Tech Over Tea - Bringing Accent Color Support To Linux | Lea/lleyton

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

Today we have Lea otherwise known as lleyton on the show, one the main people involved in starting up the the XDG Accent Color portal merge request, this I had hoped would be an easy thing to bring in, it turns out that trying to collaborate with all of the different desktops is a nightmare. ==========Guest Links========== Lleyton Github: https://github.com/lleyton Lleyton Twitter: https://twitter.com/lleyton__ Fyra Labs Website: https://fyralabs.com/ Fyra Labs Github: https://github.com/FyraLabs Fyra Labs Twitter: https://twitter.com/teamfyralabs Accent Color Merge: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/815 ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome to episode, I want to guess, 186 of Tech of a T. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robinson. Now, recently we had the whole GNOME accent color portal thing happen. And today, we have one of the people involved in getting that pushed through. Welcome to the show, Leah. How's it going? Hey, it's going good. You know, I'm Leah. Although online, especially on GitHub, I go by the name Leighton, and I'm doing good today. Any questions?

So I guess just before we get started with any of the main stuff, we can just start with a brief introduction of who you are and sort of what you do. Yeah, so, I mean, mainly I'm now sort of the head of Fira Labs, which is a company that I run. And it's a sort of hybrid of a consulting firm as well as just like, I guess consulting firm would be the best way to put open source consultancy and just sort of other things that happen. Who made this homepage? Because I noticed that when I reload it, is it procedurally generated? Yeah, it is procedurally generated. It's a flow field.

I actually made that. No, it looks really cool. Yeah. Reload. Yeah. I mean, yeah. No, it looks really cool. Yeah. I mean, yeah. No, go on. Yeah, no, I was saying, I will say that, like, I try to go a bit more overkill on the new

homepage, because a while ago, I think it was like, when Fear initially started, I remember, like, I was just like, it was like 8pm, I was just you you know in a call with like the other founders and we were just like we need a website now i was just like okay i'll do it and i just banged together website overnight and it wasn't good it worked though it wasn't this one okay i was gonna say um the current one that you're looking at yeah that's the new one

i i hope i it's the one with all the swirly patterns yeah yeah that's really yeah so what was the original website then was it just like a basic html page from css like oh god it was it could be was it on the same domain? Yes, it was definitely on the same domain. Okay, I'll have a look. Yeah. Let's see. Do you know roughly when?

When the oldest snapshot? Well, there's a snapshot from 2013. Okay, yeah, that doesn't make sense. Unless, did, maybe someone else owned the domain at some point? And then let it go? I mean, I'm, yeah, that'd be surprising to me. Probably 2021.

Oh, here we go, 2022. We found. Or 2022, yeah, sorry. So you have, I expected worse. Yeah, no, I... yeah sorry yeah so you have um i expected worse yeah no i it's not as good but it's not as bad as you made it sound like yeah i actually can you send me the archive link i haven't seen this in a while oh yeah um archive.org can be a little bit slow sometimes oh shit oh sorry

no you can swear it's fine just don't say anything you don't want a recording of it's all good of course of course um my god this is so old okay I really wonder what is that

2013 one though yeah I don't know I didn't check it um let's have a look let's see wait can i show it on the video or was it should it not be shown in the video okay the archive is taking a while to load i'm gonna not show it on just in case yeah i'm a bit worried the only way there could be an archive from back then is if someone else owned the domain but like that's a really specific name for someone else to have used before i mean i'm not surprised because i think um i think it was twitter that we tried to get the um handle for, like Fear Labs. But that was taken by, I don't even know, it was some Brazilian thing.

Oh, okay, okay. Right, I don't know Brazilian. There's a possibility. Yeah, I honestly don't know. Like, funnily enough, one of the people on the team or the person in charge of design at Fira is actually from Brazil. Maybe I should ask them, probably.

It's a little worst idea. But I can see why you didn't like it. It's not a terrible site, but I can see why this is... It's a site. Yeah, yeah. I don't understand why you have the, um, gradient on the, the, the Fear Labs part, because it

just stands out against everything else. Like, I get it, because it's like a, it's a mix of, like, the pink and the blue being used, but it- Yeah. It's the only thing on the entire page that's a gradient. Hmm. Yeah, no. but it yeah it's the only thing on the entire page it's a gradient yeah no it might design sensibilities especially like back then and especially if you take it like you know 8 p.m at night yeah probably going to midnight you know not the greatest i'll be honest no that's fair do you have any sort of, like, design experience before this page, or was this, like, you just, it looks like you've at least know some fundamentals of design, like, presumably you've done something before this. Yeah, so my development background, right,

my development background is mostly, like, sort of a weird mix of, like, systems engineering and back-end development, right, so front-end is not really my thing right but before but i did get quite a bit experience with that because i you know before that i did a lot of them and i still do to stay under you know fear instead but i did a lot of uh sort of like contracting work for other people so just like you know helping them like redo some of their you know their websites type of thing and then another thing i did which was pretty interesting is before fira um i worked on a essentially i guess you could call it like a a foss discord clone right okay um and there was yeah it was uh i don't even know if it's still around a disco as in like a whole separate service or a disco clone as in like a discord client no no no like we we um did the entire like like we it was an entirely separate service okay okay and sort of

yeah the idea was essentially because um i had like a few friends and we were all like you know wouldn't it be cool if you know we just did this and we were because we were also like i think there was some stuff going on discord back at that time i don't remember they make a lot of stupid decisions yeah usually yeah markdown links thing recently i you know um my uh so about that actually okay so that thing was like i saw like the whole twitter thing about that you know there's sort of a fuss on twitter sure right um the thing is markdown links were here for like much longer like i think they were here for yeah i want to say a month for two months

yeah it did explode on twitter just out of nowhere but yeah definitely had been in like yeah i was very good and like back i and it was like a thing like maybe even before that although i'm sort of like like i probably knew know a bit more i probably have um sort of more early understanding of that because i well one i used to do like some discord client modding stuff like a couple of months ago. And then also my girlfriend is still actively involved in that Discord client modding space. So whenever any new Discord feature hits Canary, and it becomes an experiment, and it's interesting,

she'll just tell all of us, like, oh, by the way, yeah, this is going to be a thing. So we sort of anticipated it by just, I think, in the Fira Discord server, we just added a regex where if you would ever use a markdown link, you just block the message because, you know.

That's not a bad idea. It's a bit problematic. Yeah. Well, the people that are like in my discord like some of them are terrible people but none of them are like none of them i mean it's just squirt sure none of them are trying to be like malicious with links i have had people uh i've had raids before where people are doing things they do with discord raids you know posting things that shouldn't be pictures

in the first place. So I would imagine in a situation like that, you could definitely do a bit of damage. Or like a raid, you shouldn't be clicking on links in a raid anyway, but maybe someone who just throws a bot into a server, does things like that. I don't know why it popped off when it did.

My assumption is maybe there was like a maybe someone posted on reddit or someone it was a youtube video i actually don't know why it suddenly became like the the popular thing to talk about so i think i i here's my understanding right so there were two tweets about it actually and the first tweet became came before like i guess the more popular tweet and that first tweet tweet was from some dude in the crypto Twitter scene. I assume you can understand what I'm talking about there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I assume, like, and my only guess there is that some scammer, you know, crypto scammer, probably just like, hmm, this could be very neat.

Right. And that sort of blew up there. And then the second tweet was just essentially like the same thing, but really in that crypto twitter sphere right that would make sense because i know there were certainly there was certainly a bit of discussion when it first came out but everyone kind of just forgot really quickly which is what tends to happen with pretty much everything on the internet no matter what like no matter how serious it is people just forget like in a day there's like oh what's the new what's the new exciting thing to talk about oh someone posted a new video oh new video time it's like can we like pay attention to something for more than

maybe five minutes maybe i mean it's a very good time to do controversial things if you're a company. I'll say that. Well, all you need to do... There's... My favorite quote about game company controversies is every video game boycott is one cinematic away from being over. If the company just posts one good cinematic, it doesn't matter what they've done

people forget straight away oh my god that not that's incredibly accurate it shouldn't be accurate but it is that's the problem it it it really is i mean and like i feel like every especially like with video games specifically right like i feel like every, especially, like, with video games, typically, right? Like, I feel like every year, or every time, like, some sort of game, like, you know, new release flopped, everybody's like, stop pre-ordering the games, right? Because, you know, people will pre-order, they'll get disappointed, right? And every year, people are, like, saying, you know, stop pre-ordering, and people are like, I'm not going to pre-order anymore. But every year, people keep doing it. Yep. They keep screwing themselves.

are like i'm not going to pre-order anymore but every year people keep doing it yep they keep screwing themselves i i've been like there's nothing different about the argument because back back when total biscuit was alive he was making the exact same arguments that are still being made today and nobody is listening i think the difference today though is now we have an entire generation of uh gamers who have grown up around this being a normal system. They've grown up around microtransactions and it's just normal for these things to be in games. So now the fight's just lost. There's nothing you can do at this point.

Yeah. I mean, it's... As much as it makes... I mean, I'm not old at all, but, you know, as much as it will make me sound like a boomer, I miss the old times sometimes. I miss really old times a lot. You can always go back and emulate some PS2 games, it'll be fine. True, true. I mean, I don't really care. Besides, I don't really play much games anymore, to be honest. No. Besides, like, yeah, I mean, I'm a lot more busy as of now because, you know, everything that's been going on recently.

