Untitled Linux Show 247 Transcript

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

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:00]:
This week we're talking about Germany and the ODF, that's the Open Document Foundation, and then the guys remember what used to be before systemd. We talk about Google and the finally unveiled unverified install flow for Android. There's a Blender update. We discuss whether Manjaro is cooked or just cooking and a whole lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Leo Laporte [00:00:24]:
This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all Over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the OutSystems platform, and with good reason. Build, run, and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. OutSystems is trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission-critical apps. Teams of any size and technical depth can use OutSystems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. With OutSystems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise-proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture.

Leo Laporte [00:01:21]:
OutSystems, build your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/twit. That's outsystems.com/twit.

Rob Campbell [00:01:30]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:35]:
This is TWiT. This is The Untitled Linux Show, episode 247, recorded Saturday, March 21st. Trips off the tongue. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for Linux and getting geeky about open source software. We're going to talk about some hardware stuff. Lots of good stuff today on The Untitled Linux Show. Got a motley crew with me today and it is of course our normal guys.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:06]:
We were talking a little bit before the show about metal bands. And so Motley Crue just seemed appropriate. But anyway, we've got Rob, we've got Ken, and we've got Jeff. And there's an interesting question that I have for each of us before we dive into the actual news. And this will come up here in a moment. It'll come up again a little later. But what browser is everybody connecting from?

Ken McDonald [00:02:30]:
Let's let—

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:31]:
we'll go Rob and then Jeff and then me and then Ken. Rob, what browser?

Rob Campbell [00:02:36]:
Microsoft Edge, of course.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:38]:
Are you serious? Do you really dial in with Edge on Linux?

Rob Campbell [00:02:43]:
I do.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:43]:
Yeah, that checks out, actually. Jeff?

Jeff Massie [00:02:47]:
Firefox is my main browser.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:50]:
I am running Chrome, not a Chromium, real deal Chrome on my Linux machine here. And Ken, this is all a setup if you hadn't figured it out for what Ken has to talk about before we get into the news. What browser are you using?

Ken McDonald [00:03:06]:
Today I am trying out Opera GX, though my normal day-to-day use is Firefox and Chrome, depending. I use Firefox when I'm going to any personal accounts that I don't care about, that I want to keep private. And then I use Chrome for those that I don't want to Show him. Why did my screen lock up?

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:35]:
Oh, well, that's fun. You're still moving for me. So we got you still.

Ken McDonald [00:03:39]:
All right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:41]:
Your screen inside of the new browser? Oh, okay. So yes, inside of the new browser. Maybe not a great sign.

Rob Campbell [00:03:50]:
You got to explain what GX is for those.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:52]:
Yes, yes, yes. What is it?

Ken McDonald [00:03:53]:
It's Opera. I actually haven't seen it spelled out this way, but I'm assuming it's Gamer Extreme since it It's got a lot of gamer-centric options in it. In fact, let me go ahead and— let's— there we go. And as you can see, it says GX Corner. It comes up with, uh, Steam Spring Cell, and you've got the GX Control, which lets you, uh, control your RAM for the browser, do network limiting on the browser, and you can kill hot tabs. So I'm going to, based on all of this, and since I actually heard about this through my grandson who uses it on Windows, that it's, and he does a lot of gaming on his Windows PC that he, it's primarily meant for gamers so that they can pull it up and use it there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:05:03]:
Yeah, we were teasing Ken before the show started. He's like, it's got a Discord button. It's like, you mean like a bookmark? Well, yeah, okay, kind of. Yes. And then, and then he says, and it does RAM limiting. And Jeff joined it about that time. Why would you ever want to limit your RAM? But no, no, it's, it's you limit the RAM that the browser uses so that your game does not get RAM-starved, which is actually an interesting idea. As those of us that tend to run more tabs than we should, let's say, know that that does indeed become a problem eventually.

Rob Campbell [00:05:33]:
Yeah, if you're running Discord on the browser, that'd be a great place for it, I think.

Jonathan Bennett [00:05:38]:
Yeah, yeah. I've had weird problems with Discord in the browser. It used to work great. And then suddenly I've had, like over the last month, just random times where it's like one individual person in a call, I can't hear until I refresh, or the computer behind me, I go to join a call in Discord, audio never connects. It's the weird— it's the weirdest thing.

Jeff Massie [00:05:59]:
And I have the exact opposite problem. Usually I only run in the browser because the standalone program was always causing me fits and wouldn't connect to audio.

Ken McDonald [00:06:07]:
Yeah, and I don't even think I've installed the standalone browser application, Discord application on the new system. I did have it run where I tried it once or twice on the old system. I wouldn't blame the hardware for how it ran on that one.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:25]:
Well, yeah, that's probably true. But no, I've had weird problems with it recently. I didn't used to run it in the standalone app at all. But anyway, let's move on to some news and we're going to let Rob This is sort of ironic, Rob connecting from Microsoft Edge, but Rob is going to talk about, well, free software.

Rob Campbell [00:06:50]:
Yes, this isn't news, but I'm going to help answer the question, what is free software? Because, you know, I've had some chats online recently and in the past, a lot of people seem to be confused about what free means when describing free software in the floss. you know, free, libre, open source software world, you know. And I'm going to first, I'm going to start by reading a snippet from the GNU free software philosophy. Quote, free software means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. We sometimes call it libre software, borrowing from the French or Spanish word for free, as in freedom.

Rob Campbell [00:08:04]:
Freedom to show we do not, you know, we do not mean the software is gratis. So, you know, you may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies. So according to the GNU, there are 4 essential freedoms for free software. And it's funny, they label them Freedom 0, Freedom 1, Freedom 2, Freedom 3. But anyway, the first one, the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose. The second one, the freedom to study how the program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Um, you know, access to the source code is a precondition for this because if you don't have access, you can't change things.

Rob Campbell [00:09:07]:
The third one is the freedom to redistribute so you can help others. Um, and then the, the fourth one is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified version to others. Uh, by doing this, you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes Access to the source code is a precondition for this also. So, you know what, I'm— so, you know, the next time you're speaking to someone in the Linux and open source community, you know, make sure to use clear communication terms, you know, because if you're looking for alternative Microsoft Office that doesn't cost any money, be clear and say that, you know, free as in beer. You don't— you don't— you won't— You want an alternative that you don't have to pay for because, you know, if you tell me you want a free, you know, a free alternative, since we're in an open source community, I'm just going to think you want free as in speech. But, you know, also, if you want to be clear, since there's a lot of confusion of the term free software, you know, if you're looking for software that provides you the essential freedoms from the Free Software philosophy, you know, you could use the words like libre and freedom, you know, open and free as in free speech, but try to be clear because I see like, I see a lot of confusion when people ask for, I want this free. And the answer is kind of all over the place because it's a very ambiguous term without the context in place. And to me, the context, hey, you're in a Linux community, I'm going to give you free speech software.

Rob Campbell [00:10:58]:
You know, because, and if I see someone, you know, I will criticize those suggesting software that isn't open source, regardless of if it costs money or not, because, you know, I'm kind of a social media troll like that. You know, if you're in a Linux community, open source community, free software means free speech. So be clear about what you're really asking for.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:25]:
Yeah, this is why FLOSS Weekly is free, libre, open source software. And another rabbit hole that we may go down at some point, not today, is the difference between free and open source, which mean two slightly different, similar but slightly different things. When you talk about the free software definition, there's one in particular that people are sort of forgetting these days, or maybe we're having to relearn this lesson, that freedom zero, the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose, uh, that's, that's pretty important. And that's why, uh, the, the open source initiative and Free Software Foundation, they will not approve any license that have any sort of morality clause in them. And so, you know, people have this great, oh, I'm going to write the software, but I'm going to say, but you can't use it for evil. Well, define evil. Okay, let's, let's dive into some actual use cases that you might consider evil that I might not. I might consider the exact opposite thing to be evil.

Jonathan Bennett [00:12:21]:
And, you know, you get into all sorts of law enforcement and government use and various things like that where people don't necessarily agree on what would and would not be considered evil. And so that is the primary reason why that little clause is in there, for any purpose. And you have the same thing in the open source definition— no morality clauses. It just doesn't work. And one of the other things to point out with free software is talking free as in freedom. Free software is not anti-capitalistic. It very much works within the capitalist framework.

Ken McDonald [00:12:54]:
If anything, ethically speaking and monetarily speaking, it can be the most expensive.

Rob Campbell [00:13:03]:
Yeah, free software can cost money.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:04]:
Yeah, it's usually not, but it certainly can be. So you've got, I mean, Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has got to be the most famous example of this. I think there are paid versions of SUSE. And then you've also got things like iRedmail. I use that. They've got a paid version of that. All kinds of free software out there that's free as in freedom, but you get to pay some money for it.

Jeff Massie [00:13:31]:
Ubuntu with their server support.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:33]:
That's true.

Rob Campbell [00:13:34]:
Zorin. Zorin Pro.

Ken McDonald [00:13:36]:
And there's some where you pay with the time invested into it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:41]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:13:42]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:43]:
I mean, that's true, but not quite what we're talking about.

Rob Campbell [00:13:46]:
What made me think of this? I can't even remember the question. I should have noted it down, but somebody had a question on a Linux group I'm in. And they're like, hey, I'm looking for this for free. And people were giving some, oh, it was a Zoom. I'm looking for a free alternative to Zoom. And people are like, but Zoom is free. Google, Google, and that, but Video Ninja, the Google one. I'm like, and I'd be, I was responding to people like, that's not free.

Rob Campbell [00:14:15]:
What do you mean it's not free? I was like, here's what free means in the Linux and open source community. And I had people arguing, they're like, no, I've been using this for 20 years and free has always meant it doesn't cost money. And then I posted the Gnu, like, read it and weep, suckers.

Ken McDonald [00:14:35]:
The concept of freedom, I hate to say it, but that's the most expensive concept out there. But then we're getting into politics, and let's not do that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:49]:
All right, um, although I think Ken is gonna drag us into some politics with his story. What's going on in Germany.

