Tech Over Tea - Creator Of Proton GE & Nobara Linux | Glorious Eggroll

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Linux gaming is in a much better state than it's ever been and that's thanks to Proton but there is a modified version of Proton you've probably heard of and maybe even used called Proton GE and here is Glorious Eggroll the developer of this project, also he is the developer of a distro called Nobara Linux ==========Guest Links========== Twitter: https://twitter.com/GloriousEggroll Proton GE: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/gloriouseggroll YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GloriousEggroll Blog: https://www.gloriouseggroll.tv/ ==========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 183 of Tech of a T. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson, and today we have a guest who you may have never heard speak before, but if you're involved at all in the world of Linux gaming, whether that's on the Steam Deck, whether that's on, like, you know, just your regular Linux desktop, you've probably heard of the work that he's done. Welcome to show glorious egg roll how you doing hey what's going on it's like

it is a pleasure to finally speak to you I've been using like you know most people they'll recommend like proton g anytime there is like any slight problem with the game just to try it out to see if maybe it's gonna deal with with the problem. So I've definitely, you know, I've certainly used what you've been doing for a while, but for anyone who maybe hasn't tried Linux gaming or maybe is a bit confused about what ProtonG actually is, just give a brief explanation about, you know, what you do, what it is. Okay. Well, it's, in a nutshell, the easiest way that I can explain it is

it is a fork of Steam's upstream Proton, Proton Experimental Bleeding Edge. And what we do on top of that is we add, first, we add staging patches. So if you're familiar with wine and wine staging, you know that staging is a separate patch set. We've gone through all of those patches and figured out pretty much which ones are already

applied in Proton or which ones aren't needed because you know standard wine and wine staging are for games and applications so some of those patches are not meant specifically for gaming. So we've pruned those out, brought in the extra staging patches that we think are helpful.

We've also added in FFmpeg codecs that Valve themselves can't ship because as an individual, I am not representing any kind of company. I'm an end user just like everybody else. And we want our videos

to work in our video games. So that's what we added on top of that. And it helps quite a bit because another thing that we do is we add, you know, different game patches or tweaks or things that may not necessarily be immediately able to be added to proton, but might need some testing or something like that.

Or somebody says, Hey, I have this like quick hack that works for this specific game. We can add it, we can test it. And then know i've i've communicated many many years now with a lot of the people involved with proton and it's been super helpful to have patches that i'm able to throw in test with a big community now which is really really great i'm super thankful for my community um and then give that feedback to

those devs that are involved with proton and it helps you know it helps both i get i get people coming in we get games working and then we shoot it upstream if we can and that's how it works so there's so like what's a what's a good example of something that like came from your project and that eventually got upstreamed for maybe not a popular game, maybe just some random game that just comes to mind? What's something that wasn't in the upstream project that sort of became possible because of what you were doing, what you were trying to add?

There's been a lot of things over the years. Most of the time now, I'll years late most of the time now i'll start with most of the time now usually what happens is there's a fix that comes in through like dxvk or vkd3d yeah or even some steam specific fix that somebody has for like a pending merge request and i'll take that fix put it in proton ge ship it and then we'll get feedback on it and people will be like oh this works great or oh this broke this game or ship it and then we'll get feedback on it and people will be like oh this works great or oh this broke this game or that game and then that way i give that feedback back and then they can either fix whatever is wrong with the patch or get it upstream if they

need to that's how things work now before um it was mostly i would dig through a lot of the the wine bugs like a lot of the warframe stuff like way way back early in the day this is a perfect example so warframe it had dxvk problems it had audio problems with the 64-bit version of x audio and warframe was literally what got me into this in the first place. Because before I did Proton GE, I managed a Warframe launching script. I was way back when before DXVK even existed. Oh, wow. Yeah. So what happened there is DXVK comes out.

And I'm like, oh, this is awesome. Because at that time, Warframe only worked with OpenGL. And it had some problems on NVIDIA cards with rendering things. And then it also had some different problems on the AMD side. So and this was all through OpenGL. And I was like, well, we could either fuss over OpenGL, it's been this way for years or I can reach out to this DXVK dev and say, hey

do you mind checking and see if you can get Warframe working with DXVK that'd be really cool, it's got all these current issues and that's kind of what got my foot in the door to communicating regularly with Philip the DXVk dev um and then you know

it just it went from there but that was one of the main things like i got we got dxvk working with his help um then the same thing happened with f audio although i i currently don't have communication with the f audio dev but that's how that's the same thing happened with that audio i reported the bugs they got it fixed. And now F audio, it used to be its own component, but now it's built into Wine. So, fun stuff there, but that's just one minor example. Something that I contributed, what was it?

There's been quite a few of the valve um build components or valve runtime what's it called it was it was one of the the the starts with a b i can't remember the name of it from the top of my head but anyway it was a component that was missing from the build environment that they needed uh and i managed to fix that as well as um you know, I once I fix it, I said, Hey, this is just a little small tweak, but I fixed it, submitted it, got it upstreamed. Same thing happened with GST orc, which is for G streamer, that we found out that gives a big performance boost. And we were using that in proton GE before we got it upstream. So that was another one that was really useful. But just small things here and there. And then then yeah it's it's they all add up which is

really really helpful especially over the years now well yeah as you have like you look at something like proton db for example you look at like different archives over the years like you just see tiny little changes would make massive amounts of game just all of a sudden start working and nowadays you know most things are pretty much fine like there is a a couple of examples here especially now that we have the steam deck there's a couple of examples here and there like obviously destiny is a big one uh any of the uh any of the malware written by riot that's all all a problem like you're not gonna be able to deal with their root kid unless they decide to make it work but when it comes to things just on steam with the exception of developers who are very very much for some reason just deciding not to make it work most

things are good i know a recent example that was a problem was katherine for some reason and also um Catherine for some reason and also I think Catherine is it still broken? I think it's bronze now I think it's still yeah it's a bit flaky I'll have to go double check

that brings me to another side point media foundation has been a huge ongoing pain point for many years and it's gotten a lot better now um for you know all the all the games that play videos so media foundation provides what uh that's the windows media foundation is a it's provided in windows 10 and higher and it is basically the Windows-specific codec package that allows a lot of the games to play, to play videos. Borderlands 3, all of the videos for Borderlands 3,

they were a big one that had media foundation work that needed to be done. A lot of the Unreal games, many, many of them have media foundation work that needed to be done to work correctly. There was another game that came out not too long ago i can't remember the name of it but i had i had literally a list of specific media foundation games and we had a whole patch set and every time we would make changes to that patch set it was uh the guy who who did the original patch set was Derek Lachaud. And I would work with him back and forth nonstop

to get them to the point where I swear I must have annoyed the guy to hell. But we did. We got a lot of it ironed out. A lot of it was working. And now it's in really good shape. But it wouldn't be where it is today if not for all the testing that we did right right

and yeah that's i i that's why when you hit catherine it clicked in my head i was like oh that's one of the games i was on the list i know that um when persona 5 royal came out like that was also a problem because of the anti-cheat system well no it was no that was elden riggs anti-cheat was persona 5 royal no that didn't work no that was Elden Ring's anti-cheat what was Printer 5 Royal? no that was DRM that was a DRM issue I'm pretty sure yeah which made testing watching the github thread of people

testing and then getting banned from the game because of the DRM system that was I hate like it's such it was breaking every time People change proton versions So they wanted to try a patch that would be changing a proton version and would count as like a new system was trying To launch it was it was it using de nouveau. I don't

Yeah, yeah, you know I've hit that with so many games with the nouveau and it's pissed me off so much Doom and do me turtle specifically specifically do me well do eternal okay? with so many games with the nouveau and it's pissed me off so much doom and doom eternal specifically specifically do me well doom eternal okay um when that came out it had a lot of patches and changes that it needed constantly in order to get working properly and i would hit that stupid denuvo drm block at least three times two or three times a week. Because you block, wait 24 hours, block, wait another 24 hours. I'm just like, what am I supposed to do? Legit, I had a... I own the game, but here's something funky that I did for testing.

I had a copy. We'll just say that uh and i sim linked the legit game folder to the copy folder just so that i could test it without the drm yeah so yeah that was that was fun thank you thank you denuvo it's kind of interesting you mentioned doom and doom eternal because when um when the steam deck was coming out val was using that as like one of their poster child games like this is a game that works incredibly well on the steam deck so it's weird that it was such a problem it came out before the steam deck yeah yeah maybe turtle came out before the steam deck that's why i'm saying like we had to get this stuff ironed out before Steam Deck was even out.

Once Steam Deck was out, a lot of the hard-to-fix stuff was pretty much in good shape, which I'm thankful because had it released a year or two earlier, I think it would have been a mess. I'm glad that Valve really just took their time with the Steam Deck and getting all the major stuff ironed out. Do you find... Obviously, I can look at the list

and see what games are working, but do you find a lot less people sort of complaining about there being problems with newer games now that we do have the Steam Deck here? Or is it sort of about the same? No, not really. I would say it's really no different than uh than a windows release for some modern titles like uh typically with windows that you know

a new title comes out and you probably have like an nvidia driver update or an amd driver up that you need specifically for the game either to fix something or run something same thing goes with linux with but i mean these days like uh you know ratchet and clank was one um doom doom eternal was obviously one when it came out um but most you know last of us yeah don't get started on that one either um but most i would say especially with the later dx12 titles, if it's a brand new game, give it maybe a week, week or two, and it should get most of the major... If there's problems with it running, give it a week or two, and it'll probably have most of those initial launch bugs fixed. What I do find really interesting, though,

is we asked, seeing big title like boulder's gate for example like that was i believe that was verified the day it came out like there are titles like this that are coming out where developers are explicitly like there's no shot they weren't having discussions with valve about getting it verified beforehand even it's gonna be verified day one like they're obviously doing that so it's it is really cool we are starting to see some developers actually taking that initiative to try and get it working on this platform and Like I I didn't think we would ever get to this point considering the market share that we have with Linux But for some reason even the Steam Deck isn't like, you know

It's not a Nintendo switch in sales or anything anything like that it still has had this really sort of widespread effect on the linux gaming space yeah i was i want to go back on the boulders gate three three thing um one thing that i think kind of helps with that is when games offer like uh early access right right because you know Baldur's Gate 3 even though it released now it's been an early access for forever and that really really helped when it first came out it did have problems I still I think I'd probably still have a proton fix in there for when it was originally it had some stuff that needed to be done and once like the launcher didn't even work at first and now all of that stuff works and it's because they had that early access we were able to get those things ironed out before the game even

released so that that helps i know some people are for against early access games or you know i'm not going to name any specific games because there's tons that are like, oh, early access for eternity. Well, Minecraft's a really good example of that. Like, that's a really uncontroversial one. Like, the alpha came out. I don't know. I don't know when the alpha came out. And then it was in beta for, like, 10 years.