Yeah. But when I do, you know, play games, I'll usually play, like, I'll just play, like, honestly, I had an addiction to, like, Minecraft Hypixel Skyblock for a while. That was not very healthy for me. I don't even know how I got into that. And then I have a weird thing as well where

I will just like, it doesn't make sense at all and I will just launch Cyberpunk. And I will just drive around it's strangely therapeutic i don't know why um and actually i do know why um the game is just like take away like the initial like launch bugs and all of that crap right the game itself like especially if you look at the aesthetics and like the scenery and everything it's so beautiful especially if you have like you know a decent graphics card and they're just like i could

literally like just go just drive around and just you know that's one of the things that really that's the only thing in the game that wasn't broken when it came out it had a really nice art style and like a consistent it knew what it was trying to do like if you see a screenshot from cyberpunk like you know it's a screenshot from cyberpunk yeah i think that's the problem with a lot of um a lot of like triple a games that are coming out where it's just they all kind of look the same. A lot of games are aiming for realism. And when you aim for realism, you realize the real world's kind of boring.

Yeah, it is. Like, you know, this is why the indie game scene has a lot more... A lot of people are sort of trying out indie games now. There's a lot of people realizing, like, there are some great games out there. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. Now there's a lot of people realizing like there are some great games out there. Yeah. I mean,

I totally agree. Like, and I think we're going to get to a point, I mean, obviously like realism, when you try to aim for realism and it all converges because realism is realism. Right. But I think we're going to hit a certain point where as in,

especially like even the AAA is going to realize, you know, there's not much use to going further. Because, like, have you seen, like, there was a couple of months ago, there was, um, there was, like, this popular Twitter video. I can't find it right now, but there's a popular Twitter video of, like, there's a new, like, game that was coming out. And it had, like, you know, it was made in, I think it was, like, Unreal 5. And, like, the graphics were, like, nothing you could ever see. Like, it was made in i think was like unreal 5 and like the graphics were like nothing you could ever see like it was is it the body cam game yes that one okay yes and it's cool don't get me wrong it's cool but i i don't know maybe i'm just a bit boomery on this right but

it just feels sort of gimmicky to me as well yeah it's a bit much i get like it's a cool concept um like it's a really cool concept and there were people that were sort of thinking it was um like actual real footage but i i want there to be a separation between video games and real life like i people usually play video games as sort of an escape they see body cam footage every day on the internet they don't like i'm sure someone wants to play this but i per it's not my thing it's definitely not my thing yeah i yeah 100% agree with that and I mean no I mean yeah I don't really have much else to say about that no that's fair

but yeah I did forget another game I've been you know besides this other trade I talked about that I do play and more recent as well holocaure so that's been pretty, honestly I'm just sort of, like,

not surprised, but I'm just sort of impressed that it came from, like, you know, this indie dev, like, working for essentially, like, no profit at all. Right? Because, you know, it's a whole life-time game. Right? And it's just the game itself is just really impressive. Although I've had some issues

running it on Linux, but... Did you? It's been running perfectly fine for me. So... Okay. Okay. I... Maybe my config...

My configuration, like, my setup, because I do a lot of wacky shit, I guess you could say in non-eloquent terms, on my system, so it's not very... It's not the greatest setup, but what would happen is like after 10 minutes of playing the game right i would just like start getting stutters and the game would just like periodically slow down right and because the game doesn't have um delta timing correctly implemented what i mean by delta timing is essentially like if the frame speed you know slows down the game will still progress at the same rate right the actual game like the you know, slows down, the game will still progress at the same rate, right? The actual game, like, you know, the movement of your characters and everything slows down as well as your frame rate drops, which just makes it unplayable after a while.

What do you, what is your system? Like, what are you actually running? Oh, God. Okay, are you ready? It can't be that bad, surely. Like, what are you actually running? Oh, God. Okay, are you ready? Oh, no. It can't be that bad, surely. Like, what am I preparing for? Okay, so I am running a 2018 Mac Mini.

Okay. This is a good start. Okay. Okay, okay. With an eG okay. Okay, okay. With an eGPU. Okay. Some Radeon Pro W's 6600 graphics card.

Okay. And you probably don't... It doesn't sound that cursed so far, right? And you're right, it isn't that cursed, right? But what I will say, T2 Linux, right, because this version of the Mac Mini does have a T2 chip, right? I don't know if you're aware of what that is. I'm aware, but

Phil, if you just explain for anyone who might not be. Okay, so the T2 chip um you can think of it as sort of like apple's a weird security chip or like you know a version of the secure enclave that you will find on like an iphone or max and what it does is it handles like various functions including um i think it has some part to do in secure boot and then it also has some other crap to do with um what was it it's disencryption so disencryption is also handled for the chip now that doesn't sound too bad right but you know what else is also handled through the t2 chip as far as i know

it could be totally wrong this is like what i remember from last time i was trying to get this to work a while ago audio what wait yeah so if you want to use the if you want to use the headphone jack right on you know like i have external speakers and i want to plug that into my mac mini right right i could be totally wrong maybe i'm misremembering audio is handled for the t2 chip what which yeah i'm definitely finding yeah no i'm finding people complaining about issues being caused by uh like audio professionals playing about the t2 chip what yeah no it's it's horrible so i tried like when i was trying to so there's drivers right, right? There's, like, an audio driver, which I think uses the T2 chip, you know, for the head jack, for head-put audio. But this is really, but the driver, like, I, honestly, like, I feel bad whoever wrote that driver, right? But it just, like, when I load it and when I use that output, like, audio just chops up all the time.

The entire system somehow manages to slow down significantly. Maybe that's just my curse, other curse things I'm running here. You know what I did instead? Instead, I just have DisplayPort connected to USB-C on here, and then I'm just routing audio from my monitor and then using the headphone jack on my monitor, because you can pass audio through your display port, and passing that to my external speakers. Which is cursed, but it works. Right?

The other thing I have to do, because this setup is cursed, right? Right, so I have an ultrawide monitor, okay enough because i did um a friend of mine right like i don't know how their desk was not very great and the monitor was really heavy and apparently it was causing their desk to break and i was like you know i'll buy it off of you

okay so i got it for a really good deal right and what happened is I was just so excited, I plugged it in to my desktop. And this Ultrawide 1 monitor is supposed to have, it's also supposed to be able to run at 120 hertz. And I plugged it in, and I was like, full resolution. I was like, hey, why is this locked at only 60 hertz? Right? So it turns out the DisplayPort controller on the Mac mini. Pretty old, right? Fair enough. Yeah, it's 2018 model. So I yeah, so I just so what I'm doing instead is I have an eGPU, which is connected to the Mac, right? And then I'm just making this way to EGP. But

in order to get that EGP to work, right? I had to install some like, custom EFI, like, or not EFI, like some custom bootloader, that would chain load my actual bootloader, because apparently there's some restriction. Like on like, there's some you spoof some you have to spoof the eGPU when you're on Linux for some reason or there was some weird thing I don't know Apple is weird okay yeah sounds like it so

and then you know you also have to run like a custom kernel if you're running T2 Linux regardless but it's not good it works though I'm surprised it works I am as well if you're running T2 Linux, regardless. But it's not good. It works, though. I'm surprised it works. I am as well. I...

It's certainly a setup. Honestly, I should... Look, at the end of the day, if it functions, I guess that's something. Functions is the way to put it. Yeah. So that's, you know, that's an entire thing. Honestly, I should probably just build, like, a proper PC next time, right?

Really? Like, this setup, this setup! This setup works for now i presume i presume the only reason you have it is because you've had the mac mini for a while like you didn't go out of your way yes yeah i was gonna say yeah no no i i would not i'm not um you know i'm not a masochist right yeah i'm not gonna well you know it isn't my sort of pleasure to be like, hmm, I can do a torch for myself today. I'm gonna go to Apple.com, order a 2018

specifically Mac Mini. Oh, yeah, and also an Ultra Wide and eGPU and just get all of this to work. But, um... And all of that to play Holocure yeah

and it doesn't even work well I will say I will say the t2 support in comparison like because I also okay this is gonna get cursed again I also have well not really that curse but it's a bit curse I have a

2020 MacBook Pro, right? Because, you know, Apple Silicon. And I, personally, I need to say Apple Silicon. Wait, hold up. Is that when they started doing Apple Silicon? Has that been that long already? 2020? I think so, yeah. What? I didn't realize, I've lost track

of time over the past couple of years. Jeez. Yeah, 2020, wow. Yeah. So I have a 2020 MacBook Pro. didn't realize i i've lost track of time over the past couple of years geez yeah 2020 wow yeah so i have a 2020 macbook pro with like an m1 chip and i will i will say first of all the m1 i don't like amazing right like i i don't think i've ever had a laptop that's that you know i've been able to do so much shit on like development work on and that's also lasted like for so long battery wise absolutely amazing so you know i'm running us you know of course that's me you know i'm running asahi linux right um it works really well actually which i mean and they certainly don't have the head start that i guess g2 has but at the same time there's sort of a higher incentive to work on that because you know unlike the mac mini the

you know the apple silicon computers actually have something that's unique about them well they're still being supported by Apple as well, which is the other thing. Yeah, true. Which is gonna probably stop, like, the first generation is probably gonna stop fairly soon, I would assume.

Hmm. I honestly have no idea what the support cycle is. Yeah, I haven't used a Mac since Snow Leopard Mountain Lion one of those so it's been a while for me

so I'm not really sure what model they're using right now but it will definitely be getting to that stage and when that happens then those devices you know, they just become e-waste, or you put Asahi Linux on them. True. Let me see.

Okay, I'm currently trying to find it. End of life. Okay. Okay. I, come on. Okay, let's see. Mac rumors. This could totally not go wrong. I... Come on. Okay, let's see. Mac Rumors. This could totally not go wrong.

Wait, does Apple not have an EOL list on their website? No, what am I saying? Of course they don't. I can't find it. Why would they? It's Apple. Yeah, it's Apple. What did you expect?

