LINUX Unplugged - Episode 264: Proton, Electron for Games!

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

Steam Play rocks the Linux world as it promises new levels of compatibility with AAA Windows games. But the story of how Valve is doing it might be just as fascinating. Plus community news, our thoug...hts on building a market for Linux apps, the latest from UBPorts, and more good news from LVFS! Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, Marius Gripsgard, and Martin Wimpress.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 What's new with Wimpy and Popey these days? Working in the same room. Oh, really? Now, are you going to Wimpy's co-located space? Yes. It's bizarre. Very weird. Very weird place.
Starting point is 00:00:11 Oh, really? This place has different themes, right? Yeah. We sat in the boat theme. So it was like a pirate ship with distressed wood and rigging and sails and stuff. It was very bizarre um but just across the way was narnia um and there were there's like an open space with sofas and there were people sat there with their feet up with their shoes off just like they're lounging around at home
Starting point is 00:00:38 on the sofa with a laptop it's it's very chilled i like it that sounds really cool i did see some pictures and i thought that was i I think that Wimpy posted. Yeah, it's nice. And it was lovely to have Alan there in person today. Oh, I bet. Gazing into your beautiful green eyes across the table of the pirate ship. When you take that out of context, it really makes no sense. That makes no sense at all.
Starting point is 00:01:01 I'm going to speak to HR tomorrow. That makes no sense at all. I'm going to speak to HR tomorrow. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 264 for August 28th, 2018. Hi everyone, and welcome to Linux Unplugged, Jupyter Broadcasting's weekly Linux talk show that this week is optimizing the market for Linux? I'm not quite sure, but we're going to figure out what that means. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.
Starting point is 00:01:34 We'll be getting into the optimizing of markets and the new support coming to LVFS, as well as some big features that landed in Ubuntu Touch, some nice things coming to KDE, benchmarks that can't be benchmarked that then got benchmarked, and then we'll have the big discussion about what the heck Proton is, what Steam Play is, what CodeWeaver's involvement with all of that is, and what shift has actually just happened. So we'll get all of that into the show as well.
Starting point is 00:02:03 It's going to be a packed episode, so perhaps there will be some optimizing for market in there. Well, we're yet to determine. And like every great episode of the Unplugged program, we've got that virtual look. Time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Greetings. Hello. Brent is joining us via the Mumble Room today. So if you didn't hear his voice specifically, he is in there. Guys, it's great to be connected with all of you. And I'm looking at the news this week, and the thing I thought maybe we'd start with, because it didn't really fit with the rest of the theme, but I think it's a fascinating story,
Starting point is 00:02:39 is this story from Fedora that looks like they've moved ahead with plans to start dropping packages that have essentially bad security practices. They're just, they're drawing a line and they're saying, this line no farther. And it appears to be aimed at removing packages from the Fedora package archive that have known security issues against them that are not getting addressed in timely manner. Now, you might be thinking, doesn't that already happen?
Starting point is 00:02:59 If it's a critical or important security issue, and it's currently open against a package, or a security issue of lower severity has been open for at least six months, four weeks before the branch point, a procedure similar to some longstanding trimming procedures will be called into effect and the package will be removed from the distribution. Is Cinnamon an official spin of the Fedora project? I don't know. That's a good question. Why, you think this might apply to them? Well, I'm not one to cast stones,
Starting point is 00:03:30 but yeah, totally could. Hmm. Well, that's actually where I was going, is I was thinking of XFCE or other projects that perhaps just have this really torrentially long lead time between updates. Like, they could get caught up in this, couldn't they? Well, technically, although they've been in a round of updating their code bases,
Starting point is 00:03:52 so a lot of their stuff is moving to 4.13, and what isn't has had other updates. Yeah, them specifically. Yeah, XFCE specifically. No, I don't think so. I think they'll be fine. specifically you know i know i don't think so i think they'll be fine because what isn't already gtk3 is built on top of gtk2 and its associated technologies and it's the test of time and i think they'll be fine it seems like to admit it probably matters if uh you know like what what
Starting point is 00:04:19 sort of application because if you have to get to the critical or important level of security issue there might be some low-hanging fruit you know, minor security problems for some of our favorite desktop applications that haven't been updated in a while. That's a less, much less of a big deal than an obvious flaw in something that's doing a lot of network traffic or functioning in a server aspect, right? So I can see why Fedora wants to make sure that people can trust stuff coming from their archives. If it's just a,-of-date program on your desktop, well, maybe I care less. I do feel like this is a big part of the end user being able to trust what's in that repo. That's what this is really about, is increasing confidence there and improving security.
Starting point is 00:04:56 And this seems like a pretty easy way to automate that process that doesn't require a human being to go through and flag a project and then run a stopwatch and then come back and check on it. Like this, some computers can be pretty good at. It's also good to have clear guidelines so that downstream, you know, projects can be like, well, why was I removed? Well, here's our clear policy. Okay. Well, speaking of things that are getting better, LVFS is having a banner couple of months. This is becoming more and more irresistible of a project to be involved with if you are in the hardware business that sells to Linux users. Some people still are. But, boy, is it getting harder. And Realtek couldn't say no.
Starting point is 00:05:34 In fact, it looks like they may have been happy to say yes. Realtek engineers are adding USB 3.0 hub firmware support to FW-UPD. A lot of these multifunction USB-C dongles that you see, like I've got one that's got Ethernet and HDMI on it, as well as a couple of USB-A ports. And those are actually, in most cases, connected internally with USB themselves to each other, you know, like another hub inside your hub. It's a bit of a hot mess. So there's different subcomponents that need to be updated. And that is what these,
Starting point is 00:06:09 so the Realtek chips that are in there is what LVFS is getting support for. And they're working on getting also support to update like the HDMI controllers that are Realtek as well. And in sort of a nice turn of events, some of the hardware that's getting supported here hasn't even been released yet.
Starting point is 00:06:27 So we're getting to the point with the project where in some cases, vendors have at least enough awareness of this project, like Realtek did, to start working with them before the hardware is even out. And that's really great because it means when you get the hardware, it's just going to work out of the box with your Linux machine. That's huge. Yeah, there's quite a lot of momentum around LVFS right now, and it's really great to see. It's a tipping point, I think, and a good year ahead for the Linux desktop with LVFS. Yeah, the project really does seem to be picking up steam. And I wonder if maybe other vendors in the past have said it's not enough of a priority for us to fight with upstream ODM or to reinvent our internal process. Maybe now those decisions will be re-examined. I don't know. But we'll wait and see, I suppose. So the good news for the project, lots of really great hard work, and it's really good to see them just roll this kind of stuff out.
