Untitled Linux Show 231 Transcript

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

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:00]:
Hey folks, this week we're moving to Z Wave. Or at least Rob is. And then he tries to talk us into another office option that you might want to check out. Then there's open source Nvidia News, no View, or is it Nouveau? That's where the title comes from. Then we talk about intel and they are hiring finally some Linux engineers. And Nix is coming to Fedora. It's a lot of fun, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Rob Campbell [00:00:26]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:30]:
This is Twitter. This is the Untitled Linux Show. Episode 231. Recorded Saturday, November 29th. Confused by vowels? Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time for some Linux and some open source. It is the Untitled Linux show and this is our special Black Friday. No, it's Saturday.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:55]:
What do you call the Saturday between Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Does it have.

Jeff Massie [00:00:59]:
It seems like there should be Small Business Saturday.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:02]:
Small Business Saturday. I like it. There you go.

Jeff Massie [00:01:05]:
Or you're supposed to go shop at your local business, your hometown businesses, not your corporate driven businesses.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:13]:
Are there any local small town businesses anymore? It seems like not very many. There's a few. Well, anyway, that is not what we're here to talk about. We're going to talk about Linux and Rob is going to start out with a story that is not about Linux. That's all right. We love him anyways.

Jeff Massie [00:01:35]:
50 50.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:36]:
I love you man. I love you, Rob.

Jeff Massie [00:01:39]:
Don't tell me the odds.

Rob Campbell [00:01:40]:
Yeah, this runs on an OS that is Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:45]:
It probably can.

Rob Campbell [00:01:47]:
I'm sure it's possible it's designed specifically for that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:50]:
Oh really? Okay Rob, take it away and tell us what have you done in your house that is presumably reportedly Linux related?

Rob Campbell [00:01:59]:
So this is pretty much my review of the ZWA2. So a few weeks ago I co hosted Floss Weekly with Jonathan, Jonathan Bennett and, and, and we interviewed the Home Assistant founder, Paulus Schon. One of the things he talked about was the new Z Wave antenna for Home Assistant. That is a Linux operating system. Home Assistant OS is a Linux operating system for home automation. And this, this antenna is called the ZWA2 obviously. So it's something they, they just came out with and they're selling. At that time I said that I unfortunately I went all zigbee instead of Z Wave, you know, not for any technical reasons.

Rob Campbell [00:02:49]:
You know, when I set up my stuff and I need to pick one as they seem pretty equal. So I just picked one and I couldn't find any real big tech Technical reasons to go one or the other. Well, my zigbee devices have been hit or miss. You know, some will lose connections and I have to reset them to get them back, and others would never get back on. The setup for zigbee was problematic all the time, even from the beginning. The process is to hold. Normally you hold a bun for like 10 seconds or 15 seconds until some light flashes, and then you hope the home assistant would detect it. Sometimes it would.

Rob Campbell [00:03:29]:
Sometimes one. Sometimes you're doing that over and over for a long time. So I finally decided, okay, I'm just Gonna buy the ZWA2 a few weeks ago and I bought a few Z Wave devices. I probably should just started with one, but I bought a few. So fortunately it worked out well. But I'll get into that because so far it's been a much better experience. So my experience so far with the ZWe2 antenna, when I first hooked it up and passed through the USB through proxmox to my home assistant, VM home. Home assistant was supposed to automatically detect it.

Rob Campbell [00:04:14]:
Now, I did have a few problems here. I, I don't think it wasn't. I don't think it has anything to do with the antenna, but I'll get into that. So because for whatever reason, it wasn't just automatically detecting it. You know, it would pop up when I tried to add it through the interface manually. It would say, what location is this? Like DEV TTY01 or, or whatever. You know, I had some options or I could type it in. It's like, well, I don't know where it's at.

Leo Laporte [00:04:44]:
I.

Rob Campbell [00:04:46]:
So I, I looked into it and you know, I went to look, you know, the place I should be able to see where it was for a USB device is dev/dev/editor/by dash ID the location. You know, I should be able to do it to find it, but that directory just didn't even exist. So I went into the system settings to reboot Home Assistant to the software way and went down, it came back up. So I'm not. But I'm not sure if this just resets the container that's on there and doesn't actually do a full system reset because that didn't work either. So after a couple times trying that and poking around, I'm like, okay, let's just do a hard reboot on the whole VM in it. And then after I did that, it just showed up automatically. I went.

Rob Campbell [00:05:39]:
Even after it showed up automatically, I went in there and the dev slash dev serial by ID it showed it right in there that the USB device was there and it showed me where it was over in the dev location. So whatever reason just wasn't showing up the first time. So I think, I think that might have just been somewhere glitch at the moment. Not anything against, not anything negative necessarily to Home Assistant or to the antenna. I think my, my Linux is being weird at that moment. So after that add a device, you know, I click add and then you just scan a QR code on the device and you know, you scan it into Home Assistant with the app and then it just showed up and worked way better than zigbee was. You know, since then I've already, you know, this hasn't been very long and I've already replaced most of my zigbee devices with Z Wave. Now one thing I didn't know is if, if the zigbee issues were with my cheap zigbee hub that I have.

Rob Campbell [00:06:48]:
Or maybe the devices were cheap though is multiple different brands and everything just were goofy or, or if it's a protocol itself. I don't know, that was my experience. But, but the funny thing is one, after I had a little set up I went looking for more, some more Z Wave things to, to connect to my home assistant. And then I found they now have a Zigbee antenna called the ZBT Dash 2. So if I wait a little bit, I could have just gotten one of them and see if my ZigBee devices I had would work better with that. You know, maybe if the thing would just work great and I would have not have to swap everything out. I didn't have too many zigbee devices yet just because it's flaky.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:34]:
But have you dumped all of your zigbee stuff?

Rob Campbell [00:07:38]:
So I'm down to three. Okay, I only have three zigbee devices left to replace.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:43]:
What you need to do, I think you know what you need to do. You need to buy the zigbee antenna now and see if you can run them side by side. So.

Rob Campbell [00:07:52]:
Well, I know I could run it side by side.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:55]:
Well, there you go.

Rob Campbell [00:07:56]:
Well, I am running them side by side, just not with the antenna. You know, I'll tell you what, if people donate a few copies, you don't need to donate the full price. Donate something towards it and I'll chip in the rest and do it because I'm curious. But I also don't want to throw the money into it. And then I don't know, I like the Z Wave so far better, but all of this is Just to say, I highly recommend the Z Wave antenna from Home Assistant. It reaches from the basement corner of my basement to the upstairs corner, far end of the house. No problem. And, you know, even if my zigbee were the issues with my hardware and not the protocol, like I said, the setup process is just so much nicer.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:46]:
So, yeah, interesting. It's a. The. The antenna. It is an ESP32 S3. Has the little microcontroller inside of there that's doing the. Essentially, it's just a USB serial bridge, but that's a lot of horsepower for just that. We're going to talk about that microcontroller later today.

Rob Campbell [00:09:05]:
By the way, the antenna. I measured it. It's hooked up, so I didn't bring it over here, but I did measure before. It goes from my elbow to the knuckle right here. So it's more than a foot tall. So that's a decent antenna. It has a little glowing tip.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:18]:
Nice. Very cool.

Rob Campbell [00:09:19]:
That you can turn off, on and off in the interval.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:22]:
That's good.

Rob Campbell [00:09:22]:
Like it?

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:23]:
Yeah, that's good. You need to be able to map something because there's so many things inside of Home Assistant you could map. I could map the glowing antenna to, like, you have a message waiting for.

Rob Campbell [00:09:34]:
You, or I could. Except for right now. It's like, in a corner where I'm not going to see it, but if I had that in more of a visible place, yeah, that'd be great. You could map all kinds of stuff.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:43]:
To it, make it flash when the AI talks to you something.

Jeff Massie [00:09:48]:
And just FYI, antenna length, a lot of times has to do with the frequency and what pattern you want to come out of your signal.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:58]:
So overall length, RF is such black magic. Oh, my goodness.

Jeff Massie [00:10:03]:
No, it's just a lot of math.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:05]:
No, it's black magic. I am pretty sure when you start seeing antennas that AI design that actually work, and all of the RF engineers look at it and go, we can't figure out how it works. That's when you know that you're talking about black magic and not just math.

