Untitled Linux Show 163 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Jonathan Bennett
Hey folks. This week on ULS, Fedora is going cosmic, Manjaro is going immutable, and Canonical: they're taking something of a victory lap. It's all good, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love.

0:00:15 - David Ruggles
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:22 - Jonathan Bennett
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 163, recorded Saturday, august 3rd: A Terribly Fun Bad Idea. Hey folks, it is Saturday, it is time to get your geek on. We're going to talk about Linux and open source and hardware all the stuff going on this week. It's going to be a lot of fun. It is, of course, not just me. We've got David and we have Jeff. The artists that, if I get it wrong, are otherwise known as Rob that's a callback to last week they told me right before the show. By the way, my name's not Rob. Sure, rob, that's exactly what Rob would say. Fun times, Welcome guys. Good to be here.

0:01:03 - Jeff Massie
Good to be here. I always love it, oh yeah.

0:01:04 - Jonathan Bennett
It's always fun. I always love it. Oh yeah, it's always fun. So we're going to let David kick us off with our news stories. And it's a new Zen. You're messing with my Zen thing, man.

0:01:16 - David Ruggles
Yes yes, I got Zen 4.19 to talk about. I've got a couple of links, and the reason I've got a couple of links is down at the bottom of our show notes we always have a section called the down the rabbit hole. We don't have anything in it today, but oftentimes if we have extra stories and stuff we throw them down there for anybody that doesn't get enough. Well, this particular story became my rabbit hole this week. So I actually added a second link called Understanding the Virtualization Spectrum from the Zen project, because the first reason I pulled up was actually kind of just funny. You know it has the headline from Pharonix Zen 4.19, released with new 9PFS back-end scales up to 16,383 CPUs. So you know I was going to be like, ooh, what motherboard has 16,383 sockets on it. And you know it'd be kind of funny. It's not actually CPUs, it's cores. They're considered CPUs in Xen because that's how many it can emulate. But it can support up to 16,383 cores, which then can become a single CPU each. But in the process of reading through that and then following the link in the Pharonix article to the Zen projects announcement and reading through that, I actually I mean, I use virtual machines all the time Spin them up, tear them down. I've got some out in the cloud, I've got a virtualization host that I work with and stuff, but I've never actually dug into exactly what happens behind the scenes, and so I ended up going down this whole very interesting rabbit hole about Zen. So I would encourage you, if you're bored or just interested, to definitely research it. It's really interesting. I'm not going to spend a tremendous amount of time on that, but I did add a link because it was my rabbit hole so I wanted to share it with you guys.

But this specific version 4.19, they addressed 13 security advisories. They've included the adoption of additional MRSA C rules for improved code quality, and that's going to be mentioned in a minute as well. They've deprecated support for Xeon, pi or Phi I think it's Pi, it's PHI with firm plan to remove it in the next release, 4.20. So I was like, well, what is that? Because I've never heard of that before either. Turns out that Intel for a couple of years attempted to do a GP GPU, general purpose GPU to compete with AMD and NVIDIA in the large language model, early AI development kind of stuff, and didn't get a whole lot of traction, and so they actually dropped that, but that's what Xeon Phi is. Another interesting thing, well, at least something that was interesting to me is they are continuing to work on their system D support and streamlining it. So lib system D is no longer a build dependency, which means that system Dotify support is retained but now uses a standalone library implementation. So they're just continuing to enhance that and continue to refine that, which and you know, there's some other fixes and things, but they have some supporting quotes at the end of their press release.

And two that I thought were interesting was Chris Chaplin, the open source software lead systems engineer engineering at AMD. He talked about it and they are excited about Xen 4.19 because, with the MRSA C compliance nearing completion, they are saying that it brings them closer to a safety certifiable hypervisor, and we've actually mentioned safety certifiable stuff in like car operating systems and things in the past. So now they're talking about actually having the ability to safety certify virtual machines and virtual machine implementations, safety-certified virtual machines and virtual machine implementations. They're also looking forward to ZEN's flexibility with device tree overlays for dynamic VM configurations, and Jonathan's talked about device tree overlays in the past some of the stuff he's done but it's going to help support AMD's FPGAs, which is the Field Programmable Gate Arrays, and Adaptive SOCs or System on Chips. So they're expecting it to help AMD position it as a robust solution for critical embedded applications. And then we also see Andrew Wafa if I'm pronouncing that correctly, singer Director at the software communities at ARM, talking about well, of course they say you know how ARM is a platform of choice for vast ecosystem developers.

Got to tout ARM. But they're also excited about the significant improvements included in 4.19, including dynamic node programming for the ARM architecture. So there's just a lot of industry support and I'm not specifically excluding NVIDIA or picking on them. They just didn't have a statement where I would have mentioned them as well. So all that to say, it was a very interesting read for me and it's always cool to see technology continue to move forward, and it was really interesting to see how virtualization has evolved. One quick tidbit when Zen was developed in that I learned while going down my rabbit hole. When Zen was developed back in version one at the university, it was done in partnership with Microsoft and Linux, and Microsoft Windows XP was actually written or modified to be able to run on Xen but never released out of Microsoft Research. So there are some benchmarks from that, but obviously for commercial reasons it never left Microsoft research.

0:07:51 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so Xen ends up being like a hardware target, doesn't it? You know it's not exactly x86 or x86-64. It's its own things. You've got to have your kernel compiled specifically for it, right that?

0:08:05 - David Ruggles
was part of. What that rabbit hole ended up being is the different ways that they deal with the virtualization. So because I've always, you know, talked about QEMU and Xen, I never really understood it. Xen is just the kernel side. All of the device emulation stuff is done in QEMU. Yeah.

0:08:30 - Jonathan Bennett
Which is neat because there's a lot of code share between the different projects.

0:08:33 - David Ruggles
Yeah, they're all under the same umbrella, but there is a distinction there. But there is a para-virtualization, and full virtualization and paravirtualization is where they are their own kernel, and the operating system has to be modified to support that, which is what Microsoft Research did to XP to be able to run on it. But then the I'm trying to find it real quick. What they originally did, though, was I forget the term they used, but it was where they emulated all of the calls so that it was transparent to the operating system, and that was so inefficient that it wasn't sustainable. But basically, they started there, and then they started working on getting it more efficient. Yep, yep.

0:09:38 - Jonathan Bennett
Interesting. I've never run anything that's actually Xen. I do have done a lot of virtualization, but nothing with Xen. And yeah, I find, uh an intriguing thing. I'm I'm now I'm not kind of in the background looking, it's like can I do this with alma linux? Can I use alma linux as the zen hypervisor and as a zen guest, and will I get noticeably better performance from that? Questions about all. Right, jeff, do we want to talk about Canonical?

0:10:07 - Jeff Massie
We do and.

0:10:09 - Jonathan Bennett
I'd like to have a little bit of good news.

0:10:11 - Jeff Massie
So you know, in the wake of Intel's bad news about layoffs, I thought it'd be good to have something a little more positive. So Canonical has announced their financial statements in the UK and I thought I'd report on how they've done statements in the UK and I thought we'd report on how they've done. Canonical reported revenue for 2023 at 251 million US dollars, which is up from the previous year, which had a profit of 205 million. Now their gross margin did take a small drop, though from the previous year's 82% so 82% to 2023's 80%, so they lost 2% in gross margin. Gross margin, for those that don't know, is the total amount of sales versus the cost of generating the products or service. The 80% value means that for every dollar that Canonical took in, they were able to keep 80% of it as profit and the other 20% went to running the business overhead, paying people, that kind of thing. Another good sign of the times is their headcount went in 2022 was 858 people and now for 2023's financial statement they have 1,034 people on the books. So they've had a nice increase in size and we've covered some of that in size, you know, and we've covered some of that where they've been hiring here and there and, you know, growing their business and it's good to see that they're making more money at it.

