You guys can't record now as well.
All right, recording.
I see waveforms means it's working tap tap.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
OK, somebody's got their volume way up
and just heard us bang on the mic.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I can punch the mic if you want me to.
No, don't do that.
OK, it's probably not something over.
All right, Steve,
you can do the claps when you feel like it.
No, Tyler's on a secret mission today, he's not joining us.
All right. On the count of three.
Three, two, one.
That was horrendous.
I'm pretty sure Steve was counting to four in his head.
He made it to four and then he said, oh, right, I have to clap.
All right.
We're really bad at that.
Oh, the one to it from two weeks ago wasn't actually that bad.
Maybe maybe it's perfect, and it's just Steve's internet slowing him down.
Could be. You never know.
It's fine. It is.
The three weeks ago, for whatever reason, halfway through,
Josh went out of sync and no clue why.
He was like, well, I think I figured out why.
Yeah, because for some reason
my system ran an automatic update, which re-enabled Pulse Audio.
So I literally changed sound servers in the background during last week's episode.
That's awesome.
That shouldn't even really be possible, right?
Should it? Because it is possible.
It is possible. It happened for me.
If you forget to if you forget to mask the system
deservice for the Pulse Audio socket, then it can't happen.
Oh, you were running Gentoo.
No, I was actually running.
I was not running Gentoo. Was that Solus?
I think. Yeah, it was Solus.
It happens sometimes.
Well, because an update shouldn't be able to kill a running process.
Oh, trust me. And then restart one.
It depends on your package manager.
It depends on a package manager.
Not all now on your archivist distributions.
Pac-Man doesn't automatically restart services, but, you know,
distributions like, you know, that use the package or apt.
They research system deservices and restart, restart
running processes that aren't listed as critical.
And our distros who forgot to include the correct packages
like zero Linux and the right or that right services enabled.
That should definitely not be even possible.
That shouldn't be that shouldn't be even a feature.
No, well, it happened to me.
I forgot lip pipewire and I forgot to add the user to real time group
by not adding the user to to the real time group.
Every time there's an update to pipewire, if it runs in the background,
it restarts pipewire.
Since the user is not in the real time group, it doesn't remember the setting.
That's that really should not be possible.
And it was possible because I did think to me.
No, no, no, no. I mean, I'm not I'm not saying that it's not possible.
I'm just saying it really shouldn't be possible.
I guess something that they should fix, because think about it.
Think about some of the services that run in your system that have to stay up
and run it.
I mean, what if it kills kills something that is like
an Xorg service or something or Kaywin or I mean.
So in in the Debian base,
there is actually a file in your Etsy app folder
that actually manages all the services
that the app will absolutely refuse to restart.
And in fact, it will prompt you going like, hey,
would you like to restart these services?
I'm sure you might have seen that before.
And the audio server isn't listed there.
Why would it's listed it?
Or I don't think it's listed on Debian.
And I think Ubuntu does list it.
But how long has it been since I ran Ubuntu?
I don't really know.
It's your next challenge.
And another and another thing on
Ubuntu is not my next challenge, because tomorrow I'm looking at clear Linux.
Yeah. Is that is that the Intel, the Intel developed one?
Yeah. And you know who happens, who here happens to have a full Intel system
that supports every every single thing that they that they say
that I need for the distro?
Mamma Mia!
All right, gents, let's go ahead and get started.
We're recording. All right.
We're going to we're going to.
Hey, guys, welcome to the tangent cast.
No,
we're not going to have any tangents.
We've never had any of those.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Oh, all right. All right.
I'll get me started on package managers then.
Yeah. All right.
Me, then Josh and Steve.
OK, we clarify.
We clarified it this week.
Make sure everybody heard me this time.
I think I think someone talked over me last time.
All right.
Steve, you're last.
Hey, everybody, welcome to Linuxcast.
I'm your host, Matt.
And I'm Josh.
Dark Zero, Steve.
Yeah, he's that guy.
Tyler is off this week.
So we're we're going to run with just three of us.
This is a booboo on his arm.
I'm not sure what he actually did.
He never explained his.
I'm sure it was from kind of some kind of escapade.
It's from it's from his last secret mission.
That's what it is.
All right. So this is a Linuxcast.
We talk about Linuxy things.
That's what we do.
Sometimes we do just like a regular topic.
But this week, we're going to go back to normal.
We're going to talk about some news and we have news.
So before we jump into that, we always talk about the things
that we have been doing in the Linux land.
So, Josh, why don't you tell us what you've been doing
in open source this week?
Uh, so we pushed some contributions of bug reports to KDE.
Their bug tracker is toxic, like usual.
I'm sure Steve, who very recently reported a bug earlier this week,
completely understands every single pain with it with the bugzilla
bug tracker that KDE uses.
Fantastic piece of software works perfectly fine every time
as soon as you as soon as you learn how to use it.
I got solo steps pissed off at me yet again, and this time I'm not banned.
And then other than that, we've been ripping Blu-rays again
because we because, you know, in our last hardware failure,
I didn't realize that it impacted my my video library.
You haven't you had to re-burn all of your.
I'm re-ripping. We're on disk 17 of 30.
Sounds like a fantastic time, I'm telling you.
So we just download. Thankfully, there's a Docker container that automates it.
Of course there is. There's a Docker container for everything.
All right, Steve, what have you been up to this week?
Where shall I begin?
The beginning or from the middle of the end?
All right.
Well, the thing that the thing that involved the Linux,
there was some pretty big news coming from your front earlier this week.
Yes, there's a there's a small fire that lit up in zero land,
but an understandable one.
That's why I want to bite.
I want your your guys's opinion.
I'm going to keep it short since we're pressed for time.
But there's a fire in the who shall we trust land?
Should we trust zero Linux or shouldn't we?
And I had a four hour audio debate yesterday with one on my server
all about this issue, the security issue regarding the security issue in zero Linux.
What do you guys think should we include?
Should users who download a distro blindly trust it or they should?
I don't know, study it before before they use it or whatever, because
we've been we have we have someone who's in in in the security
who is very security conscious
that's worried about the TKG
first that we include for Nvidia.
It's a whole debate, but suffice it to say that.
Wait, those developers act, they don't instill trust.
I still opted to use their their shit.
So what Nvidia packages are you using?
He wants the TKG patch one.
He KG.
If you type TKG and video dash all TKG, you will find it.
But there's there's a thing going on that they don't describe their commits.
They don't tell us what they're doing.
They expect us to read commits.
There was 10 billion commits to understand what they're doing every every day.
Should we trust them? Should we not?
The only thing.
But other than that, in the Linux land, I've been heavily
studying Cosmic Desktop and I discovered by studying it,
I discovered that it's coming to Arch.
So with that being said,
I make zero.
That's what I'm doing.
OK, I see that they're not tagging releases.
They're not they're not doing it correctly, but.
It's a whole mess.
That's all I can say.
All right. So my thought on the the whole trusting of the random distro things,
like if you if.
If you're only going to download distributions that you,
quote unquote, trust because of regions,
the only distro you probably ever install would be like Fedora or something
like because they're completely, you know, anti proprietary stuff, right?
Or maybe like Geeks or one of the other Libre Linux
kernel using distributions, I guess.
But then how can you trust those developers?
I mean, trust on the Internet is really I mean, how can you trust anybody?
But I mean, if you're so privacy and security conscious
that you won't trust a random one, are you really going to trust
a corporate back distribution as well?
I mean, maybe you should.
Matt, maybe you should maybe you should just move to the woods
and not have any electricity and just sit there and read books.
But then how can you possibly trust the books?
You know, because books have information that could be biased, you know.
So you can't read books.
You can't do anything.
You're just going to sit there in your woods with some fire.
Thank you, because I found the repository and I pulled it in.
I don't see any tag releases, so I pulled down a lot of tags.
They do have they do have a lot of tags,
but they name them by kernel name or kernel version or whatever.
But thank you, Matt, because even can you trust Nvidia itself?
Because Nvidia now is including a lot of telemetry crap
in their drivers for Windows and who knows, maybe for Linux as well.
What the TKG team are doing are is removing this telemetry
and optimizing the drivers and fixing issues that Nvidia themselves won't.
Like Vuxry does with Wayland.
I trusted and Glorious Eggroll is using it
in is using some of their patches in their in his
in his distro.
And that doesn't mean he is higher than me.
He knows low level stuff.
But if it's just that one package set that that person was worried about,
it's really easy to switch to a different driver.
I mean, you could go to an open source driver, use Nuvo or whatever
how it's called, you could do that.
Use the vanilla drivers from the arch repository.
And he and they asked me to, for example, to add an option in my tool to.
OK, vanilla or TKG add more confusion.
