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

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey folks, this week we're talking about the Raspberry Pi both booting more reliably and coming to a laptop near you. That looks really interesting. There's Wayland news, there's news about bottles, there's ray tracing news and lots more, including business and a big merger that we talk about for a while. It's really great stuff and you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:26
this is twit this is the untitled linux show, episode 211, recorded saturday, july the 12th, spicy pillow talk. Hey folks, it is saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with linux and open source, some hardware reviews and news, all kinds of good stuff. It is the Untitled Linux Show, and it's not just me Today. We've got Jeff and Rob with us. It's me and the bald guys and we are going to have fun. Oh, not quite Freshly shaven One's freshly shaven, the other's fallen down on it.

01:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, I haven't shaved for like a week or something oh my goodness.

01:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And I was the one on vacation. What the heck Rob I was busy working.

01:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've been busy working. We've got some fun stuff to talk about, though, and the first is we're going to let Rob talk about. I'm guessing this is Raspberry Pi adjacent, because it says it's the Pi boot improvement.

01:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, so this time, something that sounds like a Raspberry Pi related story really is a Raspberry Pi related story. So have you ever found your Raspberry Pi not booting after an update, be it due to a power loss, interruption during an installation or just a dodgy update? Canonical software engineer Dave Jones believes the current approach to booting is far from optimal Quote far from optimal. And he calls it, in his words, bad with a capital B. So today, if the system fails to boot, there isn't much of a fallback. Apparently, backup files exist, but they're hard to find without arcane commands and often difficult to get to work, as apparently I don't know myself. When mine breaks I just start over and reflash. But just reimage it.

02:27
But apparently you know they're difficult to get because often those files are broken, apparently. So, as Jody Sneddon says in the article that I was reading about, this quote the only thing worse than no backup is something pretending to be a backup. So you know, you don't know that false sense of security, uh thinking yeah, I'm all backed up, and when you go to to, to, to utilize as a. That's why, in the backup world, you always test your backups but you know this is a different story, kind of kind of backup thing.

03:04
I don't know how you test this, but this is why. This is why they canonical, or? Dave jones has laid out plans for a new approach to booting aiming to improve system recovery and reliability. Reliability, quote tri boot one word t-r-y-b-o-t, um tri boot to be released in a upcoming ubuntu 25.10. So dave jones explains that, uh, we'll be moving to a system that will test new boot assets and automatically fall back to a quote known good configuration in the event the test fails.

03:48
You can start testing this today, if you want, by installing the latest UMA2 25.10 daily pre-installed image for Raspberry Pi. And then you add a PPA, which is listed in the article, and then it's a simple apt install flash-kernel-pyboot. And you know they also say, if you're testing the ask, that you file bugs against the flash-kernel package tagged with raspy-image, as opposed to isolate those bugs and not get confused with any other stuff going on. And then also, apparently there's one downside to this new feature in that each time flash-kernel is run, the next boot will be a double boot, and for some that might catch some off guard. You know, seeing it boot up twice, boots up all of a sudden, you get the rainbow again and it boots again. You know, just because you know it's something that might look like something failed the boot right the first time and you're like whoa, what's wrong with my computer, unless you know what's going on. But, and additionally, this double boot also means that during you know this boot, when it, when it does that, that kernel, uh, flash kernel. This means that the boot will take roughly twice as long because it's booting up twice. So you know dave does and also dave says, you know he doesn't see any way around this.

05:26
But there's a new command. I'm not exactly sure what it does, how it, how it does it. Well, I can't just be part of the system, but I'm sure it does something. The new command that has been added to avoid this double can do a pseudo space pi boot, that's p-i-b-o-t dash, try space dash, dash, reboot, um, and then apparently it only boot once. I'm not sure what it's skipping there.

05:55
But and they also go on to say this new command will have other options, um, to manage the pi boot process, kernel boot process. So I guess those are yet to be determined what kinds of things those are, but I guess that sounds like that's maybe how things are going to be managed. So all in all, I think I'll take the slower, more reliable boot ups, especially considering how you know finicky some uh you know sometimes raspberry pies can be and you know, I guess, sometimes why I've. I move things just proxmox vm servers myself, but uh, you know, I think I'll take the double boot compared to a fast boot that is uh more susceptible to breaking if if I had to pick the two. Reliability is always good.

06:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know. The thing about this is I've had Raspberry Pis fail to boot multiple times. It's usually not a kernel issue, it's usually the SD card getting corrupted and you have to run an FSDK on it to get it to boot again. I've had that problem repeatedly. In fact, I lost a customer over that problem. By the way, I built a little tiny asterisk phone system on a Raspberry Pi and, like every other week, I had to go out and rerun FSCK on the SD card. It was not good and they finally got tired of it and like we don't. We don't actually need a phone system at this location. Yeah.

07:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Okay, so so you know I've I've been in your career field before. And one suggestion I don't think I'd have a business critical infrastructure running on a pie, so that's just a tip for you.

07:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that was. That was kind of my introduction to that. Maybe that wasn't a good answer. That's when I figured out that maybe that wasn't a good idea. I mean it's great.

07:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was gonna say it's great if you have like just a display on the wall that's like flashing some advertisements or some simple thing that if it goes down, it's like oh well, but phones aren't good for a business. Yeah, it was less than great. Well, the sd cards aren't known for being uh robust.

07:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No this is. This is why two things, this is why I was so excited when there's finally a way to run your Raspberry Pi off of NVMe or, you know, pixieboot, for that matter. It's also why I'm so annoyed by the Pi 500 not having the NVMe slot. You know, I didn't have this in the notes until now, but I'm going to add something to the notes that we're going to talk about that's Raspberry Pi related. And yeah, we're going to. In fact, I wonder if I could find this real quick. There is a device that is very interesting to Raspberry Pi users. I'm logged in. Okay, we are going to let Jeff go to his story about AMD, and I am going to go log into X and find the stories that I am going to talk about.

08:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
X11 or Xorg.

08:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Xorg Xcom, not Xorg. He got me, he got me. So confusing all these Xs, I know who in the world thought it was a good idea to rename their perfectly usable app to x when we have so many other things named x all these x's, it's like.

09:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's like jeff's past.

09:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, all right, jeff, let's suck amd first, and then we'll come back and talk raspberry pi again oh, sounds good.

09:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Okay, so we've talked in the past about how the drivers for amd cards have been improving. Over time. There have been performance improvements as AMD keeps going back and refining and polishing the code. This week's story from Pharonix is about how ray tracing has been improved, this time with the Mesa driver and its evolution, and they're putting benchmark numbers on it so we can quantify the improvements. Marked numbers on it so we can quantify the improvements. The specific driver being tested is the Mesa 25.2, which is on feature freeze currently and expected to branch off next week and start the release cycle. It's expected grain of salt here. It's expected to be flagged as stable in August. Now, while there's going to be improvements all through the driver, we're just going to be focusing on the Vulcan ray tracing improvements. These tests were done on AMD Radeon RX 9070. Now it's not an XT, just a plain 9070. Now these are running from a bone stock Ubuntu 25.04 install, with the only difference being is adding in the 25.2 Mesa development version replacing the Ubuntu standard 25.1 version. So otherwise everything was identical.

10:34
The first part of the benchmarking is just running on a couple of games and benchmarks to make sure the non-ray tracing situations didn't have a regression. Good news there is there isn't anything, which Michael found. Performance was pretty flat between the two versions, so the ray tracing improvements didn't break anything. So now, moving on to the ray tracing part of the benchmarks, there's a difference and they are for the better. Michael calls out that the gravity benchmark is running 16% faster and I'll say all the benchmarks had roughly the same kind of performance increase. But the downside is there are not any games run. Now he doesn't say in the article why. I mean, maybe it's coming in the future, maybe this is early enough that it's not really handling games. I don't know why. So I can't say what kind of performance increase it'll be in the real world, in a real world situation Benchmarks they can be a good analog to the real world performance and they can also be wrong.

11:38
It depends on how the benchmark is constructed and it can also depend on if the company or groups involved tune the code for the benchmark and it doesn't show improvement in the real world. We have seen companies do this in the past. Intel was one that did that so that their synthetic data looked awesome real world. It didn't show the same increase. But they're not the only one.