Starting point is 00:07:27 And speaking of really hard work, the chaps over at Ubiports have been plugging away like machines and have just released OTA4. And Marius joins us from the project to tell us a little bit about it. First of all, congratulations on the new release, Marius. And I noted that you say this is the official starting point of the project. That's sort of the messaging here. What does that mean? Well, it basically means this is where we have
Starting point is 00:07:53 used the time to catch up and get to our LTS base and a still supported base. So now we are on 16.04 LTS base instead of the old vivid of 1504 as it was before. And that's what we mean with the starting point is that we are used so long to both build infrastructure and build the build tools and build up a community. And now we are finally
Starting point is 00:08:22 to a point where we can see everything is going smoothly in the development process and and and we are at a catch-all point where we are on lts which is huge congratulations and how does it does it feel like it's fully yours now like this is a community project now it's an independent thing yeah i i would say that. But it's still based on Ubuntu, so we are really, really tied with the Ubuntu ecosystem, and I really like that, being tied to a strong base. So I wouldn't say we're independent in that way, but we're independent in a way that we are doing something new, which is a community-based mobile operating system, which is purely community without any official backing or a company behind it.
Starting point is 00:09:13 It's a project for the rest of us to perhaps one day have the option to put life into a device or replace the operating system on a device. And it's not tied to one individual manufacturer. It's not tied to one individual strategic partner. It is really, it's making a people's operating system for our mobile devices like they should be, like you can do with an x86 PC. And you make a good point that it's still totally based on that Ubuntu technology, but it does feel as its own independent organism now, like its own independent thing that, like you say, is doing something new. Speaking of new, I noticed in this new release, there's some
Starting point is 00:09:52 new power saving features and also a new upgrade wizard. Let's start with the power saving stuff. What's happening there? Is that savings that you see because of kernel updates? Are there other tweaks that have taken place? This is tweaks that we have done to utilize the wake logs or the Android wake logs, which is the public setting, which is kernel-based from Android. And since these kernel patches or these kernel APIs are really, really optimized for phones,
Starting point is 00:10:23 it was a good idea to use those wake logs in an efficient way after it was assigned to. So that's what we have done now. We use those wake logs properly and we're really heavily based on the thing when the process or when the phone is not in use, we want to enable those weight locks or so processor go down to sleep and just keeps one core intact. That is cool. And then there's that upgrade wizard, which I didn't see that one coming, but I guess
Starting point is 00:10:58 it does make sense. If you want to keep the same core install, you should be able to. Right. So we are currently on a kind of a rolling release type. And the problem with that that we saw is app compatibility or app ABI compatibility, because some of the apps are compiled for Vivid. And when we opt out to Xenio, we had the issue where the apps were not compatible because of the new or cute version, etc. So what this wizard does is basically update all these apps for you once you have upgraded the system to a new base.
Starting point is 00:11:40 This won't happen on every OTA. This is just for major, we call it framework change. So it's not something that comes up on every OTA. With the switch to a 16.04 base, what does that unlock in terms of things you want to achieve that you weren't able to do whilst you were based on 15.04? that you weren't able to do whilst you were based on 1504? The major thing is definitely being able to get security patches upstream, to still be on a supported base. I think that's one of the major things. But there is other things like being able to run Andbox, which was not able to run on Vivid because of older version of STL
Starting point is 00:12:24 and all these libraries that they use. And also newer version of Mesa, a newer version of Mir, and all these things that we want to upgrade at some point. We need newer version of pretty much everything. And since Mir is now targeted at Xenial, we don't have to backport things to Vivid. The Mirror team will make sure it builds on Xenial. Excellent. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:12:54 So let's shift to hardware for a second. I noticed that things seem to be working pretty well on the OnePlus with maybe the exception of camera zoom. So are we getting pretty close to another fully supported hardware device? Both, yes. I would say this is a question Dalton warned me about saying anything. So the thing with hardware is it's extremely hard and we have to do some major changes to be able to support Holium since we are running many components that are non-standard in a way and we want to to be closer to the Holium or slash MIR in one. And that's quite some components to change out,
Starting point is 00:13:48 like, for example, the sensors and TPS. And that's also why we say this is the starting point, because now we can start doing all the cool things with hallium or with Ironbox and all these features we want to implement, since now we have a solid base to do it on and a solid base to start working on top of. So yeah, definitely more devices coming.
Starting point is 00:14:13 I have two devices side by me that I have been porting nonstop after the OTA. Oh yeah? Hmm. Cool. No tease on what they are, though. You're just saying there's a couple there. I can say one of them has Slimport out.
Starting point is 00:14:30 Oh. Oh, okay. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. We'll have a link in the show notes where you can get involved, get more information, all of that. Just go to linuxunplugged.com slash 264 to get over there or ubports.com
Starting point is 00:14:42 to go directly to the project's website. Well, thank you for joining us today. You are welcome to stick around as we go on. I wanted to cover this quick, just really, just not really totally worth covering, but super quick update. Last week, we mentioned that Intel and Debian were getting into it over a new license change that was going to prevent benchmarks that used their microcode, which would be all executions on your system.
Starting point is 00:15:07 And within about a few days after Linux Unplugged, there was a change in their policy. They removed that section and made it clear that you can still benchmark, which we kind of speculated would happen. But I just wanted to kind of close the loop. It's like so many things that we end up covering. It seems like, you know, where there's lots of drama up front and, well, in the back room, the party's got it resolved. And now there's a sane part of the license and it makes it much more clear. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:31 By the time we're getting the news and people are starting to get their pitchforks, there's often already a response in the works. It's so true. Sometimes the hardest part of talking about something is not talking about it at all. How about a new feature? I bet Popey saw this. That's landing in KMail soon. And it's very Gmail-esque. And I love it.
Starting point is 00:15:53 It's really cool. It's called KDE Itinerary. And it's a couple of components, including one part that's called Prison, which is great. It's the part that takes care of barcode reading and rendering. And then there's also some support in there, mixed in there for Apple Wallet Pass files. I guess it turns out they're really nothing fancy. They're just a zip archive containing JSON data
Starting point is 00:16:13 with some graphical assets for like your logos. Hey, that's easy. No big deal, right? So they're like, well, we can read that. And they got that going. And so there's this KMail plugin that they've already got rendering Apple Wallet pass file attachments and flight itineraries in KMail. So like if you get an email confirming a flight, you get like this Google-like rendering in KMail now showing you your flight information.