Jeff Massie [00:10:24]:
Anyway, back in my day, all we had was math. Well, I mean, that's ridiculous. And that's the way we liked it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:30]:
That's really all the AI is, too. It's just really fancy math. Let's talk about some of the hardware that does all of that math and the software that lets you math the math on the hardware. Jeff has got a story about. About nouveau. I'm going to pronounce it right, because apparently it's insulting when I call it no view on. On Nvidia hardware. What is the state of the art, Jeff?

Rob Campbell [00:10:55]:
I think we call it no view because there was a time when, when you had. When you're using that one, there was no viewing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:01]:
Yes, that's where. That's where the joke comes from. The. The only person growing up, the only person I had that to talk about open source stuff, he called it no view. And I think he was in on the joke. He just never told me that. And so I was like a year into doing this show that finally we had a disgruntled listener said, you know that's not how it's actually pronounced, right? No, I didn't know that well.

Jeff Massie [00:11:24]:
And we're not French so that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:29]:
A.

Jeff Massie [00:11:30]:
Lot of vowels in there can confuse us.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:31]:
That's true. We Americans get confused by vowels.

Jeff Massie [00:11:34]:
I do think the show title should be Jonathan wasn't in on the joke.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:39]:
That works. All right, Jeff, take it away.

Jeff Massie [00:11:42]:
So for a long time Nvidia has been in one controversy or another in, you know, recent Linux history. Longer than that, but we're just sticking it to recent. The latest issue was the driver was not open source and they didn't help the open source version of the driver. Novu never got any love from Nvidia. Not in recent history anyway. I mean there's some old cards that would they helped out. But again, recent history for more recent cards. Novo driver was missing a lot of features.

Jeff Massie [00:12:12]:
You know, it was stuck at a lower speed. You know, it could never really ramp up the cards. There was a whole lot of issues and it just could not keep up with a proprietary driver in any way, shape or form. Well, in the not too distant past, Nvidia opened up their driver kind of a little sort of the code they put into the kernel is now open source, but there's still a lot of closed source bits which are loaded in as firmware. So source concerning Nvidia Open source concerning Nvidia is still kind of a very gray area. And yeah, meets the letter of the law maybe, if not the spirit of it. But I digress. The article in the show notes is dealing with benchmarking the open source Nova kernel driver using the open source Nvidia driver stack versus the closed source driver.

Jeff Massie [00:13:08]:
Now there is an open source Nova driver from Nvidia for the kernel, but it isn't ready for end users yet. Still a little rough around the edges. The open source testing was also done. It includes the latest MESA NVK driver, which is the open source Vulkan API support code and the NVK Vulkan driver is also used for looking into the open GL performance using the Zinc OpenGL on Vulkan driver which is now used for OpenGL on modern Nvidia GPUs rather than using the Novu Gallium 3D driver. So the the Rustcl driver for openCL compute is atop the NVK driver as well and this is fully open source and the latest Nvidia Linux driver support. So that was all compared to Nvidia's official 580 series Linux driver. So both 40 series and 50 series cards were used on three different with three different drivers. There was the NVK which is the out of the box driver is found in Ubuntu 2510 with the 6.17 kernel and Mesa 25.2 there's an NVK git which is like it sounds the latest greatest code from November 24th it's got the 6.18 git kernel because we don't have the 6.18 released yet and Mesa 26.0 development.

Jeff Massie [00:14:44]:
So this is all the latest greatest code he that Michael Erbal could pull out of the git repository. So it's not released, it's not in a final finished state. And finally we had the Nvidia 5809505 driver. So Ubuntu 2510 was the OS that these all ran on. And unless I otherwise stated, like I said like the like the kernel, everything was out of the box how it installs. So the out of the box NVK driver was just straight up Ubuntu 2510 NVK kit was 2510 and then adding the latest git source and then the Nvidia driver was just how it installs on 2510. Well, is it good news? Well, kind of. If you look at the long term right now you can expect overall about a 50, 50% less performance out of the open source driver than the proprietary driver.

Jeff Massie [00:15:44]:
Compute is one area where some of the benchmarks in the open source held held right in there with the closed driver, but others didn't fare so well. Now why did I start out with good news if well if you look at the long term first if you go back to the benchmarks like this that were ran In July, the 50 Series cards couldn't even run. So there's been a lot of progress there. The second thing is out of the box driver is about 20% slower than the latest git code. So that means that the, the latest code coming there, there's substantial performance improvements in the pipeline. Now there were a few benchmarks on the 470 which had some issues with the Git code, where the 480 ran just fine. The 5000 series card was a 5080. But this git code, not full release, like I said, there's going to be issues.

Jeff Massie [00:16:43]:
So the fact it didn't run on a few benchmarks, not a ton, just a few, shouldn't be surprising. But if you look through where we were and where we're at, there's more working hardware and just from the official release, I mean, there's a 20% increase improvement. So that's quite a bit. And there's headway being made and things are getting a lot better. So not where we want it, but the gap is closing and noticeable progress is being made. So I think the future is going to look pretty bright for the open source driver.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:19]:
Yeah, very cool. And there's also Nova from Nvidia. How does that fit into this? That's like their new next generation driver, right, The Nova.

Jeff Massie [00:17:29]:
Yeah, they're kind of. The way I, the way I'm understanding is the, the Novu is what's kind of used to the. It's the interim open source solution until the Nova driver is fully ready. Because like I said, it's not, it's not ready for end users yet. So they're still, still working on it. But my understanding that'll kind of be the replacement for Novu.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:51]:
Yeah, makes sense. Very cool. All right, Rob, did you want to comment on this or are you still not enough of an Nvidia fan to have anything to say? Good luck. There you go.

Jeff Massie [00:18:08]:
Well, and AMD now has a little more pressure on Nvidia because they basically went to the open source driver as their, you know, that's, that's what they're. So everybody can get in and help optimize and yeah, make things better.

Rob Campbell [00:18:23]:
One day you Nvidia folks will be with the cool crowd.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:29]:
It's coming.

Rob Campbell [00:18:30]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:18:30]:
And that's. And that's why I hope COMPUTE fully catches up to speed. I hope their hardware catches Nvidia's hardware for compute. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:40]:
All right. One of the other things we've been tracking for a while is the troubles at intel and how they have. They've dropped lots of positions, not just open source stuff, but it has hit their open source teams pretty hard at Intel. And so I saw this and I thought, oh well, this is good news. And we should celebrate it. There is a. There are two positions open. Kristen Accardi talked about this on LinkedIn.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:11]:
Hiring two fairly senior kernel engineers in Oregon actually. So your stateside looking for basically people to work on intel optimized system software for the Linux ecosystem. That one's a senior level position and then another kernel engineer for various OS internals for unnamed intel device drivers and both are rather nice as far as their salaries. Nice six figures but I just found and so obviously if anyone listening is an OS driver writer, you know, if you have patches in the kernel and this is something interesting to you, go reach out to them and see if you are the right fit. It would be extremely fun to have a fan of the show there. But other than that I just thought it was pretty neat to see that intel and at least some of their places are on the hiring path and looking to bulk out their numbers as it were to bulk up the their Linux chops once again. So not all is bad news. There was good to see.

Jeff Massie [00:20:23]:
Hiring at intel. That's definitely a good thing. And I do want to preface that that we say there was huge cuts, but there was also some voluntary packages and depending on where you're at in your career or if you think oh maybe I might get cut, you were better off to take the package than you were to stick around and then get cut where you didn't get a package. So there are some people that left that probably would never have been cut but they either said now's a good time to get out because I'm worried about it or you know, sometimes you have a developer or anybody in that's been there for, you know, maybe 20 years, 30 years and go I'm ready for something else. Oh, I get a bonus for leaving. Yeah, I'm perfect. Time to jump ship.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:07]:
I mean sometimes folks just need a break.

Rob Campbell [00:21:09]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:10]:
That, that whole the idea of a sabbatical like let me work for seven years and then take a year off like there's something to that. There is something to be said for finding a time to let let yourself rest if you've been going 247 for too long.