And now, like, the full release is out. And it's still technically, like, you know, you can call it. Like, they're still adding content patches, so, like, it's... I mean, we can't even bring this up without bringing up Star Citizen. Let's be honest here, like... Is Star Citizen a game yet? Last I heard, it was like, you know, it's still... It was a model viewer.

Not a game yet. What? When did Star Citizen get announced? When was that? Oh, it's been years, man. Wikipedia, let's see. A successful Kickstarter... Wait.

Pre-production of the game began in 2010. Production, 2011. Crowdfunding, 2012. Yeah, it's been a solid 10 years, at least. Yeah, you know. Maybe it'll come out at some point. I don't believe it. But maybe. It's been a solid 10 years, at least. Yeah, you know. Maybe it'll come out at some point. I don't believe it.

But maybe. Honestly, I think we'll get GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6 before that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if GTA 6 is just not even, like... I mean, we got Diablo 4, finally. Yeah. I feel like that one should have left that one cooking a little bit longer oh well yeah of course i mean yeah well let's be honest how long did it cook already that's fair that's no what they should

have done is let people play more than the first like the first section of the game because the same thing happened with Diablo 3. The first section was great because that's the part that got tested. I think they should have just skipped Diablo Immortal, but that's me and my opinion. But don't you guys have phones? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, man. Like, it's so sad like when you have a company like blizzard who just over the years obviously there's the whole the blizzard saga but like the just the games themselves like it's so sad when a company that is so beloved for the games they make just slow it's not even like an instant collapse like it's like one game comes out now and then like sudden terrible game it's a slow slow decline into just mediocrity yeah oh man it kind of it really the whole thing with overwatch 2 really disappoints me because i mean we all know there's there's a lot of problems with the watch too but they really haven't had a venue to you

know people that own the game haven't really had a venue to express their disappointment so then when they announced oh it's going to be on steam immediately it was just like steam reviews immediately it was just like steam reviews womp and that sucks but at the same time you know it sucks for that company but and yeah at the same time it kind of paints a bad picture for future releases because it's like i would love to see diablo 4 or world of warcraft or even starcraft they didn't have to do see See, the problem with Starcraft is they didn't kill Starcraft, they just didn't do anything with it. They just... Yeah.

People that play Starcraft still, they love Starcraft. The problem is that nobody else cares the game exists. Yep. Yep. But that's the thing, is like, regardless, if you are a person who likes those games, who plays those games, even if you're in there for solo campaigns, I would like to see them on Steam. And if that company on their side, they see, oh, we put this game on Steam and it just got bombed, that kind of makes – if I were on that side, I'd be like, do we really want to do this with our other games?

if I were on that side, I would, I'd be like, do we really want to do this with our other games? You know, it's, it sucks to have that point of view, but from a business standpoint, that's what I would see.

The theory that I heard, like obviously nothing confirmed about why they did it, but the theory that I heard that does sound kind of compelling is that it's sort of a, it's a peace offering to the regulators who are trying to stop the merger happening, who just really like, it's sort of like, okay, we are trying to stop the merger happening who just really like it's sort of like okay we'll we'll give you this see we are we are going to work

with these other companies we're not trying to take everything under the wing of microsoft like like that could just be complete nonsense but it it does with everything that's happening it does seem to hold at least a little bit of weight like If we seem like we're working with other people, then you're going to be less likely to try to stop the merger. It's like, how can we do this? Let's give them our crappiest game in the lineup right now. Honestly, I'm surprised they just didn't do Diablo Immortal. Just like... You know, surprisingly, I know some people who play diablo immortal and you know besides for me personally thinking it's just a cash grab like

it's a legit game and i at this point it's probably better than overwatch 2 certainly for players that's for sure oh man uh like no my favorite thing with Overwatch 2 is... Have you seen Holocure? The game... The, like, Vampires 5 is Light game just came out on Steam. Mm-mm. I haven't seen it yet.

Okay. So, it's... Yeah. It's based on, like, the Hololive VTuber characters. It's a fan game. Like, made by... Originally made by one dude there's like a couple of other people that work in the game now but it had double the player base

of overwatch 2 oh geez there's like 30 000 people playing it so it's like not not the biggest game of all time it's not boulder's gate level but like double what overwatch 2. Oh, man. That's rough. It is a little rough. So, one of the things that someone asked me, we're going to go back to the whole Proton thing. One of the things someone asked me on Twitter was why does Proton GE need to be

its own separate thing? Obviously, you touched on this a bit, but why isn't everything that you're doing something that's suitable to be upstreamed well i think there's two purposes that it serves one uh immediately we'll go to the ffmp codec stuff there is simply just stuff in there that valve can't ship they have their own specific version of proton that comes with steam with specific codecs that they can only ship in that version. They can't enable

extra codecs for that. They're trying to work with that. They've got their media recoder. It doesn't work for everything, but they're slowly but surely trying to put things through that. But for those other games, they simply need, currently, they simply

need those codecs from FFmpeg that Valve can't provide. That is one major reason that a lot of people started using the Proton GE builds. Another one is the FSR patches. So, now we know GameScope has FSR built into it. You can use it that way. But some people don't like using GameScope because it occasionally introduces input lag. That's just one example. Or maybe it doesn't work with their monitors correctly

for whatever reason. There's another example. Or it's not capturing their mouse for whatever desktop environment they're using. That's another example. For those reasons, they might want to use FSR directly in the game. For newer games, that's fine. They have DLSS or XLSS or FSR built into the game.

But for older games and people running on lower-end hardware, they may still want to use FSR for that benefit and you know we we did remove we've removed it twice now because it we keep getting into this point where it's like a proton update comes out for the year like the new yearly proton comes out and then we're like well crap how are we going to rebase these because the original author of those uh he he put them out for proton first as a PR or a merge Quest and then moved his work over to game scope so the proton those those patches for wine or proton are no longer getting updates from him at all we fully rely on like the community to help with those

updates and we've got excuse me like we've got a guy who thankfully has updated it for us these last two years i'm super super thankful for him he knows who he is um but yeah those are just a few examples of what sets apart proton ge from proton experimental and on top of that having all those little quirky test patches that get specific games working here and there like they could put them in proton experimental but then like everybody that's running proton experimental even on the steam deck you're gonna be like hey suddenly half my games broke because you avoided this. You can't do that on devices that you're selling to people. So it's nice to have some other venue or some other outlet where they can unofficially do that.

And I'm not saying, I'm not contracted by Valve. I don't work directly with them or anything like that. I just, I feel like it serves that purpose very well. I think that's something very clear that needs to be said as well. I had a bunch of people who got really confused about your relationship with Valve. Like they're asking it about stuff

that only Valve internally would know. It's like, is Steam ever going to make it so you don't need to use ex-Weyland on Weyland to get games running? So, explain. Guys, I'm an end user just like everybody else. I work for Red Hat, which is a

completely separate company. The stuff I do at Red Hat is completely separate from any of my projects or anything that I do on a daily basis. Anything that happens with Red Hat stays with Red Hat. I don't mess with it. I don't discuss it. That's all on its own special thing. The same thing goes

for Valve. I am just an end user. I don't have anything, no inside information, anything like that. The most I ever do is talk to the devs on a daily basis through Discord like I have been for many years and that's it

like so you just have contacts within valve and that's about as far as it goes that's about as far as it goes yeah and most of the time if i have some kind of special patch or something it's something that either has already been put out there for regular wine or it's by another community member between that that proton Discord or my wine or my my own Discord or it's something that uh you know one of the devs is like oh I've been working this used to happen doesn't happen a lot anymore most of the time nowadays anything they're working on usually just goes straight through proton experimental but for example through the Media Foundation stuff early on, we did a lot of that testing.

I would go back and forth with Derek for the Media Foundation stuff. Apart from that, most of it's just day-to-day me being an end user and trying to get the new new out there as fast as I can. How much time do you reckon you spend trying to get things just you know just how much time you spend working on G obviously you have Navarra as well as like a separate thing but just on G itself? A lot less these days than I used to. I used to and it was I'd work on it every couple of days and just constantly constantly constantly pulling stuff in constantly rebasing stuff and that was part of the reason that with proton when when proton seven came out we rebase the entire thing because we were originally doing it the same way that TKG does which was take wine put the proton patches on top of wine put the staging patches on top of that and then put our custom stuff on top of that but now we do we just rebase

off of well we use proton wine and then just rebase staging off of proton wine which is a lot easier because that way you'd only have to rebase the staging patches once a year. Okay, that makes sense. Like, I mean, occasionally you'll have a Proton change that comes in and you'll have to change maybe like one or two patches in staging. That happens.

And I've got a list of customized versions of the staging patch. And then, you know, when a new Proton version hits, that's when we have to go through and we'll have to do another rebase again but again we only have to do that once a year now as opposed to every time a new proton version drops and breaks something okay so wait can you explain the the how the proton release cycle works from your side then because i wasn't aware of any of that stuff okay so uh typically what i do is i'll release a proton version maybe like every two weeks right and the reason i do that is mainly just to keep

up with proton experimental um if there's a new patch or like an emergency fix or something that fixes a game that isn't launching for example like ratchet and clank if uh well that wouldn't i had a little bit of work that i need to do um but it was working on steam deck out of the box but there was so uh on the here's an example for that on the nvidia side there is a workaround for the direct storage problem and they can't exactly put that in upstream because of some complications with it. But it's fine for me to use it in Proton GE. It allows NVIDIA users to play the game.

So that was something that I wanted. Once it immediately came out, I was like, oh, we got to get this in Proton GE so people on NVIDIA can play the game. And being able to just get those things out on as fast as i can basis is really nice um you know don't get me wrong proton experimental they they shovel their own stuff out as quick as they can sometimes a lot faster than i can but with those little like hacks and

quirks and things again that's stuff that only i can do so so i i'm assuming that for the games that you have someone tell you like oh you know this caused a problem whatever you probably have to buy a bunch of games right how big is your steam library currently my steam library is sitting at sitting at uh come on uh 1310 there's not too i don't know if 1310 is too bad uh it's it's i don't know how many games are on steam now that i think about it but mean, that's also excluding other platforms because you got to keep in mind. I also work on Lutris. So you have one in general.