Rob Campbell [00:14:55]:
Oh boy.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:56]:
Oh boy.

Ken McDonald [00:14:58]:
This week, Bobby Borisov wrote about Germany mandating the Open Document Format, or ODF, as the standard for public administration documents within its new sovereign digital infrastructure framework. Now, this framework is called the Deutschland Stack and published by the Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization. Modernization, and the framework sets technical standards for a unified, interoperable digital environment across all levels of government. So yes, I'm dragging us straight into politics with this. Now, it explicitly requires ODF and PDF/UA as document formats, excluding proprietary alternatives from official use. Mandating OTF at the federal level ensures consistent handling of documents, system compatibility, and long-term accessibility of official records across the public institutes via the open ISO standardized file format. According to Bobby, the Ducheland support stack supports a broader strategy to build sovereign digital infrastructure using open standards, open interfaces, and reduced reliance on single vendors. It also prioritizes local data storage and open-source development to limit vendor lock-in in government IT systems.

Ken McDonald [00:16:38]:
Florian Iffenberger— and I do apologize if I'm mispronouncing that— executive director of the Document Foundation, said in a press release, this is not a recommendation or preference, it is a mandate. Germany's decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years. Open vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic interoperable, and sovereign public administrations. Now, there's more information about the framework available in Bobby's article that I've got linked in the show notes. So I definitely recommend diving down that rabbit hole by starting with that article.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:33]:
Yeah, interesting.

Jeff Massie [00:17:34]:
Oh, the sauerkraut's hitting the fan now.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:38]:
Oh, it's funny. You know, so I was a week and a half ago, I was in Germany. And it was, it was real fascinating to hear like the difference— talk about the differences between particularly EU and the German state and like things going on in the US. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna dive into details about the stuff we talked about because again, we don't want to get into the partisan politics. Um, but there were questions. It's like, why does Germany have a high-speed train network that works really well and the US doesn't? Like, well, there are reasons and multiple people we can blame for that, you know, that sort of thing. Um, It's, it's pretty cool though to see, uh, and this is, this is directly the work of, uh, of people like Simon Phipps and everybody else at the ODF, um, really going out and, uh, spreading the good word, letting— trying to educate politicians and policymakers about what it actually means for a protocol to be open and not, uh, not proprietary, not something owned by Linux— by, uh, by Microsoft. And so good for them.

Rob Campbell [00:18:41]:
And that really makes a lot of sense if you want something to last and be open and available for the long term, you know, because theoretically, I mean, I don't know that the Microsoft format's going away, but, you know, something could happen to Microsoft and they're not there anymore. And that code's locked up and eventually going to go away.

Ken McDonald [00:19:02]:
Microsoft format.

Rob Campbell [00:19:04]:
Doc, Docx.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:06]:
Yeah, I mean, you've got, you've got support for that inside of LibreOffice.

Ken McDonald [00:19:10]:
It's been, it's been reverse engineered, but I definitely get the, the point there that especially considering how many different formats the Word document's gone through over the years.

Jeff Massie [00:19:20]:
Yep, there's, you know, there's always comply.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:23]:
Yeah, yeah, there's a few of those formats that are actually really difficult to get data out of. Uh, was it, uh,.wps, the old Microsoft Works? That I remember.

Ken McDonald [00:19:33]:
Works documents?

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:34]:
Yes, I remember we had a copy of Microsoft Works that we used on a computer years ago and trying to get that data back, get it to open in anything was a huge pain. I think LibreOffice will do it, but Microsoft Office wouldn't for the longest time.

Ken McDonald [00:19:47]:
Or open a so-called text file from 40 years ago.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:53]:
40 years ago, you're probably okay. But Microsoft did have that rich text format, RTF, that was pretty wonky.

Ken McDonald [00:20:01]:
Yeah, but what character definition were you using?

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:07]:
ASCII. Everything was ASCII before.

Ken McDonald [00:20:09]:
And if you've dropped ASCII out of your options?

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:13]:
I don't think that's ever going to happen. ASCII is too baked into C and C++. ASCII forever.

Rob Campbell [00:20:19]:
You know, and you know, even though like you said, the DOC, DOCX, the formats, all those and the various versions of them over the years have been been reverse engineered. They have been today, but that doesn't mean the next one's going to be as easy or the one after that. And even then, they're often not a perfect representation of being on the Word format. I think they've gotten pretty good these days, but that doesn't mean that the next 2026, 2028 version is going to have something that's going to be harder to reverse engineer.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:52]:
And yeah, absolutely.

Ken McDonald [00:20:53]:
Does anything support any of the Lotus document formats?

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:57]:
I think LibreOffice will open them, but yeah, it's another example of something pretty obscure that maybe you can't open. WordStar. WordStar, yeah, you've got WordStar. You've also got like ClarisWorks. I've got a customer that's still got some ClarisWorks documents hanging around. I don't know if anything can open that other than an ancient install of Claris. Fun, fun old stuff. Let's move on here in just a minute.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:25]:
Jeff is going to talk about not systemd, or maybe he is going to talk about systemd. But before we get to that, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

Jeff Massie [00:21:33]:
So last week we talked about systemd coming out with a new release candidate and how they were going to put some documents in the release to help guide AI. And then we talked a little bit about the story of systemd and alternatives. You know, people bring up the init system a lot, but there are others that also tried to become the standard. And it— there are some of these alternatives I thought they were interesting to cover. And you know, why not? Let's, let's talk about it and talk a little bit about why they didn't make it. Now, first on the list is Upstart. Now honestly, I forgot about this one since it had been a while since I used it. Upstart came from Canonical and was used in Ubuntu from 2006 to 2015.

Jeff Massie [00:22:14]:
It was an event-driven system which didn't run a bunch of scripts but reacted to things happening in the system. Now, while it had a strong start and many people thought it would be the next big standard, because, you know, when it, when it started, Ubuntu was one of the Linux distributions at the time, you know, if you go back 2010, say, for example. Well, What was its downfall? It, you know, it was, it was just focused on init and service management where systemd went beyond that and people took, took a look and a lot of other things like, you know, integrated logging, device management, timers, and other things which systemd kind of had wrapped up in it. Debian then also chose systemd in 2014. That was pretty much the end of it for Upstart, you know, especially since Ubuntu is downstream from Debian. And, you know, Debian is one of the main pillars of, of the three main pillars in the Linux community that, you know, it has a lot of effect on of various distributions. So that pretty much sets a standard. Canonical decided not to fight it and didn't, didn't try to swim upstream or anything.

Jeff Massie [00:23:33]:
So they went systemd. OpenRC was another, another, another one. Gentoo and Alpine Linux used it, and Alpine still uses it today. It was designed to be just an improved sysvinit, and it kept things to just the boot and service parts of the system, which some people like because it follows the Unix style of just do one thing but do it really well. Others like the fact that systemd was a complete package and bundled a lot of the lower-level system stuff together. OpenRC never really went away, but it never got a ton of traction. So it's, it's just been a small player even today. Runinit was another one, and like OpenRC, it had a limited scope, but it was limited even— was limited even more than OpenRC.

Jeff Massie [00:24:20]:
It's tiny and very predictable, but the minimalism also is what hurt it, just like OpenRC. Having to run several other tools around it to get a fully working system, while doable, was just not the favorite choice. People wanted, like, the more complete package of systemd. Now, S6 is an init system that, unlike the last two examples, goes for a highly organized collection of services. It provides a structured framework for process supervision, dependency management, and reliable service state transitions. The system puts a lot of emphasis on correctness, deterministic behavior, and carefully defined failure handling. Why didn't it become popular? Well, all of that rigid structure, you know, makes it complex and hard to work with. So there's a large learning curve to get XS6 set up and behaving like you want, and people just didn't want to fight with it.

Jeff Massie [00:25:17]:
They didn't want to tackle the learning curve, and they wanted a little simpler and, you know, make a little change and everything works and they're on with their day rather than learning something a little, little more intricate. And really, alignment was one of the biggest reasons too that systemd won. You know, several init functions were all rolled into systemd, so it was a more complete package. And one of the big arguments on that— it should be unified. You know, one of the big arguments is should it be unified or should they stick to the original, do one thing and do it well? And that's a lot of what people argue about today with systemd is their philosophies on how that should be handled. Now, Red Hat picked it as well and actually led the charge because Debian followed Red Hat. You know, you've got two powerful distributions. That's a lot of alignment in the ecosystem.

Jeff Massie [00:26:18]:
And then, most others just kind of followed along because, you know, other tools were already integrated to work with it. Alignment made things a lot easier. Documentation was better. You know, it, it just kind of made sense at that point. But, you know, like I said, there's alternatives out there, and some distributions are still using the alternatives. If you take a look at the article linked in the show notes, you can get even more details and deeper pros and deeper cons of systemd versus the various alternatives. Past and present. And no matter which side you fall on the systemd fence, I hope all of your boots go smooth.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:55]:
Yeah, you got me, you got me looking. And Fedora, after it went from sysv and it actually ran upstart for a few releases, and then Fedora, I think it was 15, they finally went to systemd. So it had another one of those sandwiched in between.

Rob Campbell [00:27:12]:
It's funny, Ubuntu went way in on systemd just because their beloved snap package or snapd requires it. And it's one of the few major things that really require it that has a major requirement of it.

Jeff Massie [00:27:29]:
Oh, I didn't know that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:32]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:27:32]:
Yeah. You can't run it like MX Linux back in the day used to be able to pick not very long ago. I think now it's defaulted to systemd, but you could pick the old SysV in it, or that was the default, or you could pick systemd. But if you wanted to install snaps on there, you had to do systemd. It just wouldn't work. I haven't tested to see. I want to see what happened. Just, you can't.

Rob Campbell [00:27:57]:
It's a requirement. I wonder if any of the discontent, the newest discontent of the community is going to have any effect on you know, any of these other options out there.

Jeff Massie [00:28:11]:
But well, a lot of those aren't, you know, S6 would be one of the, the big ones, or if they want to go, uh, simple with the Run It. But you know, that's the one that's still in use today because some of them have been kind of abandoned or not kept up as well.