Rob Campbell [00:21:24]:
Yeah, yeah. I wonder where these, these two roles where they fit and I, I assume they must be people who weren't necessarily pushed out unless they weren't doing a good job. But maybe people who kind of fall under that umbrella where they just wanted to leave or chose to leave for one reason or another.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:43]:
Yeah, it's hard to say. We don't even know for sure that there was Someone filling these roles previously, maybe they're new roles as part of the restructuring. Not a whole lot of insight into this, but, you know, just get to see that it's there and it's a thing. Yeah, I just saw something pop and I'm trying to figure out if we need to talk about it and where I think this might be a good place to slot it in, and that is that this weekend. So possibly before the majority of our listeners get to the show, 6.18 is going to release. So it is the kernel weekend, which is always fun and, you know, kind of, kind of on point for talking about intel hiring on more people to work on this. Of course there are some intel stuff that have landed in 6.18. There's not a whole lot of really, really huge news in the 618 kernel.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:34]:
It's not going to say it's boring.

Rob Campbell [00:22:36]:
But it's boring is a good place to be an lts. When did they decide that? They decide that later. Right now.

Jeff Massie [00:22:46]:
It'Ll probably be this one because it's the last kernel released in the year and the next kernel will carry over into January sometime. So 18 I'm pretty sure is going to be the LTS.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:58]:
This article says that Linux 6.18 is anticipated to become this year's LTS kernel. So we're about to open the 6.19 merge window and then the other anticipation that people are saying is that we're probably not going to have a 6.20 because Linus Torvalds does not like big numbers. So we're probably going to have a 7.0 pretty soon next year. And so that will be fun to see too. The kernel numbers mean less than they used to, but it's still fun to see them.

Rob Campbell [00:23:28]:
Yeah, they mean more than other numbers and some other software applications that they choose to use.

Jeff Massie [00:23:34]:
That's true for. For anybody newer. It used to be that the. The whole numbers and you know, like if you went from a 2 kernel to a 3 kernel that was huge, that meant there's a big rewrite in there. And then they had. The next number was the. It was. It was only the evens were actually released kernels and then so you might have a 2.2 kernel that was released and then you have 2.3 that was like your RCS are today.

Jeff Massie [00:24:02]:
And when the 2.3 was kernel was ready to be released, it turned into a 2.4, for example.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:08]:
Yep.

Jeff Massie [00:24:08]:
Then they said, yeah, we're not doing any of that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:10]:
Who cares? Who cares Semantic versioning. Who needs it? It's for the birds. All right, so up next, we've got Rob talking about another office option. We're going to let him get to it. Ready for this?

Leo Laporte [00:24:22]:
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Rob Campbell [00:26:08]:
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Thanks for listening.

Rob Campbell [00:27:12]:
All right, so there are already a lot of good open source Office solutions available for Linux. But there are often aspects about them that people don't like, things that people have trouble with that it's a deal breaker for them for some reason to move over. Well now there is a new kind of new option to try. New to the desktop at least, but not a new Office solution. Exactly. So Collabora has been providing a web based Office solution for years and has been the choice partner for solutions like Nextcloud. Collabora Online is based on the core technologies in LibreOffice and is one of LibreOffice's largest contributors. You could almost think of it as a distribution based on LibreOffice but online, well no longer is it limited to being online only as they now have released a desktop app for Windows Mac and of course that's why we're here Linux.

Rob Campbell [00:28:27]:
So if you know if based on LibreOffice why Collabora? You know first what they say is a simpler stack while still based on the labor Office core technologies. Collabora Office has no Java dependencies which means a cleaner install, smaller footprint and a single self contained download. A quote from Frank Karlach, CEO and founder of nextcloud quote says nextcloud has a long standing close partnership with Collabora and we are pleased to have been able to bring our UX engineer engineering expertise to help make collaborative Office more ergonomic and intuitive. This combined with the strong privacy first design and document interoperability powers nextcloud Office as an excellent match for our users and customers needs. So in the past the biggest complaint with open source options has been compatibility with Microsoft Suite. But these days let's it's pretty solid for the most part. You know there's some things here and there but I think a lot of people now just complain about the look and the user Interface. You know LibreOffice is, is getting better but I think the look is still kind of looks out, excuse me, looks outdated.

Rob Campbell [00:30:00]:
You know that is one area collaborate seems to shine. So let's have a look at the new app. So for those watching here on the screen here, this is a collaborative the tech space. So it has has the ribbon a Very clean design. You know, if I want to Compare this with LibreOffice, this is what LibreOffice looks like and it looks like icons from about 2001. I know there's themes and stuff, but default is king. Going back to collaborate, you know, here's the spreadsheets, very clean look. Somebody coming from Microsoft Office.

Rob Campbell [00:30:40]:
It's not identical, but the look would be very comfortable to them. And it's very, very, very streamlined, very sleek. I believe I was going to say.

Jeff Massie [00:30:51]:
It reminded me, it reminds me a lot of Excel, the spreadsheet program. You have up very similar.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:57]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:30:58]:
And I haven't played with the PowerPoint alternative they have but they also, that's, that's, it's basically their word processor, their spreadsheet and a PowerPoint alternative. You know, if you hit file open, oops, I didn't want to do that file. And then right here you can do a blank document, blank spreadsheet, blank presentation. They have a template sue that already in there. So I think it's something that could be very, a very comfortable alternative for Windows users. And this is, I forgot it's, it's not like it's not their final release yet. This is our first initial. I don't know what they're calling it, beta maybe, but I think it looks very promising.

Rob Campbell [00:31:47]:
It has a very clean, modern look. And now with a desktop and web based offering, you know, that could make it more and more like a Microsoft 365 contender. So that's new this week.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:03]:
Yeah. Interesting. I'm glad that LibreOffice still exists because I don't want my desktop to look like a Microsoft product. So kind of a, kind of a downer for me. But that's all right. It's cool that it's out there.

Jeff Massie [00:32:15]:
I kind of like the interface because one of the things is I use LibreOffice all the time and sometimes it's like, oh my gosh, there's 600 icons here. It's like which thing do I need? And it, you know, it's cleaner. Yeah. Now was there any feature loss or.

Rob Campbell [00:32:32]:
Is it just between the web interface.

Jeff Massie [00:32:35]:
Or between the core LibreOffice and this new.

Rob Campbell [00:32:43]:
I don't know necessarily between the core libreo Office, between the web interfaces. There are minor changes here and there, but it's early days.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:53]:
So one other interesting little tidbit, you talked about getting away from Java, which is nice not only for smaller download and fewer system dependencies, but it also gets you away from Oracle. And it's sort of having anything to do with that weird, potentially problematic whole licensing scheme. I know Rob has probably run into this. We used to be able to just grab Oracle's Java Java SE and install it for people and then suddenly they said, nope, you don't get to do that anymore. And the world sort of had to scramble to go, oh no, what Java did we use? And you know, there's OpenJDK. You can install that on Windows and of course it's easy, easy on Linux. But yeah, not being dependent upon that mess is kind of a good thing.

Rob Campbell [00:33:40]:
I've always hated Java, even long before that. The only thing Java ever had going for it is its cross platform compatibility. In my opinion, the, the fact that you could write once and pretty much run the same app everywhere. But other than that speed and everything about it and, and when I, and I tried to learn at one point I had a class on it. I did great in the class. But I took the class on in college and thinking maybe if I have a formal class I'll actually like it. And no, I still hated it. It's horrible.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:15]:
I have, I have not found that having a formal class on something has ever made me love something.

Rob Campbell [00:34:21]:
No. Well, I mean I, I, I'm like, I gotta try to learn it. I was like, God, it's horrible. Maybe, maybe the books just aren't. Maybe I need somebody to, to formally teach me. It's like, nope, this is still stupid.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:34]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:34:36]:
Well now unless they changed it, you could get Java from Oracle. You just had to create like an account and say that it was personal and not going to be used for business.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:46]:
Non commercially used.

Jeff Massie [00:34:47]:
Yeah, which it wasn't just like, oh, downloaded it was.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:51]:
Which by definition means it is not open source. That is a violation of one of the tenets of the open source model. So therefore that is not an open source. License to source available license. Get that out of here. We don't want that.