Yeah. I do the Lutris stuff. I'm friends with a lot of people from the other launchers and stuff like heroic and whatnot. And I do test those as well. And I saw, therefore I have games on other platforms as well. Like I might get the direct version

for an EA game or a Uplay game or anything like that so my Steam library it's like I have my Steam library and then I have like whatever other major company is out there I have a list of games on there and then I have duplicates it's like oh it works on Steam

does it work on Heroic now I get to go figure out why another copy of the game that sounds like a pain It's like, oh, it works on Steam. Does it work on Heroic? Now I get to go figure out why. Get another copy of the game. Oh, God. That sounds like a pain. Yeah. So I will say thank you very much to my patrons because you guys help a lot with that.

Like, that's if mainly if I need to test a new game or if I need to test, you know, if i need to test you know hardware for a game that's where the patreon comes right right so that's been super super helpful yeah i i i've heard this because i'm look i'm sure you just working at red hat doesn't it doesn't pay nothing i'm sure you get a reasonable amount of money from that but having extra money to do this is i'm sure i'm sure great it yeah it definitely it's it's motivating yes yes it's it's it's motivating not only that but just being for me it's weird like i have i have just like a handful of games that i'll play on a regular basis but for me being able to figure out getting a game working on Linux

has been kind of a thing for me. It's like working on a puzzle. Once you get it together, you're like, oh, great, it's done. That's awesome. I feel really good about completing it and figuring things out, but now I have to move on to the next project. For me, it's like

once something is done and done, I'm immediately looking for the next thing which another it's a it's another uh blessing and a curse it's a blessing because i get to fix game it's a curse because i get to spend more money on games i'm sure the uh the steam sales look at they're either great for you or you look at the list and it's like everything on here i've already got oh yeah oh yeah dude i've been subscribed to humble bundle for like i don't know like five years now something like that and now i i get every other every other time there's something that uh paying a friend hey do you got this game or hey you have this game here you go here's like six codes enjoy i guess that's nice

yeah you know share the games around yeah yeah it's it helps it helps my friends to get games sure you know just just uh help i'm sure i'm sure you've given them more games and they know what to do with as well so oh yeah i mean it's just whatever whatever pops in most of the time it's games that they already own too yeah and then i'll just like pop them in my community chat if i need to oh well yeah there's always that as well yeah so when did you start working on Proton GE actually when did Proton first come out do you remember what year that was I honestly don't remember it had to be close to around

2018 maybe 2019 I know I was definitely working on it already by 2019 because that's when I actually started at Red Hat which is going on like 5 years now

August 21st 2018 yeah called it 27 tested and certified games at the time wow I forgot how short the list was yeah and that was that actually was way that was quite a ways after uh dxvk had already been well on its way which is kind of

funky like like everybody kind of had a hunch about dxvk it's like is this guy just doing this on his own or is he being contracted for valve like nobody had a clue but nobody really bothered to ask we were all just like really happy that our games were running on vulcan on linux at that time it was like oh dude this is awesome so and i'm sure he had so many pain points when things didn't work or didn't go right and we all understood those pain points but at the same time it was just like man looking back now at the stuff that he's done is just insane if i remember correctly he started working on dxvk to play nia i think that was the story yeah i always get his story and um joshua ashton's story

mixed up and i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure his story was Nia. I don't know what Josh's was. I'm gonna have to, I'll have to figure that one out. I think his was, his, I wanna say his was basically a fuck you. Someone told him that he couldn't do it. I think it was getting like,

I think it was getting like DirectX, didn't he sound like DirectX 10 or something like that? And someone was like, uh, yeah. And someone was like, I think the story getting like DirectX. Didn't he sound like DirectX 10 or something like that? And someone was like, uh, yeah. And someone was like, I think the story was someone told him that his idea was a bad idea and there was no way it was going to work.

So he just did it. And then it worked. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds, that sounds about right. He's, Josh is a good dude though. He's,

he's been around for a long time as well. And he's, he's been super, a long time as well and he's he's been super super helpful um but yeah he i think he started with 10 and then after that he started he went and did nine as well and then just all of that got immersed into dxvk so you're saying that you were already working on it when proton was coming out so when did you actually get involved with doing wine stuff then just generally oh probably about like two or three years earlier okay i would say like uh so i i used to do in my in my early 20s i used to do web development and um that's kind of at the same time when I started using Linux more.

I had also run private gaming servers, and I had learned a lot of things that way in terms of the Linux environment. And total, I've been using Linux probably since I was about 14, and I'm going on 40 now, just FYI. But it really started to click around my my early to mid 20s because that's when i first started using arch and i used that for like a good solid i don't know five six years before uh before i got my job at red hat and then switched over to fedora um but i will say again, the arch is an excellent learning tool. That's,

that's literally where I learned half of the stuff that I know today is because of just using arch. But yeah, at the same time, I would say maybe like 2015 to 2018 era is when I really was into uh working on wine learning the ins and outs of it uh figuring out where components were how the general structure works because when you when you look at the wine source code it's it's daunting if you have no idea yeah you're like Whoa. And people ask me now all the time, like, how do I get started? Where do I get started? And I'm just like, this is a rough answer. But you're gonna want to start learning where the where the various components are in line. And I think the easiest, quickest base that I

can get give on that is in the source code the DLLs folder is kind of it's where all the windows specific DLL code is and that's where most of the things are that you're going to want to fix there are other components other places in the source code but that's generally where most of the fixes the easier fixes go especially like when you need like a stub or something like that um i would say that was that would probably be the easiest way to start is figure out a stub that's currently needed by one of those dlls and wine and either implement the stub or uh figure out how to fully implement the function that stub is supposed to introduce. Yeah, it's, there are, there are still, even to this day,

there are people that know way more than I do in the wine environment. The Code Weavers guys are freaking wizards. And like, I, I am listed as a wine staging maintainer, but these days I mainly just check stuff and then ping them and uh annoy them when i tell them that something broke most of these days if something breaks up he's like yeah this broke or uh you committed this and this broke that's i think that's one of the things that i hate doing the most is when i see something that's committed by somebody that I talk to on a regular basis, I'm like, you broke it.

Nobody wants to hear that, because then they're just like, oh, shit. Yeah, you assume the code you write is good, so having to go back and look at it, I know this is supposed to work. Why? What is wrong here? i think i i probably have like and i think i for the longest time i swear zf hated me like uh zebedee for your for

your uh awesome person but man i used to i probably swear i pinged them on a daily basis way early when i was working on stuff not not nearly as much now it's been a lot easier since um most of the things like since we've rebased it's been a lot easier because now we're not having to deal with rebasing staging again on a weekly basis um I think these days the person I probably ping the most now is Paul Goffman. He does a lot of the anti-cheat stuff these days. Well, not so much anti-cheat. That was Derek super early in the day.

But Paul does a lot of the deeper stuff. He's also pretty good at getting launchers fixed. I think he helped with the Final Fantasy 14 stuff. As far as the launcher goes. Like the new launcher?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That was broken forever. Yeah, it was. It's the reason I started using another launcher. You know. Yeah. Well, there's nothing wrong with that one.

No, there's not. It works great. Yeah, it works great. You know, Square Enix may not be happy about other launch existing but hey that's a Square Enix problem. Yeah. Yeah, they should have thought about that when they uh... decided to make the game s- Is it Steam Deck verified now? I think it is. I actually don't know. FFXIV?

I have no idea. Uh... FFXIV... Steam Deck Verifier. I assume there's a list somewhere. It's not taking me on anything useful. I assume it is, but I'm not certain. Just use the XIV launcher. It works better.

So when you first started getting involved with Wine, what was the state of Windows compatibility back then? Obviously, things like DXVK didn't exist. Oh, it was hot garbage. Yeah. Just straight up. I mean, you got to understand, when I started using it, DXVK and F-Audio both did not exist.

We had to rely on Opengl and whatever worked in opengl and whatever Mesa drivers or Nvidia amd it had some like some black textures problems so for the longest time i was using an nvidia card for it and then i switched to amd and the first thing that i realized was okay warframe was working or i think it was the other way around. It had a problem with AMD, and it worked on NVIDIA. I switched to NVIDIA, and then I went to go play Elder Scrolls Online, and it had NVIDIA OpenGL had a problem with –

it had the same problem that AMD had with various black textures in OpenGL, and I'm like, shit, I just switched. Now I can play the other game, but not the original game I wanted to play. Stick a boat in the computer, switch GPUs. It was, dude, it was like that with every other

game that I would try. There were so many. Even native OpenGL games. Like Rage. Rage was another one. I've not heard that name in a while. Yeah. What was it? Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein, The Old Blood, and The New Order.

Both of those were originally, those were OpenGL games, and those had problems. And I remember opening tickets for those. The original Divinity Original Sin 1, another native Linux release with an OpenGL version. Well, actually, I don't know if it was native Linux, but I know it had an OpenGL version. But again, all of these games had various problems

that they needed. It did have a native release. Yeah. Another one, Dying Light. Dying Light has a... It worked on Ubuntu, but it has... I don't know if it still has this problem to this day, but it needed a PCI

Utils symlink for Fedora. It needed some other stuff done in Arch. I don't know if that's still a problem or not. I opened uh it needed some other problems some other stuff done in arch i don't know if that's still a problem or not yep i i opened a bug for the pci utils problem issue uh with fedora and uh i will just say i had an argument with that for a while and i don't know if it's still a problem or not i just at that point that was that was one example of what kind of drove me to start working on Nobara of several. But don't get me wrong.

They have Fedora. They have really great devs. They have some really nice people over there. I've had my qualms with them, but I also know some really good, solid people over there. So it's not everybody is like that yeah yeah before we get into nabara um when okay so before dxvk was a thing if a game didn't support open gl was there just no luck getting it running no it was dx you had to open a bug directly with Wine. Because you gotta understand, if it doesn't run OpenGL natively,

a lot of the games that I just listed were they had native OpenGL renderers. If it didn't work natively with OpenGL, then it had to render DirectX to OpenGL. And at that point, it was rendering DirectX 9, 10, and 11 to OpenGL

instead of DXVK. And it still does that to this day. If you don instead of DXVK. And it still does that to this day. You know, if you don't use DXVK, that's what it attempts to do. But these days DXVK is, it's basically the answer for everything. I think,

I think with their rendition of VKD 3D, they're trying to make that the new backend. I do not know the progress of that i haven't kept up with it at all i just i specifically just keep working on the vkd 3d proton fork and dxvk okay that makes sense okay so nabara i only recall hearing about it relatively recently but when did you actually start the project that actually i started that back in around the time fedora 35 released which is maybe two years ago okay so okay my timeline is about right then I thought maybe it'd been around for longer and just didn't know about it no no it was um i think it was either shortly before or shortly after uh i think garuda

oh if i'm yeah just didn't realize that was that young okay i thought that would have been around for longer yeah guru is a little bit older than the nobara just just a hair i believe okay that's the news to me okay so but it didn't really start getting popular no more i didn't start really getting popular until around like 36 okay well into 36 beginning of 37 okay so why why did navarro why'd you make tomorrow like what what was it about fedora that wasn't you know wasn't up to the the level you needed to be for your use case well a couple of things one was i needed something that both myself and my dad could use okay my dad uh i got him started using linux i switched him over uh this happened uh one day after he had a Windows blue screen that made all of his USB devices stop working. And I spent an entire weekend over there trying to fix it.