So I have an easier solution for you, Steve.
Just force them to read and accept the package build.
It's Arch Linux.
They can figure it out.
Then I told them, I told them, read the commits and everything.
He's like, I'm not going to waste time.
Well, then he shouldn't be using Arch Linux.
Yeah, I can't. I can't.
It's a whole debate.
But it's like this debate that I got in with got in with a guy over
in a Discord chat of all places where he's just like, I don't want to.
I don't want to use it because privacy concerns like, well,
then get the fuck off of Discord.
Yeah, exactly.
I use Discord through a VPN connected to a virtual machine
connected via the Brave browser Tor connection.
Doesn't matter because I'm still logging into my HTTPS
Discord that encrypts and verifies against my local machine.
Well, speaking of browsers, this is a very small tangent.
I'm back on Vivaldi because Vivaldi is on iOS.
I'm so happy.
And I'm still on Firefox.
I want Vivaldi to be good, but it's not.
OK, so iOS is super good.
It has this bug.
So one of my favorite feature of the new Vivaldi is the workspaces feature.
It's fantastic, right?
It allows me to have all my tabs open.
It's like I'd ask you to have tab groups inside of basically a much larger tab group.
It's great.
But for some reason, when I sign in to Vivaldi using the Vivaldi account,
it automatically starts not remembering the workspaces.
Like it just cramps everything into one.
And it's a horrendous bug.
I close tabs. Lame.
Talk to them. Don't worry.
I know the people over there.
Well, I filed a bug report, but I don't think it'll ever get fixed
because I've seen several people have the same problem.
So I don't know.
Talk to them. I'm your liaison. I'm your liaison.
I'm using Vivaldi right now in my VM, but I haven't signed in so that I can't.
So the bug doesn't affect me.
But if you don't sign in, of course, you can't sync anything, of course,
but it doesn't really matter.
All right. Anyways, for me personally, I have been so.
I decided that I was missing a challenge,
so I decided to challenge myself to abandon Vim,
or in my case, Neo Vim, and start using Nano.
And I was at least smart enough to say a month and not six months.
I'm so glad that it didn't say six months.
That would have been a nightmare.
So I've been using it now for, I think, five days.
I think that today is like day five, something like that.
And wow, it's Nano shit.
It's so bad.
The default key bindings are garbage, like hot garbage.
So I've changed all those.
I've spent days making it so that it actually works out well.
But the thing is so and clicking on links
I just found out today is apparently impossible for me.
I don't I don't know why.
It just will not let me click on links.
I know control click is supposed to do it,
but it says something about tags not being available or whatever.
But that didn't work.
But the thing I'm missing most is visual mode.
Like, I didn't even realize that I used visual mode in Vim so often.
But apparently I did.
And now every time I want to select multiple lines inside of Nano,
like apparently you can't do that without your mouse.
You know, like, what is this?
Do I live in a cave?
Why don't you see a mouse?
It's it's so it's so it's ridiculous.
Because you're a human, you use a mouse.
No, I'm a Vim user.
I don't use a mouse.
In fact, I've completely disabled my mouse inside of the Vim config.
So also also.
I haven't used the arrow keys this much in probably six years on.
Like I got to do it.
One of my keyboards doesn't even have arrow keys.
And so every time I have to use a go down a level,
now I have to switch to a function key in order to do it.
It's just dumb.
So, yeah, I'm having growing pains when it comes to Nano.
You mentioned it has a configuration file.
It does have a configuration file.
Has a default. Does it do?
Oh, it has tons of options.
There's a ton of options you can do.
You can remap all of the key bindings that you want to, which I've done.
You can remove that stupid fucking title bar at the top, which is just, I mean,
why do you need to remember what file you're working in?
It doesn't. No, no, no.
The default title bar and Nano does not tell you what
what file you're working.
All it says is Nano.
No, listen to me.
All by default, that title bar at the top.
All it does is tell you that it's Nano with the version number.
That's all it does.
The the file name is at the bottom.
Oh, yeah, that was at the top.
No, it's at the bottom.
So you can get rid of the title bar, which is a waste of space.
Also, you can add, you know, line numbers by default,
set how it's supposed to wrap instead of having the one line
that just goes off into infinity, but which is the apparently the default.
Whoever thinks that's a good default is fucking retarded.
Sorry, I shouldn't say that.
They're really dumb.
Anyways, I just have some serious, serious issues with Nano.
Maybe it's just like like maybe a week from now I'll have been used to it.
But honestly, I dread opening up a terminal in writing right now.
I've seriously considered just going back to LibreOffice
to do all my writing.
That's how bad it's fine.
It's fine.
Because at this point, you're now getting used to the Nano workflow,
which means that we're not too much too.
Here, not too much longer.
Sometime this year, we will get you back in using Emacs.
I said for financial incentive.
Yeah, financial incentive.
Significant financial incentive, not significant.
Yeah, it's two stakes, not just one.
No, that's not significant.
That's not financial incentive.
Oh, that's not financial incentive.
OK, well, money, money, money, money, money or go or go to DT.
No, I've had I've I've tried Emacs many times in the past.
I'm just you've never you've never tried Emacs.
You tried Doom Emacs.
True, but that's because I wasn't getting.
I'd immediately install evil mode on vanilla, so I might as well just use Doom.
I don't know. Still not going to do it.
I was done with with Emacs the last time I made a video about it.
And I even said I was done.
I was like, it's just.
But it's beheaded, says Vim.
Vim does not have Tetris by default.
If you use Gentoo, you can call minus games and not have any of that.
Yeah. Well, I'm not using Gentoo either.
I got those own problems anyway.
So that's what I've been I've been struggling with this entire week.
Also banged up my knee, which is the reason why we didn't have a podcast last week.
So it has not been a very good week at all, but that's OK.
Thank you, watch, for beeping at me.
I appreciate that.
It's like a third time so far.
I know I should actually turn it off.
All right, there we go.
I'm like I honestly thought I was hearing like the Kim Possible
beeps for like the old Disney show.
Well, it's just I forget that it's sometimes on.
Anyways, that's it for this week in Foss.
We're going to go ahead and move on to the news.
Let's see here, Josh, why don't you do your first link?
Oh, my first link.
So have you guys ever heard of Weston and used Weston before?
Weston, no. Weston.
Oh, well, in the event you got in the event that you guys don't know anything about it
and you both gave me strange looks as soon as I mentioned it.
Weston is the is the reference
window composite compositing software for Wayland.
It is officially maintained by by the developers behind Wayland.
And it is just reference.
And they push out big updates this week with
multi GPU support a and as well as support for screen tearing.
You'll see something for a pipeline back end,
but that was already implemented in all the other window compositors.
But the big the big thing with multi GPU support is that right now,
as as it works, most display compositors only let you use one GPU at a time.
The way this multi GPU support work will be more like how Nvidia Optimus
works on on laptops right now, where you can specify
that you only want to run specific applications inside
with using your dedicated GPU.
So that's actually showing how to get that enabled.
And and they're doing it as a proper protocol,
protocol via a portal in Wayland.
Which means that it'll be coming to known KDE
and WL routes all at the same time, as soon as they actually,
you know, get to actually enabling the portal.
So they're going to make hybrid graphics much easier on Wayland than it is on.
Yes. Yes. OK.
And then because because we all want to play our video games on our laptops,
they're allowing us to enable screen tearing on Wayland.
Per app on a per application basis, which
I understand that, you know, screen tearing looks horrible.
But in the context of playing a video game, you want to push your frame rates
because, you know, the higher the frame rate, the smoother the gameplay is.
Supposedly. And using using vertical sync or some form of adapt
of adaptive sync can actually lower the frame rate and cause jitter in your game
play. And what what this protocol does is it this disables the enforced V sync
because on Wayland, it's always been that every frame has to be drawn perfectly.
And you that would cause games to stutter.
You suffer lower frame rates than usual and so on.
Well, they're saying that they're they're they're saying that now we can just enable
it on a per application basis so that you don't have to worry about that.
So our video games are going to work even better over under Wayland already.
Yeah. Can I ask you a question, Josh?
I know you're the Wayland guy here.
You're much more of a Wayland fan than I am.
I'm running Wayland right now.
Fantastic. I'm so proud of you.
He said he said dryly.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but global support for key
bindings is still not a thing outside of hyperland, right?
It is still not a thing outside of hyperland or KD.
OK, so they worked on multi GPU support,
which affects a very small amount of people, probably, right?
Before they worked on global key binding support.
You know why they're not working on global key bindings?
No, I don't know why. I'm going to tell me because
because when you enable support for global key bindings,
you're also enabling support for key loggers.
OK, I.