Ken McDonald [00:28:36]:
From the article, it sounds like they're just running on top of the initial init system that was ported from the commercial Unix system that AT&T had come out with way back in 1983.

Jeff Massie [00:28:53]:
Yeah, some of them are improvements on the init system. Some are more rewrites. It kind of depends. The ones that are simple and just handle the basic structures, that's usually just an improvement upon the init system versus the more complex complete packages that they're definitely a different set of software. And like I said, a lot of it boils down to, no, no, we need to have it do one thing and do it well, or I like the whole package because it makes it easier to handle.

Ken McDonald [00:29:26]:
Do you say system sysv or sys5? I say v. Because I noticed that apparently Wikipedia says you say system 5.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:38]:
It's the internet. People read it however they want to. And we don't ever actually talk to each other. Yeah, let's be real.

Jeff Massie [00:29:46]:
And in my house, I defined it as v.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:50]:
When I first got started doing IT work, I called it Ethernet. And I got people really looking at me weird for that one. It's like, what?

Rob Campbell [00:29:55]:
I mean, it's like Mac OS X. I call it Mac OS X. I'm going to always call it OS X. OS X just doesn't flow off the tongue.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:04]:
Indeed. Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:30:06]:
It trips off the tongue.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:08]:
It trips off the tongue. All right. Let's move on to Android. So we've talked about this a bit over the past few months, actually. And there is Well, there's trouble in Android land, but we now know that there is at least some level of hope on the horizon. We are, of course, talking about unverified Android apps and Google and their new policy where they were going to just say, nope, nope, you don't get to sideload unverified apps. You can only sideload apps from a verified developer. And of course, People lost their mind over it, me included, because that's a really terrible idea for things like F-Droid and doing just development through GitHub.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:54]:
Lots of, lots of reasons why that's a problem. On the other hand, and I've made this point before here on the show, I do understand what Google is getting at because there is legitimately a problem with sideloading apps from malicious sources. And goodness, it Couple of weeks ago, I was on a, I was trying to download something on a website and, you know, it would, it, it had an ad that would redirect you to another website and it would show the ad, do the redirect, and then an APK would start downloading. And it's like, this I'm sure is malicious. I guarantee you it's a malicious APK. Like, that's how you get your machine, your, your Android machine botnetted and, you know, all kinds of bad stuff. So I wanted nothing to do with that. I knew what was going on, but a lot of people do actually get hit buy those sorts of things.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:41]:
So in some cases they look really, really good, they look legitimate. So I understand that Google wants to kill this inside of Android. They want people to stop getting their devices infected by these rogue APKs. But again, on the other side, you've got places like F-Droid that are totally legitimate that need to be able to do, um, sideloaded unsigned APKs. So there's been a back and forth in the community between just about everybody in the community and Google. Google has finally now revealed their grand plan for how we can sideload, and, uh, it's actually not terrible. It's not as bad as it could be. Uh, this seems like maybe— don't throw stones at me, but this seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:26]:
So the process, you grab the APK, you say download it, and Google will give you a prompt and it will say Are you being coached? Is someone guiding you? And I believe if you say yes, someone is guiding me, it just refuses to do it. Because again, the idea here is they're trying to cut down on scammers. And so they'll probably kick you over to a webpage that says, here's how to know if you're being scammed. You say no one is instructing me, you get to go on to the next, the next, uh, the next part, which is a security delay. So what it does is you hit the button and say, yes, I want to be able to sideload unverified apps. Your phone will reboot. And the idea behind the reboot is, again, it's going to disconnect the remote desktop session, you know, the remote access session. It's going to disconnect the phone call, whatever it is where someone is trying to scam you into doing this.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:22]:
And then after you reboot, you have to wait 24 hours and it will then once again prompt you "Are you sure you want to do this?" And you get to do your biometric authentication, your fingerprint, face unlock, device PIN, whatever it is you use. It will prompt you to go through that process again. And then you finally get to either temporarily or permanently enable unverified sideloading. So for those of us who use F-Droid, that just means it's a 24-hour process to set F-Droid up on a phone, which is a huge pain. I grant you that. But at the same time, it's much better than disallowing it altogether. And it's also better than, you know, grandma's phone constantly being inundated by malware where someone called and, you know, your Android needs update, your, your, your, your Google YouTube Chrome needs updated, go to this link, yes, install that APK, you know, whatever it is that's going on. So it's, uh, it's going to be a pain, but it seems to me at least to be, well, not as bad as it could be, uh, and also not the end of the world.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:32]:
What do you guys think?

Rob Campbell [00:34:33]:
I had a question.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:35]:
I have questions.

Rob Campbell [00:34:36]:
All right, so my, my question is, sure, it takes 24 hours to do F-Droid, but what about the individual apps on F-Droid? They're not coming from the Google Play Store. Is it going to consider each of those to be a sideloaded app?

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:52]:
Yes.

Rob Campbell [00:34:53]:
So each app that you install from F-Droid is going to— you have to wait 24 hours.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:58]:
No, you wait 24 hours. You get the option to enable sideloading either temporarily, like you turn it on for 7 days, or you enable this sideloading indefinitely. So if you're going to use F-Droid, that's what you're going to do.

Rob Campbell [00:35:10]:
So it's not 24 hours per sideloaded APK? Correct. Unless you did a temporary.

Ken McDonald [00:35:16]:
Okay. Yeah. Or—

Rob Campbell [00:35:18]:
it sounds good to me.

Ken McDonald [00:35:19]:
Even if you are using F-Droid, but you know you're only going to be downloading a select few within that next 7 days, then you could do the 7-day option.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:28]:
You could, but then you're going to run into it again when F-Droid tries to update something, because that's part— that's, that's part of the deal with F-Droid is it's, you know, it's its own app store, and so it downloads updates. Um, yeah, and if you're not familiar with F-Droid, what it is is it is explicitly an app store for open source applications and when an application gets hosted on F-Droid, the F-Droid guys build that application. In fact, they build them all on air-gapped servers, which is why they can't opt in. It's not that they don't want— not necessarily just that they don't want to, although I think that's part of it, but they literally cannot opt into this developer verification because they do these builds on an offline air-gapped server. They are, they are very picky about making sure that those builds are done correctly and done securely.

Ken McDonald [00:36:14]:
And I got a feeling you're going to see several, uh, developers move from Google Play to F-Droid because it's too expensive now to do it through Google Play.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:26]:
It's really not. I mean, there is a little bit of a price for the, the verification.

Rob Campbell [00:36:31]:
Yeah, when I did, it was like $25, then it was lifetime.

Ken McDonald [00:36:34]:
You haven't heard, heard the recent news then on what they're asking developers to do? No, uh, they're asking for a lot of, uh, personal information from developer plus money.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:48]:
Well, I mean, there's always $25. There's always, there's always been, um, personal information because you're, you're essentially signing a business contract with Google to get into that, and there's all kinds of compliance issues. But what's the, what's the cost that they're talking about?

Ken McDonald [00:37:04]:
Uh, Look up here real quick.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:08]:
I was gonna say, I can't imagine it being too terribly much.

Rob Campbell [00:37:12]:
Yeah, my complaint was in the past I paid $25 one time, and when I looked into it, like, iOS was $100 a year, um, which that was what annoyed me is— and, and I'm just a hobbyist, so I, I don't want to pay $100 a year for something that I'm really don't care about, but $25 one time, I'm like, yeah, why not? Here you go.

Jeff Massie [00:37:37]:
I'd be curious the rate of malicious software versus the Google Play Store versus F-Droid, what the ratios actually are, because I know people get a lot of malicious stuff off of the official stores too.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:50]:
Yeah, that's true.

Ken McDonald [00:37:51]:
At least half of it on the— to the official store.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:56]:
Yeah, I will tell you though, when I was, when I was doing the security column every week there were quite a few times that we would talk about, you know, something happening on Android and the way that it was getting onto people's phones was, you know, someone set up a watering hole attack, right? Where it's like they had this website where they were sending people to and then you went to the website and it wanted to download an APK. And the APK was claiming to be an update for whatever the watering hole website was about. So, you know, oh, you want to use, this bank that you just typed out. Well, download this APK, it's the updated banking app. And lots of people fall for it.

Jeff Massie [00:38:37]:
Now I, I'm curious, just, just simply from the fact I'm the exact opposite. I'm, I'm kind of a Luddite when it comes to the phone. I think I've told people before, you know, I got probably about 4 apps on my phone.

Rob Campbell [00:38:49]:
Do you still have a dial tone on yours, or just about But yeah, I don't think I see companies moving to it now any more than before. I mean, F-Droid's been available forever, and now it's just slightly harder for people to get F-Droid apps.

Ken McDonald [00:39:06]:
It's harder to update it because I had downloaded it through the Google Play Store years ago. And recently it's been saying it's ready for update, but it's not giving me the option to update it through the Google Play Store.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:21]:
Yeah, I think that's, I think that's the same problem. You probably need to uninstall it from there and go grab their APK and sideload it. It's basically all the same problem.

Ken McDonald [00:39:29]:
Yep. But it's still a one-time $25 registration fee. Here's where I think you're going to have a lot of developers balking.

Rob Campbell [00:39:41]:
It's funny that hasn't changed in like over a decade though.

Ken McDonald [00:39:46]:
When you're having to give 30% of your income to them for hosting the— yeah, free apps.

Rob Campbell [00:39:53]:
Anything I've ever put on there is free. I think I put like one thing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:57]:
Yeah, Google has gotten its cut from the Play Store for a long time. I don't think the 30% is new either.

Ken McDonald [00:40:03]:
No. In fact, I think there's recent talk about them dropping it down to 15%. But it's the verifying your identity. You've got to complete developer identity verification. Now, this is required for all accounts, and it includes providing a government ID.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:26]:
Well, I mean, get ready. That's coming for just about anything on the internet before you know it.

Rob Campbell [00:40:32]:
It seems fair if you're selling something on their platform.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:36]:
Yeah, I mean, it's a compliance, it's a legal thing. I'm sort of surprised that this hasn't been a thing before now. So I just teased it and now I look and I see that Rob is actually teed up to talk more about this. Rob, let's continue on with this idea of identity verification, not just for developers, but what about for the rest of us?

