Episode 786 transcript

FLOSS-786

Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, episode 786, recorded Wednesday, June 5th. What easy install script. Hey, this week Rob joins me and we talk with Brody Robertson, a YouTuber, a commentator about things Linux, things Wayland, desktop environments, and his odd decision to start his Linux journey with Arch. By the way, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Hey folks, it's time for Floss Weekly. It's a show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett. We've got a lot of fun today, but first off, our co host is Rob. Hey Rob, welcome. Hello, good to be back. Yeah, it is great to have you and we kind of put this together at like the 11th hour last night So I appreciate rob stepping in and being able to co host and we've got a we've got a really fun guest You may have heard of him brody.

Robertson has a youtube channel and a podcast. I think several youtube channels Some other things but he is kind of becoming a Well, something of a personality, maybe we could say or a talking head, a commentator around the kind of the Linux ecosystem. And one of the, one of the places that I first became aware of him was sort of the some of the kerfluffle, let's say around Wayland things and the, the kerfluffle around Hyperland and found it to be actually a pretty interesting voice something of a voice of reason.

Would be kind of the category I would put him into if we were going to categorize him like that. Rob, I know I've shared a couple of his clips with you. Are you familiar with Brody?

I don't recall offhand, but I probably watched those clips that that you shared with me, but.

Okay, so Brody's job today is to convert Rob into being a diehard fan.

And if he can do that, if Rob goes away and says, yeah, I've got to listen to more of his stuff, then Brody will have succeeded.

Rob: Yeah, or I may not have even looked at the links that you shared with me. I, I, I don't know.

Jonathan: So I must admit that one's, that one's on me, the links for this show. I sent just a few minutes ago.

Like I said, it was kind of put together at the 11th hour. But that's all right.

Rob: I'm definitely a little less prepared than normal. You know, that 11th hour kind of thing, but

Jonathan: that's, that's all right. Like I said, I think, I think our show is going to is going to basically turn into just the three of us having a great time geeking about all things Linux.

I'm not going to faff about any longer. I'm going to bring him on and I want to say, Brody, welcome to the show. How's it going? Hey,

Brodie: it is good, it is good, it's good to have you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. The answer to your question before was about four channels. There's the main channel, Brody Robson, podcast channel, Tech of a T, the gaming channel, Brody on Games, and then the react channel, which I haven't uploaded to in like, four weeks.

But the main two are the main two, the podcast and the main channel.

Jonathan: Okay. And so what, what is your, what's your niche? What do you, what do you really cover? What's your bread and butter of keeping people up to date on?

Brodie: Well, with the main channel content right now, the main focus, it's sort of shifted a bit because early on, I was doing a lot of videos on.

Like how to use window managers configuring window managers things like that Then eventually shifted into there's a period where I was doing videos on vim plugins. I don't know don't question that period Then it was more like plugins. Yes vim plugins. Yes Yes, vim plugins. There's there is a whole playlist of them.

I can show you the playlist afterwards I think i have a playlist whatever doesn't matter then I shifted more into doing like software reviewy stuff There's been some other things in between but nowadays it's more a lot of You Linux news stuff, getting people up to date on what's going on. One thing I do quite often, which I don't know why people watch, is I'll go through like issue trackers, like GitHub, GitHub, things at GitHub, GitLab, things like that mailing lists and sort of, I guess condense the information there down into a more consumable form, because you'll see these discussions going on like I don't know, any sort of Wayland Protocol discussion, it's 3, 000 comments long, and there's no easy way to get into that in a consumable way.

And you'll see articles from certain outlets and they'll take like one quote from the entire thread, but I want to make the I guess the full context there a bit easy to understand to really know what's going on behind the scenes in these projects.

Jonathan: Yeah, so your, your more recent stuff, is it fair to say that you're trying to help people see what it looks like when the sausage of the, the open source sausage, as it were, gets made?

Brodie: I guess that's a good way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I do an okay ish job. I, I don't get why people watch it. But for some reason they do. Maybe it's something to do with the Australian accent and I sound different from the rest of the Linux YouTubers out there. It's just like a, Ooh, look at this funny Australian man.

Let's listen to him.

Jonathan: I think, I think part of it has to be sort of the you're, you're taking. You're taking the, you know, all of the comp, all of the issues that are out there and you're kind of shining some light on it and say, Hey, this is the really interesting one. This is the really juicy one. And so I, I, I kind of suspect at least in, and I would say in my case, this is a true white, I like to tune in it.

It saves me time of having to go and read through the entire Wayland or what have you, you know, tracker. And somebody else has done some of the work, and you're finding the ones that are interesting, the ones that I should know about. I think that's a service.

Brodie: Yeah, no, I think that's a good way to put it.

I I do There's been issues where maybe I focus on certain aspects and rather than focusing on the technical goings on, focus more on like the the drama part of it, but I guess it depends on what I'm sort of focusing on in that case and what I feel like sort of deserves the most attention. Because look, in some cases the actual technical discussion isn't even the most exciting part.

Like there'll be an argument about, hey, how do we position a window? Should we have a a window have the ability to set an icon on itself? And you're like, I don't know why they're arguing about this. And. The argument part of it, I think, especially in cases like Wayland, because I described Wayland as a meta project.

It's a project where you have all of these different desktops coming together that all have to work on this one solution, but a lot of them can't agree what color the sky is. So it becomes kind of a mess.

Jonathan: Yes.

Rob: Yeah. I was just going to say, you're already drawing my interest in your channel and information.

I I'm kind of the, I'm the guy in the group who likes to bring the drama as much as possible. So if I can find some more drama to absorb out there.

Brodie: Well, that's not always what I do. Like I'll also talk about you know, I, I'd still like to do some videos on like software pieces sometimes I had to do these historical videos on old bugs, for example, like I did a video a couple of days ago about the can't print on Tuesday bug, which is a bug from the days of Ubuntu 12.

04. Where due to a bug in the file application, PostScript files generated by open office could not be printed. Because the file application was detecting them as an Erlang Jam file, not a Postscript file. But only specifically when Choo was in the the created by date, or whatever the specific line was.

So it was this weird bug where it was completely unnoticeable unless you used OpenOffice, because the tag was optional. And Only happened on this one day, but no sane person is going to think, Wow, my printer is broken because it's Tuesday. Eventually they worked it out though. And that's, I think things like that, it's always cool to go back and look at how someone actually came to that conclusion and sort of break down that story.