12:03
If we keep the idea, though, that there's about a 16% improvement, then there's going to be a few more frames per second on games. Now, this isn't going to be earth shattering, you know. You got to keep in mind this is how drivers mature, though you know there's almost never a night and day difference, but we get a few frames better here and there, and over time it amounts to quite a good improvement. The general rule of thumb is about a 10%. Performance increase is the bottom line of where you'll see a difference. Less than 10%, the average person won't tell a difference, not that some people who are sensitive wouldn't. We're just talking averages here, so this should give a noticeable improvement. Take a look at the article in the show notes for more details to see all the data, and you can make up your own mind. And hopefully, the future has even better gaming performance on AMD.

12:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know it's two things. One, it's interesting to see AMD's performance continue to improve. There is another article this week about a NVIDIA bug fix or something that got brought online for the nvidia nouveau drivers and it was like a 250 performance increase and I was going to cover that. Until I saw that it's like these cards from 10 years ago, I was like, oh well, nobody cares anymore. At least it's the current gen AMD cards that are getting fixed on Team Red.

13:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There was a time where I frequently used 10-year-old cards, but I've moved a little bit slightly more modern, 4 or 5-year-old maybe.

13:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And there was questions whether or not it affected the last gen, and you couldn't answer that. So I definitely the rdna4s is getting improvement, but nobody knows about the rdna3 that wasn't in the benchmarks either yeah, I'm still on the hunt for a reasonably priced amdr dna4 it's.

14:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, they're still sort of unobtain, yeah, unobtainium for the. Uh, the msrp trying to find somebody actually selling it at such a reasonable price.

14:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Uh, well, uh, the, you know there might be a little bit of something hope, uh, on our ending notes hope is on the horizon.

14:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, we'll see what we're going to see what's coming. Jeff and Rob trying to get me to spend money. Well, I'm going to get Jeff and Rob to spend money. Now it is my turn. It is my turn to convince these guys to spend some money, because there's something really cool I saw this week. I thought for a bit that I might actually be responsible for it and not directly, I am told. But so Jeff Geerling tweeted X, whatever you want to say.

14:49
Um sent out a post about a laptop that he was testing out and it is a reasonably decent not like a super high end, but a reasonably decent looking laptop, and it's got something uh odd going on with it, um, and it is got something uh odd going on with it, um, and it is. Let's see. I may be able to uh full screen this thing and actually show you I'm going to attempt to share chrome tab. This guy, this guy. There it is. That's the thing. Look at that, look at that laptop doing some SDR stuff.

15:24
Well, you may notice that that laptop has a funny little sidecar sitting out at the side, this guy here, funny little sidecar. You know what that looks like? That looks like the 40 pin header from a Raspberry Pi. Well, that is the 40 pin header from a Raspberry Pi. This is a laptop that takes a Raspberry Pi CM5 up underneath it. You punch the compute module into the bottom of the laptop. It plugs into a kind of a motherboard thing. I'm not sure. Does that make it a motherboard or a daughterboard? Which one's the mother and which one's the daughter in this scenario? I don't know. But anyway, where's the processor?

16:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
The processor is on the CM5. Is's the daughter in this scenario? I don't know. But anyway, where's the processor? The process is the raspberry pi.

16:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, then it would be the motherboard, I would think I'm not sure what that makes, the the board that makes up the laptop, then the grandmother board, I don't know. Anyway, daughter card maybe, anyway. So it's a laptop comes with a battery. It has USB ports on it, hdmi ports on it. It has an NVMe port on it too, and you just punch a Raspberry Pi CM5 up into it and it will go. And that is super interesting to me. It is being made by Argon40, and they are calling it the OneUp and they are calling it the one up, and I've got a link in the show notes to where they're going to kickstart it. It's on Kickstarter. They don't have a price announced yet, right? And so that's what's really going to make this either an instant buy or oh, that's a cool idea, but I'm not going to spend that much money on it, right? So either this thing is going to be just the hottest thing ever or it's going to be way too expensive, but it's a cool idea.

17:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So it's not a laptop by itself, right? It needs a Raspberry Pi to function.

17:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Right, it's a laptop without a CPU, essentially, and then you take the CM5, the Compute Module 5, and you snap it up in there and then it is a Raspberry Pi powered laptop which the Pi 5 is powerful enough you can totally use it as a. You know it's not going to be a compiling machine, although you can compile on it, but it's not going to be a great experience to compile. It's going to be a limited good experience for gaming. You're not going to be able to play like modern triple a, but there's a lot that you can do with the emulators does it, doesn't hang off the side, or does it?

17:56
no, it goes underneath. So that's, that was the thing. Okay, and so this is why I said I thought I might be responsible for this. You, you remember the Elecro Crowview with the Raspberry Pi that had the sidecar the whole Pi was the sidecar, and apparently Geerling and I both. We had conversations with Elecro and it's like this is cool, guys, but it's terrible that it hangs off the side. Put it underneath. So we basically described this thing. Elecro hasn't done it, but Argon 1, or, excuse me, argon 40 has, with the Argon 1 up and it is coming soon-ish.

18:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I thought the other one was pretty cool, but hanging off the side it just seemed like, okay, I'm going to snap that off or something. I don't know.

18:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, and so this one has an option to. Here we go. I can share this screen as well, so that's where it goes. That's where the cm4, the cm5 excuse me goes, okay you've also got the slot there for the nvme right, and so they both pop in there um, but there's also the um this.

19:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So the the pi is just only replacing the cpu and everything else is still laptop right, motherboard right. So I would say, yeah, that's probably a daughter cut card.

19:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So this thing and this thing to the side, that is literally just the 40 pin header, like I'm sure you don't have to have that there, but if you want to play around with a hat Raspberry Pi hat you've got this. You can hang off the side to be able to get to it.

19:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Cool.

19:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is. It's super cool.

19:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No price yet. Bit of a teaser. I already spent money, though We'll hear about that later.

19:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I'm sure.

19:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No price yet though.

19:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've spent some money too. We'll talk about that too in a minute. No, no price. And so that's what I say like is this going to be at 150 or less? It's like an instant buy, but if it's up like three or four hundred dollars, it's like that's almost as much as buying a whole new laptop. Um yeah, so I don't, I don't know where it's going to end up at. Hopefully, hopefully they can do it at a reasonable price.

20:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, they got some interesting products on their site anyway.

20:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Argon 40 has done some cool stuff. They've done the beefiest Raspberry Pi box that you can buy.

20:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I haven't heard of them before, but at least they got some advertisement from me and now I'm interested in them, even if this doesn't come to fruition, but yeah yeah, no, it's, it's a, it's a cool little.

20:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a cool little product. I would like to see it. I'd like to see it happen. Um yeah, so let's talk about wayland. That's what we do on this show. This is the untitled wayland show.

20:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Some days and most weeks it is yeah. Uh, this week it's not. I'm calling this the whalen roundup as I discuss how more and more distros, desktop environments and, you know, bits of software are continuing to push us away from our x's I mean x and forward with whalen. So first up is susa. Said that? Right, right, susa, yeah, pretty much okay, I, just I I want to call it sue, so bad, but okay. First up is susa.

21:17
Finally, they're deciding to move their agama 16 os installer from Xorg to Wayland. More work is still being done on this installer, but anyone that installs the upcoming open SUSE Leap 16 or SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 operating system will be greeted with the graphical UI installer running on Wayland rather than Xorg. So sure, this is just an installer, so it doesn't make much of a difference for the installer itself. You know it's not like the installers using HDR or anything fancy like that that needs Wayland, but it gets us one step closer to just cutting the cord on X and, you know, maybe, maybe it makes it a little bit more secure, you know, if it's not going to run some buggy thing, but you know you're at the install phase, so it's. It's more of a of a way to uh not have so much requirement on X anymore. I think next on my list is GNome, which I should say I found somewhere. I looked it up once. I never brought on the show. It is pronounced gnome because it's gnu, something, something, something something.

22:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But uh, this is what it stands for, so it's gnome.

22:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Don't correct me on that and don't say gnome anymore. Uh, gnome 49 anyway. Next on my list is gnome 49. Alpha has been released with x11 support completely disabled by default, and they still plan to be whaling only by gnome 15. So so a breakdown of the x11. X11 disablements include GDM has changed the X11 support default value to false and now disables the Xorg session by default. Gnome Control Center now builds without X11 support by default. Gnome session now disables X11 session by default. And you know, look forward for that final. I look forward to the final GNOME 49 release to hit shelves, or you can look forward to it to hit shelves in September and check out the article if you're interested to know what else is new in GNOME 49 or coming. That will be new and I'm not going to go any further than that because these other GNOME deniers on the panel here don't want me to talk too much about GNOME.

23:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
GNOME deniers.

23:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Finally. Finally, I wanted to provide a little update to Wayback. Wanted to provide a little update to Wayback. So last week Ken brought up how Wayback is an experimental X11 compatibility layer for non-Wayland desktop environments to leverage Wayland components. So although it is still in its early, early stages, with hopes to be production ready in 2026, it has already taken off from just being a personal project on github to now being hosted on a free desktoporg alongside other projects such as wayland and the xorg server and some other projects, prominent software like Mesa and stuff like that too. So it's found a new home right up there with the other prominent display servers and all that. So it's already looking to have a promising future and just another step forward as we all leave our X behind.

25:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That was a very dad pun on the way out there, yeah. So it is super fascinating to see particularly Wayback. I'm very fascinated by Wayback. I want to see some of these different desktop environments get running under Wayback. I'm very fascinated by Wayback. I want to see some of these different desktop environments get running under Wayback.

25:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, it's really come up fast. It's come up very fast.

25:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's particularly interesting to me. I have not done this yet, but I would like to Go and compare the line counts for way back with the full x11 and see just what the difference is right like, how much less complicated is way back versus running full x11 I mean, there's no way that they've developed as many lines of code in such a short amount of time, is there?

26:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't know yeah, I Well, there's a lot of old cruft that you know for hardware that existed 20 years ago. I'm sure that's still probably an X somewhere because it supports some weird archaic feature they got to leave in for somebody.

26:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The first commit on the Wayback GitHub was two weeks ago. I didn't realize it. This is a that this is a way back is a very new project. My goodness, I wonder how usable it is right now.

26:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I I honestly don't know and they already project or expect to be production ready uh next year sometime, which I mean really leaves anywhere from a month as a six to uh 18 months time range there, but still that's pretty quick, I mean, that's still not big, that's still not bad.

26:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's. That's very interesting. Yeah, I, I kind of, I kind of think this has to be way back is a pretty direct response to the ex libre thing. Huh, I think it has to be right. The timing, the timing and the fact that man ex libre takes so many people off it really did, and some of it for good reason too. I, I am convinced, some of it for bad reason. I think some of the things that went on were just dumb by everybody. But, um, the, the whole, we, the people that have worked on x for 20 years finally getting rid of it and, you know, being done with it, and then someone coming again. Nope, it's good, it's back alive again. I understand why that was frustrating. Um, I, I get that, uh, but, uh, yeah, I think, uh, I think way back was was a pretty direct response to that. Okay, fine, you want to run your X11 desktops? Fine, here's the right way to do it.

27:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think five years from now we'll be going. Hey, remember.

27:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Remember that month when everybody was fighting over X. Wasn't that great yeah.

28:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Or it's going to be relegated to like uh, you know people that didn't like, don't like system d and you know well, we've got this distribution that still uses it. It's like yeah, but 95, 98 percent of everybody just used system d and we're going to have everybody basically on wayland, except for that old system in the corner that running that weird distro that, yes, six people run I, I see, I see lots of parallels between the wayland fight and the system d fight, and I think you're right.

28:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think that is the direction it's going to go. Uh, all right, let's talk about intel. Jeff, is it time to talk about intel?

28:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
you got it is intel and uh technology advancements at intel. So, like my last story about driver improvements, you know, this one's similar, but it's a little more future looking. So the article linked in the show notes is from pharonix and talks about future Intel XE kernel graphics driver improvements. This should be seen in 6.17 kernel and you know a lot of you are probably on the 6.15 kernel and 6.17 might seem far away. But keep in mind that 6.16 is probably going to be released in the next few weeks and the expected pull request window for 617 is expected to be late July, early August. It always depends on how the current release schedule goes.

29:32
The driver for the new Intel driver is going to include support for new hardware, such as the mobile upcoming Wildcat hardware, which is expected to be the successor to the Twin Lake architecture. They're also working on their multi-device support, so they're making preparations for multi-GT hardware instances, meaning there's going to be several GPUs together in one system working as one. Now this wouldn't be for gaming. Think AI workloads. Now I know a lot of you mentioned that. You're probably thinking in your head. The head of Intel came out and said they can't catch NVIDIA for AI. But they've also called out there's some other workloads they think they can get ahead of and they're going to try to find their niche in the AI to build off of. So while they said, yeah, there's a lot of stuff they can't catch NVIDIA on, they also called out some things that they're going to try to work on that's still in the AI realm. So that's where this driver comes in. So there's also a lot of work being done on the SR-IOV single root input output virtualization. So now this is a PCI standard which lets a single card be used by several virtual machines. So it allows all those different instances to share the hardware. We've talked about GPU segregation in the past, or bifurcation, where you could set up a virtual machine and you and somebody else could use one video card to both play games, because it's treated as two video cards, virtually.

31:12
Um. Side note that features not really available on consumer graphics cards, that's, that's the big iron cards, but I digress. So this now this driver will be, or the SRIOV improvements, is going to be for the Battlemage GPUs and while the poll is in 6.17, it's not expected to be fully implemented until probably 6.18. So, but this request is laying a lot of the groundwork that future code can build off of. Now there's going to be normal changes as well, such as work to make boot up flicker-free, fan control and voltage information exposed and new driver code for accessing non-volatile memory device on the Intel discrete GPUs.

32:02
Now, michael Larable commented that this is the largest Intel XE driver pull he has seen in months or even years, because Intel is pushing hard to get into the GPU space and they know, while the hardware is pretty solid, the driver stack needs some love, which they have been giving over the past couple of years. They're also prepping for future industrial loads and that's where a lot of this is headed with this driver. Now there is consumer stuff in there as well, but we're just kind of hitting the more enterprise workloads in here. But have a look at the link in the article in the show notes for more details, as it has links to other articles where they go into deeper details on different specifics of some of the major components being updated by this pull request. So they go into much more detail. There's several articles that are chained off of the article linked in the show notes that you can dig into and I'll be honest and we'll talk a little bit about it at the ending notes. But personally I'm really rooting for Intel in the GPU segment.

33:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know, what's really interesting that I've heard a lot of people talk about with the Intel GPUs is that they are really good at video encoding and decoding. That's like one of the niches where they really make sense, because you can get the same performance out of like an amd or an nvidia car. But some of these intels are way cheaper and more available. I've several people doing it both um, you know kind of the hobbyist level, like streaming, but also or industrial. Let's hold um the system off this. It's very fascinating for that.

33:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah, you can get a cheap Intel card that'll outperform a high-end NVIDIA or AMD card for coding, decoding, Yep absolutely, and you know the drivers are going to work on Linux.

33:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's in great shape, all right. Well, I've got a couple of things. I'm going to mash two of my stories up at the same time because they're both business related. So we're going to talk about a couple of business things. First off is that Red Hat is tired of losing out to Alma Linux and Rocky Linux, I think, and so Red Hat has rolled out yet another way for people to be able to get Red Hat Enterprise Linux for free, to be able to get Red Hat Enterprise Linux for free. If only they had an official distribution that was just like Red Hat that they were giving away for free. Wouldn't that be nice? Anyway, so Red Hat has rolled out an announcement that they are doing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for business developers, which this is similar to their developer copies, where, if you're working on copies, where you know if you're working on maintaining things, you can get free copies of red hat. Well, now, if you are evaluating enterprise Linux for inside of a business, you can get, I think, up to 40 free copies of red hat enterprise Linux. And now this is for evaluation purposes only, but still it.

35:05
Uh, it really interested me that they're doing this. Um, and they like, literally, this is what CentOS was for. Like I do not understand why they killed CentOS and then went back with this. It's it's it's befuddling anyway. Hindsight is 2020 on this one, I guess. But if you are doing evaluations for enterprise Linux for a business, you can sign up and get these free licenses Very few strings attached, from what I can tell. Excuse me 25 entitlements, not 40. I misremembered the number there. But yeah, it is for development or testing use only. It is RHEL software set but no satellite. So not everything but support all those supported RHEL architectures and, yeah, some interesting stuff there. So if you're in a business and you want to go play with RHEL, sign up for it and you've got it. You can get a hold of the full fat Red Hat Enterprise linux.