Starting point is 00:16:41 And you can like click on it and add it to your calendar. Yeah. This is awesome. This is totally awesome. I heard it to your calendar. Yeah, this is awesome. This is totally awesome. I heard about this at Academy. You saw this? Yeah, they were talking about Academy and the whole goal of this is to be able to print out your boarding card or have your boarding card on your phone or your laptop or whatever
Starting point is 00:16:58 without having some giant American company reading all your email. Basically, you know, you want to be able to be in control of your data. And the whole ethos that runs through a lot of KDE apps is privacy first, that the user's privacy is respected, and they don't send your data off to third parties, but analyze your data locally. And they've worked hard to analyze these emails that you get from your travel partners or the data that you get from a travel partners or you know the data that you get from a travel booking to be able to render your ticket or your boarding card or whatever and it's hard it's a hard problem to solve because most of these other companies have solved it all on the server
Starting point is 00:17:36 and they don't make anyone you know aware of what the format of this data is so the KDE teams have worked hard I say teams because a lot of people were involved in this in order to make it possible for you to board a plane using free software. Yeah, they're even working on like a mobile end of it where you can pull it up on your mobile device and render it out. So that way you don't have to hold K-mail up to the boarding scanner, which I really appreciate that. It does look really neat. And that concept you touched on there, they looked at this and said, well, right now this can be done
Starting point is 00:18:09 by a few large US corporations. Wouldn't it be great if we could do this locally on your machine? I would love to see more of that, more of that. And it's one of those things where right now you have to rely on, yeah, big corporations, probably using a whole bunch of your data and big complicated machine learning models
Starting point is 00:18:24 to try to parse this and make it nice. It felt very far away from anything open source. So to have something that seems so close to being workable right now, I'm impressed. Yeah. I'm curious, Wimpy, are you still a MailSpring user? Is this still what you're using for mail? Have you had issues with MailSpring on high DPI? I do use MailSpring. I use it predominantly for my home email and I use it occasionally for my work email. And that's mostly because I use Wavebox for work, which sort of consolidates calendars and email and Slack and various other online collaboration tools all in one place.
Starting point is 00:19:07 So when I'm working, I tend to use Wavebox. But I do love MailSpring. As soon as MailSpring grows deep calendar integration, then I'll be in there all day, every day. Yeah, I'm finding that I am hitting the edges of it in calendar regards and also in just the UI just keeps falling over. I can't run it maximized on high DPI or else it won't render portions of the UI for me. So I'm not super thrilled with the state of native email clients on Linux. So I might look at this Wavebox, take a look at that.
Starting point is 00:19:38 I assume it's like some sort of service. No, Wavebox is a wrapper for many. It used to be called w mail back in the day and has evolved yep uh and it supports things like um uh gmail and in fact the google suite so when you add a google account it adds things like you know the calendar and hangouts and google plus and a whole bunch of different services under a collapsible menu. But it also supports things like different Slack accounts and Twitter and just a whole raft of stuff.
Starting point is 00:20:13 And it's just a really elegant way. It's basically like Pidgin for the 21st century. Yeah, that's interesting. You're right. It's a multi-service central. And I didn't used to have an appetite for that kind of thing, but now I do see the use case for it. And as luck, just sheer luck would have it, Wavebox is available as a Snap.
Starting point is 00:20:36 Who would have guessed? Who would have guessed it? It's not like the developer was an early adopter and has been behind the platform since the very beginning or anything. There you go. So, Chris, I'm going to let you into a little secret. All right. Sometimes I struggle with my grammar and use of the right words in written English.
Starting point is 00:20:56 No. Yeah, it's true. of wave box is it has sort of white listed a selection of google chrome extensions within wave box one of which is grammerly so i now have grammerly enabled and i now have grammerly persistent across all of the sessions that i manage in Wavebox through my single Grammarly instance. And it has reduced typos and screw ups in the written word significantly. So yeah, it's pretty fantastic. Wavebox is very elegantly and it's not like every extension imaginable. It's just like the really useful stuff that optimizes your workflows. And then, you know, for an extension like that, I don't necessarily have to have it in the main
Starting point is 00:21:50 browser and I could just keep it in Wavebox. Exactly so. I'll be checking that out. Now, there was an article that ran over at linuxjournal.com by Sarim, and it was on the 24th of the last week. And Sarim wrote in here that the year of the Linux desktop has been a constant call to arms that's sunken into a joke way past its expiration date. That's a good line, Sarim. That's a good line right there. And so he goes on to make a pretty compelling case.
Starting point is 00:22:19 He says, today, what we have is a distribution-centric model. Software is distributed by an OSV, which is an operating system vendor, and users get their software directly from there via whatever packaging mechanism that OSV supports. This model has evolved because in the early to mid-1990s, those OSVs existed to compile the kernel and user space into a cohesive product. He's essentially setting up the role of what the distro package maintainers had done. Packaging of applications was the next step as a convenience factor to save users from having to compile their own applications. Yep, I'd say that's pretty much
Starting point is 00:22:54 the case. Ultimately, though, these operating system vendors, or OSVs, enjoyed being gatekeepers as part of keeping developers honest and fixing issues that were unique to their operating system. OSVs saw themselves as agents representing users to provide high-quality software, and there was a feeling that developers were not to be trusted, as of course, nobody knows the state of their operating system better than they would. However, this model represented a number of challenges to both commercial and open-source developers. For commercial developers, the problem became how to maximize their audience as the Linux market
Starting point is 00:23:29 consisted of a number of major OSVs and an uncountable number of smaller niche distributions. Commercial application developers would have to develop multiple versions of their own application targeted at various distributions for fear of missing out on a subset of users. Over time, commercial application developers would settle on using Ubuntu or a compressed tar file hosted on their website. Now he goes on to keep making the case here, and I'll leave it as an exercise to you to read the whole article, but he makes the case that the distro-centric model
Starting point is 00:23:58 also makes it difficult for developers to have relationships with their users. There is no way to build a community around an application if users are getting their software from the distribution without any thought. He writes, This model, I believe, has reached its end of usefulness. In order to further scale the market for Linux applications, we need to move to a new model.
Starting point is 00:24:17 Although we can never eliminate the distribution-centric model, nor should we, to reach scalability, we need to remove the OSV as the gatekeeper for application distribution and allow developers to control how they distribute their applications. This is a new iteration on a couple of conversations we've had semi-recently, Wes. Yeah, I mean, it absolutely is, right? This has been a continued trend. We've been driven to alternative OSVs, even by the facet of we just need the software we need,
Starting point is 00:24:53 especially when you're, you know, it's one thing if you just want to have a free open source desktop that you use casually to check some emails. But once you're doing real work, you have a much closer relationship with the people providing the software that lets you do that work. And you don't need a bunch of middlemen in the way. And that's been a big problem. So it's interesting to see it being addressed in so many ways. Yeah. Yeah. It is sometimes in, in for business software, like it's a one-to-one relationship. The vendor specifically creates software for the business and you're getting it from them. You know, there's no distribution required to be in the middle. And so those typically just be distributed as tar files or something like that. And then as we've watched
Starting point is 00:25:26 the growth of snaps and flat packs, the conversation has become more and more often, hey, we're watching a shift here. I think this is, I think something we brought up just recently
Starting point is 00:25:34 is these things like self-updating flat packs and self-updating snaps, what that represents is software developers pushing new software to a store or a repo, which then gets pushed down to your machine. And that's not how it used to work. It used to work that, you know, a Debian maintainer would review a package and then submit it to the repo.