Jonathan: Yeah, that one in particular, I watched that one too, sort of in prep for the show. I found it really fascinating because it was one of the people that was working on it, it was like his wife. It's like, Oh yeah. It's, it's the printer bug. It never works on Tuesdays. And he goes, wait a second.

Rob: Tuesday?

Jonathan: It never works on Tuesdays!

Finding out that it was like, you know, the, the, the, the, the file itself, when it was set to Tuesday, it just lined up that it matched the Magic Bytes for another file format. Yeah, it was, it was great. It was a great story. I, I do yeah, I, I enjoyed those too. I was, when I, when I listened to that, I was trying to think through some of the weird bugs that I've seen, and It's like, I know some of them were really weird, but I can't bring to mind any of the really good ones.

One of the fun ones was way back in the day with the OpenWrt project. You couldn't do Your first compile of it could not be multi threaded. You had to do a single threaded compile, and then after that, you could do multi threaded compiles, and they would work. And so I, you know, I sat down with that to try to figure out why that was, and with that, when it comes to find out that they end up building GCC multiple times, which is typical for cross compiling.

That's a thing that you have to do. Well, they were, when they went to download GCC, they were overwriting. So they would start, they would download, start, compile, and then they would download a second time and overwrite that first compile in the midst of compiling it. And once I discovered that, it's like, Oh, well, that's why it's broken.

Of course I do. I enjoy bugs like that. They're obscure and weird and have way different. Kind of root causes than what you would think they would have. That's funny. So, I, I want to ask you about, about Weyland and X11. I'm just kind of curious how do you, how do you think we're doing? So, listening to, listening to some of your, your comments.

your videos about it, one could come to the conclusion of, oh my goodness, it's terrible, the whole process is broken, and maybe we should just stick with x. And I, I sort of suspected that's not actually where you would come down on it. I want to get your thoughts.

Brodie: So there's a couple of pieces of the equation here.

If we are talking about, you are a developer, you don't know what a video game is, you don't know what fun is, your entire life exists around a code editor and a web browser. Fedora swapped default to Wayland back in 2016. Yes, 2016. Back then you couldn't screen capture. Basic things didn't work back then.

But for a developer, it was enough to dog food. Come 2020, 2021 ish, like during like COVID era, a lot of things started getting addressed. One of the things being screen capture, and a lot of people suddenly became able to actually use it. There's still applications that don't implement the solution because Discord and whatever.

There's also solutions in place like Global hotkeys, which is a big part of Obviously discord having pushed to talk OBS having the ability to use like your hotkeys when you're not focused on the window But also it's a big accessibility thing. I think accessibility is the area where Everyone is aware that this is a big deal and everybody is aware.

It is broken But even though it's so important, it's such like a small amount of users who need it It just doesn't get the love and attention it needs but that's an area where I think we are really lagging behind When it comes to the data they use though, I think especially now with the recent NVIDIA Explicit Sync drivers and the Explicit Sync patches in the compositors, which has fixed a really bad flicker issue.

Where, for some people, it was literally unusable, like they could not look at their screen if NVIDIA was running under Weyland. For those people, it's pretty much good now on those drivers, but you've got to wait for the drivers to become available outside of beta and all that sort of stuff. As for like, as for other things, like a lot of the issues we have now, I would say for the most part, are more like these weird Rough edges, right?

Like there's a lot of solutions are in place But then there's issues like the whole not being able to do multi window applications There's issues like not being able to set an icon for a window. You have Actually, well, this is a pretty big one that I've talked to plenty about is the fact that VR headsets don't work under Gnome because they still don't have DRM leasing implemented and And All of these are important cases, but I would say they're more like Issues as opposed to hard blockers now for most people So

Jonathan: I my solution for this so I've been telling people it's it's simple you just need to run Fedora Use an AMD video card And run Wayland and everything pretty much just works now.

That's not true. There are, there are bugs still. And there are things right now that are driving me crazy about that, that exact setup,

Rob: I do often see, I'm, I'm, I'm a pusher of Wayland these days. And I often see people saying things like Wayland's not ready. And I'm like, well, why not? And like, blah, blah, blah.

I'm my Nvidia car. I'm like, I think Nvidia is just not ready. This is accurate.

Brodie: I would say it does do like they have been working to improve things, but nvidia is not a gpu company They're an ai shovel company That's fair. That's fair

Jonathan: The the other thing about this that really drives me crazy, particularly the the most recent shake up in fedora You know with fedora 40 the kde guys came along and I said, we're just not going to support x11 anymore And 90 of everybody was like, oh, okay and you had like two developer two maintainers You Inside of Fedora and then a few other people around the fringes that just went nuts about that.

And what drove me the most crazy about that is they're like this thing doesn't work in Weyland and it's a showstopper and everybody myself included was like Where's the bug report? Did you ever tell anybody that this is broken? It's like, if you guys would, rather than throwing a fit over this, would actually dive in and make bug reports and write code and try to actually fix things, Weyland would be ready by now.

Ah, it drove me so nuts.

Brodie: I think in some of those cases, there actually are open bug reports. A lot of the stuff with One of the big threads I did see was regarding, like, art usage. A lot of the, I'm not a big art guy, I do have like a drawing tablet here, so, like, I use it just for editing thumbnails, but my understanding is that Katie's, like, implementation and configuration tool for the drawing tablets is just not at the level that people want it to be at, and from my understanding that stuff is reported, but, again, it's like the accessibility stuff where it's important for a small group of people, so, yeah.

But it's very, very low down the list of priorities. And usually, unless you need it yourself, People aren't usually working on it, which is you know, it's just the problem you have we have limited resources Yeah, right and I was I was

Jonathan: let me let me let me rob. I'll rob. I'm gonna let you finish. Oh, that's like the second time in two days.

I've used that meme and it makes me seem really old. Anyway, the one of the things in in fedora that one of the developers was complaining about is he had like this completely cursed setup where He had a laptop that was you know 1200 by 600 and a 1080p display. And he's like in X 11, I can just scale these so that they look the same, but I can't do that in, in Wayland.

And you know, everybody that reads it is like, first off, why would you want to do that? That's cursed. And secondly, have you, have you told, and you know, there was no bug report. He opened the bug report and within a couple of weeks it was, it was fixed. So that's, that's the sort of thing that drives me nuts.

It's like this, this is your big blocker. Really? Oh, anyway, Rob, go ahead.