36:14
And then the other bit of business news that really caught my eye really find this fascinating is that global foundries have entered into an agreement to acquire mips. So let's talk about what these two companies are. First off, global foundries it is one of the big processor fabs and i'm'm sure Jeff will have some interesting thoughts on this, but it is the one that AMD spun out so way back in the day, amd advanced micro devices, which is kind of of the opinion that real processor companies make their own processors in their own fabs. They ran that way for a while and they discovered that that was not a great idea for their business and so they spun out Global Foundries. You have AMD, who makes the designs, and then Global Foundries that actually runs the VABs, physically makes the chips. Mips was, or still is, a CPU design company and they came up with the MIPS design, which runs in a whole bunch of routers and some other places, and apparently here in more recent years the MIPS company have been doing RISC-V stuff.

37:21
Okay, so now this week we get the news that MIPS is being bought. Now it's going to continue to run, from what I understand, as a standalone business, but it is going to be purchased now by Global Foundries and we're assuming that all new MIPS hardware is going to be made on Global Foundries FABs, probably for a cheaper price, and blah, blah, blah. You know all kinds, all the business agreements that normally come with this sort of thing. But it's really interesting that one Global Foundries thought this was worth it to maybe break into the risk five game. But also it's fascinating to see MIPS still hanging around and doing things other than the MIPS architecture. So a couple of really interesting business things that have happened this week and I'm sure you guys have thoughts on these.

38:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So yeah, with the red hat developer edition or whatever. So yeah, with the Red Hat Developer Edition or whatever. Does that not make it easier for Rocky again, because you could get in for free without like having to buy it? Because I imagine now they try to buy it, shut him down, buy it, shut him down and cat and mouse. But with this I mean sure they could get a developer shut it down, but once you're a developer that because of the licensing then they do have to be able to provide the source to them.

38:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm just imagining. You know the next thing. You know, there's a new LLC set up. So, first off, there's Rocky Linux, po Box 2202, wherever, wherever, and oh no, it's a new LLC box 2202 wherever, wherever. And uh, oh no, it's a new llc. Uh, aki llc at po box 2203 and akri llc, po box 2204. No, no, red hat, we're completely different businesses.

39:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Please give us our licenses yeah, and it's not exactly like sent to us either, just because obviously there's, even though if there's not many limitations there, there are stipulations and limitations where centos is like you just go and download it, yeah, but yeah, still, it's still they should have just kept it.

39:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's hilarious to me, but yeah, they, they burned. They burned so much community goodwill to get rid of centos and now they've almost entirely given it, but given it back to people where it was. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's ridiculous. Uh, jeff, what do you think about the global foundries move?

39:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
that's rather interesting. So a little little history keys 512 said uh, mips sounds like some kind of a cold for a PC, but it was originally the processor for Silicon Graphics, SGI. That was their big claim to fame and at least that's where I best know them from. And I took in college an advanced processor design class and we went through the MIPS architecture because it's pretty straightforward and fairly simple so I could uh, I could totally see them getting into the RISC-V. I mean, I'm honestly I'm a little surprised that MIPS was even still around. I thought they went belly up. The big thing is I think AMD is probably getting them. It's not AMD. Well, okay, Global Foundries is getting them because one it gets them into the risk market. So it broadens what they can do and I bet you there's some patent or trademark stuff in there and a lot of times, rather than licensing, sometimes it's just easier if there's a portfolio just to grab it all and then they have access to the entire catalog.

41:04
That's why a lot of these little companies get ate up it's. They're not necessarily interested so much in the company but in their intellectual property.

41:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's interesting.

41:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, when you first start talking about MIPS, I have no idea about MIPS and and all the stuff you're talking about. I thought you're I was thinking about MIPS no, no.

41:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
SNMP stuff.

41:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm like what are we what?

41:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
it was an early risk processor and it was kind of a good case study for uh, college cpu design classes because it's, you know, reduced instruction set. It's fairly simple, fairly straightforward, where you take something like the x86 hardware now it's basically a risk processor with a bunch of decoder translators around it so you can get those cores sped way up, because the x86 catalog of instructions is rather large now. So, yes, so if you can translate that to some uh faster instructions that your core can do, and you know it's, it's like anything in computer history. What's faster? You know the cC complex instruction set or the risk, you know it goes back and forth. They kind of leapfrog each other.

42:19
Based on the technology and how well your designs are going. You can make the risk a lot faster, but is your slower, complex instruction going to get overall more work done? And it always goes back and forth. So we'll see where this goes. It'll be interesting. Um, I think part of it too is, like I said, market share. They can tie in, they can get in with their risk five, because they know either the x86 is probably going to go away one of these days or it's going to have to have some major changes and they're going to have to cut out a lot of and I mentioned this before maybe cut out all the 32-bit and lower instructions and just go strictly x64 so that they can streamline the silicon and make it more efficient and not support so much legacy stuff.

43:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so interestingly, Rob, you were talking about you'd never run MIPS before. I bet you have no.

43:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I didn't say I never ran, I just didn't know what it was.

43:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The Linksys, the old WRT54G, you remember those things. Those were MIPS processors, yeah it was a MIPS processor and a lot of the routers that opened WRT supports over the years have been MIPS. A lot of embedded stuff was MIPS kind of from that era. And then we have an interesting question here from Middle Pickup. That's a guitar pun sort of reference to at least I thought RISC-V didn't require a license, though why would they need to buy MIPS to be able to build RISC-V? You want to answer that, Jeff? Do you have a thought?

43:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's probably more in the actual. There's probably some secret sauce in design or the fabrication part of it. So it there's.

44:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's always little uh tricks and stuff in there that uh, it's open source yeah but the risk five specification itself is open, but not necessarily any of the implementations, not necessarily any of the add-ons to it, because that's one of the things that risk five is all about is you can add your own extensions to it and there is very possibly, very likely, in fact, going to be patents that exist on top of those implementations of RISC-V, and so I think the sort of thing Jeff is talking about is those patents and the intellectual property for those enhancements that they've made to it.

44:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So an analogy for that might be the Microsoft Edge browser, for that might be, uh, the microsoft edge browser, while the chromium engine underneath is, uh, is open source. They have their own wrapper sauce on top of it, that's wrapper sauce.

45:05 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Wrapper sauce, I like that actually I don't know if I've ever heard anybody say that? That might be a show title right there wrapper, sauceapper Sauce.

45:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Rapper Sauce.

45:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yup, and I would comment to Wizardlings says risk and sys doesn't mean much anymore, and that's pretty true. We're kind of using it in the higher level abstract for the non-hardware people.

45:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah Well, I mean, you kind of have to understand that x86 processors don't actually run x86 code anymore. They emulate it. You mentioned this, but there aren't any x86 machines made anymore. It's just they're all really fancy chips that emulate the old x86 to keep everybody on the same page.

45:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It is a ridiculous point that we have come to in computing it is a ridiculous point that we've come to in computing and and that that actually we we could have a whole segment on the and and we've seen it across multiple platforms and hardware devices of how much legacy do you hold on to versus the weight that you have to support that legacy where it's just so much overhead and extra work and complexity. That, and especially the early days where sometimes stuff is kind of kludged together or just not implemented very well and it's a lot of spaghetti code to make it run, and it wasn't till later on that things really got streamlined. And at what point do you go? We just have to, we just have to cut it and say, okay, from this point on, yeah, I mean you could argue that's what they try to do.

46:40
Intel tried to do with Optane, but that had its own set of problems and many argue wasn't implemented very well. But I think you could do it if you got AMD on board as well and they both agreed to say, okay, here are the instruction sets we are going to drop and you know we're going to guarantee this support and this stuff is going away. And if you had a concerted effort between both companies to transition, I think you could do it yeah, good luck with that, though, getting two of them to cooperate on something like that.

47:14
So well, you know, but they do, though, because there's a lot of standards that they're both involved in. Yes, yes, yes.

47:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But there's also a lot of knife fighting that people don't get to see. So there's a. There's a lot of that that has happened. Some of it we know.

47:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
About a lot of it we don't, but you know you know I will not comment on any kind of interactions I may or may not have been involved with between certain major corporations.

47:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, there is knife fighting that happens in the background. Oh yeah, we're totally. We're going to implement this as well. And then you know they bring the chip out and it's either a broken implementation or a really good implementation that has extra stuff, or you know, it's not implemented on this version for the consumer level chips and just. It's just always something, and some of it is done on purpose and some of it is done out of who knows why, but at some point you're saying you're saying the x86 underscore 64.

48:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The x86 could get dropped and removed at some point and just be 64 oh, they've already talked well, yeah, well, it would be.

48:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It would be more because they they've talked about to be competitive and have lower power requirements. If they could get rid of a lot of legacy instructions and they could, they could thin it up and better compete with, like the risk type chips, the risk five and stuff where, where they can simplify those cores more and reduce your silicon count, it makes things cheaper to manufacture, more efficient, smaller. It's got a lot of benefits other than, okay, there's some really old stuff you just can't support anymore. Now you could maybe even just say, well, you know what, we'll have a hardware emulator for that really old stuff, and newer chips are going to be fast enough. Is it really going to matter?

49:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Intel back a couple of years ago was talking about by the end of 2025,.

49:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't know if this is still the case or not, but they said a couple of years ago, by the end of 2025, they would transition to 64-bit CPUs only and just yank out all of the other 32-bit support.

49:44
Yeah, I don't think we're there yet We'll see but they do want to go that way, and I'm sure there's discussions going on between them and AMD, and what they have to do, though, is they have to just have a standard, something like a JDEX type of standard, that they go in and say, okay, here's how we're going to do it, we're going to agree on this, and otherwise, I think it'll be like optane. People are going to say, yeah, why change when I can still get somebody else? That isn't changed. I think you have to have everybody do it, and wizarding brings up something too.

50:28
Intel says a lot of things. They said that a few years ago, before they had some financial issues, so a lot of stuff in the news. For those that don't know, there's a lot of layoffs going on. Heart goes out to all those people that are going through hard times because of this. They've had some major restructuring, so you can't you know anything that was done. Well, and if you look the past couple of years, or past year, they're on, they're on their. What third CEO now? Yeah, well, kind of. I mean, they had, they had, they had one. They got rid of them, which I think they didn't let him have enough time, but that's just my personal opinion. They had some interim people that were never going to be the permanent CEOs. Now we've got our current person in and they're making a lot of changes. Gpu division because the gpu division has a very good reputation right now for being lean and mean and flexible and fast on their uh, their designs, their changes, how they react to the market.

51:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The cpu division is not seen that way in the outside world so, so so you said that, um, you think they both would need to drop it in order to make it feasible to go forward, because otherwise, if one dropped it, people would just go to the other, so they could still have it. But what about the scenario I mean, is it a scenario? Maybe I don't understand as well enough, but, um, as somebody who doesn't know, what about the scenario where, if we get to a point where and maybe we're even already there we don't need that because the software we use doesn't use that, somebody goes ahead and drops it and that just makes that processor that much more efficient, better, one way or another, um, what would the point of going to the other, the other alternative be that hasn't dropped yet?

52:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
some of it's going to just be perception, because there's going to be that, oh, you can't run the certain thing on your CPA, it doesn't support all the instructions, it doesn't, and so the fear would be something like kind of almost a major marketing issue that would stop people because they're like well, just in case, I might want to run this thing, which I don't know what it would be.

52:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But just in case, I'm going to get the full instruction set, so I think the benchmarks and everything you know, people like Foronix running benchmarks and saying how much better this is, and everybody else. I think I feel like the word would get out. You know, kind of like when Apple went to their you know new M1s, there may have been some people at first who were worried about it, but then when the word got out, kind of how much better in every way it was than you know what they had before, I don't think anybody is looking back.

53:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But there again, see, when you're dealing with Apple and yeah, a lot of of people like that chip, but it's kind of a closed. You want an Apple, here's the chip you're getting. You know, versus you could, you're not having several competing, couple of competing standards and I think, just to make it smoother in how everything's done, if they could just both agree it would be better. And there's many standards, they both, and, as Jonathan said, there's knife fights. I mean it can get knocked down, dragged up, but they do come to agreements. And you have like JDEX standards, memory standards, pcie standards. There's a lot of different standards that they're involved with. They're sitting on a lot of boards, both Intel and AMD, and they have to agree on things. And both of them.

54:21
I think would have a vested interest to go. You know what? We could streamline our designs, we could make it faster, faster turns on our silicon because there's less to test. Simpler designs, smaller designs, so it's going to be cheaper to manufacture, easier to manufacture. I think both would have a vested interest to try to make that change. It's just that now with Intel's up, evil and possible. You know, there there's talk. Are they going to split it? They're not going to split, are they? You know a whole lot of speculation there that I won't go into. Um I I may. It might be a couple years before we see 32-bit dropped from. The optimistic part of me thinks it would sell itself.

55:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But I think maybe then again it's probably analogous to wayland or a lot of things like that where all comes back.

55:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Why?

55:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
wouldn't we go to whalen? Whalen is way better.

55:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You don't need x anymore and all these things and you got or so or any of that I will say, trying to make, trying to make these changes in a way that's completely backwards compatible, would be extremely difficult, right, and so the thing you would run into is your, your different vendors, would have to make, probably would have to make the decision of, okay, which of these two, if it's going to fork, which of the two forks do we fully support, and people are going to make the decision based upon, you know, whatever Microsoft said, the requirement was, by the way, what I was thinking of was x86s. That was what Intel was talking about was supposed to happen by the end of 2025. Well, december 2024, intel put out a statement and said we're not doing that anymore. Instead, what they have done is they have joined the advisory group, the x86 ecosystem, which I don't know if they've announced anything yet, but that is the group that has Intel and AMD and MediaT, media tech, and apparently, linus torvalds is on the board.

56:18
A lot of different people are there, um, and they are the ones that are looking now into what is the next version of x86 going to look like, because, like I said, the x86 v4 thing has just been a mess. Um, not everything supports it. Some of the new chips do. Some of the new chips don't. It's been terrible, so maybe maybe everybody can get their heads together and we can figure out what x86 v5 is going to look like and everything can support it.

56:46 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We can drop the 32-bit stuff well, and linus torvalds has said that he wants to get rid of a bunch of the 32-bit stuff because he talks about it's kind of kludgy in there and it would clean up a lot of things. I'll guarantee you. Microsoft is in there, you know. There's a. There's going to be a whole list of. There's probably 30, I don't know, but I wouldn't surprise me if there's like 30 companies in there. And usually the way this goes at least what I've seen like, say, there's a hundred instructions there, they're on the chopping block, 95 everybody agrees on. Yeah, it's going to be like five of them that are oh my gosh, if we get rid of this, that's going to mess up our stuff. And other people like, yeah, but this totally cleans up our thing. Be like, yeah, but this totally cleans up our thing. And it's just the last few bits that usually are the ones that they really have discussions on. And what does this mean? And all that kind of stuff.

57:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, okay, so here's, here's the group of people. When they formed this, this was back October 2024. It's not that terribly long ago. Um, it's a. It's a weird group, right? So there's Intel and there's AMD. Those are the two like headliners. And then you've got Broadcom and Lenovo and Dell and Meta, google and Microsoft, hewlett Packard, oracle, hp and Red Hat, and then there are two luminaries. So, like the two people on the board, just because these people are so cool, they made it Linus Torvalds and Tim Sweeney. That's quite the group. That's quite the group. That's quite the group. We'll see if they ever come up with anything. Yeah, there's a. There's a picture of Pat Pat Gelsinger and Lisaisa sue together.

58:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
that's fun back when he was still at intel anyway we'll see if these guys come up with anything interesting but if you think about it, if you have a lot of the kind of end users along with the designers of the chips, I mean that ideally you should cover most use cases or a major majority, and, and it wouldn't surprise me, there's going to be some kind of little hardware, you know, kind of a proton type thing, a little wine style program that. Okay, you got this program from 20 years ago that requires this and nobody's ever updated it, but it's important. Okay, here's your little emulator that just it just handles it in software instead of hardware yeah, absolutely, absolutely well that, thinking about it, that really is a who's who list.

59:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was thinking the only person, the only group that's really a big company in this space that's not, that's not here, is ibm. It's like oh wait a second, no red hat's in there, it's ibm now, did you mention amazon? Um, I don't, you know, I don't think amazon was in there.

59:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's true, amazon is another big player when it was formed, they could be part of it now. It might be part of it now yeah, I, I don't know I'm not saying one way or the other, but uh it, uh it wouldn't spray. A lot of times those kind of groups pick up people along the way because somebody internally say at amazon goes hey, with our cloud services, we got to know how this is going to affect our software. How's you know?

01:00:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
well, amazon amazon is interesting. They're big enough now they have the amazon and google and meta slash, facebook, like. They're big enough that if this goes wrong and something, something is, they're big enough that if this goes wrong and something is, they're big enough to make their own hardware. Like that's true of a lot of the people in that group. They either have been or are currently big enough that they can just they can do their own run of you know whatever kind of chip they want from a fab and build their own hardware from the ground up. Several of these companies are doing it Google is doing it.

01:00:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Google makes a lot of custom hardware, so it's very fascinating to see who all is in that group. Yeah, but if you just said okay, google says, oh my gosh, we got to make our own x86 to handle this. It would take them, I bet, five years to do it. Because even though, if they're designing to go to that standard clean slate, they now, if they licensed, maybe not. You know, it would speed it up, but there is a lot involved in designing a chip until you get it out the door it's a thinking.

01:01:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Google has already done it though an x86 chip uh, I don't know if it's x86 or not, but I know they have made very bespoke custom hardware.

01:01:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I'm talking just Maybe ARM not x86. I'm just talking like if they try to do an x86 and they've already got hardware experience, if they don't have, if you have no, I mean I don't care how big you are, if you have no experience, I would say it would take you at least seven years.

01:01:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I saw a YouTuber that made him in his garage.

01:01:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I know who you're talking about and that is very cool.

01:01:46 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And it was a very major project. It was a 1970s.

01:01:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, he was struggling to be able to make something. He was still several steps away from being able to make an 8088 or the old, what was it? The random Commodore 64 and all those oh, I don't remember the name of the chip. All right, well, next week on the Unt, the nes in the snes, yeah, um, let's see. What was it? No wikipedia. That's not the article I want. Anyway, let's move on to the next story.

01:02:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Uh, yeah, my, my sole point was it's hard to make hardware it. It takes a lot of to design it, to fab it, to test it, to package it. It's hard.

01:02:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
We got it. Jeff, let's move on.

01:02:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Rob, I think is up next.

01:02:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't want to be here all night.

01:02:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, you know, rob is up next talking about bottles begging bottles, right, that sounds like a problem hit the bottle oh, we might need a. We might need an intervention for rob begging bottles.

01:03:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So, uh, the struggle to juggle open source as a passion project and paying the bills continues on as the bottles project writes a blog post begging for donations. So you know, I mean, we're all limited by time and those working on bottles are no different. Every moment spent working on a passion project, you know, that doesn't receive much funding, is time spent receive much funding. Is time spent, uh, not working on a job that pays the bills, you know, making money or spending time with family, so so it's understandable when you know a project gets abandoned. I'm not saying bottles is abandoned yet, but in a post made by merco blog posts, he notes that they have. First, he starts well, he says they have fantastic sponsors. I mean, he doesn't start there, but he does say they have fantastic sponsors like Hyperbit, linode and JetBrains and others. Yet still, even with these great, fantastic sponsors, the average monthly donations only totals around 100 euros, which, he also notes, isn't even enough to cover the cost of the resources they use, presumably, I suppose, the server costs and stuff like that. So you know, developing bottles is costing them money, not making them anything. Apparently, merco says he just can't dedicate as much time to bottles as he used to, because you know he has family and a new home and a company to run and the strategic projects like Benella OS, that require an enormous amount of time. Also so implied in this statement is that more funding for bottles could allow him to focus more time on bottles or pay others to work on it. You know, although focus on, you know, although focus on bottles has been slowed, mirko states that he is continuing to work on it and continuing to work on bottles.

01:05:24
Next, a quote from the blog about bottles. Next Next is the future of bottles. We're talking about a back-end rewrite from scratch with a clear and modern vision. We're talking about new reusable libraries designed to be modular and flexible. We're talking he sure says we're talking about a lot. Anyway, we're talking about a modern communication protocol between back-end and front-end, more solid and easier to extend. But all of this needs one fundamental thing Time, and time today needs to be funded. So time is money, or money is time, in this case, all the way around.

01:06:13
So you know, we bring a bottle software from time to time and you know I keep saying I need to try it again. It looks like an interesting project. You know to make what, you know what it does. For those who haven't seen, haven't heard of it, you know, running to make running software with blind basically easier. It's essentially front end to make it work better, more simple, you know, like lutris and that stuff.

01:06:38
But it has been a quite a few years since, since I last tested. You know I keep saying I need to uh, but I still need to uh. And but at that time when I tried to last for me it was a previous computer too. It wasn't a great computer but it didn't work very well at all for me. I could not get anything to run because as soon as I started up it would like lock up my system, slow it down, slow it all down to the point where to get my computer to run I pretty much had to reboot it.

01:07:11
But many others out there, you know, it must have been something wonky with my computer, I don't know, or the distro I was using, I don't know. I don't remember what it was at the time, maybe Arch. But many others talk about how great bottles is, and so it must have been me. But to date, marco says that Bottles has over 3 million downloads on Flatpak alone. So if even a small percentage donate just a little bit, it would go a long way. You know, I'm going to have to give another shot one of these days. But knowing, you know, knowing that there might be a bottles next, maybe someday, that kind of intrigues me too. You know, since the network's so well for me, it'd be kind of cool maybe to see a rewrite of it. But if you want to donate you can go to use bottlescom slash funding.

01:08:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And you know, if you like it, support them. So about bottles next.

01:08:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I went to their github and the last commit was six months ago he did say, uh, in this blog post that it's been going slow because he's busy with family and work and this and that and he needs money.

01:08:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, I totally understand that that is a real thing and I get that.

01:08:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've abandoned projects myself. I mean not that they were great enough to get significant donations, but let's just say I would have got significant donations, maybe I would would quit my job and worked on that instead yeah, I've had to give up some projects too, it's true, multiple times, yeah, multiples.

01:08:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
One of them was fairly fairly popular too back several years ago, but uh just couldn't make it work I actually did have one that was fairly popular, sold it eventually.

01:09:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I started selling it for I don't know, 9.99, 95, I don't know. I made like $1,000 a year on it.

01:09:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, it's not bad. It's not bad at all. That's pretty good. That's about just under 100 euros a month that he's making on it.

01:09:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah Well, and then at that point it was actually fronted into another project, just like this, and the main project kind of started dying, declining and sales disappeared.

01:09:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, I guess I'm done with that it was a nice run, yeah, all right. Well, let's talk about something that, hopefully, is not on the decline. Um, there is, uh, there's, some system 76 news, one of our favorite laptop manufacturers, one of not our only. Uh, jeff, I have a feeling that there's a reason that you're talking about system 76 yeah, I have a confession to make.

01:09:58 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I do too, but you go first. This is the laptop I wish I could have bought, as I said could have. So I've been on vacation the past couple weeks and I had a birthday party the week before, so I've not been on the show for the past few weeks. Right before leaving for vacation, the laptop I was going to take died on me. The screen went out and I needed a laptop. Long story short, at the 11th hour, needing one, I had to purchase from a local store because I didn't have time for the laptop to come in, needing, you know, needing it now, and I was limited on what I could get. But why I do bring this up is because the laptop is near to these specs. On the laptop I bought, it's pretty, pretty comparable to the system 76 system and I would have loved to have purchased from System76. I have in the past. They've great machines, just loved them. So my experience with System76 has been great. Now I have two articles linked in the show notes, one link from LinuxAC and the other from 9to5Linux, both talking about the new system which System76 has added to their lineup.

01:11:13
It comes with an Intel Core Ultra i9-275HX which has 24 cores, that's 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. It can clock up to 5.4 GHz, but has a base clock of 2.7 GHz for the performance cores and 2.1 gigahertz for the efficiency cores. It does come with an internal GPU, but it also includes an external GPU, an NVIDIA RTX 5050, 5060, or 5070 option. You can also specify the memory from 16 gigabytes up to 96 gigabytes and several choices in size for OS drive and a second or third drive of various sizes if you so desire. The screen size ranges from 15.6 inches to 17 inches, but the screen size is also based on the GPU you want to use. The 5050 only comes in the 15.6 and the 5070 only comes in the 17 inch, while the 5060 can be had in either size. Of course, it comes with the standard connections like ethernet, hdmi display ports, usb connections, ethernet all the standard stuff you'd expect.