For those newer to the Linux community, I do want to point out that even just a few years ago, canonical was running at a loss. You know it's now it's actually making money and able to stand on its own. But by recent I mean 2019, they were still operating at a loss and at that time they only had 473 people, which is still quite a bit. But Mark Shuttleworth doesn't want to bankroll Canonical forever. He wants them to become a viable business, which they are Looking at. The last few years, canonical's come quite far and growing up in size. The article in the show notes credits some of the recent uplift from the Ubuntu Pro paid customers and other subscription services.

Canonical's financial statements does make mention of a significant product launch which is scheduled for 2024, but at this time we don't have a lot of specifics. So they hinted in the financial release but they don't give us details. There's even possibly talk of possibly carrying out an IPO, but none of that's cemented in yet. We'll have to wait and see if that happens. Ipo, for those who don't know, is initial public offering. That's where they would actually sell stock, so you could buy stock andical and they become a public company and it helps generate revenue and money for the company so they can maybe take a bigger step into some other area or hire more people or whatever. A cash flow injection would really help them achieve their next goal.

Take a look at the article in the show notes if you want more details so you can see the changes in things like the sales and marketing expenses and the research and development expenses among other things. It's, it's all in there. It's very detailed. So if you've looked through financial reports, you know that every item is in there, is all lined out so you can really see how the company's doing. The full financial statement is linked in all its glorious splendor and you know I'm just happy there's some good news in the tech sector.

0:13:33 - Jonathan Bennett
Somewhere, indeed, I didn't think things are not quite that dire, but yes, I get what you're talking about.

0:13:40 - Jeff Massie
Yeah Well, later on we're going to have a little more gloom and doom. Well, something to look forward to With a Jonathan story Something to look forward to.

0:13:49 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, there is some crazy stuff going on. No good for Canonical. You know we every once in a while like to have a little bit of fun at Canonical's expense, but they, for the most part they are a good member of the community, they do good work and so I'm glad to see that they are doing well. Good for them. Yeah, uh, ae4ko aaron says it wouldn't surprise him if canonical is benefiting from red hat's marketing strategy changes. Air quotes like yeah, that that could be yeah, very, very possible.

0:14:25 - Jeff Massie
And they did talk about Canonical's cloud business too. It's picking up some revenue for them as more and more stuff gets into the cloud, plus the pro subscriptions, all that, so you can run your machines a lot longer, so on, and we mentioned before, but it is free for I think it's five machines or less, something like that.

0:14:54 - Jonathan Bennett
So if you want, to run a machine longer and you want the pro benefits, you can do it as a home user and not pay anything. Why would you, as a home user, want to run really old Linux?

0:15:06 - Jeff Massie
software though I just I don't. I like being on the bleeding edge. I do too too, but there's always somebody that just it works. I don't want to touch it. I you know. Yep, it makes them happy, and or it's grandma's computer. I don't want anything to change. I don't want any buttons to move, I don't want, you know that is true.

0:15:23 - Jonathan Bennett
That is true, all right. Well, that is canonical. Let's talk for a bit about manjaro and something new that manjaro is dipping their toes into. We shall say um, manjaro now has a, a very early preview, a test of an immutable spin of manjaro. So this is based on Arch, which this is kind of an incongruous thing, like it just doesn't fit together, arch based and immutable. Well, they're going to make it work and the image is available. They are asking people to test it. It is actually based on ArcDep, which is from the Arcane Linux distro, but Manjaro is offering this for people to test and in the forums there is an actual representative.

The Manjaro team is asked is this going to become official? And he says our plan is definitely for it to become an official variant of Manjaro With the community testing version. We are now gathering some feedback on what people expect from such a variant and what should still go in there or what could be slimmed down. So the official word is that Manjaro is going to be officially. How many times can I say official in this story? Manjaro is officially going to be officially. How many times can I say official in this story? Manjaro is officially going to be shipping an immutable linux distro. So if you want your manjaro, but you really you don't want it to ever break and if it does break you want to be able to roll it back. Manjaro immutable isn't interesting.

0:17:02 - Jeff Massie
I don't know. Isn't it kind of at odds with what Manjaro is, though, where it's so much more cutting edge?

0:17:09 - Jonathan Bennett
See, that's kind of what I was getting at. I used the $5 word incongruous. It seems that way, doesn't it? And especially because it's based on Arch, where you compile everything yourself. I don't know it's. It's based on arch where, like, you compile everything yourself. Um, I don't know. So maybe they have some system where you compile everything and then you switch to it in an immutable way, which could be interesting. I don't. I don't know all the details about how they've made this work. It's a cool idea though, like so, and I guess immutable go ahead yeah.

So arch and arch and manjaro, they're like they're on the bleeding edge and so breakages happen. So from another point of view, that is the distro where you would want the features of immutable to be able to roll back to a working image.

0:17:54 - David Ruggles
And I was going to say, you know, immutable doesn't necessarily have any indication of how often it updates. I mean you could update every 30 minutes and still be immutable because you're able to roll back.

0:18:05 - Jonathan Bennett
Technically. And one more thing on this is none of the immutable distros are actually like technically immutable. They just what they mean by that is they're versioned and they have. They have rollback to like known good software and they have rollback to known good software.

0:18:25 - David Ruggles
I remember that was discussed before. Isn't Atomic more accurate than Immutable?

0:18:31 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it probably is. The problem with that term is, at least Fedora uses Atomic as sort of their name for their Atomic distro, so maybe we need yet another term, that uh, that that lets you know, that really captures this without being uh, without being a brand name. You know the Kleenex, right? Kleenex is where the brand name is taken over the thing. Nobody talks about facial tissues anymore. Um, so maybe, maybe, maybe atomic Linux is just going to stick. I don't know.

0:19:03 - Jeff Massie
Well, I'm just. If they're doing this, I'm waiting for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Rawhide. Update your server daily. Test them in production, let's go.

0:19:14 - Jonathan Bennett
Kind of what Fedora is.

0:19:17 - Jeff Massie
No, no, no. Official Red Hat server edition.

0:19:21 - Jonathan Bennett
That's kind of what Fedora is. It's kind of the. You can run it as a server and it's sort of from Red Hat. But it's kind of what Fedora is. It's kind of the. You can run it as a server and it's sort of from Red Hat, but it's kind of always rolling and bleeding and yeah.

0:19:31 - Jeff Massie
But it's not advertised as server, see no, Fedora has a server spin.

0:19:37 - Jonathan Bennett
There is a Fedora server image. I'm going to download it. No, Rawhide though. No, okay, so that's interesting. I don't know if there is a Rawhide server image. No, I don't think there is. Now you can install Rawhide and then install like the server package set so sure you can almost get there.

0:19:58 - Jeff Massie
Well, I was just going with immutable Manjaro going oh, let's have daily updated enterprise Linux, yeah.

0:20:06 - Jonathan Bennett
All right, let's talk about well, let's talk about one of the technologies that tends to play into immutable Linux distros, that's Snap and Flatpak and David, you're going to tell us all about both of them.

0:20:19 - David Ruggles
No, actually I'm not, and which one's better? Nope, not going to do that either. So we have talked about Snap and Flatpak extensively and there have even been competitions and benchmarks to decree why one is better than the other. But there is an article from ZDNet so more of a general tech organization, not open source specific that talks about Snap and Flatpak and why they make Linux a better OS. So I am not going to they. Actually, in this article they do talk a little bit about the differences between Snap and Flatpak and I'm not going to go down that path because, if you're interested in that, we've talked about it at length in thepak. And I'm not going to go down that path because, if you're interested in that, we've talked about it at length in the past and I guarantee you next time there's an update we'll be talking about it at length in the future. But what I really like about this article, and why I wanted to bring it before you guys today, is they talk about it from an end-user perspective and what is helpful about Snap and Flatpak.