Show up. Okay, this is not what I want. Oh, wait. More information is available on the apple site let's see how that did you seriously just redirect me to the developer docs oh my uh macbook m1 earwell list there's an ear list for the uh the iphone like they have a list on their website of iphones compatible with ios 16 so surely they have the same list for their their computers you would you would hope at least wait did they did they never pull up did they never release like anything about this i can't find

anything wait because i'm on mac rumors right now you know obviously it's mac rumors so you never know but um people are just like people are just essentially just tossing random numbers here so like somebody's saying like 10 years seven years five years what is the current version of mac os oh god i'm gonna i'll just go to w What is this? Yeah, I do not know. Ventura, apparently. Oh, okay. Apple computers that support macOS Ventura. Okay.

Oh, here we go. We found something. so oh god why is every one of their computers named the exact same thing oh oh yeah oh you love this so much macbook pro 16 inch macbook pro 14 inch macbook pro 13 inch 2022 macbookinch, 2021. Use a different name! Oh, my God. I don't even... Oh, here we go. Okay.

So, M1 is still supported on the current version, but they don't say when it's not going to be supported. Very useful. Okay. Great. So, I just don't know i great you know this is why i love apple yeah it's great truly what what reason is there that you have these apple devices okay so for my mac mini right right um that was actually uh like a hand-me-down from my dad right that makes sense and then the macbook pro it's because it's apple silicon and it was worth

it for me okay fair enough that's totally fair yeah um yeah so okay um completely unrelated but i was trying to find the end of life on end of life.site right and i just you know i saw hmm i saw sent to us there i was just like this is interesting i'll see end of life.date end of life.date i've never heard of this site what wait end of life it's just it's end of life for everything huh so um it's how have i never heard of this okay well now you have yeah now i have apparently god i just find it incredibly like look at the centos one wait centos centos not stream yeah yeah uh ends in nine months and yeah i you see what i'm talking about yeah the situation was such a mess it was um i god i like from a technical perspective, you know, my personal perspective, like, I get the technical reason for doing it.

Like, I think the old CentOS model was actually, like, kind of shit, to be honest. Like, you would have, like, there would be sort of this lag between, you know, CentOS getting shit in RHEL, and it was not very great, you know, breakage crap. getting shit in rel and it was not very great you know breakage crap but like and i really like this new model where you have like you know stream in between fedora and rel because then you know it allows you know it allows me to get sort of like if i ever you know i'm don't do anything that necessarily requires stream but if i ever actually we might in the future i'll explain that later um but if we do you know having stream there just to be able to test crap before the new rel minor release comes up very nice and also just that's great but it was such a clusterfuck um the entire thing i think i think like all they

needed to do was keep sent to us until the next version RHEL and that like be like hey We are cutting the CentOS project you have until the next version of RHEL to migrate come join RHEL If you don't want to find something else but like doing it in the middle of a release like that's where it gets really weird Hmm. Yeah, no that that I mean I have kind of That was horrible. Um, and I mean on I mean, kind of... That was horrible. And I mean, especially in recent, you know, Red Hats also have, you know, other communication fuck-ups,

I guess you could say, right? Just generally bad decisions, and at this point, like, you know, it's just... I... I don't really know what else... I don't really know what to say it's just i i've just sort of disappointed but it is what it is it is what it is and it is what it is it's not a great time to be in the enterprise linux ecosystem well isn't it it's a great time if you like looking at it from the outside and you want to see an absolute train wreck oh god yeah this uh this shouldn't need to be said but i'll say it

again everyone i know at red hat is a lovely person like all of the engineers that i've met all great people they are not the people who are making the like executive decisions the engineers that are you know in repost you see every day they're just trying to make things better if you want to blame anyone for the problems that rel has focus on like focus on the company itself not on the people doing important work yeah i 100 agree i've had a lot of like i mean i've had nice not many but i've had nice conversations with people from red hat and they've generally been like very great i know like a lot of our there's people on the you know fira team that have you know i know like a lot more people from red hat and they can all test through that. The developers, everyone there,

great people. I do agree. Don't go after the individuals here. Or at least the individual developers. The technical people. The non-managers. Yeah. They're just doing what they do.

I know people, I've spoken to people from Red Hat who just openly just disagree with the direction they're going. But, you know, it's like, yeah, like, just, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, of course. Like, I just wish that, I obviously don't know how they run internally. Right. Sure. But I just,

I really wish they, like, had more people and actively involved in development in some sort of, like, management role

or at least an advisory role. Just so they know. At least they could structure the communication where it isn't, you know, complete dog shit. Like,

in the case of, you know, sent to us the buckle. Right. And I, I, complete dog shit, like in the case of CentOS debacle. I'll be honest, I used to really love the whole Enterprise Linux thing. We do still run, we run Alma for our production servers. Except for our new servers, which I know this is going to sound a bit scary,

but they run a they run SUSE microOS. Yeah, I think that's what it is. OpenSUSE microOS. I don't think I recognize the system. I want to say. It's just OpenSUSE's immutable thing.

Oh, okay. So we run that in production because we have a three-node Kubernetes cluster running in Europe. For all of our services and internal services and such. And I will say, I've had some, I've run into, you know, micro-OS sometimes, so just you know, weird annoyances. But in general, I've been really liking it. So,

if you ever need to run a Kubernetes cluster, there you go. Yeah, something that definitely comes up in my daily life, for sure. Yeah, of course. I mean, you know. Honestly, I don. I mean, you know. Honestly, I don't even know what Kubernetes is. Like, I've been out of the dev space long enough at this point. Okay.

Yeah, explain to me Kubernetes. Because I hear the term often. Yeah. I used to be a Kubernetes, like, hater, I guess you could say. Like, I used to be Kubernetes' number one hater. Anytime Kubernetes was mentioned, I would you could say. I used to be Kubernetes' number one hater. Anytime Kubernetes would mention, I would just start going off, right? But I somehow got, became,

I somehow flipped recently. But to put it shortly, what Kubernetes is, is trying to think of analogy, or not analogy, just an explanation that's not too technical. Okay, you're a company, or you're an organization, and you explanation. Not too technical. Okay. You're a company or you're an organization. You have a workload, right?

You have some nodes, right? You don't care how your applications get run on those. But with this group of nodes, like this group of servers, you just want your applications to get to run on them reliably, right? So what Kubernetes is, it's a platform, and you install Kubernetes on all your nodes, you join them together, and it gives you this sort of standardized interface for running containers on them. It's like, you know, Docker containers, essentially. And the idea is, like, Kubernetes provides, like, you know, a lot of, you know, different

features besides, features besides abstracting the host operating system. So for example, if a node drops on the cluster, when I mean drops, it just fails. Like the server dies. Kubernetes will be like, hmm, something's wrong, and it will reschedule your workload onto another machine. And then Kubernetes also actively tries to fill out vacancies. It tries to make the most out of the compute you have.

So in a way, I sort of compare it to, it's like an operating system for, this is going to sound very stupid, but sort of like an operating system for cloud workloads. It gives you the standardized way to essentially... No, I can see that. I can definitely see that. Yeah, so it gives you the standardized way to essentially deploy applications against this cluster, which is basically just a bunch of servers that can come and leave at any time they want. I will say, if you are interested, let me find the Kubernetes. There's a really good

Kubernetes comic. Like the Google Cloud people. It's made a comic. I'm trying to find it. Here it is. Take a look. I don't know. But it's

essentially just a very good explanation of what Kubernetes does. This is really well drawn. What the hell? I, I need a- Wait, I wasn't expecting it to be this well drawn. I don't know. I mean, Google Cloud doesn't seem to be cheaping out here. Yeah, I can see that. To be fair- I'm not going to read it all here, but I could, yeah, I can see lots of Kubernetes

symbols and explanations. I might check it out afterwards. Um, yeah, yeah, of course. But, um, for me, the sort of like, the thing that clicked in my mind for Kubernetes is just sort of when I realized, like, oh, yeah, why don't you just get a large server and just deploy Docker Compose, use Docker Compose to deploy a bunch of crap there. And initially, the reason why we played with Kubernetes is because we had reliability issues. Because everything was on essentially one node. And that wasn't the greatest or high availability. So we were like, let's try this new setup. And after playing with it, it's just good. It's difficult to set up.

And also the hardest part of Kubernetes is it's difficult to install. And there's a steep learning curve. But once you understand how it works, a lot of it makes sense. Yeah. So I'm pretty happy with it so far. Maybe that'll change in the future. Yeah.

Maybe there'll be something, from everything I can see about the dev space, it seems to move relatively quickly. So there's always going to be some, like, new exciting tech that everybody is talking about. I don't know what's in that, like, that focus right now, but it just seems like, at least from the outside, there's always something new that people are, like, experimenting with. Even if it doesn't become, like, a mainstream tool that everybody uses, there's always someone out there that has a new idea about how things can be run yeah and i think that's like one of the really amazing things about tech it's just like how much happens here but i think as a developer especially if you know just you know just getting started out in the space it's so easy to get sucked in the vortex of just like i need to

learn the next new thing especially you're in the javascript ecosystem no that was that was the space i got most into and then i i realized very quickly that there are a lot of websites out there that are still just built with jquery i mean there are a bunch of websites that are just built with php yeah yes right like i know like giant i i can solve with giant companies right pulling in like millions in revenue that are just their websites are just like some wordpress site running on like a like a random server you know in like a closet yeah so it's like you know you don't need to know like all of this new tech all the time to be you know i guess if your job is if your goal is to get higher you don't need to know all of this new tech right and i think in general like trying to chase after the new thing like i

think it's good to play with new tech but don't make it don't feel like it's a necessity right um like if you have something that works and that's something that's relatively in demand don't feel like you you know you need to like learn or switch to the next new thing now if you're a kobold maybe you should learn something oh no because no okay well yeah well actually the thing with kobold is the group that know kobold still and know fortran is so small that assuming you don't take a job to basically delete your job uh you'll always have a position i know um i know some people that know kobold who've had positions where it's like hey can you convert our cobol program into like c sharp never accept those jobs because you are deleting the limited amount of cobol work that still exists

i mean job security hell yeah yeah so no i mean there's some interesting stuff even happening in like the cobol space and i know that's gonna sound insane but, but I think Cloudflare, right? This could have just been like, obviously, I think this is more Cloudflare meaning, right? But they released some sort of template or library that allows you to run COBOL on their Cloudflare workers, which is like their serverless, in quotes, hosting platform. Right. So there's some like it you know

a movement a little movement but no um kobol report yeah to conference on data systems languages including initial specifications for a common business oriented language kobol for programming electronic digital computers department of defense april 1960 yeah oh cobalt's one of the ogs yeah it is um i mean i don't see i don't see like banks or you know companies that are running cobalt like moving or wanting to move anytime soon no if it works it works yeah it works i mean like if you're not in the tech space right if you're not exclusively a tech company right i guess your priorities when it comes to what technologies you use internally are just a lot different yeah which is what Well, there was the whole thing with Japan a few years back

where a lot of their businesses still rely on floppy disks, still rely on... Well, they still heavily use fax machines. Like, if you have a system in place that functions, if you're not aiming to be like a pioneer in the tech space, like you're just going to keep doing the thing that always works. I have friends who work in call centers who still use DOS applications for their like call center work, like for doing all of the data entry.