Did you fix it? Oh, yeah. We got it fixed. And then after that, I switched him to Linux. And we started with Arch, and then we moved him to Fedora once I got going with Fedora. You started him with Arch, and then we moved him to Fedora once I got going with Fedora. You started him with Arch? Well, at that time, it was not Arch.

It was... What was the name of it? It doesn't exist anymore. It was basically Arch with an installer before Endeavor existed. Oh, yeah, okay, okay, yeah. But anyway, we started with that and obviously you know the problem with Arches every once in a while you'll get something funky that happens and then it too will kind of screw up the system and

the fact of the matter is I don't live in the same state with them anymore so I can't drive over for a weekend and fix the stuff like I used to and that's another reason we had to move over to Fedora. The problem that I had, the problems that I had with Fedora were basically just gaming,

gaming stuff here and there, like Mesa not being up to date or needing an updated version of game scope or needing patches for Rad V in Mesa or just various little things here and there, which is also why there's now like a massive list of the changes that Noboru puts in because all that stuff added up over time. And at first, a lot of people, they may argue, oh, well, Noboru is just Fedora with a couple of patches thrown in or a couple of things here and there.

You don't understand. There's like a massive list of changes that we've done. And when you add all of those things up and you take your basic Fedora installation and you go and implement those one by one by one by one, that shit adds up over time. You don't want to spend a day or two days getting your fedora system back to what it was and you know if you just have one or two minor changes that you do

on fedora that's fine just go ahead and do fedora but for me that's not what happened and for me to have my daily driver like that and have multiple systems that i need to do that on that's where it stemmed from and i was just like okay let's just go ahead and do this get it done get something that I can easily pop in on any system or that my dad can use and I can remote it I know where to look for changes where to look for things that I need to fix or resolve or things that might be outdated and boom immediately be able to resolve it. That's where it stemmed from. And I was just like, once I started using it myself and got comfortable with it, I was like,

you know, there's some other people that I know that would probably like this. So I put it out there. And I was like, you know, still to this day, the bottom line is I make it for myself and my dad. You may love it. You may hate it you might have problems with it i can't please any i can't please everyone i don't care to please

everyone if you have a problem with it that's your problem i if you come on my discord and you ask me then sure if you're very if you're polite about it i'm going to be polite back and i'm going to try and help you like that's that's generally my take but i've had i'm sure a lot of communities have had the specific people that come in that either seem or act entitled or uh demand things or they just come in and they're meaning like oh this distro and i'm like oh well you're goodbye like i'll dish it you want to dish it i'll dish it right back like there's two sides to everything and i that's just the way i am right you know i'm not i'm not going to sugarcoat it and be be i can't be nice all the time i'd go insane it we it sounds like a lot of

things going on to be nice all the time I could sit here and give you a big long paragraph be super businessy with you or I could be like no go away you're doing stuff with wine, you're doing stuff with proton you work at Red Hat, you got Nabara a lot of things

yeah that's pretty much it. If you're nice, if it's just a general question, I don't care. I will give you an answer if I can. If I don't have the answer, sure, maybe somebody in our community has it. That'd be great if somebody can help them.

But if I can help, I will. But man, I literally, I have in the rules in my Discord that please don't ping me. I'm not your personal tech support butler. I'll help if I can, if I'm there. But that's, I get pings non, I used to get pings nonstop. I still get pings every once in a while.

But, and that's also another thing. I used to, in my free time, I would live stream on Twitch just because I was bored playing video games at that point. I'm sure your questions, you're like, hey, how do I fix this? Oh, they would pop into my Twitch chat

all the time, just nonstop asking me, hey, can you fix this game? Hey, can you fix that game? Hey, I can't get this to work. Hey, I can't get that worked on. I'm like, bro, I'm just trying to relax like let me play my video games but yeah that's that's just kind of where that stems from i don't mind helping people but man especially not these days because all my stuff has been out there for a long time now whereas before it was just a small circle

that was constantly getting now i have those rules in place and it helps out quite a bit you know even with the amount of attention that i do end up getting it's still helpful for people to know now hey i'm busy yeah well even from my perspective i get the occasional person pinging me being like hey how do i do this thing and this thing like do i have a video on it if i do go watch the video if i don't like i don't i don't know i have no idea i've got other things to worry about but you being in this position where you're actually like making a project that that i i'm sure you get a lot more than i would ever ever possibly get on this i've literally used let me google that for you links oh that's all yeah i i i love when people ask you a question and you just type the question

into google it's like did you like i'm i'm fine to give you some advice if something it's like did you like i'm fine to give you some advice if something isn't clear but when someone puts in absolutely zero effort in trying to get the answer themselves like i don't want to help you like i'm sorry but i don't want to help you yep my so my biggest pet peeve in Discord is when people don't read the channel pins. So with Nobara and with Proton and with Wine, we have all dedicated channels for that. And each one of those, the very first thing it says in the subject in capital letters is read the channel pins before asking questions. And we have important pins for all of those in every single channel and i swear man people just come in and immediately bam hey do you know this answer how many people ask you how do i install a version of proton ge hey do you have basic reading

comprehension just how many people have you had asked you how to install proton ge it used to be a lot now thankfully uh thank you to david for proton up qt is a godsend i loved it so much dude if i didn't have that tool i would just i would lose my mind i i mean like i i obviously i know how to install proton g like i know how to install it myself but like i really don't want to and i can just click this click that and boom it's done yeah yeah that's every time anybody has a question now i'm just like just go install proton up ut you'll find it i'm sure type it in any any flat pack I mean it comes as a flat pack you can just download it that way and we ship it in Nobara out of the box so it's just so much easier anyone

who's not using at least that or there's also ProtonUp which is a completely separate project which is like a terminal version yeah yeah I know the depth of that too it's I think ProtonUp started first and then ProtonUp Qt was made as like a gooey i don't know if it was made on top of proton up or if it was made on its own i i want to say they're completely separate projects but i'm not certain on that either way they're great i love them like yeah i had qt also do like lutra stuff as as well? Yep. Yep. It does. I know when ProtonUp first came out, not Qt,

a lot of people wanted me to implement it into Proton and I told them I was like, look, no, I can't do that because that's... Yeah, they wanted it as a built-in tool to install Proton and I'm like, first of all, it doesn't make sense because you would have to clone the Git repo

and then run the command from the Git repo to download the release. Right. And then you have all these files in the Git repo that are the source code that have absolutely nothing else to do. And they're just taking up this space. Like, why? I mean, that was the major issue.

But the other issue is i would also have to maintain that on top of my normal proton build you know and it's like i can't i've got enough projects as it is on my own i don't need to worry i don't want to worry about managing something else someone else is working on on top of my version that's in my project as a fork right right yeah or copy whatever yeah i i don't i don't even know what was trying to be asked that's so weird it was way early in proton too like the early days of proton yeah yeah that okay that makes sense. So, with Nabarro, what sort of reception have you had from it? Obviously, you said you've had a couple of trolls coming through,

but how many people are in the Discord? How much have you heard people talking about it? So, it blew up within 36 to 37. Okay. 37 was really good. It was rock solid. 36 had some issues that we fixed in 37. It got really, really, really stupidly popular. Like it blew my mind how popular that it got.

But these days it's a little more calm uh with 38 it's it's nicer I would say that we've cleaned up a lot of stuff with 38 um a lot of the repo issue like most of the repo issues we fixed in 37 but there were still a couple lingering things like and and but and we fixed those in 38 now officially like uh one example is we have we do snapshots of fedora's repositories so rather than providing fedora's repositories directly we'll do a snapshot and we provide those through like cloudflare r2 oh okay so you have like a known consistent packages available exactly and the part of the reason that we do that is because we want to make sure that the packages that we provide that we

build in copper um work with those ones that we right right okay because otherwise what happens is fedora updates a package and then we have outdated copper there is a lot of stuff in copper that's like that. Yeah, especially like luckily we don't run into that too often with GNOME, but with KDE packages those keep getting updated quite a bit. They used to a lot and we would have to constantly keep

rebuilding the KDE stuff. Which, you know, it's fine putting those in, but it kind of also is a pain in the butt when people are reporting it every other week. Right, so it adds a lot of maintenance burden for maybe a very minor change. Yeah, so what we do instead is we have those

snapshots, and we update them once a month, and we'll go and update the, whatever copper packages we need for that snapshot. Now, important things that are outside of the snapshot that we do separate patching on, those are done separately. There's a reason that we have copper packages for those or AppStream packages for those.

So the stuff that we can't put in copper, like OBS, like we have our own copy of OBS made from the RPM Fusion build. So RPM Fusion, they have their own stuff that they provide outside of Base Fedora there are modifications like for example the OBS Studio package we have our own patches that we put on top of it so we can't use the RPM Fusion one

because otherwise it wouldn't have our patches or our changes so we have a copy of that and we can't put that in Copper because Copper can't provide RPM Fusion stuff so we have our App of that and we can't put that in Copper because Copper can't provide our PM Fusion stuff. So we have our AppStream repo for that. That is just one example of a couple of packages that we use for our PM Fusion. But again, that stuff has to match the snapshot. So that's why we did that.

that another reason for the snapshot is because we have all of those packages in copper that are supposed to be overrides for the original package some that you know fedora might already provide uh you'll get conflicts for things like gnome software or KDE discover where there's they see they might before we have a snapshot they would say oh there's an update in fedora for this package and then people would be like why can't we download this update? Well, it's because those software managers for some reason are completely ignoring the exclude list that we have or the priority that we had setting that we have for the repository. Well, we fixed that in 38. So we went, I went through and I, the way that we do the snapshot, we do a clone, and then we upload it to R2. So what I did is I went through, and I found out every –

I got a name for every single package that we replace. And after the clone, I go and I have a script that just goes and wipes out all of those packages from the Fedora repo. So that way, the only ones that are available are the ones from R Copper. Right. So that way, the only ones that are available are the ones from our copper. Right. So that way, there's no conflict. That way, now, Gnome Software or KDE Discover won't see the version in Fedora that might say, hey, it's newer than the one that you have in copper.