So they start out by talking about how, for a long time, linux received a bad rap, not just for being difficult to use but for not having the software necessary to be productive. And yes, maybe that was a valid argument, they say. Yes, maybe that was a valid argument, they say, since using the operating system in the early days of 1997. Yes, last century. But they go on to talk about. Okay, let's just take something, for example, like Firefox. Firefox is pretty much included so you can pseudo-apt install Firefox on Ubuntu or Debian-based distro. Or if you've got your RHEL-based distro, a DNF, install Firefox. So it's pretty simple to do.

But if you take something more complicated and not built in, like, say, zoom, for example, like, say, zoom, for example, you're going to have to go find the repos or repositories that contain the Zoom code and then when you add those and attempt to install it, you're going to find that it's got dependencies. And a lot of times you'll run into situations where you already have software installed on your machine that has one version of a dependency and then other software requires a different version of the same dependency. And if you do that, you break the first software and you enter into what is often known as dependency hell, where you're just in this cycle of breaking things and trying to get updates to everything all at the same time to get everything functional. Flatpak and Snap both solve that problem because they build all of the dependencies to run any particular application into the software repository. So there is no external dependency other than the Snap or Flatpak system itself. So, again in their example, using Zoom, you just Snap, install Zoom-client and now you have that Zoom client available to you Both of them have. You have the Snapcraft store or Flathub where you can go and find software that you might not otherwise have access to or have known about. So they both make installing software easier on Linux, especially for someone that doesn't want to have to understand or worry about dependencies, how software relates. What even does dependency mean? Why does this depend on that? I don't care, I just want to run whatever my software is. So they are reducing the barrier to entry.

Now there can be arguments that hey, you know, now you have these really bloated applications because you have a whole bunch of software that shares dependencies and each installation now has a copy of the exact same dependencies.

And those are some of the arguments against Snap and Flatpak. But if we're pragmatic it doesn't really matter, because our systems have more memory, they have more storage space. The system I'm talking to you from right now has two couple of megabytes or even a gig here or there. So, to summarize, this writer says, which I want to actually give credit I didn't get his name at the beginning or his or her name at the beginning to give credit. I didn't get his name at the beginning or his or her name at the beginning Jack Wallen. It says that because of Snap and Flatpak, he actually feels more comfortable recommending Linux to beginners and to people who are interested in just trying different things. So I basically it's just to say that, as much as we can nitpick the details and debate the pros and cons of the technical details, the fact that we have things like Flatpak and Snap is decreasing the barrier to entry to the open source community and that's a net positive yeah.

0:26:06 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so I've got a link that I added here it's off to a Hackaday article about Lightburn, which is software for laser cutters that has recently dropped their Linux version, and they talk about the segmentation of Linux distributions, complicating things, and, yes, that is a problem. Anyone that's tried to do software development particularly where you have, you know, somebody wants to be able to install on Debian and Ubuntu. Like I've got a project right now where, when people come and say I want to do this on Ubuntu, well, you might be able to compile it, but you may have problems and we support Debian officially. It's just the way it is. Well, the solution for some of this is, I think, snaps and flatbacks, and now I will not go so far as to say that even the majority of applications should be containerized. I think the majority of applications should be built the way that they're built now, but there is this subset of apps that it makes a lot of sense to containerized.

I think the majority of applications should be built the way that they're built now, but there is this subset of apps that it makes a lot of sense to containerize, and the browser may or may not be one of them, I don't know. I still like having the browser installed for real. But there are some other things where it does make a lot of sense, particularly some of these projects that are not or programs even that are not open source projects, where all of the users are running linux, but it's something that's going to be mainly on windows and they would like to support one version of linux. You know they want to just target ubuntu and be done with it, and then you know other people. What about fedora? I'm on mint and you put it in a put in a flat pack or a snap and you're done, and I think it makes a lot of sense there.

0:27:43 - David Ruggles
Yeah, and even like that, where you're porting a Windows application, let's say that you want to use Wine or Proton or something to get your Windows application running and you bundle that into a flat pack or a snap, and then you don't have to worry about keeping up with the updates of that project. I mean, on the flip side, you might need to worry about security.

0:28:07 - Jeff Massie
Jeff. Well, I was going to say a couple of things. One is that the article says the snaps are only available at the Canonical store. That's not quite true because a couple of months ago maybe three months ago now we talked about, Canon hired somebody and they're working with other distributions to be able to set up their own snap stores. So I would say the majority right now, you know almost all is on the canonical snap store, but they're opening that up so more people can set up their own store and be able to use it. And the other thing I was going to mention is even Linus Torvalds has mentioned how one of the reasons he is so adamant about not breaking user space is because the rest of Linux he talked about having a dive program and he says just, they don't offer it for Linux because every you know Linux's flexibility is also its Achilles heel, kind of like Jonathan said, where, yeah, we officially support this, but you want to put it on another distribution. Well, maybe it will, maybe it won't work, yeah.

0:29:11 - Jonathan Bennett
I can't tell you the number of games that got Linux releases, even just a few years ago, that don't work on Linux native anymore. But what continues to work are the Windows releases running in Wine or Proton. It's the craziest thing. But we are at the point now where, because Windows is a relatively stable in fact Windows Well, in fact Windows is that they have a stable user space and things that ran on Windows 95 are pretty much expected to still run on modern Windows. It has become to the point to where, if you want something to continue running on a computer for a long time, you build it for Windows and then you use Wine to run it on Linux, which is just a crazy place to come to. But that's where we're at.

0:30:04 - Jeff Massie
Yeah, we have the stable API then. And you talked about security too. I don't know what it is in Flatpak, but in Snap there is some sandboxing. I don't know if it's highly secure, but there's at least some walls.

0:30:20 - Jonathan Bennett
That's the other weird thing with Snap is that to really get that sandboxing door correctly it requires, as of last time I checked. Now I'm hopeful that they will eventually fix this Maybe they already have, but as of the last time I checked, to really properly sandbox your Snap you needed an out-of-tree kernel patch that unfortunately canonical kind of signal that they were done trying to get it upstreamed and they just gave up on that. So that's actually that's one of the big problems with snap trying to go to other package other, to other distros other than ubuntu oh, that's good to know.

I didn't know that, yep all right, let's talk about uh, let's talk about the opposite something, some uplifting news, at least. I think it's uplifting. I like it, I like the idea of it. I don't think they're gonna pry my dear my, my cold, hard fingers off of my kde, at least not on my desktop, but, uh, on the laptop. This might be interesting.

0:31:19 - Jeff Massie
Maybe not yet what is fedora up to? Well, fedora very likely might be getting a new desktop environment. By the way of system 76, fedora might be going cosmic, at least as an option. Now, just to refresh people's memory, cosmic is a desktop environment that system 76 is working on that. They've written this from scratch, which hasn't been done in a long time. The last real big desktop environments, kde and GNOME, have been around for a very long time and they're the two juggernauts in the desktop environments. Yes, there's a lot of other ones out there, but the biggest market share is KDE and GNOME. Market share is KDE and GNOME. That's the huge chunk of what's out there.

Cosmic is not based on any previous desktop environment. It's all new, custom built compositor library and applets and it's going to be a tiling window manager, so it will help you arrange your windows, which may or may not be a feature you're really looking forward to. You know that one's a little subjective. It's designed to be highly customizable and it's built using Rust, so they're trying to use a modern, memory safe programming language. Not that it's going to fix everything. You know like security wise, but you know another little thing to help keep things safe. You know every little bit helps. Currently, cosmic is almost to alpha stage and it runs on Pop OS, which is System76's own distribution, and it's based on Ubuntu. So System76, for those who don't know, is a hardware builder and they make laptops, desktops, servers, all of which are Linux friendly and come pre-installed with Linux. So that out of the way, now that everybody's all caught up, let's go back to Fedora.

So this information comes from a discussion over at X or the site formerly known as Twitter. A user had a question and Carl Richel, the CEO and founder of System76, had this to say when asked about installing Cosmic on Pop OS version 22, carl said yep, that's where the most development was done, but we've moved it to Pop 24 for the alpha release and beyond. Then someone asked will there be an official spin of it in the future, or something like that? Carl then replied yes, we may miss the Fedora 41 window, so hopefully Fedora 42. Okay, that sounds pretty cool, right, but keep in mind this is not an official announcement. Nobody Fedora was in on this discussion and nothing came across on official letterhead.