Jeff Massie [00:35:06]:
I never got into Java programming, but I will say Python I wasn't a fan of at first until I got some training on it and then I went, oh, I get a lot of this stuff now and it, I love it. So learning more about it has improved certain things for me.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:22]:
Oh now don't, don't misconstrue what I said. Learning more about something can make you fall in love with it. Yes, getting a formal class on it has never made me fall in love with something. I very much enjoy learning about things but not going to lectures with a bunch of other people in a formal classroom that I have trouble with for.

Rob Campbell [00:35:43]:
My degree, I needed a class and I'm like, well, let's take this one. I've always wanted to figure out how to learn Java and I just struggled by myself.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:52]:
There you go. All right, Jeff, let's talk about colors. What's new in colors in Linux?

Jeff Massie [00:36:00]:
So what do we say? A ton on this show and it seems to be creeping into everything HDR and a lot of people don't take advantage of it. Well, you were thinking of two vowels. No, I'm thinking hdr. Valve has jumped on the trend and is now supporting a color pipeline API and it's finally ready for upstream entry into the kernel. The major amount of work has been on the AMD Radeon driver for a couple reasons. One is the Steam hardware and the Steam deck and the Steam machine, you know, both use AMD hardware. There's also been some hardware capabilities which are recent in the AMD hardware. So they, they've just added some hardware features in this last generation or so.

Jeff Massie [00:36:47]:
They've had 13 revisions of this code to make sure it was working as intended before waiting to submit it into the kernel. So initial implementations are for the AMD GPU DRM driver as well as the virtual KMS or VKMS driver. And Valve had a note describing this, which I won't read because it's describing hardware functions in the amd dcn version 3 or later. Unless you're a a driver coder, I don't think any of it will mean anything to you. I know it sure didn't for me. Also, I will say the DCN is the display core next, and it's the architecture for AMD's modern display engine found in their GPUs and APUs. It's a flexible hardware pipeline designed to handle display related tasks from processing pixel data and managing color to outputting signals to various monitors, things like that. The code is in the DRM next, so that's where you put your code to get included into the kernel.

Jeff Massie [00:37:54]:
But it's late in the cycle and normally the cutoff for making it into the kernel is at the previous kernels RC6 stage. So it probably isn't going to make it into 6. 19. The thought is it will probably hit kernel 7 or like we said, but what everybody thinks is probably going to be seven, you know, unless Linus changes his mind, which has happened. So what does this do? You know, H Now this is something that I'm not sure everybody realizes. HDR is not just a switch you can turn on because there's a lot of different color content sources. There's a lot of different color profiles, different color gamuts, and the support still needs to be there for the standard dynamic range. So it's not just, oh, going to open it up to 32 bit color and away we go.

Jeff Massie [00:38:42]:
No, there's also a wide range of display devices and they don't all show color the same way. So this code also handles an interface to be able to handle a wide range of color profiles. So basically that means when you see a specific shade of green, it will show up on different hardware and for others as the same shade of green. There's also other benefits to handling color which are a lot faster than the current software methods. The API is already supported in Valve's Game Scope, which is a compositor which is built to optimize games. Because it's so focused, it's sometimes referred to as a mini compositor. Kd, kde Kwin and Whalen Weston implementations also support the new API. Now that the color API interface has been solidified, expect a lot more compositors to support the new color interface.

Jeff Massie [00:39:40]:
So you can take a look at the article linked in the Show Notes for more details and links to the original presentations on what's happening in the hardware stack with the different supported features. And they go in and explain in there how all this other stuff and what building blocks and the hardware it interfaces with and. But again, unless you're really kind of into the driver stuff, I don't know as you get much out of it. But you know, the information is there if you care to look. So I think I can say that the future is looking bright and colorful.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:12]:
The future is looking bright. This is, this is mainly to do hardware based HDR rendering, right? Like, yes, accelerated hdr.

Jeff Massie [00:40:23]:
Yeah. Right now there's kind of some software, it's handled a lot in software, but hardware can do it just about instantly for almost no overhead. So it's. It'll speed things up there. And it's just a common interface for HDR is not just HDR because there's so many different variations of it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:42]:
Right, right, right.

Jeff Massie [00:40:44]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:47]:
It's unfortunate that we will probably not ever see what is it Dolby Vision or if we do, it'll be half of forever until we see it on the Linux desktop. That's another one of those HDR implementations. Probably not going to happen anytime soon.

Jeff Massie [00:41:01]:
I'm going to talk about why, because that's probably licensing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:06]:
I'm going to talk about why we'll get there. Let's. Let's unpack this right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:41:12]:
Hey, Everybody, it's Leo Laporte. You know about MacBreak Weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple, and this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:29]:
It's an easy subscription.

Leo Laporte [00:41:30]:
Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Mac Break Weekly. Or visit our website, Twitter, TV mbw. You don't want to miss a week of Mac Break Weekly.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:41]:
All right, so as I was hinting about, we're actually talking about patents this time. And for those of us that have been around the Linux desktop for a while, software patents are not our friends. So let's think back through this history of software patents and the things that you couldn't do on Linux for the longest time because of them. One of the ones that annoyed me the most for years and years, and this still will get you, depending upon what you want to do. You couldn't listen to MP3s because MP3s were patented and most of the distros, for legal reasons were not willing to ship code that, you know, in theory, violated those patents. It was not that very many years ago that finally the lawyers at places like Red Hat signed off on it and said, okay, it's been long enough that no matter what legal shenanigans, you know, impeg La or whatever licensing group used, no matter what legal shenanigans they use, those patents are finally old enough, we don't have to worry about them. So now we, hey, we can listen to MP3s on our Linux desktop. It's really great.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:49]:
Now that, you know, the entire world has moved past MP3s, we finally have support for them. Another one was compressed texture uploads for video cards. It was another bit of patented technology, and that was a problem in WINE for the longest time. Wine and also your video card driver is. These games would have compressed textures and you just, for legal reasons, weren't allowed to upload them. We still have some problems with patents and if you dive into things like the, the HDMI, what is it? Is it 2.1, I think I don't remember the exact numbering, but AMD cards just can't support it because of the licensing. And, well, guess what? It is, it's behind a lot of those licensing issues is the patents that get used. So it's still a thing that is with us and is painful from time to time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:41]:
Well, what's the news today? The news today is, or this week is that the US Patent Office is making a change that unfortunately is going to make it a little bit harder to challenge bad patents. So this is one of the things that companies have done, companies and individuals, open source people have done over the years is when one of these patents gets written and granted that it's an obviously bad patent, they're able to challenge it through an ipr, an interparties review, which basically is where someone says, hey, I have documented evidence that says that they were not the inventor of that patent. And you can do an ipr, you can send it into the patent office. The poor overworked people at the patent office will look at that and make a determination of either. You know, yes, this is sufficient evidence. No, it's not. And bad patents have gotten dismissed and thrown out as a result. The new change is the change to that IPR which says two things.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:50]:
One, if someone files an IPR against a patent, they give up their right to litigate about that patent. So it's, it's a, they, they sort of dismiss their future claims with prejudice. And the other change is that if a patent has been tried, if there's an exist, if there's existing case law regarding a patent, then you cannot do an IPR to challenge it. You can only challenge it in court. And so this really narrows the ability to use this particular. And an IPR is basically free. There may be a small charge, but it's not anywhere compared to the huge cost that it is to challenge a patent in a full court. That is expensive.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:48]:
And so what this change does is it narrows the usability of this IPR process, which again, unfortunately is one of the few ways that individuals and small companies have to challenge a patent. It doesn't make it impossible, but what it does is it means that if you're going to do this, there has to be some strategic thinking, let's say, because what you would need to do is make sure that the IPR challenges come first. And then if they get thrown out, you have to. IPR challenges has to come first and not from the people that would then want to litigate the patent. Right? It has to come from like third parties. And then if that fails, then you would have to go into litigation against the patent to try to get it removed. And so it just, it, it turns the whole thing into even more of a minefield than it absolutely is, which is really unfortunate because software patents are such a terrible idea and have always been a problem. So that's my, that's my legal, legal rant for the day.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:58]:
Hardware patents not so bad. Software patents garbage and need to go away.