Starting point is 00:25:56 And then when there was a new version of Debian that would get cut, the new versions of packages would get cut. Like it was a way different process just even a couple of years ago. would get cut. Like it was a way different process just even a couple of years ago. And there has been this huge shift with app images and all these other universal installers that we have just kind of sat back and watched and commented on now a little bit more. And I think that's in that context. That's why I'm pretty curious to see how, which I think is the first Libre Application Summit goes. It's happening next week in Denver, September 6th through the 9th, and it's hosted by GNOME. And it bills itself as an application summit that brings together application writers, distributions, toolkits,
Starting point is 00:26:36 and OS plumbers to build an ecosystem that encourages building applications on free software operating systems. One of the nice things about the Libre Application Summit is Gnome has reached out to XSCE. I think they tried to reach out to Solus, and there's going to be a bunch of folks from Plasma that are going to be there. So it's not just about GDK, it's not just about the Gnome desktop, but it's being grown to reach out to the community at large. Did they contact anyone from the Electron community? I was on a conference call today, and they're reaching out to a few folks from there as well. Oh, good. Fantastic.
Starting point is 00:27:13 If they need help with that, can you connect us? Because I can help with that. Sure. Shoot me a telegram, and I'll get you connected. Right, will do. Because, you know, obviously Electron on Linux sits on top of GTK, well, two or three, depending on which version of Elect get you connected. Right, will do. Because, you know, obviously, Electron on Linux sits on top of GTK, well, two or three, depending on which version of Electron you use.
Starting point is 00:27:29 So there's obviously some, you know, overlap there. Might be a bit late in the day, but let's have a go. All right, so, Poby, Wimby, Wes, you and I, we've all been to plenty of conferences. What do you think of this one? About a conference, and I think we're familiar with the background and all that.
Starting point is 00:27:47 A conference to kind of get together and encourage application development on Linux. Where do we start with this? I'm curious to know your thoughts, Pope, because I think you and I learned about it at the same time on Twitter. Yeah. So I would love to have gone, actually.
Starting point is 00:28:03 I really wanted to represent us, but it's a terrible weekend for people in the UK because that's when kids start back at school. Plus, there's been a whole lot of other events. So I was actually super keen to go along, but it's in the wrong continent at the wrong time. I find it interesting that there's an event that talks about applications on Linux. I'm interested to know who the target audience for this is, whether it's the KDE people, the GTK people, the Electron people, and Qt and everyone else, and who they're going to be talking to.
Starting point is 00:28:40 Are they going to be talking to each other and saying, yeah, we should get all this done, and what are the outcomes of this going to be? Or are they trying to pitch talking to each other and saying, yeah, we should get all this done? And what are they get? What are the outcomes of this going to be? Or are they trying to pitch this to new developers like students who are entering the market and just starting to develop? I'm keen to understand who that target is. And for me, it isn't completely clear who the target for this event is. Well, I think that's something that's growing. I think this is the third year or so of this particular conference.
Starting point is 00:29:11 There is a couple of talks on making projects interesting for students. There's some talks being put on by KDE about how they do things. There's talks being put on by GNOME about how they do things. And someone I left out was Elementary OS. They've got a couple of folks that are coming. So I think the target audience is application developers as a whole, be it new developers, old developers. I think it's trying to set a precedent for development of applications moving forward. I would have loved to attended this event and also Guadec as well, representing the Marte desktop. But as Alan has just explained, the Marte desktop. But as Alan has just explained, the timing doesn't work for me. And maybe next year, I'll be able to get involved. If there's anyone who is listening from the organizing committee, or he's going to be there. One of the things I learned recently was
Starting point is 00:30:01 when I was at the Electron Maint electron maintainers summit an electron being dependent on gtk2 traditionally and more so gtk3 in the recent versions of electron they were shocked to learn at the abi breakage that existed through sort of through gtk in recent years and the fact that they had deliberately built against old versions of gtk thinking they were going to bake in some kind of you know legacy forward compatibility and then horrified to learn that you know it seg faults like a bastard and it's and it's a big fat mess. And, you know, we need to think beyond what are the traditional Linux application developers now. You can think what you like about Electron and you can be wrong about that and that's fine.
Starting point is 00:30:57 But the majority of development that happens on the Linux desktop right now that is relevant to the world that we live in happens in the electron sphere and we need to invite those people into our world and educate them to the nuances of the way that we do things and the peculiarities of our toolkits and also seek their feedback on how we are going to accommodate enterprise class application developers on our platform. I also was really hoping to make it this year.
Starting point is 00:31:33 It's a long shot for me because I will be traveling during that time, but I will be traveling home because I want to see the kids for school. So I'm really torn because it seems like an event that I really support. And that's why I wanted to give them some time here on the show to talk about a little bit because I think the idea is good. How do we get different projects together all with the same goal of making Linux a better platform to develop applications for? Build a network of people that are interested in that, right, and can provide support and
Starting point is 00:32:04 fast feedback. And I'm excited to see what the second version of this looks like, if this can get off the ground rolling really well. I'm sure the next one will be even better, more people, and probably we can tell a little bit more about what it's all going to be about. So Eric, the IT guy, if you end up getting to go, you'll be our reporter on the ground. You can report back and let us know, okay? I will definitely be there, and I'm checking up with one of the folks from System76. He offered me a place to sleep, which made it financially affordable. So I'll be making the drive next Wednesday morning. Oh, doing a road trip style.
Starting point is 00:32:35 Good, good. That's how I like to do it too. I like to do it that way. All right, guys. Well, I think it's going to be a good show. I don't think I'm going to make it. But if you do make it and you want to join us too and share your experiences like Eric will, you are welcome to.
Starting point is 00:32:48 We do this show live on Tuesdays. You can go to jblive.tv. Usually starts around 2 p.m. Pacific, but it's all converted at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to your local time. And you don't even have to hang out in the mobile. You can just come watch the show if you want. In fact, I would encourage you to join us next week because we have a
Starting point is 00:33:04 really great show planned for next week with some special guests. And I think it will be a good one. So join us live next week, jblive.tv on Tuesday. And if you make it to the Libre Application Summit, first of all, tell them to choose a different name than last. And then let us know how it went. Now let's take a moment and thank a few of our sponsors. I want to get – after the sponsor block here, I want to get into Proton. I want to get into Steam Play and I just want to leave as much room for it as we want. If it's a five minute conversation, if it's a 55 minute
Starting point is 00:33:33 conversation, I think there's a lot to get into. We've dug into some of the technicals here, done some testing, quote unquote, for you, you know, the hard work. But also I've been talking to people in the audience that for some, it's the end of the world. And for some, it means they can now fundamentally switch to Linux. And I've gotten a couple of stories that have gotten me kind of hyped because I am at a point right now where Windows applications are just not a thing I need anymore. I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to be high and mighty. It's just, I've spent years sort of systematically avoiding Windows. And so I really haven't built up a demand of applications
Starting point is 00:34:12 that I need. And that even extends to games. If the game wasn't available for Linux, that's fine. I've got plenty of games to play. So it took me a little bit to get my head around why I should care about this. I mean, obviously I care because it's a lot of cool stuff happening for people that like to use Linux. That makes me care. But why should I personally get excited about this? And when I started hearing some people's stories and I started digging into what's happening here, I got excited. And I'm going to share with you what I've learned, including I contacted the folks at CodeWeavers. And I got some official statements
Starting point is 00:34:46 from them on what their involvement with all of this was. And so we can clear up all of that. So let's start by thanking Ting. You can start by going to linux.ting.com. That's how you support the show and get $25 off a device, or if you bring a device, $25 in service credit. Your average Ting bill is just 23 bucks. So that $25 will pay for more than your first month. It really makes a difference. And that's because it's smarter than unlimited. You just pay for what you use. However much you talk, text, and data you use, that's what you pay. If you're visiting the state sometime, grab a Ting line.