So take this with a grain of salt, but at least initially, it looks promising that we'll have a second, probably more in the future for distributions, we'll have Cosmic as an option. So Fedora gets it going, then how long before a bunch of the other ones jump on? Probably not too long. The article in the show notes speculates that rolling release distributions such as Arch and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed will probably have it available in the repositories as soon as the official alpha is out, which is set to release to the general public on August 8th. So now, just so everybody's aware.

You know I always say this, but it's an alpha, so there's going to be bugs, it's going to be rough, but it at least should sort of work, you know, give you a good sense of the feel of it. Anyway. You know, just seems there's like a lot of good news in Linux this past week, and so take a look at the article in the show notes for all the details and for other links to the discussion on X and links to pre-release versions of Cosmic. So if you're really adventurous you can try it out before it hits alpha.

0:34:54 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so I happened to be in on a media call Was it yesterday or the day before? I happened to be in on a media call was it yesterday or the day before with Carl Richel and some of the other Pop OS System76 developers. And it's a fairly certain thing that Cosmic is coming to Fedora. In fact, I've got a link here that there's already a Cosmic SIG matrix chat, which I believe that means that there is also a Cosmic Sig Sig being special interest group. So it's coming to Fedora. It's not been confirmed that there's going to be a spin for it, but Cosmic is pretty certainly coming to Fedora. And then there's some other neat things about Cosmic coming up, one of them being I asked on that very call what about HDR? That was one thing that was promised. I haven't heard anything about it and the answer was it's not ready for Alpha 1 yet, but we're thinking it's going to make Alpha 2. So they are really making some quick progress with Cosmic on Pop OS. It's really impressive.

0:36:01 - David Ruggles
So just to clarify my understanding, cosmic is basically on the same plane as KDE or GNOME, so it's running on top of Wayland.

0:36:16 - Jonathan Bennett
Yes and no. So Wayland things don't run on top of Wayland Things. They implement Wayland. So Wayland is things don't run on top of Wayland things. They implement Wayland. So it's. Wayland is not like X. X11 was a server that ran and then your desktop environment ran on top of that. That's not actually how Wayland works. With Wayland, it's basically just a specification and your desktop environment gets to implement the specification.

0:36:42 - David Ruggles
Um, and so okay, so does cosmic implement wayland?

0:36:45 - Jonathan Bennett
yes, yes, okay now the maybe the more interesting question does cosmic? Will cosmic run on top of x11? And I don't think so. I think it is wayland only, and the cosmic also is written in rust and it is literally a new ground-up desktop environment built on top of WL Roots. I think so. In this case, wl Roots is like the server component that provides some of that very low-level stuff. So I guess it's not entirely accurate to say that Cosmic implements all of this because they're reusing WL roots. That's sort of the reference implementation, I believe is the way that they put it, but it's a lot of new code and it's a lot of cool stuff that they've got in there. I got to see a little demo of it. It was neat.

0:37:37 - Jeff Massie
And kind of probably a good analogy to think about this for the non-computer programmers. When Jonathan says it implements a spec, it's, for example, wayland has now that I'm just making this up but has a command draw red box. So it says, okay, when you do this you're going to have a box and here's how it needs to look. They don't care how you do it. That's all under the hood for your desktop manager. You just know you have to make it happen. So how you internally handle that command, as long as you get the same output, that's okay.

0:38:11 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, essentially. And so the reason that's important is because now you have programs that just an application now, not even a desktop environment, but just an application. It will target the Wayland APIs and so long as your desktop environments all implement those APIs correctly and then your program is written properly to use them, you can take that exact same source code and it'll run on Cosmic on KDE, wayland on GNOME. You know, it's not a problem, it's just it's it's pluggable into that established API.

0:38:44 - David Ruggles
Um, so are they using WL roots or are they like using it as a reference, cause I just pulled up WL roots and notice it appears to be written in C, not rust.

0:38:56 - Jonathan Bennett
I. I believe that they are actually using WL roots as one of the layers underneath. Okay, so you know, it would not be entirely accurate to say that everything about Cosmic is done in Rust, but everything built on top of WL roots. So all of the new code that the PopOS developers have written is in Rust.

0:39:21 - Jeff Massie
So I tell you Until.

0:39:22 - Jonathan Bennett
DARP. Well, so I'll tell you what. I'm actually interviewing Carl Richel on Floss Weekly at the end of this month and I will make sure and ask him about that. Do they intend to rewrite WL roots in Rust? And I imagine he will laugh at me, but that's okay.

0:39:39 - Jeff Massie
Or wait for the DARPA tractor program to automate C and C++ conversion to Rust trying to use AI.

0:39:51 - Jonathan Bennett
That's a real thing, isn't it?

0:39:52 - Jeff Massie
Yes, yeah, darpa wants to convert a lot of older C and C++ code to Rust code. But they acknowledge that sometimes AI makes good code and sometimes it doesn't make good code.

0:40:11 - David Ruggles
I didn't know. Sometimes it made good code.

0:40:16 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, no, what actually happens is sometimes AI regurgitates good code.

0:40:20 - Jeff Massie
Yeah, yeah, I actually happens is sometimes AI regurgitates. Good code, yeah, yeah, I would give you that.

0:40:24 - Jonathan Bennett
Although, to be fair, that's what programmers do a lot of times too. Yes, okay, we know, david, how much of our code has slash. Slash link to Stack Overflow.

0:40:40 - David Ruggles
Let's be honest Slash slash link to Stack Overflow. Let's be honest.

0:40:48 - Jonathan Bennett
Well, that right there determines what level of programmer you are, because the higher level you remove that comment. That's actually so if you go and look, that is actually a license violation. Stack Overflow Stack Overflow in their terms of service is an interesting tidbit for folks. In the terms of service of Stack Overflow, it has essentially a built-in CLA that says you know, any code that you write as a part of a Stack Overflow answer automatically gets licensed with and it's I forget, the exact license that they use One of the permissive licenses. So it's like it's MIT or Apache or BSD. So it's like it's MIT or Apache or BSD. It's one of those with the addendum that all that is required to properly attribute is a link to where, on Stack Overflow, you found it.

0:41:42 - David Ruggles
So you can literally copy and paste Stack Overflow code in the comments, put a link to the page where you found it and you are good to go on the licensing. It's great. Well, I guess, to elaborate on my answer, then a higher level programmer, even if they find the answer there, they won't take it verbatim, they'll rewrite it into their code and part of that, just so we're being a little facetious and a little whatever. But in all seriousness, I don't ever like to copy and paste code in anything. I do because I want to thoroughly understand what it's doing, and if it's to the point that I have to research it, then it's not simple, it's something more complicated, and so I want to thoroughly understand what it's doing. So I'm going to rewrite it anyway.

0:42:16 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's fair, Even when I rewrite it, though, I like to leave a link a breadcrumb.

0:42:27 - Jeff Massie
Here's where you find the code that you've looked at to understand how this works. Show title David Takes the High Road I don't know about that.

0:42:37 - Jonathan Bennett
All right, so we covered Cosmic. I bragged about being on the press call. Let's talk about Fossa and StackShare.

0:42:46 - David Ruggles
Oh, my turn again All right, dave's turn again Okay.

0:42:50 - Jeff Massie
I cut him off there.

0:42:52 - David Ruggles
Oh, that's no problem. I derailed that whole conversation. I didn't even know where we were at anymore. So I've got an article about FASA and StackShare and part of the reason. So I like to keep an eye on open source news and things, and this is from TechCrunch by Dominic Midori Davis, and I was actually not aware of either of these organizations until I read this article. So it is an article about FASA buying StackShare. But looking into it first off, I'm actually kind of surprised. I was not aware of StackShare, started by Jonas Beshwarad, who was a solo founder, and he started StackShare because as he was looking into full stack solutions.