But even though the copper priority is higher, it just completely ignores that and says, hey, do you want to download this? The user's like, I can't click it. It won't let me do the thing i guess it so it's fixed now right that's weird that it was causing a problem in the first place but i guess it's just it's i guess having copper being higher priority this wasn't really a thought initially with them yeah they yeah they don't take any consideration. I don't know why. I mean, you would think if you're building something that's meant to use repositories,

regardless of which repositories, you would hope that they would include the priority of that repository. But it was a problem. Regardless, now it's fixed. Thankfully, that's a recent change. But yeah, I'm just glad that's over with that was another like week and a half of pain so specifically with obs like i use the obs flat pack like that's just because the arch package is broken and they just they for years now have never wanted to actually package it properly but why the if you don't know about the arch stuff um the so for the the browser stuff in obs it requires cf uh minimal

and they ship the wrong version so that breaks obs and they just don't want to include a separate package um and it's been like that for years and All of that functionality just does not work on Arch. So it's Flatpak or use like Titan's version or someone else's version, but like the one in the core repos just doesn't work. But why do you actually, like what sort of patches do you add onto OBS to justify not using the Firehack? So a couple of things, this is probably going to help the OBS devs out because from what I've heard, they complain a lot about Nobara having a custom version.

Let's see. So we add a GStreamer plugin, which does the same functionality as the FFmpeg VAPI plugin. It's just VAPI is being routed through GStreamer instead of FFmpeg. Oh, yeah. I have that plugin installed, yeah. yeah okay so we have that one um i have another patch for here let me just bring this up because this will it'll be easier for me just your list here and i know the web the web socket stuff is out of date because that's actually available in obs now yeah i need to update the website as the website is always kind of like the the

back of the this after the it's the after afterthought of everything else all right where is obs here obs browser it says patch with browser plugin i think that's really out of date actually unless that's something different. No, no, no, no. So Fedora's version of OBS does not come with the browser plugin at all. What? Yeah, they can't because it's CEF. I believe... Oh, so that's the exact same problem that Arch has.

Yeah. Except I'm sure... What's their reasoning for doing so, if you happen to know? I don't know. Okay. Do not know. All I know is that's, what's their reasoning for doing so? If you happen to know, I don't know. Okay. Do not know. All I know is that's, that's one of the major problems.

The browser plugin is something that you need an OBS. So that is added. We have, let's see the NDI plugin. We have that built in because I know quite a few people use NDI. What does that do? It's a specific type of connector. Actually. What does that do? It's a specific type of connector. Actually, I don't remember if it's NDI.

I'm thinking of something else. Actually, it might not be a type of connector. If I remember right, it's the way to... You can share the OBS output between two systems. This plugin adds simple audio, video input and output over IP using a new text NDI technology. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, I'm thinking of a different type of connector,

but that's not related. The NDI plugin allows you to basically run obs on one computer and then have the output put over the network to another obs somewhere else oh so like yeah it's it's i don't remember uh how can i describe this it's more it's more so for uh like easier resource management because you don't necessarily have to encode on the same system um but it is a really useful plugin so it's a way to do it's a way to have a capture pc without having capture card you just do it with ip kind of yeah yeah okay yeah okay that makes sense yeah i don't i don't personally use it very often i've used it once or twice for testing because somebody asked

for it and so i know like the basics of what it does right but uh apart from that i i personally don't use it but it is something that a lot of people do okay okay so we've got that in we've got that in. We've got the AMF patch, which the author of the AMF patch, he's not maintaining that officially anymore. He's also already upstreamed patches to Mesa to get the VAPI stuff and Mesa performing well, as well as the FFmpeg VAPI in OBS. He's committed stuff to get that fixed up as well. We've had internal discussions about that. The problem with the AMF patch is even though it does work,

it requires specific firmware, proprietary firmware from AMD. Even the open source version, it'll work one day and be broken the next. It requires the proprietary AMF codec libraries from their drivers instead of Mesa. So that's another problem. Just all these different little stupid proprietary factors that come into play when you use it.

So if you're going to use it, you need to know what you're doing. Otherwise, don't bother. Just use VAPI. And at this point, VAPI actually works really, really well for Vega and higher. There are also some tweaks for the Polaris series that I believe he's talked about or mentioned upstreaming something like that. But it's getting there. So that's one of them.

OBS browser, obviously. OBS WebSockets. like that but uh it's getting there so that's one of them uh obs browser obviously obs web sockets obs vk capture aka game capture for vulcan that's another one that doesn't come in by default it's you know on when if you use obs on windows you have your game capture that's what vk capture is it does the same thing the value of like game capture rather than just doing like window capture uh a lot it's a lot less resource intensive okay for sure like uh if you're gonna do game capture or if you're gonna do gaming and want to capture it and you don't have a capture card uh vk capture game capture is like the way to go uh it's a lot less resource intensive than using a full window capture. So that's another reason we put that there. And these days, now it also does work on Wayland with NVIDIA and AMD.

Wow. Yeah, it used to only work on AMD, but now it works for both, which is awesome. The guy that does that plug-in also is the guy that did the AMF encoder and is also doing the vap he worked so his name is no rep oh yeah yeah no reps freaking awesome um let's see there's some there's some other stuff in here i see pipeline application audio capture but yeah that's a plug-in they've been meaning to i think that's a pending merge request okay and it's been sitting there for a while and the intention is to get that upstream but we already have that added in our version as well i see this is a very yeah it's a very active thread i see let's see is there anything else that i'm missing here that I probably can't think of off the top of my head? Anything that's on this list you haven't mentioned?

No, I think that's everything, at least on the list that's on the website. We do have the Twitch integrations working. By default, those integrations working uh by default the so so by default those integrations don't work uh the the

interface for them wasn't working on wayland there's some some workarounds that you can do but it doesn't work properly but on x11 they work perfectly fine and there's some launch options that you can use in wayland to make them work it's a bit hacky but it does work yeah doesn't it force obs to run through x wayland or something like work. It's a bit hacky, but it does work. Yeah, doesn't it force OBS to run through xWayland or something like that? Yeah, it's something funky like that. But some people like those integrations. So we have those.

We managed to get them from the Ubuntu package sources. We do not ship any of the secret stuff related to that in our package source. We strip all of that out before providing this source rpm in respect to the obs devs i know they don't want that stuff out there um you know if you do enough digging you can get it that's where we got it but bottom line you know

we want to play it safe right and if they asked us to remove it we would gladly remove it um so that is just another one of those advantages because i know the flat pack has that functionality too yeah and a lot of their official packages have it so flat pack ubuntu i think that's all the official packages on linux i could be missing one i think those those are the main official ones yeah so we want i wanted that functionality because i use obs a lot and it is it's nice to have yeah right now i think the only reason that it doesn't work on wayland is because of a cef bug and yeah yeah yeah so we're kind of waiting on that to get fixed before it works properly and wayland again so you're saying before that the obs devs don't really like that you have your own custom version of obs that you ship yeah it's mainly just because of

the patches that i add which it's not it's not even really patches it's it's mainly just we add extra plugins i mean the only other patches that we add are the AMF patch, which is, you might as well just consider that a plugin. And yeah, that's about it. Just the plugins. We don't really add anything like customized or special to the OBS source itself directly. We're not going in and internally deeply changing anything. And yeah, anybody that opens the source RPM can see what we do.

So it's sort of a matter of if someone's on Nabara and they report a problem, then it's unclear if it's a change that you've made or changed it from, like, their repo. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but the same thing could be said for anybody. If you're going to report it to, you know,

if you had a problem with the RPM Fusion version, you would have to report it to RPM Fusion devs. Or if you had a problem with the rpm fusion version you would have to report it to rpm fusion devs or if you had a problem with like say the arch version you have to report it to the obs um forums before and there is if you look up arch obs browser you will find a ton of people being like this functionality doesn't work and i'm on arch i'm on arch it doesn't work like and everyone's just like yep the arch version is broken just just we can't do anything about it until the arch devs decide to fix it yeah but i mean like i said that's that's something that's and that's i i understand their point of view i understand that's why they have their flat pack that you know they want a way to be able to safely fix bugs and knowingly reproduce bugs and flat pack is one of the guaranteed ways to do that for them

so with um with nabar like with the you've got a bunch of changes on it now but is there anything like that you still feel like needs to be added or anything you're working on right now that you think is like a really big addition or is it just a matter of keeping things like up to date as changes come in i'd say hardware support on the kernel really so like we've got a lot of stuff like custom patches and stuff on the kernel we've got our tkg zen patches but like um a lot of people will up using, I've noticed a lot of people end up using Nobara for like maybe their ASUS laptop or like the ASUS RG ally, or maybe their steam deck. I mean, I use Nobara on my steam deck or what else? Linux surface devices. Cause we have the patches for that in there or Lenovo

laptop. Cause we have the patches for that in there. Lenovo laptop because we have the patches for that in there. A lot of official distributions don't ship those extra patch sets, but we do. And that's another reason that we also have a big disclaimer when you go to download our ISOs. There's a big box that says, hey, here's your user agreement. We're telling you right now this is a hobby distribution.

It's not made by any official company or anything like that you know we just I just out of my spare time because I want my to work right and that's kind of the same just as a lot of Linux users so you know as long as you're willing to accept that and understand hey you know this isn't made meant for production don't go expecting to take this to your day-to-day job. And then if something breaks, immediately requesting support. That's not going to work.

No, that's fair. That makes a lot of sense. So, well, I guess a lot of that is then just making sure that things just keep working as updates come in. Obviously, there's going to be other patch sets that need to be added if for some reason you want to get uh go along with that but you would say that the core changes you

want to make are done at this point it's just adding in little things here and there yeah right on a day-to-day basis i would say regularly we keep so with our mesa release um what we do is most most most distros will just release the latest version of mesa right and we know we all know that the radv driver will constantly get updates and tweaks and fixes and sometimes it's a really good fix that you want right now and not everybody wants to go and recompile all of Mesa get just to have that rapid fix so what we did is we separated Mesa's Mesa so the way it's patches the package name is Mesa Vulcan drivers okay okay that's the package name. Everything that's prefixed with Mesa Dash is part of the general Mesa build.