Rob: I was just going to say, I think my big blocker when I was anti whaling and all X and was really due to like the, the screen capture and when it comes to things like a remote desktop, you know, being in the IT support industry, being able to remote into someone's desktop and do what you got to do.

And that just didn't work for the longest time. And, and after that got around, I was like, well, it all kind of seems to work for me. And after I got to dumping it. Yeah, that's

Brodie: one of the cases where it is like a super hard blocker. And I think a lot of people mistake hard blockers for minor inconveniences.

Right, like a hard blocker is your, you literally cannot capture your screen. You're doing some work where you need screen capture. A hard blocker is your GPU inflicts a seizure because your screen is constantly flickering. A hard blocker isn't. Window icons being broken or other little things like that.

Like it's Discord push to talk doesn't work things like that. Like yeah, it's annoying and sure maybe you'd prefer it to like work but It's not at that point a reason to Halt the entire development of this process.

Rob: Yeah, one could argue I could have just got around that with SSH, but that's a little tricky in some situations.

Jonathan: Well, that was that was the other thing, right? For the longest time with Wayland. It's like, oh, with SSH you can do SSH dash X, and because X11 is transparent to all of this stuff. Yeah, we're transparency. The fun thing about that is it's like, it's not though. The, the amount of bubble gum and duct tape under the hood to make that SSH call work was painful and X11 no longer had network transparency.

It was, it was sort of simulated. And there's also now way pipe that just works and does it.

Brodie: If people don't know how broken a lot of modern applications are with network transparency, my understanding is Fedora Firefox completely dies if you try to do network transparency at this point. I haven't tried it in a while, but that's, that's the, my recent understanding.

And I would not be surprised if a lot of other things just do not behave at all like you would expect. Because yeah, you're right. Like it's, network transparency is a thing that made sense when Well, the reason why it was there is because X11 was developed in a time where you weren't running your ex server and your ex client on the same hardware.

You actually did run a client server model. Now, we have the hardware to run it on the same system and that's very much just a holdover from the way it was developed. Originally developed because there's no reason to redesign it when that's just the way it always basically always worked

Jonathan: Well, I would I would go a step further than that and say there actually was a reason to redesign it and Wayland is to Redesign.

That's true

Rob: Well, there's a lot.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's the other thing with Wayland It's like all of the x11 developers are now working on Wayland and and and this is this is interesting I think One of the Fedora guys, that's also sort of a RHEL guy, was talking about this. Apparently, here in another few months, when, when the, the last RHEL release that is X11 only, goes to long term support, RHEL is apparently going to move Their engineers off of doing bug fixes for X and so it's, it's actually getting ready to be kind of a dicey thing to run X anymore.

I mean, it's always been a dicey thing, but yeah, that would

Brodie: be the end of row seven.

Jonathan: Yes, yes, it's going to be fun. Okay, so if we have, not that we have exhausted the Weyland topic, but there are, there are some other things to get into. How about gaming? I think, I know Rob and I are aficionados of gaming on Linux.

Is this a thing that you two, you do as well, Brody?

Brodie: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I've said before that Whilst I started using Linux during a time where I wasn't gaming If I couldn't game on Linux, I probably wouldn't be daily driving at this point like yeah for me like yeah That's it's important use case Well

Jonathan: it's true, and you do some, you do some let's plays, don't you?

Brodie: Yeah, yeah, I have a stream channel. I will be live there in about 8 hours from now for anyone who's watching this live. I'll take a nap first though. I'm doing a co op stream of It Takes Two with a Mate of Mine. And the other stream I'm doing right now is Sekiro. So

Jonathan: when was the last time that you, you, you bought a new game and went to fire it up on Linux and had anything other than just a stellar experience?

Of

Brodie: a new game? There was a game I played recently, which is a very edge case game where on Arch Linux the, this is actually an issue that every distro is basically fixed now because of this game and a couple of others. This game had an issue with memory maps, where the default number set by the kernel was just too low.

And the game would use all of them because it's designed terribly and just ruins your entire system. But it's the way it works, and it's the way it was designed on Windows. But changing that setting? It works. Besides that, I've had issues with older games where they use weird cutscene formats and cutscenes just don't play.

But besides that no, no. The only other issue I had was, it was just a core issue with my system and I had a driver issue and nothing was working properly. But the games itself, no, it's pretty much been good. I'm not a big multiplayer guy for the most part, so I don't deal with a lot of the anti cheat stuff.

Yeah,

Jonathan: it works well. Have you been, have you been around Linux and Linux gaming long enough to remember the, the bad old days? Where, you know, you would have to wait a couple of years after a title released for it to finally start working in wine?

Brodie: I started using Linux daily in 2019, which is a year after Proton.

And as I said, I wasn't gaming at the time anyway. So by the time I started gaming again, it was probably like 2020, 2021. So things were a lot smoother by then. All the

Rob: good old days there.

Jonathan: Yeah. You missed out on all of that fun. You know, So, for example, I used to play Lord of the Rings Online, LOTRO, and the hoops we would have to Somebody, somebody built a launcher in Python just to be able to run LOTRO on Wine, on Linux.

And, you know, every time they would update, you would have to wait for the guy that wrote the script to update his script to make things work again. And that was just normal. And those of us that were real hardcore Linux fans, we just, oh yeah, this is just the way the world is. And then Steam came along with Proton, and, and You know, especially getting ready for the Steam Deck, really started putting some effort into it.

And it's just, it's, it's amazing. It's such a different experience.

Rob: Yeah, unfortunately I go back to the times where it just wasn't really a thing with most games, but yeah, so whenever I do hear people complaining these days about, well, you can't game on Linux, it's like, well, I think you're a little outdated with your information or sometimes they just don't know where you're going and tick that box, run with Proton.

It's like, oh, yeah. Well, that's all I had to do. Yeah.

Brodie: Yeah. I was watching a lot from the outside back during like the steam machine era, for example, but yeah, I, I know the things definitely have gotten, I was like aware of wine. Cause wine's also a thing over on the MacOS side. And during that period I was a MacOS user, but as for like doing the whole gaming back then, yeah, no, I, I, I was a, during high school, Console and a bit of Windows.

That's for the most part.

Rob: So you are a Mac OS user, so you know all about games not working well on your system.

Brodie: Well, look, here's the thing, right? Games work well when the only thing you play is Halo 1 and some old Unreal Tournament.

Rob: Yeah, I happen to have a Mac too, and I just recall running into spots where this just doesn't even support it on here.

Yeah, I suppose I could.