You call the software that includes your operating system, your programming languages, your database engine, what JavaScript code you're running in the web browser when you're building a web, not just a website, but a web portal, web application. That whole software is known as a software stack, and he said that there were that. He started having the issue of knowing you know what stack to use as he was getting into that, and then you know what broader set of developer tools to use and he realized that there were a lot of questions around that for developers as a gang of that. So he created StackShare so that it could be a community where people talk about the stack, they use the pros and cons of it and all of that. Fossa is a company, not was is a company that provides an important service. They have a free tier and then they have paid tiers, but they're all about S-bombs and I'm sure we've talked about S-bombs before, but that is a software bill of material, but that is a software bill of material.

It's especially important in well, not especially, but it is important in open source projects, because you need to be able to when you're dealing with security issues and things that can crop up in different packages out there. That may be included not even necessarily you may not have included them directly but when you imported a package in whatever programming language you use Java or Python or any other programming language, npm for JavaScript, but anyway you've imported a package that winds up having other dependencies I was just talking about dependencies a little bit ago. So it's connected to a bunch of other things. So you've actually imported all this third-party code that you haven't written yourself and you probably haven't either had the time or been able to audit yourself. So when there are security issues that come up, you need to be able to say, hey, is this thing that I wrote that is running out there as a service? Does it have that vulnerability? So that's what FASA does is it manages your projects and keeps up with every time you do an update, everything you pull in new code what that software is and what all the dependencies are, so that you can keep up with security and keep up with your software build materials. We are also seeing, especially in the US although other nations are doing it as well people that are doing software development as contracts for governments, whether local or federal. That's becoming more and more of a requirement. There's probably still exceptions to that requirement, but because they need to know, when they purchase the software, what all does it include so that they can be monitoring it for security vulnerabilities. That's the big issue around SBOM.

So, first off, I wasn't aware of either company and I have use for both, so that was pretty cool.

But beyond that, if you're watching the video, it's quite obvious. But I'm an older white guy and, as I've actually mentioned before, because you know, I have daughters interested in it, but I also have a lot of friends of color that are interested in IT and stuff. It's always been a passion of mine to celebrate and do everything I can to diversify technology and do everything I can to diversify technology. So both Yiannis himself and then a lot of his investors, which are celebrated in here, are people of color, and so that is something that is less common in technology and in open source, and so that is pretty cool. So I wanted to point that out specifically as well, because that is mentioned in there. He talks about some of the investors that he worked with. He said he's quoted as saying I also believe there aren't enough black people investing in the developer tools and enterprise space. I'm really proud to have had some amazing ones back me and StackShare, so just seeing a success story like that is awesome, and so I just wanted to celebrate that as well.

0:48:55 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, this is a cool story. I'm particularly interested in StackShare. You know, there's multiple times that you go to Facebook or Google. I wonder how they solved this problem and a lot of these big companies. They have StackShare stacks set up where you can go and just look and, oh, they did this in Python or Facebook. They're using PHP for stuff and so that's pretty neat and I think it's going to be a lot of work for them. But I think it might be a really neat integration with FASA to be able to have not just you know, this idea of a technology stack, but then build on to that kind of a I don't know what you would call it, but like a full stack SBOM maybe, stack S-bomb maybe so that you know every library and every bit of software that's running everywhere in your business. That's pretty interesting and pretty intriguing. I can definitely see why people were intrigued with that.

Very cool Something to keep an eye on. Best of luck to them. Hope they do well. Very cool, jeff is going to. Jeff is going to tell us all about all of the hardware and that I'm going to tell you more about the hardware. So strap in, we're about to talk hardware but not the hardware I'm talking about.

0:50:14 - Jeff Massie
So this next segment I've got here is a benchmarking comparison story of the amd 5 300 series of processors. Now, for those that don't know, these are for laptops and other mobile devices, the 9000 series, which is not due until the 15th of August. Those are the desktop versions, but they're also the Zen 5 cores. As of right now there are three models of this processor that's released. They're all AMD Ryzen AI9s, but the low end has just 365 appended to that mouthful. The middle one is an HX370, and the top of the line, which was just announced, is an HX375. The 365 has 10 cores and 20 threads with a 5 GHz boost frequency. The 370 has 12 cores and 20 threads with a 5 gigahertz boost frequency. The 370 has 12 cores and 24 threads with a 5.1 gigahertz boost frequency. And the 375 is the same as the 370, except for the NPU, which is the bit of the chip used for AI. It's a little faster, at 55 tops versus 50 tops.

Now our friend Michael Larable over at Phronix has been benchmarking his little hard out. So I've got three stories in the show notes and all three stories are talking about the 365 and 370 CPUs. He did not have a 375, and the software to fully take advantage of the NPU is still working its way into the kernel, so there wouldn't be any valuable benchmarking yet anyway. So for what Michael's running? The 375 and the 370 are basically going to look identical. So the first article is benchmarking the 365, and I've included this because a previous story which is linked in the inside that first article covers the 370. This one lets you see the two chips side by side among a lot of other AMD and Intel mobile CPUs. So part of the articles now do go into the laptops they're in and give details. So if you're so interested in looking for a new laptop, definitely pay attention to which story you follow because, like, for example, the 370, which I don't have linked but it is in the 365 story does go into the laptop and the hardware that it's housed around.

Now I'm going to summarize here because he ran over 130 benchmarks. So anybody wanting to see the full details, look at the first link in the show notes for your particular situation. Look at the first link in the show notes for your particular situation. Bottom line is the 370 was the fastest, with the 365 coming in second, but only by a small margin. Wasn't a lot of difference between them, but I mean the 370 was faster. The biggest noteworthy information called out in the article was that the 365 is basically the same speed as the Ryzen 7 7800HS, but it's only using 52% of the power. Now this was called out in the article and the previous 370 article the large increase in power efficiency. So for those asking, no, there was not an Apple laptop, so we don't see how it compares to an M3.

There are a lot of discussions in the comments which talk about how AMD closed the gap, but there's a lot of disagreement on the best way to actually measure the efficiency and things like single-threaded benchmarks. Are they that valuable of a benchmark versus real-world use? We'll probably see something in the future when they get directly benchmarked, but until then we have some educated guesses but there's a lot of disagreement. So, for example, taking a benchmark like a blender render and then looking at the watts while other people say joules and they're not the same measurement. So I'll leave that research to the listener on that.

But the second link in the show notes is another for a Pharonix article where Michael benchmarks Windows 11 versus Ubuntu Linux performance on the 365 processor. So Michael used Windows 11 with all available system and firmware updates as of launch day launch day of the 365. And he used Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upgraded the kernel to 6.10 stable and updated the Mesa Git by the OBF PPA and again had the latest AMD GPU firmware files. It was the same laptop, he just ran dual boot, so it's identical hardware. This time Michael had a shorter version of the benchmarking, with a little over 100 benchmarks ran instead of the previous story's 130. And looking over the results, it was pretty close, with the 610 kernel and Ubuntu 24.04 beinga little bit less than 3% faster than Windows 11. So real world performance, basically it's the same. You're not going to tell a 3% performance sitting at the keyboard. But I think it's pretty good though for launch day that we see Linux for launch day, because we know how Linux ages like fine wine and gets a lot better with age. So on opening day I'll take a 3% faster than Windows. We know for a fact it's only going to get better as time goes on. Now the third article in the show notes I have linked Michael benchmarks SMT performance on the 365 processor.

Why would Michael benchmark hyperthreading? Because the new Intel mobile processors which are due out September 3rd, they get rid of hyperthreading. Intel says they see a benefit. Amd says hyperthreading still works really well for them and they're going to keep it in. Amd says hyperthreading still works really well for them and they're going to keep it in.