Rob Campbell [00:41:00]:
Well, yeah, we've talked quite a bit over the last few weeks about age verification laws going into effect in various places like California. Maybe Colorado and New York. And there have been a lot of questions about the laws. And now someone has answered that ageless question. What are we going to do if all distros are going to have age verification? What will, you know, privacy-loving penguins like us run? The answer to that ageless question is ageless. Ageless Linux, that is, is a new Debian-based distro. But what makes it notable is that it is created as a symbol of resistance to the growing push for operating system level verification. Ageless Linux responds to that concern by positioning itself as a deliberately non-compliant alternative, rejecting the idea that an operating system should act as a digital identity keeper.

Rob Campbell [00:42:05]:
The project's purpose is to offer users a familiar Linux system with age verification mechanisms removed or avoided, preserving the view that an operating system should simply run software, not monitor or categorize the people using it. That is one way to attack the problem. But in places like Colorado, we have people like Carl from System76 appealing to the government to exclude open source. And including to a recent tweet, it sounds like they're actually making progress and may get that put into their law. But then there are other areas of the world that, at least unless you talked about when I wasn't here, we completely missed on this topic. I even used an example of, you know what, if somebody makes a distro in Brazil and tries to use in California. But this is also happening in Brazil as they're passing a, well, they've already passed a potentially stricter, that went into effect March 17th, I think it was. But, you know, more stricter, but maybe more vague age verification law to which distros like Arch Linux 32, which is a 32-bit spin of Arch, has just completely blocked downloads to Brazil and California.

Rob Campbell [00:43:27]:
So if you come there from, from one of those places and your IP is properly geolocated, you're going to get a page that says, yeah, we just can't support you, basically. You know, and if all those ideas aren't good, you could just give in and add it right to the core components of Linux itself, which is what systemd did. SystemD added an optional birth date field, um, to its, uh, user, user records. So now there's a standardized place where an administrator could store a user's birth date. SystemD itself is not doing age verification, not enforcing policy, and not sending age data to apps. It is just adding a field that other software could use as a centralized location of a distro or project, you know, decides to build any kind of age features into it. Still, it's enough reason for systemd haters to say, I told you so. And from what I'm seeing on social media today, they're going insane with comments.

Rob Campbell [00:44:41]:
Those watching, I got some behind me. I have names crossed out so you can't see the full names, but comments like, quote, SystemD is just showing who they are and possibly sealing their fate. Another one, another reason to avoid SystemD, in which somebody replied to that person, quote, as if we needed another reason. And then I saw questions online from apparently a new Linux user. Says he's new, used Mint a couple weeks or a week or something, asking for distros that don't have systemd, saying because this new feature, quote, puts every system-based distro at risk upstream. What are we to do? It's just horrible. Okay. I mean, I'm not for this age verification stuff.

Rob Campbell [00:45:39]:
And I think a lot of it's just dumb, but people are just getting stupid over this now. I mean, come on. Slippery slope. I don't know.

Jeff Massie [00:45:52]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:53]:
Okay. So there is, there is nothing inherently wrong with having an age field or a birthday field in systemd, or I'm pretty sure this has been in Unix. In the past is, you know, user's birthday, user's current age. Like, there's nothing—

Rob Campbell [00:46:11]:
their office number.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:15]:
This is typical stuff.

Rob Campbell [00:46:17]:
Yeah, if you go on Reddit, it's just insane. It's just pages and pages of people in Facebook Linux groups and everywhere.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:25]:
It's like, yeah, I can imagine. Right. So let's— and the reason I say this, though, is that there is an issue here. But you need to understand what the issue is. And it's not having an age field in systemd. I could care less about that. But the idea of, you know, a government forcing a Linux distro to ask someone's age when they create an account, like, that's a bridge too far. I think, in my opinion, that's pushing beyond what's appropriate for freedom to use a computer.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:03]:
At the same token, I understand why there is this push for, you know, let's have an age field and filter what, what you get to see online by that. And, and like on a technical level, that could be useful even, right? Like what advertisements get shown on various websites. I would, I would really love for my kids to not see some of the advertisements that get shown on some websites. So like, I get that too. But yeah, it's a pain. Now, to be clear, what none of this is talking about is having to go through and do a government ID verification to be able to do a Linux installer to create an account. Nobody's asking for that. Nobody, that's not part of this suggestion at all.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:51]:
And so what this is, is it's just when you create an account, please enter your current age. And so it's not as onerous as people think it is.

Rob Campbell [00:47:58]:
And that age just stays in the same.

Ken McDonald [00:48:00]:
Is it your current age or your birth date?

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:03]:
I don't think the law, at least the laws that I've looked into, I don't think they specify which way to do it.

Ken McDonald [00:48:08]:
No, they have a D field.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:11]:
Oh, I have no idea.

Rob Campbell [00:48:12]:
It's birth date.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:13]:
Yeah, that makes sense.

Rob Campbell [00:48:15]:
The actual field is birth capital D date.

Jeff Massie [00:48:19]:
I read it as now you can optionally set a variable to a value.

Rob Campbell [00:48:25]:
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:27]:
And, and so there's, there's another angle.

Jeff Massie [00:48:28]:
There's nothing more there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:29]:
There's another angle to this too, and that is those, those guys running the distros that are like, uh, blatantly against this. Um, you know, that's fine in places where code is free speech. So in the US, that's absolutely not a problem at all. You get, you get to do that because our Supreme Court has ruled that code is free speech. Code is speech, and therefore you get to do things like this because we have the First Amendment. Um, But in a business setting, that will not fly at all. And so that's why IBM, Red Hat, Ubuntu, they are going to do what the law says that they're going to, that they need to do because they are businesses.

Rob Campbell [00:49:05]:
And those distros can use systemd without touching that feature.

Leo Laporte [00:49:10]:
Absolutely.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:11]:
You don't have to use it just because it's in there. It's not like it's spying on you, collecting your data to upload to the government.

Rob Campbell [00:49:18]:
But those corporate systems that have to use it, this provides a central location. Otherwise, you're going to have Canonical and Red Hat forcing either forking systemd because they want to centralize there, or they're going to have to make their own place to put it where it's going to be different everywhere across every system. And, you know, eventually it's like this just makes us centralized so that way everybody's on the same page.

Ken McDonald [00:49:46]:
I got a What I think is going to happen is you'll have systemd doing this, and then when you create users, it's going to include this as part of the information that goes into that comment field that you have. That's, uh, basically a text string, uh, that's generally used as a short description of the account, and in most cases is used as a field for the user's first full or full name.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:20]:
Yeah, I think what systemd has done is they've added an additional field for this. But yeah, you could absolutely put it in there if you didn't have that. But yeah, so all of this I think is just a— yes, it's an important thing to think through, like whether you want your local government mandating something like this. But the hysteria that we've seen from it is just a little ridiculous. So we're going to let Ken in just a moment talk about a new application— well, not new, but a new update to an application that we all know and love. First, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. All right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:52]:
Let's talk Blender.

Ken McDonald [00:50:55]:
I agree, Jonathan. Let's talk Blender. This week, Marcus Nister and Michael Larabel wrote about the Blender project's latest release. I'm talking about Blender 5.1. Now, according to Marcus, Blender 5.1 highlights include AMD GPUs with HIPRT ray tracing enabled by default, and a new F-curve modifier called Gaussian Smooth that allows non-destructive smoothing of F-curves. Blender 5.1 adds support for opening windows without decorations on Wayland by using the --no-window-frame argument, removing the dependency on the libdecor client-side decorations library for Wayland Silence. Also, Blender now uses the, and this is all in caps, TBB_Malloc_PROXY for memory allocation on Linux. Now, according to Michael's benchmarking article, overall Blender 5.1 on Linux is running well with CPU rendering performance up to a few percent faster than Blender 5.0.

Ken McDonald [00:52:11]:
Also new in Blender 5.1 is an operator to replace the action on multiple objects, support for snapping and precision. You use Control and Shift keys for doing that while using bevel and add support for AVIF files or AFIF. Now, since I don't have time to cover all the new features, I do recommend reading Marcus and Mark Michael's articles. Now, I'll also provide a link to the nearly 14-minute video hosted by Jonathan Lampell from cgcookie.com that demonstrates most of the new features. I don't think you want me to take 14 minutes, do you, Jonathan?

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:59]:
Probably not quite that long. So if anyone like me couldn't remember and wondered what AMD's HIP stands for, that is AMD Heterogeneous Compute Interface for Portability. and that's what we call it. HIP, Heterogeneous Compute Interface for Portability.

Ken McDonald [00:53:19]:
And let's just call that HIP and forget that other.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:22]:
Yes.

Rob Campbell [00:53:23]:
Yeah, Ken, save your 14 minutes for your command line tip.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:26]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:53:28]:
I think it's good that they got HIP in there by default, you know, get more of the GPU rendering. CPU rendering performance increase— how many people are actually using the CPUs to render these days, you know?

Ken McDonald [00:53:39]:
Those with AMD cards?

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:41]:
Not anymore.

Jeff Massie [00:53:41]:
Not anymore.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:42]:
Maybe you have an Intel card. You're still using it.

Ken McDonald [00:53:49]:
Yes.

Jeff Massie [00:53:49]:
Oh, really?

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:50]:
Yeah. Maybe.

Jeff Massie [00:53:50]:
Well, I don't know. We have to look because ROCm and HIP and all that, that was supposed to be open source so Intel could follow along.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:59]:
I don't think they've ported it to Intel cards. That would be really interesting if they did, but I don't think it's happened. Anyway, yeah, so again, Blender is another one of those things that's on my very long list of things to play with and learn how to use.

Ken McDonald [00:54:16]:
But above or below Calibre?

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:21]:
Not sure. It's not a literal list. It's a mental list. You know, like many things. Yeah, there you go. It's more like more of a pile.