Starting point is 00:35:14 You can get a SIM card, pop it in a device that's compatible, check their BYOD page. They have CDMA and GSM, which means you've got a lot of options to choose from. There's no contract, so when you're ready to go after you've been visiting, you could disable it if you want. You could also just keep it. It's $6 a month for the line. I mean, it's $6 plus whatever Uncle Sam's going to cut, and then your usage. So if you want to just keep a Ting line, you can.
Starting point is 00:35:38 It's pretty economical. They have a great control panel that lets you manage all of this and set up alerts and usage stuff, and also great customer service that's always ready to help you out. Devices you can buy directly or bring one. They have a great BOIOD page and the entire activation process can be done through their website. If you want to do it at 1 a.m. while you just have a wild hair and you just don't feel like talking to another human being, well, that's how I activated my Evo. And it worked.
Starting point is 00:36:03 I couldn't believe it. I assumed I'd have to call. I activated my Evo 4G WiMAX edition over four years ago, popped that sucker in and I got $25 in service credit. And when it paid for more than my first month, I've never, ever gone back. Canceled Verizon, moved my other phones over. It was great. I went from paying 120 before taxes. So it was more like 145 per month to sometimes like maybe 45. It's just, it was a huge shift, huge shift. And I just, I'll never forget that experience. And you can try it out too, by starting to go to linux.ting.com. Now, DigitalOcean. Now, if you want to, you want to be, you want to make big podcasts, you want to make big projects,
Starting point is 00:36:47 you want to look like you got a big data center, I don't know where I'm going with that, really, other than to tell you DigitalOcean is how you do it. do.co.unplugged. I say that because within 55 seconds, you can have something on their enterprise-grade SSDs, 40-gigabit connections coming into their hypervisors, data centers all over the world.
Starting point is 00:37:03 Like, it's a legitimate setup setup and you have access to it and you can get it for $100 of a credit and just try it out for like 60 days. And it's yours to like have as a data center infrastructure. You wrap your head around that concept. You can just go deploy systems when you want them now. And it's great. It's nothing like it used to be. You know, when I'd have to get a system set up,
Starting point is 00:37:24 it would be a two-week lead time before the vendor would even ship the parts. And then you got to put it in the rack and then you got to pay for power. You got to pay for internet. And you know, T1 line's like a thousand bucks a month. And now for three cents an hour, I can have four gigs of RAM, two CPUs,
Starting point is 00:37:41 80 gigabytes of enterprise grade SSD, three terabytes worth of transfer, and a dashboard that is an industry-leading dashboard. Like, nobody does it like this. They set the bar. They're trusted by over a million developers, and the pricing is straightforward and predictable. And when you go to do.co slash unplugged,
Starting point is 00:37:59 you get a $100 credit when you sign up with a new account. You can try them out, see what I've been talking about, maybe go get off Dropbox and move over to NextCloud. I'm just saying, you know, they've got some good infrastructure for that. I've been running an NextCloud instance up there for about two years as like a hot test, you know, like a hot standby. It's great. It's great. I've recently attached 25 gigs worth of additional storage.
Starting point is 00:38:22 Love it. What? Love it. It's just perfect. So go check it out, do.co slash unplugged and get started. And then last but absolutely not least, a big thank you to Linux Academy. I would tell you to go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, but I'm actually saying don't do that. I mean, do it, but don't do it until September 3rd because they're doing a huge sale.
Starting point is 00:38:45 You can buy out the whole year for $2.99. Just be done for the year. $2.99, you get access to everything. And that's a great deal. That's like phenomenal pricing. And the value you get from that is mind-blowing. That is an – the books alone back in the day to take those courses would have been $400 or $500. I can't even with you right now with this. So go to Linux Academy, but wait
Starting point is 00:39:14 until September 3rd, because on September 3rd, Monday, they're starting a $2.99 a year sale. And I think that's the best deal. They've been doing ads on this network since 2014. And I think that's the best deal that we have ever seen. So go to Linux Academy, but just wait a couple of days and then sign up. It's a platform to learn about Linux, everything that Linux runs or runs on Linux, including the things that are really going to make your resume look good. And it's stuff that's put together by full-time training architects who specialize in this stuff. Like they're from the field and they're creating the courseware and they're answering your questions. And now they're doing a sale that is way beyond anything I've ever seen. So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged on Monday and September 3rd,
Starting point is 00:40:02 2018, and look for that $2.99 a year sale. Dig around until you get it. That's the best tip I've had for Linux Academy for a long time. Plus, they just launched all that new content. It's all in there. All the new labs, the interactive guides, it's all in there as part of that. So it's a great deal.
Starting point is 00:40:18 LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Thanks to all of our sponsors for sponsoring this here show. Okay, so there we go. Sponsor block is done. We've done our business for the day. Now we get to just play around. So let's talk
Starting point is 00:40:34 about Steam Play. We can have fun. Oh, I was having fun. Let me tell you, I was having fun. But now, now this is a whole new kind of fun. This is like an emulated fun. But don't call it an emulator. All right. So let's talk about Steam Play, which we were speculating about on Linux Action News.
Starting point is 00:40:54 And then it came out and boom, here we have it. And the core of Steam Play is really something called Proton. That's what's sitting underneath the Steam client is this Proton system. And I don't know, Wes, I'd say it's probably fair to describe Proton as something that's made up of many parts. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. And, you know, there's lots of little bits keeping those parts together in a way that you, the happy steamed end user, hopefully doesn't have to care about. Yeah, yeah, there's like, the way they've built this thing, they being the people that have contributed to it, is like there's different shims in there for different types of Windows gaming technology. So there might be a shim in there
Starting point is 00:41:31 specifically for DirectX 12, which is much more Vulkan-like at lower levels and requires less translation. And there's also shims in there for older versions of DirectX, right? Yeah, there's older ones and of, you know, DirectX 9, DirectX 11, of course. Plus they've had to do some, you know, some other work just to make things play nice, like better full screen support, game set support. And of course,
Starting point is 00:41:53 they have their own things to integrate, like better things for Steamworks targeting native APIs, better open VR support. There's just a lot in this one title. So Valve has posted Proton up on GitHub. And when you look through some of the issues that have been closed, there is a comment in there who's a collaborator on the project, who's a CodeWeavers employee. And I believe his name is Eric. And he writes, we've been working on Proton for a long time. We've needed an internal code name for it. And we couldn't really tip our hat if it leaked. So we had to decide, how the heck are we going to name Proton? What do we refer to it as?