Yep. Now, the way that Katie and hyperland
both do it is when you hold your when you hold your modifier key
because you have to do it through a modifier key, you'll be able to grab.
Basically, what it does is it ghosts the window into focus.
That way, your global hot key for the application works.
And then so technically,
you're bringing that window into focus.
So what you're saying, it's unlikely that we'll get
a proper global key binding support out of Wayland
is not a hack, which is what you're describing ever.
At the rate that current things are going?
Yes, until somebody influenced like a proper method to get it
that everybody can actually agree on.
So Wayland will never be ready.
In your eyes. I want to know.
It's working perfectly fine for me.
But then again, I'm also using a lot of applications that support web sockets.
Yeah. Well, it seems so the whole portals thing.
Got to remember, I'm not a developer, so it seems like they could use.
I don't know.
It just feels weird to me that they focused on the multi GPU thing
before they focused on other thing.
But apparently, they're not going to focus on other thing ever because of some.
Security is. Yeah.
It's understandable.
I think I see it. It's understandable.
It's understandable if you're trying to be like this,
the ultimate super perfectionist ever.
Right. If you're trying.
That's what they're trying to do, because the big thing,
the biggest thing with the Wayland code base is that they do not want it
to fall down the same rabbit hole that Xorg did.
So and a lot of the a lot of the code for the Wayland protocols
is actually really, really cleanly written.
See, you're never ever, ever going to create a.
Program of any sort without some kind of bug or flaw.
OK, you're just never going to.
I'm not saying that what I'm saying is that they're not trying to make it bug free.
They're trying to make it so that it's maintainable. Right.
And by making it maintainable, they they also want to they want to make it
both maintainable and secure at the same time.
OK, well, I can understand not wanting to open up a.
A security flaw.
You know, on purpose, I can understand that.
But also, you're going to hamstring yourself
not only with this area, but other places, you know, just, you know, if you're not.
I'm sure I'm sure somebody is going to find a other than Voxrey for hyperland.
Voxrey is a unique edge case.
I'm sure somebody is going to figure out a way around this.
It's just a matter of time. But.
Now I understand why they're doing it,
because today's security is the most important thing,
especially the thing that happened with me and the TKG drivers.
We need to now be more aware of things
because he passed just got hacked.
I'm not going to continue to use Xorg until they pry out of my cold dead hands.
I'm saying, same here, same here.
We're in the same boat, brother.
I'm just not.
Every time I try Wayland, either something goes wrong or I just feel like.
Why?
Like, there's always this question of why, when it comes to why do I like?
I'm 100% positive.
And from everything I've read, everything Josh has told me,
other people told me that there are a ton of development reasons
why Wayland exists and why Wayland is better.
But from a user facing perspective.
Oh, no, as users, it's absolutely horrible for us.
But I just haven't seen any reason why I want to switch to it right there.
When you come like, for example, just for example, like
I had the same thing with Pipewire when Pipewire first came out.
Like, why is this better than Pulse Audio?
Like Pulse Audio already breaks a lot.
But at least when it came with like came to Pipewire, when they transitioned to it,
it was mostly a seamless transition, right?
Yes, things still break.
But you didn't have to worry about finding alternatives to literally everything.
OBS, you know, started supporting Pipewire and everything.
You know, Firefox and, you know, your your music players and all this stuff
started supporting Pipewire, and it just was a
maybe it wasn't a seamless transition, but it wasn't a transition
that put the onus of transitioning onto the user.
You know, I mean, like you when you transition to Wayland,
you basically have to do, I mean, unless you're using GNOME or KDE.
Outside of that, it's very much a user facing.
It's your stuff that you have to figure out how to find,
you know, make sure things work on.
And if you don't, you can't find something that, you know,
where, you know, if you can't find alternatives or whatever, it's your fault.
Have you ever used X-Free 86 before? No.
OK, the transition for X, X-Free 86 to X11
was worse than our transition to Wayland.
Because there was there was no layer of backwards compatibility of X-Wayland.
That just simply did not exist for X-Free 86.
So as a result, the transition to X11 was actually rougher than it is today.
You know, the biggest difference is that we're just we're on platforms
that are much more sociable than emailing listeners see channels.
But let me ask you this question, X-Wayland, in order to for an application
to support X-Wayland, the developer has to do something, right?
It's not probably not a lot of no, it just works.
OK, well, then it should be it should theoretically then just be fine.
But in my experience, it hasn't just, you know, been fine.
Anyways, I've talked to Tom Blue in the face.
X-Org is going to be mine until I die.
X-Org is dead to me.
It's just it's just a fanaticism over something that's not ready yet.
They want it to be ready.
Users are trying their best.
And I haven't seen a single person that switched or tested
hyperland or Wayland or anything Wayland related.
I've only seen them reinstalling and moving distro hopping to something
that uses X-Org because they either had a lot of issues or they didn't want
to even bother because the argument that you get a lot of the time
when it comes to Wayland is there are if your application doesn't work,
find alternatives.
But I haven't seen a single person bothering to find alternatives.
Well, I think for a long time, I think, you know,
find alternatives waiting for us to suggest them to them.
Yeah, I think that the biggest thing is that the people behind Wayland are Uber
and they did this with X-Org too, obviously, because the focus has to be on
GNOME, has to be on KDE, because that's what the vast majority of people
are going to use.
And the developers of other desktop environment,
window managers are going to be doing things on their own,
which means they're automatically going to be doing things a little bit
differently than GNOME or KDE.
So everything is not quite the same.
But also, it just it makes it feel not a cohesive strategy, right?
It just it feels really disjointed a lot of the time.
And, you know, but the thing is, I think that if you are like a norm,
the three of us are not normal users,
especially you, Josh, you're not a normal user.
I mean, we make videos about it.
So, of course, we're definitely not normal users.
But at the same time, the biggest thing is that I and I'm seeing this here
in the chat where people are going like,
I'm never going to switch to Wayland.
I'm just going to stick on X11 for life.
Are you going to maintain X11?
Are you going to maintain X11?
I'm going to continue.
Are you going to are you going to fork the Xorg project and maintain that?
Going to continue to use X11 as long as there are X11 window managers to use.
All right. I just I just wanted to ask because, you know,
they just barely had enough people for their for their last election.
Yeah. And it's just going to get worse.
I'm sure I'm sure it is, but we're we agree here.
All agree here that we're going to Matt and I will we're going to you.
What we Matt meant to say is we're going to continue using X11
until X11 itself.
I said nobody uses it anymore.
And all these projects go dormant and dead and become unusable.
I do. I don't think that it's too much to ask to want things to work.
You know, it's fine.
It's fine, Matt, because I'm working on a video series
where we look through every single possible compositor on Wayland.
And that right there is and I'm certain and I'm certain
that you'll find one that you like.
There's so many compositors and they all do something
that's a little bit differently.
And it's it's it's a mess.
And the thing thing when it comes to.
Xorg is that they all use Xorg.
Yes, you could find different compositors
and you found different window managers and all those things were separated.
With Wayland, they've tried to cram everything into being the same thing.
You know, it's the compositors, the windowing service.
It handles all the screen tearing nonsense.
It interfaces much closer with all the drivers and the hardware and stuff
than Xorg ever did. Right.
It's it's they've tried to.
So what you're saying is that you want to dedicate
display server in a separate with a separate composite
with a separate window manager.
And I have that. It's called Xorg.
OK, it's called Mir.
Yeah, but nobody uses Mir.
Nobody uses Mir.
OK, there's a there's a reason why Mir is a dead thing.
How many Steam games have you launched using Proton?
Are you telling me Proton uses Mir?
I'm telling you, GameScope uses Mir.
I don't know what GameScope even is.
On Steam Deck, yeah, GameScope is on.
I just want to think that I'm the the middle ground
between uber technical and new user, and I just want things to work.
If I were to use Kate, if I were to use GNOME, Wayland is ready.
OK, because most of the development to make Wayland really good
on is good in GNOME. Right.
Katie slowly getting there.
But Katie's has been bugger and shit forever.
Adding some more stuff to it to make even more buggy
is not going to be something that anybody notices.
It just continues to be buggy.
So not a big deal there.
But the problem is, is that I'm not a Katie or GNOME guy anymore.
I either prefer XFCE, which I'll be very interested
to see how XFCE does Wayland, because next version Wayland's coming.
But I'm also a window manager guy.
And once you delve into the window manager space,
Wayland becomes a fucking mess.
Right. It's just, you know, Sway is doing things their own way.
Hyperland's got his own stuff.
So you need a different portal between those different things if you need it.
And you need to know what portals are in order to do those things, which is fine.
I mean, you're not expecting a brand new user to use a window manager.