Brodie: Especially now between architecture changes and massive OS rewrites. I imagine all that stuff is completely busted anyway. Yeah, I haven't even tried

Jonathan: that. Not to mention the fact that Mac is basically dropping support for OpenGL. I still don't understand that for a long time though.

Yes, yes. Oh, it's hilarious. You know, you have better OpenGL support. On as Sahi now than you do on Mac Os. Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. Mac. The, the Max's? Like, no, no. We just, on our, on our chip, we can't support the new OpenGL stuff. And these Sahi guys come along and we, we made it work. ,

Brodie: it's

Jonathan: crazy.

Brodie: They just wanna push people over to metal and all that sort of fancy stuff.

Jonathan: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's exactly what it is. It's working great. So you said something about Arch, and I'm wondering if that was your, I run Arch by the way, moment. Is that your distro of choice?

Brodie: Yes, yes, I've been daily driving Arch. Since the day I swapped to Linux, it's not a good choice to do that.

I've got a video coming out soon about, like, my my, my origin story, we'll say. I've talked about it in the past before, but it was, like, back when my channel was way smaller. Yeah, literally the day I swapped Arch Linux. Now, when I swapped was a bad idea, because I was in the middle of classes. I did it in the third week of the semester.

Rob: Well, did you at least use the easy install script, or were you just all manual, do it easy install script?

Brodie: There was no easy install script

back then. I could have installed Endeavor. But no, no, my, my plan, I was, I never planned to be daily driving Linux, this is the problem. So I had a laptop, it's somewhere I don't want to grab it.

I had this laptop, it has two drive slots. I had a Windows install. And I put a second drive in and was going to install Arch on that. Now, I must have made a mistake with fdisk or something, and I accidentally deleted the Windows disk. So, I was like, you know what? We're here anyway. Let's just, let's just do it.

Now, I did back up my files, luckily. I didn't lose any, like, classwork or anything, but Yeah, the, the whole swapping to Linux fully at the time was very much not planned.

I

Jonathan: had an experience like that back when I first went to Linux and what would that have been early 2000s, I think yeah, somewhere around there, like 2000, I don't even know. Some early 2000, somewhere around there and running Windows XP at the time. And. My laptop, because, well, I know now it's because it was a spinning hard drive, you know, conventional hard drive.

But I would have to reinstall Windows XP about once a year to keep it running reasonably well. And I discovered Linux, I think it was dual booting at the time, and Windows XP popped up and said, You gotta go to your C drive. Careful, modifying files in here could damage your, you know, your system. Are you sure you want to continue?

And I just sat and I looked at that for a while and I'm like, I don't really want an operating system that treats me like this. That was my point where I'm like, okay, I'm, I'm done with this. I'm going to go, I'm going to windows for all or for Linux for all of my stuff. That was, yeah, I was. Back in the day when we still called it Fedora core.

Rob: I don't think I've ever made a mistake like that exactly other than Accidentally overwriting the bootloader or something like that. But I have you know, I was dual booting Windows and Linux for off and on for years. And not too many years ago, my windows drive died. I'm like, ah, well, that's all right.

I bought, I, I ordered a new drive with the intention of reinstalling windows, just so it'd be there. And I still have a brand new unused drive that I've never even bothered reinstalling windows or anything on. So I have a spare drive sitting around.

Jonathan: What what desktop environment are you in these days, Brody?

Brodie: Right now I'm in KDE. Not the long term solution. I'd swapped over with Plasma 6 because I wanted to just, you know, I hadn't daily driven KD before, so I want to see what it was like. I want to see, is the grass actually greener? Look, it's, it's greener in some places, but the rest of the grass is dead.

Before that I was on Hyperland and I've used a lot of, like I've used Awesome, WM, i3, Plasma 6. BSPWM, things like that. But my next endeavor is going to be Cosmic when System76 gets the alpha ready for that. Yes. So that's actually the direction I was going. Cosmic, Cosmic looks really interesting, doesn't it?

Yes, it does. Yes, it does. I like to bully Carl about the light theme and his choice of accent colors. But besides that, I I, I think it is really good. Yes.

Rob: Have you tried it out yet?

Brodie: I've not had a chance My, my entire opinion on it is based on what I've seen from the demos and all of that. I've not had a chance to actually try it yet.

I, I, what I should do is just, Chuck, I know there's like a couple of Fedora based distros that ship Cosmic Like, there's like a couple of third party things. I'll probably chuck them in a virtual machine, give it a proper shot. But my, like, I was kind of waiting for the alpha to be ready, because I know a lot of just basic things, you know, pre alpha, a lot of basic things are just going to be broken.

So, I'm not going to run it on my system until at least the alpha, at least until they feel like it's ready. To be shipping to the Pop! OS users.

Rob: Yeah, it was probably February or March. I did try it out and demoed it. It's, it's pretty easy if you install Pop! OS and then install it on there. It's pretty simple, but it definitely wasn't ready.

I, I could have gotten by. I mean, if, if I absolutely had to, that was just what I had. You could run it. You just don't have some settings there and you could do some things in, in command line, or even, even I, I tested found you could still start up the GNOME settings and stuff like that and worked halfway.

But yeah, it was it was a nice looking environment. Looked, it definitely looked promising.

Jonathan: Yeah. What, what interests me so much about Cosmic is that it's so, in some ways it's so cutting edge. And it's intended to be like a desktop environment for the regular user So, you know, you've you've got some of these that are new desktop environments Well, like hyperland for instance, I mean that is very cutting edge But it is aimed at a very specific type of user, right?

Whereas you've got your your kind of general use case Desktop environments gnome and kde Well those have All of the baggage of having existed for however many years they've been around. I think it's really interesting that, that Pop! OS is coming along and saying, Alright, we're going to build a desktop environment from scratch.

We're going to do it in a modern language, Rust. We're going to do it with the modern backend, Wayland. And so it's not going to have It's not going to have any x11 baggage connected to it. And I think that's, that's really fascinating. That's why a lot of us are kind of keeping our eyes on it, trying to see, you know, what can they come up with?

What can they do without having the baggage? And what new ideas can they come up with for kind of the general populace? And that's, what's exciting about it.

Brodie: Yeah, I think the, what, what I really like about Cosmic is they aren't designing a desktop in a vacuum. They aren't saying, okay, we're going to make a desktop environment and just pretend like the last.