Now, looking at Michael's results, I would have to agree. Leaving hyperthreading on had a definite performance improvement over removing it, and the power consumption was identical Well, I mean within error of noise. So realistically, same amount of power and even temperature at the CPU is basically the same, which would follow because if it's taking the same power it's going to have the same heat. So, turning on uh on on the amd 300 series of chips, there's no downside to leaving hyper threading on, only benefits. Now we will have to take a look and see what intel does, you know, and once they release their new chips we'll have a whole bunch more benchmarking and I'll report on what the findings are. So stay tuned to future Untitled Linux shows for all the new hardware goodness coming your way this year, but it should be rather exciting.

0:56:39 - Jonathan Bennett
I've got to say AMD, we love you, but your numbering system is terrible. It has been for a while, but the AMD 365, I love a comment I don't know who it was, but a comment somebody made. Is that related to Office 365 or the number of days in a year when it's a leap year? I don't know.

0:57:02 - Jeff Massie
And I don't know what it is about tech companies, because there's no tech company out there that has not done this. They have all, at one time or another, had garbage names, and I won't even bring up the USB consortium. Why it makes perfect sense. Well, when it's your day job and that's all you look at all day, it makes perfect sense. You know. Average person non-techieie goes what the heck is this? You know I.

0:57:30 - David Ruggles
I also think that there's, uh, maybe some non-techie marketing people involved. At some point it was like, oh, we need a new number for whatever seo or something I mean it's.

0:57:43 - Jonathan Bennett
It's fairly obvious they were trying to tap into the ai. Goodness, with this one it it's like let's name it AI. If we name it AI, though, it's not going to be, it doesn't fit, it's not a Verizon, you know whatever anymore. Just call it AI, it'll be fine, it'll be great.

0:58:00 - Jeff Massie
Yeah, I don't know, it's quite the mess. I mean, for quite a while what AMD was doing was kind of leapfrogging. So well, I guess that's not entirely true. For a while they would have like say, they call it 8000, and that was their mobile processors. But I guess that's not true because they had some overlap in there. So yeah, with their mobile they've kind of always floundered with what they were going to call it and it depended on the generation floundered with what they were going to call it and it depended on the generation.

0:58:31 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, well, and I get. I get why they wanted to do that because they were they were pushing out mobile chips that were still using, like the old die generation right, which there are reasons you might want to do that for, you know, power consumption or what have you. It might make sense, but it's kind of a downer for marketing to say here's our new 5000 series chips. Yes, we know, we just announced the 6000 for the desktop, but you should really buy these on your laptop uh, yeah, well, they're coming.

0:58:59 - Jeff Massie
they're coming out with the 5900x, which is a 12 core cpu CPU, but normally the 900 ones are a 12, core 16, I think Are they normally 12s. Yeah, the 950s are the 16s.

0:59:20 - Jonathan Bennett
Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:59:22 - Jeff Massie
So they've got a. It's like, wait a minute, that doesn't match the previous numbering with the. I'm okay if they would have just put like an M after it. So you know it's the mobile. Wait a minute. That doesn't match the previous numbering with the. I'm okay if they would have just put like an M after it, so you know it's the mobile chip or whatever.

0:59:33 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, I mean Intel has been doing. They've gotten the numbering down right for a long time now. Right, we're like 14 generations of good numbering system.

0:59:44 - Jeff Massie
I believe next gen they're breaking it.

0:59:47 - Jonathan Bennett
I mean, it has gotten to be kind of a mouthful, so, but hopefully, hopefully they'll pick a new numbering system and stick with it for like another dozen generations, uh, and not just make something up every time. That's that's really where it gets to be a problem, like when you've got to make something up for every release, like nobody knows what generation you're in, what you're talking about and what's worse is when the numbering number doesn't.

1:00:10 - Jeff Massie
You know, bigger is not better, because I know nvidia has been caught at that where, oh, this is a 960, whatever, yeah, but it's actually the previous generation 950 and it's not. You know, it's slower than the, yeah, current gens 950. You have to have a scorecard to keep track of everybody so you know exactly what you're getting. I think we're having a technical difficulty.

1:00:56 - David Ruggles
Okay, so it's not just me.

1:00:58 - Jeff Massie
No, I think we might have lost Jonathan a little bit there. Anybody in the audience? Are we coming in, david and I coming in okay, or is Jonathan coming okay and David and I are messed up?

1:01:24 - David Ruggles
Whoa, okay, wow. So which one of us is hosting now?

1:01:31 - Jeff Massie
I don't know, I just know that. See, that's what happens. When he had an opinion I didn't agree with Let that be a lesson.

1:01:36 - Jonathan Bennett
Am I back yet Can you hear me now?

Yes, yes, that was fun, all right. So let's see when were we? Oh yes, intel, intel. Intel and their 13th and 14th generation desktop processors have had a problem. You may have noticed. If you have one of those, you may have had crashes and come to find out that was a problem with voltages and overvolting parts of the Intel processors. And I believe Intel tried really hard to blame motherboard manufacturers. I'm not sure if that is or is not the case. They did Well. I know they tried to. I'm not sure whether or not the blame actually fully oh no.

1:02:28 - Jeff Massie
Uh-oh.

1:02:30 - Jonathan Bennett
It will be releasing a microcode update and it's going to fix everything.

1:02:42 - David Ruggles
Is he running on an Intel chip?

1:02:44 - Jonathan Bennett
Permanent Could be, You're dropping out jonathan I'm continuing to drop out. Uh, I don't, I don't know, I'm not sure exactly what's causing that. Anyway, um, these intel chips have been, in some cases, permanently damaged and, in their out of the goodness of their hearts, to try to save their reputation, uh, intel is extending the warranty on all 13th and 14th generation CPUs for an extra two years. Just to say we goofed and we're sorry, and, yes, we will make it right. So if you have one of these 13th, 14th generation chips, it is time to keep an eye on them, and if they get real flaky on you, you might want to reach out and get them rma'd. Wait until after the microcode update. That way you don't break the new chip.

But uh, yeah, there was a, there was a bit of a problem there, and intel is trying to make it right. Uh, this has been going on for a while though, hasn't it? It's been kind of a thing happening in the background that you know gaming on them or what have you that it's. It's sort of uh, not entirely stable yeah.

1:03:55 - Jeff Massie
So they did try to blame motherboards and the argument came down to intel said why did you give us this voltage, that? And the motherboard manufacturer said that's our job, you ask for it, we have to supply what you ask for. And so there became a head-to-head there and I think they kind of finally sorted that out. There was also an issue with oxide that was growing in some of the chips and they solved that. But they didn't recall the chips. So there, some of them, I think even into early 24 that still had the problem.

And then now it's just anecdotal at this point there was a person that had a problem with two chips and they were saying oh, those, those are not um official chips. But he had all of uh photographic evidence that like, yeah, they were official intel, they weren't counterfeit. One was from micro center, I think, one was from um amazon, maybe it was. It was two reputable companies that he that he purchased them from and at least one reputable company, and amazon yeah, but I want to say I thought it was a reputable company through Amazon.

It wasn't like Bob's PC place. And then there's been some talk about oh, are they going to support the tray systems? Because if you buy an Intel boxed one you get an actual box with, you know, probably comes with a cooler. In some cases they will support the warranty on that. They've been a little flaky on the tray. Now what happens? There is somebody will buy a large tray of processors and they, because they're buying a bulk tray, they get it at a cheaper price and they can sell them cheaper. So you probably just get the cpu in a little package. You're not getting all the other stuff and the stickers and whatnot with it and trades are usually for OEMs or somebody like that that needs to build a lot of systems.

Now what's happening with the voltage? So what happens when you overvolt your silicon? It degrades it. So that's how you can actually accelerate wear to see how long are your chips going to last. You accelerate temperature and you accelerate voltage. Well, these modern chips are designed to run at about 95 to 100 C and they say they throttle themselves there. So you're already pretty hot. Now you've got over voltage. You're just increasing wear.