So you should have some technological know how to switch between packages
and stuff like that. It's fine.
But it's just a matter of.
I haven't found a single window manager out there where I could just install it
and know that it's going to work out of the box.
So, for example, if your name is not Josh,
you can install I3, have it work out of the box.
It just works, right?
You're not going to have, you know.
Sure. Once you get into configuring it and stuff like that,
you may end up having problems based on skill level problems.
It's not that I3 doesn't work for me or that it fails to launch or anything like that.
I just don't like the workflow for it.
Right. And I mean, that's a good point.
Not all window managers are for everybody.
But also fine.
Qtile, Xmonad, BSPWM.
You install those things right out of the box.
Bam. They work.
I've not seen a single Wayland compositor
that you can argue that that works that way.
It's I just haven't found Sway's the closest.
Sway is the closest.
But even then, once you get into the configuring it and finding alternatives
to all the programs and stuff like that, she is just.
Anyways, guys, which I said at the beginning, no tangents.
It's it's fine.
Can we talk about Mozilla selling out at least?
We're going to go to Steve next.
Oh, OK. Steve, your first link.
My first my first link.
It's talking about Plasma 6 and why I'm angry with them.
Not angry, just not really happy.
Oh, you want to continue the debate. All right.
It's not continuing the debate.
It's it's another part of the debate.
KDE decided to want to switch to Wayland by default.
And we have as maintainers to do the work and more work to disable Wayland
because we are Xorg fanatics, as Matt and I said.
But yeah, they're going to switch default better for better defaults.
Wayland, by example.
And they're going to switch
to double click by default, which that's the worst.
That's the worst change ever.
I think that's my favorite change.
Single click for life, man.
It's the way that that's what made Katie good.
Double click for life.
It's an option you can enable in Nautilus.
I know it's it's it's never hidden that feature from you.
It's an option you can enable in every single file manager.
I am actually except for Crusader Crusader doesn't have the option.
So yeah, I'm a double click guy.
I get off and I get my muscle.
I cannot get my muscle memory to get used to a single click.
Well, once you move laptops, I understand.
But once you move to it, you would never switch back.
The thing is, when I first started using Linux, I found I started
using the single click because I was a plasma guy
and it was single click by default back then.
And once you once you get used to it, you started that way.
I didn't start that way.
I'm coming from Windows and I come to this is simple.
A click is my first ever experience with single click
was when I accidentally executed a bash script.
That blew up my home directory.
So I have I think you understand my concern.
Honestly, hold on.
But let's just parse out that statement for just a minute.
Somewhere along the line, Josh, I'm assuming he was like five years old
or something when we managed to get to get into a file manager
somewhere and decided that it was a good idea to double click on a bash script.
Well, you see, my assumption is that the bash script was not executable
because, you know, when you back in the day, when you download files off the internet,
they didn't you didn't get file permissions with it yet.
So so it would just pull down with default file permissions.
Well, somehow I completely missed that the HCT protocol
enabled file for file permissions for Unix based operating systems.
So I didn't read that this bash script, which, you know,
normally I would just double click on, which would open a text editor
because that was my workflow at the time.
Right. And, you know, right click and specified open
and text editor like I do nowadays because I learned.
But, you know, I I I downloaded this bash script on the internet
because, you know, I just wanted to parse through real quick,
you know, just give it a good check before, you know, I executed it.
So I double left click.
Well, I single left clicked it, it's executed
and it wiped out my home director before I even knew what happened.
Oh, that sucks.
We started a war in the chat, by the way.
We've moved on from one Linux nerd battle, Wayland versus Xorg
to double click versus single click all in one session.
It's great.
It's fine.
Other thing they enabled by they changed,
not that made default is humongous thumbnail tab.
Yeah.
Now, when you click Alt tab, you get the preview of the application.
Applications.
I like that. That's what I use.
The cover flow alt tab on GNOME and on KDE.
So I'm good.
Oh, the thing that I said, they're bringing floating panels by default.
Just to guess it was at Nikolo that said that the reason why they're doing this
was because they didn't want to look like windows anymore.
Is that? Yes. OK.
Well, their solution prior on default KDE Plasma
was I would just pop up on the left side of the screen
and vertically sort through the tabs, which is something I never
I myself never really particularly enjoyed.
Well, my my problem with the vertical tab switcher
was that it occupied the same space as activities.
So if you were an activities user and accidentally, you know,
especially if you had a key buying that was similar to Alt tab,
maybe use control tab or something like that to switch between.
I think I think they're going to modify that as well.
But he didn't mention it.
I hope they're not the I hope they're not the same UI.
I hope that they I hope that they enable virtual virtual
workspaces by default instead of activities in Plasma six,
because, you know, I don't like activities.
All right. You guys know me.
I'm big. I hoard tabs, but I also hoard workspaces
and activities gives you more work.
So it is so the best thing about activity.
So you can set up four virtual workspaces and then use many different activities.
That means you can have as many
workspaces as you want without having to set up like 20 of them
and you think you're trying to figure out why your computer
doesn't want to shut down because, you know, you got like things open
and just random activity all the way over there.
And who shuts their computer down?
It's called reboot because I updated my kernel.
I just stand the same kernel. It's fine.
I'm sure it's fine.
There's it's not mentioned in this article, but Nicolo mentioned it
in one of his videos.
They're up there
rehauling the overview.
The overview will will also have
vertical.
They will allow you to have horizontal workspaces, vertical workspaces.
Are you talking about the expose thing that they stole from Mac?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Not not the man from they call it.
We stole it from Gnome.
Who stole it from Mac?
OK. Well, really, so
I think I'm actually had it before Mac probably did.
And I think anyway, early Gnome three.
Well, I don't know.
Expose and Mac has been around for a very long time.
So it'd be I don't know.
It doesn't matter because has anybody ever actually used that was a
feature? I used to use it.
Oh, not on Mac, but I have used the active.
I have used the activities overview on plasma.
On purpose or just by accident?
On purpose, because I was trying to turn plasma into Gnome.
Oh, OK.
Steve does a better job.
Also, get off my podcast.
I use expose at work because we had to.
We used to have the calculator and the tax, the taxes
and whatever an expose we need to do quickly.
I mean, when you have lots and lots of windows open
and using a floating window manager, that kind of workflow is actually
a bit of a game changer, especially, you know, if you're if you're
not doing the proper thing where you're splitting windows
into different virtual workspaces and everything.
And and back then and with Apple, just the gesture thing,
you just do that and you get the expose and
you can do your your stuff quickly when the customer
is right there in front of you waiting.
So that helped a lot.
But also in the overview that you're going to be able to
vertically stack workspaces.
Actual workspaces vertically stacked them in or windows
vertically stacked them, or you can have tiles of of work.
Yeah, but they're not dynamic yet, are they?
No, not yet.
I hear all working on it.
I hear all these features that they're adding for the next version of plasma.
I was like, oh, man, that's going to wait.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
No, wait, of course, there will be bugs.
That's that's inherent with every new feature. But
starting next year, they're going to release only two versions
during every year.
And during the in-between time, they're going to be squashing bugs.
So we they said, expect more bugs
to be squashed than ever before.
I hope that's true, because
KD is one of those things you just want to love.
But every time you use it, it just pisses all over your face.
They're slowing down on the releases.
They're slowing down on the releases.
And they're going to be squashing more bugs and more bugs
because they admitted that they have way more bugs than a project should have.
Especially the fact that, you know, how I praised
I kept praising
Dolphin for having this
feature where it remembers sessions.
Every time I open it, it remembers where I left off.
Well, that feature decided to break in the latest KDE Gear release.
It has to be something to do with an underlying technology,
because Crusader apparently uses that same thing
because it also broke in Crusader for a little while.
It has been fixed in Crusader, thank goodness.
But it hasn't been fixed, but it has been fixed.
But it won't come to KDE until KDE Gear
24.04.23.04.2.
Yeah, I think Crusader handles all that packaging on its own.
So it's kind of separated out because it's not default.
For KDE, it's until June 6th.
It's coming on June 6th.
But the developer and the maintainer said one thing at the end
and the bug in the bug report.
It's not merged yet, and it's not for sure going to be merged.
But there is a new version of Dolphin coming in KDE Gear
and the new version of KDE on June 6th.
The fix might be there.
It might not be there.
So I'm like,
come on.
Yeah, just download Crusader, you'll be happy.
Anyway, that's my news article.
It's a simple one, because the next one, my second one is the big one.
OK, because I have so little to say about it.
But anyways, the my first one is that Microsoft has
is trying to seduce Firefox into ditching Google and switching to Bing.
Now, I support this change.
Money, money, money.
Really? Yeah, I actually do.
