Untitled Linux Show 184 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.
 

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey folks, this week we have our year in review show and we talk about the Steam survey, the Linux commit kernel review for the year. There's Proxmox news, there's Debian 13 news, there's Xorg news. There's a lot going on. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twit. You trust this is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 184, recorded Saturday January the 4th. Pop OS broke Pop OS. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to geek out about Linux and open source and all kinds of fun stuff. And it is a brand new year. Linux and open source and all kinds of fun stuff. And it is a brand new year. Welcome to 2025. We all made it, and boy. That means that we get to do some year in review and go back and take a look at our predictions, See how we did. And, of course, we've got the regular crew here. We've got Rob and Ken and Jeff and we've got four sets of predictions.

01:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And at the end of the year happy new year to everybody.

01:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We're first going to go over some news and then we're going to get into our predictions what we predicted would happen in 2024. We'll give ourselves grades, talk about how well we did. But first and we're going to let Rob go first but he's sort of sneaking one in here because this is something that's going to show up in his list of predictions too uh, but, rob, what's new with the steam survey?

01:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
well, I forgot to wear my new year's outfit, um, and if I wasn't supposed to sneak these into my story and and have them relate, then I apologize, because everything I'm talking about today has to do with predictions one way or another. So if you look back into 2023, okay, that's not last year, it's the year before that Linux was inching closer to that 2%, peaking right around, I think, right around the 1.9% mark at its highest, as I recall. Right around the 1.9% mark at its highest, as I recall. So I predicted in 2024, we would break that elusive 2% mark. Well, we smashed that goal early in 2024. We broke past that 2% mark and then it fell back under right away. And well, I didn't bring that back up because I was sad. But then again, in November, linux hit 2.03%. I guess it was adjusted down to 2% after the fact, but it broke 2% again there. But we aren't done yet.

02:39
December showed a real success story, topping out at an amazing 2.29%. In that survey, windows lost some ground, losing 0.51%, bringing them down to 96.1%, while our actual close competitor in the area right now hopefully not for long, we'll leave them in the dust is macOS. Also, they also gained some ground with gaining a 0.22 increase, which brought them up to 1.61%. So, with Linux, continue to maintain a healthy lead over macOS and, as we pointed out in the past, valve and their steam deck have a lot to do with the increase. Uh, you know, showing that steam os accounts for about 36 of the like linux gamers. But this increase, you know, still benefits all linux users, as I say every time I bring it up, and ultimately even those that aren't gamers will benefit as the market share grows and other software vendors port to Linux as well.

03:55
Another interesting stat from the survey is how much Linux users love AMD. Users love AMD, with 73.6% of Linux users using an AMD CPU processor, though the numbers are a little weird, since Intel CPU is at 29.6%, which, if you add that up, brings the total to 103.2%. I assume there's some weird rounding going on in the background. Maybe the details have further breakdowns of the CPUs and those numbers got rounded up a little too aggressively. It's close enough. Either way you look at it, amd is quite a bit above Intel in the Linux gaming ecosystem.

04:46
For Linux enthusiasts, some other interesting numbers may be the breakdown of Linux distros themselves on the survey. Most interestingly in the stats is that Arch and Ubuntu-based distros are the only things listed in the top 10. Red Hat-based, like Fed Fedora, doesn't even show up, likely buried somewhere in the other section at number 10. Other section being 27.47%. So when looking at the list on top, as stated earlier, steamos is 36.47%. Number two is Arch at 9.7%. Number three is Flatpak at 5.73%, which could be split up anywhere. Maybe that's where the Red Hat users are, I don't know. Number four is Ubuntu 24.04 at 4.79%. Number five is another Ubuntu-based Linux, which isux mint 22 at 3.79 percent, and I'll be joining these ranks soon, I promise.

05:54
Number six uh, a little surprising is ubuntu core 22. I didn't really know that was heavily used out there, um, but that's at 3.79. And then number seven, another arch based, is manjaro 2.96. Number eight it went to base pop os 2.71, and then arch based endeavor os is at 2.66. And number 10 is the other section I mentioned earlier and, and you know, looking at this I was just thinking maybe one reason Fedora isn't in there is just because they change versions so often Pretty much almost everybody is every sixth at least a year. They have to change because it's not supported anymore, whereas a lot of these are LTSs Linux Mint 22, 24, and 4, which is still a pretty recent LTS. But a lot of these don't change as much. So if they're breaking them down into versions, that may have just split the count up of Fedora. So maybe you're not as bad off as you look, jonathan, with your Fedora. But you know, the surprises to me is Ubuntu, core endeavor, os. You know, I knew these were popular, but I didn't really realize they'd be in the top 10 at least.

07:09
Uh, for gaming, uh, and in 2025. I'm already gonna throw my prediction out here. We'll reiterate it later, but it ties into this. I predict linux on steam survey. That for sure linux will hit 2.5. That's the easy one. But my stars, my shooting for the stars, where I'm gambling on, is I think, I think there's a chance they'll get that three percent. You know, just for a moment, one month we'll hit that three percent mark could be, could be.

07:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, jeff, you've got something linked here that's actually kind of uh on on topic yeah, uh.

07:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So in the discord I linked uh linus from linus tech tips and he just released this today where it says I can't keep waiting for steam os, linux gaming update 2025. So what he does in the video is he takes the steam os that you would get on your steam controller, your gamepad, on a steam deck yeah, or steam deck and he loads it onto a pc and they he he uses an amd, uh cpu and gpu, so it works. He said they tried to use nvidia and it didn't work. But he acknowledges that it's not ready for prime time and there's a lot of drivers and stuff that aren't supported. But yeah, he plays it and basically says this thing rocks, it works really good, with the limitations that it's still the Steam Deck OS, so it's geared to that uh basic interface. You can't. You can drop into the desktop version, but it's still limited right now he should he just use something like chimera.

08:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But what's really shocking me about that story is the fact that how was he able to install steam os on a computer? I mean, that's a lot of work rounds. From what I recall, last time he couldn't even figure out the basics of pop os without breaking it well, okay, this was something he said, but go ahead, jonathan I was gonna say, to be fair to him, that was a pop os problem.

09:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Pop os broke pop os. Now they got it fixed within like 24 hours but that was not an Alanis problem near so much as that was a Pop OS problem.

09:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and last time they should have really they should have stuck to like Ubuntu or Fedora or something pretty mainstream and they kind of chose a little more adventurous path. But on, this one.

09:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Hold on, hold on on. We just looked at the survey. Fedora is not more mainstream than pop os in steam.

09:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So you're talking about the steam survey versus linux users everywhere.

09:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We're talking about gaming too right, but I'm talking about a distribution that you can just put in and load up, because in that video I've watched it he talks about um, I can't little. You know, it's little little johnny consumer is what he. He names this imaginary person about. They can't, you know, I don't want to get in and have to mess with the command line and do all this stuff. And you know he wanted something you just load up, and I would. I would argue that like an ubuntu, a fedora, you know, something like that you can just load up, you don't ever have to get into the command line.

10:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, I agree with Ubuntu or an elementary OS as far as that goes, pop OS you said, ever need to go on the command line either. Apparently, indeed, but he was had that, but but he was remember.

10:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Pop OS was a little rougher when he tried it. That was what two years ago now, yeah.

10:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I believe so.

10:46 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's gone a long ways since then. Yeah, Maybe now you can say that, but at the time it was still a little beta-ish.

10:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And, to be fair, SteamOS on desktop is a little beta-ish at this point too, isn't it? Wasn't there some fun in how he even got that installed?

11:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, point too, isn't? It wasn't there some, oh, totally fun? And how he even got that installed. Yeah, it, well, it pretty much installed. What he does is there's an image you can download to re-image. Yeah, your steam deck, and he just loaded that into a pc. But he did, they did make sure the pc had amd hardware in it so that it would work. Because they talk about, you know, even if you go to the desktop, like there's no printer support, there's no nvidia support, there's no, you know, there's a lot of stuff missing because it was tailored for the steam deck but they keep talking about. They're also talking about how steam os is. They're. They're predicting it's going to get released as a, as a general distribution, so that everybody can just game yeah, calling that a beta right now is probably a stretch.

11:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean, it's not at the moment not designed to support that software. It's pre-alpha, or for hardware I mean yeah, but it's.

11:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it's interesting though, because you know there's been noises being made about valve coming out or not coming out directly, but supporting people making other Steam box whatever they're going to call it made for SteamOS hardware, and that implies supporting a little bit wider hardware set for a lot of people, ideally supporting NVIDIA. So you figure, all that's got to be coming.

12:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Especially since it's to valves advantage financially oh yeah, well, and they're worried and he talks about it. They were worried about back in the windows 8 days, about how windows kept talking about they were going to have like the walled garden kind of like apple does, and lock everybody out so you couldn't just load any third-party software yeah, and it was going to be the windows store and only the windows store.

12:47
Yeah with windows apps and they haven't really backed. Yeah, they haven't really backed off from what he was saying. Anyway, I I think that I thought they had, but it's still there. I mean, it's, it's not. They haven't walked away from it, it's kind of on pause a little bit and and then you know, with everything Windows 11 is doing not making people happy, and the state of Linux in general is so much easier than it was. There's a lot more distributions you can just load on and go without having to fight and mess with them so much.

13:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you pretty much. These days you only have to get into the command line and fight with stuff if you really want to, yeah.

13:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And a lot of times I do because I'm running the game. Yeah, exactly.

13:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's. That's the game for us. That's why it's fun.

13:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And and that's why, you know, people say, well God, you got to get all this. It's well, yeah, because I'm running weird beta software on top of alphas and I'm wedging things in that weren't maybe supposed to go together, and so it's it's a problem of my own design.

13:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's not, you know, canonical's fault in my case. Yeah, and I I see people pointing this out in our chat. They they talked about it in, uh, the the lindis tech tip video that right now, the actual Steam OS on an x86 desktop is not the way that you want to go. There are other options that are going to be a lot easier. They were using that for a specific reason, and that is that they foresee that becoming an official solution soon. But yeah, right now there are. There are other options that are way better than trying to run SteamOS on your desktop.

14:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Maybe on that latest ARM system that System76 has got out.

14:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You could, if you really wanted to, sure.

14:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well and, in all fairness, in the video they do talk about that. This is not meant for mainstream yet. This was kind of an experiment to see how it ran and how much problems they would have. It is not desktop ready for general use, but it. If you have the right hardware, it does give you the steam steam deck interface and all that and it works just like the steam deck does. Yeah, and a side note, when you talked about amd being popular, not only is it on the steam deck.

15:11
If you look at a lot of top retailers, intel cpu sales are not in the top 10. And the last time I looked it through the amazon like the first intel cpu was the 12th gen. The new release was like number 15 or something like that. I mean it was. They were selling some of their old 12th gen cpus more than they were selling the current gen. Yeah, and even one of the uh 14 900ks was above the current gen. So people, you know gamers usually keep up on hardware a little more in general not, you know, not universally, true, but a little more than grandma checking her email. And am amd is just killing it in sales right now on the cpu side.

16:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, for sure, on the cpu, yeah yeah, gamers do keep up with that, because I I just bought a gaming keyboard for, uh, my kid and when I watched a video on it, because I couldn't figure out how to turn the thing on, the power button was hidden.

16:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But uh a power button on a keyboard.

16:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, it's a wireless, oh okay, but uh, I I thought it was funny. The guy said the batteries last for 18 months. That's, I changed my computer more often than that.

16:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, wow wow, I, I'm, I'm still flabbergasted at the idea of a wireless gaming keyboard. Those are just not words that go together, but anyway the other funny thing.

16:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The other funny thing, I gotta quick say is it using a microwave uh radio? No two keys were on upside down too. It was a renewed device. The app was upside down and the Windows key was upside down.

17:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Let's talk about XOrg and X.11. Ken, there was kind of a bump in commits for X.11 in 2024. Is it coming back? Is there a resurgence? Are we going to move back to X.11?

17:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Is the question you're asking. Is there still some life in Xorg server?

17:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, oh.

17:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, michael Larabelle's article about the number of commits in 24 to the Xorg server Git tree has me wondering if Xorg is going out with a bang or a whimper Now. Michael was also surprised to see last year had the most commits over the last decade. He doesn't think it is a sign of resurgence, since Wayland continues to become the dominant force in the Linux desktop. Now here is what Michael saw. The Xorg server saw 708 commits last year compared to the 200 to 300 commits seen each year going back to 2018 when there were 535 commits. Now Xorg was averaging 400 to 500 commits a year between 2010 and 2020.

18:20
Why are we seeing this much activity in 2024? Two reasons. Why are we seeing this much activity in 2024? Two reasons. First, the X Wayland code within the Xorg server continues to be actively developed to support new Wayland protocols and other fixes or additions. The second reason is open source developer Enrico and I do apologize if I'm mispronouncing this. Enrico and I do apologize if I'm mispronouncing this Enrico has largely been working on Xorg server fixes and improvements around testing and better CI and BSD coverage areas for the Xorg server. Enrico has nearly single-handedly been working on some Xorg server fixes and other minor feature work with no major vendors like Red Hat or Intel left investing the Xorg server development. Now, let's don't forget that there were some security fixes Xorg had last year also. Now, according to Michael, there were only 35 authors doing commits last year. If you do want to know how many lines of code were produced in 2024, I recommend reading Michael's article, as well as to get some of the other numbers that I didn't touch on.

19:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, interesting stuff. And that is probably the most interesting of all of this is that we are down to 35 authors in XOR for 2024. In 2023, there were 44 and 22, there were 52 separate authors, so we may be seeing more commits and more lines of code changing, but fewer and fewer people working on it.

20:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I want to know how many of those commits were urgent security bug fixes.

20:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
A handful of them sure.

20:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And that's a bit of a foreshadowing for one of my predictions coming up.

20:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I do also find it real fascinating that somebody from the BSD side is working on the continuous integration stuff for Xorg server. I guess there is no, or at least it's not, mainstream doing Wayland on BSD. They're still using Xorg and X11.

20:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So it makes sense that they're still interested in it. Go with another one that I saw mention. I'm trying to think something again with an AR. And I'm trying to think something Again with an AR I can't think of the name of it now.

20:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know. That is definitely interesting to think about. You know what they're?

20:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's it, arcan.

20:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I am not familiar with that.

21:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It was an alternative that some maybe hoped would have been the next de facto after x, but instead it never really had a chance yeah, yeah, that one.

21:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
let's see the last. Uh, the the last commit was a december 25. Some of the 23rd was it's getting continuous commits. Probably more commits in Arcan than there were in the XORG server for 2024. Not a high bar to cross. Yeah, not a real high bar to cross.

21:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And one of the comments is X11 just works, but it doesn't fully work. I mean from the user standpoint possibly, but there's a lot of security issues, there's a lot of things that we want to do into the future that X11 just can't do.

22:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It just works on legacy devices connected to a single monitor yeah, yeah, that's the case. Oh, that's funny that's when you start doing dual or quad monitors, hdr, you know securely, and don't have those monitors at a different resolution.

22:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You can't individually scale, or not very well anyway.

22:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, all right. Do we want to talk about the kernel commits, since we're measuring commit numbers?

22:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We do. Michael Arable over at P Pharonix has been reflecting on the previous year. You know, much like many of us do at the end of one year and the start of the next. He examined the number of kernel commits in 2024 and compared them to previous years. Michael found that last year's commits hit a decade low. However, when you look at the actual number of lines added and removed, they're pretty much in line with the previous decade. So while there are fewer actual commits, they're, on average, larger in size. Now, to give you a sense of scale, last year's commits totaled 75,314. And between 2021 and 2023, they were averaging about 86,000 to 88,000 commits. And the peak was during 2020, when I think nothing was happening, which had almost 91,000 commits and also saw the most lines of code added to the kernel. Now, michael generated this data from the Git stats on the Linux Git source tree, so this is straight from where it's going in and out. He also tried to see if timing of the merge window had any effect, but from the data he couldn't find any correlation. So even though sometimes the the when you have the pull request windows changes, it didn't nothing. Nothing was there to show that any timing was effect or any other uh issue that he could find outside of why there was fewer. But you know, even even with the lower commit count, the kernel last year saw almost 3.7 million lines of code added and almost 1.5 million lines removed. You know, of course, linus Torvalds was in the top in the commits with almost 2,900, but that's mostly from merges. Michael also highlighted some top contributors from organizations like Lenaro, meta, bcash, fs and Intel and overall there were 4,807 authors contributing to the kernel this year, which is down slightly from previous years by about 50 authors from last year, for example. So it's not like there's a huge difference.

25:01
I did take a look in the comments to see if there's anything that people might be saying about this. You know there are many covering very complex scheduling, new network optimizations and performance tweaks that are not trivial and a lot of times they're based in specific hardware. You know not that there aren't a bunch of small things that gets fixed as well, but I believe a lot of the low-hanging fruits already been picked To say I'm going to optimize the scheduler. It's a very high level theory crafting you have to do and then actually write it, prove it out, do it. This is not trivial type things Not that writing a kernel is ever trivial, but I mean, I think the difficulty's gone up quite a bit Now.

26:08
I should add that this activity that we had in 2024 is about what it was 10 years ago and it has been for a long time. And keep in mind, numbers like these are always variable, so I don't want anyone to think that the Linux kernel's in trouble. It's vibrant and healthy, and this is just a bit of interesting data and but, that being said, if you ever thought you would like to develop for the kernel, you know there's plenty of room for you to jump in and try making things better, you know, and happy coding.

26:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I do know, because the kernel guys talk about it a lot. One of the things that they are very concerned about is bringing along new programmers and sort of training up new developers but also new maintainers for the kernel systems, because they they see that as a very much a potential problem that, as the current maintainers get old, and age out, you know they have to retire from it. Uh is, is there going to be people there to step in and take care of things?

27:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
so well, I don't remember who is you or somebody. Somebody had said, maybe, maybe it was, uh, greg, greg hartman, um that if you, if you're putting a few commits into the kernel, you're going to have a job offer it was five commits.

27:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They said the average is five commits. If you land five commits in the kernel you'll get a job from it on average yes, so.

27:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So if you're, if you're in university right now, you know, or you're, you're even in high school and you're like I want to be, you know something I might want to do? Start working on it, because you know you start contributing at that level. That's, that's a serious job.

27:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Uh, resume right there, yeah, yeah for sure and make one of those commits in rust honestly, yeah, that is.

27:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That is a very hot job market right now. If I were, if I were starting over again, I would. I would be, uh, working even harder to try to learn rust. I did a little bit. I did the first few days of the uh, the, the advent of code challenge and rust, and then everything else came up and then everybody at my house got sick. I haven't gotten back to it yet, but, yeah, that was fun, so learn some rust.

28:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
David ruggles is in the audience listening. He said we need new gray beards to replace the old gray beards and I'd say no, we need the peach fuzz beards to replace the gray beards.

28:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, the gray beards are always going to be gray beards. You need people to start training to be gray beards when they're still peach fuzz. Yes.

28:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
None of us here, except for maybe Jonathan Bennett or what.

28:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I can say Are young enough.

28:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, and dressed. Yeah Well, that's a start, that's a start.

28:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
None of us are young enough to take the place of Linus.

29:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's not a job that I would want. That is way too much cat herding. Way too much cat herding. Yeah, in looking at that the numbers for the kernel, the one thing that does come to mind that does concern me just a little bit about this more when we get to our 2025 predictions, because this is something that I see happening more and more in various places.

29:37
But you know, we did dismiss some people from kernel development. Now, it happened late in the year, so there wouldn't have been a big part of this. People from kernel development now it happened late in the year, so there wouldn't have been a big part of this. Um, but if, if the if the kernel guys keep doing that and uh, obviously that wasn't necessarily at their, at their own behest but if, uh, if more people around the world keep getting kicked out of doing kernel development, then your commits are going to continue to fall. It's just. It's just the math of it, and I assume, jeff, that is part of what people were getting into and arguing about in the comments uh it it had to actually do about sanctions with, like uh, russia and things like that.

30:12 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's what I'm talking about.

30:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah that's, that is, that is pretty much what I'm talking about, um, and I don't know that that's, that's a big, uh, a big driver of these numbers. Yet, um, I do, I do fear for that future, though.

30:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and it kind of boiled down to the really short version, was because the Linux Foundation is a US organization and the US government has put sanctions on certain countries that they have to not allow certain countries to contribute, because then that would be kind of breaking the sanction and it's then it would. They would be in violation of the law.

30:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's kind of the short version. I mean, that's a real thing, right, that they can't accept contributions, but what the statement that the Linux Foundation came out and finally gave was that people from, well, individuals that were hired by companies that were on the sanction list were not allowed to be listed as maintainers. It's specifically what the judgment came down to, but it does. It brings to mind this question of are we going to start to see sort of a fracturing in where the kernel is developed and how it's developed? Um, are we going to see a? Are we going to see a bricks kernel?

31:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
right is a european kernel possibly I would say less likely european and more likely uh asia well.

31:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So that would be part, that would be part of bricks, like when you, when you look at that, when you look at the way geopolitics split out right now, you've pretty much got the west and you've got bricks, and uh, there's a lot of sanctions going back and forth between the two, and so the, the kernel, a lot of open source projects, but the kernel has sort of been able to avoid wading into that at all. We've not had to do geopolitics in the Linux kernel, and here in the last few months it's sort of been forced into the kernel that no, there are sanctions and there are laws and you've got to pay attention to them and what is BRICS.

32:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Isn't that what Brazil, Russia, India, China?

32:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And what's the last one? Afghanistan? Maybe no, it would beS. And what's the last one, afghanistan? Maybe no, it would be S, it would be S, oh my goodness. Is it like Syria maybe.

32:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
South Africa. Oh yeah, it's not afghanistan.

32:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, I earned a lot of shade with that one. Oh yeah, anyway, we'll talk a little bit more about this when we get to predictions. Um, but let's, uh, let's continue rocking through here. And what's up with Proxmox?

33:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right. So VMware's ESXi was, and still is, the king of virtual machines in the data center. The end of 2023, we saw Broadcom purchasing VMware and completely ripping it down, beginning in 2024. Breaking off from partner channels, ending perpetual licensing, killing its pipeline by ending the free ESXi that students and hobbyists are using to get familiar with and then bring it into the world at work. You know the path.

33:45
Many enthusiasts and those in education, you know. You know they bring it back to the office, serving personally, serving on a local, uh college, uh, computer careers board. Uh, I learned that that this college, that uh, I kind of helped advise in big group it's not like just me, but I've learned that they're no longer even a part of the VMware Academy that they used to be in and I assume it ain't really getting to it, but I assume it's somehow related to this change. Discussions took place as to what others are doing about it in the industry, because this board is made up of businesses in the area, what kind of IT needs they have. So the discussion came up. You know, what are you guys doing? Are you doing anything with this? Are you replacing it? What are you replacing it with?

34:41
You know, and I've seen a lot of ads and various things with other vendors trying to step up, like scale computing and canonical trying to fill the void being left by VMware. But I think one of the strongest contenders in this space may be Proxmox, one of the closest drop-ins that I've seen. Proxmox, one of the closest drop-ins that I've seen. As it sits today, I already thought Proxmox was a great drop-in replacement and I didn't even realize it was missing anything. It works great in a cluster, but what about managing multiple clusters? Well, that is where the new Proxmox Data Center Manager comes in. Funny thing is, when I first saw this posted about Proxmox Data Center Manager, I thought it was a job posting. I clicked him.

35:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I thought maybe I could apply for a job there, but it's not.

35:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's a piece of software to manage all your clusters, and I tested it out. Manage all your clusters. I tested it out. The first alpha was released and it doesn't add a lot to what's in place today, especially if you only have one cluster, as I do. But for managing multiple clusters this simple alpha may have features you need. Proxmox Data Center Manager is a single pane of glass that can monitor and manage all your Proxmox clusters. You can already easily migrate VMs and containers between servers within a cluster, but if you're managing multiple clusters, there's no way to migrate them without Proxmox Data Center, because with Proxmox Data Center Manager you can migrate systems between distinct, separate clusters. So monitoring, managing or, yeah, monitoring managing all clusters at once are the key features and I believe this may be in response to better set of proxmox as a replacement to vmware's exi, supplying similar functionality to vmware's vcenter, which is kind of a manager for uh, all their esxi v spheres up, all their ESXi vSphere. For those watching, I actually have my data center manager up 0.1.7 alpha you could see things such as all the remotes could be reached.

37:20
Virtual nodes are two nodes in my cluster. How many virtual machines are? I have two online two except two nodes in my cluster. How many virtual machines are running? How many are stopped? How many containers are running? How many are stopped? There's access controls, certificates, administration stuff. Shell down at the bottom the remotes pves. You could do a lot of the same things you could do when you're actually on Proxmox itself start, stop, clone. You can't do everything yet. It's alpha but, like I said, one thing you can do here that you cannot do is actually migrate a VM from one Proxmox in one cluster over to another connected cluster, proxmox in one cluster over to another connected cluster.

38:17
The roadmap shows many more management improvements planned to where I believe at some point Proxmox clusters will be able to be completely managed within this Proxmox data center manager, much like vCenter does for VMware. I'm not sure how to quantify some of my thoughts in this prediction for 2025, but I believe that proxmox will make large gains into in the enterprise data center in 2025, especially with some of the things I've heard even before this. We may or may not be aware of these gains, but I think what we will see without being in these data centers is major improvements to the Proxmox ecosystem and data center manager, with a final release by the end of the year. So the measurable thing is Proxmox data center manager having its first final release. That might be a stretch, being only in alpha now, but it gives them a year and you know we'll released a Proxmox data center. You know, starting to develop.

39:32
This has anything to do with possibly new money that's maybe already being injected into into Proxmox. You know, maybe you know they've had a whole year to start thinking about where do you want to go and you know I've heard a lot of talk about people going to to Proxmox and if you're in the enterprise they have paid support, just like vCenter. So it's not like you're completely all on your own. You can pay for the support, you can get their service, you can set that up in your data center. It's really out of the things I know, probably the path I would like to recommend and push going forward, and maybe others already are. Maybe people are buying that support and maybe they have some new money. I don't know if there's somewhere to look up, if they have that somewhere, but that might be a good sign. New products coming out might be a good sign for Proxmox this year.

40:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah Well, I mean, broadcom has ticked enough people off with their changes to VMware. You figure that there's going to be a couple of different places that that pick up customers as a result. Um, so yeah, interesting to see.

40:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Broadcom did fine with hardware for years, but once they started getting into software, they just fumble it. What it must have been 2019, 2020. They bought Symantec and they did all the same things Killed their channel partners, their partnerships and so many of the same things. And I don't know of anybody that uses that anymore. Same things, and I don't know of anybody that uses that anymore. And VMware's esxi is probably a lot more deeper rooted in a lot of data centers. So it might be a lot more work for people to get rid of. But you know, once people start, you know it may be able to take a little more time, but I don't think people are going to want to keep that yeah.

41:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So it's never a good business model to say it's too annoying to get rid of us, like that's not what you ever want to rely on as your business model especially when you got somebody else that says users are definitely free to ignore their subscription notices yeah yeah, yeah, I noticed that proxmox uh staff member says in their uh forum notes yeah, I noticed that proximox uh staff member says in their forum notes yeah, interesting.

41:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, you don't have to get a license. That's or. It's completely free to use it if you don't, if you want.

41:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But you can get support licenses and if you want guaranteed support, then I would recommend that subscription yeah, if you're a business with a real data center, you probably are an insurance company that won't prove you've got support yeah, yeah, but at home here with my personal vms that I dabble in it's, it's not worth it to me.

42:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
for that price I wouldn't mind, like a, a smaller tier, like you know, an enthusi tier or maybe somewhere just to donate. Even if I don't get that full license and feature, I wouldn't mind donating. But the bottom tier for just an individual like me is, if I remember, is probably a little higher than I'd want to pay or even donate. But I don't need to report, I wouldn't mind, just a donation tier.

42:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it makes sense, I donate not much, just a donation tier. Yeah, it makes sense. Um, I, I, I donate, uh, not much, just a few dollars a month, but a little bit um off to uh like ardor. It's one of the tools that I use all the time and I wouldn't be able to pay them, you know, a hundred dollars a month. But I can, I can give them a few dollars a month and that you Ardor, that actually unlocks some things for you.

43:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Like getting the latest version on any desktop.

43:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you can do their downloads and all that stuff. So it's definitely a viable business model to let people do sort of a donation if they want to.

43:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Code Weavers. Here yeah, Code Weavers.

43:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, code Weaver's here. Yeah. So, ken, let's talk about Debian. Debian 13 is about to be a thing.

43:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, it is. In fact. Marius Nestor ended his 2024 with an article about the first alpha version of the installer for the upcoming Debian GNU Linux 13 Trixie operating system series. It comes with support for the latest Linux 6.12 LTS kernel series and introduces various hardware improvements, starting with support for the RISC-564 architecture.

44:10
The Debian Trixie installer alpha drops support for the RML and the I386 architectures. It also comes with some new recipes targeting small disks and improvements to automatic partitioning, such as to compute the swap size, along with revamped screens for the creation of the root user and the first user. Now the new default Ceratopsian theme was created by Elise Cooper and it has made its debut in the installer and can be seen all over the place, including the wallpaper, the lock and login screens. In fact, the wallpaper you see behind me is from it. Elise's artwork won the contest held last fall. Now you can read Maria's article for more details about how she got the article, why this version is called Trixie and some of the other features that you may see coming out with it, and I'm going to predict that it'll probably be by the middle of this year that we'll see it.

45:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I am interested in what's coming with Debian. I'm actually really interested that they are dropping ARM L. You wouldn't necessarily think that anything out there uses that, but actually the one where people would use that is Raspberry Pi, the 32-bit Raspberry Pis. That is what sort of what they run, because they are actually ARM v6. And so anybody that's got like an original Pi Zero if they want to do something with that. The Debian version that you would use for that is ARM L. So you know it still kicks around a little bit, but it is old hardware and I definitely see why they want to retire it.

46:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And that's also why you saw it being one of the reasons why you saw it being dropped because of the framework that you're using now for creating Debian. I think we covered a story about that last year.

46:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I can believe it. I can believe it. Also cool to see that they're bringing risks at risk. Five, sixty, four bit as as an officially supported arch. That is definitely an interesting future thing that more and more boards are starting to pick up on.

46:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I look forward to Will we see you be running Debian on one of your RISC flags this year.

46:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know. Maybe I do run. I mean, I guess I run Debian as a part of the Raspberry Pi OS that's built on Debian. That's about the only Debian that I run right now, but I don't know. Maybe Might be worth giving it a try. I don't usually live on the Debian side of the fence, but I know enough about it to be dangerous Debian wasn't in the top 10 of the Steam survey either. Nope.

47:06 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But just to give everybody a better view of the wallpaper, I'm going to take myself out of the picture for a minute there you go. And there it is.

47:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I like that a lot better.

47:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's nice, and oh, that was mean. Okay, well, jeff, let's talk about plasma.

47:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I mean we can't end and start a new year without talking about KDE Plasma. I mean, that's been the big story you know for many months now, and a little over a month ago we saw the release of KDE Plasma 6.2.4. And now we have the next release, 6.2.5. Now, this is going to be the final update for the 6.2 desktop series and because it's the last update in this series, no new features are being added. Version 6.2.5 is strictly a bug fix release.

48:03
Now, some of the fixes include resolving a system settings crash that occurred when plugging in a mouse while viewing the mouse page, which I thought was kind of funny, and they fixed a nasty bug which could cause the lock screen to appear all black when using an X11 session. And additionally, a black screen issue that happened when wiggling the pointer while the screen was about to lock has been addressed, so you shouldn't run into that anymore. There are also improvements for recording specific windows with Spectacle and OBS Studio when using screen scaling. Now version 6.2.5 enhances the display of metadata for the picture of the day wallpapers, improves pasting of images from plasma notifications into sandbox sandbox apps and offers better support for apps using input capture portal, allowing you to regain full control of your pointer and keyboard immediately.

49:00
Another issue that has been fixed was the mispositioning of notifications after dragging any widgets on the desktop for the first time.

49:09
Nate Graham explained this fix by saying, and I quote this turned out to have been caused by the Plasma config file having old crusty system tray widgets left over from prior Plasma customizations which were competing for control over the positioning of notifications.

49:26
Now they're cleaned up properly, which also reduces memory usage, removes a ton of cruft in the config file and may resolve other mysterious and random seeming issues with notifications being positioned incorrectly. Now I won't go over the numerous other fixes in this release, but if you take a look at the article in the show notes, they go over it in much more detail and they also have a link to the full change log if you want to see every single update to the full change log. If you want to see every single update, you know. Basically, this update's essentially prepping for the 6.3 release, which is expected on February 11th of this year. If you can wait a little longer from today, or perhaps by the time you hear this, if you download it later, the 6.3 desktop beta should be ready for testing on Januaryuary 9th, so that's coming up pretty quick and you know I'm a really excited to see what this next year holds for kde 6 yeah, it should be really interesting.

50:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, that's actually one of my predictions from last year and also for next year, so lots of interesting things coming. I've've been enjoying KDE 6. There was just a little bit of growing pains getting into the first version, but those got fixed pretty quick and it's been a great experience.

50:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've seen posts recently from people saying that KDE 6 isn't ready yet.

50:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I upgraded to Ubuntu Studio 24.10 just so I could get up to KDE 6, as well as Pipewire 1.2.4.

50:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
See, I'm on Kubuntu 24.10 and I'm on KDE 6.1 and 2504, I believe, is going to have 6.3. Point something when it gets released here pretty quick, so yeah, coming soon. Point something when it when it gets released here pretty quick. So yeah, yeah, because I talked, there's little niggles that I've uh had in 6-1 nothing, nothing groundbreaking, but just some little little issues. But I have tried 24 or 25, 04, the daily or nightly build, but they haven't upgraded to the latest kernel yet and they're still on 6.1. So it's it's still kind of a 24.10 extra at this point. They're not even truly calling it 25.04 yet, did you say?

51:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
niggles yeah are you know, have?

51:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
you ever heard that.

51:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's, that's. He didn't just make that word up no, no, no, it's like a little.

52:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's little things that aren't right, but they're not horribly catastrophic, they're not major, they're just like little annoyances they're niddly from from the oxford dictionary a trifling complaint, dispute or criticism not truffle trifle yeah, yes, indeed, rob learned a new word today yeah, all right.

52:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, yeah, I am interested to see where Plasma goes next. So let's chat then for a minute about predictions, and we had some of these. Mine are listed first, so I will go ahead and talk about mine. So first off, I said that the 2024 release of Ubuntu LTS was going to be sort of a big deal because you finally got things like KDE Neon and everything else using them on the newer kernel, and I don't know that it was a big deal in that a whole lot of people noticed, but it definitely helped things like KDE Neon to be able to be on the newer kernel, so I give myself a partial credit for that.

53:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I take points away, being that, specifically, kde Neon or the KDE Neon folks have decided to make another distribution based on was it Arch?

53:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, yeah, we'll see if anything ever becomes of that. I'm skeptical about that particular thing that they're going to do.

53:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I still think it says something, though it says something about it On the Ubuntu LTS.

53:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I would have said you were spot on.

53:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It was a big deal for you. Well, but keep in mind the whole basis of Neon is they wanted a stable foundation to run the beta and development desktop on, so they don't want to fight underlying bugs. That's originally why it was built off of LTS. It's just right now. The kernel development was well. Up until now it was slow, so they were having issues with some of the later kernel features were needed to run KDE and to me it seems like it would be easier to take that LTS and just run a newer kernel in it rather than just totally jump to a different distribution. Yep.

54:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
In other words, use the hardware enablement.

54:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, yeah, but depending on what kind of features they're developing in a kernel isn't necessarily the only limiting factor.

54:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Also true, you've got your Mesa version, all the other libraries that you're building against.

54:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You're going to build against the current ones, rather than what worked last year and rather than what's going to work next month.

54:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. So my second prediction was that Fedora with KDE 6 was going to basically be the premier Linux desktop. And well, for me it has been. But I think something else that's interesting here to note is that Fedora is looking at and I think they have approved already uh, they are going to make a flagship out of kde for fedora 43, I think, is where they're going to start doing that. So, um, they literally do consider fedora with kde to be one of the premier linux desktop experiences, so I'm going to call that fedora.

55:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That definitely is a win. I don't know how you'd measure that for uh, for the general uh, it's very subjective, unless you want to look at the steam survey. It's not even on there, but well, that's true.

55:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I said the second half of the year would be boring, because everything just starts working only sort of give you a c on that one, because we saw a lot of, you know, uh, scheduler updates. We saw, you know, a lot of a lot of optimizations with new hardware I was a little optimistic about how quickly things were going to get fixed though my boring part was december so

56:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think I was closer to it with saying everything was going to be exciting yeah, um, and then the.

56:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The last thing which I knocked out of the park was I said there's going to be a pi 500 and there was. Uh, I'm a little disappointed by the pi 500, but hopefully we'll get a follow-up here before too long, but uh, you didn't say it was going to be the best ever yeah, yeah, I did not all right, jeff.

56:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Uh, yeah, I didn't do quite as well. Uh, I said I originally said amd graphics cards are going to take a big leap in performance. Uh, they took more. Yeah, they kind of, and they killed some of their high-end stuff and supposedly some future stuff is coming. That's supposed to be pretty powerful, but we won't see it next year. So I give myself, you know, maybe a C minus on that one or a D. It didn't work out as well.

57:08
My next prediction was CUDA will have a valid competitor and we'll see a real path to moving off of cuda I it. We do have a valid competitor. I guess it depends how you want to look at it, because that rock m and hip from amd and intel, I believe, is also getting behind it to try to have an open source compute stack to compete with CUDA. It just isn't completed yet. So I mean, I guess I don't know it's valid yet, but it is heading that way. So it's, it's, it's coming online, it's a lot of people are working on it. It's just not there yet. So yeah I think.

57:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think part of this is also, uh, the zluda project, which that's where you can take cuda code and run it directly on amd stuff. So there is, you know, there are definitely people working towards this.

58:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, just, not quite yeah, so maybe off the top of the hill yeah so so maybe maybe a C on that one, you know as maybe a little early. I um, I also said CXL will become a lot bigger and more mainstream. Yeah, that one was kind of a D minus. It's it's growing but it's more enterprise and it's not so much mainstream. It's it's industrial applications it's growing, but the average everyday user it's not uh not going, uh more I. I also had more acceptance of snap packages and at least one distribution besides. You know, one of the ubuntus will have snap, that's enough, as that happened.

58:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
As any of the other, I looked it up like fedora's got it.

58:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
fedora supports Snap Well everybody supports Snap.

58:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Everybody supports Snap. You could always install Snaps anywhere. That's not new. I ran Snaps on Fedora two years ago when I had Fedora.

59:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, but it looks like now when I was looking it up, it's officially supported, Because there's a lot of them that are still in kind of developer stages.

59:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So you can run snaps on them as opposed to we support running snaps on them.

59:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Can you run the Ubuntu core snap on Fedora?

59:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I have no idea.

59:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know. It'd be fun to to try.

59:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't care what the difference is. I'll try that on my lenova thinkpad, since I've just recently uh installed fedora 41 on that I I have not seen a whole lot of uh popular support for snaps.

59:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
In fact, just the other day someone was uh ranting in one of the discord servers that I'm in like what is all of this, this, this, uh, how did he put it? Uh, he liked linux 10 years ago but he doesn't like all the new stuff that's been added to it. That feels it feels all like cruft, and snap was one of the things he was complaining about. Complain about system d oh yes, yes, of course he did so it is. I suppose that Snap is the new system D.

01:00:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
By God, Postick Standard has gone downhill since the VT100 terminals went away.

01:00:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I will admit, jeff Flatpak seems to be more popular than Snap at the moment.

01:00:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think that they're going to be competing standards and Flatpak probably will be a bigger thing. It's just you can't do everything you need with Flatpak and Snap. There are certain things that Snap does that Flat pack can't. So I don't. I don't know a snap will ever take over, but I think it'll be out there more. Just because there's certain when you have to tie real low level, tie into low level stuff, snaps can do that when you?

01:01:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah, I guess the real question there is whether, um, whether flat packs are going to add support for doing things like that. Are they going to go? Oh, that is actually a neat feature that snap has. Let's add it to flat pack well, I don't, I don't know how much refactoring that would take.

01:01:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't know if they're kind of in the painted in a corner kind of thing or if they could add it. I don't.

01:01:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know enough about the containering that to say one way or the other let's uh, let's uh, let's ask a vote from the audience on if Jeff got that one or not for snaps, because I don't believe it. Jeff thinks he did. I don't know what the other guys think. Let's have a vote. I'll give you the link later on. Donate a coffee and give your vote, or just send a message. You don't have to donate me a coffee, you just send a message. You don't have to donate me a coffee, you just send a message. I would love to hear on LinkedIn or Mastodon or whatever. Maybe I'll post something on Mastodon and you guys can just comment and tell me what you think, but I would love to hear if you think he got that one or not.

01:02:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, rob, so let's talk about your predictions then.

01:02:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think everyone is at least close. So let's talk about your predictions then. I think everyone is at least close, so let's go From the top. As I already mentioned, one of the predictions I had for 2024 is this year Linux breaks 2% on the Steam survey and, yeah, we nailed that way past. Maybe that was too easy. I don't know if it was necessarily a sure thing last year, but it was white.

01:02:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It was a safe one. Come on, oh, come on.

01:02:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right, all right, we'll move on. Go ahead, ken.

01:02:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I was just going to say. Well, breaking 2% on the Steam survey is one thing, breaking 2% on the Steam survey is one thing, but becoming 4% of the desktop operating systems globally is another.

01:03:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, it did that too. Did that too, but that wasn't among my predictions, so I can't claim any awards for that. And remember, you have to donate a copy for everyone. I get right, so just Alright. Next on the list Installable Cosmic Beta. And remember, you have to donate a coffee for everyone. I get right, so just All right. Next on the list Installable Cosmic Beta by the end of 2024. It wasn't a beta, it was an alpha Alpha 4.

01:03:30
I'd say close, I mean it's installable. Maybe just the terminology of alpha and beta and whatever that distinction, they could have called it whatever they wanted. They could have called it beta. It's subjective on what they called it. But yeah, close, I didn't make it, I didn't get that one.

01:03:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, we have the finalized Cosmic Alp by the end of this year.

01:04:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Absolutely but we're not on the prediction section yet, so just back off, Swing and roll man Stop reading ahead.

01:04:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, all right. The next one I had is the year of Whalen. Any mainstream distros that haven't announced going full Wayland will this year. What do you think?

01:04:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's pretty much happened yeah, pretty much there.

01:04:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Maybe not an A+, maybe one holdout.

01:04:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean they all at least have it experimental, if not their main. So close I'd give it a B+.

01:04:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Even XFCE's got an experimental version.

01:04:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
XFCE's Cinnamon.

01:04:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'd give you a B. We're not grading on a curve here.

01:04:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If we're grading on a curve, it'd be an a plus, because I'm the only one who uh in the curve, so it'd all be easy, all right. Next someone will announce a premium arm based linux laptop this year. What do you think? Can I get that one? Uh, were you talking?

01:05:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
about the 76 laptop yeah, Windows 76. I had posted earlier in the Discord link to a YouTube review of it. It can even run Windows.

01:05:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, so I didn't even catch that Before I heard Ken talk about that pre-show. I think I didn't think I got it, but hey, I guess I did. System76 has a premium ARM-based Linux laptop this year.

01:05:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's not a laptop, you said desktop.

01:05:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, what about, hold on? So I have some other ones up my sleeve and for the life of me, I can't remember what it's called. What is?

01:05:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
that module.

01:05:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The framework. They have the ARM module. So I think that's premium, that's ARM.

01:06:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's a premium price. It's not quite as quick as the System76 desktop, though.

01:06:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, is the System76 the Elite, it's got the Ampere ARM.

01:06:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I hate to break it to you, but the framework module that you're thinking of is RISC-V, not ARM.

01:06:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, they had an ARM too?

01:06:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Not that I see. I see a Reddit thread where people are asking for one. That's all that comes up. I see a Reddit thread where people are asking for one. That's all that comes up.

01:06:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Okay, fine, there are premium ARM.

01:06:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm trying to help you Rob.

01:06:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There are premium ARM laptops available that you can install Linux on, but they're not Linux laptops. Okay, I didn't get it. I call it close, but I didn't get it. I call it close, but I didn't get it.

01:06:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh, you're talking about that Snapdragon. That's not going to be developed anymore.

01:07:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I don't think we were giving you that one, matt.

01:07:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, I didn't. I think it was close. I think it could have happened, but it didn't quite. I think it should have happened. What is wrong with you hardware makers?

01:07:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
you gotta pick up your slack though, if you had predicted that windows would come out with a arm laptop that would run linux, great then you'd have been spot on yeah, I was leaving that one for david ruggles, but uh, he didn't come on, so all right, and then?

01:07:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
what about a Linux phone? My last one was a new premium Linux phone announced. I did have a story on a phone that seemed premium and I can't even remember what it was called and I couldn't find it.

01:07:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Is it a new Pine?

01:07:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, I had the story, I think.

01:07:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Puree or Pure OS.

01:08:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, no, there was a. They even did a snippet, a teaser of that one. They did it.

01:08:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't think that was a premium phone, though I think it was kind of for the low end market.

01:08:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If I'm thinking of the same one. You're not. What was the librem 5?

01:08:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
no, oh, you blew it rob, just face it uh, yeah, I, I think that's a, I think that's a bust as well.

01:08:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Back to mastodon, and we'll see if I got that one right or not. I'll figure it out.

01:08:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
If you can find it, feel free to update the show notes. Ken, you had some safe ones. At least two of these were pretty safe predictions.

01:08:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, I may have fallen a bit short on what would be the LTS version, but I did predict that we would have Linux kernel version 6.11 by the end of October, which we did. And then we did see the end of life for the kernel 4.19 LTS, end of life for the kernel 4.19 lts, and I still think I nailed it with the second half of 2024. It will be exciting, as we see even more improvements.