Starting point is 00:42:29 He says, we didn't want it to be something we'd be embarrassed after using it after release, so no badger, badger, badger. And a bunch of ideas that were kicked around the CodeWeaver's office one afternoon, and it ended up we picked Proton because it's short, easy to remember, sounds cool, and it's hard to Google for. So I was like, interesting. What did CodeWeavers have to do with this? Because I've heard about Valve.
Starting point is 00:42:51 I've heard about Valve financing developers. I've heard about Valve's investment in Linux gaming. I've heard about SteamOS. But what do CodeWeavers have to do with this? CodeWeavers are the folks that make Crossover, Office for Linux, and Mac that lets you run lots of applications, including games. And Jeremy White, their CEO, blogged the day of the announcement that they've been working directly with Valve for two years on this effort. And that got my interest, but it wasn't good enough.
Starting point is 00:43:18 I said to myself, that doesn't make any sense because Valve is technically a competitor in some ways. Like this makes there be less demand for Crossover Office because a huge part of it is making Windows games work that don't normally work very easily under Wine. So I emailed Crossover. I said, guys, could you clear this up for me? Because it sounds like from what I'm reading, I'm getting vague implications that CodeWeavers was fairly involved with Proton. And it's true. I asked, did you have dedicated staff to work on Proton?
Starting point is 00:43:50 And they write, yes, we did have dedicated staff. Was a large portion of the code to Proton contributed by CodeWeavers? And they say that we contributed to wine for this project and contributed a great deal of the Proton glue code. There's a lot of other folks who contributed as well, and we've been amazed by the amount of energy the Valve continues to bring into this. I asked if this was actually started in-house at CodeWeavers, and the answer I got there was, we have worked with Valve on this from the beginning. In other words, to me, that sounds like Valve contacted them
Starting point is 00:44:27 and said, here's something we want to do and we think you're the folks to hire to do it. Because that is something that CodeWeavers has done before for other folks. We have worked with Valve on this from the beginning. To me, sounds like someone from Valve reached out to them from the very, very beginning of the project and said,
Starting point is 00:44:42 we want to make changes to Wine and we want to work with you to do it. I asked if it was always intended to be used by Valve or if they started it as an internal project to use it. And they say their sole intention was working with Valve to create this for them. The last follow-up question that I asked was if we would see some of these improvements make it into Upstream Wine and Crossover Office. And they said, yes, absolutely. The Crossover Linux product will contain all of the wine goodness that we have contributed upstream. The proton bits aren't
Starting point is 00:45:14 really necessary for that as generally our product already has all of the glue bits that we already need, like picking the different DirectX levels and setting up the wine bottles. But they are exploring using DXVK, but it gets tricky as they also consider the macOS a part of their customer base. And it's a different set of applications requirements. But it does sound like CodeWeaver, from the very, very beginning of this effort, was involved and was working with Valve to build this thing and then contribute those improvements upstream to Wine. I mean, that kind of makes sense. We'd seen some movement on the Direct3D 12 implementation, BKD 3D. I had been, I think a lot of people have been kind of like, well, where's this coming from?
Starting point is 00:45:55 Who's funding this? Why is this a Wine project? I mean, it made sense that it would fall under that umbrella. But, you know, that's a big undertaking to come out of nowhere. So I'm sure, you know, knowing that they had the support that this a big undertaking to come out of nowhere. So I'm sure knowing that they had the support that this bigger hidden undertaking was happening, that's a lot of confidence, a lot of runway to build something that takes a long time to get a usable product. I feel like they valved up the announcement a little bit, sort of a typical thing. It's a
Starting point is 00:46:19 pretty solid announcement, but they managed to do something small that just really sets the impression. And they had this initial list of like 15 supported games and two or three, four of them are like modern this year games. And the rest are all like old games that nobody cares about, that nobody's trying to run on Linux. You know, stuff that came out years ago, years ago. And it just reinforces this impression that, you know, these old, you can't get all these games on Linux. It's just, it was this really odd list of games that I, I felt like was actually more harmful than good. Because when you look at the actual list that the community is maintaining of games that work, it's astronomically large. I'll have some links in the show notes.
Starting point is 00:47:09 It is huge. There are so many well-supported games. And I'll tell you, when it clicked for me was when I realized I could play Age of Empires 2 again. That is, I swear to God, Microsoft is never going to release that game. They'll never update Age of Empires 2 or 3 for Linux. I'm just SOL. But now with this and the community list where they tell you what tweaks to make, I can play those old games again.
Starting point is 00:47:33 And it's pretty exciting. It represents a significant shift of availability again. Now, it's not a perfect solution. Not everything works. And sometimes you got to implement some workarounds. But we just probably got another thousand games that work on Linux. And some of them are AAA titles. So with that all said, I feel like I must defer to the elite gamer of the group, Mr. Martin Wimpress and get your impressions on this news. Well, it's humbling to know that you recognize my status in this discussion um yeah we we talk about this on
Starting point is 00:48:10 a recent ubuntu podcast and my take is that you know i've never until steam came to linux i was never a gamer on linux you know i used consoles as the means by which to consume games and as soon as steam arrived for linux then i i was able to game on a platform that i really believed in and this just extends the corpus of um gaming catalog that i have access to now um and in particular i you know i there's a particular genre of games that i enjoy most which is racing games um and in particular i you know i there's a particular genre of games that i enjoy most which is racing games um and i've installed dozens uh in fact purchased and installed dozens of these windows titles on um the new steam client beta and had a wonderful time revisiting some classic uh racing games that I've not played for years, and also some new games that I really wanted to play but didn't have access to, and I'm now able
Starting point is 00:49:13 to. And I'm sure there are going to be rough edges along the way, but I think this is a net positive for us. If you make publishers' publishers lives easy that they can see the number of people that are playing their published titles on linux and not experiencing issues outside of what they know to be you know the bugs that exist in in in their existing you know windows platform compatibility then they're going to get behind this because it's a almost zero effort um activity so yeah i i i realize that some people will see proton as the electron for gaming on linux and it will be the demon seed and it will be berated and chastised in all the usual corners of the internet that those opinions are expressed. But for me, this is a positive step forward
Starting point is 00:50:12 and I'll be really interested to see how it develops over the next six to nine months and what other pieces of the Valve jigsaw puzzle fall into place behind it. Yeah, this is one of the more interesting pieces. This is the central piece, right? This is the pivotal piece to whatever Valve's strategy may have been at the outset and the various faltering starts. I think this could be the piece that really propels things forward. And it sounds like we get a timeline.