We took Mesa Vulcan drivers and we separated that into its own package. It's already its own package, but we made its own separate source RPM instead of being part of the main build. Then we made Mesa not depend on that for the installation. So you can go and that way what it allows users to do

is upgrade or downgrade Mesa if they need to from major versions and still keep the stability of all their major versions. And then specifically we do regular weekly or biweek-weekly updates of just mesa vulcan drivers right okay so now they're getting the latest and greatest of those mesa vulcan drivers without messing with the rest of mesa and having remaining you know keeping the stability of the rest of mesa okay that makes sense that makes sense yeah it's super helpful i'm like really glad that i did that early on because we used to ship we used to just ship mesa get on our iso out of the box and we would get a problem like every other week with hey it's not working on this system or hey it's

not working on that vm or yeah hey here's xyz nvidia problem of the week and i'm like oh then finally i just said okay screw it let's just do this. And it's been way easier since then. Yeah, it's always a bit rough running, especially like if you are trying to do updates regularly, running Git packages, like just even something, like obviously Mesa is a big project, but even if you're running like a Git version of like a window manager, for example,

like there are going to be versions that work wonderfully. But if someone commits some little thing, there's always... Projects have regressions. That's just a fact of developing code. And at some point, you're going to run into a regression that really gets in the way of what you're trying to do. And then you have to go work out what the problem is.

And hopefully, you of what you're trying to do and then you have to go work out what the problem is and hopefully hopefully you know what you're doing and can actually track that down somewhat easily that is that is hands down the blessing and curse of arch linux like not everything in arches like by default they basically miss they pretty much just ship the latest version yeah rather than get but you know anything from the aor you're probably going to end up getting from git um and even like the major even the major versions you might you still run into probably regressions like that that's why that's another reason that people instead might turn to something like ubuntu or even for super stability debian um but yeah that's like that's the reason why i was like with fedora fedora is really really good that's the reason why I was like Fedora is really really good

that's another reason we use Fedora as a basis because they are really good at generally ironing out those bugs they're not perfect you're still going to hit problems just like every other distro every once in a while but they're pretty good with getting new versions

testing them before putting them out and that's why we use them as a base yeah actually that was one of the things that someone asked me like why specifically fedora is the base but i guess you just addressed it then unless there's anything you want to add to that it was just that and i am you know because i work at red hat and i was already using fedora that's that's kind of a given and because I'm because of that I'm comfortable with the Fedora build system you know um Debian I've I use I've used it once or twice in the past for the like the build system but I would have to kind of go and relearn a lot in terms of learning that build system to get it you get everything imported now um it

has crossed my mind like there have been discussions of porting you know rebasing on top of Ubuntu in the past okay right now we're solid like I'm happy with Fedora Fedora's good um we do have so there's a there's a dev in my Discord very young guy but super super awesome his name is Cosmo dude is a he's a 16 year old from Syria and he's astounding the the stuff this guy does is insane so uh shout out to Cosmo thank you so much dude he's he's helped immensely uh so he he did a branch. He kind of... He still does work with us, but he made PikaOS, which is... He took Ubuntu's

base, and he has ported a lot of the major Nobara changes over to Ubuntu. So that's what it is. So yeah, not everybody likes the Fedora base or likes our like is comfortable with dnf or you know rpms and so in that case that's he was like hey I want to try and do this pico s I was like dude go for it and if if push comes to shove we've already had

discussions about like if I absolutely wanted or needed to rebase on top of Ubuntu we would probably just merge nobara into pika pika OS and rename you know I would like to keep the nobara name he at when at the time we discussed it he wasn't opposed to it right but we don't know what they if that ever happens that's we just I just know that it would be not difficult. There is one thing I'd like to say. His website is way nicer than yours is. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

You used a giant wall of text. Mine, dude, mine was... People rag on me for using freaking WordPress and I just, I don't care. Here's the thing. Like I'm not using, I'm not using WordPress as hosting or anything like that. I use my own hosting. I've used WordPress for years.

I use a very limited set of plugins because we all know that's where like a shit ton of any kind of vulnerabilities come in for WordPress. So I just, I keep it simple. Vulnerabilities come in for WordPress. So I just keep it simple. If it provides what it needs and it does its job and you can use it easily, there's no reason to change it.

Now, obviously, other than the fact that it's butt ugly, but we'll just putting that aside. That's why the very first sentence says it's a work in progress. But you can get it. Yeah, your website's just early access. Like, all of these games that are in early access are 10 years. Early access for eternity. Yeah, you know.

Well, we'll do something about it eventually. And, like, I've had people in the community that have offered, they'll say, hey, you want me to... At some point, I will go ahead and give them the yes, but right now I just need something to be there to give people information right right it's not it's not a major deal like that obviously it it is fun to do it's fun to poke fun at it but like it does it does whatever it

needs to do like you have a download link at the top like that's all you need so let's go back in time a little bit like Like, you said you've been using Linux for a really long time. So, how did you get involved in Linux just in the first place? And what sort of brought you to it? This is going to be a funny, terrible story. Okay. You know, these days, even always, your family has ever said, hey, you know, don't go talking to strangers and

things like that right uh i went into a stranger's house and the re okay so let me let me start right right i was i was maybe 13 14 years old okay i was riding my bike down the street and my uh one of the neighbors on the street had this big pile of junk that they were throwing out so i you know being 13 14 year old i immediately saw some computer stuff in there so i started digging through their computer source like oh what do they have here is there anything i can change at that point my computer was a uh it was a pentium 175 75 megahertz computer. And yeah, I was going to say, do you want to age yourself?

Oh, well, that was the first one that I had of my own. The one before that, that my family owned was a Wang. I three 86. I, but I didn't know too much about that one.

I didn't really start getting into it until I got the, the Pentium one of my own. But anyway, so this, this neighbor had these computer parts and I started digging into them trying to see what I can salvage. And the neighbor came out and he came out and he asked me, he's like,

Hey, do you like computers? Cause he noticed what I was digging in. And I was like, yeah, I was just sorry. I didn't mean to bother you. I was just trying to figure out if there was anything that you were throwing out that I might be able to use.

And he goes, you know, he's like, have you ever heard? And that's when he popped the question. Have you ever heard of Linux? And I was like, no. He's like, and he was a younger dude. He was pretty chill. He had a couple, you know, a couple people hanging out or whatnot. He seemed like he was safe in my 13-year-old brain for whatever reason.

He was like, hey, do you want to come see something? I was like, sure. What's danger? Let's go inside this stranger's house. I went in there, and he brought me over to his computer and he showed me his computer that at that point was running i think it was it had to be it had to be either debian or mandrake one of the two at the very beginning but he showed it to me and of course he had like the matrix screensaver and stuff on there at the time and i just thought

it was so freaking cool. And I was just like, Oh, what is this? It's so cool. He showed me all the different customized window, a window management stuff and theming. And,

uh, what was the, what was it called at the time where you could like zoom out the entire desktop into a cube? Um, this compass V it was it was fusion fusion something um it was really old oh uh yeah i'm but he anyway he was just he was showing me that stuff and i just thought it was so freaking cool and he's just like yeah this is yeah this is linux you should check it out

and um i think it was debian because that's that's kind of what i remember that was the kind of also the first distro that i like really really dug into on my own um but at that point ed after that i went home and i was i was hooked at that point. Because at that point, I was 13, 14 years old, but I was already making like AltaVista webpages and stuff like that. And like my own blogs and things like that. All the little 13, 14 year old nerdy things at that time. And so I remember maybe like,

it piqued my interest. I kept using Windows at that point for a little bit longer, but I remember Debbie in the back of my head. And then at one point I remember I had gotten an Nvidia card and I decided I was going to install Debbie in and try to get this in video card working on Debbie. And at that time, and keep in mind,

this was early two thousands and nvidia drivers were shit let alone trying to get them working on debian right right i must have spent like i don't know maybe like two three four days on that thing but i did get it working i eventually did get it working and once i got it working i was like this is the coolest shit ever and i was hooked since then obviously after i got it working the thrill was gone it was done i was like great this is the coolest shit ever. And I was hooked since then. Obviously, after I got it working, the thrill was gone. It was done. I was like, great, this is awesome. I got it working.

What do I do now? I can't run any games. Let's reinstall Windows. That was 14-year-old me. But that was my first dash in Linux. A couple years later, I got some Mandrake Linux uh discs i remember i had asked for them for a gift and i got them and i dug into linux a little bit more that time but again it didn't stick and it really didn't stick until like my mid my early to mid 20s when i started working for web

like doing web design because at that point i wasn't gaming i was mainly just doing dev work and uh you know that's how i learned the basic lamp stack and how i learned php and basic html and css and java and javascript well javascript for the web-based stuff um i didn't really get into java later on until the twitch stuff because I started streaming on Twitch and I wanted my own Twitch chat chat bot okay and that was a previous existing bot that I had found that was kind of like rusty it needed some work and we started fixing it up it was me and a couple of guys at that time but that was all all java it was all java based and that you know part of the reason that we kept it all java based is that we wanted to be cross-platform so that it ran on linux and that's kind of what got me just like slowly but

surely stick on linux um yeah and then at that point i just had a love-hate relationship between windows and linux because i wanted a game and Windows was hit or miss with the game. And then I also wanted to use Linux for all my dev stuff. And ultimately, I ended up just fully switching. And now I do what I do now, which is get those games running on Linux if I can. So is that part of the, like, just throwing yourself headfirst into Linux?

Is that, like, part of the reason why you're... Danger in a stranger's house? Throwing myself headfirst into into linux is that like part of the reason why you're danger in a stranger's house throwing myself headfirst yeah i guess that also adds up doesn't it like is that is that part of the reason why you got interested in trying to get like wine working better and now you're doing proton ge yeah it's just you dive in headfirst the things that i've learned is dive in head first. If you don't immediately make progress, don't, don't just give up. If you're going to distro hop, distro hop to find something that you're comfortable with. But if you've, and if you find something you're comfortable with and you hit another problem, at that point I say, don't distro hop. Instead, try digging into the problem to

figure out what's wrong because once you get to that point and you can slowly but surely start figuring out what's wrong on that one distro that you like you can then later on apply that elsewhere to other components whether it's on the same distro or on different distro and it helps a lot to kind of get comfortable with linux in general rather than you know i get new people all the time that come in, they're just like, Oh, you know, I've tried like four different distros, I can't get this into work. It's like, well, you know, under the hood, they're kind of sort of all the same thing. Maybe you should look under the hood, or at least try. And what's the point if it's, if it's already broken, how worse can's if it's already broken how worse can you make it especially or how much worse can you make it especially if you're just going to consider reinstalling anyway you might as well just try and try and fix it if you can i've never really been one to distro like i've used other gestures before um when i was studying i used buntu a bit

i'd use sent to us a bit but Arch is like the place that I've been. Was there ever a period where you were doing disk draw hopping? Or had you just found places you were comfortable, stuck with that until you found something better, and then... Oh, before Arch, for sure. Like I said, I had been introduced to Debian. I had used Mandrake. At one point, I had Red Hat disks that I had never

really messed with. Ubuntu, again, I had started using Ubuntu shortly before I got into using Arch. And then once I got into Arch and I learned that, you know, started learning a lot about Arch, that was also the same time that I had started making my Arch install YouTube videos. Like, I had one each year that I would put out. Wait, do these? And they blew up, like, way, way, way earlier. They, like, super blew up.