Ken McDonald [00:54:30]:
And it keeps changing from today to day on which one's on top.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:33]:
Yes, it does. It does very much.

Ken McDonald [00:54:36]:
That definitely sounds like a pile.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:38]:
A mental pile, really. All right, Jeff, let's talk Manjaro. And is it cooked? Is it cooked?

Ken McDonald [00:54:48]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:54:49]:
Well, today we're going to dive into a Linux shakeup in the internal collapse and attempted rebirth of the Manjaro project. Now, if you've been around Linux for a while, you probably remember when Manjaro was, you know, the go-to Arch-based distro for for newcomers. You know, it offered Arch's power with a friendlier, more curated experience. But over the past decade, things have gone downhill, slowly at first and then kind of all at once. Now, a Manjaro team member recently published a manifesto titled Manjaro 2.0, and it confirms that what many users suspected— the project has been stagnating, losing contributors, and repeatedly making the same mistakes without fixing them. One line from the document says it plainly. The Manjaro project has been declining over the past decade. The problems weren't just minor bugs.

Jeff Massie [00:55:42]:
We're talking about basic infrastructure failures like TLS certificates expiring multiple times, leaving users unable to update. Team members built tools to fix these issues, but leadership never implemented them. Updates to the stable branch sometimes stalled for months, and the project became known for mismanagement rather than innovation. At the center of the crisis is Manjaro's leadership structure. The project is effectively controlled by one person, Philip Mueller, co-owner of the Manjaro company. According to the manifesto, he centralized access to the infrastructure, refused to delegate, and didn't invest company funds back into the project. As a result, Manjaro's only full-time developer lost their income when the money ran out. Now, this isn't new tension.

Jeff Massie [00:56:30]:
For years, the line between Manjaro the community project and Manjaro the company has been blurry. There have been controversies, and for example, in like spending €2,000 on a laptop purchased without the treasurer's approval, which after which, when the treasurer was questioning some of this, The treasurer was removed. The team finally reached the point where they felt the project was dying, and their solution: split Manjaro into two entities. So you'd have Manjaro GmbH, the company, and then Manjaro Project e.V. It's a new nonprofit run by the community. As you can tell, those are, uh, German type, uh, letter designations at the end of the Manjaro name. Under this plan, the nonprofit would take over nearly everything— the Git repos, the domains, the infrastructure, the forums, the finances— essentially the entire project. And the company would become downstream and would have to pay for any infrastructure it used.

Jeff Massie [00:57:41]:
So one of the most striking details, the company would eventually hand over the Manjaro trademark to the nonprofit for €1. When Mueller didn't respond to the proposal, the community escalated. Moderators, admins, and assistants went on strike. No new forum regulations were approved. You know, no moderation happened. Internal discussions were archived so nothing could be deleted, but the message was clear: either leadership changes or the project collapses. Now I should say, before they posted this, there were some internal postings about this as well to try to get Mueller on board, but it was basically silenced the whole time. So eventually they had different stages.

Jeff Massie [00:58:28]:
This is where it went public. So this is not like they just immediately went public with this. They were— tried to handle it behind closed doors for a while, and it— nothing happened. So that's, that's why they were like talking about archiving and that kind of stuff, so that they have record of their previous communications. Now, I did say co-owned, and the other 50% owner, Roman Gilig, G-I-L-G, publicly supported the nonprofit plan and challenged Mueller to explain why the asset shouldn't be transferred. His involvement is significant. He has equal legal authority, and he's siding with the community. Now, the manifesto also criticizes how Manjaro was marketed, especially the claim that it's perfect for beginners or ideal for gamers.

Jeff Massie [00:59:18]:
The author argues that this was misleading, driven by the company's desire to attract customers rather than accurately describe the distribution. Now, the video— now, because this is a— in the show notes, there's a link to a video, and the video says there isn't an update, and if Mueller is going to respond, You know, there isn't any update on if Mueller is going to respond, but in the comments section there was an update and it appears that the agreement is going to go through. And so it was— it— the comment was by the, the maker of the video after the video already went out. Now I'm saying appears, not that it's for sure or is going to appears. Time will tell, but take a look at the video in the show notes for even more details. And because I condensed a 25-30 minute video, and we'll keep a watch out for the results of this, and we'll give updates as results come to light.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:21]:
Yeah, that's— it's always a little disheartening to see something like this where a, a project kind of Somebody goes AWOL and the project kind of has to suffer and you're not sure what's going to happen with it. This is why it's always useful to have, you know, more than one. And in this case, they're learning the hard way, more than two people at the top to be able to make these decisions. When you've got two people there and they are, they're essentially split 50-50, then there's not a whole lot you can do, even with, even with one of them present. It's still split.

Jeff Massie [01:00:58]:
So, and it's even worse because Mueller centralized, like I said, a lot of stuff under him. So legality-wise, 50-50, but there's a lot of other stuff Mueller has total control over.

Rob Campbell [01:01:09]:
I remember when Manjaro was the Linux distribution that Leo used. Because of it, I tried it that time for a little while until it broke, and then I moved on.

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

Jeff Massie [01:01:21]:
And you know, I— CacheOS is stealing a lot of the Arch distribution thunder too. So Manjaro to come back, they're probably going to have to fight uphill a little bit and really have to work to distinguish themselves from—

Rob Campbell [01:01:37]:
Even before Cache, Endeavour was starting to steal a lot of thunder. Now Cache is just taking it away.

Jeff Massie [01:01:42]:
I don't, I don't see how Manjaro can come back from that, but Yeah, well, if they can differentiate themselves, you know, maybe they take on a little more server role or they go cutting edge as well, or, you know.

Rob Campbell [01:01:56]:
Well, didn't I have a story about Cache having a server release?

Ken McDonald [01:02:01]:
I thought I had one.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:03]:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I will say this, so like, uh, Benjaro has made the news because of this. If they do successfully do this and, and you, you get a decent community that takes control and they didn't then push out an update and get things going again, like that will be some publicity for the brand. And sometimes, sometimes you can take, you can take something like this where it looks like bad news and then you, you snatch victory back from the jaws of defeat. That could be a, you know, very effective, um, I, I don't mean this to sound quite as, uh, heartless as it's going to, but man, that's an effective marketing tool.

Rob Campbell [01:02:41]:
I, uh, one thing I remember liking about Manjaro, I mean, you can do it anywhere. I've used it after that because it— but I discovered it with Manjaro. They had the, uh, the Quake, or maybe it's Quake or one of those versions, but the Quake terminal where you just hit the, uh, I don't use it anymore, but the, the— I don't remember, one of the F keys, F12, and it would pop down. Um, and I really like that. I should install that again.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:04]:
But yeah, KDE has that with your Quake. Spelled with a K. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:03:10]:
And really, you know, this— I use this statement at work all the time, is there's opportunity in chaos. So if they can grab this, you know, then run with it. It'll work.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:24]:
Absolutely.

Rob Campbell [01:03:25]:
KDE is not built in by default though, right? You have to install it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:28]:
It's an application. Yeah. But it's part of the KDE desktop environment.

Rob Campbell [01:03:33]:
I mean, yeah, man, Gerald, I was just in— default when you install Manjaro is just there.

Jeff Massie [01:03:38]:
But you're supposed to hit tilde to hit console.

Ken McDonald [01:03:44]:
Jeff, I'm surprised you didn't include the link to the Manjaro 2.0 manifesto with your other link.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:53]:
That one right there? From kenmac999.

Ken McDonald [01:03:59]:
I'm going to go ahead and add it to the show notes as well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:03]:
How new is this?

Ken McDonald [01:04:05]:
It's an ongoing one.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:06]:
It comes up to, uh, looks like 2 days ago was the latest, uh, March 19th.

Ken McDonald [01:04:17]:
March. Yep.

Rob Campbell [01:04:18]:
Let's run a diff on their first one and compare with this one and see what's, uh, what they've got ticking out of there.

Ken McDonald [01:04:25]:
Oh, this is another one.

Rob Campbell [01:04:26]:
Never mind.

Ken McDonald [01:04:28]:
Actually, this is an ongoing, uh, thread.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:34]:
Well, we will keep an eye on the Manjaro folks. And if we have anything, anything interesting happens, we'll be back next week and we'll talk about it. But I've got, well, I've got a bit of a gripe actually. I like ARM. I like Raspberry Pis. And there is a problem. Dang it. They don't have a decent browser.

Ken McDonald [01:04:55]:
Chromium's not decent?

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:56]:
I'm being a little facetious. Don't throw anything at me. You know, there's Firefox and there's Chromium, but man, I miss my real Chrome over on Raspberry Pi. And there's reasons for that. One of the reasons is Widevine support to be able to watch things like Netflix and all of that just doesn't work there. Well, finally, Chrome, Google is bringing the heat to the ARM64 party. And they have now announced that they are officially bringing Google Chrome to ARM64 Linux in Q2 of 2026. So within the next 3 months, we should see this.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:37]:
And it'll be a full-on— it'll be a full-on Chrome, just like you can get on Linux on the desktop. Linux on x86 will now be able to get it over on ARM. And, uh, you know, there's already Chromium, so for some people this is really not going to matter very much, but there are some things that do get bundled with full-on Chrome that you don't get Chromeum. And like I said, the tools to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime and some of those other things are one of the ones that will be interesting. There's also the Google Pay integration, and Google has its enhanced protection in safe mode browsing. They've got some other stuff that they mention here. You can actually log in and get your Google Password Manager if you, if you use that. It can be part of this as well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:24]:
So some interesting things going on. And so I'm just as a, uh, I'm already getting grief for this in the comments. I see live coming in. Um, but, uh, you know, if you are like I am, an ARM64 and yet also a Chrome enthusiast, well, finally we'll get a decent browser.

Jeff Massie [01:06:48]:
So you can't watch Netflix on Firefox on ARM? Because I know you can on x86.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:54]:
I don't think so. I've, I've I don't know for sure that I've tried it, to be honest with you. It was a while back the last time that I actually tried this.