I mean, yeah, no, if your company, that works, that works. I'm not going to, I'm not going to bash you on that. Right. I mean, yeah. I mean not going to bash you on that. I mean, if you ever need to modernize your legacy craft, we're always here. We always have services for that. But if it works

for you, no shame on that. Fairlabs.com Fairlabs.com Services at Fairlabs.com Emaillabs.com yeah services at fearlabs.com email us we can make it work i was gonna say don't say the email unless you want to get a lot of spam because there will be there will be uh i already get yeah i was gonna say dude i already get too much spam do you have okay no it is just directly on the website okay yeah that's why yeah there's no like because of youtube's um auto auto subtitling there's bots that will then scrape those and

use that information for other things um but you've already just got it on the website anyway so it's already in every single spam database. Yeah, it's honestly... I've sort of gotten used to just tuning out spam. If you have a good spam filter as well, that helps a lot. There used to be a thing where...

Or not used to be a thing, but I will say, if you're ever bored for some reason, and you ever just want to be thing but like i will say if you're ever in if you're ever bored for some reason right and you ever just want to be intrigued just open like you know if you're on g open gmail open the spam folder just read it yep yep a lot of funny things there trust me i get a lot of weird crap lots of weird crap i like doing the same thing with my held for review YouTube comments so YouTube will automatically hide comments that are like insulting or like spam so with the insulting ones

they put in like a separate like these are offensive comments those are always fun to read because it's always it's always people who are very clearly a little bit unhinged to a lot of bit unhinged. Yeah.

I mean, to be fair, that's sort of, like, any internet comment section. Yeah, yeah. Right? Like, I... Even, like, on your videos, like, you know, sometimes I'll just, like... I'll scroll down and I'm like, you know, maybe I won't read in this entire thing. Maybe I won't read further on now. Yeah.

Um, there's a lot of unhinged people everywhere. Uh, especially... Maybe it won't read further on now. There's a lot of unhinged people everywhere. Especially, I mean, another thing, Twitter or X. I don't fucking know what to call it. Twitter or X. I know that you haven't updated the branding on the Fear of Labs website, but you're not alone here. When X put out the new brand kit, tons of massive companies just ignored it and just didn't update their branding like honestly when twitter changed their branding or

i don't fucking know x twitter right x slash um x plus twitter right when they changed their branding um i just like i didn't think like the thought of just changing the stuff on our site yeah right or in any of like our stuff just never occurred to me it was just like oh oh oh okay yeah everyone knows what it is and they're always gonna have the twitter domain yeah like they can't let go of the twitter domain because it's just too valuable if someone takes takes it, it's always going to have to be a redirect to X. I mean, right now,

isn't the primary Twitter application just running, or X application running on Twitter? It is, but my assumption is the plan, they eventually want to migrate it over X. That's the way I understand it. Yeah. But. I mean, they can try. I mean if they do good for them but like um what i'm gonna say at least for that is um i feel like there's gonna be

a i feel like you're gonna run an issue where there's probably gonna be you know twitter's code base massive it's like split into a bunch of different projects right i feel like you're just going to run into like a bunch of hard-coded domains right just have weird like issues if they ever try to switch over probably you know i mean that's why i said they can try they can try i if they need some consulting for your lab.com exactly hey elon hit us up no but um oh god

that reminded me of the whole like when they open source the algorithm right oh yeah I did see that that was insane like um you of all you know obviously it's on you know github so everybody's like opening like dummy issues and prs and crap right but like there were some interesting stuff there so like i think they had like a weird like they had like a specific like line of code like that was checking for like elon yeah there was like

another one for like democrat and republican there was like another one for like democrat and republican it was just insane yeah i don't know how much of it was real that's the thing i think i don't think it was actually influencing outcomes um as far as i know it was just monitoring in order to check like oh which party you know it is one of the parties like you know that's why they had the democrat or Republican, like, getting more, I guess you could say, algorithm engagement than the other. Hmm. Well, no, like, because of, like, Elon talked about wanting to release it for so long that

I don't know if it's, like, specifically crafted in a way, but, like, if you were going to craft it, why would you put inflating Elon's tweets in there? Like, that... Yeah, no, i don't yeah it doesn't make sense i don't think they were ever trying to inflate like this was like person or party or whatever right but at least obviously you have to look at the at least in elon's case i wouldn't be surprised if he specifically wanted that added in there yes i mean just yelling their first or i'm not even gonna try try to do an Elon accent or something.

Or an impression I mean. Like your first order. Make me on the top of every timeline. Just pin me actually. Right. So I. I mean I could see. On one hand I could see it.

On the other. Yeah. I don't know. Did you see the tweet. Of like the leaked email where you talked about the the panels for the cyber truck they need to be within like like a couple of like a degree of accuracy or like a couple of atoms of accuracy or something ridiculous like that i don't remember the exact um the exact email oh my god i i saw it it was like like i want to say four microns yeah four microns yeah something like that yeah accuracy is like what sub 10 micron accuracy yeah

yeah yeah that's what it is oh i was just when i saw that i don't even know what i just due to the nature of some truck which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb all parts of this vehicle whether internal or from suppliers need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy I don't think even

I don't think even Lockheed Martin uses sub 10 micron accuracy if Lego and soda cans can which are very low cost we can do this and use it as something like products. If Lego and soda cans can, which are very low cost, we can use. Oh my god. Also, Lego are not being driven down the road and hitting potholes.

Oh god. It's... Man, Elon is quite something. If you just stop taking him seriously and treat everything that's happening on twitter as sort of like a reality show it's all it's a lot more fun it like just don't worry about it there's nothing you can do to stop it it's just just enjoy it

true honest no you have a good point there um honestly like i sort of had like a similar take when um twitter got acquired and i was just like okay if elon runs twitter into the ground that's a net benefit for humanity if elon makes twitter better somehow that's a net benefit for humanity there's no losing here yeah twitter was already a cesspool before elon i think that goes back to what we're saying earlier everybody forgot that like they're talking about twitter's so bad now like no it's always been bad like what do you mean it's bad now it's just bad in like different ways but one thing remains consistent full of crypto scares true um so about yeah so i for some like now like i guess i'm i'm

sort of flagged as a part of crypto twitter because i have a friend that sort of like is in that space right right sort of a large player in that space and like interact with them on twitter a bit right so like at like on some of my posts at least, I'll just like, whenever I post I'll instantly get like a bot, like a crypto bot, just like, you know, a bunch of them like instantly replying. Fucking horrible. And then of course, there's

also like, if you want to purposely fish bots, which I think is probably another pretty funny thing you can do, you know, just start I lost my Metamask or whatever. I lost my Metamask wallet i need an essay right that's always fun to see what happens or i think the new one is like t-shirts like have you seen those bots that will like like if you ever go on like um like one of those twitter meme pages and we'll have like an image there are bots, which is honestly, it's actually quite clever.

That will just take the meme and we'll just, like, put it on a t-shirt and just, like, create a product. I didn't know this. I know. There are articles about this, though. Huh. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, it's pretty smart. But also, like, you know, it's spam.

All the same. It's definitely spam. But it's next generation spam i'll say that like the spammers are evolving in that sense look hey it's something new it's it's something different from the crypto spammers and the only fan spammers so i'll take it i yeah at least each spam in a way is sort of unique there. Hmm. Or, unique in quotes, right? Because, you know, it's based on the image that the person posted.

That's true, yeah. Yeah, so, I- again, next generation spam. Um... Do you know what we should eventually talk about? We should eventually talk about the reason why I brought you here. I... I hope we won't go over time no we're only an hour in okay um so now that we've filtered everybody out and nobody's watching uh let's talk about the accent portal okay so what would you like me i mean there's a lot of different ways i could address

this because i i think you've seen the pr i you you made a video about it of course right so I guess the best way to yeah just I guess the best way to start is just explain what the portal is why you needed a portal in the first place what the problem is trying to solve is

okay so when we were designing Lip Helium at Fira so Lip Helium is essentially the UI platform library that we developed. It's for GTK that we developed for Tile West, right? And we have, you know, lanes doing that design. If you don't know, they're like a prominent, like, they used to make like a lot of indie, like, LiveAwayda apps. And they're actually like a part of the GNOME Foundation, right? So they did like design for GNOME. But now they mostly design for Fiora stuff. So that's cool. But when they were designing that, right, they, you know, had any ideas.

Like, okay, what if we did something like Material You, right, in our design library? So we did, okay Material You in our design library? So we would do this. Okay, let's try this. So what we did is we would allow the user to essentially set up an accent color, and then we have our own implement. It's not exactly Material You, but it's our essentially, we took the code from Material You, we ported it to Vala, and then we did a lot of modification and tweaking to get it to work better, because there's quite a bit of issues in the open source versions of Material U. And we just used the user's accent color there.