You think you think Bing is better than Google or you have other reasons?
Now, I honestly think that Firefox has been monopolized by Google for too long.
So it's nice to show that they're at least willing to talk to other people.
So them switching to Bing is probably not a bad eye.
It is not.
It allows Firefox to be a little bit more competitive with their prices.
You go like, hey, we switched to Bing away from you, Google.
You're going to pay us even more.
Because every time, every strategy,
every time that that Google has renewed with Firefox,
the amount has actually never changed.
And that is not how you run a business.
Every time you renew, every time you go to renew contracts,
the business is supposed to upcharge.
Yes, it's been like 400 million.
Yeah, yeah.
So honestly, Firefox, I honestly think that if Microsoft is actually
if these talks are actually happening and Microsoft is willing to pony up
some money, money to Mozilla, then yes, Mozilla should go with the change.
But Bing is the wrong one.
I mean, yeah, Bing is the wrong search engine.
But at the same time, it's not that hard to change, change the search engine
in Firefox. In fact, it's easier than it is in Chrome.
Yeah, I always change it to search anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
But yeah, yeah, I think I understand your point.
I think I agree with you, Josh.
If they can manage to get more money out of it.
I'm glad that somebody somebody on one of the hosts agrees with me on this podcast.
I mean, that never happens at the end of the day.
What does it matter?
All it matters is how much money they can possibly squeeze out of that rock
until it dies.
And if they if they can make Google
even if they just kind of create a bidding war,
like maybe they just sit there and like it's an eBay auction for Firefox.
It just keeps going up and up and up.
And you get as much money as they possibly can or create
like a Bing version of Firefox sponsored by Bing, you know.
And then, you know, Mozilla making in more money.
Hopefully they can, you know, not pay their CEO like.
Oh, no, he's that CEO is definitely getting a raise.
Of course. And they'll still start about six other projects
that have nothing to do with Firefox.
Yeah, probably.
But, you know, Mozilla making more money means that Mozilla stays relevant for longer.
So I'm fine with it.
But speaking of search engines,
I had to I recently had to
force Dr. Go
because Matt had a point.
Dr. Go sucks.
It's so bad.
It's just so bad. So bad.
I even tested it by searching for
Nvidia dash all TKG.
Any search other search engine puts the correct search result
way on top that go six page.
So here's the thing about Dr.
Go is that it depends.
The results for what you're searching for differ by person.
So I tooted about this on Macedon.
I posted something about Dr.
Go being crap, and I posted the exact search term that I use.
I don't remember what it is now.
Someone else searched for the exact same thing with the exact phrase
and had different search results than I had.
And then it turned out so I was searching for how to do something.
And it turns out if I had removed the how to part of it,
I'd get different results based on just having the how to because that
I can't remember what is a broad term maybe for Dr.
Go. Well, it kept bringing up Nvidia results when I was searching for
I don't remember what I was actually searching for.
I apologize for that. But whatever it was, it was bringing up
it had two things that had the exact same name and it was bringing up.
Oh, it was Nano.
It was it was bringing up the Nvidia Nano thing with the single board computer.
And it was only doing that for me, for everybody else.
It was bringing up actual Nanos.
I was looking for ways of, you know, configuring Nano,
you know, specific options and stuff like that.
And it kept bringing up the wrong thing.
So, yeah, Dr. Go is horrible.
But on top of that, like there are a lot of bad searches out there.
Cirques even half the time doesn't give me what I want.
But I put up with Cirques because I know that it's, you know, privacy focused
and you can do a lot of tweaking in order to make the search results better.
You know, you can search for I just went back to Google.
You know, it's fine.
But with Dr. Go, not only is it bad, but it's like super fucking slow.
Like it's been so slowly.
It's just like sometimes it takes like 15 to 20 seconds for the page to load.
And it's ridiculous.
Not only that, try an image search.
It filters. It has such a hardened filter.
I get like two, three pages. That's it.
On Google, it tells you, it asks you on Google, it asks you,
do you want copyright free or all licenses or filter by license or whatever?
Even if I tell it, I want the license free ones.
I get hundreds and hundreds of pages.
Why is Duck Duck Go so stupid and hard
to give it to give me image?
I can't take an opinion because I use a brave search.
Well, at least with least with Brave, they're using their own indexing, right?
Yeah. So you're getting the benefit of knowing that you're not having to pull
from Google anyways or pulling from Bing, which Duck Duck Go
doesn't do anything other than just pull from Bing.
They have no indexing of their own.
You want to use our own user agent that still that still identifies you.
So it's not really like privacy focused at all.
It just offers you no benefits for crappier search results.
And the thing is, like, I've used Bing before,
and I don't remember the search results being that bad.
I mean, they're bad. They're not as good as Google.
But it seems like the Duck Duck Go paid Bing for worse search results somehow.
It just it's it's. Yeah.
And if you want a worse experience, just try their browser on.
Well, nobody now only exists on Mac OS.
But on Mac OS and iOS, I use I have.
I don't use I have the Duck Duck Go browser.
Let's just say it's a clone of Firefox.
They use WebKit, of course, because they're on Apple.
But they just just use a search search index.
If you're even slower, it's even slower.
I mean, yeah, it's low.
But when it comes to, you know, like search results,
I don't care about performance.
I just want accurate results.
And that's not even after Google, because Google Google search results
have gone way down. They have gotten worse.
So the thing about search results is that you can be
there's that whole saying you can either have fast and good,
but you can't do both at the same time.
You know, but the problem with Duck Duck Go and several other ones
is that it's neither fast nor good.
You can't be just that's just bad.
You know, it's just it's just bad.
At least when you use Google, it can be slow.
It can be mediocre search results, but it's fast. Right.
Or you can use like, you know, you know, you use Bing
or you can use Brave Search or whatever, but you're getting,
you know, mediocre results. But at least it's fast.
You know, you can't you can't be you can't just suck at everything
and expect people to use you.
I'll tell you why I started using Duck Duck Go in the first place,
because Google detects your geolocation.
And since I'm in Lebanon, it always gives me results in Arabic.
I don't care for that language.
I want everything in English, everything on the web I want in English.
So I I switched to Duck Duck Go because Duck Duck Go
never gives me anything in Arabic.
It doesn't detect my location.
It gives me an option to search by according to my location.
But I disable that. It gives you the option to disable it.
That's why I started using Duck Duck Go.
But now, like, I will take your Arabic results, Google, please,
because Duck Duck Go is like in the crapper.
There needs to be a really good search.
I divorced it. Brave has, I think, some potential to be good.
But I don't think it's there yet.
Anyway, it's fine, though, because I want to talk about
all your video games potentially breaking.
Yeah. All right. Anyway, before we jump into
the video game stuff and Intel and stuff,
we're going to go to move into the contact information.
If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so in any number of ways.
The best way to do so is head on over to the website, which is the Linuxcast.org.
There you'll find previous episodes and all my blog posts.
I write a blog post every week and you can read all of those there.
Leave a comment. I'd love to have you leave a comment there
because very few people leave comments because it turns out
if you force people to have a GitHub account in order to make a comment.
Not a good idea, apparently.
I really wish utterances would at least use GitLab, but it doesn't matter.
Anyways, you can support me on Patreon at patreon.com
slash Linuxcast.
You can subscribe to my channel at youtube.com slash Linuxcast.
Josh, you can find all of his contact information at tenleyj.com
slash stalker. Steve is on YouTube at youtube.com slash at zero Linux.
Zero with an X, not a Z.
All of his other stuff will be available on the website,
which you can find at thelinxcast.org slash contact.
There you'll find all of the contact information I just said,
along with the Discord server, email address, all that kind of stuff.
So thelinxcast.org slash contact was where you can find most of that stuff.
If you don't want to just type in stuff, you can go actually click on actual links.
So that's the contact information.
So who who's going next?
What's next?
I was first, so I'll go next.
All right. So you're doing the Intel stuff, right?
Yep. All right.
So Intel is has pushed a proposal for a new x86 standard
called x86-S, which is 64 bit only.
This is not reverse compatible.
This is not backwards compatible at all.
This specification is just for x86.
And because Intel is a chip maker,
they're probably going to be they might actually just produce these chips
because we got the 2038 issue that is coming with 32 bit CPUs no matter what,
which means that after 2038, your 32 bit applications,
otherwise known as your Steam games or Steam itself, who knows,
might potentially just quit working entirely in seg faulting almost immediately
and potentially even taking down your whole system when you go to go to attempt
to launch them because, you know, computer errors.
But this is a thing that is probably going to be happening.
And at the after, if this actually comes to make a change,
you can still virtualize 32 bit architectures.
So you would so you would have to play your video games in a video machine,
which then raises issues with anti-cheat.
