Tech Over Tea - Developers Of PikaOS Linux | Ferreo & Cosmo

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Today we have some of the main developers of the PikaOS Linux project on the show to chat about the distro, what it offers and what makes it special in the landscape of other Linux distros available.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Website: https://wiki.pika-os.com/en/home==========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 Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://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 back to the show. I'm the Zoologist, Brody Robertson, and today we have the developers, or some of the developers, the lead developers, yeah that, we'll go with that one, the lead developers of the Pico OS project. Welcome to the show. How about you introduce yourselves and then we can talk about, we can talk about what the project is. I guess, so you don't talk over each other. Ferio, you start and then we'll go to Cosmo. Morning, I'm Ferio, I'm a software developer by trade and I'm one of the lead maintainers

on PicaOS. Okay, I thought you were were gonna say more than that, but sure that works. Cosmo. Hello, I'm Cosmo, a teenage developer who's the lead developer of Pika, my favorite programming language is Rust. Hey, at least you said a little bit more about yourself.

So firstly, I just wanna say thank you to Kylo Neko for like breaching the gap here because I was aware of the project for quite a while now. I think I first heard about it back when I had... one of the times I had Gloria Zagrol on the show. Yeah I think he brought it up a couple of times, but I hadn't really looked too deeply into the project back then. And I wasn't really sure how to get in contact with anyone involved in it. So I didn't do that, but now we're here.

So welcome. Hello. So about that, we also were trying to find a way to like contact you. I am a fan of the Tech over T show. Yeah. Interview with Gloria Sagro and I wanted to add my own answer to these questions. Yeah. For anyone who might be curious, who's not aware, I have like the easiest way if you don't have like a Twitter or a mastodon, my email is listed on my YouTube account. So for anybody who wants to get in contact, that's the easiest way.

I'm not going to say it here because I don't want to deal with more AI scrapers having my email. Have the ones that already have it now are enough of a problem with all the uh, the useless spam that I'm getting. I don't need more of it. But yes, go to the YouTube channel. So, I guess the very first place to start here is at a high level, what is Pico OS? Pico OS is basically a Debian distribution that's way more up to date from DEs to Mesa drivers to like back end stuff like ZIG and C, drivers, to like back end stuff like Zig and C, GCC, Rust. We update all that.

On top of that, we got our own configs. Some are our own things. Some are stolen from cache OS and no borrow. And we also contribute back to them. So it's fair, I guess. We also use package optimizations just like cache us x86 v3 and LTO to improve upon Debian's performance. I do definitely want to touch on all of those things in more detail, but I think the... I guess the first place I want to get to from here is, why going with something debian based?

Because obviously, the thing this project gets compared to quite often is going to be something like Nabara. But why build off of a debian base? Because you could go with an arch base, you could do a fedora base. Why debian specifically? We chose the Ubuntu debian space because there's already a million awesome distros for fedora and arch. For arch you have like cachey OS already. If we want to do Fedora, we just contribute to Nobara, that's better. The Debian and Ubuntu space, like everything is out of date and doesn't have these performance optimizations. So it's kind of like an empty

space to conquer. On top of that, like for a normal user, I would suggest a dev base, like a new user who wants to download the Minecraft launcher, he would go to minecraft.net, you would find the dev there. So that's why we chose, eyes also just like the bien literally Yeah, prior to there being things like flat packs and app images Deb was sort of treated as the Default distribution message method for proprietary packages for better or worse because it It doesn't it works out well enough if you're dealing with debbie in or a buddhintu but I imagine sometimes there can be package

dependency mismatches there if you're using things are a bit more new than what those actually expect we don't seem to have experienced that. Like, we didn't get any reports of that. Although in theory it is possible. In the main area we get that is with like kernel modules, like dkms packages, because we use a much newer kernel than most Debian based systems. Yeah, that's, well in that case it is very, very version dependent. You want to have the DKMS modules built against that kernel version.