And we were like, you know what would be neat? Because we want people to use liphelium apps outside of just Tau, the Tau ecosystem. What if this sort of Material US thing, where the internal name is called Ensor, could work on other desktops, GNOME, KDE, etc.? Is there a standard for this?

Oh, no, there isn't. This should be easy. You're like, okay. Lanes and I got into a call, the entire team got into a call, and we just started banging out, like, the XML. We're like, perfect. And then we have a reference implementation, and then we have a reference implementation

in our fork of the GNOME portal. Perfect. PPR. And then, oh, no! So this was June 18th, 2022, or June 17th? I don't know, time zones are weird. June 18th for me. So, you posted it on that day.

What did you think would happen? Honestly, like, I looked at the other PRs, they did they seem pretty mundane so it's like okay you know maybe there'll be some deliberation right probably some discussion might take a bit because you know designed by committee is usually that way yeah yeah so you know we were just chilling we were just okay let's wait right i don't think expected it to go okay. In reality, though. Yeah, in reality, though. The one-year bike shed. And honestly, I should have known

in advance because it's usually in any type of project, it's usually the minor things that get the most bike shedding. Because, you know, it's minor. So, I... There's a lot I could say about it i'll just say um i don't even know what i guess the best place to start is one of the early concerns that was had here about getting in contact with the uh the various desktops. What was done from your side? So as, okay.

So a member of our team, I want to say, I think it was either Lanes or Jade, contacted, actually did reach out to some desktops. I want to say KDE and some other. I don't know if we reached, I don't think we might, I don't think GNOME saw

when we reached out to them. Right. So that's a thing. But I'm just going to sort of, not really devil's advocate, but I'm just going to sort of say something here. And it could be a bit controversial. I don't think it's our job to go to every desktop and reach out to them individually, right,

before we make any, like, an issue or a PR on the public project. And the reason why I'm saying that is because if you look at any other... I get what they're trying to say, but then you have to consider which desktops are important enough where we should reach out to them. How are we going to keep the message

and all the communication between them in a standardized way where we aren't missing details or omitting details by accident? In an open development model, your conversation, the conversation around development needs to be open as well. And going to a bunch of different desktops and matrix channels and asking them them hey we have this thing repeating the same thing again and again right in these private you know i don't want to say they're private but they're they're not exactly public either because you're sort of acting as the the bridge between these different groups rather than using the existing public location like the existing centralized location exactly so it's a lot more inefficient and it just brings up a lot of questions especially it said like which ones

should we contact and such right and sort of that information asymmetry that can happen so in our opinion right we don't believe that it's an effective model to go in you know contact all of you separately and there's another reason as well right and when especially when it comes to like these non like when it comes to private or communications and such right is that it's in a way it's also designed like reaching on this public space is also designed to protect ourselves because in this like it's easy with these private communications for misrepresentations that happen, right? And having it in the centralized public record allows us to, you know, essentially absolve ourself if we get, you know, if some drama happens. And drama did happen, especially behind the scenes, right?

Right? So, in general, like, I think if you are going to say that this is an open development, you know, if you're going to say that open development is the goal, right? I mean, you let an open development as the goal, then it should be on a place

that's open. Right? I mean, that's just my opinion. I do agree that the actual discussion about the merits of the system for sure should be in the open discussion, without a doubt.

I don't think there's anything wrong with informing the projects that this is something being worked on. That, I think, like, just be like, hey, this is the thing that we're doing, if you want to get involved here's where to get involved I mean and that's what we did okay right but we weren't going to have the discussions in those individual rooms as I as far as like some of the criticism went

right where they're like you should probably have talked to GNOME design about this I'm like no yeah sound more like they wanted you to do it like upstream in their projects before coming i guess it'd be down yeah it'd be downstream they wanted you to go to the downstream projects first before you tried to upstream it yeah i i i don't i really don't think that's like a good idea compatible in an open development model. Besides, you're not going to ping. And that's probably a bit of a controversial take. But that's just how I see it.

And the only desktop, and I really hate to single out people here because I'm not trying to put a target on my back. But the only desktop that really had an issue with this so far is GNOME there were some concerns from the elementary side but they weren't hard concerns, it was like hey

we'd prefer to do named colors because this makes more sense for our model but for the sake of getting somewhere we're willing to like work with the rest of the wand yeah no i should have specified i was talking about when it came to reaching out to them individually those were like the parties that had the concern that was essentially just gonna yeah okay that's fair yeah so i think i think initially be like hey i get it as like an initial thing but once you're already here like we don't need to have a

discussion about the fact that we didn't exactly we're already talking to you right now that's that's in the past let's talk about the actual thing yeah it doesn't and because that was in the future that was like way too long of a discussion as well. Just focusing on like, why didn't you talk to us? Yeah, it was a bit petty, I guess you could say. And I will say in the future, besides, you know, a simple ping, which is what we did. Right. As far as I know.

We aren't going to have these discussions in private spaces or individualized spaces. And that aspect is probably not going to change if we do make a future contribution to XTG portals. And that's a hard stand we're taking just because of the reasons I mentioned before, as well as the point I made about being able to absolve yourself in cases like hostility has become more important to us as well. So favoring that sort of

public forum is something we prefer. Was this the first bit of work you've gotten involved with, sorry for cutting you off, but was this the first bit of work you've gotten involved with where there cutting you off, but was this the first bit of work you've gotten involved with where there's been like this much discussion and controversy around it?

Yes. It was. Um Yeah, this was really the first thing that popped off his heart, I was gonna say. And it's... I'm

very disappointed. I'm disappointed, right? I'm happy that's over as well, but... Obviously, we will still contribute stuff upstream when we can, right? But this entire situation has sort of turned us off from a lot of this, right? But this entire situation has sort of turned us off from

a lot of this, right? I there was I really don't know how much I can share without like naming single people, right? But there was hostility behind the scenes in private

spaces, right? Oh, so there was hostility behind the scenes in private spaces right oh so there was more than just what we saw in the thread then yeah okay there was things like there was hostility and discussions in private spaces that did not go well right they're sort of like past i don't i guess i could say like sort of i don't want to say past drama, but past relationships, as far as I know, did come into effect between some of our developers and some other parties. It was not a great situation. And I don't want to say that I regretted ever wanting to contribute upstream, because I think it was in the best interest of the community

to have this as an upstream thing but as I said before it just sort of it sort of disenchanted the entire thing for me and I just wish as a community we could I just wish as a community we could at least have a bit more...

I guess you could say, I don't know how to word it, but just work a bit better together. Compromise, maybe? Yeah, compromise, I guess you could say yeah sure so the main point of contention in here was over named colors and arbitrary colors so i guess just for anyone who didn't see the video the basic idea is name colors would be a set list of colors that then, or set list of color names, they'll then be defined The actual color will be defined by the desktop So you would have say red blue green so on and so forth, but the meaning of red blue green would be green, so on and so forth.

But the meaning of red, blue, green would be defined by GNOME. It would be defined by KDE in their upstream portals, sorry, their downstream portals that are being used on their desktop. So, the application would say, I want the accent color red

and then, depending on the desktops being run on, it would use I want the accent color red and then depending on the desktops being run on it would use whatever red is defined by that. Then you have arbitrary colors which is more akin to what the user would expect where I set the color uh let's say 25500 so I set the color red. And then that red is used, assuming the same color space, obviously if you're outside of sRGB, things get weird then, but assuming the same color space,

it is the same color, regardless of where the application is being run. Is that correct? Did I misunderstand anything there? No, you understood correctly. So yeah, essentially the difference is, I'll just reiterate, just to make sure. The difference is, I'll just reiterate just to make sure, the difference is instead of in named colors, right,

the portal will return essentially one of a predefined set of colors, which would be like red, orange, yellow, et cetera, right? Where an arbitrary color, you would just, the portal would essentially just return an arbitrary sRGB color. Yes. That's the main differences explain that a lot more coherently and uh concisely than i did yeah so here's our opinions and i think we've held these opinions from the start on this right i don't think named colors serve the if you're gonna in it sort of an open standard it has to keep going to open right open standard like

this right in an open public center like this you want to cater to i don't want to say you don't necessarily want to cater to all parties right but you want to be generic enough where each platform can make their own restrictive decisions on their own or how they interpret that on their own right so that's our main reason for wanting arbitrary. But also because with name colors, you have the question, what colors should go in there in the first place? And you can think, oh, we'll just put red, yellow, green, but there's probably some other color that's missing that you probably want. And also there's going to be desktops of disagreements like of what color should be in that set and one other thing is you have a desktop that wants to be focused around blue for example so they have a bunch of different versions of blue or they're focused around green

or a bunch of versions of green yeah so i mean that's another thing like um in when it comes to just our own cases, like at Fira and how, right? As I mentioned before, we have the color, you know, we have the engine that generates the color palettes for the app, Lib Helium apps, right? I said it's for, it's like material you like. And what we do is we have an option in addition to predefined colors that you can select from, we have an option where the user can essentially take a wallpaper wallpaper and then blend it into an arbitrary color and then use that as the color that's used to derive the palette.

And that doesn't really work well with named colors. I can, as you can, you know, for obvious reasons, you lose a lot of precision when you go from the entire sRGB space to 6, 10, 16 colors. And you have KDE as well, and KDE just wants people to do whatever the fuck they want in that sense right so again like it makes more sense in that regard you know this is a protocol right user is not going to be like it's like you know the user is not going to be consuming the accent color sent by the portal directly the platform is right and as you know as a standard the platform is free as with any other standard right the platform is. And as a standard, the platform is free, as with any other standard, the platform is free to interpret these values how they wish.