01:12:27
Starting price at the time of the podcast is just under 2k. It was like one 99 99. And there's current cause it's currently a hundred dollars off and it comes with a stainless steel water bottle and a notebook. Uh, now, that's for a limited time. So you know, check the website, depending on when you hear this whether that's still running or not. Um, take a look at the article linked in the show notes for a deeper dive into the details of the system. And I would you know I wish I could have had time to purchase this system.

01:12:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I I really would have liked to yeah, so I, at about the same time as you, went to best buy and bought yours or whatever big box store you went to best buy. Yeah, I figured this is a place that's really the place to go if you need to buy one. Um, I ordered a framework framework, framework 13, and got that in. Oh nice.

01:13:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah.

01:13:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Did not get one of the super high-end models just because we didn't need it, but it was one of the new ones, one of the AMD. Let's see which one was it. Hit the button here and find out. It was one of the AMD AI 900, whatever they call it. Whatever their terrible naming scheme for the new AMD chips oh, the 300.

01:13:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
AI.

01:13:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yes, so I thought I think we got the AI 5. 340 is what's in it, with like 16 gigs of RAM. Nice little laptop. It's small. It surprised us. Obviously it's a little laptop. It's small, it it surprised us. Obviously it's a 13 inch laptop, but it surprised us with how much smaller it was than our, our previous dell that we had out there. Um, but it is. It is now the kitchen, kitchen slash, living room laptop that my wife uses just about as much as I, probably more than I do. Honestly, um, the old laptop that we had out there was in such bad shape, like the battery was turned into a spicy pillow and multiple keys did not work on it. And it was, yes, rob.

01:14:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
A spicy pillow.

01:14:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Have you not ever heard that term?

01:14:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No.

01:14:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's when a lithium ion battery uh expands.

01:14:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean, I've explained that plenty of times. I just called it a bulging battery or it's a spicy pillow.

01:14:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's. Yeah, it is. I've never heard that either. Oh, yeah, it's the thing. I knew what you meant when you uttered it, but I yeah, so did I.

01:14:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I got the gist of it.

01:14:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, no, it's, it's a fun term. It's not fun when it happens, though, and it's even less fun if they actually get pierced and blow up on you. That's not good at all. So that was one of the reasons why we wanted to get that thing out of service, and yeah, I've enjoyed the process. We put Fedora 41 on it and that was a seamless install. Got everything going there. It's been a great little machine. So far, I've enjoyed it. You might be able to get my wife to tell you a few things that she doesn't like about it, but so so if we talk about it on the show, we call that spicy pillow talk I'm not even touching that one thanks mo but Mo.

01:15:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But yeah, see the one I did get. It has the same 275HX CPU. I've got 32 gigs of RAM. Mine's an 18-inch screen, but it also has an NVIDIA GPU in it. It's very similar to this one. The GPU, though, is a 5080 instead of like a 5070.

01:15:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I remember the laptops when they first started making the full-on Ryzen desktop cores inside of a laptop. You guys remember those from a few years ago. Those were very tempting, like talk about desktop replacement. Those were nuts. Uh, did not go with that just don't need it and they.

01:16:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They had very limited selection of amd cpus but it seems like the, from what I was seeing, the intel mobile cpus are pretty good. They seem. Yeah, yeah, I can believe that solid the.

01:16:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The amd mobiles are really good right now, though, too, like everybody, everybody's making decent laptop processors, cpus so it just seems like the.

01:16:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
The amd, though, is harder to find.

01:16:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know if they just haven't hit the uh manufacturing stream yet, or it was very limited well, there for a while like two out of the three major uh console manufacturers were putting amd processors and the mobile amd processors in their consoles. So, like there was, it was getting used for a lot of different places that's what right but?

01:17:02
I mean if you went shopping for a laptop, they didn't have the newer processors yet very, very slim pickings yeah, it's because they were getting bought up by microsoft for the, the xboxes, and sony for the playstations, and valve for the, the steam decks. I mean everybody. Everybody was going amd. It's a good time to be amd, goodness. All right, let's see here. Um, I've got one final story. This should be a reasonably quick one.

01:17:34
I've not tested this out yet, but I hear that OBS has 31.1 out and it's got some really interesting things in there. One in particular kind of excites me. A couple of them, I suppose there's, you know, your normal bug fixes and updates, but one of the big things that they've added is multi-track video from macOS and Linux the ability to record multi-track, which is pretty cool. I definitely look forward to looking into that. It's where you can have a you know your normal camera and then have like an overhead view and be able to record both of them at once. Some very interesting things there. There is AV1 B-frame support. There is better color conversion in GPU, there's better network optimizations all of that good stuff. You get down, though, and a couple of the really interesting things is the V4l2 virtual camera is now supported on non-linux environments, that's bsd to be particular. Uh, which that is particularly interesting, but the one that really caught my eye is support for the hardware accelerated browser source in linux, and this feature is disabled on nvidiaIA GPUs because NVIDIA GPUs are, they put it nicely and say, due to feature support inconsistencies across modeled series and driver series. But if you're on AMD, then you get access to the hardware accelerated browser, which that'll be super useful for where I use OBS and we use a video Ninja for um for actually plugging in guests and such Um.

01:19:19
So some some neat stuff in a 31 one. There was also a, uh, there was a. There was something that was pipe wire specific. Let's see what was that. Um, oh, explicit sync for pipe wire screen capture. Right, right, right. And so that's pulling things in from like your Wayland compositor over pipe wire, still not doing the pipe wire video output. I know there are people working on that. It's not ready yet. One of these days we'll be there and we'll be able to have our pipe wire fun, but just got to wait, I suppose. But yeah, some cool stuff in OBS 31.1. And I don't know, maybe it'll fix some of the weird issues you guys are having, or maybe not.

01:20:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Is that 31.1 or 31.1.1?

01:20:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
31.1.0. Let's see there is a 31.1.1, which is a hot fix, and they fixed a crash and issues causing things to fail.

01:20:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So and they fixed an issue. I'll have to get a try.

01:20:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They fixed an issue causing browser source hardware acceleration to fail on Linux.

01:20:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'll need to get another webcam. Yeah, but if I get another, if I get another angle, I'm gonna need some more green screen.

01:20:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's just how it goes, yeah this barely covers it yeah, it's fun yeah, well, but the sad part for me is coming back from vacation I and running the back ports, so I'm I'm running a lot of the beta software from 25.10 for some of it up to now there's. They still haven't had a feature freeze, so it's, it's still coming in. I think I had like about 400 updates, so I do that and then if I install obs it's like well, what fixed it? I? I don't know something happened somewhere in that huge update.

01:21:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Uh, mess, it's, it's working somewhere in the mess all right, so that's a donation of like somewhere between 20 and 30 coffees. I guess. Uh for uh for another camera, there you go. She had to point that out out. Uh, I mean not the specific number, but get another camera for coffee cam, he says coffee cam there you?

01:21:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That'd be fun. Let me think of that, yeah, all right. Well, that's our news. Let's get into some command line tips. We're going to let Rob go first and he's going to talk about Proxmox some more.

01:21:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, so I'm going to continue a Proxmox series. This isn't a command line tip, it's a website tip, I guess, because you know, in my Proxmox journeys I'm always looking for more projects and things to run on Proxmox itself. And so I came along this website and I mean it's also done more than that. It's helped me convert some virtual machines into Alexis because they have the scripts there. So what this is, what I'm talking about here is it's a community scripts for Proxmox website. So you can either go to Google and just search for Proxmox helper scripts and you'll probably find the GitHub. It came up first for me. Otherwise, check out the show notes it's community-scriptsgithubio, slash ProxmoxVE and the P and the V-E-R capital, and that should get you there.

01:22:40
But for those watching, you know, if you go there they have all kinds of scripts to make it really easy. You know now, like anything public, I guess, be cautious of what you're doing, because you know, often we say not to just bash curl a script. You can, you know, scrutinize the scripts if you want, but they do tell you a simple one-liner command. It's basically a bash curl that uh sets the whole uh container. Um, I think maybe they're all containers, maybe some of them are virtual machines, I don't know, but on this site it has all kinds of all kinds of different scripts to set up different uh containers. Has, you know, proxmox virtualization. Has operating system docker stuff, network firewalls. You know netbox all different. You know a unified network server, all kinds of things. You know backup, recovery, duplicati and stuff like that, um, some of the things. You know media streaming if you want to quick set up a Jellyfin or Plex, you can do that simply with set up an LXE container. Just copy that and run that in your Proxmox and it will install for you stuff due to the configuration, but it'll have it all set up. And so there's all kinds of stuff monitoring. You know there's only office docs, all kinds of stuff here.