Um, I can definitely see how that would be a problem. But I guess things like, well to be fair, I was going to say things like Steam, but no, you just grab There should be a regular pack for anyway I kind of think of that many things you would want to grab from the websites directly That there wouldn't be a better installation method already if you have any example if you have any examples of that I would like to hear them Basically Google Chrome the Minecraft launcher discord as we sometimes miss if you package it yourself You miss an update then it does the whole loop thing right? We'll ask you do you want the tar GZ or a dip now if you were an arch? You would have to change the package build of the aor thingy But here you just download the new depth

But here you just download the new dep. Fair enough. Yeah Arch manages to somehow keep things relatively smooth with The discord updates usually when the discord update there will be a new package version within a couple of minutes But without having some sort of tooling in place to make that happen, that would be a bunch of additional work because Discord, they can't just make things work in a way that makes sense. They need to throw out updates every couple of days that just make the idea of packaging annoying. It makes sense in the Windows and the MacOS model where self updating binaries are a fairly normal thing but on Linux when you have this package management system

you know, we've all seen we've all seen Discord complain because it needs to install a new package version. I guess the biggest gripe with that is that it doesn't let you just continue to launch anyway It forces you to go right which is just ridiculous like I would understand if It was like hey You can launch but oh if you're not on the absolute latest version I don't know voice chat doesn't work like sure. I guess that's far that like that's fine I I don't know, voice chat doesn't work. Like, sure, I guess that's fine. Like, that's fine.

I don't know why Steam's never had an issue with it. Now that I think about it, because Steam does its own internal updating as well. I'm sure there's some reason for, or some method they've built in place to make that not become a problem. I would have to ask someone about how that happens. The Steam package is like like basically a small script. You just launch it and it downloads a Steam client

in your home directory, which is writable by the program itself. So when you update the Steam package, you only need to update the scripts. If the scripts don't need a change it just updates them in your home directory the steam UI client actually it doesn't have that problem I guess that makes sense but this could yeah but this cord is a chromium chromium react thingy when they update you have to change the chromium binary in the

root directory every time So they need package Just for that That's fun What I don't like this highly music is this popular Same yeah, it's a problem with chops isn't it until they get like Popular there's no point using it right? Yeah. Yeah, so you kind of just stuck where all the people are

Yeah, I've had people be like hey, why don't you make a gilded or why don't you make this? Why don't you make that like? for the five people that use it like Yeah, I guess that's cool. But at the end of the day, a chat application, it could be the greatest thing ever. It could have the, uh, some amazing feature set. But if the people that you want to talk to aren't on it, it basically has zero value.

Yeah, that's absolutely true So but also like discord is internally the best one when you get get in it has the best interface IRC sucks IRC is a great tech to build off of like the the twitch chat is built off of IRC but from a user experience I know there's people that love IRC who've been using it for 30 years but let's be honest the user experience of most IRC clients is not great. It's fine and you get used to it. And to be fair, Discord has its issues. It's very cluttered in a lot of places.

But it makes sense why people sort of gravitated towards that back when that started coming out. Especially when there wasn't really something that fit in that space. People were moving over from things like Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Skype. We didn't really have something that fit in that Discord way of communicating we have now.

Unless you wanted to go back to IRC. Yeah, like Pride element, it's an absolute joke compared to discord. Mm-hmm. It feels so barren Yeah, it's gotten better My main problem with with matrix is the moderation experience for a server is just It's a mess and you can't delete a server you need to

It's a mess and you can't delete a server you need to ban everyone from it or send this very specific JSON package that effectively tells the home server to Treat that as like a null server, and then it will clean it up There's no clean hey delete the server button which I've wanted a couple of times because I've made rooms before and I Didn't want them around anymore button which I've wanted a couple of times because I've made rooms before and I didn't want them around anymore. Yeah, a little. My biggest gripe with Matrix is like the more people are in your community the slower the

entire experience gets for everybody in it. It just... Yeah. Like defeats the point. Yeah, it defeats the point Yeah, it's I I like the tech don't get me wrong and I wish we could all be using some open source communication standard, but We don't so, you know, it is what it is basically So going back to Peter OS