In the case of GNOME, if they want to snap it to a named color, good for them. For us, we want to run it through our fancy color engine, good for us. KDE, just show the color, good for them, right? So the actual color being sent is more of a concern of the platform than of the standard, in our opinion. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. I can understand why a platform like Gnome...

There was a really good explanation about why Gnome wants to use name colors. That makes sense why you want to have these set colors that then you define other colors off of that to increase the level of contrast. That makes sense from an implementation perspective i totally understand that but that shouldn't be limiting what what kde wants to do what budgie wants to do what actually cosmic doesn't really care like cosmic would just work like they don't exist yet anyway so they're just gonna work with whatever exists um yeah i mean like as far as i know right i i think one of i want to say i don't know who has a contact with

somebody from who's working on cosmic right but i think they were interested in supporting like i could be totally wrong so very sorry if i'm misinterpreting or if i just misremembered um as far as i know they do want to have some sort of like arbitrary color jeremy did say that in the thread yeah but um i don't think they had too much an opinion on how the protocol went yeah but yeah please continue i'm I'm sorry. No, no. I don't know where I was going. Okay, so I guess we'll just shift to this. Of the desktops that were involved, so we had Gnome, Budgie,

KD, Cosmic, and Elementary. KD seemed like... so the weird thing with like Linux desktop right is when we talk about KDE and GNOME being the biggest desktops

that's true but it's in the sense that KDE is the second biggest to this monolith that is GNOME GNOME is so much bigger than the KDE project that

whilst they are certainly the two biggest like the amount of weight of what, like the weight of the GNOME project is so much larger and I don't want to say that they throw that around as if like everyone's just going to listen, but in this case

it certainly seems like that's what was happening. Yeah, no, I, god, I I have to be very careful about what I say. No, no, if you don't if there's anything you don't want to say. Look, I have them, I have

staff to protect here. No, totally fair, totally fair. It's already seen so much going on, and I don't want to subject them anymore, so I'm very sorry if I'm going to be very vague here, right? If you want to move on from the topic, we can do that. That's fine with me. Yeah, here's what I'll say, right?

I think an ecosystem, which puts, obviously, Gnome, right? They are the largest desktop, right? That's fair enough, right? I think Gnome, I love their design, actually, right? I think that has you a lot of things right. On the opposite hand, right? I don't think we should put Gnome in a place where they can essentially dictate the entire ecosystem for everybody else. And I don't think an ecosystem that puts GNOME as a first-class citizen and the other desktops as

somewhat below that, right, is something that is ideal for any user of the Linux desktop. It's something that is ideal for any user of the Linux desktop. And I... I'm sorry, I'm trying to think. I don't think I could say much more without... No, that's fair. That's totally fair. Putting my... As I mentioned before, why I can't speak more about no that's that's totally understandable no i get that um well we can talk about some of the other things

that uh fear labs is involved with like you sure um right now on the fear labs website you have the broken version of the tower osOS website, but you have the also actual working version where the link is. There it is. Okay, there's the actual link. So, what is TauOS? Okay.

So, essentially, put it in short, right? It's essentially what, it's essentially what... It's our interpretation, Fiora's interpretation of what a modern Linux desktop ought to do for the average user. What I mean by this is one of the major... For example, I think the Linux desktop has progressed really far, right? And we're getting to a point where you can run Linux on your old laptop or even new desktop and such, and it works pretty decently. But something that this ecosystem doesn't really have that we want to experiment with is, okay, how about cross-device workflows?

So that's actually one of the foundations of this project. So we have a, we're developing, right, a syncing service that will allow applications to essentially plug in to the service, and then essentially just have an end-to-end encrypted sync between all their devices running Tau. Right? Uh-huh. essentially just have an end-to-end encrypted sync between all their devices running Tau. Essentially, for example, let's take a notes application. It'd kind of suck if you could only access your notes on one device. I have a laptop and a desktop. Or there might be workflows where you have multiple devices. Our Sync Daemon provides that. And our sync daemon also does things for applications that are not in

the Tau ecosystem. For example, something that's really nice is that Flatpaks store all their application data in a centralized location. We can sync all those files between devices, which means if you have any application, that's a Flatpak,

that stores local data, that data will be accessible on any other device running Tau that's signed to your same account. And that's essentially one of the core concepts, that Tau isn't something that's constructed to one device. It's rather, it's in addition to the actual operating system itself it's also the workflow that you have between other devices running town because this is something that exists on the apple side nowadays where like you know you can just go between all of your devices

and it's just it's all i just i just got distracted looking at this study page wikipedia page i have open is Catgirl. But in like the Apple ecosystem, like you can go between your devices and because of all of their magical whatever stuff going on in the background, like it's just all It's treated as if you're in an ecosystem, which is not something that like you can do this already on linux it's just a lot of extra steps you need to take and it sounds like what you're trying to do is sort of streamline that process exactly we want to take you know you have like all these separate you know we sort of wanted to create...

Hmm. This is probably an unfair comparison to make, but as sort of Ubuntu arguably revolutionized in a sense, the ease of use for the end user when it comes to setting up a single

workstation. We want to take it a step further and put our own spin of what should a operating system and desktop in 2023 provide for its users? You know? That aren't incredibly technical or technical

at all, really. So that's our goal there. I mean, if there's any other questions, if you want to know anything about the specifics of how it works, I can share as well. Okay, so is TauOS a fully original distro? Is it based on something that already exists?

Where are you going with it? Okay, so we actually, when we started the project, we sort of looked at different bases. Because obviously, we weren't going to build an entire... There's no need to repackage everything in the universe in our own package inventor. So we built, we decided, okay, we had a couple options. I think it came to Arch with OSTree and Fedora with RPM OSTree. We looked at the ecosystem and stuff, and we thought, okay, for our use tree and Fedora with RPM OS tree. We looked at the ecosystem and saw, okay, for use

case, Fedora with RPM OS tree, pretty good decision to go with. And so far, we've been pretty happy with that. To be clear, we wanted something that was immutable. Because this is something that end users, like normal users, are going to be running. Right? Non-technical. So we want something that's, you know, relatively stable and that is hard to break. And OSTree gives us that. Do you find anything in the current state of immutable desktops to be limiting so far? Because there's a lot of people with a lot of opinions on immutability, but I'm curious where you stand on it.

Okay. Sorry. So, limited, right? I will say that it's, as a developer, because I used to actually, like, I mean, as a developer, I used to use Silverblue a lot. It actually works pretty well, but yeah, there are some things, because I do weird stuff,

as I mentioned before, where sort of that immutability sort of can get in the way of my development tasks. And in general, there have been workarounds that have helped with that. So for example, Distrobox, amazing, right? Flatpak sort of prevents the need to install applications as system packages, so that's

another thing that helps a lot. And then whenever, if I really need it, RPMOS tree has this really neat feature which allows you to essentially make the system mutable when you want it to. So what it will do is it will put an overlay on your root file system. And that overlay is writable. When you reboot, that overlay file system just gets dropped. So it allows you to mutate the system without actually mutating the system. That's been really useful in development use cases for us.

What I will say is that if you're doing... I think immutability, I think people have a skewed perspective of what immutability is, because they hear the word immutable, and they think, oh, fuck, right, I'm not gonna be able to figure anything on this crap, right? So I think that's a really, like, bad marketing. Like, I think that's, um, I was gonna say, like, I get, I get what, yeah, yeah, sorry. I was gonna say that- Like, I get- I get what- yeah, yeah. No, please continue. I was gonna say that I don't- I've said before that I don't like the term immutability, much like I don't like the term free software.

It's a needlessly confusing term that has baggage that sort of leads you away from what the intended meaning is supposed to be. Yeah, no. Like, I do get why it's called immutability. Like, immutable, right? Because it makes sense. But we really do need a different name for it that's not, like, immutable. Like, image-based is one that I've heard, which works. Although, to to be honest I don't really know about the good term

either atomic I think that one's decent I yeah no when it comes to naming I'm not exactly a yeah naming is really hard I think I'm not exactly a marketing person either so

I can't really say much there. But, yeah, I just... I think immutability, right, in general, I think it can work for much... I would just say give it a shot, right? Install Silverblue, give it a shot. I think it can work for a lot of people's workflows, unless you're in certain development circumstances,

it's probably not the best. But especially because you can layer packages on Silverblue and such, I think it can work for most people. And I would really implore anybody to just like write up be fun yeah i think that's the case for pretty much everything like just don't take what other people said at face value like all this stuff is free like it it's just gonna cost you a bit of

time try it out see what it's like if you don't like it go back to what you had before exactly hey and at least if you find you know you don't like it, go back to what you had before. Exactly. And at least if you find, you know, you don't like it, at least you learn more about something that's happening and developing in the space. So, on the topic of the West Tree, though, right,

I've seen, like, I think there's been, like, a sort of I don't want to say renaissance, but sort of like a lot of stuff going on in the mutability space, especially recently with, like, I think there's been a sort of, I don't want to say renaissance, but sort of like a lot of stuff going on in the mutability space, especially recently with like vanilla and all that stuff going on. Because immutability has been around for much longer than most people are aware of.

It started off as, I want to say, either Project Atomic or the original CoreOS, right? And like, you know, XCG app and all that crap. But the whole immutability thing has only been getting the limelight recently. And I will say that, like, I guess one of the disappointments for me I guess one of the disappointments for me is that a lot of the new immutable distros are going for an AB root model rather than something OS tree-like. And the reason why that's disappointing to me is because I don't want to say it feels like a copout, but it's... It doesn't give quite the same features that something like OSTree does. So for example, in OSTree, it's a very easy comparison to compare to Git.