Ken McDonald [01:07:03]:
But it depends on if you— I think you have to accept some options in Firefox for enabling digital rights management.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:15]:
Yeah, that's the thing though. I don't know if those DRM extensions are in Firefox on ARM. I've got an ARM laptop here. This is my, well, it's a Raspberry Pi CM5. I forget the name of the Argon. It's the Argon one-up. It's what this is.

Rob Campbell [01:07:31]:
Oh, it's the Argon. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:33]:
I'll boot this up and I'll see if I can get logged into my Netflix. And then we'll just find out.

Jeff Massie [01:07:39]:
Testing in production.

Ken McDonald [01:07:40]:
And the biggest advantage to being able to run Google's Chrome browser is that you can automatically sync between devices.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:50]:
That is one of the things.

Ken McDonald [01:07:51]:
Yeah, that's one of the things that's super nice to include, transferring a web page that you have open on one device to another to make it easier. Say you've got something that you've opened on your phone that you want to enter stuff in, but you'd rather use a keyboard to do it. Transfer to your, uh, Chrome browser on your Linux computer and use that keyboard.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:13]:
Yeah, I mean, you can log in with your, your your Google account and all of those things work in Chrome and not so well in Chromium or Firefox. They're waiting on this to boot up. We'll check it out.

Ken McDonald [01:08:23]:
Bookmark sync and you end up having to export the bookmark, then import it back into Chromium or Firefox.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:32]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:08:33]:
Kind of a pain.

Jeff Massie [01:08:34]:
One time Firefox was going to have sync across. I don't know if they fully—

Ken McDonald [01:08:38]:
If you set up an account with Firefox.

Rob Campbell [01:08:41]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:08:42]:
Do you have an account set up with Firefox, Jeff?

Jeff Massie [01:08:45]:
I do not.

Ken McDonald [01:08:46]:
I don't either.

Jeff Massie [01:08:47]:
But I don't, you know, see, talking about transferring browser windows, I don't, or pages, I don't do that because I don't browse on my phone really. Like I said, I'm a Luddite. I mostly texting and calling is what my phone's for. You call people on your cell phone?

Ken McDonald [01:09:06]:
What's up with that?

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:07]:
I don't know.

Rob Campbell [01:09:07]:
I just have a flip phone.

Ken McDonald [01:09:08]:
Using what app?

Jeff Massie [01:09:09]:
Because you can't really get a flip phone anymore.

Rob Campbell [01:09:12]:
Oh yeah, you can. We still sell them.

Jeff Massie [01:09:14]:
Yeah, but they're garbage now. They're just kind of—

Rob Campbell [01:09:16]:
They've always been.

Ken McDonald [01:09:18]:
Do they have any 5G flip phones?

Jeff Massie [01:09:21]:
Do what?

Ken McDonald [01:09:22]:
Do they have any flip phones that are capable of 5G? Yes. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:26]:
It's not very— they're not very popular in the US, but they are in some other places.

Ken McDonald [01:09:30]:
So in other words, living in the US, you might not be able to find one.

Rob Campbell [01:09:35]:
Oh, you can see.

Jeff Massie [01:09:36]:
I, for me though, see, part of it is just, it bugs me on my phone. Like, oh, you can surf on your phone. No, I want my 46-inch monitor with monster machine power in this and just feeding me information.

Rob Campbell [01:09:48]:
What if you're not at home?

Ken McDonald [01:09:51]:
I agree with you, Jeff, on that, because that's easier for me to read.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:55]:
I'm looking.

Jeff Massie [01:09:56]:
Yeah, I'm looking around. I'm socializing. I'm out and about.

Rob Campbell [01:09:59]:
What about when you're in the restroom?

Ken McDonald [01:10:02]:
I just, uh, that's getting too personal.

Rob Campbell [01:10:07]:
You have a 40-inch screen right in there for you, don't you?

Ken McDonald [01:10:12]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:10:12]:
I'm not, I'm not hanging out all the time. You know, I'm not. Go in, get the job done and leave.

Rob Campbell [01:10:19]:
I mean, sometimes it takes a while or you have a game to finish.

Ken McDonald [01:10:22]:
That's what those paper books are for.

Jeff Massie [01:10:24]:
I don't ever play games on my phone.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:27]:
Okay, so I am getting in Firefox a prompt. You can't see it here, but he says you must enable DRM to play some audio or video on this page. Let's hit the button and see if it works. I will, I will honestly, I will be impressed if this does work here, but we'll give it a try.

Ken McDonald [01:10:48]:
What version of Firefox is that?

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:53]:
Let's see, is it actually gonna—

Rob Campbell [01:10:55]:
ah, it does play Firefox GX.

Jeff Massie [01:10:59]:
There's, there's, there's a show title right there. Firefox impresses Jonathan.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:04]:
It does play. I didn't think it would. I am, I'm actually pretty impressed by that.

Ken McDonald [01:11:09]:
Then you've got one of the later versions.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:11]:
Oh yeah, it's up to— it's up to date Firefox. Yeah, for sure. Um, it is, uh, 148.

Ken McDonald [01:11:19]:
Not too old.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:20]:
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty recent. We did updates on this not too long ago, but it will, it will play. I did not expect it to do that. So yes, Firefox does impress Jonathan. That can't— that is a valid, it's a valid title. No, no clickbait there. Uh, right, we are going to, uh, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to talk about a vulnerability in one of our favorite pieces of software. We'll be right back after this.

Rob Campbell [01:11:47]:
We all love to hate on Snaps and Ubuntu and all the things Canonical, but sometimes they just make it too easy. Last week, Ubuntu users were dealing with AppArmor security concerns, and now another issue has surfaced, this time involving Snaps. A newly discovered vulnerability, CVE-2026-12696, 3.8.8.8 affects Snapd and has been rated as a high severity. According to the report, a local user could potentially gain root privileges by recreating Snap's private /tmp or TMP directory when systemd-tempfiles is enabled. That makes it a local privilege escalation issue rather than a remote attack. But if they have any user at all, a remote user can log in and, you know, exploit that local privilege escalation. And so it's still serious because it could cause a normal user to— user account to gain full control of the system. The story is especially notable because it involves Snaps, which is already a been a frequent target of criticism in the Linux community, arguing that it's too heavy, too slow, too centralized, and too tightly tied to Canonical's ecosystem.

Rob Campbell [01:13:23]:
So when there's a flaw, of course, the community is going to talk about it. The flaw has led to security updates for Ubuntu 25.10 and all supported LTS releases back to 16.04. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 25.10 are affected in default configurations, while Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and older releases are only affected in certain non-default setups. So even though patches are available, this gives Snap haters just one more reason to hate. And if you're not a Snap hater and you're going to keep on using it, make sure you're updated.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:08]:
You know, I will say that for most of us, this is not that big of a deal. If you've, if you've got something malicious running on your machine, you're already in deep trouble. But it is definitely good hygiene to get this update, get it fixed on the upstream side and get this updated.

Rob Campbell [01:14:21]:
The, the biggest issue is if you have a multi-user system, especially maybe a server where other, where you let other users log on for some other reason or whatever. If you're the admin and they are not, they could take advantage of it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:37]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Ken McDonald [01:14:39]:
How about if you're just using SSH to remotely log in from another system?

Rob Campbell [01:14:46]:
Well, they first have to exploit something to take over that SSH and get in there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:53]:
But if you're just using it, yeah, you're not going to pull this off on yourself. All right. Not a whole lot of sense unless you accidentally locked yourself out of your system or you're just doing it for fun. You know, various options there. But yeah, this is definitely not a hair on fire vulnerability for at least most of us.

Rob Campbell [01:15:16]:
Oh, but it snaps. It snaps.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:19]:
I know.

Rob Campbell [01:15:19]:
It snaps.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:21]:
It's fun to dog on snaps.

Jeff Massie [01:15:23]:
And those of us without hair, not a problem.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:27]:
Jeff and Robert, good to go.

Ken McDonald [01:15:29]:
By the way, my SnapD is fixed.

Rob Campbell [01:15:33]:
There you go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:34]:
Spay the neuter. Okay, Ken, save us from Rob's terrible puns and let's talk Pipewire for a minute.

Ken McDonald [01:15:44]:
So you want me to do my own puns?

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:46]:
Yeah, unfortunately, that is what I'm asking for.

Jeff Massie [01:15:49]:
Oh no.

Ken McDonald [01:15:50]:
In that case, Jonathan, this week. I'm going to bring some articles from Markus Nester and Bobby Barsol. Now, Markus wrote about Pipewire 1.6.2, adding some small optimizations to the audio mixer, marking props or properties as write-only in the libcamera library, and fixing the jack_port_type_id with the colon, um, uh, not colons, but the parentheses, uh, open and close parentheses after that function to return values compatible with Jack 1 and 2. Now Bobby wrote about a small maintenance update for the older 1.4 stable series. That's Pipewire 1.4.11. It addresses a potential issue with invalid memory freeing and file descriptor handling that could lead to crashes, resolves a segmentation fault affecting some Jack applications, and several improvements made to the filter graph system. Now comparing the release notes for Pipewire 1.6.2 to the Pipewire 1.4.11 it looks like some of the bug fixes for 1.6.2 may have been backported to the 1.4.11. As always, I recommend reading Bobby and Marius's articles for all the information I did not cover.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:28]:
Yeah, interesting stuff. You know, every time we talk about a Pipewire update, I have to go and refresh myself on, uh, um, the, the, the V4L2 debacle inside of OBS. And, you know, eventually I'm sure we will get Pipewire output and, and, you know, full Pipewire video stream, uh, capabilities. But it's just—

Jeff Massie [01:17:49]:
I, I tried it recently. It's still— it's better, but it's not there yet.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:55]:
Yeah, currently to do it you got to use, uh, the, the V4L2, um, out-of-tree kernel loopback plugin, and it's just not great.

Ken McDonald [01:18:03]:
That's what I'm using with the Opera GX to get the virtual camera.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:09]:
Yeah, which is, you know, it's better than nothing, but it's not amazing.

Jeff Massie [01:18:14]:
Yeah, if I use the actual Pipewire, I get about 5 frames per second.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:18]:
That's not enough. That's not very many frames.