25 years of, maybe even longer, 27? Whatever. Probably, yeah, about 27 years of, like, genomic ADE have just never happened. Things that they've resolved, that they've resolved years ago, Cosmos is like, okay, yeah, good solution. Let's do that. Other things where maybe KDE is lagging behind on something, like, okay, well, people have had this, like, one of the things is the way virtual desktops work.

So on, on K KDE, it's lagging behind. If you swap your virtual desktop, it changes the virtual desktop on all of your monitors. On a window manager, on something like i3, it'll change it on the individual monitor. This has been open on KDE as like a bug for about, I think since KDE Yes, it's KDE 3, so it's a bit of a bit of an old one and the Cosmic guys like, okay Let's just do that.

Let's just make it work. And you're right like it's it's getting rid of a lot of that baggage The one of the things I do think is gonna be interesting with it is with them using Rust It's not them just using new toolkits. It's They are the reason there is GUI toolkits, really. Because there were GUI toolkits for Rust before, but they were like, fairly Fairly new, because Rust is a really new language, and GUI Rust is even newer than that, and if you look at ICED, They are the top contributors, like pretty much all the top contributors for ICED now are System76 people.

Like, they are really trying to make this happen, and Yeah. ICED is good, but it has a lot of, well, the documentation's rough,

Speaker 4: very,

Jonathan: very

Brodie: rough.

Jonathan: Well, that's, but, yeah. That's fairly, that's fairly common for when a tool like that is under heavy development. It seems like documentation tends to lag behind. And I guess one of the, one of the measures of how well System76 is doing is whether they spend the time and resources to catch the documentation up as they go along.

Rob: Oh.

Jonathan: Let's see if they do. Yeah, there is

Rob: a There was a lot of concern, I know, or a lot of, a lot of doubt when system 76 went into making their own distribution and nobody believed that that was going to be worth their time or was going to go anywhere. And I mean, Pop! OS, I'm not a user of it, but it did turn out to be a really good distribution.

So, you know, I'm not really doubting them with Cosmic as as I and many other people did when Pop! OS came out.

Brodie: System76 is a weird oddball in the Linux space because obviously Ubuntu is backed by Canonical and they put a lot of money into server development, but System76 is a company who, their entire business model revolves around Desktop Linux.

They sell desktop computers. They still sell, like, server hardware as well. Sure, there's that as well, but their main their main product skew is their laptops, and there's, desktops as well matter, but the main thing's the laptops, and that means you have a company that has a vested interest in making sure their desktop experience is as good as possible, and They just sort of exist as an outlier.

There's no other entities that do both of these things, both be a hardware seller and also make an operating system and make a desktop or make a distro, make a desktop as well.

Rob: Yeah. Unless you're Apple.

Brodie: Well, yeah,

Jonathan: I mean, in a Linux

Brodie: space.

Jonathan: Yeah. You could, you could almost make an argument that that's what Sun did on the server side of things, but yeah, that's, that is interesting.

All right, so there's one other thing I wanted to make sure and cover, and then we'll kind of go into more freeform. But I want to ask you about this. Are you, are you watching the mess around Windows Recall? And what are your thoughts on what that is going to mean for Linux?

Brodie: Well, I did put a video out yesterday.

I don't know what, what I, I tapped into with this video. Cause this thing is doing, it is doing the rounds. Right now it is at 75, 000 views. Which is, Over double my next top video. My views are like over the last 48 hour period are triple what they normally are. I tapped into something. Yeah. I think, I think recall is, it's, it's one of those things where it feels like the engineers at Microsoft sat in a circle and they're like, Hey, we have this co pilot thing.

Let's. Let's go, let's do something really cool with it. But they never spoke to anyone outside of the circle. They didn't ask, like, they didn't do any, any testing with like regular people. They didn't bring anyone in and be like, Hey, is this a good idea? They didn't speak to any of their like networking guys, their security guys.

It just seems like they wanted to do something really cool. And then it turns out there's a lot of really bad people. really bad decision made with it. Like the whole, it's a SQLite database and it's encrypted when you're not logged in, which is not a problem. We don't care about that. The problem is the fact that you can just exfiltrate the entire SQLite database

Jonathan: with basically no issues.

I saw a story Artist Technica did that apparently you can log in as another user and get into the database too. So like the whole, the whole thing is, is on a, there, there are, there are broken things about their security model, but I think most people don't care about that. Like most people don't know what a SQL lite database is, but the idea that their computer is intentionally taking screenshots of everything they do every five seconds, I think that kind of taps into like.

the creepy factor. Like that's a, it's a creepypasta that your computer is watching you and I've seen, I've seen people that are not Linux users that, that are just creeped out by that. And a lot of them are starting to look at Linux as an alternative, which I think is really interesting. I don't know, I don't know how much traction that's going to get, because it's easy to say, Oh, I'm not going to run Windows anymore.

And then, you know, you try to install Linux and for some people you, you hit the learning curve wall. And not everybody is willing to spend the time to get over that. Or some people just have weird bugs that they hit. So let me ask you this Do you think linux is ready for an influx of people coming from?

Windows

Brodie: It's funny you say linux influx of people so I know someone who is involved in Like device sales and device integration. They had a company just cancel a big order of windows devices and They're now swapping all over to apple. So it's not going to be entirely swapping to linux There's a lot of cases where people are like, hey, let's let's try out this whole apple thing Assuming they have enough money or want to take out a loan.

But for the regular people I it's weird right because You If you are seeing people discuss something online, those are already the, like, 1 percent technical people. Even if they're in, like, fairly non technical spaces, if you are discussing something on Reddit, you are already, like, a very small group of people that even know what an operating system is in the first place and know that you can change it.

Because most people, they don't change operating systems, they change computers. If you know someone who has a 10 year old computer, they're likely still running whatever operating system that device shipped with, because they That's just how it goes. Yes. I think, I think this is, this is a really tough one, right?

Because, yes, if you're, if you're a technical person, you can absolutely do it. Like, we've all done this. And if you're swapping to something like PopOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, you can do it. But even then, I'm still seeing people saying, like, I installed, And I, I, everything broke and they just don't know why because the whole like the whole idea of troubleshooting isn't really a necessary skill for using a computer at this point.

Everything's been so streamlined that You can kind of just, like, go your way through everything and without any sort of issues along the way. And then when something does pop up, like trying to use Linux, you just don't have that skill set or that, that knowledge base to know how to even go about trying to resolve the issue.

