate was available.

Ken McDonald [00:18:15]:
The requester confirmed that bottles launched successfully on their own ARM64 hardware, so the issue was marked as completed shortly thereafter. Mirko Bromben stated CPAC is being used for this test because it is the first packaging path where the application, Winebase, and native ARM CI are available together. Saurav also included installation instructions in his article, which you can find in our show notes.

Rob Campbell [00:18:49]:
You know, about the Microsoft 365, the big, I mean, the big thing about that is enterprises, you know, just businesses, businesses in general use it. And that's one of the major things that really holds them back from going in, going all in.

Ken McDonald [00:19:12]:
So, Jeff, do you think this could be leading your company to switching over to having Linux on their desktops?

Rob Campbell [00:19:26]:
Probably not. I imagine it'll take time.

Ken McDonald [00:19:28]:
No comment?

Jeff Massie [00:19:29]:
Well, I mean, we run a ton of Linux stuff, but we're kind of tied into the Office stuff as well. Yeah. It's kind of a whole ecosystem. So it's— and one of the things that my next story I'll talk about, that would be a problem for us.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:49]:
Yeah, I think Ken is trying to set us up for the next story. I do find it interesting though that Bottles is now running on ARM. I don't have a whole lot of ARM things to play with outside of like the Raspberry Pi, but those, those would be an interesting place to mess with this. I do actually have— I don't think I've talked about this on the show. I do actually have a new Raspberry Pi toy. It's the, the UConsole. This is a, this is a pretty nifty little device that I finally got a piece of hardware in. It's not an official story or anything, but see if the batteries are charged.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:26]:
Yeah, the batteries are charged enough for it to pop on. It'll boot here in a second, but it's literally, it's, it's like the, it's, it's honestly the first piece of hardware I've ever had that really made me think like this could be used as, as sort of the cyber deck that you read about in sci-fi stories. Um, and one of the real fun things about it is the way that they've built it internally is it's upgradable. So you've got, um, on one side, you've got in here, it's booted up now to the Raspberry Pi desktop. Decent keyboard. Probably the worst thing about it, it's got a trackball here and the trackball is not great. It's better now than when I first turned it on the first time. It's like, you know how you get old electronics with the old rubber and it's already falling apart? Like it felt like that at first.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:13]:
I've used it a little bit and it cleaned up. So I think they probably shipped it with some goop on there to try to lubricate it. once that unfortunately came off on my fingers for after using it for a while.

Jeff Massie [00:21:24]:
It's like a BlackBerry XL.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:27]:
Pretty much, yes. Except, you know, running Linux, running a Raspberry Pi OS.

Rob Campbell [00:21:33]:
So you just slap the Raspberry Pi onto the back of that?

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:36]:
It uses the compute module. So underneath here, there's a CM4. You can get it upgraded to a CM5. Open source, open source hardware. And the thing that I like about this is that there's a bunch of companies out there that are already making like different expansion things for it. So for example, I've got in it right now an LTE modem, and then it's got the battery pack is also replaceable. So there's another company that is making a— so it ships with dual 18650 cells, and there's a company that's doing like, I forget the exact numbers, but it's like the 21— I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's the bigger round cells. And then that company also has like the ability to do the add-on.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:22]:
If you're on a CM5, you can on that same battery pack, you can also put an NVMe drive because you've got the one-lane PCIe coming off of the Pi CM5. You can do either the— so what I've got on here is the LTE expansion. There's another one that you can get that does Ethernet, and then there's another one you can get that'll do like Um, SDR. Uh, and so, you know, several, several different options there as well. And I just, I like that, that it's sort of plug and play about what different things you want to put on there. Um, yeah, so far I've really enjoyed having it. Not done a whole lot of like work off of it, but you know, it's, it's going to be good for gaming, right? It's got the up, down, left, right, left click, right click. And then they've got a YXBA, you know, so there you can kind of set it up.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:10]:
Oh, cool.

Ken McDonald [00:23:11]:
And a keyboard. So if you needed to type a document, you could.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:14]:
And then a full keyboard. Yeah. So you can, I mean, you can pull up terminal and SSH into something off of this and it's not—

Ken McDonald [00:23:19]:
Would it have enough memory for you to log into Microsoft 365?

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:25]:
So I was just thinking about that, right? That's kind of what led me into this weird rabbit hole that we're in right now is now that Bottles supports ARM, you could feasibly do that. And if you are either filthy rich or were like me and bought it couple of years ago, you could have a CM4 with 8 gigs of RAM on it and, you know, not have to get out a second mortgage on your house to be able to afford it. And you actually have a fairly capable little machine. You can even get the CM5 with 8 gigs of RAM for even more. I don't think they ever made a CM5 with 16 gigs. I don't remember.

Ken McDonald [00:24:01]:
Though I do want to ask one more question before we move on to Jeff's article. Can anybody think of what office suite you'd use to replace Microsoft 365 with?

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:17]:
Probably Collabora, honestly, if you wanted that 365-style experience.

Jeff Massie [00:24:23]:
Well, because 365, for those who don't know, is mainly web-based. I mean, you have localized programs as well, but they like to run A lot of web stuff, which is— they're kind of crippled from the full local program, but a lot of times it's good enough for what you're doing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:47]:
Not quite as much anymore. And Collabora does now actually have a full desktop side office suite. I don't know this for sure, but, you know, there's kind of been some rumblings that Collabora may take over and become the premier open source office suite on Linux. We'll see if that actually happens, but that's kind of been the rumblings that I've heard of.

Jeff Massie [00:25:10]:
I was only speaking for Microsoft.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:13]:
Oh, okay, okay.

Ken McDonald [00:25:14]:
Gotcha.

Jeff Massie [00:25:14]:
I have not used Collaborator.

Rob Campbell [00:25:16]:
Jeff speaks for Microsoft. You heard it here.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:18]:
Jeff speaks for Microsoft. All right, well, after that, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to let Jeff come back and speak about something other than Microsoft. Jeff speaks for Switzerland in this case. Don't go away. We'll be right back.

Jeff Massie [00:25:34]:
So in this story, I want to talk about Switzerland saying auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft. Well, not totally, at least on 3,000 computers. Now, if you've been following the show for any length of time, you know, 2026 has really turned into the year European governments started doing something about their Microsoft dependencies in force, you know, instead of just talking about it. Yes, there were some towns and some small movements in the past, but 2026 has really got the movements going. This week's entry comes from Switzerland, and it's a big one because it comes with 9 million Swiss francs attached to it just to make sure that this actually works. Switzerland's Federal Chancellery, and that's basically the administrative body that runs the day-to-day functions of the federal government, just kicked off a pilot program to move 3,000 government computers off Microsoft 365. Now, this is somewhat small as the Swiss Federal Administration runs about 54,000 computers in total. So this program covers roughly 7% of the total computers.

Jeff Massie [00:26:43]:
You know, small compared to the whole government, but Switzerland, you know, if you know their history at all, they tend to test things thoroughly before committing. So 3,000 real employees doing real work is a meaningful trial. And Not just some token gesture that doesn't really carry any weight. What are they switching to, you might ask? Well, they're switching to OpenDesk. Now, we've talked about it in the past, but if you forgot, OpenDesk is basically Germany's answer to, what if we build our own Microsoft 365 but open source? It's developed by a German government agency. Bundles together a bunch of existing open source tools under one roof. So like document editing is from Collabora, file storage from Nextcloud, you know, chat and video from Element, and so on, filling out everything you would want in an office suite. It's been in production in Germany since late 2024, and apparently it's gotten popular enough that the German agencies alone have filed over 1,500 inquiries about adopting it.

Jeff Massie [00:27:52]:
I should note that OpenDesk, and we mentioned this before the break, is it's a server/cloud-based set of tools. So it doesn't load a lot of programs on your computer like, say, LibreOffice does, where it loads into the local machine. So why is Switzerland doing this? Well, the government just didn't wake up one day annoyed at Clippy, though I could give that enough reason just to make the switch, but they had more important reasons. This actually traces back to a digital sovereignty law that Switzerland adopted in December of 2025, which became legally binding for the central federal administration this past January. And a professor at the University of Bern who studies this stuff, Mathis Sumpter laid out reasoning in 3 parts. One, legal exposure. Under US law, American companies can be compelled to hand over data to US authorities, even if that data is sitting on a server in Switzerland, which a lot of European companies do not like. I mean, a lot of US residents don't like that either, but I digress.

Jeff Massie [00:29:03]:
2, vendor dependability. Your entire government runs on one foreign company's software stack, you don't have a lot of leverage technically or politically, you know, if something goes wrong, whether it's a service outage, pricing dispute, or a policy disagreement. And 3, cost. Licensing fees for proprietary software keeps climbing, and when you're locked in, you don't have much room to negotiate. So Just so people know, this isn't totally off the cuff though, because Switzerland ran a proof of concept they called it POC BOSS, POC space BOSS, with 172 federal employees using OpenDesk. The results were published last week and were a mixed bag. Document editing and email worked well enough to be genuinely viable for daily governmental work. But, and this is the one I was talking about for where I work, large-scale video conferencing hit a real technical limitation.

Jeff Massie [00:30:06]:
So this isn't an open source magically solves everything use case, you know, but it, but it's off to a good start though. And as more people use the suite, it will continue to get updates and improvements. You know, it's open source. Let's just fix it. But I digress. This plot runs in parallel with the existing Microsoft 365 setup. So if someone has something they have to use the Office suite for, they still can with a target to complete migration by the end of 2027. So it's not just an instant switch.

Jeff Massie [00:30:41]:
Interestingly, Switzerland's military cyber command isn't waiting around. They're on a faster track, aiming to fully replace Microsoft 365 with OpenDesk By this coming October, which based on the reasons we just previously listed, you can see why their military cyber command isn't waiting around. They want to have the control of their data. Other countries have been making the shift and overall the feedback is positive and it's been called out. There's financial savings being reported as well as You know, as this is kind of a growing trend all over Europe. One interesting tidbit though, Microsoft isn't just sitting back and kind of watching this happen. The company reportedly committed to investing 325 million Swiss francs into Swiss AI and Swiss cloud infrastructure, which, you know, from an outside observer looks a lot like Microsoft's kind of trying to make staying with them more attractive. You know, hey, look, we're giving back, you know.