Are they just on the Glory Circle channel or down on the other channel? I think they're on there. They're probably in the Linux Guides channel. I haven't uploaded in quite a while. Four months. Yeah, I'm periodic with it. I would love to be consistent, but I'm so busy, man. That's not something that I can do on my day-to-day basis currently.

I would absolutely love to. And I know people out there still watch my stuff all the time, and they love it when I upload stuff I just man I just not enough time no I totally get that that's what we have we have 2016 Arch Linux network manager Wi-Fi setup guide 2016 Arch Linux EFI install guide part one preparation that is a title and a half 2017 Arch Linux EFI install guide oh there's a part two of the EFI install guide part 1 preparation disposition that is a title and a half 2017 Arch Linux EFI install guide oh there's a part 2 of the EFI install guide of 2016 Arch Linux how to install wine

with all dependencies these are great titles I love these titles oh the oldest one 2015 Arch Linux EFI install guide part 1 preparation disposition you know to this day the network one that's on there yeah i still get comments to this day with that network one that with people that are like dude this fixed

my issue and it's from like 10 years ago and i'm like hey it's kind of crazy how relevant that still is isn't it that's nuts four months ago seven years later still useful one year ago thanks a lot sir fix my wi-fi and xc arch this six year old tutorial helped me cheers yeah that's still useful that's why i keep it up there because it's still useful information and even to this day most of the stuff still sticks and like i remember when i had first gotten started and I went and posted those guys on the Arch Reddit. You know how the Arch Reddit goes with pretty much anything that's a guide. It's like,

why are you going to post this? It's going to be obsolete in a year. You're not going to keep up with it. At this point, I'm like, look, you're not wrong, but a lot of the information is still useful yeah like and it still helps the community out like uh that's just the arch reddit being arch reddit yeah well i'm surprised there wasn't like more pushback about like um arch install being added

into the arch iso the CLI installer. Yeah. Yeah, I could see people getting angry about that. But at the same time, it's like... It is an amazing learning tool. It's excellent for people to read the documentation, but it's terrible for user adoption. Well, I think you should go through that manual install process. Oh, yeah. I fully agree. Like, I don't want... Like't want like i've done it like a bunch of times i

don't want to do it again like i know how to do it see that's the thing is like you have the people that have never done it and should learn it and that's what that's great for but at the same time you have the people who have used it for years and don't want to go through that process for the 500 millionth time yeah it's well i guess that was part of the reason why you made the bar as well like you exactly yeah you've made these changes a bunch of times before so might as well just put them all in one place and just basically exactly like i've said this about a bunch of distros but your distro very much so your distro is basically a glorified install script in the form of an ISO yeah yeah pretty much

like it just it just puts like you don't have to worry about install like someone did ask me like why isn't Nabara just an install script but like there's no point like running all these changes locally when you can just do them all like once and then distribute like that

as a complete thing well not only that but bug reporting like if I made an install script and then it was still you know Fedora people would start opening bugs for Fedora and Fedora devs would turn around and tell them oh you got a third party package here

or you have a custom this and that here we can't help you with that. What are they going to do? At that point, they're on Fedora, and the Fedora devs are telling them, hey, that's not our stuff. I actually didn't know that. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so now

I have my Discord. So a lot of people get annoyed with me with not having bug trackers open. Now, for Proton, I don't having bug trackers open now for proton um i don't have bug trackers open for proton because there are a million repeated questions that just happen on a daily basis that i don't want on that tracker but for nobara i actually have uh the bug tracker open for the nobara images the nobara iso images there's a repo for that and i do get bugs that are open regularly on that that i handle um anything that's not there again we either pin it

in discord and most of the stuff that's pinned in discord i will also make a document for on the web page that's why we have our our document section so a lot of people may not know that but you know if it's if it's not if it's pinned discord and you don't use discord check the documents section of our website because that's it's likely there well with yng and proton ge i could imagine a lot of people sending you bug reports that should just be upstreamed like they're not problems that you have in your project it's just a more general proton or wine problem uh well let's again that's why we have the separate channels in our discord like i have a proton wine what i mean is like if you have like the bug reports open on the repo I mean, luckily, we actually don't get too much of that

with the Nobara images repository. So surprisingly, there's not a lot of bugs open on that, thankfully. I do try to handle the ones that I can. And if it's in the wrong place, I will just straight up tell them, hey, this is a problem with XYZ component that isn't part of Nobara. But we thankfully don't get too much of that on the nobara side on the proton side we get that all the time yeah that's what that's what i was more concerned about like consider like protons a more widespread thing than

just nobara is yeah yeah with proton i used to get that like all the freaking time and uh for me as much as people absolutely hate it discord is just easier for me like i'm one guy i can't track 500 000 uh bug reports that are open on you know you might if if i had those open and somebody had a problem somebody had a problem and I got like say 100 bug reports in a day their issue would immediately get knocked off the top of the page and I would not see it right and I'm the I'm pretty much the only person that works mainly on proton ge for regular maintenance I do you know we do get a lot of people that'll submit fixes for like proton fixes fixes or for FSR or specific components or patches. But for keeping everything going on a regular day-to-day basis, it's just me. I can't go through all of that.

It's easier for me to see it on Discord. That makes sense. So you obviously have to test a lot of games to make sure things are working. But what games are you just finding yourself just regularly playing now like what what i know for i know 40 we talked about that a little bit 14 uh diablo is a big one like um you know people love or hate it i've i played diablo 3 for God knows how long. I'm not as high level as some people who still played it nonstop,

but I think when I quit, I was maybe around 500-something Paragon levels. So I had sunk a massive amount in that game, and by the time when Diablo 4 came out, I was stoked. I was so happy that game came out so i i jumped into that uh you know got a level 50 something character beat the campaign and now i have a level 40 something hardcore character and i'm slowly but surely working my way through that whenever i have free time so um yeah that's pretty much it i used to play a lot of warframe too uh i don't i don't play warframe too much these days mainly i just pop in if somebody has a problem check it out but um that used to be a big one on my list these days it's mainly just ff14 and diablo that takes up

enough time by itself just occasionally occasionally i'll hop into like a single player game just to you know enjoy the story for a little bit like uh i think one of the other ones that i started playing a while was god god of war the first one um you know even though it's been out a while i still haven't played the first one or the reboot first one the reboot first one yeah yeah yeah so that one uh another one that i was hooked on for a little while was horizon zero dawn okay uh a lot of the playstation titles that have come to pc like uh those i generally get hooked to those pretty quick so yeah but on a day on a regular daily basis pretty much just

diablo or f at 14 well actually we talked about this before but i do want you to bring up like how long you've been playing 14 for because like way longer than i have uh so i i don't i don't know the year okay it was a long time ago but i did i played the ff14 original beta before they redid it as a roam reborn so i played the beta i wasn't a regular in the original release i just i had played the beta and then i i've played like officially played since a roam reborn released okay okay the game was a very i've seen like videos of like changes over the years and the game was a very very different game back the things have been very streamlined now yeah and like even though even though i didn't like super officially play before a realm reborn i have all of the physical

collector's editions including the original final fantasy 14 collector's edition release, and the Realm Reborn release. Both of them. It's cool. I look at it now, I have all the little collector stuff from the original release on my account too, and I'm just like, oh yeah, I got this stuff, nobody else has it. Those little tweaks.

Was it the XIV spoke to you, or had you been a big Final Fantasy fan before? I have been a big final fantasy fan before i have been a big final fantasy fan for a long long long time um up until so up until uh i want to say 12 i think 12 is when i stopped i played everything up until 12 um I played everything up until 12. Playing through 12 right now. Yeah, I think that's where I stopped.

I played everything else up until then. I own all of them on Steam. All of them. Every time there's a new one that comes out, I'm like, give me, give me. But yeah, Final Fantasy XIV, it also came in at a time where i was kind of burnt out on wow okay yeah i had played wow for a little while um i played it on and i played it on on and off until up all the way up from release through uh at least through warlord to drain or

about that time is when i stopped jeez I used to be a huge MMO fan like I've played through all the main stuff on SWTOR I played all through ESO when I came out I played both of those since release obviously Final Fantasy 14

OG WoW shoot OG WoW was another one that I had played when i when i was like 15 16 years old i had to be 16 because i remember that time i had also worked at an internet cafe um yeah so i've i've had my share of rpgs i i didn't i had friends that were like really into wow that were trying to get me to play it at one point, but by that point, I was in high school. I was already burned out of MMOs because I played RuneScape

from 2000 and... whatever year the Grand Exchange was at, like 2006, 2007, up until Evolution of Combat. So RuneScape 3, where a bunch of people quit because they were sicker they didn't like the direction it was going that is one that i never got into like i don't get me wrong i've logged in i've played maybe an hour or two of it sure sure but i have i never like fully dived into

runescape out of all the all the rpg all the old rpg center out there that was one that i never like deeply dived into well runescape is a very different kind of mmo to modern games like modern mmos are all about the end game runescape obviously now has it has some raids it has some end game content but like the entire game is the leveling experience like you cannot play runescape without the leveling experience. Yeah, yeah. As much, you know... You can say that about a lot of MMOs these days now. Like Final Fantasy XIV is a perfect example of that. The leveling experience... Well, okay.

It's more the story experience with XIV rather than the leveling experience. The story experience, yeah. Leveling is sort of mind-numbing. I would say up until around level 30 yes sure yeah level 30 is when it really kind of starts taking off and i also that's also why i'm really glad that they eventually included heaven's ward in a trial now storm blood with the next patch yeah yeah i'm really really happy that they did that because the original game the realm reborn by

itself was just not enough to get a good experience yeah a lot of the jobs just don't really some of right now it's probably the only job that feels because it doesn't get any more buttons it just stops with getting more buttons after like 56 or something that just changes what the button looks like. But a lot of the jobs just don't start playing properly until at least level 60 or 70. Like playing a level 50 Sage, for example, like the job just doesn't work. Like you can get all the content easy. You can get through it,

but it just doesn't flow like it's supposed to or playing a dancer at that level or playing a dark knight at that level. Like a lot of these jobs just don't work at level 50 yeah you know i kind of feel a little bit that way with samurai like i play samurai currently and it was such a change for me because i went i i started as pugilist and then went Monk and then went yeah and pugilist was too much for me uh then I went Ninja and Ninja was a blast Ninja was a lot of fun to play um and then I switched from when when Stormblood came out despite a lot of people not liking Stormblood I loved Stormblood I had a lot of fun in it and when i the

reason i switched for samurai wasn't for the pve or the raids of the story it was because samurai is a blast to play in pvp and pvp in that game is not as big as other games but oh man i had so much yeah that was when pvp was the guess, yeah, a lot of the jobs just... Yeah. I was like, summoner PvP didn't make any sense. But I guess, yeah, I guess maybe samurai was good. Samurai, at that time, was so much fun. So they have a lot of dashes.