I, I think a lot of people are going to try it. At least those, especially in the gaming space, because a lot of people in the gaming space have Some knowledge of like, a lot of people have built computers, right? They've probably installed Windows once or twice before. I think they might try it. Whether people will stick around is another question.

And, I guess, keep an eye on the Steam Hardware Surveys because that's the only numbers we have on Linux users apparently.

Jonathan: Yeah. Well it's, it's it's, it's increasing. Let's see, we, what did the latest Veronix article say about that? We blew past the 2 or 3 percent mark, something like that. 2, I think we're like at 2.

Rob: 3 I think or something. Yeah, but it's

Jonathan: more than, it's more than Mac has, right?

Rob: Yes. Yeah, it's it's been it's been above Mac Mac on the steam survey since last summer.

Brodie: It's sad that it took that long though. Yes,

Jonathan: yes. So, I think I saw another one of your videos talking about the distros that we should recommend to new users.

And you kind of touched on it now, but this is something I see too and it drives me nuts. These niche distros, which I don't, okay, I don't have a problem with somebody doing a niche distro, like if there's an idea that they just want to go in for and, you know, repackage Ubuntu using this weird desktop environment that nobody's heard of, it's like, that's fine, if that's your toy project and you want to work on that, that's fine.

Everyone distro. In fact, there needs to be a very small number of people running your distro because there are going to be problems with some one person packaging all that stuff. Like, there's just going to be problems with it. And you particularly should not be telling new users to run this niche distro.

What, so, to turn this into a question, what do you think would be the best distro for a new Linux user to try?

Brodie: That's, that's, that's tough, because I think, Fedora I think we have to take off the table just because Fedora has such a focus on free software. And that's good for the people that know about it, but having to add this additional repo in just to be able to access, you know, proprietary things you want to access, it's, it's just this weird extra hurdle.

Hmm. Honestly, like, the tried and true answer is just Ubuntu. Like, I know a lot of people say Ubuntu, but realistically, it's fine. Yeah, I know, Snaps, whatever. But, for someone who's new, Ubuntu is perfectly reasonable. There are issues when it comes to Ubuntu having slightly older software, especially slightly older drivers.

And if you're on, you know, Ubuntu, the newest of newest GPUs, for example, that can be an issue for sure. But

it's probably the best option. Pop OS, you know, it's, it's also a good option if you are more in that, that gaming sort of focus. I think both of those are pretty reasonable choices. If you're going outside of that, like, you know, Debian, Debian's Debian, especially, you know, if you're anywhere near. The end of a Debian cycle, things are getting really, really out of date and it's become a problem.

Anything Arch based is just I think the only time something Arch based makes sense is when Valve has specifically, you know, they've made a thing. It's not really Arch. The Steam Deck's operating system is not Arch. It's a, it's a specific image based on a specific set of packages, treat it more like its own separate thing.

And I don't think there's really any Arch based distro that You can recommend, because Arch just has, it's rolling release, no matter what you try to do besides doing that, and it's just, that comes with too many issues, I just don't think it's worth trying to put someone on it. I think, just, go with a tried and true answer, go with Ubuntu, go with PopOS, look, go with Mint, it's, it's fine.

Like, look, Mint is a classic answer, but there's a reason it's a classic answer, it's a good answer.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Rob: I hear so many people recommend Mint all the time, and, It's not me, but I mean A lot of people

Brodie: also say Zoran, if I think the issue with going with something with like Zoran or like Mint is it's too like Windows and that might trick people into treating it like Windows and then getting confused when things are not in the place where they expect it to be in.

Rob: Half the time my answer is, if you're leaving Windows, don't you want something different? It's just so much like Windows. And, and then they're always like, well, you can configure it any way you want. I'm like, well, why not go to a good starting point? But there's, there's nothing wrong with Mint. I argue against it all the time because that's just the kind of person I am.

But in all honesty, I think Mint and Zorn are mostly fine distributions.

Jonathan: I put somebody on Mint for their first Linux computer back a few years ago. And then I came along a couple of years afterwards and it's like, okay, so let's update this. How do I, how do I update this thing? And of course, you know, it had gotten way out of date.

And I'm not a Mint user, and so I had to sit there on that machine for quite a while to try to figure out like how do I get them to the next release of Mint? I don't think I ever managed to do it. I think I reinstalled it instead. I come to find out, I don't think Mint has an upgrade path to go from one to the other.

So that, that kind of burned me out on putting new people on Mint, because you kind of want them to be able to upgrade. I'm, I'm sure there's a way to do it, but like there wasn't an, an easy, there wasn't an easy way to do it. And it wasn't my machine, so I didn't want to spend hours and hours and hours fighting

Rob: it.

I thought you could use the same Ubuntu, the disk release upgrade, or whatever it is, to Do whatever it is, do release upgrade. Or the fact that you have to have this

Brodie: discussion about how to do it already means there's some issues with sure.

Rob: I mean, to be, to be, maybe not to be fair, but I mean, Zorin literally did not have a upgrade path until, was it a year?

Maybe it's been two years already, but I remember, I remember the announcement when they finally put that in there, that. And I think it was just beta then, I don't even know where it's at now, but So, I know you literally couldn't for that.

Jonathan: Yep, yep. And before all the Mint people come and tell me, Here's how you do it, I'm pretty sure that was actually LMDE.

The Linux Mint Debian Edition. And so that's even yet another step removed from mainstream Mint. It was, it was, I would not put them on the same distro now. Looking back, I would probably go with Fedora. Probably Ubuntu. Honestly, because this was, this was back before Pop! OS was really good.

Rob: Yeah, I don't, I don't use Ubuntu on my desktop, but just like you Brody, that's, that's the one I recommend to people all the time.

Mainly I say, stick with the mainstream, you know, Ubuntu, Ubuntu mainly, but then, you know, if you want to go out there, Debian or Fedora, but you know, there's these, you know, things like you mentioned that that are good. I

Brodie: think once you're familiar with stuff, you can always branch out, but yeah, the first step should just be something where you know it's fine, like, it's not great, it's not perfect, it's just, it's just fine.

Not a ton. I do think the concept is really cool, and I have said if I was going to set up, like, I want to set up a capture PC at some point, I really should, because my capture setup is really not good, but if I was going to do a capture PC, I probably would just chuck something atomic on it. I think nowadays the idea of Atomic Distros has gotten a lot easier thanks to the existence of Distrobox.