the obvious comparisons that people are gonna make are things like hey why Use Pika OS when there's this Nobara thing or why use Pika OS when there is this Catios thing and obviously you mentioned it having a Debian base as well But for a lot of people the base of the distro doesn't really matter it's Everything else around that. So what else does Pico actually actually provide to the user? Pico OS like I mentioned has the cache OS and Nobough that is but on top of that we have our own patches some things feropools for kernels and stuff the GUI

applications such as the update manager the kernel manager and the new device manager thing we made these these things make the user experience for managing these things a lot better. And we also like export them to other distros. Nobara's GUI applications are PicoOS applications exported to Nobara. Can you talk more about those pieces of software that you've built, the device manager and things like that? Because I wasn't aware of those. Yeah, the device manager is like...

They're all like JTK for Lebedoite or Rust apps. So it basically allows you to... So it basically allows you to... It lists all PCI and USB devices you have. Puts them in classes. You can click on them. You can unload the driver or load it. Or make it permanently not load the driver on boot time. Or undo that. and called pkos driver manager it basically had a net app like a json that's downloaded on runtime it has a database of all packages that could be installed

for a certain device we basically got rid of that program and merged it into this device manager so let me send you a screenshot yes that'd be nice for the question is will I remember to cut out the dead air or will I just leave it in that's man that lock was a bitch yeah I basically need a VPN to send you stuff embeds in discord I'm under sanctions Did it did you receive it yes, yes Yes, so you can basically see There's like these four buttons under where it lists the device info. Mm-hmm

You can unload the driver for the Nvidia and make it not cloud on boot and such and on the available profiles list you can see you can install different versions of the Nvidia driver. Right, so it's just providing a graphical method to interact with what would normally be some sort of uh cly command it would run not even a command like this thing specifically you need to echo into sysfs there is no command i just wrote a script and this is like the front end of it let me send you another screenshot of what this looks like okay okay it's

gonna be faster this time okay awesome cool let's see if we have to cut out the dead air oh there we go awesome yes you can basically see Basically see Okay, so we have the Device manager. Yes and driver manager combo right Okay, okay So so I've already just learned. I'm sorry for anyone just listening on the left hand side There's a big list of the devices with the PCI devices

USB devices under that and then the right hand side we have the VGA compatible controllers here Yeah, so for the next program It's our update manager. Let me show that. So it basically allows you to update apps and flat-back packages and manage the repos for them. Let me send you the screenshot lists. Okay.

It's similar things to exist in like Linux Minute and stuff, but we tried using those and we had nothing but problems with people. It's just not working or people having upgrade issues and things. Any idea why those could be the issue? Could be an issue? They were just coded in horrible Python I is the Python bad, or you just not a fan of Python Like it's not really great for this sort of thing because you need to load multiple things and and on Biden things. Also Linux Mint specifically doesn't code them well. Like to be honest. Well that's as good of a reason as any to make something in Rust then.

Yeah. Do you have that screen? And like it, and like, it's the new, the programs that we make ourselves are best optimized for the Pico experience. Uh, did you mean to send a screenshot? Cause all I'm seeing in the chat is texts saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's they're coming. Oh, okay. You want to like separate it. I see. I see. Oh, okay. You want to like separate it. I see. I see that makes sense

My connection is horrible, please help Oh you want to okay you had sent six at once. Okay, that explains the problem. Okay. Okay. Okay. I that makes sense cool um Sweet, okay. That makes sense. Cool. Sweet. Okay, so the first one here we have is just like a general home screen showing you that you have updates available. On the left-hand side there is like a list of all of the upgrades you can do through apt. Okay, so this is for like all of the different things that you manage on your system. So you can update Flatpak through this as well. Okay, that's cool. Okay, that's cool.

What is this app? Oh, the app settings page is the repos you grab from. Okay. So basically like, you know, we used to steal the Ubuntu on. So basically you would have the updater and the software properties GTK thingy. Basically they needed each other. They were dependent on each other and they both sucked ass.