Jeff Massie [00:47:04]:
Hardware patents even need a limited shelf life. But I can tell you a lot of cutting edge stuff. There's companies that don't patent things because once you patent it, it's public knowledge. So they just keep it internal and keep it hidden and.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:21]:
Well, because there are companies in other countries. I won't exactly name which one. We know which country. They don't care if you have a patent on it. They'll still make it in their factories.

Rob Campbell [00:47:30]:
Yeah, yeah. Trade secrets.

Jeff Massie [00:47:33]:
Yep, yep, yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:35]:
Absolutely.

Jeff Massie [00:47:36]:
That's why you won't find Colonel Sanders 11 herbs and spices on the patent anywhere. Patented, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:42]:
Indeed.

Jeff Massie [00:47:43]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:47:43]:
You had to go to TikTok for that.

Jeff Massie [00:47:46]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:50]:
Yes. Yeah. I don't, I don't know if we would ever be able to do it. Goodness. Right now we can't, we can't get our politicians to agree on the color of the sky. It seems like in the United States and around the. What's that, Jeff?

Jeff Massie [00:48:06]:
Well, I was gonna say we couldn't get him degree on daylight removing Daylight savings time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:09]:
Indeed. Yeah. The United States and around the world. We could really use a review on intellectual property because copyright is insanely too long. And there, you know, there are works that are literally being lost because you can't preserve them because it would be a copyright violation.

Rob Campbell [00:48:30]:
Off topic. I don't think the real problem with daylight savings time is that they can't agree to get rid of it. I think they can't agree which way to go. Yeah, that's true.

Jeff Massie [00:48:41]:
But they can't agree.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:42]:
Yeah, indeed, indeed.

Jeff Massie [00:48:45]:
And that's one company that kept copyright going longer and longer and longer until they realized that they could trademark things. And trademarks don't have a limitation like copyrights do. But you're right. Google tried to save a bunch of books and digitize some old ones and there were people that, oh, you're, you're the rights holder to this book. And they had no idea because they're. Their great uncle twice removed had written something in 1935 and it was a little book that never went much of anywhere and through people dying and natural, you know, oh, here's a family tree. Oh, I guess you're the next in line. You own this and no idea, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:25]:
Yep, yep.

Jeff Massie [00:49:26]:
Or they can't even find who now's the rights holder.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:29]:
So it blocks them Yep, absolutely. All right, well that's enough of that kind of a Macabre topic. Let's move on to something a little bit more cheery. No, it's not more cheery, is it Rob?

Rob Campbell [00:49:47]:
No, something at least a little bit more Linuxy. Somebody who's trying to call out people for doing non Linux shows law segment.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:59]:
Well, it's Linux adjacent. I was hoping for some cheer though, Rob, and you're not bringing any cheer at all.

Rob Campbell [00:50:05]:
No cheer. We are losing a pop. Popular Linux Distro so this is a, It's a Linux story, it's an Android story. And what I'm talking about, it's, it's the future of Chrome os. So Chrome OS is about to. About as close to a Linux distro as you can get without being called a Linux distro. It's much closer than Android for sure because Android is based on the Linux kernel, but it pretty much ends there. It's, it's, it's never listed in the official numbers, but unofficially Chrome OS adds a few percentage points to the Linux Desktop base.

Rob Campbell [00:50:47]:
So I like to call Linux Desktop. But if Google's plans work out for them, we will be losing Chrome OS as Linux Distro as Google's new aluminum OS or Aluminium OS as some of you out there might call it project brings Android to the PC so well again, it's not like we haven't had Android x86 available for PCs for years, but this time Google is doing it. A year ago, Google quietly began reshaping its desktop ambitions. Instead of keeping Chrome OS and Android on separate tracks, the company decided to fuse them into a single platform and push Android directly into the piece into the PC world. A recent Google job listing spells out that this is an Android based operating system for laptops, tablets, detachables and small box PCs built with AI at its core. It's a, it's.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:58]:
Yeah, that's what, that's exactly what we need. That's what the world needs, is desktops with AI at their core. Because that's working out so well for Microsoft right now.

Jeff Massie [00:52:07]:
Sorry, we're going to avoid those two letters we tried. Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:52:11]:
So anyway, it's, it's tightly linked to Qualcomm, with both companies pitching this as a way to merge mobile and desktop computing and bring Google's full AI stack to them. Or my opinion, they could just go straight Linux on the desktop and phones, you know, merging them together. You know, if you build it, they will come do the right thing. Google, remember your old mantra but let's continue to continue with the story here. The plan for Aluminum OS or Aluminium os it's not just for cheap hardware. The roadmap calls out several tiers al entry, al mass premium and al premium alongside their Chromebook and Chromebook plus tiers. That tells us Google wants Android PCs that span from budget to high end machines, directly challenging Windows, Mac OS and Linux. That wasn't called on this article, but I had to throw in there.

Rob Campbell [00:53:13]:
Obviously it's challenging Linux too. Maybe it's not really, but instead of saying, you know, instead of staying in the low cost Chromebook niche where they have been but you know, it's not like they haven't tried the premium market before with their premium Pixel books that mostly failed though I know Jeff Jarvis loved his so the same job listing says the role will manage both Chrome OS and Luminous while also developing a strategy to move Google from Chrome OS to Aluminum without disrupting businesses and schools that rely on Chromebooks. In practice, that likely means legacy Chrome OS devices get maintained until their normal end of life. Some newer Chromebooks, like Those with MediaTek Companion 520 or Intel Alder like chips may be eligible for an optional upgrade. New devices, though, will eventually ship with Aluminum OS outside of the box and will hopefully fail boo to Aluminum os. Internally, engineers are already labeling using the label like Chrome OS classic and non aluminum Chrome os, hinting that Google might keep the Chrome OS name even if the underlying system becomes Android based or alternatively marketed as some form of Android desktop. The exact branding still is undecided, but what is clear is the timing. Google is testing Android 16 builds on development hardware now and has confirmed a 2026 launch window for Android on piece.

Rob Campbell [00:54:48]:
Given that schedule, the first public Aluminum OS release will likely arrive on top of Android 17, making the marking the moment Google tries to turn Android into a full spectrum desktop platform. You know, much of the story reminds me of the Apple memes. You know, where iOS comes out with a great new feature that Android already has and they pretend that hey, we invented this new thing, you know, because almost a decade ago when I was working in a computer sales and repair store, we sold an Android desktop computer. Well, okay, we sold like one. We only sold one. That's all that anyone ever bought. We had a few more in stock, but you know, we, we really sold. We sold one to an older guy, it worked out really well for him, but it never became popular.

Rob Campbell [00:55:44]:
So it's not like it hasn't been done before. Android X86 has been a thing anyone could install and play with for years. That never really took off. Anyway, my point is it's been done. It's never really took off before. And I hope this initiative doesn't take off either. Just go. Pure Linux.

Rob Campbell [00:56:01]:
Stop the insanity. Do the right thing, Google.

Jonathan Bennett [00:56:04]:
So I'm imagining the way that this meeting went at Google's corporate level. Some very excited somebody up there in the halls of power went, I know the perfect name for our new AI. Did you know that there's an element on the periodic table that uses AI? That's. It's. It's elemental symbol is AI and it's. No, no, it's. It's Al. But your font, you just can't tell the difference.

Jonathan Bennett [00:56:32]:
We have this all the time over on Hackaday because we have Al, Williams and Alex looks like AI. And so this, this article written by Al, not AI, gets us all the time.

Jeff Massie [00:56:44]:
And that should be aluminium. It's. It's spelled the British way.

Rob Campbell [00:56:48]:
Oh, is it spelled the British way?

Jonathan Bennett [00:56:50]:
Probably because of chromium. Right? Chromium intended to rhyme. Yeah, yeah. Like I said, somebody thought they were being super clever with this.

Rob Campbell [00:57:00]:
So much cleverness going on here. Yeah, it's so much clever.

Jeff Massie [00:57:05]:
The English ends in N U M and the British version ends in NI U M. And that's how they have it spelled, at least in the article anyway, is with the. The extra.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:15]:
I beat you, Rob. I beat you. I heard him start typing, like, oh.