Jeff Massie [00:31:49]:
But I will let the listeners and readers make that decision for themselves. And you can do that by taking a look at the article linked in the show notes for more details, more links to support material, and a lot of information in there. So happy migration.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:06]:
Yeah, well, I mean, it kind of, it makes a lot of sense that like if you want to do business with a government, you need to have You need to have the data stored in that country and, you know, some sort of, some sort of a siloed approach to doing that so that other governments can't just write a national security letter and get access to all of that. Like, that's, that's, that's sort of basic security stuff.

Jeff Massie [00:32:33]:
I'm a—

Rob Campbell [00:32:34]:
I don't remember ever talking about this. We've talked about OpenDesk before?

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:38]:
Not OpenDesk in particular.

Ken McDonald [00:32:39]:
I don't think we talked about Was this the one where there's an issue with the Russian—

Rob Campbell [00:32:47]:
No, that's EuroDesk.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:50]:
EuroOffice.

Jeff Massie [00:32:52]:
Yeah, I remember we talked about it. It was like a year ago or something when this started coming out. Maybe it was '24 when we did it because we talked about how Germany was leading the charge on this.

Rob Campbell [00:33:06]:
I'm finding multiple projects called OpenDesk, so I'm not sure which one I'm supposed to get.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:10]:
Uh, opendesk.eu. I'm looking for the source code though.

Rob Campbell [00:33:16]:
Yeah, opendesk.eu. I don't see anywhere to download from there though.

Ken McDonald [00:33:19]:
I don't think you're going to find the source code in one central, uh, area because it's basically combining several open source components. Collabora Online, then it uses Nextcloud, uh, To act as a OneDrive or SharePoint, OpenProject to replace Microsoft Project, and Element, the matrix-based Element, to replace the Teams chat.

Rob Campbell [00:33:52]:
Yeah, what if it's a project, you should be able to get the code somewhere. I see book a demo and I see some GitHub, but they don't look like the same thing.

Ken McDonald [00:34:03]:
It's maintained by Germany's Center for Digital Sovereignty.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:08]:
Oh, here's a GitLab link. gitlab.opencode.de. I think that is the one that you want. And quite appropriate that they refuse to host on the other, you know, the same US company, GitHub, owned by Microsoft.

Ken McDonald [00:34:29]:
Oh yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:34:30]:
Okay, I'll have to see if I can by that, because just looking at the, the, the opendesk.eu, the, the things they, that they have all bundled together seems pretty interesting.

Ken McDonald [00:34:44]:
Uh, Jonathan, do we want to add that, uh, GitLab link to the show notes?

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:49]:
That's actually a good idea. Let me do that. Um, sign in. Nope, that's not what I want. Uh, I want This link then for the projects. Make sure and get that added. Yeah, again, I mean, if you're a country and you're not thinking about this and doing this, what are you even doing? Including the US, right?

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

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:17]:
It makes sense. Of course you should be doing this. Of course you should be thinking about open source and digital sovereignty and making sure that You're not under the whims of a country and a company across the ocean.

Ken McDonald [00:35:31]:
So if the US is thinking about it, fork it and then move it under gitlab.opencode.com.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:38]:
I can guarantee you, I know that the United States already has several GitLab instances that they host for various things.

Jeff Massie [00:35:46]:
Guaranteed. The hard part is, you know, and I don't know how it is for Europe, but like in the US, a lot of the It's tough to get out from under the Office suite because it's tied in with so much. Basically what Microsoft will do is, you know, you'd write them a big check and then they say, oh, we're handling the operating system and the Office suite and AI and storage and, you know, all sorts of stuff.

Rob Campbell [00:36:10]:
Yep, yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:11]:
Email and knowledge management and single sign-on. Yeah, everything.

Jeff Massie [00:36:17]:
Oh, we're a phone call away. Something goes down, They're on it, you know.

Rob Campbell [00:36:22]:
Yes, I've seen, I've been involved in some of those phone calls. It's not that great.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:27]:
No, it really isn't. Never, never, never is.

Ken McDonald [00:36:30]:
Not involved being involved in those phone calls or not that great with having to make them.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:37]:
Using Microsoft Teams, it can be a Microsoft phone as well.

Rob Campbell [00:36:41]:
Yeah, well, having to call them was one thing, but when they give you a tier 1 for the wrong product, And they spend like 3 days on it before they tell you that, oh, that's not my area. And then, yeah, you know, it takes 3 months to, you know, communicate back and forth with supposedly the right area. And then you go to a third party who's like, oh, here's how you fix that. That's a true story.

Ken McDonald [00:37:05]:
Oh, they're run like a government.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:07]:
I'm sure.

Jeff Massie [00:37:07]:
Well, and I don't know if it's still true, but I knew I worked with a guy and his brother worked at a publishing company and they had a support license and he, Basically said all the support license does is you just automatically jump past the people that go, is it plugged in? Did you try rebooting it? You know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:25]:
I mean, that's not nothing. I would, I would have loved to have that. I just was never willing to pay for it. Yes, I've rebooted the machine at least twice. Please let me through to the actual tier 1.

Rob Campbell [00:37:37]:
Yeah, I was, I was specifically working on a Teams phone setup. They're having issues with it, you know, clearly the administration side of it. And this first one, you know, I clearly said that, and this first one's like trying to troubleshoot Teams with me. Like, like, I don't know, but I don't remember. This was 5 years ago maybe, but it's like—

Ken McDonald [00:38:04]:
So in your experience, Rob, Would you say it's easier to manage items created by Microsoft or open source?

Rob Campbell [00:38:21]:
Open source, because when there's a problem, I could find other people who've had the problem and I could just go in there and fix it. Like, I can't—

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:31]:
I think there's an important point to be made here though. Because it is such a huge deal now, because you can now go to the AI agent of your choice and say, I'm having this problem, but the code is available. Go look at the source code and figure it out. Like, that is a huge disadvantage for closed source programs and projects, because you can't— you have no visibility. Your agent has no visibility into that to figure out what's going on.

Rob Campbell [00:38:56]:
Right. And even if there's visibility, if the problem is on Microsoft's side, I can't do anything anyway. Yep.

Ken McDonald [00:39:04]:
Have you got any recommendations then?

Rob Campbell [00:39:09]:
What, what, what's my next story? No, it has nothing to do with that. I don't know. What do you want me to recommend? Who's next?

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:17]:
I think Rob is up next and he is actually going to recommend a piece of open source software from a previous Microsoft employee. But, uh, It's maybe not something that we expect. What you got, Rob?

Rob Campbell [00:39:32]:
Uh, yeah, so.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:34]:
He was not ready for that.

Rob Campbell [00:39:39]:
I'm lost on what the segue. Oh, okay. Anyway, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:44]:
Just roll with it.

Rob Campbell [00:39:46]:
I see. I think Ken's misunderstanding this. I don't know. Anyway, Linux, certainly. isn't short on system monitors. I've shared many, others have shared them, I think, too. You know, we have everything. You know, we got the basic command line ones like top, htop, btop in the terminal to desktop tools such as Mission Center and Plasma System Monitor.

Rob Campbell [00:40:10]:
But a new contender has arrived with a particularly interesting pedigree. TMOG, short for Task manager OG comes from Dave Plummer, the former Microsoft engineer who wrote the original Windows Task Manager back in 1994. So that application began as a personal side project inspired appropriately enough by the Unix top command. It was eventually incorporated into Windows NT. NT and shipped with Windows NT 4.0 in 1996. More than 30 years later, Plummer has essentially come full circle by bringing his modern interpretation of Task Manager to Linux and Windows and macOS. But we're concerned with the Linux one here. TMOG Beta 3 is available for Linux as an AppImage.

Rob Campbell [00:41:13]:
Debian package, or compressed tarball. It currently supports x86-64 systems and works under both X11 and Wayland. The Linux interface is written in C++ using Qt 6, while Windows gets a native Win32 application and macOS uses Swift and AppKit. Underneath those interfaces is a shared C++20 measurement engine intended to provide the same metrics and terminology across all 3 platforms. And importantly, this isn't an Electron app like some of the things that are brought over from Microsoft. There's no embedded browser or web interface pretending to be a desktop program. TMoG combines process management, with detailed views of CPU, memory, GPU, disks, networking, energy use, thermals, services, users, startup, applications, installed software, disk usage, and benchmarks. It can separate performance and efficiency cores, display individual logical processors or NUMA nodes, and keep longer-term history alongside the live data.

Rob Campbell [00:42:32]:
Beta 3 adds several refinements, including improved performance, new VFD-style meters that can take advantage of HDR displays, and better historical graphs. You can move across the graph to see which processes are using the most CPU or memory at that particular moment. When a process exists, TMOG can briefly leave behind a red tombstone showing its exit information instead of making it immediately disappear from the list. There's also a compact floating monitor that can remain above a compile, game, render, or large file transfer. And naturally, the interface includes plenty of visual customizations ranging from modern light and dark modes to green amber and blue phosphorus themes. You know, for those familiar with the Windows Task Manager, it's very similar, but kind of prettied up. more modernized, which I'll show later in the show. The current free edition does not expire and requires no registration.

Rob Campbell [00:43:36]:
Plumber says the existing free features will remain free, but a pro edition is coming. Pro will unlock deeper power and frequency information, network connection analysis, installed application disk space tools, saved benchmark results, and performance recording and playback. The recorder is currently planned for Windows and macOS. While Mac users will also receive an optional local network iPhone viewer, Pro cannot yet be purchased and pricing has not been announced. There are a few Linux caveats. Hardware sensors are notoriously inconsistent across Linux systems. Compatibility is still being improved across Linux distributions. And, you know, there's no Flatpak or Snap listed yet, but it's easy to install with an AppImage.

Rob Campbell [00:44:31]:
TMOG also is not being presented as an— it's not an open source project, which will matter to part of the Linux community. Still, Linux users already have excellent monitoring tools, but TMOG's real advantage may be offering one polished, highly visual interface that behaves consistently across Linux, Windows, and macOS, and that maybe feels a little more something that Windows users are a little more used to. It's Task Manager rebuilt by the man who originally created Task Manager. And this time, Linux is a first-class platform.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:10]:
Yeah, it's interesting to see. Like, so obviously Rob and I have been doing the vibe coding thing. here recently. And like, Rob, when you look at that website, what jumps out at you?

Rob Campbell [00:45:22]:
Oh, you're thinking it's vibe quoting. I don't know. I didn't—

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:25]:
The website is 100%, absolutely guaranteed.