So we rewrote them. Let's see, flat pack settings is basically the same thing. It lets you set your Flatpak repos, which to be honest, you're probably never going to touch anyway, unless you want to have like some beta repo. And I think that last, is that last screenshot a replica of an earlier one? Oh no, no, it's not. No, this shows you like what happens if you click on a package you can get the description, the developer info, size and such and see where the URI is coming from. Oh, okay, that's nice So this is built in Rust.

What toolkit is it built with? LibreDewaite. Oh, so you're using the Rust GTK bindings? Yes. Okay. They're actually great. I've heard very mixed things about them. Yeah, can you talk about that? I actually would like to know.

Like the most annoying thing with them is basically multi-threading. But that can be easily resolved with the async channel thingy Otherwise like yeah, it's class-based so it looks really good with GUIs working with them elements And they're fast AF Considering that you're using Rust what made you want to go with the would you want to go with GTK like there are native rust toolkits or were you not a fan of the state they are in or you know what exactly was wrong with those I mean I originally was a Python GTK3 dev. I see.

OK. That's like the first thing I tried. Why did I go with that? Basically, Python was my first language. So that's the Python part. And GTK is like the GTK3 specifically specifically integrated well with both genome and KDE. Whereas QT integrates well with KDE but doesn't look good in genome. And it kind of looks better than QT back in the JTK3 themes days.

So my first GUI experience was based on that. So I went looking for a better language. And the internet is full of frost propagandists, so yeah So basically they said memory safety and I was like, okay, I'll take that And Why GTK 4 because I'm experienced with JTK3. So, just went with that. And my statement still stands like,

that's, that looks, this is KDE. And that app looks really good in it. Yeah, this is actually a really clean looking application. I actually, am I'm kind of surprised with you mentioned it was Libid Waiter yeah this is a little bit later it looks great in KDE and it will of course look great and no the The native Rust things, like Sled and whatever it was. What was it? Sorry? Oh, Slint, Iced?

Slint, yes, Slint and Iced. Like they're cool, but they don't look integrated with neither KDE nor GNOME. And I have no experience with them. No, right and I have no experience with them So yeah, so that you just you know, okay, so it just made sense to go GTK Yeah Fair enough there enough. I think this is one of the things I did want to talk about With the the way the project The way the project shows itself off. So when I go to the PQRS website,

yes, you talk a bit about what the project is, but I had no idea these tools existed. And I do think that it might be helpful to put some of that stuff on the front page of the website, of the wiki. So people actually know that this stuff is even something that is available. It's all Faro's fault. You want to go in on that?

Yeah, the main issue we have is we're both busy developing the distro, right? So it's difficult to find time to concentrate on the wiki. We were based on Ubuntu and we recently, late last year, switched over to the Debian base and we wanted to have a new webpage for it so we just kind of threw up the wiki. So it is very much just placeholder. We did used to have a website and everything, but obviously we changed, we changed base and it was all out of date. So there was no point trying to update that. So. Right. That explains why when I went and looked into some stuff, I was seeing people saying it was a Bundu based.

Some of those must have been some older comments then or people who didn't realize there was a change in the base. Yeah so I guess for everyone watching and listening we started converting over around last March last year. It took a long time for us to, because we're rebuilding every single Debian package. So it took about three months to build all of them in the end. That's 24 seven on a 32 thread dedicated build server as well.

It took a long time. And then we had a beta period and then we finally released in November. What was, I saw you send those pictures to the Colonel Manager. We'll have a look at those in just a second. What was the reason for the swap from an Ubuntu base to a Debian base? the to improve performance, desktop integration and not get bowed-mouthed by people. We made efforts to take them back to their packages. Some packages like Firefox, converting them was like easy.

Some things like the KDE discovered Snapback and kept forcing itself upon people and nuking stuff when there isn't snaps. And other applications that were gradually getting Snapified. Chromium was really annoying with that. So basically, like, someone suggested we recompile the stuff to be all with native packages in mind. And we had, we wanted, we wanted to, hold on, I'm getting a call. Sorry, I'll take over then. The other thing we were aiming to do and we'd start doing was to become a rolling distro rather than fixed release cycles.