So game compatibility in Linux has been getting great these these years.
So here in the future, when this comes out,
we get to see Linux once again not working with video games.
Go forward, then go backward.
Yep. But honestly,
you shouldn't be using a 32 bit system anyway,
unless like it's a micro micro controller of some kind.
Be honest, these days, most games have a 64 bit binary.
So yeah, the game binary itself does.
But the libraries that that binary is calling well, oftentimes,
there's a reason why you have to have the multi-lib or whatever it is
for Steam on Arch. Right.
The the thing is that that's going to be a.
Valve has done such a good job of getting Linux
games to work or Windows games to work on Linux and stuff like that
with compatibility layers and Proton and Wine and all this stuff.
It feels like they're going to come up with some kind of emulation layer
for this as well.
I mean, I don't know the technical thing.
Maybe it's not even possible, but it feels like because you can emulate,
you know, probably six 16 bit and stuff like that in games
on in emulators and stuff. Right.
So, yeah, in theory, you know, in theory,
you could do the same thing with 32 bit performance.
The thing is, like if your game is relying on 32 bit libraries completely,
it's probably not probably doesn't have super duper anti-cheat attached to it.
You wouldn't think because most of those games are going to be pretty older.
Right. If your game is newer, not always.
There are still there are still video games coming out these days.
There are still 32 bit cyberpunk cyberpunk 2077 being a prime example of it.
Sounds like we need to have a talk with game developers
because it's it's time to move on.
Not even the game developers that are responsible for is the game engines
are that are responsible for. All right.
Epic. Fuck off.
Yeah, exactly.
Why is Epic always ruining our day?
Yeah, Epic is literally ruining our day
as well as Unity.
And thankfully, Godot, I believe, is 64 bit only.
Great. The the the the one game engine that nobody wants to use.
OK. Yeah, I'm surprised.
I'm surprised the drawdown from 32 bit has has taken this long, to be honest with you.
It feels like it's it's just been dragging.
It feels like we've been drawing down from 32 bit for at least 10 years.
We're still not 100 percent there.
And I know I know a ton of people in the Linux community
who are still running 32 bit operating systems, like a ton of people.
It's kind of nuts how many people I know is still running.
They just don't want to they just don't want to buy new hardware.
Well, then I keep I keep getting keep getting questions on the channel.
Like, hey, what's the best 32 bit?
You know, just you're out there.
I was like, well, I have to think about it for a minute
because there's not that many left.
The default answer is Debian unless you want to go into it.
Well, Debian or anything based on Debian, because like a lot of
MX Linux still has it.
You know, there's there's I think Sparky still has one.
So if you're 32,
Ard still has a 32 bit ISO.
Not official.
It's it's a community project.
Oh, OK. Well, that's that's we have some issues with their GPG keys.
That's where 32 bit is going to go to die is with community distros.
Anyways, that's it for that.
That one, Steve, why don't you tell us about yours?
You're you seem very, very excited about this
non-existent piece of crap.
So much. That was a pre-show topic.
Steve, yours.
OK, there's there's the steam deck has competition
now, a real competition danger zone danger zone.
It's called the ASUS ROG.
Everybody calls it the alley.
It's got the ally.
And what I meant by competition, the same price range.
The top and the same day.
It's six ninety nine.
And boy is it does.
Does it have the specs paper that is
it's got a AMD Ryzen Z1 extreme processor with 16 gigabytes
of RAM, DDR5 RAM, which is 6400 mega transfers per second
that of the six, I think, six thousand of the steam deck.
But the same next still using DDR4, I think.
On the DR5, but it's slower.
Five hundred and twelve gigabytes PCIe.
And that's the only storage that you will get on the ally.
You don't have lower or higher until so far.
But it has been tested and I've been watching following ETA Prime.
It's on YouTube, whose sole purpose in life is
viewing different machines for emulation.
And he surely tested it.
And the worst part of the ally, the thing that brings it down
in my mind is the fact that it's running Windows.
And in their presentation, Keynote mentioned Windows
like one point five billion times.
Well, it's because Microsoft was a partner in its creation.
Yeah, I had to mention the deal.
The Verge reviewed it and they didn't seem impressed.
Let me get to that point.
I was I was excited, too.
I was excited and super hyped because I'm a steam deck owner
and I wanted to see competition for it for this competition is healthy.
It fell on its face.
I guess the steam because the steam deck does has a lot of optimization done here.
They just on this on the allied, it just slapped
a very technical
tweaking system that regular users are just not going to use.
Simply not going to use a non optimized version of Windows on there,
which is just I mean, just Windows 11.
That's it. All they had to do was defaulted to steam big picture mode.
But the problem is that they don't want to limit people to steam.
They want you to.
Yeah, it boots to the desktop.
That's the weirdest part.
And they also need like valves permission to prepackage steam.
Yeah. Well, here's here's the thing.
ETA Prime flashed, tried to flash
hollow ISO on it, make it on par with the steam deck.
It didn't work
because the hollow ISO hasn't been updated since November last year.
So he then tried Chimera OS. Yeah.
Chimera OS.
OK, it works, but it cannot access the TDP settings.
And there's a lot of broken things here and there.
So this device, I think they made sure that Linux doesn't work very well on it
because they're so heavily endorsed by Microsoft.
Yeah, it sucks.
Sucks. It brings it down.
It's it's it's not what it should be.
It had potential.
OK, so there's two ways of looking at this that I think first.
And this is the way you should look at it right now, is that steam,
the valve is very fortunate that this thing came out
and similar ones like this came out after the steam deck had general availability.
Because if this thing had come out, you know,
10 months ago when it was still kind of hard to get a steam deck,
you know, this thing would have gained a lot more traction
because people would have been, you know, out there searching for alternatives
more because they would want something like the steam deck
because they couldn't get a steam deck.
Now you can go buy a steam deck and have it delivered in the next few days, right?
It's just available to you.
So there's no there's not that fear of missing out thing
that it would have experienced if the steam deck was still pretty rare.
But the the place where this kind of scares me,
and we talked about this before when it comes to the steam deck,
is that Valve is not known for doing very well with sequels
when they come, you know,
and they're good at the initial sequel, but the one after doesn't exist.
Well, no, no, no, no.
Software games, whatever, fine.
When it comes to hardware, at least they don't do sequels.
Like the the index hasn't seen a sequel.
It's been available for at least five years.
The the steam controller never had a sequel.
The they also can't do anything with the steam controller
because, you know, they got sued over it.
Well, whatever.
Oh, I'm saying is suing the steam deck now.
Yeah, yeah, it's the exact same company I sued them last time.
I think when it when it comes wrong on that, when it comes to hardware,
they don't do sequels well at all.
OK, but one thing you can say about Windows hardware
is that it's very plentiful and gets updated a lot.
OK, so this ASUS ROG ally will have a second version next year.
OK, there's a good chance it's successful.
Well, even if it's even as moderately,
if 10 people buy it, they'll make another one.
OK, that's just the way Windows things work.
They'll at least give it a second generation for sure.
There's a good chance that we won't see a second version of the Steam Deck
next year or the next year or the year after that. OK. Yeah.
The big thing that concerns me with the steam deck has a big community behind it.
That's the biggest difference between that and the Steam Deck and the Windows stuff.
They won't have a lot of communities behind them,
but the Steam Deck has customizations, communities and stuff like that.
This as the ally has the screen that the Steam Deck should have had.
120 Hertz, 1080p screen.
What were you saying?
Here's the thing is that this is that I don't think that the ally
is going to affect the Steam Deck by any means, simply because of how
Steam Deck is still number one because of the large momentum behind the Steam Deck.
What I'm concerned about is all of the other hand held computing devices.
I'm talking about stuff like the what is it?
The Ion Neo and then there's like four other ones.
Yeah, these those companies are much smaller
and they're the ones that are selling their devices for like a thousand plus dollars.
Whereas, you know, Asus can afford to, you know, not make as much of a margin as they are.
Asus is going to make other devices like this.
And that was my point was that these companies and even the smaller ones
are going to be able to iterate much faster than Valve is going to.
So you're right, Steve.
The Valve and the Steam Deck have momentum right now
and they have the community behind them right now.
But how long does that community?
I mean, the Linux guys are going to stick around the Steam Deck for a very long time
because they stick around on 32 bit for a very long time.
But the people who came to Linux because of the Steam Deck
are eventually going to be wowed by higher specs.
An OLED screen, a 120 Hertz screen, you know,
a higher end processor, the ability to play a triple A game like a year and a half.
And the only time the only time the only time I see this thing
being a real competitor to the Steam Deck is when because this will happen.
This will happen. And we all know that Linux distro will come out.