Rob Campbell [00:45:28]:
Yeah, I didn't pay that much attention. I guess I don't really look at it.

Ken McDonald [00:45:32]:
Well, what I noticed is that the site was built September 6th, 2026, 6:54:03 PM Central Daytime.

Rob Campbell [00:45:43]:
Yes. So this is all very new.

Jeff Massie [00:45:45]:
And I downloaded the app while Rob was doing the story and clicked on it and fired it up and it started working right away.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:52]:
You know, I mean, I'm sure the app is cool. I have no problem with the app. I just, I just can't, I can't unsee the, the AI fingerprints on the website just because it, you know, I'll be transparent because I have had the AI spin up a few websites and dashboards for me. Like, hey, I want to be able to see this, put it somewhere.

Jeff Massie [00:46:11]:
And like, This is what it looks like.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:13]:
This is the way it talks.

Rob Campbell [00:46:14]:
He's not a website designer.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:15]:
And that's fine. That's fine. It just, it's just hilarious to me. I've gotten, I've seen so much of it and messed with it so much. I can just see it. You just tell sometimes it has the, it has the Claude look to it.

Rob Campbell [00:46:30]:
I've done a lot, but—

Ken McDonald [00:46:31]:
Well, then later in the show, I'm going to be demonstrating the website and you ask You can tell me whether or not you can see any of the Claude look in it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:43]:
All right, we can do that.

Jeff Massie [00:46:45]:
I would say I would agree with Jonathan because I've done some getting on the vibe coding bandwagon and I designed a user interface for something and it was like, oh yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:46:56]:
I'm looking at the site now and just the way it's put together, right?

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:01]:
Like 3 useful answers from slow to something you can act upon. Oh, that's That's the way I put it. A diagnosis in 4 readings.

Jeff Massie [00:47:10]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:11]:
Yes.

Ken McDonald [00:47:12]:
And yes, we're considering it is the process manager that's slowing your computer down.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:18]:
Sometimes.

Rob Campbell [00:47:19]:
All right.

Ken McDonald [00:47:21]:
Especially if it's the only thing running.

Rob Campbell [00:47:25]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:26]:
All right, Ken, you want to tell us about something that I think is inherently not vibe-coded? Do the guys at GIMP have a statement out about this? Do they use AI tooling in their stuff yet? I don't remember.

Ken McDonald [00:47:38]:
I haven't seen any statements saying anything about that, but I did read 3 articles written by Bobby Borisov, Michael Arbel, and Marcus Nester about the latest maintenance update for my favorite open source, free, and cross-platform image editing software available for GNU/Linux, macOS, and we've even been talking about stuff for Windows. It's GIMP 3.2.6. This update includes several months' worth of patches, bug fixes, security updates, and new contributions from both new and longtime users. So let's go ahead and thank Cheesequake, who has added a new feature that lets users use the cut function on a layer group. This means you can cut the same section across all layers within the group as long as the layers are rasterized and not locked. Also, Jian, thank you for making additional improvements to this feature. Now, Balui— I hope I'm saying that right— has made various enhancements to increase performance when loading multiple fonts. While some lag still exists and we will likely need to update to GTK4, the initial startup of GIMP, typing in the text tool, and closing font lists should be much faster.

Ken McDonald [00:49:08]:
New contributors Ryan McDonald and Idris Fekir— I hope I'm saying that one right— have resolved an issue where the end of a line might be hidden on the left or the right side when the text layout is set to fixed. Now, although this issue will still appear when loading older XCF files, changes to the text layer will update it to the correct view. Additionally, thank you Andre, Michael, and Jehan, who have started making changes to GIMP's codebase in preparation for a future GTK4 port. This includes swapping out the deprecated gtk_widget_show functions with gtk_widget_set_visible, replacing direct access to GDK event types with better— with getter functions, substituting GDKWA_CURSOR flags with explicit GDK_WINDOW_SET_CURSOR calls, and more. Now, although GIMP is not planning a GTK4 port yet, it is beneficial to start preparing now. For more details on other patches and improvements, you can check out the articles by Bobby, Michael, and Markus.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:38]:
Yeah, and I did find that the guy behind GIMP, whose name I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce, gave a talk at LGM 2026. And one of the things that he mentioned there is that GIMP is for humans by humans. They do not use AI in the core GIMP code, although there are some plugins that let you do different AI things like working with ComfyUI, doing Stable Diffusion, some of those different things.

Rob Campbell [00:51:14]:
Yeah, that's a common thing going on around. There was a story this week also about Boyd Linux having some drama. And I did post about that on my social medias, but it's not a show story tonight. It was too recent.

Ken McDonald [00:51:29]:
I saw that one.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:32]:
Where did they come down on the question?

Rob Campbell [00:51:36]:
Well, they allow some AI usage, but they—

Jeff Massie [00:51:44]:
You better know what the output is. And they want it used more for like learning and investigation and not just generate code unless you intimately know what that code is doing and how it interacts with the rest of the system.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:58]:
Okay, so pretty reasonable approach then for an existing project.

Rob Campbell [00:52:02]:
But the story was that there's a contributor who, um, they orphaned 100 packages because of this contributor, I guess, couldn't agree with the stance that they had.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:15]:
Yeah, that seems— that's a pretty— that story is repeated several times where, you know, a A project will come up with what we would consider to be, you know, a pretty reasonable response to AI. We want people to use it responsibly. We don't want this to become an AI slot project, but we understand that this is the future. And then, you know, of the organization, of the people working on the code, you'll have one or two that really get out of sorts about it and fly off the handle and leave the project. It's— we've seen it several times now.

Ken McDonald [00:52:48]:
One thing we won't see AI do is come up with new hardware for us, I don't think.

Rob Campbell [00:52:55]:
Oh, they might come up with it, but they're just not going to physically put it together themselves.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:00]:
I don't know about that either. I imagine that there's quite a few factories that now use some AI in running the tooling and the robot arms. Anyway, so there is actually an interesting question around the use of AI on the output, And that is that in most cases, the output of AI is not considered copyrightable, which means nobody owns it. And that ties in interestingly to something that Jeff has to talk about. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to get into the unexpectedly thorny question of who owns Linux anyways? Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

Jeff Massie [00:53:42]:
So we've got an update this past month on what might be the longest running legal fight in open source history. A case that's been dragging on since 2003. Now, let's go back to the beginning, just so everybody has a good foundation. In 1998, IBM teamed up with a company called Santa Cruz Operations, better known as SCO, along with Intel and a company called Sequent on something called Project Monetary. The goal was to build a unified version of Unix that could run on all kinds of processors. Except while they were building it, something else happened. Linux got good, really good. Good enough that by 2001, IBM looked at the Project Monterey and looked at Linux and basically said, why are we doing this the hard way? IBM pulled out, pulled out of the deal and threw its weight behind Linux instead.

Jeff Massie [00:54:36]:
And that was pretty much the death knell of Project Monterey. SCO went through some ownership changes, and by 2002, it was led by new leadership under a CEO named Darryl McBride. And McBride had a theory that IBM had taken code and ideas from Project Monterey, code SCO believed it owned, and folded it into Linux. Since Linux was rapidly becoming the operating system running a huge chunk of the world's servers and big iron, SCO's argument was essentially, we own a piece of everything everybody's using, so everybody owes us. In March 2003, SCO sued IBM. This kicked off what became known as the SCO versus Linux saga. SCO didn't just sue IBM, they went after Linux users directly. They threatened companies running Linux with legal action.

Jeff Massie [00:55:32]:
And one of the more colorful footnotes of the whole affair It later came out that Microsoft had quietly helped fund SCO's legal campaign against IBM. Yeah. Which for the more seasoned listeners, i.e., older, they remember Microsoft and how they ran business back then, which is why people over a certain age still don't trust Microsoft. They're waiting for the other update to drop, to turn a phrase.

Rob Campbell [00:56:00]:
Yes.

Jeff Massie [00:56:02]:
Anyway, the problem for SCO was that they never actually produced convincing evidence. In 2007, a federal judge ruled that Novell, not SCO, actually owned the core Unix copyrights SCO had been suing over. That ruling gutted SCO's whole case. Within a month, SCO filed for bankruptcy. Darryl McBride was pushed out. The company eventually went into full liquidation in 2012. But like a good or not good horror movie, the bad guy still lives. SCO's remaining assets and legal claims got passed down through a chain of successor companies, and one of them, a company called Zymos, inherited the right to keep pursuing IBM.

Jeff Massie [00:56:50]:
In 2021, one branch of this fight actually did settle, with IBM paying $14. $2.5 million to what was left of the SCO's bankruptcy estate. But Zymos kept going with a new angle. Instead of claiming outright ownership of the code like the original SCO lawsuit did, Zymos argued something more specific, that IBM only ever had limited, non-exclusive license to that Project Monterey code, and that IBM breached that license by contributing to Linux. A federal district court in New York rejected that argument, and then on August 10th of this year, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Zaimos's appeal too. So Zaimos was still going at it, and they've been smacked down twice now. The court's reasoning was Zaimos was trying to dress up an ownership argument, the same kind of argument that had already failed back in 2007, As a licensing argument instead of it— they were dressing up the ownership argument as a licensing argument instead, and the clock had simply run out on that claim years ago. So the bad guy's dead.

Jeff Massie [00:58:06]:
Oh wait, the fingers are twitching. Zymo says it plans to ask for a full bench hearing, meaning the whole state of appeal appellate judges would reveal the case together instead of just the panel that already ruled. But legal reporting on this puts the odds of that actually happening at less than 3%. So functionally barring a Hail Mary disaster, the SCO, this whole big fight is essentially over. It's still not over till they actually make the— if they turn it down or whatever, but it's a microscopic chance that it'll actually go anywhere. So 23 years after SCO first filed suit, the question of who owns Linux appears to have finally been answered. Nobody gets to own it, and IBM and Red Hat can keep using what they've been using all along. One tech journalist put it perfectly, saying, this case seems destined to persist until either the heat death of the universe or the actual arrival of the year of the Linux desktop.

Jeff Massie [00:59:14]:
Normally, I'd bet on the heat death personally, but, you know, if anything, 2026 has shown the year of the Linux desktop might happen in my lifetime. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for more information. And there's an archive of history to find out there for those who really wanted to dig into the full play-by-play for the case of these past several years.

Rob Campbell [00:59:38]:
Yeah, so it's over.

Ken McDonald [00:59:40]:
Again.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:41]:
It's over again.