Starting point is 00:50:42 CodeWeavers gives us a two-year timeline. Yeah, well, let's see. I mean, there's certainly been, obviously, over the last week... No, I mean, they've been working on it for two years. It sounds like CodeWeavers may have been contracted for two years to work on this. Without realizing it, some of the fun and games that Popey and I have had recently, publishing Windows games inside Snaps, publishing windows games inside snaps builds on this very technology we just didn't realize we were doing that until these announcements last week so it's all it's already a net positive for the for the linux environment you know this is this is compatibility and funded development around things that you know we we already have a good productivity story on the Linux desktop.
Starting point is 00:51:28 We already have an excellent developer story on the Linux desktop. And the conversation always comes around to games eventually. And we've had an okay to good story there. And we're on the cusp of having an excellent story there. So well said. Well done, Valve. You've put your money where your mouth is, and you're really making a difference where it counts. So one thing that I don't understand is where does negativity come with both electron and this proton?
Starting point is 00:52:00 I don't understand. From my side, I only see positive. I don't see why anyone would see it negatively. desktop and i hate the fact that there are cute libraries loaded on my system or i've got a cute based desktop and i hate the fact there are gtk libraries on my system or i've got a cute and i hate the fact that there's electron people should build natively and everything will be super performant and it should be written in native languages or assembler or you know they're misguided that they can berate developers into doing things differently to suit them when they are a tiny tiny speck of an
Starting point is 00:52:46 audience. You can't do that. You need to welcome these developers to our platform. I don't always agree with it, but I think also there's some amount of, at least for the desktop side of people, worrying about when you have a shim layer or a common abstraction, then you write to that, and it may not take full advantage of some of the unique features of various platforms. But if people aren't going to do that anyway, if people aren't, for instance, if people aren't making Linux games for you that you want to play or that the market wants, well, then you might want that. But if you're not getting it, what choice do you have? But Proton is a much stronger story in that regard to the other solutions. So we've had the likes of virtual programming in the past, which it grossly
Starting point is 00:53:22 oversimplified or a wine wrapper around a windows game but it was all single threaded and at least the proton development is uh offers up you know multi-threaded capability and a whole heap of other stuff besides so you know you've got to appreciate that valve are you know a a means to market for games publishers and they want games publishers to be able to exploit the processing capability of the platform that they're delivering on. And I think as a solution, there are obviously some things about this we should be cautious about, but I think Valve have done everything possible to smooth things over
Starting point is 00:54:05 for people wanting to target Linux through a compatibility layer as best as they can. And I really feel they should be applauded for this because the Valve coming to Linux in the first place was a massive blooming turning point for adoption of the Linux desktop. And this will be even more so, considerably more so. It is as big a deal as everyone's hyping it up to be. I've already talked to several people that I'm like, look, you can play these games now. I know
Starting point is 00:54:33 you were holding off. You have a Windows installed just for these. No more, my friend. I've had those same conversations and people are very excited by that. But I think there's also an aspect to this that we're maybe not giving enough attention to, and I think it's on the tip of Minimac's mind, and that is Vulkan is the wild card in this. In some cases, we're going from very low-level DirectX 12 calls, which are already quite similar to Vulkan, and just translating them to native local Vulkan.
Starting point is 00:55:01 And that's going to be a big piece, right, Minimac? Yeah, I think that's the whole thing. That whole thing is very future-proof because as I understand, Windows games supporting Vulkan only have to translate the Windows game part, not the graphics rendering part. That is Vulkan that takes all the stuff.
Starting point is 00:55:19 And the old DirectX thing is encapsulated in Vulkan, so it is a huge push for Vulkan. And I would like to have some responses of macOS, of the Apple people about that. Yes, right. Oh, good point. There's terrible support for that kind of stuff on macOS.
Starting point is 00:55:36 I mean, they kind of ebb and flow. Like, OpenGL is just horrible right now, but Metal support's fantastic. So I guess you just need one more shim to convert it to Metal. Yeah. Yeah, well, there is. There's MoltenVK, which is like the shim to Metal for Vulkan API calls, which is very decent and can certainly facilitate those targeting requirements but valve were quite clear that mac os doesn't feature in this initiative at the moment or possibly at all well could you blame them well are mac shipping many devices with significant enough graphics capability to be a serious gaming platform and unless you're prepared to shell out 12 grand the answer is no yeah so why why would i mean that's like super niche you know if you you think we're a niche audience but those people that can afford you know an imac pro with the vegas
Starting point is 00:56:41 64 option and everything else that is a super niche audience. So you can probably appreciate why they're not investing effort there right now. Yeah, that's a point well made. I've got one thought at the back of my mind. Okay. That I'm a little bit like, I wonder how this is going to play out. This is all great stuff. But as far as I'm aware, and I'm very happy to be proven wrong about this,
Starting point is 00:57:07 so if you know better, do contact Chris. Not me. Do contact Chris and let him know how wrong I was. He'll bring it to my attention in low bandwidth form. Wine is X11 exclusively right now. I wonder how much of this effort is going to be targeted at bringing Proton, stroke Wine, to talk Weyland natively, or how much of this effort is purely going to be focused around implementing the compatibility necessarily on top of the X11 stack that these games run more reliably? And will this defer and push back the general acceptance of Wayland as a display server technology? Or will they become some of our most frequent ex-Wayland apps? That's a good question.
Starting point is 00:58:04 And you have to wonder if it's not a chicken and the egg problem with graphics drivers. You know, you're going to, to really develop that, you would need a Linux box with full proprietary 3D graphics to troubleshoot and test. And you got to get that first. Well, you'd do better with the fully open source drivers for Wayland stuff. Sure. So, you know, I'm not close enough to the development of these things to know how prioritized Wayland is something that's of paramount importance, that it helps deliver Wayland to the Linux desktop,
Starting point is 00:58:51 or if it's something that pushes back the acceptance of the Wayland desktop because there is a significant enough performance impact on these games being run through compatibility layers that people just aren't prepared to go there yet just as the transition to wayland was looking simple and smooth this has to come along i can answer this um because i'm working pretty closely with wayland and mirror and i would say the the answer to this is nVIDIA. NVIDIA, their proprietary drivers, doesn't work at all with any of the Wayland stuff without needing to use their L stream APIs.
Starting point is 00:59:35 And without NVIDIA support, most of the graphics cards that the gamers have, which is NVIDIA, doesn't work on Wayland. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's where I would expect the main cause of angst to be. And like I said, a bit of a chicken and egg there. And maybe somebody could reach out to NVIDIA and encourage them to pick up the pace on that.