Ken McDonald [01:18:22]:
No, what version of Pipewire are you, uh, currently running? Do you know? Uh, whatever the latest command line, you can just type white Pipewire space dash dash version. I think I covered that command.

Rob Campbell [01:18:35]:
Can't you do just dash V? Isn't that quicker?

Jeff Massie [01:18:39]:
Uh, 1.6.2.

Ken McDonald [01:18:43]:
Well, you're up there. You've got updated to the latest one. This antiquated Ubuntu 25.10. I'm still running 1.4.7. 1.4.7. So I've got notification of some updates.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:02]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:19:03]:
Oh, you can't just do -v. Huh. Lame.

Jeff Massie [01:19:09]:
It would have been funnier if Rob would have said, yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:18]:
Yelp. That would have been great. All right. Jeff, let's talk ButterFS or BetterFS or BTRFS, however you want to say it. We're on the internet. Nobody knows how to pronounce anything.

Jeff Massie [01:19:29]:
Yeah, well, we're better.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:31]:
I mean, we demonstrated that we do not.

Jeff Massie [01:19:34]:
Yeah, we can't even get names right. But you know, in my house, I like to— I mix better and butter because I like butter.

Rob Campbell [01:19:42]:
Who doesn't?

Jeff Massie [01:19:43]:
Well, anyway, last week we talked about performance of some popular Linux file systems, and one of the benchmarks looked at several systems and how they compare to each other with the Linux kernel 7.0. And the other benchmark we talked about had XFS and ext4 and how their performance changed through the last several kernel revisions. This week we can add BetterFS to this list through kernel history performance changes. And we talked about last week that Michael Larabel was going to run this, and he's added it to the dataset. So this BetterFS data is going to— is added now to the XFS and ext4 performance Now, right now there's no ZFS or BcacheFS as they are not in the kernel. And there are requests to see those as well, but with the 7.0 kernel, they're just having some issues. And until they're fixed, Michael Larabel over at Phronix was gonna say, we're gonna have to wait. They just can't be fully ran through the series of kernels yet.

Jeff Massie [01:20:46]:
Now, not surprisingly, the two top speed file systems from last week are still on top and well ahead of BetterFS. Through time. And what is surprising though is the speed regression that BetterFS took around kernel 6.15, which is also the time that ext4 took a large uptick. Now the regression isn't in all the tests. It shows up in the Tiger Beetle and FIO random writes benchmark. So not all benchmarks are showing the issue, though when you look at the geometric mean, there is an overall slight slowdown to performance happening at that 6:15. Well, what happened? It fixed an issue. The patch, which they knew was going to cause a slowdown in specific conditions, said fall back to buffer write if direct I/O is done on a file that requires checksums.

Jeff Massie [01:21:40]:
This avoids a problem with checksum mismatch errors observed, for example, on virtual images when writes to pages under writeback cause the checksum mismatch reports. Now this may lead to some performance degradation, but currently the recommended setup for VM images is to use the nocow— that's no copyright— copybackonwrite file attribute that also disables checksums. So this isn't an everywhere type of fix, but it could still have an effect. So, and that was from the, uh, comments of when they put the patch in. In the 6.15 kernel. So if you go through and read the comments on the story, basically things fell into two camps. The pro BetterFS because of the images, copy-on-write, and all the other features that it has, which can help keep your data safe. Some said it's great for servers, and others said it's even more important for home users because the average home hardware is not susceptible, or is more susceptible to stability problems than server hardware.

Jeff Massie [01:22:46]:
The second camp was the Pro EXT4 and XFS, as they talked about how speed was most important. They didn't need the extra features. And others said they were worried that they were going to lose their data with BetterFS, and they'd rather just use backups with EXT4 and XFS. Those who brought up OpenZFS and BcacheFS You know, Pharaonix did have a benchmark on the 6.17 kernel, and it was posted in the comments. If it holds true whenever they run on 7.0, both OpenZFS and bcacheFS were significantly slower than BetterFS. And, you know, there's also comments, they're talking about future enhancements to BetterFS and you know, there's hope that they're going to see more performance increase. Um, you know, and some of that's going to be— it'll probably never be as fast when you're doing so much more overhead and checking and things like that. It's just never going to be there.

Jeff Massie [01:23:51]:
But as I said last week, personally, going from ext4 to BetterFS, I never noticed a difference. Even in game loading times, you know, I don't see a difference. You know, I, I guess I'm not hitting the drives hard enough to notice. Uh, but you know, take a look at the article linked in the show notes and let us know the, you know, on Club Discord what you think and where you fall into the file system, uh, side of the fence, you know. And you know, what do you use in your machines and what's their use case?

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:21]:
I have a hot take for you. You want your file system to be super boring.

Jeff Massie [01:24:28]:
Yes.

Rob Campbell [01:24:29]:
Here's, here's my hot take.

Ken McDonald [01:24:32]:
Video's exciting, file systems boring.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:35]:
Yeah, that's all right.

Rob Campbell [01:24:37]:
My hot take is it's ButterFS, not BetterFS. I just can't believe it's not butter.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:43]:
So I just can't believe it. Uh, yeah, yeah, this, this is something, this is something I've learned doing business stuff too, that it's like there's a certain subset of things that either are just going to be boring, or you really want them to be boring. And there's a reason that it is an oriental curse: may you always live in interesting times. File systems, you really want to be boring.

Jeff Massie [01:25:10]:
Yeah, and you know, and like I said, a lot of times too, some of this stuff, it shows up in benchmarks but doesn't really show up in real-world applications. I mean, other than extreme examples.

Ken McDonald [01:25:23]:
Is that because the difference is so slight it's not humanly detectable?

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:29]:
It's because when you're doing a benchmark, it's such a homogenous— homogenous, yes. Yeah, it's such a homogenous use case. You're doing the one thing over and over and over and over again. And so, you know, any, any tiny derivation in that one use case just grows, and so suddenly you can see it. But in real-world computer use, you know, you're doing this, you're doing that, and you've got this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, it's very, very heterogeneous. That is to say, you're doing all of these different file system things all at the same time. And so you don't have just the one use case that really shows up at the top, unless it is a huge difference, either a huge speedup or a huge recession, revision.

Ken McDonald [01:26:08]:
Or something that is visible, like a 10-second delay after you click something.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:14]:
Exactly.

Jeff Massie [01:26:15]:
Right. It will. Performance-wise, you need about 10% uptick before you even really perceive it, humanly perceivable. Below that, it's kind of lost in the noise.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:27]:
Yep.

Jeff Massie [01:26:28]:
And here's a perfect—

Rob Campbell [01:26:29]:
I mean, it really depends. If you're talking about something that takes an hour and you cut off 10 minutes, I'll notice that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:36]:
That's not 10% though.

Rob Campbell [01:26:39]:
Yeah, I know.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:40]:
I don't want— I think you failed the math.

Rob Campbell [01:26:42]:
You're talking an hour and 40 minutes. Seconds and it takes and it cut it down to an hour and a half, I'll notice it.

Jeff Massie [01:26:47]:
We just have Rob because he's pretty, not for his, uh, now if it—

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:51]:
I don't know that it'd go that far.

Ken McDonald [01:26:55]:
If it takes 5 microseconds and you see a thousandth of a second delay, will you notice that?

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:03]:
Definitely not. Not unless you're doing it, you know, a million times.

Jeff Massie [01:27:07]:
And, you know, I can give a good hardware analogy to this is there's some new processors being released and you can— they're talking about they up, uptick the TDP, the power thermal results, but they're actually gaming and doing a lot of other stuff. If you say, oh, I turned it up so it now has 110-watt TDP, a lot of times you're not running but like 80. So it's like you can— oh, I uncorked it. You're not hitting the limit anyway. It's just not, uh, you're outside of benchmarks. You're just not hammering it enough.

Ken McDonald [01:27:44]:
Yeah, like hammering that keyboard when you're typing in those commands.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:50]:
Keyboard.

Jeff Massie [01:27:51]:
I can't type fast enough to bog down my processor.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:53]:
Yeah, well, speaking of commands, it is time for Command Line Tips. Well, it's almost time. We're going to take one more quick break, and then we're going to end out the show with our favorite command line tips for the week. We'll be right back. Let's get to command line tips. We're gonna let Rob go first, and he has a very posh command line tip for us. What do you got for us, Rob?

Rob Campbell [01:28:15]:
Oh my posh. So that is my command line tip. Do you like to rice your computer, as they say? A lot of Linux folks love to customize their Linux desktop till their heart's content. But I don't hear about a lot of people customizing their shell, their command line. Well, OhMyPosh lets you theme and customize your shell. So for those watching, you could see a little bit what it— this is just one of the themes. And you could see a little bit how I have customized the, uh, the breadcrumb, I guess, to, uh, I don't know, look a little fancier. And there are directions on the site to manually install this, but next week I'm going to show you an easier way to install and manage Oh My Posh.

Rob Campbell [01:29:17]:
And you can go through and see all the various themes that they have available.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:23]:
Oh, so we got to wait for next week to actually do the install. You're teasing us this week. Such a tease. All right. Well, that's fine. That looks pretty interesting though. I will definitely have to take a look at that. In fact, what I will do, I'll come back next week and I will listen to what Rob has to say about doing the install and maybe get it going then.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:41]:
All right, Ken, what is MC?

Ken McDonald [01:29:46]:
Well, this is one I'm surprised we have not covered.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:50]:
Ah, yes.

Ken McDonald [01:29:51]:
Have you ever heard of Midnight Commander?

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:53]:
Midnight Commander, yes. That was an old, was it a DOS program first?

Jeff Massie [01:29:59]:
Yes.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:00]:
I think.

Jeff Massie [01:30:01]:
DOS originally.

Ken McDonald [01:30:03]:
And let me switch my.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:08]:
Yeah, that's Opera. I don't think that's the one you wanted to show off.