Jeff Massie [00:59:43]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:44]:
I—

Ken McDonald [00:59:44]:
Now, who's financing these lawsuits?

Jeff Massie [00:59:50]:
Zymos. They acquired the rights from the skeleton of SCO. Yeah. But I think they're funding it themselves. I don't know of any other companies secretly funneling money.

Ken McDonald [01:00:05]:
So wouldn't they eventually Run out of funds, they'll drop the case.

Jeff Massie [01:00:10]:
Well, they have to, because if the, uh, the whole, uh, appellate ruling fails, there's nowhere to go. And it relies on the fact that there's a discrepancy in the case that says, oh, wait a minute, we totally forgot this very important data. But the other part is it's so old that the statute of limitations has run out on a ton of this stuff, so they can't just We're going to bring it up again. It's done.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:40]:
Yeah. A lot of the patents that are involved here, which a lot of this comes down to patents, I believe, are, you know, they're expired or expiring. Yeah. I have a funny memory of SCO Unix. I dropped a picture in the Discord here of, it's a Fedora running like KDE 4. And then in the middle, Oracle VM VirtualBox and a SCO SysV login screen inside of that. This was a, this was a doctor's office that they brought me in here locally. And they're like, we have this old computer and it runs our old backend that we, we don't really use anymore, but we need it to be available to be able to look up historical data, but we want to have a backup so that it doesn't just die.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:24]:
And I looked at it and it was a SCO UNIX box. You know, very, very much like the Jurassic Park meme. It's a Unix system. I know this.

Jeff Massie [01:01:32]:
I know this. Yeah. And years ago, Linus Torvalds actually got called to the stand and he had to defend some code, which turned out to be bottom line is, you know, they said, hey, this code came from us. And really there was only one method to do what the code was doing. So it basically was like, yeah, this is just an obvious solution. It's not novel or unique to SEO. And they got slapped down.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:07]:
Torvalds was subpoenaed. That's interesting. I'll have to, uh, do some more reading on that. Oh, some hosted on the legal journalism site Groklaw. I miss Groklaw. I used to be a— did you guys used to read Grok Law to get your stuff, your coverage of this kind of thing?

Ken McDonald [01:02:28]:
I didn't.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:30]:
Oh, it was one of the good ones. Yeah, so there was a— I don't think she was a lawyer, but a legal expert, PJ, that was covering a lot of these issues, the SCO court, the SCO case, and some other things. And it was one of the, one of the really great places to find real information about all of this. But yeah, when the— I think it was the Snowden revelations about things that were happening over email came out, BJ was like, so much of this happens over email. Really, really took it to heart and said, you know, that was, that was the point where she stepped away and ended Groklaw as a thing. And now, unfortunately, groklaw.net is advertising Bitcoin gambling sites of 2025. Oh, that's unfortunate. The corpse has been desecrated.

Rob Campbell [01:03:22]:
I find that so unfortunate. People just let their domains go. I have a handful of domains that I haven't used in over a decade, but I keep them because I don't want somebody to squat them. Ruin them.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:35]:
Yes. Absolutely.

Ken McDonald [01:03:38]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:03:38]:
And I said there's a ton of information out there because anybody that really wants to get into this, They can do a search and there is tons of articles and all the— I mean, because back, you know, when this was going on, it was the hot topic and people were up in arms. And I mean, absolutely.

Ken McDonald [01:03:57]:
So what's going to be the next hot topic?

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:00]:
Well, I was going to say that SCOW is the case that never dies. We've got something else that just refuses to die that Rob has been trying to help kill.

Rob Campbell [01:04:08]:
Trying my best.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:09]:
Trying your best, Rob. What's going on with X.Org?

Rob Campbell [01:04:12]:
So X.Org Server 26.1 is almost here. And no, that's, that's not a typo in my notes. This will be the first major feature release of the X.Org Server since version 21.1 arrived all the way back in October of 2021. The second release candidate is now available, bringing fixes for XKB, XInput, the Mason build system, and several other smaller issues. It also updates the extension and video driver ABIs, which is important for packaging video drivers for anything else that needs to target a specific X.Org ABI version. This isn't, you know, some dramatic reinvention of X11. It's really the result of 5 years of accumulated fixes that are just going to get released. You know, new features, code revisions, and maintenance, you know, finally gathered together.

Rob Campbell [01:05:21]:
But with most Linux desktops continuing their move toward Wayland and X-Libre, Now providing another branch of the X11 family, the fact that X.Org is receiving a new feature release at all has sparked quite the conversation. And that's partly what I really want to talk about here. Some of the conversations on here were pretty good. So, you know, after I read the story in the comments there, somebody says, oh, so X11 isn't dead after all.

Ken McDonald [01:05:57]:
Good.

Rob Campbell [01:05:58]:
And somebody responded to that, it is the stink that gives the impression. And, you know, and then the next response to that was, if collecting fossils, fixing them up, and telling people dinosaurs are still alive— see here, my patched-up Velociraptor. There we go.

Jeff Massie [01:06:22]:
Velociraptor.

Rob Campbell [01:06:24]:
That's, that's what I was— Velociraptor skeleton, it's still working. Ah, no, don't touch it yet. The glue hasn't cured, uh, counts. Then yes, you are right. Um, still alive. But you know, then they went into some other stuff. You know, I brought up Ex Libri and, you know, one person here says, oh good, that way people who haven't migrated Ex Libri will finally gets things like tier-free support on the mode setting driver and more. I just wish the Red Hat agenda wouldn't have delayed this by a literal lustrum.

Rob Campbell [01:07:06]:
And someone replies to that, so virtually everyone? You know, and then there was another one, another response to that. Ex Libris is a broken mess. that has caused dozens and dozens of regressions, as evidenced by its rollout in Artix Linux and subsequent removal when the devs started crying about it. Everyone sane either never migrated to it or are migrating away from it, uh, or migrating from it. Uh, TearFree wasn't even made by The guy, MuteX, and he just switched it on, which can already be easily done by just patching X.Org. I'm glad X.Org proper is getting a new release, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, the talk, some people out there seem to really believe that X-Libre is the way forward. But, you know, I feel like— There was another distro, but Artix, you know, Artix actually made X-Libre its default X server back in April of 2026.

Rob Campbell [01:08:19]:
While keeping X.Org available as an alternative, it then decided shortly afterwards to reverse course because of what the Artix team called, quote, unusual high amount of X-Libre-related bug reports. And the timeline of this was April 3rd, Artix officially made Ex Libris the default X server. Soon afterwards, Artix decided to return to X.Org because of the volume of reported problems. Weekly images began switching back. August 26th, the official Artix ISO returned to X.Org as the default. August 27th, Artix announced it would stop packaging Ex Libris entirely. Existing packages would be migrating back to the corresponding X.Org packages. Users could still use third-party X-Libre repositories, but Artix would not be supporting them.

Rob Campbell [01:09:17]:
So like, like I think we've said before, Artix isn't— not Artix. X-Libre isn't the way forward. X is history. There's the Y server out there. You know, maybe that'll come with something, but Really just come to, come to your senses. It's, it's just Wayland, you know, most of the world Linux users have realized Wayland just works. Okay. I know, I know there are some niche use cases like this thing doesn't work for me and this doesn't work for you.

Rob Campbell [01:09:56]:
That's the great thing about open source. Use those niche cases. But for the bulk majority of the people, Eklund just works now. It's not 2019 anymore.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:10]:
I think that sums it up nicely. It's not 2019 anymore. That word lustrum, by the way, is a Latin word and it means 5 years, a 5-year span.

Rob Campbell [01:10:19]:
Oh, thanks for that, 'cause I, yeah, I didn't know that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:23]:
I could tell.

Jeff Massie [01:10:24]:
Well, I thought it was interesting when people would argue against, You know, moving off of X11 and they're like, well, but it does this, this, and this. And then the code maintainers would go, it hasn't done that for 10 years. We took that out because it was broken and no modern hardware supports it.

Ken McDonald [01:10:42]:
But my hardware supports it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:45]:
Yeah, except it usually didn't.

Jeff Massie [01:10:46]:
Well, yours might, Ken. It's old enough, but.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:47]:
Yeah, that's true. It usually didn't though. Like the things that people were talking about, it's like, yeah, like Jeff says, that That wasn't actually a thing inside of X.Org for a long time now. It's just, we were able to do the same thing in other ways to make it, you know, like, for example, one of the examples that you always heard a lot about was network transparency and the idea that, oh, you can just tunnel your X.Org applications anywhere and it just works. It's like, well, no, we'd kind of been faking that for a long time. And part of the argument was, and you'll never be able to do that with Wayland. Waypipe exists, thank you very much. And it wasn't actually that hard to make it work.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:28]:
I, yeah, the one, the one—

Ken McDonald [01:11:31]:
And we didn't have to vibe code it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:34]:
Yeah, well, I mean, that's, that was, that was before vibe coding was a thing. Nowadays we would totally vibe code it. As an aside, there are a group of us that we are just the right age to have ultimate bragging rights of I made X thing work before vibe coding was a thing. And so the guys that wrote Waypipe, that can be their, you know, that's the, that's their trophy to carry around forever. We made Waypipe work before vibe coding was a thing.

Rob Campbell [01:12:02]:
I remember configuring x386.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:06]:
There you go.

Jeff Massie [01:12:07]:
I remember that.

Ken McDonald [01:12:09]:
All right.

Rob Campbell [01:12:09]:
That was one that was really fun.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:13]:
We want to move on to openSUSE?

Ken McDonald [01:12:16]:
I'm ready.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:17]:
All right, Ken, take it away. Tell us what's going on in Tumbleweed world.

Ken McDonald [01:12:22]:
Well, this week we learn about the latest developments in the openSUSE project from Bobby Borisov and Markus Nester. Bobby and Markus both shared the openSUSE project has launched a new version of their web-based installer for Tumbleweed, SLO-Ro, and microOS distributions. Known as Agama version 24. Bobby notes that one prominent update is the revamped interface for setting language, keyboard layout, and time zone. Now, instead of opening 3 separate full-page selectors as before, the users now have all 3 settings in a single form equipped with searchable fields. The new version also adds a browse with details feature in the web UI, which lets users access a sortable table listing each— table listing each network device, its type, IP addresses, and connection state, enabling selection of the appropriate network connection and improving network binding. According to Marcus, a Gamma 24 enhances search features for locating storage devices in the system by supporting identification by kernel driver, file system, partition ID, or the count and contents of partitions or logical volumes in a disk or LVM volume group. Now, Bobby also discusses a new open source tool from openSUSE called osdiff, which simplifies comparing package versions between tumbleweed and Leap without checking each one individually.