And one of the reasons they said they're going to go to two years is because you might be like, oh, my chip is running fine, well, but it's already degraded a bunch and you might have taken several years of life off of it and within a year it might die because you basically wore it out. You just don't realize it right now. So they've been having a lot of flack about not jumping in and saying, okay, um, we're just going to recall them or automatically exchange them. No questions asked it there's. There's certain some of the rma stuff. They've had some pushback, so intel's having a heck of a time and and they had the, the 15 000 people laid off or they are laying off yeah, that's rough.

1:07:12 - Jonathan Bennett
All happened at the same time. Yeah, there's your doom and gloom folks.

1:07:17 - Jeff Massie
Yeah, well, and, and you know there's a lot of uh internet videos on it. You know you can look at Linus tech tips. Uh, gamers Nexus has some good ones. Um, uh, level one texts. You know that's. They've got some good stuff out there. Yeah, and you know there's a talk to a lot of a lot of people are saying, okay, we're going to check the 9000 series versus the next generation of Intel chips, but can we recommend them? There's not getting a warm fuzzy. And a lot of them said, okay, they should have owned up to it and said you know what? We dropped the ball, our bad, you got any problems? No questions asked, rma or we do a recall, we'll take care of it, we'll fix it, versus kind of dragging their feet a little.

1:08:09 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. In my opinion, though, coming out and giving these two generations the um, the two years of extra, free, extra warranty that, honestly, that goes a long ways towards making it right. This sounds to me like they're finally coming out and owning up and saying, yes, there were some problems.

1:08:32 - Jeff Massie
Yeah, and as long as the RMA process is going to be nice and easy and not fighting it.

1:08:39 - Jonathan Bennett
That's true, that's true. There could be some malicious compliance going on there, from Intel, I suppose.

1:08:46 - Jeff Massie
Yeah, like I said, there was some anecdotal stuff where they were pushing back on a return, but I haven't heard of any large scale, it was kind of a little more anecdotal. So I would think at that point Intel would and I I I don't know if it's true or not I've heard they have a third party doing the RMAs. They're not actually doing them themselves, they just kind of work with a third party. But I would think either way they would say look, just take them back, exchange them, don't you know? Don't fight it, don't you know?

1:09:18 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's it. It takes some time though for that sort of order to make its way down, like for the engineers you know, the the high level engineers to realize there's a problem with these chips, and then you know that that's sort of that order starts filtering, so first it's got to go up to your ceos, who are then going to make a decision how do we handle this and then that sort of filters down and finally makes it to the people on the ground running the OEM process, and in a big corporation that could take some time.

1:09:45 - Jeff Massie
So I'm not surprised and it takes time to figure that stuff out, because even having a dead chip, you can say well, we know, I think they call it the ring buffer or ring connection. It's like an interconnect between the cores and you can say, oh yeah, it's dead. We see that. Well, why? What's causing this? Where is this coming from? And it could be.

The overvoltage is only in certain instances where it's really trying to stress something, trying to peak a core, and so you've got to have those right conditions to catch that and some of that stuff. People think, well, you just hook it up to all the scopes and meters and testers, it'd be easy. A lot of times there's a lot of interactions and when you get something coming back with an RMA, you got to first figure out did somebody do something they shouldn't have? Or did this, you know, did the motherboard do something? That the CPU said I need 1.1 volts and the motherboard gave it 1.7. There's a lot of back and forth and just rooting through the problem to figure out what actually goes on, because the integration in the chips is so complex.

1:10:56 - Jonathan Bennett
It's a very difficult problem to solve these days.

1:10:59 - Jeff Massie
Sorry, my background was coming out there.

1:11:00 - Jonathan Bennett
Oh no, no, it's great great it's good stuff. Yeah, definitely good stuff.

1:11:03 - David Ruggles
So I don't know if it's related to this or something else, but out of curiosity I just checked and their stock price lost almost a third of its value yesterday oh well, the entire tech sector took a major header a lot yesterday, the last couple days.

1:11:22 - Jeff Massie
Yeah, it's, yeah, all the tech companies are just taking a major hit, so they're. They're not alone, amd nvidia, you know they're all I didn't.

1:11:32 - David Ruggles
I didn't look anybody else up, I was just, since we were talking about intel I looked at my microns took a hit there.

1:11:38 - Jeff Massie
The whole market was uh taking a header is that?

1:11:40 - Jonathan Bennett
is that just because all the earning calls happened and people started seeing things not going the direction they wanted it to, or was there? Was there some big piece of news that we missed?

1:11:49 - Jeff Massie
well it was. It was more related people saying to the jobs report and the us didn't get as many jobs as they thought and everything seemed weaker and they didn't lower interest rates. So they're thinking, oh, are we, are we heading to a recession? So everybody had kind of a sell-offs and so there, there wasn't one. Well, I mean, that was the one big news, but there was nothing directly in tech saying uh-oh panic.

1:12:12 - David Ruggles
Normal. It's stock market and economic stuff, not tech.

1:12:18 - Jeff Massie
Yes, like it, yeah and and intel, and intel's layoff didn't help. But a lot of that was related to their foundry businesses not doing so hot. So they actually hired somebody from Micron Naga and he's going to run their foundry business and he's a really sharp guy. I have a lot of respect for him. So we'll see if he can turn the foundry stuff around.

1:12:45 - David Ruggles
Interesting, all right, very cool. So this is ULS Stock Tips. You heard it here first.

1:12:52 - Jonathan Bennett
This is not economic advice. Talk to your advisor before you buy any stocks. We are not lawyers.

1:13:00 - David Ruggles
Or CPAs, or investors.

1:13:04 - Jeff Massie
Indeed, if you listen to a random guy on the internet for your stock advice, you're going to have a bad time of it.

1:13:12 - Jonathan Bennett
Oh, the funniest thing. So I interviewed Evan Upton on Floss Weekly back months ago now about Raspberry Pi and we asked him about because at that time it was sort of rumored and was beginning to be more solid that an IPO was coming. So we talked a little bit about that and then we talked about a bunch of other tech stuff, posted it on YouTube. When the IPO happened I had people coming to that YouTube video and commenting should I buy the Raspberry pi ipo? I don't know, you do you man, I'm not going to give you that kind of advice. Uh, yeah, looking for tips. It was great, yeah, and and just kind of editorial yeah, a little editorial, I think.

1:13:56 - Jeff Massie
I think intel's problems were when they had too many bean counters running it and they didn't have a engineer forcing the technology more there. There was too much uh, marketing and accounting going on. Yes, but that's my opinion and you know what's it worth absolutely nothing.

1:14:14 - David Ruggles
It's worth what you just paid to get it.

1:14:16 - Jeff Massie
Yep yeah, well they are. I was going to say that, but they are actually paying because they're in the club oh yeah.

1:14:21 - David Ruggles
yeah, that's true. Well, we may have some live viewers that are getting it directly and if you are, let's see up there. Join the club now that thing.

1:14:34 - Jonathan Bennett
Scan it, join the club? Yeah, all right, let's move to command line tips. This is the real good stuff. This is what people are really here for, talking about all of these juicy command line tips. We've got some fun ones today. I know Jeff has a really fun gaming sort of tip, and I have an oddball tip. That would actually be a lot of fun. I don't know if I'm ever going to use it, but it'd be a lot of fun to do.

1:14:58 - David Ruggles
We're going to let David go first, though and we're going to let David go first, though, and he's going to talk about LocalSend, yes, which is not a command line tip at all, but it is a tip. So if you have friends that use Apple first, I'm sorry for you. No, I'm joking, but you are probably familiar with whatever they call it AirDrop, yes, and you know easy way to transfer files between iOS devices and Mac and iOS. Well, you've got a few other technologies out there Windows and Samsung, I think it is. They have one that you can use for their devices and their nearby share, or near share, or something, but what about something that breaks down the barriers, brings us all together and lets us share our memes directly? We have the solution for you. It's called LocalSend, so I've got a link to an article about it in the show notes, and it's an open source AirDrop alternative for everyone, so you can install it on all your devices Android and iOS, all your operating systems Windows, mac and Linux. It's written primarily in the Dart programming language, which is the main programming. Well, not the main. It's the programming language behind Flutter, which we've mentioned before, programming language behind Flutter, which we've mentioned before, and they talk in the article about some of the tests and stuff. He's got lots of screenshots and everything.