01:09:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, december was pretty boring, so you were a month short from the whole second half being exciting yeah, we saw some boring for me there was some big amd improvements that went in and there was some.

01:09:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So yeah, I mean yeah it was so boring.

01:09:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You haven't even had a story in months, ken then you're right, it was boring without me, wasn, wasn't it?

01:09:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It was boring. I missed you Ken.

01:10:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And then you've got a question here, ken. What did we not see coming? That was big news. I know one thing that comes to mind we already talked about it for this show and I'm going to talk about it again but that was the sanctions hitting the colonel. That blindsided a lot of people and was huge news.

01:10:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I was thinking of the Raspberry Pi monitor when you asked that.

01:10:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh yeah, see that I can't get very excited about the Raspberry Pi monitor.

01:10:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Until Jonathan Bennett pointed out all of the negatives and, yeah, he knocked it down for me yeah, yeah, all right.

01:10:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So, ken, what's coming in 2025?

01:10:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
well, I think we will see, uh, the linux kernel version 5.4.x series reach into life by december of next year, or this year actually, and then in December 2025, we'll either I'm going to take a leap of faith and say that Linus is probably going to switch to 7.0 and make that the selected LTS kernel. The other option is either 6.17 or 6. 618, depending on the way the rcs fall I make sense.

01:11:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I have a comment there. I bet you it's not 7.0 after the lts, just for for no other reason than just oh, an lts shouldn't be a 7.0, it should be my number.

01:11:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Is somebody predicting the 7.0 kernel this year?

01:11:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I am. I think ken is, ken is I'm gonna well right I.

01:11:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I guess you did it right in there. I guess that was kind of bundled in.

01:11:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I'm going to take a stretch and say that we will see 7.0 and very likely it will be the LTS for 2025.

01:12:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So you got a two-parter there.

01:12:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yep, and we ended the year talking about OpenSUSE rebranding. I don't think we're going to see that this year. They will be switching to a new package management tool by the end of this year, though. Actually I think we'll see that by the middle of this year.

01:12:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Now not switching away from RPMs, but just using a different tool to manage, as opposed to. Zipper.

01:12:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's going to be called. Let's see if I can figure out how to say this.

01:12:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Or is it the graphical side of it?

01:12:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's. I'm just going to say YQ Package. Well, that's not a prediction.

01:12:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You're reading it.

01:13:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's from my notes.

01:13:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And then what's up? What do you foresee with Fedora 42, Ken?

01:13:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh, that'll probably update to a new upstream release of Python setup tools and I got a feeling Fedora Rawhide's going to see a lot of packages impacted. I'm going to predict at least 142 of them.

01:13:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And what is interesting about the new Python setup tools version, like what's interesting about the new Python setup tools version.

01:13:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Like what's different about it? It's going to be changing the I'm trying to remember now.

01:13:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I didn't put that in my notes.

01:13:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I didn't warn you, I was going to ask. The legacy tools have actually been deprecated for at least five years.

01:14:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That sounds like it needs to be updated, then that's a good bet there, I think.

01:14:06
Yeah, I have just recently been sort of rediscovering that packaging Python packages and Go and Rust have this problem as well is a huge pain, because Python, when you go to install these packages, it assumes that you're going to be online and so you can grab all the things, and most distros have sort of a rule that when you build your packages you do not get to do that connected to the internet, and you know that makes sense in and of itself, but when you're then talking about building packages that are inherently on the internet, you run into problems sometimes. So that is that is the main reason why I was asking you mean like corrupt data?

01:14:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
no, like building.

01:14:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This package is going to pull other packages, but only as build dependencies, and so the way that it's normally built is it assumes it's connected to the internet to be is going to pull other packages, but only as build dependencies. And so the way that it's normally built is it assumes it's connected to the internet to be able to pull those extra packages. But when you go to build it inside of the build root system, it's not connected to the internet and therefore can't get those packages, and so sometimes you have to really jump through hoops in your build scripts to make things work.

01:15:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And if you were connected to the Internet and you had a bad connection, you could get corrupted data downloaded.

01:15:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, there are things that are in place to keep that from happening. The real problem, the real thing that they want to avoid, is packages changing depending upon when you build them.

01:15:34
So you know, something upstream changing and a new version getting pulled that could definitely affect things yeah, well, it it it breaks um being able to do reproducible builds it's one of the things they really talk about um. I've got some predictions and uh, these are. These are some interesting ones. You know we talk a lot about hdr and the color management. The Wayland color management protocol is finally close to landing and once that happens, then I predict that you're going to see browsers to begin to support it, and I've been doing a little sniffing around and I actually consider it possible that Firefox is going to land HDR support on Linux before Chrome does. It may be that Firefox is the first browser to support it, but I imagine that by the end of 2025, we're going to be able to just open a browser, go to YouTube and play HDR videos and it'll just work.

01:16:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
By the end of the year. I think it'll happen, Especially if Google sells Chrome off to Firefox for a dollar.

01:16:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's not a thing that's going to happen. But, yeah, interesting future ahead there. I do foresee that projects are going to continue to have problems. We're going to continue to have stories about open source projects and the culture war issues, where someone tweets something from the project and a lot of people tweet back or, you know, report and say we really wish you hadn't said that, and then people get banned from the project.

01:17:05
You know that sort of unfortunate thing, um, and I think we're going to see that some of those forks are going to um, gain steam and actually begin to threaten the original project. Um, and it's difficult to predict which of those are going to be. You know so, for example, godot godot uh had one of these instances. A bunch of people got banned and now there's like at least two different forks of godot uh. One of them, I think, is called Redo or Red Dot. However, you want to pronounce that there's going to be at least one project that has a fork that gets formed in 2025 from one of these events and the fork is going to really take off. Maybe it will be that one, I don't know, and, depending upon how things go, we may actually see a bricks kernel. We talked about this earlier. That may be a thing that happens and I will consider that to be unfortunate because open source in the kernel has avoided to this point, having to fiddle about with geopolitics. But I think it's inevitable.

01:18:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I call out a few forks that have never gone anywhere, that some probably hope would be the fork of gimp, the fork of audacity uh yeah, so forks.

01:18:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah well, lots, lots and lots of forks happen and it's it's actually pretty rare that a fork like a non-friendly fork happens and takes over as the the main bit.

01:18:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I call those out just because at the time there was some political upheaval and expectation that the main ones are just going to go away and these forks are going to take over. Not like LibreOffice, there's a successful fork.

01:18:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If I didn't know better, I'd say y'all are describing history repeating itself.

01:18:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well sure, there are definitely patterns that happen and continue to happen. Oh yeah, yep. Well sure, there are definitely patterns that happen and continue to happen. Oh yeah, yep. So anyway, um, I think that's going to continue to be a problem and I don't know exactly what the solution is going to be, but uh, we'll see that. Um, I do think we will see a pi 500 pro or a pi 500 xl or a pi 550 I don't know what they're going to call it. Um, but there was a pretty universal panning of the Pi 500. Everybody looked at that and went, wow, it could have been so much more.

01:19:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Where's the NVMe slot?

01:19:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
NVMe. I think Power over Ethernet would be really cool and I still want to see mounting inserts on the bottom of it to be able to make more interesting cases out of it. So I am hoping that we get those things off of our wishlist for the pro version, whatever we call it, the Pi 500.

01:19:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
If you have a NVMe slot you can hook up that 64 terabyte SSD.

01:19:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, and then the last thing that I'm going to predict for 2025 that this is going to take off and this is kind of a callback to my last Floss Weekly episode is that we are seeing more and more legislation where software is liable for damages caused, and I think that's going to give open source projects a new funding model, because we're already seeing it to some extent. Right Like so, a business will come along to an open source project and say we need a software bill of materials to be able to keep using your software, and I've said for a long time now that the correct answer to that sort of query is sure, here's our hourly rate, and there are people out there working on it trying to codify this kind of give a blueprint for open source projects to be able to do this, and so I think that's going to kind of take off and hopefully will be a positive change.

01:20:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah.

01:20:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'd like to see that, but really, you know, and when you talk about that.

01:20:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I'll say when you talk about that, really software is like about the only product that you get that you know it may work, it may not, it may not. I mean, imagine buying a car if it had a software license attached to it.

01:20:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Nobody would touch it. Isn't that a thing already? Actually there are. I mean, essentially, you can get a car with all the functioning stuff, some of them, and then you could pay extra for the software to unlock the heated seats or yeah, no, you don't buy a car.

01:21:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You don't buy a car and it part. You know, part of the paperwork you sign says no warranty, express or implied Right, no government regulation.

01:21:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm just saying parts of it are not working though.

01:21:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, I mean like the engine falls out and you can't do anything because they're like oh sorry, there's no warranty.

01:21:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
After a few years few years.

01:21:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
The only what the paperwork does say is when you sign, for it is if you fail to keep it updated you avoid the warranty.

01:21:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's a thing. All right, rob, you want to give us some predictions?

01:21:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
no, all right yeah no not my predictions so the lin, linux on Steam survey. So, as I already said earlier, it's definitely going to hit 2.5. That's not even a, not even a I don't know, I can't think of a word but it's definitely going to hit that. But my big gamble here is I'm going to say they're going to peak out at that 3%.

01:22:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No four. Here is I'm gonna say they're gonna peak out at that.