Ken McDonald [01:14:20]:
Douglas DeMaio states in his blog that the openSUSE version diff tool is available at github.com/opensuse/ /osdiff and creates a comprehensive machine-generated comparison of source package versions between Tumbleweed and the most current Leap releases. Now, as per Bobby, the automatically created page monitors source packages and categorizes them into one of 5 states. You have the older in Leap, where the Leap includes an earlier upstream version than Tumbleweed. Newer in Leap, where Leap has a newer version. Same, where both Leap and Tumbleweed have an identical upstream version. Only in TW, where the package is exclusive to Tumbleweed. Only in Leap, where the package exists only in Leap. The generated page also provides maintainer information and keeps its claims precise.

Ken McDonald [01:15:27]:
This distinction is significant as the tool explicitly states it only compares the upstream version, not the RPM release. Now, as always, I recommend reading Bobby and Marco's articles for more details, but I do want to go ahead and demonstrate what this page looks like. Let me go ahead and pull it up here and then I'll share it with you.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:56]:
I pulled it up and I looked for Twig and PHP Twig is apparently not available in any of the Tumbleweed or Leap distros. So that's the one I was going to look for.

Ken McDonald [01:16:09]:
Yep. I've actually got it bookmarked in the show notes so anybody can pull it up on their computer when they want to. But as you can see, it gives you all that. What's nice is you can come over here, you can change the, uh, filtering so that it shows perfection, all the ones that are older in leap, uh, same. And as you look, you'll see it also, it gives you the source package. I wonder if it's got PHP Twig. Nope.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:56]:
Yeah, so they don't have— I looked for Twig and didn't see it.

Ken McDonald [01:17:01]:
But as you can see, you've got quite a few, uh, packages there, like 7-Zip, You know, honestly, back when I used openSUSE, that was their weakness.

Rob Campbell [01:17:12]:
Their default repos had a lot fewer packages than, than other distros I've used.

Ken McDonald [01:17:22]:
Now, as I said, Rob, this is actually what's upstream from all of these packages. So it's basically going to be whatever is available in their upstream version, not in each of the RPMs.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:42]:
Yeah, interesting. The list of things, and I'm thinking of Rob's Ubuntu story, of course, with this, the list of things that are newer in Leap is a really small list, only 12 packages. But interestingly, there's quite a few things that are only in Leap and not in Tumbleweed at all. A few things. See, I think I saw Budgie. Is that one of the ones that went by? Budgie Extras, Budgie Wayland Session, a bunch of GHC stuff, some Go stuff. Interesting. I'm kind of surprised that they have things like this that are in Leap and not in Tumbleweed.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:22]:
But yeah, interesting.

Ken McDonald [01:18:26]:
But it is nice to be able to just have it someplace where you can pull this up and do a comparison.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:31]:
Yeah, it's a useful tool for sure. And this is official from openSUSE. This is not like some disgruntled guy who's like, look, look at the difference. Look at how far they— no, it's, this is openSUSE themselves posting it.

Ken McDonald [01:18:42]:
Now, now here's my challenge for Canonical and Red Hat. Can y'all do the same?

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:53]:
I'm sure somebody could. It'd be pretty easy to put it together.

Rob Campbell [01:18:56]:
But maybe openSUSE's smaller quantity of packages is what allows them to make openSUSE such a reliable distribution. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, that could be.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:08]:
I thought you were going somewhere different with that, Rob.

Rob Campbell [01:19:10]:
I guess looking for that backend component.

Ken McDonald [01:19:12]:
Having 17,791 source packages is a small amount.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:17]:
It is smaller than some of the others.

Rob Campbell [01:19:19]:
Yeah, because when I used it, I thought it was a great distro and extremely snappy, reliable. And, you know, all the things you look for except for packages were missing.

Ken McDonald [01:19:30]:
I still use the openSUSE Tumbleweed that I've got installed in a VM on occasion.

Rob Campbell [01:19:35]:
Yeah, my last computer finished off with openSUSE, which I just recently, it's not my main computer, but I just recently installed something else bare metal on it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:48]:
Yeah, we'll have to talk about that. Get a little sneak peek of things coming. Let's actually take a quick break and then we're going to come back and jump into those last few stories. And we may interrogate Rob about his new bare metal install. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

Jeff Massie [01:20:10]:
So KDE Plasma 6.8 is set to release on October 14th. 14th, 2026. That date matters because it was on October 14th, 1996, exactly 30 years earlier, that a university student in Germany named Matthias Ettrich posted an announcement online proposing something he called Cool Desktop Environment, KDE. His complaint was simple. None of the desktop apps on Unix systems looked, felt, or worked the same way as each other. And he wanted to fix that by building one consistent environment instead of a pile of mismatched tools. That project became KDE. And 30 years later, almost to the day, it's still one of the most popular desktop environments in the Linux world.

Jeff Massie [01:21:05]:
Now, keep in mind, A lot of the desktops that are used today were not around back then. And if they were, they were a lot more of a mess back then. It was, it was, those early days were pretty clunky. So this release is KDE's 30th birthday present to itself. And it's a big one because it also is the release that finally kills off X11.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:29]:
So, woohoo!

Jeff Massie [01:21:32]:
Which, you know, I wrote this because I didn't realize Rob's, you know, story. But quick refresher for anyone who needs it. X11 is the display system that's been running Linux desktops since basically forever, going back to the '80s, or it could trace its roots back there anyway. Wayland is the modern replacement that's been gradually taking over for the past several years. KDE has been running both side by side for a while and letting you choose at login which one you wanted. So there's a little— option when you're logging in to say, well, you want to run X11, you want Wayland. Well, starting with Plasma 6.8, that choice is gone. There is no more X11 session option.

Jeff Massie [01:22:14]:
Everything runs on Wayland now. Now, before you panic, older X11-only apps still work fine because of XWayland. So nothing you're currently running is going to stop working. It's just the native X11 desktop session that's gone for good. You know, honestly, the timing makes sense. According to KDE's own usage data, over 95% of the people were already using Wayland by choice. This isn't KDE forcing people off a system they love. It's KDE cleaning up a decision most users had already made for themselves.

Jeff Massie [01:22:51]:
Now, A couple, let's talk a couple features that, you know, we've not previously talked about. And during the break, I'd mentioned, for example, like I'm not going to go over Union, which is the KDE theming feature to integrate things because we've talked about it in the past. So this is just a couple of things that are newer that we haven't covered in previous stories. So one of them is develop— KDE developer Xavier Huel reworked how the desktop handles setups with multiple graphics cards, especially external GPUs, the kind that you'd plug into a laptop through an enclosure to get a desktop-level graphics power-up on the go. The problem before was the system was constantly copying image data back and forth between GPUs in a way that wasted a ton of performance. Hugo, Or Hugh Hewell, I guess, actually tested this on one of his own laptops, a Framework laptop with an external RX 5700 XT graphics card plugged into it. And before the fix, running simple graphics tests, he was getting about 55 frames per second on a screen that's supposed to refresh at 120 times per second. After the fix, the real-world testing showed frame rates roughly doubling.

Jeff Massie [01:24:10]:
One outlet tested Cyberpunk 2077 and saw frame rates jump from 27 to 50 frames per second. Now, on top of that, KDE also finally re-enabled a graphics smoothing feature, triple buffering for NVIDIA cards by default. Now, they tried turning this back on in 2024, and I think we talked about it back then. But it caused enough visual glitches and stuttering that they had to pull it back out, basically, or just not turn it on. 2 years and a lot of bug fixes later, it's going back in. And because it's the 30th anniversary, KDE contributors, including the person who originally designed it, brought back 2 classic themes from the KDE 4 era called Oxygen and Air, fully updated to work with the modern codebase, complete with the old wallpaper And, you know, it's kind of a nice little wink back to the past of where the project came from. And as it takes, you know, this major step forward, the major step being getting rid of X11, like I said before, there's many features such as the Union theme upgrade and stuff that we've talked about previously, which is still in 6.8, of course. You know, of course, a ton of bug fixes, ton of paper cuts corrected.

Jeff Massie [01:25:28]:
You know, a cornucopia of other upgrades and features. I was just trying to hit on a couple of things we hadn't talked about before. So take a look at the article linked in the show notes, and it has links to other supporting information and tons and tons of links out there on KDE 6.8. So happy early birthday, KDE.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:48]:
I love it. 30 years. That is a long time to be working on a piece of software that's still You know, still up to date, still modern, still doing stuff.

Jeff Massie [01:25:58]:
I remember using 1 point something and compiling it to go to 2.0.

Rob Campbell [01:26:02]:
Yeah, it was only a few years later when I was using it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:07]:
I remember the 3.0 to 4.0 days. It was my— I used it in the 3 dot, but that was when really it was its hardest to use and also came into its own. I think came to the modern era. So yeah, neat to see. About a month until 6.8 will be out. So yeah, looking forward to that.

Jeff Massie [01:26:29]:
And the second beta is out right now if somebody wants to early test drive it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:33]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Campbell [01:26:33]:
Yeah, I think if I remember, I think I was briefly on 1.0 or 1 before 2.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:39]:
Could be.

Jeff Massie [01:26:40]:
So you figured out that you started, you started, you graduated high school when I started working at my current company. And I was using KDE 1.whatever, going to 2 when I was working at my current company.

Rob Campbell [01:26:53]:
Yeah, it was the late '90s when I first used Linux. Yeah. '99, I think.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:00]:
All right. Well, I think we mentioned this last week and I decided to go and give it a test drive. I went and installed LemonAid. That is an AMD and Canonical project together doing local AI inference on everybody's own computers, desktops and laptops. And I grabbed the— actually, I grabbed the RPM because they distribute this for a whole bunch of different platforms, make it very easy to get up and running. And they have Fedora RPMs that you can grab. So went and downloaded that and got it running and brought up the user interface. And I got to admit, I was immediately lost.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:39]:
I knew basically what it was for, but I didn't see a whole lot of documentation on board. But what they did is they had a Essentially a chatbot. It pre-downloaded a small text-based AI engine. So essentially a small chatbot that you could interact with. And so I immediately said, hey, I just downloaded— into the built-in UI interface chatbot thing. I said, hey, I just installed LemonAid, but I'm lost. What should I do first with this piece of software? And it gave me a response back. Let's see if I can find it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:17]:
It gave me a response back that was just hilarious. And it's like, well, I don't know what this LemonAid software is that you're talking about, but let me give you some general ideas about what to do with software. And I'm just like, I immediately went to the first feedback place that I could find, which happened to be their Discord. And I'm like, hey guys, Please put a gettingstarted.md file into your chatbot's knowledge base so that when someone starts out, they can ask these questions and get a reasonable response and not just this dumb pre-canned chatbot stuff because it's really bad.