And obviously Ubuntu is very much a fixed release cycle distro. And it would mean like, we weren't on LTS either, so it was like twice a year we'd have like a couple of weeks where we'd just have to hammer out whatever weird updates, canonical or random we decided to do in the latest version of Ubuntu and make it work with Pica and then write custom upgrade scripts every time to make sure that people could upgrade. Where was I? Yes, also back then we had an eye out for the cache OS CPU optimizations. optimizations I've heard a lot about um, I've heard a lot about the catch us if you optimizations What is the what is the deal there? Like what actually is the value with that?

Like what are they what have they actually done on their distro? or may be honest, yes, so basically there are likes GCC and whatever compilers compile options. By default, x86 has like four subsets. There's an x84v1 that works on all x8664 CPUs from like the Athlon x64 till the latest Intel or AMD device. Oh, V1 goes back even further than that. V1, yeah. But basically it's way slower and less efficient the more recent you go.

Yeah, yeah. V2 is like, I think, like first generation Intel CPUs or something. V2. Yeah, I've got the, I've got the, with PDR Open now. It's Theoretically the what is that? 2008 The nah Hellem chips, which is prior to the the renaming they did And then AMD bulls are bulldozer AMD Jaguar so ran ran 2008 or so Yeah, so basically the x86 v2 will Programs compiled with it will not function on all on pre 2008 CPUs

but our Faster on post 2008 CPUs then v1 The same thing carries over to v3 and V4. V4 code runs the fastest on the latest AMD processors but will not work with anything like... like even 14th Agenda doesn't have V4 on all chips. Yeah, V4 is really... V4's a really weird one, because that's... No one can really agree what it is. For anyone who's not really aware of the CPU version levels thing, this wasn't a thing

that was there from the start. This was applied retroactively, I believe. I want to say something like 2020, something like that. It's a fairly recent concept, so it makes Enough sense for the older chips, but with the newer chips where the features are still being added No one's really sure on what they want to be in v4 so on what they want to be in V4. So optimizing for V4, even if you have a chip newer than, like theoretically things newer than 2017 should be V4.

But there's a lot of random chips where they're missing things like AVX 512 or random other features where it would fall out of that category. where it would fall out of that category. I think the main issue there is Intel removing AVX 512 from their desktop processors. Yeah. That can kind of squeeze them over there. Here's something funny, like the Intel 11th gen was like V4 compatible.

They took it out in 12th and 13th and 14th gen. Like 11th gen was V4, but 13th gen wasn't. My current CPU is an i9-1300H. So basically, the decision was done for us for which level we would initially use Like v3 was the minimum or I wouldn't be able to use it. Yeah v3 is a pretty sensible baseline There's not at least for what most people are using there aren't modern ships being made that are v2 Yeah, there are technique if you want to

If you want to be very technical there are chips being made. They V2. Yeah, there are tech- If you wanna- If you wanna be very technical, there are chips being made, they're just not consumer chips. Like most consumers- I think only 2022 onwards, I think. There were some Intel atoms that didn't, Oh! For some reason have AVX2.

Yeah, I forgot about those. 2022. I forgot about those. I'd help you pick one of those though. Basically for most consumers, most people have 4th gen as a minimum. And 4th gen, that's pretty old and it's V3 compatible. So it was the perfect compatibility to performance ratio x86v3. The other optimization is like PGO and LTO. These are complex linker things that even I don't

understand. They do boost performance quite a lot and they're a simple link. Yeah, back to what I was saying about the Ubuntu thingy. So anyways, we had an eye for them. So you had to modify the source code and stuff to be de-snapified, add the compile stuff to that, the compile flags for the CPU optimization. After that, we rebuild every single Ubuntu package. We said to ourselves, if we're going to rebuild everything from scratch, why not move to Debian and just bump the sources, and then we don't have to edit anything? It made perfect sense, so we went with that.