01:22:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Three percent, no, four, um, no, at least not 2025, 2029, uh, I don't know. Well, I'll tell you next year, all right, and I'm gonna go this year going to be the year of the cosmic desktop. I don't know. I feel like now I mean, they got through four alphas in half a year it seems like maybe it's a stretch to say that they'll have an actual final release. I think they were really hoping for it, so I'm going to just hope for it too. They're going to burn through these betas quick and get a final release of the Cosmic desktop.

01:23:03
This is the Rust-based one. It might be a stretch, but they were hoping for it. I was hoping for it. My next one, out of nowhere A new Steam console, probably from Valve, like the Steam Deck, but maybe it'll be from someone else. I'm just saying there's going to be a Steam console and then, as I said earlier, proxmox will see major improvements as it tries to replace VMware in the enterprise, improvements as it tries to replace VMware in the enterprise, and I think the measurable thing we're going to see here is that Proxmox Data Center Manager will have a final release this year. Again, maybe a stretch, I don't know how quick they're going to develop through it, but they've only got the first release now the first beta release, I think they call it, and some of the others that I was close on I think are going to come true this year. I think that premium ARM-based laptop, linux laptop, will come out this year. How do we?

01:24:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
see a premium RISC-V before we see the premium Arm base.

01:24:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't, it's not yeah, but it's not Premium specs. It doesn't run like the Arm does this year or last year or now. Wayland, you guys pretty much said I was right there and got it, but you know any stragglers are gonna they're gonna be finalizing their plans and be all in on it yep, yep, I think that's all fair.

01:24:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think those are all fairly easy and safe predictions man, you think there's gonna be a steam console I. I don't know that valve's gonna make it, but yes, I think that is a that is a thing that let me put it this way I've seen news stories about valve preparing to have a new steam console.

01:25:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah it's, it's pretty out there that stuff is coming.

01:25:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If it's not directly from valve, it's going to be valve in collaboration with the third party. I bet.

01:25:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And that 3% is a stretch. I think too. That would be a bigger jump than we got last year.

01:25:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's fair.

01:25:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
What that hot console comes out. There you go.

01:25:32
That'll be a boost, it's true. So, as always, there's a little bit of hardware in here too. But AMD graphics cards are going to stumble this year in sales, you know. The new ones are going to come out, they're just going to, you know. But the work to fight CUDA will continue and keep gaining more traction because AMD and Intel both want in the AI market, which is right in there with the computational stuff. So they're going to keep working on HIP and ROKM and make that happen. I don't think it'll replace CUDA yet replace CUDA yet. We're way too early in the cycle for that. But I think you're going to start seeing it becomes a very valid alternative to run AMD or Intel for computational workloads.

01:26:28
I have another one here that maybe is a little. See, I stretch these. I don't throw the meatballs across the plate here, but I'm saying ubuntu is gonna, ubuntu is gonna start fighting with fedora, not literal fighting, but, uh, fighting for the cutting edge and trying new things. And I do say not arch cutting edge, but a step back. So so Ubuntu is looking at compiling with, like Clang. They're looking at getting rid of, you know, older support. They're adding more newer kernels.

01:27:06
Yeah, I was going to say they're being more aggressive about pulling newer kernels in Optimizations they're looking at doing more compiling with greater optimizations and cutting some of the legacy stuff. Doing more compiling with greater optimizations and cutting some of the legacy stuff. So I think you know Fedora is known for being that cutting edge, not bleeding edge like an arch or rolling, you know.

01:27:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or rawhide.

01:27:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, they're slightly a step back. Well, I think Ubuntu is going to try to be right there with Fedora on a lot of their packaging and kernel versioning and things like that and just even possibly leading the charge on the options they're compiling into the distribution.

01:27:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You think they're going to be up there with Tumbleweed?

01:27:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, they're not going gonna be up there with the rolling releases. They're that step back. So that's what I mean by not arch cutting edge. They're not tumbleweed cutting edge, they're not rawhide cutting edge, they're, they're gonna they're gonna want a little stability.

01:28:08
So they're gonna be back slightly, but they're not gonna be running, you know, oh, we're running three dot ancient for our whatever you know they're. They're gonna kick it into gear and they're trying to really reinvent themselves. I think a little bit. So that's, yeah, I, I think it's basically. I'm predicting it's going to continue for the new year, until by this time next year we're talking about, yeah, ubuntu is running the same versioning, or maybe newer, and has just as good options or maybe even better options than Fedora has. Or they're going to be neck and neck because Fedora then says, well, we got to keep up and we're going to follow suit. So that's what I mean by fighting, not disagreeing with each other.

01:28:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If that happens, I might have to switch back to them on the desktop, but that might be a little too cutting edge for my servers, though I might have to find somewhere else for them to go.

01:29:05 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's where you load up Debian or Red Hat Enterprise.

01:29:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's what Ubuntu LTS is for.

01:29:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I am also predicting we'll have our first major distribution, is going to at least propose not that they'll get it done dropping x and only letting x be handled by x.

01:29:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Wayland jeff I have a question for you do. Do you consider REL to be a major distribution? Yeah, because that's what they're doing, with REL 10 coming out H1 of this year.

01:29:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, See besides REL 10. Hasn't Fedora?

01:29:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
already proposed that. No, not dropping it altogether.

01:29:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
They did. Then they backed off because we covered that last year?

01:29:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I thought so. So they proposed it. They didn't do it.

01:29:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't think they proposed not packaging x.

01:30:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They proposed not doing an x version of kde, but that was not a distro wide thing I suppose not having it by default is maybe more what they've, what we've been seeing, as opposed to not.

01:30:12 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, I'm talking about yeah, at least not packaging it, I'm talking about. Yeah, at least not packaging it. I'm talking proposing not having X in there. They're going to propose out of there, no X in their repos at all.

01:30:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yes, that is coming with RHEL 10. And interestingly, I suspect that that's going to be a real sea change in how everyone else sees X11, because once RHEL is no longer doing any maintenance work on it, it is essentially going to be unmaintained software and that, for some distros is going to make some big changes based on their policies. They may not even be allowed to package it coming up here pretty soon, because X11X will not maintain software.

01:31:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So I guess that was a safer prediction than I thought. Yeah, real safe.

01:31:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's pretty wild to me.

01:31:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Unless America really steps up and starts working 24-7 on all those commits.

01:31:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, it is fundamentally broken on a lot of stuff going forward. It just can't do it and I'm predicting hardware releases are going to be boring this year. Now, without any insider knowledge, I don't think the new GPUs from NVIDIA are going to be that exciting. I think they're going to be expensive and they're not going to be a huge step forward. I'm going to say maybe 10% faster. Yeah, I think they're going to be expensive. The coming of the new processor, the rest of the processor releases are going to be pretty ho-hum. I know people are excited for the 9950X3D but I believe, if the rumors are true, the cache is only on one of the NUMA nodes. So you're going to be back to. Part of it has cache, part of it doesn't. I don't think they're going to be that great.

01:32:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There was a lot of hardware excitement last year. It's hard to follow it up year after year.

01:32:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, so I think this year is going to be hardware-wise, is going to be boring.

01:32:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I got a question, something I'm just thinking of. Once you get to the point to where you can do 4k, as I was talking about gpu, you can do 4k and you can do ray tracing, and you can do that essentially at, let's say, 120 frames per second, is there really particularly a direction to go? What, what is? Is there anything next? Is there anything big to push for after that?

01:32:54 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
8K.

01:33:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There is 8K, but that's kind of a niche that I don't know is ever going to take off, at least not for a decade. Oh, at least a decade or two. Because you have to have a really big display to be able to see the difference between 4K and 8k. Yeah, when you went from standard, you know, 320 by 200 interlaced, and then the regular, even 720p, was like wow, look at that. And you go from 1080p to 4k, it's like, yeah, that's, that's kind of better.

01:33:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, I, I think, I think I can see the difference yeah, yeah, but it's not as shocking.

01:33:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And then when you go 4K to 8K, it's like I can't see any difference. Yeah, yeah, it's like oh, maybe in this one corner, if you freeze it, you can see it better, but I mean, unless you're running a monster display, it just really isn't there. Now there's always games that can push it harder. You know, even more ray tracing, they can do it better. I'm thinking that's where you also start getting some of the AI in those cards in your game. So when you're out fighting zombies, maybe the zombies get a little smarter and start reacting better to what you're doing Smart zombies.

01:34:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I hope not. I'm having enough trouble winning, yeah, and smart zombies?

01:34:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
not, I'm having enough trouble winning. Yeah, well, you know, I remember seeing. I remember seeing some mods where people were doing things like you know. They would take skyrim and they would take the uh, the npc, um responses and they would feed those as prompts into something like chat, gpt, and then have an ai service speak it back and so you would be able to have conversations with NPCs that were that were way more intriguing than just the all the prepackaged stuff. So I could, I could see those sorts of things making their way into games. But do you really need like, is that? Is that a huge stretch for what current gen GPUs can do? I don't know that it is.

01:34:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I, I don't know that it is. Uh, I, I don't know. I mean, I I think if you really start tapping into it hard, there's a little more computation there. Of course they can turn up the like I said, turn up the ray tracing, the graphics there, because they're still writing a lot of stuff for, because they know a lot of people aren't running, you know, the super high-end cards. But yeah, you do kind of come into a point where you're like even even say, okay, like you said, for I'm running 4k at 120 hertz. Well, now, what you know, oh, but this one can run it at 500, yeah, but my monitor is only 120, I'm not, you know.