Rob Campbell [00:57:21]:
He did beat me. I would scroll up so I didn't see it. I was exactly that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:30]:
That's fun. That's fun. All right. Yeah. I'm not super excited over the aluminium desktop either. It's bad enough running Android on my phones. I will at some point look, I think, a little harder into the Linux phone idea.

Rob Campbell [00:57:48]:
Well, sure. And we've had stories earlier this year about how they're making Android worse.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:54]:
So, yeah, it's not coming from my desktop. Not anytime soon. All right, we have a story here in just a second from Jeff about desktop stuff that we can absolutely get behind. And it's Linux this time. We talk about that right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:58:12]:
Hey, everybody, Leo Laporte here and I'm going to bug you one more time to join Club twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25% of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more. We can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public.

Leo Laporte [00:58:51]:
Please join the club if you haven't done it yet. We'd love to have you find out more at Twitt TV Club Twit and thank you so much.

Jeff Massie [00:59:00]:
So KDE has had an announcement this week that they're going to drop support for X11 in Plasma 6.8. Now we're currently on Plasma 6.5 and 6.6 should be released in February if if the schedule holds. Now this means that X11 will be supported. If you extrapolate out the suggested timelines into early 2027 Again, if the schedule holds, I mean, you know, that's just projected timelines. There could always be a shift in releases, you know, technical errors, whatever, but KDE has been fairly decent about holding pretty close to that. There's even talk that maybe they would support 6.7 a little longer with some X11 bug fixes and patches, but that's not been fully decided. So right now early 2027 is the end of X11 on KDE. Now if you really need to have X11, you know, they suggest there are still long term support releases which you'll be able to run.

Jeff Massie [01:00:01]:
And the example in the article they give is Alma Linux 9, which includes X11 and it'll be supported until 2032. So if you, if you have X11 application, and if you have X11 applications, they'll still work using X Wayland and they're not removing that. They're only removing the ability to run on anything other than Wayland. So your favorite X11 application will still work. It's just running a compatibility layer, kind of like Wine does for Windows programs. You know, you can think of it that way. Accessibility is one area where Wayland is working hard to make sure there are no gaps. KDE says they're up to the X11 standards for accessibility features, but if you have third party programs, the same can't be said.

Jeff Massie [01:00:46]:
There's some third party application accessibility apps that may or may not work. The article linked in the show notes does ask that if you have accessibility features that you need and it isn't already covered, let them know because they're very interested in proving this aspect of kde. They want to make sure that KDE is accessible for everyone, no matter what disability you might have. So you know if you, if you see a gap, they, they definitely want to know. Now for those who don't know Plasma 6 point in Plasma 6.4 they split K1 into two programs. They've got K win, Wayland and Kwin x11. So it, it makes this split easier because what they'll do is they'll just stop including K win x 11. So why are they doing it? So they're, they're saying that While split, splitting K1 into two pieces helped development a lot, there's still many other areas of the desktop which are held back because of X11.

Jeff Massie [01:01:47]:
So there's a lot of, you know, like the frameworks for example, they, there's just having to always include the X11 code that's causing them kind of some heartaches. So they say that dropping x11 will help them be more nimble and agile and save on resources as they have last back less black ends they need to support. Now it's also going to get harder and harder as more distributions keep dropping this and yes, you have your LTSs, but they won't have the latest kernels. And so as X11 kind of fades out through a lot of distributions, even testing, this is going to become more of a challenge. If you take a look at the first article in the Show Notes for more details and you can see links to the reference documents and a lot more information on what's going on and why they're doing this and some behind the scenes stuff. Now I have a second article which is talking about KDE 6.6 because we had a couple stories without Linux and I thought you guys need some more linux news. So 6.6 is coming. They're not at a feature freeze yet.

Jeff Massie [01:02:54]:
So what I'm telling you here is kind of the foreshadowing what's coming. But there could be more because it's, it's about. I think it's mid January if I remember correctly. When the feature freeze happens.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:07]:
There'S.

Jeff Massie [01:03:07]:
There's several things to look forward to though. You know, there's global actions going forward for going Forwards or backwards 5 or 30 seconds in playing media. There does need to be support built into the app, but a lot of them already support the API. It's now possible to configure order of the icons on the logout screen. There's more polish in the XDG portal dialogues. The screen and window chooser has been simplified and improved. The kicker application no longer quickly flashes no matches found after you search for things. Even if it did find something and if you have a QR code in the clipboard and it happens to be showing and if you clear the clipboard it will now also dismiss the QR code as well.

Jeff Massie [01:03:48]:
It didn't previously. There are several other fixes improvements overall bug squashed. So take a look at the second link in the show notes to see them. And as there are a ton I didn't cover for just the sake of brevity and they even cover in their frameworks 6.21 fixes and changes. And they do mention that framework 6.2.1 is really going to start showing some of its feature set in 6.6. So a lot of good things coming. And I must say, you know I'm continually impressed with the continuous improvements in kde. They're really doing a lot of lot of code work.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:28]:
Yeah, so I, I remember and you may as well There was a blog post over on Pointed Stick from Nate Graham talking about when is plasma going to lose the X11 session? I couldn't help but think about that. I went back and I looked and he says yes, it'll eventually happen. At the time there was no firm plan as to win. This was July of this year, by the way. It wasn't actually that long ago. It was like five months, six. Five months ago. Yeah, like five months ago.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:02]:
He says yes, the writing is on the wall, it'll eventually happen. But as for when Plasma will drop support for X11, there's currently no firm timeline for this. I certainly don't expect it to happen in the next year. Well, it's happening in the next year, early in the next year even. Certainly don't expect it to happen in the next two years. But that's just a guess. Depends upon how long everything works. And then I want to say that they talked somewhere in here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:32]:
You talked about 7.0, but I'm not sure. I can't find it at the moment. Maybe we just mused at the time that that meant that they were going to stay with X11 as long as they had the 6. X releases. But anyway, all that to say this happened a lot quicker than people expected. Even KDE people expected. And I wonder why. Like there's the obvious reasons, and we've talked about here a time OR 2, that X11 is losing its few paid contributors.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:10]:
That may have a lot to do with this. Actually Red Hat was employing some people that because they were still actively supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux that shipped with X11, they were still paying some people to find and fix bugs in it. And that Is I think, no longer the case or is about to no longer be the case. They may have a lot to do with this.

Jeff Massie [01:06:32]:
But yeah, I think also as the feature sets diverge, like HDR, it's not trivial to try to wedge HDR into X11.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:42]:
Yeah. It becomes more and more of a burden to make the, the old code continue to work while you're adding new features, for sure.

Jeff Massie [01:06:51]:
So I think it wouldn't surprise me that's driving a lot of it. And with a lot of distributions at least hinting in the background they're going to start dropping x11. I think it was just kind of like, hey, you know what, let's get on this bandwagon too. And there's just that much less that we have to support.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:09]:
Yep.

Jeff Massie [01:07:10]:
And like I said, it's going to get harder to test. Is a lot of distributions start going, okay, we're dropping X. So, okay, how do we test it? But we need the new kernel and new libraries, which a lot of this, you know, version whatever is going to need required to build off of.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:28]:
Yeah, it's going to settle some debates about whether your distro should support it or not. Well, should Fedora continue to have an x11 build of KDE? Nope, not after this.

Rob Campbell [01:07:42]:
I don't know if it settles debate if they should. They may still say they shouldn't even after they go to it. But yeah, well, it's, it's amazing. Like, when I saw this online, how many people was like, well, I guess I'm leaving kde. It's like, I don't know, I, I advocate for Waylon maybe too harshly on the Internet. I'm like that Internet guy who, who argues and just keeps jumping into the conversation saying over and over, I really need just copy and paste this, because I say the same thing over and over 100 times a week. But there's just so many reasons to move on.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:26]:
So what, what we'll eventually have is it's the same thing. Like, you have some people that really don't like system. And so there are distros that are formed around this idea of I don't want system D, I want to use one of the old INIT systems. And that's fine. Like, I have nothing against those. Just I don't want to run one of them. But I have nothing against them existing. It's like I have nothing against X11 code running out there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:47]:
People just need to acknowledge that it's not actually being fixed. There's not actually security vulnerabilities getting Patched and so.