So in OSTree, you have commits of an operating system. And you can roll back a commit. You can jump between commits. You have branches. You can jump between branches. And that allows you to do a lot of powerful stuff, right? And then OSTree, like, you can, has, like, its own system of OS deployments, so you can have a root partition, right? But it's sort of like dual booting, where you can have multiple OS deployments that are deployed to a separate branch, and you can boot between them,

and you can even have, like, isolated data between those, like, deployments. So deployed to a separate branch. And you can boot between them, and you can even have isolated data between those deployments. So it's really nice in that way. And I do understand why a lot of these newer products are going for AB root over OS tree. AB root system is because it's a lot easier to work with. It's much more simple, and you get to use the existing tooling. You get to use the mutable package managers, in a sense. But I just do wish that this becomes more of a stopgap rather than the end destination when it comes to mutability.

I think there are powerful things you can do when you treat your system as an image or as this atomic component that aren't going to be achieved by this AV-root model. I guess that's sort of my criticisms of what vanilla is doing immutability-wise and other distros as well.

I certainly think it's worth experimenting with, like this is sort of goes back to some of the stuff said before that whilst we have this OS tree model and this OS tree model seems like it does a really good job, maybe there is something better. Maybe that isn't a B root, like maybe it's not something like that, maybe it's something else different, but if we just stick with this one system we won't sort of realize what else is possible like yeah that's pretty much yeah of course um no i totally agree i obviously you can some people argue that you know i'm biased because how OSTree, but we are looking into, and we will actually look into, other methods that get us closer to our goal when they become available

or when we develop them. So for example, Lennart Pluttering, oh god, controversial figure, has been doing some really interesting stuff with Secure Boot and immutability. I don't know if you've seen his blog. You should read it if you haven't. I have not read that specifically. But if you want to get a preview of what's going to happen in Linux in the next 10 years, reading his blog, reading it must.

Let me find it. Give me a second. And there's a specific article I want to show you. Let me expect petitions how to set to show you if you can find it yeah i have it like in my notes somewhere because i yeah there we go oh okay so this is the blog there's just a big article i want to find oh yeah okay i found the blog that that part i found just fine you know what the actual blog post is called yes you got it um i think i found the blog that that part i found just fine if you know what the actual blog post is called yes you got it um i think i found it let me just skim through it it's pretty long so you

probably can't you know show it here but um i would read it when you have the chance i want to say oh this is not it okay ah okay there's so much yeah going on here yeah like he his blog posts are just giant well they're especially this one i'm trying unless i'm missing something there's not like different pages for them is there i think it's all just on one page maybe it's like I think it's all just on one page. Maybe it's like at the bottom. God, I hate this so much. Okay, wait. No, I found it.

One second. Okay, yes. Okay, so this website, this blog is not the greatest i'll be honest with you like i found that i found that the paragraph that's relevant but i need to find the title element so i can actually link to it right um um so lenar um if you're ever watching this, hit us up. Consulting services at beerlots.com We'll make you an awesome blog. This is it. Fitting everything together.

And this is essentially Lennart's view of what essentially a next generation Linux-based operating system could look like. So he talks about a lot of stuff like secure boots, how we could use the TPM, immutability,

which obviously because it's Lenard, he's basing all of this on existing system B and new system utilities. So something uses, which I haven't seen used by a current distribution for immutability, I'm trying to find something. I think it's called sysimage.

There's sysup this update which is related right and this is like his version of like how immutability could work i okay i sent you a man page it's not very descriptive again the article does much more justice right to the concepts but um that being said right um i think we're still in the beginning of realizing this brave new immutable future. And I'm just really excited to see what can come out of this. And if that means there's something that surpasses OSTree and ABroot, perfect. I want something better, if that's a thing right but at the moment

os3 we've decided is the best fit technically for us for what we're doing no that's understandable i yeah i'll definitely have to go have a read of this um i've not looked at lenart's blog in quite a while but clearly he has a lot to say here yeah no i i think one of the amazing amazing one of the great things about um lenart is the downfalls and sort of the thing that makes lenart great as a developer is that he's very opinionated yeah yeah so obviously. So, obviously, you get a lot of the controversy around that, you know, SystemD obviously. But you also get, like, a lot of really

new interesting ideas. Like, you know, what's being here. And you might not agree with them, but somebody needs to do the work, right? Somebody needs to ask the questions. The fun thing with, like, SystemD and Pulse Audio is even though he's like really opinionated he's right no he is right i people don't like the way he talks but he's right yeah

no i don't think people really especially in this modern day i don't think people really understood what the world was like before systemd and Pulse Audio. It was not fun. Look, you can believe it's some Red Hat, Microsoft, CIA lizard conspiracy that systemd got adopted, but in reality, the reason why systemd got adopted is because it was less shitty than the other options. That's just, you know. because it was less shitty than the other options that's just you know and it's easy to look it's easy to from our sort of more up-to-date privileged position like go back and be like oh yeah systemd sucks but if you haven't really like played in the world without systemd and i don't mean the

like i don't mean like currently like gen 2 without SystemD or Alpine without SystemD. Because a lot of the other service managers have made leaps since SystemD to catch up. But I mean a world before, actually before SystemD. It's not great.

And I am truly glad that we have something like SystemD. Even if Lenard is not the best well-spoken or you know not that well-spoken when it comes to communicate like you know amicably communicating his ideas to other people well this is that's kind of true with a lot of people in the the false world like lightest tour vault is a great example of this, especially old Torvald's, back in like 2010 sort of era. Back then, like, there's a reason why he has, like, he had a reputation of being an absolute arsehole on the

mailing list. Because he was. Like, just, absolutely. He was not, and it wasn't just English being his second language, it was Linus was just not going to deal with you like it's just he's got better things to do of course i i mean yeah like um it's often the most opinionated people that generally make the most change

right and with opinions comes controversy and disagreement yeah so that's just i mean that's just how it is for sure and i feel like the comment section is With opinions comes controversy and disagreement. Yeah. So that's just, I mean, that's just how it is. For sure. And I feel like the comments section is going to be a bunch, full of a bunch of System D haters now. I'm going to get called a Lenart bootlicker or something. I don't know.

It's fine. I am YouTube's top Weyland propagandist, so you need a nickname as well. Okay. top Weyland propagandist, so you need a nickname as well. Okay, um... Oh god, I'll have to think of one. I... Gotta think of something.

I'm sure they'll give you one. They will figure something out. They always do. Yep, yep. They always do. So, besides Tau OS, you always do yep yep they always do so besides um tau os you also have uh ultramarine linux and the terra repository so i guess we should talk about those as well okay um i will say there's quite a bit missing that i haven't talked about in the tower oh yeah if there's anything you want to talk about but yeah but um just to go with the flow of things we'll, yeah, if there's anything you want to talk about with Tao, we can keep doing that, yeah. Yeah, but, um,

just to go with the flow of things, we'll... I don't know. Maybe I'll revisit later within this, but let's just go on to Ultramarine. Okay, sure. I think that conversation sort of lasted a while. In the term Ultramarine, Ultramarine as a project existed before Vera. It was actually a separate thing.

It was run by, um... I think it was, like, yeah. But it was a separate thing. It was run by... I think it was like... But it was a separate thing. It was like it's... Essentially the goal was to make Fedora less... Fedora without... I guess you could say without such a hardline

stance on certain things. So what I mean by that is Ultramarine... Obviously Fedora does this now, but Ultramarine would ship FlatHub by default. It would ship drivers by default. Basically, everything that we believed

a normal user or an end user would need that Fedora doesn't need because of their ideology, that's what Ultramarine was. And we looked at the project and the main developer of it was sort of because of their ideology. That's what Ultramarine was. And we looked at the project, and the main developer of it was sort of getting burnt out, and we're like, okay, we'll help you with this.

So we took on Ultramarine. And the main developer actually still is at Fira, still works on Ultramarine, as well as other things. And what we did is we're continuing on the vision. We've done some other improvements. We're now shipping a System76's scheduler, which helps a lot if you're on a laptop and connected to power. It essentially increases the priority of the audio server as well as whatever is currently focused on the desktop. But the main thing that came out of that entire merger, I guess you could call it, is just

we realized we had duplicate packages. There's a lot of software that's missing from Fedora, and that's on RPM Fusion. We had a lot of duplicate packages that were in both Tau and UltraMarine. We wanted a place to put them. And the UltraMarine people were actually working on a build system for RPM packages. And it's pretty good, if I say so myself.

And what we did is we created, essentially, we created the Andaman Common Repositories, which became Terra, because the Andaman Common Repositories is probably not Terra, because the Andaman Common Repositories is probably not a good name for marketing. How do you even spell that? A-N-D-A-M-A-N.

Yeah. No, it's not. Because the build system is... Yeah. The build system is called Anda. Right. So we have created the Andaman Common Repositories. Terra now, right? And the idea was, is it's everything in Fedora you will need. So essentially, it's the community repository for Fedora without the limitations of Fedora.

And that's easier to contribute to than RPM Fusion. So how it works is it's pretty simple. You go on the GitHub. You you can make a fork you can write a spec file and then you pull you just make a pr right and we have a pretty like i don't want to say it's complex but it's a wait so you have a pretty extensive like system similar to like the aors model then i guess it's kind of like the aurR, but it's more, it's, it's a single repository. You have to note that. Okay.

Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. So there are, so unlike the AUR, we do vet packages when they go in the repository. Right. We do basically, you know, we do some vetting and such, but in general, you can basically contribute as much, you can contribute whatever you want as long as the package is not malicious, broken, bad, or if it doesn't get us sued. Or if it gets us sued.

If it doesn't get us sued, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we just want to be that sort of missing community repository for Fedora. And so far we've built, as I mentioned, we have the on-demand tool, and that allows us to essentially have all these spec files in a single Git repository. And just makes it easy to manage it as a monorepository, just all of these. And the other cool thing that on-demand does is it will automatically update packages. So if an upstream project makes a new release of some piece of software that's in Tera, right? On demand, every 30 minutes, we're actually reducing it to 10 minutes, will pull these new releases. And if a new release is detected, it will code mod the spec file and push it to the Git repository, which causes a rebuild, which causes it to get uploaded to the T Terra, you know, the actual repository, which means oftentimes you get updates extremely fast or rolling release in that sense.