One of the issues that Atomic Distros had early on is just software availability, and if you don't, if you weren't gonna have a distro that had all the software available, you'd have to have a bunch of layered packages, and layered packages slow down your update process massively. Nowadays a lot more things are available on Flathub, available as snaps, available as app images, and it is a lot easier, but At the end of the day, there's going to be some things that are missing.

And distro box has massively smoothed out that process.

Jonathan: So speaking of, do you, do you have, we're just going to ask about all of the holy war topics. Do you have an opinion on the snap flat pack and app image of war that we are currently in?

Brodie: I Refuse to run snaps on my system. I do not want them anywhere near my device.

Speaker 4: Okay

Brodie: My honestly the main reason it's it's people might argue. It's a dumb reason. It's snap just Constantly spamming your device your your drive with loopback devices. I don't know why That's the solution they've gone with. I don't, if I've run LSBLK, I want to see my drives and my petitions. I don't want to see all of this other nonsense.

App images, I, app images are a weird one because they're very much up to the developer. They had an issue a while back where they basically got deprecated on like major distros because they were running a, or they were relying on an old version of the, uh, user space file system thing that I'm forgetting the name of Like squash FS

Jonathan: or fuse

Brodie: or Fuse, yes.

They're relying on Fuse 2, and Ubuntu dropped that and moved up to Fuse 3. So it broke a bunch of app images, but as a, as a bit of technology, I think app images are fine. I think the issue with app images is the fact that they are treated as stand alone content. binaries. So unless it has an update process built in, there's no way to update it without just going and redownloading it.

There is a application I do have that does have a built in updater. It just, what it does is just up, it downloads a new version and then just deletes itself. It's like, here you go, here's the new version. I mean, but most things don't do that. Most it's you have to go and manually update it. Flatpaks, I think have I like Flatpaks.

I do. I think they have issues, especially when it comes to launch times. I've noticed a lot of, a lot of applications take a bit of time to deal with stuff. And when we're dealing with both Flatpaks and Snaps, there's obviously going to be issues with sandboxing and, you know, Yeah, that's especially if they're third party solutions and the developers haven't properly addressed those So yep, it can be very hit and miss.

Jonathan: I must admit I've not played with snaps at all yet Not on one of those desktops You got pop Well, yes, okay, that's true. I have pop. I'm probably running a snap somewhere in here and don't even realize it The thing that fascinates me about snaps though. Is it they can run? server side processes Whereas you know with with with flat packs, that's all all gooey stuff and Ubuntu claims it was snaps Well, no, you can do you can run your daemons as snaps too.

And it's like that's that's a fascinating idea I could see something coming of that. I could see that eventually being a killer feature maps

Brodie: Printing Cups is a snap, or it's going to be a snap.

Jonathan: That's interesting. That might work out really well for them.

Rob: And Pop! OS doesn't have snaps by default. But, you can run snaps anywhere.

You can run it on your Fedora or anything. You could. So that's the

Jonathan: thing about snaps, and we've, Rob, you know this, we've talked about this. There's actually a kernel patch to make snaps work right. So to have the, the sandboxing that snaps are supposed to have, there's a kernel patch that you need. Well, you get it automatically in Ubuntu, but if you run another distro, you do not have that kernel patch.

And so you can, yes, you can run snaps there, but they are running in a sort of crippled way where they can get to your system in ways that they're not supposed to be able to, and the, the. The thing about this that drives me nuts is apparently Ubuntu is no longer working on upstreaming that kernel patch.

It's like Why do you want this thing to work everywhere or not?

All right Brody, ARM. I'm curious Have you played around with ARM and RISC and all of those alternative architectures? MIPS even?

Brodie: I have a phone

Jonathan: running Linux. No, I'm,

Brodie: I'm pretty, I I'm pretty much just X 86 on everything I do. I, I really would like to go and mess around with some other stuff. And there's so many things I would like to do, right.

It's just a matter of sitting down, having time to do things. But then I'm like, Hey, I've got these other things I want to focus on. And You know, every project is just a matter of time. Yeah. Right? And there's only so much time in the day.

Jonathan: Raspberry Pi? You know, that's a For some of us, that's a big part of the Linux ecosystem now.

Is that a thing that you've messed with yet? Do you have a Raspberry Pi? No, again,

Brodie: that's another thing, like, I've really wanted to get into, like, doing basic, like, electronic programming stuff and just It's one of these things where I would love to sit down and do it. It's just Time! Yep. Yep. Nope. I'm

Rob: interested to see how the Snapdragon X Elite performs and, and getting Linux on that.

Brodie: Yeah, I'm curious to see what people end up doing with those devices and what I go how it's gonna really fit in there What what what sort of use cases people are gonna have or if it's just gonna be like hey Now you just have like dedicated arm chip on this device and I don't know run Android with it or something.

I don't know come with a solution

Jonathan: Well, so that's, that's the interesting thing. You look at the, the new Mac laptops, the M1s, the M2s, we've got with Asahi, we've got now a great version of Linux on them. The thing about it is you have to jump through the hoops to be able to do the install on it. And that's something I'm curious about how it's going to work with the, with the Snapdragon laptops when they come out, because ARM is Historically arm has been difficult to boot Linux on like it's been, it's been fiddly.

So either you have to go in and fiddle with U Boot, which I've spent the last 48 hours fighting with U Boot and I just You you, okay. U Boot is a great project. Thank you to the guy that wrote U Boot. It's great. It makes things work. I hate messing with you. Boot on X 86. You have, well it used to be, you know, your bio, so now you've got UEFI and like most of the time now Linux just works.

Pushed your flash drive in or your DVD or whatever and it said, Oh, hey, do you want to boot from this? And you say yes, and it just works. It's great. On an ARM, historically, you've had to fiddle with it for hours and hours to finally get it to work. And then you do an update and it breaks again. You gotta fi I'm a little jaded about running Linux on ARM just because of that.

Like the Raspberry Pi, they've got it down. They figured out how to do it. But so many of these other devices, it's so fiddly to get it to work. It's such a pain.

Rob: What I'm, what I'm reading here is that the Snap, Snapdragon X Elite supports UEFI based boots, so

Jonathan: And this, this is the solution that is hopefully going to rescue everyone, and that is that they have started doing UEFI on ARM.

And if, if If more companies would move to that, you know, more of these devices, they'd write the firmware to do it. Things would begin to just work on ARM like they do on x86. I have some hope but on the other hand, companies are very slow to upstream. Their bits into the kernel. And so, you know, you, you'll have something based on a rock chip device or a snapdragon device, and it's like, well, yeah, there's patches out there to make it work with the kernel.