01:35:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So hot off the press. One last prediction about x, since you brought that up uh, x11, xorg. What's gonna be their downfall is this year elon musk is gonna discover that there is another x out there and he's going to sue them out of existence and tell them to stop using the name X. It's right, oh that soup, by the way.

01:36:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.

01:36:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, he's like I was here first. I own the. Why don't you own the domain name? I own the domain name, it's me.

01:36:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's me. That's hilarious, all right, this is xcom, not xorg. There you go, let's get into some command line tips. We'll let Rob go first. And what do you have to start the year off, rob?

01:36:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
My first tip of the year is not a command line. It is maybe not even uh, something to try yet, but something to keep your eye on and something that might be something to use in the future. So gnome tweaks has long been the tool uh to use when tweaking gnome settings. But with many of those settings being pulled into gnome, you know we we may no longer need gnome tweaks and there's a new kid in town, perhaps one of the successors called refine. So refine is available in flat hub.

01:37:12
Um and the first release supports cursor themes, icon themes, light style for shell themes, main ui font, terminal monospace font, uh under the mouse and touch settings. You could control the middle click to uh to paste options. Uh under the shell. Uh compositor. There's a center new window. Attach model window to parent. Enable variable refresh rate options to display and enable fractional scaling options in display X Wayland native scaling. Under sound configuration. There's volume stepping options in display X Wayland native scaling. Under sound configuration. There's volume stepping. So it's something maybe you want to try out if you like tweaking your GNOME. But time will tell if the future will bring a refine as maybe the replacement to gnome tweaks. As you know, this is their first release. It's in flat hub, so you know, maybe you don't want that on your urban too, because that's, you know, snaps. But you know, if you have a flat pack somewhere else it might be something to try out If you want to try tweaking things with it all right, and that brings us, uh, to ken muted.

01:38:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is ironic that you're talking about an audio tip and you have your volume muted too many buttons to press as I'm bringing it up here.

01:38:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But the audio tip I'm going to be talking about is PWJack and I'm going to be demonstrating with some slides here how I used it to run Ardor on a system that was set up with POS Audio. For those of y'all listening, I've brought up in the video screen a screenshot of my terminal showing me running the first of the options that you can use with a hard order to get help with it. That's a pw-jack-h, and that shows this brief help screen which gives all the options you have. You have dash h for help, dash r, followed by the remote daemon name if you want to control a remote instance of pipe wire. Dash V to get a verbose digbug info at when you're running it. Dash 8 or, excuse me, dash s, will give you the sample rate. Now the defaults, according to the help screen, is 48,000. And then you've got a dash P if you need to put in the period in samples. Now the next green snapshot I have is showing me getting ready to launch Ardour using PWJack and I'm going to be doing the dash V. So I have the verbose debug info on and I've also, at the end of it, got the ampersand, just a single one, so that it will run in the background. The command line says pw-jack space, dash v space, and here I give the location of where our doors, which is slash. Use usr, slash bin, slash our door. The next screen shows what happens when I hit enter. First thing you'll notice right after I hit enter is it moves it to the background and gives us the process ID for it. Then, on the next screen it starts giving us some information about the running in Pipewire and, as you'll see, it says I'm running in Pipewire version 1.24 and then gives all the information that Ardour spits out on the command line as it's booting up. This is actually two screens full of information. There you go. And with the second screen it shows that Ardor is loading bindings and loading the UI configuration and, because I haven't set up any templates yet, it says found nothing along the home dead config. Slash our door eight templates or the user share our door eight templates.

01:42:03
The next screen is showing the session setup, part of Ardor where it's opened up, and asking me to either start a new session recent sessions I can choose from or other sessions. Now, in this case, I went ahead and chose the session that was named Don Williams Especially for you. Side 1. Williams, especially for you. Side one it's where I'd are previously used our door to record side one of the Don Williams album. Especially for you. I've got it in vinyl.

01:42:40
Then on the next screen it shows that it's power come up. I've gone in and opened up the audio MIDI setup. It's showing the jack is already running, so you can see that PW jacks got it running. And then on the left half of this that shows the output from pipe PW jack showing that it's got pipe wire jack running. Now this next screenshot for you those of y'all lifting is from QT Pipewire Graph, where it shows that Ardour is running and it's showing that I've got my USB record player connected to the audio inputs on it as well as a lot of audio connections between Ardour itself. It's amazing how many connections Ardour does internally.

01:43:38
Yeah, and the next screen that I took a snapshot of was both of my displays monitors. On the left side is the QP pipe wire graph and then on the right side I've got two terminals, one above the other. That one has the output from PipewireJax using the verbose debug information. Right below it is the ALSA mixer showing that I'm using Pipewire to control the audio, and then, of course, ardor over to the far right on the other monitor and the last screen shows the what happens when I exited RDoor? It just goes to done. It repeats the command that I used and puts me at the DOS prompt waiting for the next command.

01:44:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool.

01:44:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So you can use Pipewire or PW-Jack when you want to run an application that is Jack-aware only, even though you've got your system configured primarily to use the POS Audio server under Pipewire.

01:45:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think some distros do that for you automatically. I'm pretty sure, fedora, I don't have to actually run that and it does it automatically, but that is useful to know what is going on under the hood. So very good, jeff, you've got, is it? What did? I just saw it? Base name it's gonna say base camp like no, no, that's something else. What is base name?

01:45:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
yeah, base camp is not a good program.

01:45:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'll just tell you that?

01:45:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
um, so, basically. So, when I was searching for a command line tip, I stumbled on this one and I decided to check our spreadsheet just to see if it had been used before and interestingly I found that Ken had incorporated it into some of his scripts but nobody ever actually discussed it. So this tip is actually quite simple and useful. So the base name command, just B-A-S-E-N-A-M-E, and it takes the result of a file or a full file path name, like you'd have it. If you typed in which or something like that, what it would come up and it shortens it just to the name. And there's really just a few command line options available for this.

01:46:33
So there's a dash A and you use that. If you have multiple inputs, you separate them by a space. There's a dash S which stands for suffix and it removes the trailing suffix. So if you have a, for example, if you have a file named like notestext, it would just give you notes and it would remove, like the text, portion of the file name. There's a dash Z which separates the output with a null character rather than a new line, and of course you have the dash dash help and dash dash version, which displays help and version. Basically, you know, the base name command just allows easier parsing of file names with paths and especially like in, basically for scripting. It just makes things simpler.

01:47:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool. All right, I've got one that I will quickly talk about, and that is loginctl, and this is a command that you might come up with if you go to look. For how do I check if I'm running Xorg, like X11, or Wayland on a given machine? And one of the ways to look is there's a one-liner that runs loginctl, and it's actually a pretty interesting command in and of itself. So if you run just log in ctl, it'll give you a list of sessions, a list of graphical sessions on your machine, and so right now I'm using session two and uid of a thousand and my username and it's seat zero, because this is a single seat machine. But then you can then take login CTL and add show dash session and that session number so session two in this case and you get lots more information about that particular session. One of the details that are in there is type, and in my case, on this Pop OS machine, type is still X11. On this Pop OS machine, type is still X11. So, yeah, a very interesting way to get lots and lots of information about the exact session, the login session that you are in. So we've never covered it. And so there you go, login CTL Very cool, yeah, all right, we have covered our tips.

01:48:49
We've covered our predictions. I'm going to let each of the guys get in the last word if they want to Plug whatever they want to. Rob is up first with that.

01:48:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Alright, guys. Happy New Year everybody.

01:49:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Happy New Year.

01:49:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And I just have my usual plug Come connect with me and when you connect with me, you can share with me your votes on, like whether or not you think Jeff actually got some of those right that he thinks he did, and or not. So to do that, you go to Robert P Campbellcom. That's Robert P, as in Patrick Campbell, as in Campbellcombell, as in campbellcom, and on that page you can find a link to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Mastodon, which I well, between that and LinkedIn, is my most active, not that I'm crazy active or anything. I won't flood your feet. Or, if you just appreciate what I've done for you, click this little coffee cup here to donate a coffee in $5 increments.

01:50:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go, alright, and Ken.

01:50:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I just wanted to recommend an article from the latest issue of PC Linux OS Magazine. I've got the link in the show notes to it. It's about what's entering the public domain as of the first of this year. So those of you with a creative bent, you may be able to get some uh inspiration from all some of that old uh public domain stuff yeah, it's always fun to see what what hits the public domain.

01:50:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I like that a lot. There's a couple of interesting ones this year too. All right, jeff there are.

01:50:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
uh, don't have much to say, so it's just going to be a poetry corner. Roses are red, lettuce is green. Be nice to computers before the rise of machines. Have a great week everybody.

01:51:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's great. Thank you guys for being here. I sure enjoyed it and appreciate it. If you want to follow my stuff, of course you can find me over at Hackaday. We've got the security column goes live on Fridays and Floss Weekly as well. I have a super interesting Floss Weekly this past week and another one coming up this week. We record those on Tuesday. They go live on Wednesdays, so watch for that and check it. You can scan the QR code and learn about how to join the club that is part of Club Twit. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per day and it keeps the network going. It's the way to show that you care and we sure appreciate the support there as well. We appreciate you guys, everybody being here, everybody watching those to get us live and on the download, and we will see you next week on the untitled Linux Show.