Well, I don't know if you would call it a lot, but samurais have gap closers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was one of the things that made it really fun in pvp is that you could just gap close and it was you know they have that global cooldown but it wasn't so much of a problem for samurai as it was for some other classes with with uh you know if i did pvp for ninja i oh god i was getting my ass whooped but like i when i switched to samurai is like swing

this way knock a couple people knock one or two people down zoom over this way and knock a couple people down it was so much easier it was just a lot of fun that's what got me hooked on samurai i'm still samurai currently but i'll probably change when i start like really picking up the game i don't think i've played samurai p PvP. I've unlocked Samurai. I've played like a little bit of it. But right now I'm playing... I'm going through the story as Sage, like just through the Endwalker stuff.

I've got both Sage and Reaper to 90. So I could play either of them. But when I first started the game, I picked a Gladiator and turned into Paladin. Paladin's great, but I don't know. I know a lot of people, if you want to see people just whining about stuff, just go to the FFXIV forums. They're always complaining about something. But I think all the jobs are fun to play.

There's a bunch that I still need to get around to messing with. I need to mess around with Red Mage still. I need to unlock Dragoon. But of the jobs that I have played, which is the majority of them, they're all fun to play in their own way. Yeah, yeah. I think the next class that I'll probably try is Gunslinger.

Gunslinger looks pretty cool. The, uh, wait. Did you mean... Or was it... Machinist? Gunbreaker? Yeah, Machin wait. Machinist? Gunbreaker? Yeah, Machinist. Machinist, yeah. The one with guns.

Yeah, yeah. Pretty much the only one with guns. Well, when Dawn Trail comes out, maybe, like, we know the new job has a sword, but if it's a pirate, they're probably going to have a gun in their offhand. No, just reintrodu reproduce gun blades problem solved

gun breaker is a gun blade yeah okay yeah you're right oh man I forgot that class exists so wait there's so many classes now I don't want to be anywhere near that balance team that sounds like a nightmare well i mean that's also probably why the game is very much pve focused

and not pvp focused well it doesn't have at least in the pvp it doesn't have the wow problem of being geared pvp yeah yeah and wow well the other problem with that is wow has their their pvp specific year then they have to balance that out as well yeah yeah yeah that's always been a problem so how far are you actually have you played through the story of 14 are you still making way through i'm still making my way through endwalker right now okay yeah i think i i had i had recently finished shadow bringers so i'm still like early on in endwalker just kind of making my pace whenever i hop into the game no that's fair that's fair i guess you got a bunch of other things that are more important to be doing love the game to death but it's just uh there's a lot of stuff. Well, I guess one other thing I'll

bring up is I see on your Twitter you randomly post some anime stuff. I saw that you're caught up on One Piece by the looks of it. Oh, yes. I made the mistake of recently starting to watch it, so I'm like 70 episodes in.

It's great. Oh, good. So you've passed Usopp's story, hopefully. Yeah, Usopp's story was the first point was a little bit rough. Yeah. I would say out of the entire beginning, Usopp's was the worst. That was the hardest for me to get through with the stupid cat. I don't know if you're going to remember this part of it, but I'm up to the island with the two giants that were fighting.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a pretty good storyline. The Elbath. Elbath? I don't remember. I think it's TH. Yeah, it's Fablebackers. Yeah. It's a... I didn't even realize that.

What, you didn't? No, I never thought about that you're like oh it's Fablebackers like well holy shit you learn something new every day but uh that was pretty good I I'm trying to remember

what comes next I think I think Chopper comes up soon I've read most oh you haven't gotten to Chopper yet so I've read the Oh you haven't gotten to Chopper yet So I've read the manga a long time ago I got up to Whole Cake So I've read through all this stuff I read when Whole Cake was current content

So I've forgotten Everything that's happened Well If you've gotten up to Whole Cake You're pretty close because Whole Cake came before Wano There's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in Wayno, but Whole Cake came right before that. Yeah, now I'm just going back and watching it.

And watching it is a whole different experience. I know major story beats like Ace dies, Skypiea, things like that. I know these big events, but I don't remember any of the in-between stuff. Are you... So I'm assuming you're watching sub but yeah um if you get bored one day uh i would say check out the dub especially like maybe maybe at least for like the skypea arc okay because the voice acting for the dub is great for the English dub and in particular

the Skypiea Skypiea arc was one of my favorites and Zorro is really funny in that arc so obviously Luffy's got his moments where he's making fun of various people but in general I

actually had watched the English dub up through probably through Skypea, at least. And then when the English dub ended, I was like, well, shit, there's no more English episodes for me to watch, but I want to keep watching the

rest of it, so that's when I switched over to sub. And it's like, I don't have anything in sub. I like subs, most of the stuff that I watch is in subs. But sometimes I'm multitasking and it's easier just for me to hear what's going on. No, that's totally fair. I've picked up enough Japanese being a weeb over the years that I can half pay attention now. It's good.

If you ask me to speak any Japanese i can't do it but if you're oh yeah if i'm like passively paying attention to a conversation like i can understand enough to like you know if i've got some like clothes that need to be put away like i can step away for a moment and still follow along what's going on yeah but yeah at some point in the future i'll eventually catch up on uh on one piece but that's a while away i did see you're watching uh bocce recently as well yep i finished bocce bocce was hilarious it's freaking awesome that was uh that was not expected like every once in a while you gotta you gotta watch something different. You have your typical Shonen Jump stuff.

You have your typical Isekai stuff. And your typical fantasy stuff. And then every once in a while you just gotta watch something different. And Bochy is one of those shows that's just like... That's not normally what you'd go for there. Yeah. Well, I mean

it all depends on what my mood is. I've watched all the typical stuff, and then like... What was the other one? Something is a girl with a redhead. It's like this girl that's a tomboy, and she has this best friend, and she's had a crush on him for forever and she's trying to get him to realize that she's a girl and has that

kind of interest in him. Tom and Chana's go. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. So that was also a really good one. The guy that she's interested in that's her best friend and her other girl best friend they just hate each other and they just go at each other's throats non-stop and it's like bro you guys are brutal but it's so funny it was oh man that's that's one of those other like

off-ball ones that i really enjoyed i don't know how I haven't watched that, because I remember seeing, like, as the manga was being translated, like, it just got posted on Reddit for like years and years. Like, I'd seen so much of it already, but somehow the anime slipped by me. I need to go check it out. Yeah, it's worth checking out. I've seen a lot of the animes that have short runs i've probably watched right and the main reason for that is that exercise bike behind me that's as soon as i get off of work i do that for an hour and i it's right in front of the tv so i'll pop in like two or three episodes of whatever i'm watching at that time. And a week goes by, I'm done with the season. Right, okay.

That's a good way to do it. Yeah, if anyone wants to make cardio less boring, just watch something. Cardio... The only reason people don't like cardio is because it's boring. Just, you have a phone. Just put something on your phone.

Yeah, the biggest thing is just to take your mind off of counting down the time yeah because you're gonna be out of breath you're gonna be sweating it's gonna suck well but if you're not paying attention to that then time goes by pretty quick for me i've tried to use music the problem with music is i very quickly realize how long songs are and then i start counting songs which gives me the exact same problem so i need something where it's like you know with obviously an anime is gonna be like 20 something minutes long but like that's a bit longer of a time and also it's hard to work out especially if you're not seeing the episode before where in the episode you are when it's songs you've heard like you know how far in

that song you are yeah and also the other thing with anime though is like if you're watching a really good part of the story arc and like the episode like say say you're on the bike episode ends you start the next episode the time that you need to be on the bike ends but the episode's still going and it's like at a really intense part you might be so i've had times where i'm so tuned into the episode and then i look at the time on my bike and i'm like oh i was supposed to end 10 15 minutes ago whoops oh well at that point it's not a bad thing yeah yeah it's right it's better to just forget that you're actually doing that than constantly keeping tabs on it was like oh god can i get off this thing yet

you know well i guess with that we sort of passed the two hour mark now oh wow yeah yeah time goes by that flew by so let the people know where they can find you where they can find your stuff uh whatever you want to direct people do okay uh well my discord if you got if anybody has questions for like nobara or um or Proton GE or anything like that, Discord is the easiest spot for me to see that. Oh, so you might as well be from the same Discord, do you? Yep, yep. It's all from the same Discord.

It's linked on the Nobara webpage, bottom right corner for the Discord. YouTube, even though I'm not active on there, if people do end up commenting on one of my YouTube comments, I see those almost immediately because I always have my email up. But yeah, that's pretty much...

If you need to contact me, that's where I am. I will, again, really shout out my Patreon subscribers. I'm not asking for patrons here at all that's not the point here my point is to super shout out the patrons that I do have because you guys are awesome um there have been people on there that have supported me for years now and I am ever great like never-endingly grateful for those people. There is a lot of generous people in this space.

I've had people on mine who've been there for three or four years. And I look on Patreon and you can see the total of how much they've given. And you're like, that's a lot of money. Yeah. Like, you could buy a car with that. It adds up over time, man. It's really awesome to see people that are just, like, super helpful and supportive. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

So there's nothing else you want to mention? Is that... That's it. That's all I got, pretty much. As for me, the gaming channel is Brodeon Games. Right now, I'm still playing through Final Fantasy XVI. I'm almost done with this. Probably got like another three or four streams left. Also, I'm probably done with Portal Co-op by the time this comes out.

So, I have no idea what I'll be playing. Maybe God of War 2. Maybe a Kingdom Hearts. I don't know. Come over to the stream and you'll idea what I'll be playing. Maybe God of War 2. Maybe a Kingdom Hearts. I don't know. Come over to the stream and you'll see what I'm playing. I have no idea. Because this is coming out in like a couple of weeks. Main channel, Brody Robinson.

Do Linux videos there six days a week. There'll be videos there. I don't know. Check them out. Something fun probably. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, the video version can be found on YouTube at Tech over t if you're watching the video you can find the audio pretty much on any audio podcast platform there is an rss feed put it in your favorite app and you're

good to go so i'll give you the final word what do you want to say thank you everybody that too did thank you everybody that's hanging out thank you everybody that watched well that uh hung out and watched there's nobody live hanging out but thank you absolutely and see you guys later