01:24:20
So it's one just a great place to try to find some new projects, to run some things. I've I've been finding some new things. You know like I, I use this to change my uptime Kuma from a VM to a LXC container. I also used it. This is where I got Pulse, from, where I even discovered Pulse that I demonstrated last week. Pulse right here is just as simple as copy, paste it in and then it's all set up. I configured it. So yeah, great place to find projects, things to run. If you want to find some new things to run on your Proxmox and you know, if you don't want to use the scripts you don't trust them at least it's going to give you some ideas for projects. Otherwise you can. If you want to trust the scripts, you know use that at your own risk and you know, do that. Uh, bash curl generally don't recommend that unless it's from a trusted source indeed.

01:25:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All right, uh and jeff uh, mine's gonna be proton plus. So in episode 166 I talked aboutUp-QT. That's a great little program to install things like the glorious egg roll version of Proton in Steam. No need to go looking through directories or anything to place it. You don't even have to download it, just click on the version you want or don't want. You can remove them too, and it'll just put it right into your Steam account.

01:25:49
Today's program tip is Proton Plus. So while it does the same things as Proton Up-QT does, it does some things that that program doesn't, such as supporting Lutris, heroic Games Launcher and Bottles. And yes, like I said, it still does support Steam. It does what Proton Up-QT does, but it also supports the use of other tools to help your gaming adventures, such as Luxorpedia, boxtron and Steam Tinker Launch. So these are tools, applications that help get your games running.

01:26:28
Another thing it can do is it can support options for each game. So if, for example, game A requires normal Proton, but game B needs a specific version of the glorious egg roll or specific version of a normal Proton, it's easy to set up through Proton Plus. So you have like a grid you can go through and just set them all right there and get your games all squared away without having to go individually in Steam to each individual preference file. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes from the Gaming on Linux website so you can fine tune your gaming experience, and they have links to the GitHub page and the article linked also has another link in there. We really have an article that talks about various versions of Proton and what they are. So plenty of stuff to get you on your gaming adventures. So happy gaming, yeah.

01:27:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool. I have a two part tip and hopefully I remember to do the other half of it next week. So I'm going to talk a little bit about libraries and how this works in Linux. So when you go to run an application, you have various system libraries that get loaded dynamically, and you might ask yourself, I wonder what libraries this application loads, and where does it get them from? What are the actual files on the disk?

01:27:54
There is a tool that'll let you find that out. It's LDD and it's the list dynamic, something or other. I don't know exactly what it stands for, and you might think that you could just run LDD and then the name of the command. Say, in this case, I might be interested in the Meshtastic D program that I kind of helped maintain. No, it doesn't work that way. Ldd looks for what is in the current directory.

01:28:20
So another command that we've talked about over the years is which, and so you can use which to find where that application is at. And now you can do one of two things here. You can either retype that whole, the entire path, with the binary at the end, or you can use backticks, and of course, if we use backticks, what actually will happen is bash runs the command inside the backticks. And, of course, if we use backticks, what actually will happen is bash runs the command inside the backticks and then replaces it with the output of that command and runs the entire thing, and then you get the library list. And so now what we're looking at here is the list of all of the individual, so files, the libraries that are going to get loaded when you run this command.

01:29:13
And you might think, well, why would I ever need to know that? Well, when you get into the weeds of trying to troubleshoot why something doesn't work, being able to look at the libraries is useful sometimes and I think next week, if I remember, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about a hack, a trick, something that is done on purpose, but it's very useful to change the way that those libraries load and how exactly they are processed. So look forward to that LDD to list out the dynamic libraries that a program is going to run on stuff.

01:29:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I like it. Yeah, it's not often, but it is one of of those. I've had to go digging through libraries sometimes to, yes, what exactly is this doing, or what is you know?

01:29:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
why is this failing to run? Or yeah, absolutely. All right, I'm gonna let each of the guys plug whatever they want to, and I think each of them have something in the end notes. Uh, rob what you got I have.

01:30:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
so because I've been talking so much about people moving away from microsoft, going to libre office and linux from microsoft stuff, I did not want to have another full story about it this week because that's just going to be redundant, so I'm just going to throw out there. I found another story about the mention. The German state, schleswig-holstein, moved 30,000 PCs from office to labor office, and I guess the Danish Ministry of Digitalization is also doing the same. And then I also found another article about an unprecedented Linux growth in Europe, and they attributed this to the Windows 10 end of life. Maybe it's that, maybe it's the other.

01:30:59
There's just a combination of things all going on that is really helping Linux out, and they even had a link which it wasn't working for me, but the stack counter. I wonder if that'll work right now. Yeah, the gsstackcountercom. For some reason to me it looks like the CSS or something's not loading, but it had a link to that stack counter on there and showing that the growth is up there at like. I don't know. I think it's in Europe getting close to 5%. So yeah, lots of good news. I'm not going to go any deeper than that. I did put the links in the show notes if you want to check that out. Otherwise, normally I'm going to do my normal bit here. If you want to check out more of me, which who wouldn't? Because it's me, I'm awesome. Everybody loves, loves me. I'm the greatest.

01:31:55
uh, you can find and modest and, yes, I am the greatest and most modest person on here. Everybody knows it. Come find me robertpcampbellcom, and on that page you'll find links to my linkedin, my twitter, my um, blue sky mastodon and a place to donate copies and, as I said earlier, uh, something like a 20 30 coffee somewhere around there, depending how good of a camera you want. If you donate that many copies, I'll be able to get myself a new camera. Uh, so I could try out the obs and have some different views and and look even awesomer for you yeah, cool, all right, couple of things.

01:32:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
First off, uh, harold finch points out that the dd stands for dynamic dependency. So ldd is list, dynamic dependencies. Checks out sounds good to me. Uh, talking about the end of windows 10 in europe, I've got to, I've got to let you know that I interviewed Joseph P Devengeis of the End of 10 and KDE's Eco Initiative just this last week on PLOS Weekly and that is exactly what we were talking about. Really, really fast, really fascinating conversation. So that's my plug. We'll let Jeff get in whatever he wants to plug. I know he's got stuff too.

01:33:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I do my plug. We let jeff get in whatever he wants to plug. I know he's got stuff too. I do so. This week I included a show on youtube.

01:33:18
It's from gamers nexus and it's help us, intel, you're our only hope. And basically they go into. Well, they say that intel is basically selling all the silicon they can. They can't make it fast enough. But they also go into the dynamics of manufacturing the cards and how sometimes Intel gets pushed to the back of the line for these contract manufacturers and they go into a little bit of some of the pricing and how controlling some companies are and how not controlling other companies are, and they even talk a little bit about rebates and how things work. And I thought it would be kind of interesting for our audience, who doesn't get to dabble in the hardware probably that much, just kind of get a little bit behind the scenes, look at kind of how things work and just in general how the industry runs. Other than that, I should be back for a while. Um, if you want to find me on LinkedIn, you can find me through Rob's LinkedIn, that's, and several of you have. So, um, other than that, have a great week everybody.

01:34:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, absolutely Appreciate you guys being here. It's been a fun show. Um, do want to let folks know we mentioned, we mentioned Floss Weekly. There's also my security column is on pack a day on every Friday morning, Unless, of course, that Friday morning happens to be the 4th of July. Then it gets bumped to Monday for some reason. Anyway, it still ran just a couple of days later than expected. But other than that, I really want to let you know, and this is going to change. We're going to see all three guys again. That's all right.

01:34:54
Uh, I want to let you know about club twit, and if you're not a part of club twit, you should really think about it. You've got the QR code over there. Past past Rob, that one. Scan it with your camera. Um, and uh, yeah, you should. You should think about joining the club. It's not much more than the price of a cup of coffee per month and it is the best way to support the network and the shows that you come to know and love, and we sure appreciate it. We appreciate everybody that watches and that listens, those that get us live and on the download, and we'll be back next week. We'll see you then on the next episode