How often does that cause issues when, you know, dependency versions change or bugs get pushed up? Like, how much extra maintenance overhead is there for that? Not that much, actually. So it's actually not... I don't want to say it's... It's definitely... It's there, right? There is extra burden there. But breakage is surprisingly not too common. Because in general, projects don't really fundamentally either change the structure of what files they install, or they don't really change the build process much.

And at least for the projects we bundle, they very rarely change their dependencies. And for projects that do change their dependencies, right, Terra will automatically generate the dependency list for, I want to say, Rust and Go packages based on the RPM helpers that already exist. So we have that covered there. And, I mean, we're doing some workflow improvements that are going to help things. So instead of committing directly to the repository, we're going to have it so it gates. So it creates a pull request. It will run CI on that pull request. If CI passes, we will automatically merge it. If it doesn't, we'll have some sort of system that automatically maintains the correct,

like automatically pings the correct person. And we've surprisingly got quite a bit of the community around Dara. I didn't expect it. Because essentially, initially, remember, it just started as a dump being packaged and shared between Tau and Ultramarine. And we sort of expanded out to this Fedora community thing. But we've had, I think his his name is his github name is cat master and what he's done is he's repack yeah i know he's repackaged um you know the unity desktop right yes he's repackaged that for fedora um lamiri so i i often joke that that Fedora is the best place to run Unity.

Mm. After Ubuntu. Yeah, so... I... He also packaged Lemary, which is the version of Unity for Ubuntu Mobile. Uh-huh. He's packaged KDE Liquid Shell, which I didn't even know existed. Right?

Which is like a lightweight version of Plasma, I want to say. I don't exactly remember. But a lot of desktop components. And then we actually have another arrangement, or not really arrangement, but another thing where, I don't know if you're aware of Prism Launcher, those people? The Minecraft launcher, yeah.

Yeah, so they actually, I want to say, I think one of our developers were in their discord and they're talking about like fedora packaging and such and you're like hey we have this thing right and we had like you know prism launcher rpms they would have them on copper right as well as terra but here's the thing because terra has a process for autumn for automatically updating stuff right we were able to offer a nightly build of Prism, right? Here's where things get even funnier. Because Terra will automatically update

repository for the nightly builds, the Copper repository actually uses the... it rebuilds it, but it uses the spec files, like the code modded ones, from Terra to build the nightly packages in Copper. Wow, okay. For Prism Launcher, at least. And I think they're trying to get into the normal Fedora repositories. But that's the thing where the auto-update system can become really useful when it comes to nightly packages. It's also saved me a lot of times where, like, if I have the VOLA compiler, right? There's some feature I need in nightly packages. It's also saved me a lot of times where if I have the VOLA compiler, there's some feature I need in nightly that's not unstable. I just make a nightly package and

it will automatically update. Boom, I have it there. So I will say if there are RPMs missing for Fedora and you are interested in like anybody that and you are interested in contributing RPMs or introduces packaging in general on your own Fedora, take a look at Terra. We will help you if you have any questions. We have, I want to say, pretty decent documentation on how Terra works as a system. And yeah, that's really all I can, i can say about terra unless you have questions of course no um that honestly sounds like really cool um yeah i i didn't know that like i i thought it was like wait let me think i i have this problem where i start speaking before I think about what I'm trying to say. Yeah. So, I wasn't aware that, you know,

Terra was this thing that people were actually using. Because I hadn't heard of it before I saw it on your website. So, what sort of reception have you been getting from it? Initially, we got some negative reception, because we were like, oh, why do you need another repository? Fair enough. But I think people found that, hey, there's software here that you genuinely can't get from other places. I think one of the major things for us was when, I want to say Fedora 38 or 37 dropped Pantheon, the Pantheon desktop. We just scooped up all those RPM specs and we just plopped them to Terra. And that's actually what powers the Ultramarine Pantheon build that we have. But not only that, if you want Pantheon Fedoraora there's one place to get it now

terror.feralabs.com uh so um no but there's uh i think another like another reception you know is uh i want to say it was have you heard of sodalite or fedora

um it's an immutable desktop i'm forgetting what you can guess yeah Have you heard of Sotolite? Or Fedora? It's an immutable desktop? I'm forgetting what it is. I don't remember. It's Fedora. It's semi-popular-ish. Actually, I don't know how popular it is.

But it's a... Think of it as Silverblue, but Pantheon. Yeah, Pantheon. Yeah. Because they were using the pantheon packages from fedora right and those got pulled you know we we found the maintainer of sodalite because they've had an issue and it's like we might not be able to release like a version for 38 and we're like hey we have this repository we have pantheon packages use it and they used it and they seem pretty happy with it

so far wow yeah but um there's always you know we're looking to grow we're looking to get more packages in we're currently planning a 39 release for the upcoming fedora 39 so how that goes how that goes yeah it seems like you have a lot of stuff going on here i because i i wasn't aware of most of what you've had gotten involved with before i sort of did a dig through the website and dig through like your Twitter and stuff but there is a lot of really cool stuff you've got yourself involved with and people around you have gotten involved with. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we do necessarily a great job at marketing ourselves and just sort of, like, explaining what we do. Right.

Like, all the different things we do in general, which is something I want to work on, right? I, you know, I... We're doing, like, some updates to the website to better explain things, and we also want to actually start making social posts on Twitter, or whatever the fuck it is. And the Fediverse and stuff. So hopefully we can put ourselves out there a bit more. There's a lot of different things that we do. I think one of the more exciting things that's coming up that we have internally developed, this is the first time that's going to be in the public. We have, I want to say,

one of the former maintainers or contributors of, have you heard of, I think of Xanmod? I don't think that no i don't think it rings a bell it's um it was some like popular like often patch of the kernel like something let me find it let me search it up i know like a lot of like let me find that um oh wait there it is i actually know i think i i might know what you're talking about Let me find that. Oh, wait. There it is.

Actually, no, I think I might know what you're talking about. Yeah, so ZenMod, right? I think they were like a former maintainer or contributor of the project. Either maintainer or contributor, right? We have them working on essentially, we don't really have a good name for it. We just call it the fear kernel in quotes right which is going to be um a compilation right sort of of different performance and um different performance and support like hardware support patches right as well you know that are already found in the wild in other builds. But also,

the person that's working on this right now has some experience with the Android kernel and the Android ecosystem and stuff. So they're actually taking some optimizations that Android has done for their kernel and they're bringing it here. Oh, wow.

Yeah. So there's going to be some really interesting stuff happening there. Everything's in development right now, right? With that, I can't give any release date or any other details besides that. Understandable. But we hope to have a build in Altering Linux, and hopefully in Terra, hopefully the Wire ecosystem in general. Sorry, when? You cut out for a moment then? Oh, sorry. and hopefully in Terra, hopefully the wire ecosystem in general.

Sorry, when? You cut out for a moment then? Oh, sorry. I was saying so we hope to have, like, we hope to be able to ship it eventually. Yeah, in Ultramarine, in at least Ultramarine, maybe we'll throw it into Terra and we hope other people from other distributions can take

advantage of, you know, that sort of work that we're doing there yeah wow so well i guess um yeah i we could get into more but we are also closing in on the uh the two hour mark now um i mean yeah, I don't want to go over it. No, that's fair. I guess, let... If there's any final words you want to say, anything

you feel like we just need to mention before we end it off, and do sign-offs? I guess if you're interested in the work that we're doing at Pure End, or just me in general I'm not that interesting, but if I am to you for some reason

Twitter my Twitter is Leighton underscore underscore, I know, very strange That is Leighton Leighton will be Yeah I hope they will be in the hope they will be in the description they will be in the description yes yeah um my macedon slash fediverse is um at leah at ordinary

dot cafe um for fira stuff go to fira labs.com it links to everywhere else. We have a lovely Discord. Join it if you're interested. Lovely GitHub repository. I didn't know where it was going. That's a lot of things we're doing. I hope I can see all of y'all soon eventually again is that all of the links you want to mention nothing else that you've forgotten about oh yeah of course if your company needs you want to mention? Nothing else that you've forgotten about?

Oh yeah, of course. If your company needs some open source consulting work done... Come on, get shit for the company, it's fine. If you are in a business and they need some open source consulting work done, or DevOps work, or we even do media

production now, we have a pretty wide range of consulting services. Hit us up. You can check on the main Fira site, firalabs.com, or just email us, as I mentioned before, and as the bots will know,

services at firalabs.com, and we will make you right. I guess I could say. Okay. Nothing more to show. Is that it? Yeah, as far as I know, there's nothing else I should show here,

but those are... Yeah. That's basically it there. Okay, okay. Cool. As for me, the main channel is brodie robertson i do linux videos there six-ish days a week i am way ahead of schedule right now this is being recorded on september 10th for me i don't know when this is being released probably towards the end of the

month i need to take like i need to take two weeks off i just need to take a couple weeks off and stop recording podcasts but I keep finding interesting people to talk to so it doesn't happen yeah the gaming channel is Brody on Games I stream on YouTube and Twitch twice a week on Thursday and Friday

10am A-C-S-T A-S-T I don't know just looking when I'm alive on the channel, I posted on Twitter, um, I don't remember what my time zone is, uh, right now I probably am still playing through Armored Core 6, and I may have finished Final Fantasy 16, in which case, in which case, I don't know what's in that slot, maybe God of War 2, maybe Neptunia Sisters vs Sisters, I don't know, we'll just go there and work it out, if you listen to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea, if you're watching the video version, you can find the audio on pretty much any podcast platform. There is an RSS feed. Yeah, put it in your favorite app and you're good to go.

So what do you want to say? Sign us off. Um, yeah. That's how we're going to end it. Bye.