I have not installed it yet, but I'm actually planning on doing it because I have needs quite often for sharing stuff and, honestly, most often what I do right now is use something like Google Drive or OneDrive to sync it out of wherever I'm at up to the cloud service and then back down, because that's faster than trying to share between you know, three or four different operating systems at the same time.

So this is a tool that I came across and I have definite use cases for it. But the only thing they mentioned is he said smaller transfers are better than large transfers, because he did try a 90 gig transfer and after fluctuating speeds it ended up up just failing. But if you're transferring 90 gig, you probably need something a little more robust than any sort of quick share operation. And now I haven't tested it, but I'm not even sure if airdrop could handle something that large. That's the main end is exactly. But hey, hey, it's a quick tip, um, not command line specifically. Um, but you can run it from anything and it is in the flat hub store. Uh, to have a quick call back to a previous article.

So yeah, lots of options no, they don't mention that, so oh, no, snap uh, yeah, it's in snap.

1:18:23 - Jonathan Bennett
They've got a snap. Oh it is in snap okay, snapcraftio slash local send awesome, there you go.

1:18:28 - David Ruggles
So yeah, all your repository sources yep, very cool, I'm.

1:18:34 - Jonathan Bennett
I'm looking to see if you can run it from the command line. It seems like there should be a way to, but I don't. I don't see it, so maybe it really is a gui only program oh well.

1:18:44 - Jeff Massie
Well, you can always kick them off from the command line.

1:18:46 - Jonathan Bennett
That there you go, there you. You can, if you, if you would like to, yes, all right, jeff, what do you have for us?

1:18:54 - Jeff Massie
well, I have retro arch. Now we're not talking about the distribution arch, we we're talking games, and I know a lot of you like to play games, and this is a classic video game emulator so you can play those old, fond memories. Now you might be thinking, ah, steam does that. I don't have a problem playing old games. Well, retroarch is a little different. It's a multi-emulator application. For example, you can play PS1, ps2, psp, nintendo Switch, example, you can play ps1, ps2, psp, nintendo switch and commodore games, among many others. I mean, there's several other consoles that are emulated as well. So this is, this is all your childhood fantasies, for those of you that are old enough to have those older machines as childhood play things.

Now you might be thinking there's a lot of emulators out there that do this, isn't you know? What's the big deal? Well, the difference is RetroArch has an online updater functionality which allows you to download free games directly and quickly within the app. Another benefit is where you know it's not only available for Linux, but it's available for Mac OS on AMD 64 and ARM platforms. And yeah, there's some other OS called Windows, I think. I don't know whatever it is. I guess it works on there too, but I don't know anything about that one.

The program has support for advanced features like shaders, netplay, rewinding, next frame, response times run ahead, machine translation, blind accessibility features and many others across multiple platforms. So if you're a fan of old games, take a look at the article in the show notes. It has instructions on how to install it on Ubuntu and other distributions. You can install it via and I didn't prep this. You can install it via and I didn't prep this Snap, flatpak or an Ubuntu PPA. So Snap or Flatpak, it's right there for you. It gives you instructions on how to play the games as well and how to install it if you decide that gaming is taking up too much of your time.

1:21:03 - Jonathan Bennett
So not that we would ever get too sidetracked with games. But you know, give it a look. Yeah, RetroArch is cool. One of the really fun things about it is that it runs everywhere, and so if you've got a smart TV, you can probably install RetroArch on it If you're running. It used to be Xbox Media Center, XBMC, it's now whatever it's called now my again, my brain will not come up with the name of it but you can install all of the retro arc uh plugins inside of that and so you can have your uh, your your video game experience, right there on your tv interface. Um so, and one of the real fun things about RetroArch is a lot of the commercial emulators. You know, like the 26 and 1 emulators. It's actually running RetroArch underneath. There's been a few times that they've tried to go after people. It's like ah, that's supposed to be GPL'd.

1:21:56 - Jeff Massie
So and the thing is that old hardware was so slow compared to modern day that it's not hard to emulate and things like that. There's probably a lot of them that they've had to slow down from, even like a TV CPU.

1:22:16 - Jonathan Bennett
Yep, cody is what I was trying to come up with, by the way, the project formerly known as XBMC Cody. I should know that I've got it on my TV. Anyway, all right, my command line tip. This is a fun one. This is an oddball tip. It is TCC. That is the Trivial C Compiler. It is literally exactly what it says on the tin. It is a micro compiler for C code. You generally don't need make files, you just run. Now there is a trick that you can do with TCC, and that is, if you have it installed, you can do a shebang to the TCC location and then append dash run to the end of that and use C scripting as your interpreter there and be able to just run a dot C and it will compile it and run it for you. C scripting on your Linux machines, that's. That's fun. That's terrible and horrible and a bad idea, but a lot of fun. David's cringing in the in the background. Because you can, we must, because we can so is that?

1:23:31 - Jeff Massie
is that the main purpose of tcc is no, you can do that no, it's, it's a, it's a full-blown.

1:23:37 - Jonathan Bennett
It's a full-blown compiler. You can do all kinds of stuff with it, but that is one of the tricks that it lets you do.

1:23:43 - David Ruggles
And the reason you can do that is because it's self-contained, so it doesn't have any external linkers or anything. It's completely self-contained. I was reading the documentation because when I saw the link in the show notes and I was kind of like but why? They did actually say it allows you to use C in Python or Perl.

1:24:10 - Jonathan Bennett
TCC is installable in your Debian derivatives. It is not, unfortunately, in Fedora. I was a little sad by that, but I could put it on the Pop OS laptop. I think I'll have to do that and do some C scripting.

1:24:21 - David Ruggles
Now one of the interesting things about it, though, again. But why? But they did mention that it is extremely fast, and it is so fast that a C script will be almost as fast, or almost indistinguishable from compiling it and running the application.

1:24:39 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, which in some cases is going to be faster than something like a bash script from compiling it and running the application, yeah, which in some cases is going to be faster than something like a bash script.

1:24:46 - Jeff Massie
So there you go. Yeah, faster than a bash script is not setting a high benchmark in my experience.

1:24:55 - Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, well, I mean the fact that you're compiling the program and then running it is faster than the bash script can run it. That's maybe saying something yeah, all right. Okay, so that is our tips. It has been fun. I'm gonna let each of the guys get in the last word plug whatever they want to.

1:25:15 - David Ruggles
David is up first well, I don't really have anything specific to plug. Yes, I'm pointing in the correct direction. I will plug. If you're watching this live and you're not already a member of the club, why aren't you a member of the club Right there? Scan that QR code thing that way, dang it. You know mirrored screen and all that and join us. We have lots of fun and there's no reason not to. So come on, absolutely All right, jeff.

1:25:54 - Jeff Massie
Well, hopefully this time next week I'll have a nice ending note. I'm going to go to Bonneville and do a little racing. We'll see how that turns out, but for this week I don't really have anything. So Poetry Corner, 10,000 things how long do any persist? Netscape 2 has gone. Have a great week, everybody.

1:26:21 - Jonathan Bennett
Oh, that's great. All right, thank you guys for being here. You can find my work on Hackaday. Oh, I've got my terminal pulled up back there. It's scrolling log messages. Underneath that is Hackaday. Go find my stuff on Hackaday. The security column goes live Friday mornings. We've got Floss Weekly over there as well. I've been having a lot of fun with Floss Weekly. They're getting me with Java, they're getting me with Java and Floss Weekly. So last week was JReleaser Up next week is another Java application. It's fine, I'll put up with it. It's a fine language, it's fine. But we appreciate everybody being here, appreciate you supporting Club TWiT. Make sure to join the club if you're not. And hey, we will be back next week with the Untitled Linux Show and we'll see you then.