You can either use the experimental patches that aren't good enough to be upstreamed yet, or you can use this five year old vendor kernel that has all of their patches on top of it. It's like, neither of these are good answers. Neither of these are the way to go. I don't like, I don't like A or B. Is there, is there a door number C?

Brodie: I know that there's some. Stuff that Intel's working on as well. And Intel is generally pretty good at getting things upstreamed. So I don't know, maybe, maybe something will happen there. Yeah. So Intel

Jonathan: is known when they want something upstream and someone else is working on it, they're known to just buy the company that's working on it to be able to get it upstreamed.

Like the, the, the real time patches. Apparently someone at Intel said, we really need to get more of this upstream. So they just bought the company and it's like, we'll do it this way. Okay, so, what if you had a, we're getting close to the end of the show, so, I'll ask you some wrap up questions. If you had a magic wand and you could just change something about Linux for the Linux desktop, what, what do you think, what would you change?

Brodie: Do I want people to get angry at me?

Jonathan: Yes. It's fine.

Brodie: I would like to instill a BDFL in the Weyland project. I think they need some leadership.

Jonathan: Benevolent dictator for life inside Weyland. I am, I am, I am in agreement with this. Weyland is too much designed by committee and they need somebody in charge of it. I agree

Brodie: with that. It is the dictionary definition of designed by committee. They literally have a committee of people who vote on changes.

I would, I would, I'm

Jonathan: in agreement with this. I'm, I'm for it. That would take a magic wand, though, to be able to pull off. It definitely would. Fork

Rob: it. Start over. Well, yeah, that's good. Well, not over, but.

Jonathan: That's really, that's really the way to, to, to fix that. And it, it's funny because other projects have had this experience.

Where someone forks it, a lot of people move over to the fork, which in some cases gets run differently, and then the fork is so successful that finally the guys running the original project are like, you know what, let's just let the fork be the project. So GCC had this happen way back in the day. OpenWRT had this happen, and both of those projects, big, big successful projects, both had these forks that the forks did so well that they kind of got folded back in with, with some of their changes becoming, you know, official in the way the project was run.

So yeah, maybe, maybe that's the way to do it. Maybe somebody, maybe we need to find a benevolent dictator and fork Weyland and give the fork of Weyland over to the, the BDFL.

Brodie: I don't know who would do it, cause like, there's a That's the problem, cause I A lot of the people I don't think are in that position.

There are a couple of people I think Could do it, it's just, I don't think they want to waste their entire life away doing that.

Jonathan: Yes, that would, that is indeed a life position. It, it works for the Colonel, because the Colonel has critical mass. And, you know, we, there's now enough money tied up in the Colonel, that you can give Linus Torvalds and and Greg You could pay them, like there's enough money in the ecosystem now that you can, you can give them a comfortable salary to be Essentially benevolent dictators for life.

I don't know that there's that much money in Weyland yet.

We'll see. That's an interesting answer though. I like that. I like that. Rob, anything you want to get in before I ask our final questions and we look to wrap?

Rob: I don't think so.

Jonathan: Okay. All right. I'll pass.

Rob: All

Jonathan: right. So Brody, let me ask you these final two questions before we let you go. What is your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Brodie: Text, terminal based text editor, Envim. But when I'm doing a lot of programming stuff recently, I've been using VS Codium. As for scripting language, I am Python. Thanks again.

Jonathan: Okay, yeah All right. Is there anything that we we didn't cover? We didn't ask you about that you want to let folks know?

Anything you want to plug?

Brodie: Anything I want to plug? Yeah, go check out the, I did, at least you got something, another point where I can save my links? Is this where I'm gonna save my, where people can find me?

Jonathan: Yeah,

Brodie: okay. The The main channel is Brody Robertson. The podcast channel, I upload there once a week with the actual episode and the rest of the days are clips.

That is tech over tea. The gaming channel is Brody on Games. I stream there twice a week, both on YouTube and Twitch. And I guess there is the react channel. I don't even remember what it's called. Brody Robertson reacts, I think. Where I don't upload stuff. So, whatever. But they'll, you guys have links, so whatever needs to be done with those.

Jonathan: Yes, we will make sure and get the links in the show notes. All right. It has been, it has been fun, man. I appreciate you coming. We'll have to have you back when you know, something really interesting happens in Wayland. We'll have you back and talk about it. Absolute pleasure to do this. Awesome. Thanks so much.

All right, Rob, have we turned you into a fan?

Rob: His opinions definitely seem to align with about everything I say and think. So I'm definitely got to check out his content.

Jonathan: So here, when you get into one of your famous discussion debates on some weird Facebook group, you just, you have a YouTuber. Like, look, I'm obviously right because Brody agrees with me.

Here's the link to his video saying the same thing. I mean, it's It's just great. It's a tool.

Rob: Right. And I don't really watch games on YouTube, but I'll have to check out if any of my kids are familiar with them at all.

Jonathan: Yeah. Because I watch a

Rob: lot.

Jonathan: I, I don't need any more Let's Players to follow. I have too many of those already from, you know, being on YouTube for years and years.

But I, I definitely appreciate the the, the Linux commentary and the Wayland stuff. And it was, it was fun to talk to him. I enjoyed it very much. All right. Rob, is there anything you want to plug before we let everybody go?

Rob: You guys can come find me, connect with me. That is at Robert P Campbell.

com and on there, you can find links to my LinkedIn mastodon, or as many of you may know, you can come catch me on the untitled Linux show with Jonathan, which I haven't been on for a couple of weeks, but I'll be back.

Jonathan: You need to be back. Goodness, we've had to do it with three people instead of four because you've been out and David's been out.

Yep, Okay, cool. And that is, of course, on the Twit network. You can find us over there at Twit, twit. tv. Things I want to plug, of course, we've got Hackaday, my work there. So we've got the security column goes live every Friday morning. And of course, Floss Weekly is now part of Hackaday. Records every Wednesday.

Contemplating moving to Tuesdays. We'll see if anything actually happens with that. But boy, that would, that would free my schedule up a lot to not be working 24 hours a day almost on Twit. to, on Wednesdays and Thursdays. So we will see if that happens. You can find my stuff. I do have a YouTube channel where I occasionally upload things, usually around either how to fix stuff on Linux or around the Meshtastic project.

But yeah, find, find our stuff there, follow us, and we will see you next week on Floss Weekly.