Rob Campbell [01:28:55]:
Sounds like Siri in the 2010s.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:57]:
Yeah. Yeah. It was hilarious. Let's see.

Jeff Massie [01:29:02]:
I've got it.

Rob Campbell [01:29:03]:
This is what I found on the web.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:05]:
Yeah, except it wasn't even allowed to access the internet. It was hilarious. And then one of the other things that I discovered that it's like—

Rob Campbell [01:29:16]:
here it is.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:18]:
I will copy this image and drop it in the notes because it really shows the state of things. And then one of the other problems that I ran into with LemonAid, it's like, You have to download models, but in the interface, you can click on a model and say, download this, but you can't— there's no place to click and there's no help text of what the model is that you're about to download. And so you have to look at the models that are available. These are the recommended models. It does have this nice feature built in. It looks at your system and goes, you can probably run these. These are the top models that we suggest. But you then have to take that model and go to Google or to Claude or, you know, whatever and say, hey, tell me about this model inside of LemonAid to be able to then make your decision.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:06]:
Okay, that's probably the one that I want. And so I also went and I opened a bug report, a new feature request as a bug report on their GitHub. And I'm like, this would be really nice too if there was a way to figure this out inside the UI. And finally, an AMD guy got back to me in both of those places and he's like, yes, we understand these are failings. They're both good ideas. In fact, they are built into the next version of the GUI, which is now in beta and it's going to be releasing in about a month. So LemonAid is very cool for running models locally. Give it about a month and their GUI 3 is going to come out.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:39]:
And it, from what I've been told, is going to be way better. So about a month, we'll take another look at it and see if it is ready for primetime then, because it had some rough edges when I tried it.

Rob Campbell [01:30:52]:
You alone are pushing it forward. But I got to ask, were you able to actually do anything useful? useful in your time with it?

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:00]:
I mean, define useful, right? Like, so I'm—

Ken McDonald [01:31:04]:
Were you able to write a script to launch it?

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:07]:
Uh, actually, yes, I was. Um, hilariously, you define useful. I— yeah, the, the one thing that I've done with LemonAid that is the most useful is I wanted to be able to give it a description of like a, a character in a tabletop game and give me a transparent background overhead shot to be able to load into like a tabletop, a virtual tabletop. And I went to Claude because I couldn't make Lemonade do it inherently. I went to Claude. I'm like, Claude, how do I do this with Lemonade? And Claude gives me back a Python script that calls Lemonade, a couple of tools inside Lemonade to make it happen. So I am, but sort of.

Rob Campbell [01:31:51]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:52]:
But I can do it offline now. I just had to get some help to do it to start with.

Rob Campbell [01:31:57]:
And learn how to do it. Yes.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:59]:
And so that, I mean, really that ties back into that same problem though of like the tool, technically it works, but the tooling is not quite as user-friendly as it could be. And so hopefully that's going to get better.

Ken McDonald [01:32:09]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:32:09]:
Give it some time.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:11]:
I would say, I would say I'm going to try to remember to revisit it in about a month, grab the newest version of it when that is available, and then take another look at it and see.

Ken McDonald [01:32:20]:
Or maybe wait till after the holidays?

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:25]:
Probably not. I will probably, if I remember, I'll probably grab it as soon as it's available. Rob, do you want to talk about what you installed briefly or do you want to wait?

Rob Campbell [01:32:34]:
Sure, I'll go ahead.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:35]:
Give us a teaser.

Rob Campbell [01:32:36]:
Yeah, I mean, it's short because it was quick. So obviously I showed y'all Umachi and I'm sure many people hated that story because I've seen so much hate on the internet since then reading about it, but I don't know. It's, it's an interesting project. So separate things out. So anyway, on bare metal, I thought I dug up my old computer, one that happened to have openSUSE on it, and I installed Umachi on it. Uh, really the only problem I had is the first USB drive. It seemed like it was working before, but I could not get it to burn the ISO on it successfully for whatever reason. So I just grabbed a different USB.

Rob Campbell [01:33:20]:
It worked just fine. Plugged it in there, booted it up, installed. You know, it only has a few questions at the beginning and then it just does its thing. And it was up and running in, I don't know, a few minutes after I got it burned on a good USB for whatever reason. It just so happens the one that failed was an older 128 gig one. I don't know if there's some issue ahead with that. The newer one was a 64 gig new one that I just had laying around anyway. So I got it set up, played around with it a little bit.

Rob Campbell [01:33:58]:
And my command line tip, I did install on there, which I'll show you when we get to that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:03]:
We'll get to that in a minute.

Rob Campbell [01:34:05]:
Yeah. Otherwise it was not a whole lot else to say. I have Umachi running on a bare metal computer and I'll be experimenting with that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:14]:
Yeah. So hopefully in the next couple of weeks we'll hear more about your experiences there.

Jeff Massie [01:34:19]:
Is the whole big Umachi controversy just based on the guy leading the—

Rob Campbell [01:34:24]:
Mostly. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:26]:
It's, I think it's the majority of it is there's a group of people out there that really, really dislike DHH. For various reasons.

Jeff Massie [01:34:34]:
And, you know, because I keep hearing about it and I'm like, it's just a Linux dude. Who cares? You know, what's to get excited about?

Rob Campbell [01:34:42]:
It's the guy, not the distro. And my response on there is, you know, separate them.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:49]:
Those are 2 separate things. I am capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. I don't have to hate Omachi just because people don't like DHH.

Rob Campbell [01:34:58]:
Yeah. I mean, I could hate hate the guy all I want and still think the project is cool. And, you know, I thought it was refreshing in his interview that I— oh, you shared last week. I just watched it. You shared it last week. He even said on there, he's like, you can hate me all you want. I get it. I think he even like basically called himself a troll and he says he has fun with that stuff.

Rob Campbell [01:35:23]:
But this project can be good for Linux and all the other things that it's supposed ports, you know, the— all the software it uses, you know. And even if you don't like Umachi, use Umachi, the software that's in there hopefully will get better because of Umachi. You know, that was some of the things he said.

Ken McDonald [01:35:42]:
Sure.

Rob Campbell [01:35:42]:
You know, I, I resonated with that. I was like, you know what, I, I, I've never even looked too deep into why people hate them. I don't want to know. But, uh, um, but yeah, uh, You know, that resonated with me. It's like, you know what? I like that perspective. You're okay if I hate you. You have no problem with that. This is about the project.

Jeff Massie [01:36:07]:
Well, and really, you could even say Linux kind of has a history of we've had some project maintainers that have been jerks or more and have actually come up with pretty good software.

Rob Campbell [01:36:19]:
In some ways, Linus is a jerk. I don't know if I'd want him to be my boss.

Jeff Massie [01:36:24]:
Or used to be. This is the softer, gentler Linus now.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:28]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:36:29]:
You've outgrown that phase, Rob.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:31]:
Come to find out, that just means that he doesn't use profanity when he tells people they're dumb.

Jeff Massie [01:36:37]:
But those unbridled rants were always so much fun.

Ken McDonald [01:36:39]:
But he still uses 4-letter words.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:41]:
Yeah. Well, no, I mean, there's a couple of observations there. There is a certain element of you have to be willing to be obnoxious to be a good project leader. You know, I think that's just most people that have been on successful projects have seen that to some extent or another.

Ken McDonald [01:37:06]:
I would say kind of disagree with that. Most of the great leaders I've read about— sorry, Jeff, go ahead.

Jeff Massie [01:37:11]:
Well, I would say I kind of disagree with that. I think it's more of I think it's more of some of these people are very brilliant, and I've worked with some extremely brilliant people, and a lot of times at a certain level they start lacking people skills. So I think that it's not so much being a good project leader as they can kind of just push their way through and people kind of, I guess that is a good idea, okay, and I would, at the very least, I would not call him a good project leader. Maybe effective, but I mean, a ruthless jerk can be effective, but I wouldn't call him good.

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:54]:
Yeah, I guess effective then is more the— if you want to make that distinction, then I'm talking about being effective. I think in a lot of cases, when you get to a certain size to be able to be effective, there has to be a certain element of being willing to be slightly mean, let's just say. And that's something Torvalds talks—

Ken McDonald [01:38:15]:
No compromising.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:17]:
Well, not even, not even no compromising, but just like, you have to be direct, very, very direct in your communications, and you cannot take the time to discuss every decision. And this is something Torvalds has talked about. Like, he tried to be nice at the beginning of Linux, and people were working on projects, and he would eventually have to shoot them down, and they would get very distraught. And he actually came to the conclusion that it was better to just shoot it down immediately, very hard, so that someone wouldn't get so invested in the idea. And like—

Rob Campbell [01:38:49]:
I remember that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:50]:
Yeah, he's talked about that a couple of different times. So, but anyway, that's, that's not really what we're necessarily here to talk about. In fact, we have hit the end of the show. We're going to take one more break and then we're going to come back and talk about command line tips because we've got some fun stuff going on there. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. All right, Rob, you've got some interesting tips here. What are we looking at?

Rob Campbell [01:39:14]:
Well, I've already told you the story about Task Manager OG. So now I'm just going to show it to you. And here's a— first, here's Umachi, which is where I installed TM OG or Task Manager OG. And, you know, I just, I know it's pretty easy to download an AppImage and just run the thing like, you know, like Jeff did during the show, but this is Umachi. I had to do it the fun way. I used AI and I said, install the task manager from tmog.org. And so it did it.

Jeff Massie [01:39:54]:
Huh.

Rob Campbell [01:39:55]:
Yeah, it's fun. I like it anyway. So for those watching, you get the better experience here. This is going to be really hard to describe, but it's somewhat like the traditional Windows Task Manager, but fancier where, you know, you got to have a summary where you got CPU clock, temp, GPU. Unfortunately, I found what it does on the screen. It kind of uses a lot of CPU, but—

Jonathan Bennett [01:40:22]:
The Task Manager uses a lot of CPU?