Rob Campbell [01:09:01]:
Well, you know, mainstream should, you know, do the right thing.

Jeff Massie [01:09:05]:
Yeah. You know what, what sold me on Wayland, though, was because, and I mentioned this before, the X11 people that were working on it said we have to totally tear it down and rebuild this to put these features and security in. And they're the ones that started Wayland. And I remember some of those early talks and stuff, and it kind of boiled down to a lot of people saying, well, you need to do this. And it's like you don't understand the architecture. It is. It's such a convoluted mess. You can't, you know, it's a house of cards and you can't touch anything without breaking 20 others.

Jeff Massie [01:09:39]:
And Wayland was a result of that. And even if you're not a fan of Wayland, the people that were working x11, that's who built it and that's where they went. Nobody's, you know, Everybody abandoned the X11 house.

Rob Campbell [01:09:52]:
If you can't believe the developers of X11 and Waylon, who are you going to believe?

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:58]:
Yeah, the Internet.

Rob Campbell [01:10:02]:
And not me on the Internet.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:03]:
Not me on the Internet.

Jeff Massie [01:10:05]:
Yeah. Well, you talked about it one time. X11 had its own printer driver and was halfway to becoming its own operating system. And they're like, oh my gosh, this is just.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:13]:
We got to stop.

Jeff Massie [01:10:14]:
Yeah. Yes, sorry, Jonathan, I cut you off.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:17]:
No, no, I was just. I was thinking like, what was it? If you don't want to trust these guys, what Was it before X11? Was it the, the old X windowing system before it was X11, something like that?

Jeff Massie [01:10:27]:
Yeah, it was 86.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:29]:
Yeah, that's right. XF86. Yep. Yeah, I see. I heard that. You know what that sound was from, Rob? That was the sound of. I remember that, but that was a long time ago and there was.

Jeff Massie [01:10:44]:
There was a lot of manually going in in the command line and editing files to get a. Yeah. A real grass. Graphical display going other than your basic.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:54]:
That was the same sound. That was the same sound that old Ben Kenobi said. Obi Wan Kenobi. I have not heard that name for a very long. Is the exact same sounds what Rob just made?

Rob Campbell [01:11:05]:
Well, the fact that started with X, I. I guess I didn't realize that it was something different, but I definitely remember xf86 and the configurations. I just thought they made it better and then changed the name a little bit.

Jeff Massie [01:11:24]:
Forked.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:25]:
It was a fork. Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:11:26]:
Is that what it was?

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:28]:
X386 forked into x.org?. I'm trying to remember. I think X386 was a fork of something else.

Rob Campbell [01:11:36]:
So it's still kind of based on the same code. It's just forked and. Okay, but yeah, those are the fun things.

Jeff Massie [01:11:45]:
Now that X11 code is really forked.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:51]:
Yes, yes it is. Okay, I got to stop this. I started going down the rabbit hole of tracing out the history of X on Wikipedia and I don't have time for that tonight. All right, we do have one more pair of stories to cover. These are a couple that I found. One is. One is a bit troubling and then the other one is pretty cool. So we're gonna, we're gonna get the bad news first.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:18]:
It's not that bad, but it could cause problems. So the bad news here is that the Rust for Linux co maintainer is formally stepped down. Alex Gaynor is formally no longer a Rust for Linux maintainer. He has sent in the patches to remove his name from it. And that means that we are down to a single maintainer for the Rust for Linux project, and that's Miguel Ojeda. Now this is actually not as big of a change as it sounds like because Alex has not really had the spare time to be able to work on this code for quite some time. That's why we say formally steps down. But it is even that being said, it is a bit of a problem that there's only one project leader for this rather large and important bit of code in the kernel.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:12]:
There are a few other people that help review patches, but at this point Miguel is the only one that really is a maintainer of it. And that's a lot. It's a lot of code for one person to be responsible for. So one of the things as we sort of look forwards that's going to be interesting to think about and look at is where is the Rust for Linux project going to go? What direction is it going to take? Because you can imagine a future scenario where Miguel steps down as well and the Rust code starts to bit rot. And we know that Torvalds has no, no problem pulling out code that's bit rotted. And so, well, nobody's using this anymore. So out it goes. That is very much a possible future for the Rust for Linux code.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:03]:
It's not necessarily where things are going, but it would be good to see more people stepping up to both write and help maintain that code. So that is the bit of the downer news. And then there's something pretty cool for me, this is for me it's cool. I don't know, there's only a few of you out there that really will get excited about this. In Fedora 44 we are getting the Nix packaging tool and I believe that is going to then open the ability to install all of these Nix packages. And Nix is interesting in that it's package manager, it has the ability to run single user package installs which essentially it's almost like how an app image or a flatpak gets installed where you just install it for the local user. So really interesting. And so this is coming to Fedora officially.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:01]:
In Fedora 44 you'll be able to DNF install Nix and then you'll be able to nix install the various things that are out there. So it'll work like a PIP for Python and those sorts of things. One of the reasons that this is particularly interesting for me is that right now there is someone that is trying to officially package meshtasticd. That's the one of the other projects I work on for Nix. And so once that happens, it'll be just a couple of commands to be able to get that officially installed on Fedora. And so that's fun. I'm looking forward to that. But there's a lot of other NIX related things that are out there that'll be fun to be able to get on Fedora.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:39]:
It's just cool. It's cool to see crazy stuff like this finally working and someone said why don't we do it?

Jeff Massie [01:15:47]:
And does any distribution by default use Nix Nix os?

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:51]:
Nixos? Yeah, it's the only one.

Rob Campbell [01:15:54]:
But yeah, Nix OS and the NIX package managers, not anything I've ever tried. Something I definitely should because. Like what?

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:01]:
Put it on your coffee list.

Rob Campbell [01:16:03]:
What? I'll wait. I'll wait to put out that challenge. But yeah, I mean what's, what's awesome that I've read about it is that it's a, you know, it's a reproducible declarative configuration. So when you install all your packages, at least with Nix OS, NixOS, I'm assuming it's the same if you have the package manager somewhere else. Once you install everything, have it configured, you take that configuration to your next nixaus and have it be reproducible, the same thing. And I don't know if it's, if that's a feature of the package manager, meaning that anywhere you have that package manager you can run that configuration or if there's something missing in just a package manager that limits you from having that. The nixos has. Like I said, I never tried it, but I should.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:56]:
Yeah. The way I read this is you're going to be able to install the NIX packages as they're compiled by nix inside of Fedora if you want to. So, I mean that. I would think that that would give you the same reproducible builds.

Rob Campbell [01:17:12]:
So, yeah, 2020. I'll throw it out there now. 2026, challenge for me throwing. Throwing the coffees. If you. If you want me to do it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:22]:
And you got to put on there in the fine print, this coffee buys a Nick sauce.

Rob Campbell [01:17:28]:
Yes. It's actually a one that I've wanted to try.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:33]:
Well, there you go.

Jeff Massie [01:17:35]:
If you do that, also put in there this. I want you to try the Nix os, but I want this coffee to go to either Jeff or Jonathan. Make him work for it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:47]:
Make him work for it.

Jeff Massie [01:17:48]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:49]:
All right. That is our news for the week. Quite a bit of it. Some good stuff in there. We've got some tips. We have got some command line tips, and we're going to get to them right after this. Okay. So on the tips, Rob is up first.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:08]:
Rob, you don't have one. Is it a surprise? Did you intentionally do this? You want to surprise us with what your tip is?

Rob Campbell [01:18:13]:
I forgot to put my tip on there. Huh.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:15]:
Did you forget to pick a tip, though?

Rob Campbell [01:18:18]:
I did not forget to pick the tip.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:20]:
That's good. All right.

Jeff Massie [01:18:21]:
He looks through his notes.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:24]:
It's here somewhere. I know it is.

Rob Campbell [01:18:25]:
I can't remember what it was.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:26]:
Where'd it go?

Rob Campbell [01:18:27]:
Yeah, I have it opened already. I just.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:29]:
Okay.