Starting point is 00:59:56 Maybe. We'll see. Somebody. There is no need to pick up the pace, though, on the community's development around Steam Play and Proton. There's already really cool sites set up. I'll recommend one called Proton.city. That's where I learned how to get Age of Empires 2 working. You just type in the game there and then it'll tell you like the status, the workarounds.
Starting point is 01:00:16 It's a little slow right now because it's getting slammed but they've got like reviews and all of that stuff and it's all dynamically generated so it's Proton.city and that's how I got Age of Empires working. I'm very, very, very happy about it. There's also some lists. There's some Google Docs out there that have all of the games
Starting point is 01:00:32 and their status and notes, and it's staggering. It's thousands of games. It's so staggering that it kills your browser trying to load the spreadsheet of the list of games. That's how massive it is. And there is just so much energy. There's so much passion that this is definitely a net positive. And I have hired people that are concerned that it will
Starting point is 01:00:54 de-incentivize more native games. Steam was pretty up front and they had a good, you know, they talk right there. Like if I'm trying to target Linux natively like just target Vulkan, use that. And hopefully like maybe less than in the desktop space, maybe not. Games are already somewhat disconnected. Now they do need a bunch of, you know, stuff to do to sound and tie to internet and all that, but they're already something that's not just another desktop application.
Starting point is 01:01:16 They're a pretty niche use case that's segmented from a regular desktop. So I think we need like a Turing test for Proton. And I think the rules for the Turing test for Proton are, can it run Fortnite yet? And until the outcome of that question is an unequivocal yes, then we're not there. But as soon as it runs Fortnite, then we're all sorted. Yeah, we do need to get that. We do need to get that. That is an embarrassing weak spot.
Starting point is 01:01:50 I have not really gotten to Fortnite, but I have heard people bring it up, and every other platform's got it. That's a good one. Does it run Fortnite? We will wait and see. I bet you it happens sooner than later. It's not published on Steam,
Starting point is 01:02:02 so Valve have got no skin in the game on making that one work. Ah. I will include a link in the show notes on how to run Proton from the command line. So it is possible to just point it at an executable and go.
Starting point is 01:02:17 So that might help. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes if I can dig it up again. Also, another link I'll have in there is, this also helps if you just want to use it sort of outside of Steam – is there's proton tricks, like wine tricks that lets you set some of the – Oh. Yeah. Registry stuff and whatever.
Starting point is 01:02:33 I don't know whatever Windows calls it. So, yeah. There's now proton tricks where you can apply actions and whatnot or apply it even to specific games and things. So people are developing tools around this, directories. There's just all kinds of stuff coming together. So it's a good time for this kind of thing because it seems like the community was just super hungry for it. And within days, we've seen all of this stuff get set up, all of these resources, all of
Starting point is 01:02:59 these games tested. It's like people are sitting around just waiting to play video games. Is there anything else anyone wants to chime in before we wrap this one up? Well, do we think there's going to be another round of Steam machine investment here now that, you know, it might actually be able to play some of the games you want? Right. Yeah. What is next for SteamOS now? And will it be a doubling down? Will it be like integrated into big picture mode and all that or is this a acknowledgement that you know what you can go get ubuntu 1804 you can load our steam
Starting point is 01:03:32 package on there and everything's good to go the kernel improvements are all there the graphics drivers work and with our steam client we have all these libraries and proton, like maybe this is a shifting of the landscape and Steam machines are just not as necessary? He says in a questioning voice. We'll have to wait and see. Yeah, I guess stay tuned and find out. That probably won't be what we're talking about next week, but we'd love to have you
Starting point is 01:03:57 guys join us there. If you're all done, then that's good. We don't have to go get the links at linuxunplugged.com slash 264. That's fine. You don't have to. But if you want linuxunplugged.com slash 264. That's fine. You don't have to. But if you want a little more, you want a little more content, go check out the Ubuntu podcast where you can get more of Popey and Wimpy and their cohort, Mark, is on the Ubuntu podcast,
Starting point is 01:04:15 ubuntupodcast.org. Good episode. I loved that episode on Academy. That was really fascinating. I thought that was a really well done take on going to an event too. Just going to an event and then summarizing it in a show is not always super easy. And I thought you nailed it, Poppy. So great episode of Ubuntu podcast. Thank you. And go get more Wes Payne over at techsnap.systems.
Starting point is 01:04:33 He's at Wes Payne on the Twitter. Do it. And the whole network is at Jupyter Signal. Linuxunplugged.com is our site. Thank you for joining us and we will see you next Tuesday. All right, let's name this thing. Now, Wimpy, did the title go through that you were thinking we were going to see? Did that make its way through? Yeah, that made its way through. I went for a super long version and then trimmed it down.
Starting point is 01:05:25 Okay, let's go take a look at this thing. JB Titles. It's number one. I'm feeling confident in my prediction for this week's show title. Oh my goodness, that is pretty good. It is long, but it is pretty good. I can give you an even shortened version.
Starting point is 01:05:41 You can just go for Proton Electron for Games. Yeah, that's nice. That's nice. That's that. That is good. All right. That's going to be pretty hard to beat. I also know that's going to irritate people that I know
Starting point is 01:05:54 and I'm friends with horribly, but hey-ho. It's the meme. It's summarizing the meme within, you know, the peanut gallery in, you know, four words or less. That's all we've ever wanted from a title. I love it. I'm going for it. I'm going with the slightly shorter version, Proton, Electron for Games.
Starting point is 01:06:14 Now, what did we miss this week, Wes? Oh, I was going to say we didn't. I was happy to see that Proton counts as Linux for Steam Play. So if you're going to get surveyed, if you're running it through Proton, it counts as Linux, not Windows. Yeah, that is a good point to make. Yeah, we should have made that in the shows. It's always been this way, too. It's the way the Valve system works.
Starting point is 01:06:33 It's whatever system you've played the most on after two weeks. Who here has purchased a game as a result of the Steam Play beta? I did. Yeah, I did. I bought Age of Empires. I did, too. Yeah, so did I. i bought over a dozen um oh well they were in packs they were they were they were racing stroke driving games in packs so you know why wouldn't i now when the steep sale is on i'm i'm not going to feel so limited
Starting point is 01:07:00 i'm going to just go crazy and my wallet's's gonna be empty in no time at all yeah that's very true but you do need to check these community driven you know does it work because i was looking at those like is my investment safe you know if i buy this thing and the curious thing is the only game that doesn't work for me is doom which is white listed and i i put my steam client in give me all the things mode and everything that i purchased outside of you know it's tested and supported worked until i decided i'm going to purchase doom nothing black screen i'm not gonna that's all i'm not gonna do that i'm do that. I'm not going to hold back. I'm just going to buy it and have
Starting point is 01:07:47 the confidence that someone out there will fix this for me. That is the Linux way, my friend. Yeah, totally. I'll just rant on Twitter if it doesn't work. That's the way.

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