Rob Campbell [01:40:27]:
Yeah, yeah. But this isn't like a high-end VM either. So, you know, maybe I'll have to try this on my bare metal machine, see how it looks. But I'm like, why is this thing using so much? I don't have anything installed on here. And then I looked at the stuff. But yeah, my CPU right now is at 90%. Well, it's bounced around between like 70 and 90, I guess. And you can see that I have 2 cores on this VM.

Rob Campbell [01:40:57]:
See the memory. But you could see energy if this, you know, I mean, this is a VM.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:04]:
It's real hardware.

Rob Campbell [01:41:05]:
Same with thermals, physical disk usage, and the network adapter. You got your processes, but many ways to look at that. Here's a way that's familiar to Windows users, really.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:25]:
I mean, it was written by the same guy that wrote the original Windows Task Manager.

Rob Campbell [01:41:31]:
So yeah, it's System Info. Yep, System Info. So you can go through and see all the stuff. Startup apps, simple little checkbox to not run them at startup anymore. Kind of simple. Users, services, same thing, checkboxes. Let's turn off the network manager. That's good.

Rob Campbell [01:41:52]:
Then the pro features, it shows down here, but it's not— it's just a sample of the pro features. But there's a power and frequency section, values, min/max for various— for like cores and stuff. Flight recorder, they call it, pro feature.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:15]:
And yeah, it looks like some of that could be useful.

Rob Campbell [01:42:21]:
Yeah, there's connections. I don't know what that'll look like over there, but installed apps, drivers, disk space. And then the benchmark section that— start that guy? No, because it's a sample and you need to throw. But yeah, you can do disk read/write. You were asking me about latency. Here's CPU, single-core, multi-core, GPU. You're gonna have different benchmarks there. And then there's a TMOG score.

Rob Campbell [01:43:02]:
So yeah, those are the pro features though. So nobody can see those today. But otherwise it's a task manager somewhat familiar to Windows users, but a bit fancier. And there's different skins and stuff. So you could, you know, this one's a little more glowy. Maybe there's something a little more mellow like the Windows one. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:43:27]:
You can get one that's too. Boring and enterprise. Yeah, I'm sure.

Rob Campbell [01:43:31]:
Yeah, that's, that's the TMOG that just came out this week. One of, one of my employees at work actually shared it with me, shared it with the whole team. He's like, hey, check this out. And he posted that website. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. I know what I'm going to use this week.

Ken McDonald [01:43:48]:
So did you do a comparison to see which one uses more CPU? TMOG or your original system monitor that was already installed with the system?

Rob Campbell [01:44:00]:
I don't know if there's even one installed already on Umachi, but I'm sure there's, there's top or htop or gtop. Yeah, which isn't going to use anything.

Jeff Massie [01:44:10]:
Yeah, gtop was always my favorite. Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:44:13]:
Yeah. I meant graphical. I don't know that there's a graphical one installed, but I guess I could have used one of the more popular ones to compare.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:19]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:44:21]:
But I think that all that graphical movement, you know, the graphs just going like crazy, uses a lot of CPU cycles.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:28]:
Yeah. I do have the feeling that AI was used in the generation of that to some extent, and it's not necessarily super great at making lightweight GUIs. So I'm not terribly surprised that it uses quite a bit of horsepower.

Ken McDonald [01:44:46]:
I noticed he doesn't have the source code for it available for us to look at.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:52]:
No, it is not an open source project because there's a paid version.

Ken McDonald [01:44:57]:
Yep.

Jeff Massie [01:44:57]:
It's not impossible, but it's hard to do a paid version for open source.

Rob Campbell [01:45:02]:
Yeah, I mean, you can. There are plenty of things out there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:45:06]:
All right, Ken, what you've got, what XML Starlet? I don't know what that is. I know what XML is, but beyond that—

Ken McDonald [01:45:15]:
Then I'm really going to confuse you with how I'm going to start off by introducing it. This week, I will show you how you can read, listen, or even watch podcasts from the command line using the command XML Starlet. Now, first of all, I'm going to go ahead and— is that big enough for everybody to read that's watching? Okay, but for those of y'all listening, I've brought up my terminal and I've already typed out xml-starlet --help out. And as it says, it's a command line utilities for XML, and it gives the usage as XML followed by options, then a command, or sometimes referred to as a subcommand, and then subcommand-specific options, where the command can be one of -ed for editing, -sel for selecting data or querying XML documents, -tr for transforming XML documents. You can use the command -val for validating, -fo for formatting, -el for displaying element structure of an XML document. And then there's C14N, which is used for XML canonicalization. Try saying that 3 times fast.

Jonathan Bennett [01:46:43]:
Mm-hmm.

Ken McDonald [01:46:44]:
Then LS for listing directory as XML. I never— haven't played with all of these. Actually, the only one I concentrated on was SEL. I'm going to let the— those of y'all listening I would recommend going back and installing and then using either— there's also the man page you can pull up, which doesn't give as much information as the help does, from my experience.

Jonathan Bennett [01:47:18]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:47:18]:
But I'm going to go ahead and expand, give you help for the SEL, the Select Data or Query XML document, since that's the one that I'm going to use for querying the podcast RSS feeds.

Jonathan Bennett [01:47:34]:
I was gonna say, this comes back to the fact that RSS is based on XML, doesn't it?

Ken McDonald [01:47:41]:
Yes. Now let me scroll back up here again. For those of y'all listening, I did XML Starlette SEL help, and this is, uh, from the XML Starlette Starlet Toolkit, select from XML, and the— it gives you the usage. There's global options, or you can use a template XML file. And I'll show you how you can get that XML file that you're going to use in a minute. But with the global options, you can do— they're all in caps, like -Q for quiet. -N for capital N for name. Then there's 2 that are not.

Ken McDonald [01:48:27]:
One's --net, which allows you to fetch DTDs or entities over a network. And of course, the --help that I've already shown.

Jonathan Bennett [01:48:41]:
Now, DTD is a document type definition. That's, that's part of the XML spec stuff.

Ken McDonald [01:48:47]:
And then for the templates, you indicate that you're wanting to do a template by a -t, and then you can give options like— all the rest are going to be lowercase— -c to print a copy of the XPath expression, -v where you can print the value of the XPath expression, -o where you can just output, uh, literal, a string literal, and -n to print a new line. I'm going to demonstrate those in a minute. Now, as I said, I wanted to show you how to get those RSS feeds. I'm going to use twit.tv as a great source for that. And I'm going to go back to some of those old shows that you may not be able to watch anymore. In particular, I'm going to Coding 101. And I'm going to go to subscribe to video. It brings up on the right side, for those of y'all listening, the subscribe to visual option where you can choose a provider.

Ken McDonald [01:49:59]:
This is probably where y'all have chosen in the past for the podcast application you want. And here we go with RSS. Now when you hit subscribe, this opens up this page here, which is so hard to read, isn't it?

Jonathan Bennett [01:50:17]:
Yeah, but it happens to be a .xml.

Ken McDonald [01:50:20]:
So, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy the, uh, URL from it. And then I'm going to go back to my, uh, terminal, and I'm going to use a variable so that it's easier to switch from, uh, one feed to another. So by doing that, I can then use Another command that we've covered in the past, curl, to pipe that into XML Starlet. And if you'll remember, we've covered the T as a template. The M is to match. Here we're asking it to match anything that has //item. Once it matches it, then we're asking it to print the value of the title for that item. Now we're also going to do the -o, and in this case I did a dash greater than sign.

Ken McDonald [01:51:38]:
So keep that in mind when it prints out. And then a -v for— and the enclosure @url, and then a -n so it does a newline print. And isn't that a little easier to read? Yeah. For those of y'all listening, we just got a listing of Seal 101, episode 97, colon Arduino PWM, dash PWM with Arduino. Then you have a dash ampersand GT, which is what it's converting the greater than sign to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:52:17]:
That's HTML encoding safe for the greater than.

Ken McDonald [01:52:22]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [01:52:22]:
So if you wanted to clean this up even more, you could do things like convert the ampersand GT into—

Ken McDonald [01:52:28]:
Well, no, that's actually from this. I'll demonstrate in a minute.

Jonathan Bennett [01:52:33]:
Oh, okay.

Ken McDonald [01:52:35]:
So it's treating it as if it was HTML encoding. And converting it. And then we've got the, uh, link to that particular episode. And then it keeps going down with episodes all the way back to episode 69 is what was in that RSS feed.

Jonathan Bennett [01:53:00]:
Cool.

Ken McDonald [01:53:02]:
Now that's Go with, uh, uh, TWiT API 4.4. David Deers explains how to account for expanding the TWiT API with new versions. I— when I move my cursor over that in the terminal, the link for it, it shows that it's treating it as a hyperlink. If I right-click on it, I can then open the link.

Jonathan Bennett [01:53:33]:
Pull it up in your web browser.

Ken McDonald [01:53:37]:
And I'm going to move that to a new window and pull it over here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:53:47]:
CashFly. And there it is.

Ken McDonald [01:53:50]:
Now y'all can't hear the audio that I'm hearing talking over Jonathan.

Jonathan Bennett [01:53:57]:
I was, I was narrating it. I've heard, I've heard those intros many, many times over the years.

Ken McDonald [01:54:03]:
Yep. Now I've also— this is also a great way if you are able to get the RSS feed for those of y'all that have signed into Club Twit.

Jonathan Bennett [01:54:22]:
Don't, uh, don't share your Club Twit RSS feed on the screen though.

Ken McDonald [01:54:26]:
I am not. I figured that out real quick. That's why I went with the, uh, the, uh, variable. I have one that I'd already set up previously.

Jonathan Bennett [01:54:38]:
There you go.

Ken McDonald [01:54:40]:
Curl RSS link prev. Now this one, I'm just showing the item title and name instead of the actual URLs because of that. And but if you use the other one, the, uh, that I showed for the first one, you could have it print out the URL as well, and you could click on them and, uh, go to them. This lets you go back to Untitled Linux Show Episode 0.

Jonathan Bennett [01:55:13]:
Nice, very cool. So now I know how to use this Swiss Army knife with XML, which might come in handy. I do have to work with XML every once in a while.

Rob Campbell [01:55:27]:
So I do have an update. A couple of things that I should have found before I did my command or my tip.

Jonathan Bennett [01:55:36]:
Errata before the show is even over with.