Rob Campbell [01:18:30]:
Forgot what it was. I'm like, what is it called? I'm drawing a blank. It's on my notes, so. And I'll have to add it to the show notes. So my surprise tip of the day is a command line tip. It is called POD Liner. So I'm just going to bring this up here. I already have it open.

Rob Campbell [01:18:50]:
So this is a. A. I don't know if it's two or what, but it's. It's in the command line with a, you know, command line graphical kind of interface, something like tui, whether or not they use that technology or not to do podcasts. So for those watching, I've already loaded the Untitled Linux show and Floss Weekly into this. And also, this is kind of like the. The VI or vim of podcast. It's of podcast applications.

Rob Campbell [01:19:21]:
It took me a little bit to actually realize this. And you know what? You guys can't see that because my name is there, but there's a little command line spot right at the bottom, which I'm going to adjust this.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:36]:
There you go.

Rob Campbell [01:19:38]:
Oh, okay. You got that?

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:39]:
Okay, I have a button. I push the button.

Rob Campbell [01:19:42]:
That'll work. So there's a little command line here at the bottom. So at first I was having a hard time figuring this out. So because I'm running this in a gui, I can actually click around on stuff. But being a command line, I need to know how to use this in the command line. So I figured out that if you do colon H, it's going to bring up your commands, so it tells you all the things to do.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:08]:
It's the illegitimate son of VI and Midnight Commander.

Rob Campbell [01:20:13]:
Right. So it's not even necessarily all the commands, now that I think about it, because to add, it's like colon add. And then you put the URL to the RSS feed, and that's how I added these already. But to play, I figured I have this first one selected. I hit space bar, it's going to play. And I don't have my audio piped over to the. To the show here, but you can see the. No, you can't see the whole tavern because I'm in the way now.

Rob Campbell [01:20:47]:
Let me get me out of the way here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:48]:
You can see the bar going across on the bottom.

Rob Campbell [01:20:51]:
Okay, you can see that. Let's just get me out of the way here, though. So also, you can see the little timer going now. It's 11 minutes, 23 seconds in. So that said, it takes a bit to figure out the navigation house. I haven't figured it all out myself yet. Yet. But I figured out how to get it to play a podcast.

Rob Campbell [01:21:13]:
So if. If you have. If you're making some kind of device and you want text space only or whatever, you got podliner. And that can be used for your. To play your podcast in the command line.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:31]:
For extra geek points. Do it over ssh. So have your Raspberry PI connected to a Bluetooth speaker and SSH into the PI to run Podliner. Yeah, there you go.

Rob Campbell [01:21:44]:
I mean, that's the way to do it. You have a little Raspberry PI hooked up to a speaker, and then you SSH in and do what you do.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:54]:
Voila. That's fun. That's a lot of fun. All right, let's see. Jeff, you are up next with ss.

Jeff Massie [01:22:03]:
Yeah. And you know something funny? I was going to put in a joke command line tip for Rob, and I looked it up and it's like, oh, that's a real command. So I added One into the pile to go. Oh, I accidentally stumbled across one.

Rob Campbell [01:22:17]:
Okay, what's the joke? Why is it a command line tip for me though, before you.

Jeff Massie [01:22:22]:
Because it was blank. Oh, because I had a blank and I was going to fill it in the show notes for you. Yeah, it's like. Well, it's real. I'm keeping that for myself. But my command line tip this week is ss and in the man page it's listed as another utility to investigate sockets. SS stands for socket statistics. Basically it's used to dump socket statistics and it allows showing information similar to netstat.

Jeff Massie [01:22:50]:
It can be. It though can display a lot more TCP and state information than other tools. Usage is pretty simple. For example, to see all TCP sockets, just type SS t space dash a. And if you wanted to do something like find all local processes connected to the X server, it would be SS space dash x space src space slash temp x11 Unix *. And you could even filter by ports using sspace sport s p o r t space equals space colon 80. And if you even want really more, a lot more filters, you can do things like list all the TCP stock sockets in state fin dash wait one for our Apache server to network 193-223-24 and look at their timers. Yes, I cut down the IP.

Jeff Massie [01:23:55]:
You don't need to hear me say that. And I'm not going to read that command because it's a little bit long, but you can, you can do very specialized things. And actually SS is the net they say. They say it's the net stat replacement. And it works faster than that stat because it doesn't parse the log files or large files, but it talks directly with the kernel, which now it's not an issue on a small machine, but like if you have a large enterprise server and maybe you got a hundred thousand connections, netstat can be a little slow and take a lot of CPU cycles. So if you take a look at the man page for SS as it should be in most distributions, or look at the link in the show notes for more information on this handy little networking.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:38]:
Tool. Very cool. I like it. Always useful to have more tools for doing that sort of thing. All right, my command line tip comes from kind of a weird spot, so I got sent to the mail a couple of these things. This is the Supercon badge from the latest Hackaday Supercon. And this is an ESP32 S3 and a Lorachip. And as soon as I heard what was going to be in It.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:02]:
I said, oh, send me a couple. I'll put Meshtastic on it. And we have indeed ported Meshtastic to it. Probably can't. Can't see that, but it is indeed there. There you go. Good one. To show the time.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:15]:
The time. The ding. The time is. Anyway, one of the other guys hacking on this badge, though sent in, yeah, I'm ssh'd into mine. And we went, you're what? Oh, yeah, you can run Linux on these now. And I went, wait, you could? That's what my wife said. Wizarding badge. That's not a bad.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:32]:
No, it's not really a badge. Anyway, I went down this rabbit hole. Wait a second. You can run Linux on the ESP32S3. And apparently, yes, you actually can. And there is a. I've not done it yet, but there is a guide here on how to compile Linux for the thing and actually make it happen. And apparently it is indeed possible to compile Linux and run it on one of these, which blew my mind.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:03]:
And I figured that the folks here would be sufficiently geeky enough to. To. To really appreciate that fact as well. So. Not exactly a normal command line tip, but still very, very cool to be able to do that. So, Rob, your antenna can probably run.

Rob Campbell [01:26:19]:
Linux. So. So when I buy the zigbee one, just to test out and then decide I. I don't really want to use it, I'll figure out how to get Linux on.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:32]:
It. There you.

Rob Campbell [01:26:32]:
Go. So dual. Dual reasons to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:36]:
Donate. Exactly. Would be fun. Oh, all right. It has been a. It's been a blast of a show. Thank you guys for being here. Doing a little bit of double duty today, but it has been a lot of.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:48]:
A lot of fun. I'm going to let each of the guys get in the last word on something if they want to, or maybe tell us some poetry or maybe remind us where to go to donate coffee. Jeff gets to go.

Jeff Massie [01:26:59]:
First. Nothing to cover. So it's going to be Poetry Corner. This one's. This one's short but sweet. Keyboards are violent, rodents are green. Rtfm, if you know what I mean. Have a great week, everybody.

Jeff Massie [01:27:14]:
I like.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:14]:
It. I like it. All right.

Rob Campbell [01:27:16]:
Rob. All right. Roses are red, violets are blue. Linux is fun and so are you. Just made that up on the spot. I.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:25]:
Am. We could tell. We could.

Rob Campbell [01:27:27]:
Tell. All right. But for those who want more poetry, like that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:32]:
One, not the greatest sell.

Rob Campbell [01:27:36]:
Man. Or to find out how to donate a coffee to get me to do one of those crazy wild things, you can go to my website robertpcampbell.com on the website near the top there are links to my LinkedIn, my, my Twitter Blue Sky Mastodon and a little coffee cup where you can donate coffees which is five dollar increments so so you don't have to donate a whole like $8 coffee just a $5 coffee or two $5 coffees or 10 as.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:06]:
Many coffees as you want. All right, very cool. Thank you guys. You can find me at mainly Hackaday these days. We've got Floss Weekly there and that's a whole lot of fun. There's also the security column goes live on Friday mornings and you can find probably going to take another week off around Christmas time but other than that you can find me there covering the Linux and otherwise security news. Other than that just want to say thank you. Appreciate everyone that's here and those that watch, those that listen whether you get us live or on the download.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:41]:
And hey we'll see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.