Works 100 percent flawlessly that
let's say the Holo ISO gets updated to support that thing.
It becomes identical to the Steam Deck with no issues
and everything working on it out of the box.
And because ETA Prime in some games on Chimera OS
got as high as 80 and 70 and 80 frames per second on 1080p medium.
Well, OK, so two things there.
First, I don't I'm not worried about this version of the ROG Ally.
This version here is never going to it's going to be the next one
and the next one after that or a similar version from another company,
wherever the ability to iterate faster because the Steam Deck
is going to be the same for a long time for a very long time.
That's what worries me.
But the other thing is, is that and maybe this is Valve's, you know, pocket ace.
They will eventually release Steam OS for other hardware.
They've said that they're going to do it.
It hasn't happened yet.
Eventually, they'll have an official steam ISO.
That's that's where the possibility of other hardware
being interesting from a steam involved perspective comes into play.
But it hasn't happened yet.
And you can't trust Valve to release anything in a reasonable amount of time.
I mean, they're very, very small company.
You know, compared to Microsoft and, you know, ASUS.
So you can there's a reason why they're still moving.
It feels like the entire company is always focused on one thing.
And then when they get done with that one thing, they move on to the next thing.
Right. They don't have, you know, you know what else makes the Steam Deck
still number one, the visibility of the of the Steam Deck.
You can replace the joystick with Halifax joysticks.
You can upgrade the storage. You can do this.
You can do that with the ally. You're locked down.
You cannot do shit.
Yeah. Speaking of upgrading the Steam Deck.
Hey, look at their transition.
FX technology has come out
or they're teasing a screen update for the Steam Deck.
And it is now remember nobody's really tried this yet,
but it sounds like utter garbage.
So, first of all, not even they're moving it to 10 to 1920 by 1020
1920 by 1200, which is the upgraded screen that they're offering.
But it's not higher.
It's not higher refresh rate.
Not all that, which I wasn't really expecting all that anyways.
But you would expect to have at least, you know, 90 hertz, you know,
but it's still 60 hertz.
And the only other improvement seems that they're moving to a better color
range, the 74 percent Adobe RGB coverage versus the 45 percent they're at now.
So colors will be better. So those are the two options.
So the way I look at this, like, first of all, like Steve said, you can
you can update or you can upgrade your Steam Deck.
That's really freaking cool.
But this particular upgrade doesn't seem to be doing anything worthwhile
because when I look at it, it's also pretty involved.
Well, yeah, it's going to be tech.
Yeah, it's going to be you're going to want to I'm assuming
there's going to probably be some soldering.
I don't know.
You don't you don't need solder or anything,
but you do have to basically take the entire device apart.
There's nothing hard wired in the Steam Deck.
No, it's just connectors.
Valve actually has a video posting of them tearing apart a Steam Deck.
But the big thing is the biggest thing is that your is that you're dealing
with a bunch of ribbon cables that are really, really delicate.
And you have to disconnect them all.
And it's similar to taking apart a phone.
So yeah, it's but basically during assembly,
the screen is the very first thing put into into the chassis.
So as a result, it's going to be the very last thing you take out of the chassis.
So it so realistically, I wouldn't say
that you buy the screen as an upgrade.
You buy it because you need a new screen.
Well, and you know, it's ninety nine dollars.
Why not pay for the upgrade?
Well, it'd be nice if it was an actual it felt like an upgrade to me.
To me, like a higher resolution is not what I need on a Steam Deck
because it's such a small screen.
So the pixels, I mean, who pixels?
I mean, it's just the Steam Deck is already is already
what's referred to as pixel perfect or retina.
If you're from the Apple and what people would want is a higher
refresh rate, OLED, if you're going to if you're going to, you know, go that far.
Those are the two two things that would make the upgrade worth it to me.
But also, no matter what kind of upgrade you're searching for,
even if you're just going for the higher resolution like this is,
the Steam Deck's battery is already not great when you're using it, right?
It's you know, you get three, four hours, maybe, right?
This is going to cut that in half.
You know, if you're lucky. Yeah.
You know, it's just
I don't know.
So you're just going to run it.
You're going to run a lower display resolution anyway for the battery savings.
And honestly, I agree with with
a googly googler in the chat where he's just like, yeah,
he'd rather have a higher refresher, higher 120 hertz with variable refresh rate.
Well, it just you know, honestly, I would do.
It just feels like the processes you'd have to go to upgrade
and the downside of the battery isn't a
the value that you're getting for those things isn't high enough.
Like I said, you're not buying this for the sake of upgrading.
You're just buying it because you need a replacement screen.
You just don't feel like buying it from Valve.
And, you know, some people are going to look at the higher
a higher higher thing and think that it's an upgrade.
But I don't think that it's an upgrade.
Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily an upgrade.
It's just one of those things.
Let's let's see. What's the cost of a Steam Deck screen right now?
You can get an I fix it, right?
Yeah, I'm looking at I fix it because they are the official store
for Steam Deck parts for the 512 gigabyte version of the screen.
It's ninety nine dollars.
It's the same price.
It's the same exact price.
But if you had to replace your screen,
you might as well go with the higher resolution one.
Yeah, it's the same price.
But if you're searching for if you're searching for this
because you're expecting it to be an upgrade, it's not.
It's not the upgrade.
If it had had if it had a higher refresh rate, it'd be awesome.
It's more of a downgrade.
It's more of a downgrade on the battery battery front.
Yeah. Honestly, though, I have looked into like LCD screen production before,
and it is actually kind of hard to find like a small screen like that.
That's actually good.
That's not like smaller because typically typically small screens
that have like the ridiculously high refresh rates are phone sized
and not exactly seven inches or tablet sized.
The only one that really owns that market is Apple because iPads.
Other than that.
Well, you find really all of the cheap ones in the fucking world.
Samsung is the only display manufacturer, really.
I mean, LG has kind of gotten into it.
But the Samsung, if you want to source a display
between the five point nine and eight inch display range,
it has to come from it has to come from Samsung.
And and they're so caught up when it comes to contract with Apple
and doing their own stuff that I mean, a small company is going to have
a really hard time getting merchandise from them when it comes to this kind of stuff.
Plus, I'm sure I'm sure that there's the whole it's like a licensing chipsets
and stuff from Qualcomm or whatever.
You have to deal with all the licenses and patent shit and stuff.
So it is it's just another one of those things
that you get to kind of go back to and think about.
Man, it's going to if it feels like it's going to be a really long time
before we see us seem that too.
Because every single part here, you know, they have to deal with the chipset
and the, you know, the the network stuff and all of the other stuff.
It's not going to be the little piddly stuff that they're going to problem with.
It's going to be the screen.
It's going to be the network stuff.
It's going to be the chipset.
You know, when it comes to when it comes to a device like this,
I don't necessarily like what a yearly update anyway.
I'd rather treat it like a game console.
We're just like we get new game consoles every five to six years.
I'm fine with that.
And in all honesty, I'm fine with it for the most part.
I agree with you.
But when you're in a new category
that you basically created, the biggest way to fail
is to allow your competitors to innovate faster than you can.
Well, Valve didn't even create this category.
Well, rejuvenated this category.
Let's put it down and rejuvenate it.
Yeah, they did.
Can I raise you the Nintendo Switch?
Yeah, that's those.
I don't think the Nintendo Switch and the the the Steam Deck are comparable at all.
When it comes to video game devices, I put them in the exact same category
because I do not see the Steam Deck as a desktop computer.
Yeah, I disagree with you because you can't you can't
name the number of AAA games you can play on the Steam Deck
or on the on the on the Switch.
How many Nintendo titles are there?
Those aren't AAA titles, and we all know it.
But it's Mario, man.
I would I would put Super Smash Brothers as a AAA title.
OK, so that was OK, one. OK.
Yeah, Smash Brothers, Mario, Zelda.
How about this? Can you play Call of Duty,
an actual Call of Duty on there or just a nerf version like you used to be able to?
I believe the actual Call of Duty is on there.
Is it? I mean, it's news to me because it must be new.
Anyways, it doesn't matter.
That's it for us on this one.
Oh, wait a minute. Hold on a second.
I forgot something. Thingies of the Week.
I forgot Thingies of the Week.
How could I possibly do that?
Let's move on to the Thingies of the Week.
And so the last section that we do every week
on the podcast is where we we find we call them picks.
We could have called them picks.
We end up calling them thingies.
So, Josh, your thingy of the week?
Obviously, you know, we Matt and I were mentioning it earlier here.
And I am known as an I3 hater.
But of course, my pick this week is Sway.
Which, you know, some people might be a little bit surprised by,
but I have fallen in love with Sway as my new found replacement for Cage,
which Cage Cage is a Wayland display model,
is a Wayland compositor that is just a kiosk.