Rob Campbell [01:55:38]:
Errata, yes. That's how fast we move today. So one, There is settings. Um, so the default settings are high-frequency visuals. You can adjust that, uh, the FPS and, and all kinds of things way down. And then also there's a link to buy now. So I went and clicked on it. It's in the interface.

Rob Campbell [01:56:02]:
Um, it takes you to a website with the price, $39.95, but you can't actually buy it now. Yet, but the price is there. So I assume that's probably the final price. So when I said there's no price available yet for the Pro, it looks like there might be.

Jonathan Bennett [01:56:19]:
Price available, just not the actual code. It's not done yet.

Ken McDonald [01:56:23]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [01:56:24]:
All right.

Rob Campbell [01:56:24]:
Still waiting for Claude.

Jonathan Bennett [01:56:27]:
Gotta pay for all them Claude tokens. All right, Jeff, what do you got for us?

Jeff Massie [01:56:33]:
Mine's pretty simple. It's Metaflack. So basically this tip's for anyone out there with a music collection sitting in FLAC files. And the tool comes bundled with the standard FLAC command line package tools. So if you've got FLAC installed, you most certainly have this one as well. FLAC, as people may or may not know, carries metadata just like MP3s, image files, other file types. In this case, it's things like the artist name, album title, track number, number of channels, sampling rate, things like that. But sometimes the metadata is wrong, missing, or maybe you rip the whole album and every track says track 01 instead of the actual song name.

Jeff Massie [01:57:20]:
Well, fixing that one at a time in normal GUI tools, it's just, it's just a pain, you know, it's just slow and tedious. Metaflack lets you do that straight from the terminal, and more importantly, it lets you do it in bulk. Now, just a couple quick— just a few quick examples. If you want to see everything in a file's metadata, you run metaflack --list the file, your FLAC's file name, and it'll dump everything that's in the file, you know, sample rate, channels, tags, all of it. If you want to, uh, just check specific details across a bunch of files at once, like sample rate and channel count, you run metaflac --show-sample-rate --show-channels *.flac, and you'll get a quick readout of all the metadata for that whole folder. So every file you'll have the sample rate and how many channels it contains. Uh, maybe you need to strip out junk metadata like a stray description or comment tag that, that got left in from a rip or some— something went wrong. Metaflax space dash dash remove dash tag equals and then description.

Jeff Massie [01:58:42]:
So that would be the description of whatever the, the actual tag that you want removed. And then you put the, you know, yourfile.flack. So whatever your file name's called. And you can even get fancy and use the --preserve-mode-time flag. And it will update it without touching the file's original modification date. So like, it won't mess with like archive software and stuff like that, if that could be an issue for you. There's also support for importing and exporting tags in bulk form from a plain text file, which there you can generate that however, and then you can just use it to update your library. So if you manage any amount of FLAC files and, you know, really use the metadata, I think this one's worth, you know, I'd say add to your toolbox or at least know about because it's Probably already there if you have FLAC files.

Jeff Massie [01:59:41]:
See the link in the show notes for a lot more flags and information on how to use it and happy managing.

Ken McDonald [01:59:47]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:59:48]:
All right. I do have a tip this week and it is also what we talked about in FLOSS Weekly this week and that is update-cli. And I sort of came up with an intriguing way to use this tool in the middle of the episode and I thought I'd talk about it here for just a bit. Update CLI, you generally will run it. It's a Go program. You'll generally run it like inside a GitHub Action to go and look for, do you have libraries? Are there things that get built into a piece of software that need to be updated? And so essentially what it's doing is it's, you give it a URL to watch and it'll go out once an hour, once a day, however long you, however often you tell it to do so. And it'll go look like, is there an update there? Has this, you know, on GitHub, has there been a new release or in this Git branch, is there something new pushed? And then you tell it, okay, when something new is there, this is the thing that I want you to do. And in a lot of cases, that's going to be open inside the project that you're working with, open a pull request to update to the thing.

Jonathan Bennett [02:00:47]:
So there's some other tools that work in similar ways, Renovate being one of the famous ones that a lot of us use. Update CLI gives you a lot more flexibility though. And that brought to mind a question, an idea for using it, and that is, Could you run update-cli as a systemd service that fired every, say, 30 minutes and went and checked a GitHub or a Git repository and then installed that repository, or in this case, updated that repository on the local machine when it found updates? And I was talking with the guy behind it and he said, sure, you can do that. And people do it, which then brought to this really crazy idea of like, What if you're managing a website or a web application as a Git tree and you want to just push to your Git tree and have your server automatically pull it down and make it live? And apparently you can do that. And so I am— the link here is actually off to one of my repositories, one of my tabletop tools that I'm fiddling around with, but a YAML file, an update-cli.yaml. Update-cli YAML file that will watch this Git tree and install updates to a beta test of it whenever I push updates to Git. And I've not made this live yet, but here soon I'm going to. I'll report back on how well that works.

Jonathan Bennett [02:02:11]:
But I thought it was a really, really intriguing use case for update-cli. And we've got a few other places that I manage things on remote servers. And it's like, it's always a pain to have to SSH into them to make changes, to make something live. If I could have some tooling that would do it automatically based on just pushing something to Git, that sounds pretty intriguing. So I'm definitely going to jump on that and see if I can make it work. So pretty cool tool to know about. Update CLI. I need to get the link off to the Floss interview too, because it was a really good one.

Ken McDonald [02:02:43]:
So when are you going to interview yourself?

Jonathan Bennett [02:02:47]:
We've done that a couple of times, I think.

Rob Campbell [02:02:49]:
Oh yeah? Do you have a, like, Duplicate yourself and you ask yourself questions.

Jonathan Bennett [02:02:54]:
No. So there's, there was at least one time where I was there and we had a co-host for that particular show and the guest didn't come on. And so I ended up having the co-host interview me.

Rob Campbell [02:03:05]:
Yeah. I think there's one time I was there and we thought that was going to happen and then he showed up.

Jonathan Bennett [02:03:09]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff Massie [02:03:11]:
Well, and it kind of happened too somewhat when your wife was there.

Jonathan Bennett [02:03:14]:
That's true. Yeah, we did that.

Ken McDonald [02:03:16]:
Isn't that the episode where you interviewed the ultimate user?

Jonathan Bennett [02:03:20]:
I don't remember. Uh, I, I think, I think it was one time when David Ruggles was on that he interviewed me was the way that that went. That's been, that's been a while ago though.

Jeff Massie [02:03:31]:
I forgot about that one.

Rob Campbell [02:03:31]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [02:03:32]:
Yeah. So anyway, let's, uh, let's, let's, let's close the show out. We're gonna give each of the guys a chance to, uh, plug anything that they want to. And, uh, I, I have a feeling that Rob has something to plug.

Rob Campbell [02:03:46]:
I do. It's been a long show.

Jonathan Bennett [02:03:47]:
Wow.

Rob Campbell [02:03:48]:
Look at that time on there. Anyway, things I want to plug. First, ways to find me, robertpcampbell.com. Links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Bluesky, my Mastodon, place to donate coffee. And I'd like to say thank you to Mario D this week who donated me 3 coffees. You can click on there and see his message. I think it was public. Let's see what he said.

Rob Campbell [02:04:13]:
Thank you, Mario, for being a listener and contributing. Other ways that you can help me out is buying my book, which a few people on the show already have. And well, on this panel and on the show.

Jonathan Bennett [02:04:32]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [02:04:34]:
Already have. And Jeff's already through part 1 of it, so, uh, curious to hear how it turns out for him. But anyway, if you want to look for that, you can find that on Amazon, Trailer Park to Technology Leader, or on my website if you scroll down. It's, uh, you know, right there, just a little bit down there. Got— has, uh, stories of my life from childhood, things that led me on my trajectory from Being born, poor child, in a winter storm in a trailer park. I wasn't born in the trailer park, but that's where I grew up. And, you know, my trajectory—

Jonathan Bennett [02:05:16]:
I was going to ask, that sounds like a great story.

Rob Campbell [02:05:18]:
My trajectory to where I am today. And there's even the story of how the Untitled Linux Show started. So if you don't know that story, it's in there.

Jonathan Bennett [02:05:29]:
Yep, very cool. All right, thank you, Rob.

Ken McDonald [02:05:32]:
Ken? Uh, yes, I've also got a book I want to, um, let everybody know about by Peter Menik. Uh, if you are an MCU fan, then you may enjoy his, uh, book titled Tony Stark: Odysseus and the Myths Behind Marvel: Ancient Heroes in the Modern World, a Comparative Mythology of Greek Legends and Marvel Superheroes. As I said, by Peter, um, Meenik. I've got a link to, uh, the Goodreads, uh, for the book itself if you want to read its description. But I found it— I just finished it, and it wasn't, uh, it was a great, uh, comparison between Tony Stark and Odysseus.

Jonathan Bennett [02:06:28]:
Cool.

Ken McDonald [02:06:29]:
Among others.

Jonathan Bennett [02:06:30]:
Yeah, very interesting. All right, and Jeff?

Jeff Massie [02:06:35]:
Uh, as Rob said, yeah, I'm through part 1 of his book. I've learned that I'm never gonna let him, uh, borrow one of my remote control cars to fix it, but people in the— people have to read the book to find out the story there. Other than that, I have a poem. Or kind of a poem.

Ken McDonald [02:06:54]:
Kind of.

Jeff Massie [02:06:55]:
Fans whirring in night, dreams of code in pixel light, laptop snores in fright. Have a great week, everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [02:07:05]:
Is that a haiku?

Jeff Massie [02:07:07]:
Yeah, kind of. I didn't count the syllables, so I don't know if it's officially a haiku.

Rob Campbell [02:07:11]:
I have grown a lot since those days of that car. So, uh, Now I just want to do what I did.

Jeff Massie [02:07:18]:
Hey, don't give away a spoiler. People got to look.

Jonathan Bennett [02:07:21]:
I'll go look. I'm sure I'll get the joke here after a bit. All right. Appreciate you guys. It's been a blast. And as we pointed out, a long show. It's the first time all 4 of us have been back for a while. So not surprising that we went a little long.

Jonathan Bennett [02:07:36]:
All right. If you want to find more of me, there is, of course, Hackaday. It's where FLOSS Weekly lives. We talked about a little bit. And yeah, we appreciate everybody that's here, whether you get us live or on the download, whether you watch or listen, we just want to say thank you. And we will be back on the Untitled Linux Show next week. Don't miss it. We'll see you then.