Ken McDonald [01:30:11]:
I don't know why, but today I'm having to keep going in and select the monitor that I want to use. Uh-huh. But here's Midnight Commander, and some of y'all may remember this if you've used it in the bygone days, but it's a great way to go into from the terminal. Now I'm going to go ahead and quit out of this, and as I've got in the, uh, show notes, it's got mc as the actual command. Well, find that F10. Oops.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:03]:
This is, this is interesting to go and poke at their GitHub. It's been around for a very long time, but it's still being maintained.

Jeff Massie [01:31:11]:
Yeah, 94.

Rob Campbell [01:31:16]:
Even has the old DOS blue.

Ken McDonald [01:31:17]:
There we go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:18]:
Yep, the good old days.

Ken McDonald [01:31:22]:
And I'm going to go back up here because you can put the directories that you want to open up in beside it. And if you use man mc, you can see what the various options are when you launch it. As you saw, I just launched it and it opened up with both panels having the same directory. But with this one, I can go in and it's got the, uh, my Downloads directory on the left side. I can use the Tab key to go over to the right side, and this is my home directory. You go in, you can Find items. Let's see. Here's my avatars that I keep.

Ken McDonald [01:32:10]:
Here's the one for the current show. And you gotta, you can hit F1 and this will give you the main help screen and to go to the interactive help facility from here. I just hit enter and it gives you the various keys that you can use to manage around. And escape will exit out of that. It also provides mouse support, so I can click up here and I can go to info. And as you saw, I went to the left one and it gives the info about the file current-avatar.png, and it shows that it was created today.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:06]:
Yeah, so apparently Midnight Commander was a clone of Norton Commander, which was first released way back in, uh, 1986. Yeah, and of course that date got me going down the, the, uh, rabbit hole. Of did either of these show up on the Computer Chronicles. Midnight Commander did not. I wonder if Norton Commander did.

Ken McDonald [01:33:28]:
I bet that one did, probably.

Jeff Massie [01:33:34]:
I might have been thinking of Norton Commander on DOS, not Midnight.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:39]:
Yeah, it says so. The AI says that it was. And here's a 1990, uh, Home PCs episode of Computer Chronicles. So I'll have to watch that later. I love the Computer Chronicles. I, I Especially the ones from like the '80s and early '90s. Something about them are just, they're just great.

Ken McDonald [01:33:58]:
But I do recommend playing around with Midnight Commander. You may find it a great alternative to using the default file manager that comes with your system on occasion.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:11]:
Yeah. All right. Well, what if you just need to leave yourself a note? Jeff, you got anything you'd help us out?

Jeff Massie [01:34:19]:
I do. Memos, which is a free open source note-taking app. Open source freedom. While a lot of other applications try and do it all, Memos is pretty much just focused on taking notes. So there's not a, a monster array of things that it also does in addition. It focused on notes. Uh, when typing notes, you can easily add tags and So then you can— everything, things become searchable because it uses a markdown language. You can easily format your notes, organize ideas quickly without ever really leaving the keyboard.

Jeff Massie [01:34:56]:
You can reference past notes, you can have things linked, you know, past notes linked to your current notes, multiple ways you can search and filter. And if you're hosting, so this is set up also so you can, you can host it yourself to various people. You can set it so there's security options, so you can see— set who can see it. So you can have like private or just tag certain people so they, they can only see it, or you can open it up to everyone. So it, it's kind of flexible, like if you had a small group or family setting where you wanted to collect notes for whatever, whatever thing you're doing, a project Linux, you know, whatever you got. The link is to an article which does talk about Windows, but don't worry, I didn't go full Rob on all you, on everyone. If you want to look at the link in the article, you can go to the GitHub page where they have both source and precompiled binaries for Linux. They do recommend you run it in a Docker container and they talk about how you set that up.

Jeff Massie [01:36:06]:
Um, but the thing I kind of liked is I think it makes a lot of sense for those who want to share information with smaller groups of people, like I said, like families, educational uses, small teams, you know, maybe you got a gaming group that you want to have a central little repository of notes and you just want to self-host it without putting it all over the internet. So yeah, take a look. Very cool. Like a look at memos.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:30]:
Very cool. All right, uh, so I've got a command line tip that I'm sort of surprised that we haven't ever covered, but I've not seen it in our notes. I don't think we have talked about it, and that's ClamAV. And so this is— you normally see this run on like mail servers to try to, to try to catch malicious attachments, but you can actually run it on your local machine and run do an antivirus scan on your local Linux machine. And this is particularly interesting and useful if you find yourself, like I have recently, in a position where for compliance reasons, you've got to have an up-to-date antivirus scanner on your machine. And you really don't want to install something closed source on your primarily open source Linux machine. So I went looking and remembered ClamAV. And, uh, it does— you can, you can do an install.

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:24]:
It's actually quite easy to do an install on Fedora, which is where I've got it. And then you can just manually run ClamScan to run a very quick scan. Then of course you can use either your— I'll show it to you real quick. You can use either your built-in package manager or there is a screen, a command that is dedicated to doing updates, which is— let's see, I had it here a moment ago— Fresh Clam. Fresh Clam is the signature updater, and then you can just run clamscan. You can use it as a root or as an individual user, and so it'll load all of those, um, all of those things up into into memory and then run through everything in your home folder. And it gives you a quick scan. It looks like, uh, it looks like Restream has completely failed to actually share my, uh, my screen here, but that's all right.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:32]:
It works, I promise. It looks really great here. I'm sorry nobody else is able to see it. Uh, but anyway, ClamScan, if so, if one, you want to be able to scan things, or two, if you are required to have an antivirus on your Linux machine for compliance reasons, you might want to think about it. As well.

Ken McDonald [01:38:51]:
Yeah, and I was thinking I'd covered this ages ago, but I don't— couldn't find it in our command.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:00]:
Yeah, I know if we, if we have talked about it as a tip, it would have been a long time ago. So maybe we, maybe we covered it.

Ken McDonald [01:39:06]:
It's not even in the command line spreadsheet.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:10]:
Yeah, maybe we covered it as a story at some point instead of as a tip.

Rob Campbell [01:39:14]:
And always vision. All of these tips today have been brought to you as free as speech.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:24]:
Free Libre, open source software.

Rob Campbell [01:39:26]:
Libre. Free as in speech.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:29]:
Yes.

Ken McDonald [01:39:30]:
They've been paid for with blood, sweat, and in some cases, tears.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:36]:
I would say the blood is probably the most optional one there. I don't always bleed while I'm programming.

Rob Campbell [01:39:42]:
Sometimes my fingertips.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:44]:
Yeah. I mean, I have cut myself open reaching into a computer before. That has happened multiple times.

Rob Campbell [01:39:48]:
Sometimes you just get a bloody nose because it's so dry.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:51]:
Well, that's a little different.

Ken McDonald [01:39:52]:
Sharp edges on those cases can draw a little bit of blood.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:56]:
Yep. That's the one.

Ken McDonald [01:39:57]:
All right.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:58]:
That is the show. Although I know a couple of us have some stuff to plug here at the end. We'll let Rob go first. He is going to tell us about his stuff, places where you can donate coffee to him and all of that good stuff. What you got?

Rob Campbell [01:40:11]:
Yes. So for those of you want to get more of me, you can come connect with me at robertpcampbell.com. That's my website. On there's links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Bluesky, my Mastodon, and a place to donate coffee to me. And I also want to thank— I forgot to look this up beforehand— Mike, who bought 4 coffees. This was before the last show. I wasn't here last weekend. So after the show before, who bought 4 coffees, one for each of us.

Rob Campbell [01:40:41]:
He says, ULS remains the most entertaining way to keep up with developments. Thanks for keeping it up. One for you and one for George, Paul, and Ringo. Thank you, Mike.

Jeff Massie [01:40:56]:
Now, who is who, I wonder?

Jonathan Bennett [01:40:59]:
Nice. I actually claim John. That's me.

Rob Campbell [01:41:07]:
Well, John. Yeah. I don't know.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:09]:
Rob can't be John. This just doesn't work. Anyway.

Ken McDonald [01:41:12]:
Who was the quiet one?

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:14]:
I don't remember.

Rob Campbell [01:41:15]:
I mean, obviously I'm John because he said you, which is me. George, Paul, Ringo. So.

Ken McDonald [01:41:21]:
Sure. No, you make me think more of Paul.

Rob Campbell [01:41:24]:
Hey, you tell that to Mike.

Jeff Massie [01:41:26]:
I just want to thank Mike just for the simple fact that I don't owe Rob any money now.

Rob Campbell [01:41:33]:
Yeah, we're free.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:34]:
Nice.

Rob Campbell [01:41:35]:
I still owe the other two.

Jeff Massie [01:41:36]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:37]:
I think you owe me two coffees now. Anyway, Ken, what you got to close the show out?

Ken McDonald [01:41:43]:
Well, this week I've got a link in the show notes that takes you to an article by Marcus Nestor. This week he wrote about a free classic 2D jump and run side scroller game that distracted me for several hours this week.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:02]:
Super Tux.

Jeff Massie [01:42:05]:
Yes.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:06]:
A good old Mario clone.

Ken McDonald [01:42:08]:
Very cool.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:09]:
All right, Jeff.

Jeff Massie [01:42:11]:
Not much to cover, so I'll just have a technology haiku. Errors have occurred. We won't tell you where or why. Lazy programmers. Have a great week, everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:25]:
Great. All right, thank you guys for being here. It has been a lot of fun. Uh, so as everybody knows, I normally plug something over at Hackaday. It's one of my other places to do things. We talk about FLOSS Weekly. Today I'm going to plug something in Hackaday that is no longer mine, and that is the This Week in Security column is back. I am no longer the one doing it because my plate was full to overflowing.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:50]:
Mike Kershaw of Kismet fame. Mike is great and he has done 2 or 3 columns now. He's back to doing them once a week. And I have been able to go back and enjoy those as a reader rather than as the writer.

Jeff Massie [01:43:03]:
And I am loving it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:43:05]:
So if you want to get your weekly written security fix, Hackaday's This Week in Security, I recommend it. And then of course, while you're there, check out Floss Weekly too. But we appreciate everybody that's here with us and whether you get us live or on the download. And we will be back next week with the Untitled Linux Show.