And that's how I'm using Sway as a kiosk application.
And, you know, it's been super stable.
The load times are infinitely faster than Cage because Cage doesn't
preload GTK or QT themes whatsoever.
But thankfully, Sway does.
And, you know, the configuration is actually in a file
and not part of the shell command.
You have to call for Cage.
Am I picking it for desktop usage?
No, because, you know, it's running my home theater computer, which is over there.
Can we can I ask you a question?
Is is how you were saying that word key?
Is how you were saying that word key kiosk?
Is that how you actually pronounce that?
Or that's how I pronounce it.
I always thought it was Koisk, but the fuck do I know?
It's key. It's kiosk.
Key or kiosk.
Yeah, that's how you pronounce kiosk.
English is hard. Let's speak something.
It's a it's a French word.
It's a French word. It's kiosk.
We'll see. We should have just asked Steve.
The Americans took.
We steal everything, man, and we make it better.
All right. Anyways, Josh or Steve, you're about a thing of the week.
Thing of the week I'm wearing right now.
It's called the Amazfit Urex 2 smartwatch
because my Apple watch died.
Natural death, natural causes.
Don't worry. It's age.
It was a series two, not a series seven or a series eight.
We're up to the eight and upcoming is nine.
Oh, it's like six, seven generations old.
What is your what is your new watch run?
What operating system that was?
It's not Android.
Yeah, it's Zappos.
And I made sure that it doesn't run Android
because Android doesn't work with iOS and I have an iOS device.
So I needed something that worked with iOS.
And for one hundred and fifty bucks
retail, this watch is
beyond amazing.
It's got 25, 25 day battery life.
If you turn everything off like I do, anything related to the heart rate,
any any health related features, GPS
and that has a dual band satellite connection.
I turned all that off. I don't care for that.
All I needed is for push notifications and call ID.
So you can turn all that stuff off and you don't have to charge
a watch every single night.
Lasts for 50 day for 40 days.
You would be a prime candidate for a hybrid smartwatch.
One of the ones that one of those ones that just do push notifications
until the time.
Yeah, I know. I wanted the Pebble watch.
I couldn't find the Pebble watch.
I only found one listing on eBay and it was used.
And I don't know that those stuff.
Well, the the company of Pebble doesn't exist anymore.
I know it was bought by Fitbit, then Fitbit was bought by Google.
So yeah, so I buy your buy your pine sixty four watch and use that.
Yeah, I want performance, please.
I don't want the when I scroll, I have to wait five minutes
for the thing to show.
But anyway, this watch is amazing.
And the most important part for me was support for custom
watch faces by the watch face community.
There's a separate app called A.W.
Maze watch faces.
They amaze with watches that gives me access
to the entire watch face community and everything.
I spent like three hours today just playing around with watch faces.
I found one that was purple pink, the colors of zero Linux.
Didn't like it too much because it clashes with the black
and red design of the watch.
I stayed on black and red.
And best part of this of this thing is
that I don't have to I don't have to charge it every every night
and every two nights.
It's I don't know what it is.
I've never really understood the the disinterest
in just charging your watch overnight.
I just put my watch on the charger with my phone every night.
I don't want to wear electricity here.
Remember? Oh, that's true.
My whole thing is that, you know, I'm used to like
having a watch and then never have and then never have thing
to urge my watch because I do all the watches I ever owned.
But you wind up.
But you take your work for years at a time.
You take your watch off at night when you go to sleep, though, right?
Or during the day now, right?
You just take watch off.
You don't wear while you go to sleep, do you?
No, not really. OK.
So what's the difference between taking it off and sitting it on your dresser
and then taking off and just sitting on a charger?
I mean, I mean, there's not a difference.
I don't even wear a watch.
So you say your argument is no.
All right. Anyways, no.
But suffice it to say that today, with all the playing,
it was the 71 percent when I started playing with it,
just when I got it this morning.
It's 69 percent now.
So how long until we get the zero time?
Zero time in 40 days.
But this is the first charge.
I haven't charged it since I got it.
I'm going to let it drain for the first time and then charge it.
Then from this is the first cycle, you don't count it.
Once it's drained and you charge it for the first time,
then you start counting how long.
See, I've had my watch on since I woke up this morning and I'm down to 82 percent total.
And I have everything. What is your smartwatch?
I have the Galaxy Watch 4, the classic version.
OK, that has a three day battery life, if I'm not mistaken.
Two, if I'm lucky.
But I charge it every night, so I don't care.
I'm not going to wear it to bed, so I just it just I just set it on the charge.
The whole the whole point for me buying this watch is because all the smartwatches
I had before, like the Apple Watch Series 2 and the Pebbles Time Steal before that,
they were not salt water resistant.
They tell you four meters, five meters.
And I traveled to Greece, dude.
I in Greece, you go to the beach.
So I needed to take something that I could forget on my wrist.
Take a shower to the beach, go to the go to the pool
without ever having to worry about taking it off.
I like something stick on my wrist forever.
Weird. OK, I'm sure I'm sure.
Maybe I'm the weird one that just takes it off when I, you know, going to get wet.
I mean, like I'm going to take a shower.
I'm not going to take my watch in there.
I'll be honest with you.
If you have a plastic wristband, yeah, I would understand
because it tends to start to stink after a while.
That's why the first thing I'm going to do next week is go to Beirut
with my friends to have lunch and we're going to drop by a watch place
and ask them and get your stuff a proper leather band.
Leather through that.
Yeah, metal. Why not metal metal?
I mean, I guess metal is steel.
Stainless steel. That's what I love.
I have a fabric band, actually.
I have fabric work still.
It's just more comfortable than like something heavy.
And this is too light on my wrist. I need something heavy.
I want to be able to bash someone across the head with, you know,
with my watch and just murder them.
All right. Anyway, so my thing of the week, just really simple.
So everybody knows that I like to create themes for my window manager.
And I've long since had a reputation for that.
But no longer.
I no longer have to do that because I I didn't discover Piwad.
I've known about Piwad for a long time, but I haven't used it in a while.
And I saw someone using Piwad on the Discord with Hyperland.
And when I went to when I was trying Hyperland for a little while,
I was like, well, maybe I just don't need to do a bunch of things.
I was just I'll just use Piwad to do my thing for me.
I didn't end up sticking with Hyperland,
but I did decide to install Piwad with Qtel.
And man, it is so good.
I had forgotten how good it actually is at creating a color scheme
that works really, really well.
You just change a wallpaper and I, you know, created a script
and it just, you know, every time I hit a key binding inside of Ranger,
it changes the wallpaper, changes the Qtel theme, changes the terminal theme,
changes the Firefox theme, because it's there's a Firefox
plugin that you can use in order to have it take on the color.
So it's really good.
Now, the only downside is, is that it has been updated in forever.
So if you're one of those people who care that a project hasn't been updated
and it's still on the AUR and not on mainline repository.
Yeah, I don't I don't care where as long as I can download it, I don't mind.
So if you care that it hasn't been updated in a while,
then you won't want to use it.
But I don't care because it still works just fine.
So, yeah, I will.
That is feature complete.
Maybe it's feature complete. It could be.
It has a couple of errors.
So there are some bugs that could fix the biggest issues
that the developer seems to have just gone completely AWOL.
No response to issues or anything.
But that's, you know, whatever.
Someone else has forked it with the ability to use more colors.
I haven't been able to get that to build yet.
So it's called Pywall 16.
Yeah, color. Yep.
Anyways, that's it for this episode of Linuxcast.
We record this live every Saturday at three o'clock p.m. Eastern time.
We usually go for an hour and a half to close to two hours.
But we did pretty good at constraining ourselves this week.
So Linuxcast, youtube.com slash Linuxcast.
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You guys are all absolutely amazing without you.
The channels are not anywhere near where it is right now.
So thank you very, very much for your support.
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So thanks to the new guys as well.
Thanks, everybody, for watching again.
Every Saturday, three o'clock p.m. Eastern time catches live.
We'll see you next week.
Before we before we end, I want to say one thing.
Everybody on Arch, if you notice, there's no updates coming.
It's because they're merging repositories extra.
I mean, community will be merged with extra.
And community will be empty and all the migration will end tomorrow.
At some point, the whatever time, go to the archlinux.org website
to check out. So you're saying right now, right now is not a good time
for me to install Arch Linux.
You just installed Gentoo. I saw you do it.
Yeah, I saw Gentoo on that computer.
OK, anyway, if you run an update and and you notice that it's going
way too quickly for some reason and you're getting no updates, that's why.
OK, thank you for that, Steve.
Anyways, we'll see you next week.