OK. It made perfect sense, so we went with that. OK. You sent these pictures of the Colonel Manager before. So let's bring those ones up as well. OK, so the first one we have here, this... is showing... what do we have? We have the... Oh, so this is showing the version that's running if there's a... if there's like a newer version available. Yes, when my version was up to date, all the badges would be blue. Mm, mm, mm. But since I'm behind the red... When my version was up to date, all the badges would be blue.

But since I'm behind the red. Why do you have the the sked option there as well? That seems like a weird thing to expose to like a like on a gaming distro. Like, so like you can use Levit for performance to battery or something extreme. I think it was Rust. It's exposed to use and it's pretty simple to switch over. Schedules help. We do also have a thing called Farkin D that automatically can switch to Sherex schedulers for specific games based on profiles. Oh, I didn't notice anything that anyone was actually doing.

As well as, we only have it, it's only currently, we only use Sherex ones for handheld profiles at the moment. Still trying to work out what the best combination is for regular gaming. FalconD does other things as well, like it switches your governor to performance. Sorry, what was that called? FalconD. FalconD. Yeah, I can link you to our wiki page

it's basically our game mode on the laptop and into laptop cpus where you have p cores and d cores it's also sets the games to use the p cores it's basically our more advanced version of game mode like there's game mode run here there's falcon yeah but this but this Falcon D is different because it's based on profiles. You don't have to mess around with your command options in Steam, it just detects that a proton game is running and then it will load the default proton profile. Okay.

So it's like a lot less hassle for users. Huh. Because I've had a developer involved in like in SkedxT on the show, who was initially like when I had him on, he was like, oh, well, there's not really much of a reason for like a regular big really care about optimization sort of stuff where it like on on like a regular consumer scale it doesn't really have much of an effect so i wasn't even aware there was stuff going on in this space yeah so one thing i've been benchmarking is bpf land specifically is the scheduler and on my 9950x I get better 1% loads in most games using BPFland than using BOR which is a default CPU scheduler. Better by how much? So the main game I was benchmarking went from 40 fps to 60 fps so quite considerable bump. 40 FPS to 60 FPS so quite considerable bump. Okay! There's obviously some kind of... it's the UE5 engine game on Nvidia so...

Right. It isn't without issues in itself. Yeah, yeah. But it was like, papering over some of the issues there. Strangely, it only improved it in Gnome, Cosmic and KDE. Hyperland already had good 1% lows, so a win for Hyperland there. OK.

But I did the same test on my 9950X3D, and it didn't help at all. So it is very specific. So these profiles are things that you still need some knowledge of to edit. We can't currently set them globally for SharedX anyway. We do for other things like... We also, if you have a dual CCD X3D chip, we set it to favor the cache rather than the frequency cause,

which Windows has historically had a nightmare about, but I perfectly find on PicaOS by default. Are you aware of the storyline of us splitting off Nobara, then creating PicaOS and meeting Pharaoh? Uhhhhhhhhh... I don't think so. I'm aware that there was like a split off of that, but I don't know much of the story. Yeah, so basically, like, I had my old computer had an AMD GPU and RX 580. Whenever I tried to record on OBS, the vapid driver for that card was absolute garbage. So basically we needed the proprietary AMF thingy, the encoder to work. Basically I worked on repackaging them to be to work on Fedora. I was a Fedora user. I was trying out Fedora. So basically I made a little spec sheet. It turns the driver into something that you load with an environment variable. And when you do that, the AMF encoder, which is way better than the Vapion for the RX 580, becomes available in OBS Studio. the for everyone uh... basically i was on the no uh... glorious agro discord server for

proton uh... somebody was trying to use my spec sheets on like in rdn a two-card and they didn't work uh... g said it's just broken. I told them no it works perfectly fine here. Basically we did a lot of debugging it was like libdrm and firmware mismatches.

so I just like fixed those up and started maintaining them and the ROKEM compute module for Nobara I was like the AMD driver maintainer something like that the Yeah, so, GlorySegro, I think, so GlorySegro was trying to find a fix before like, RPM Fusion did the free world thingy. And he didn't find anything that would take off the US bullshit of his name. Yeah, sorry, for anyone who's unaware of that, can you just briefly explain the codec thing? We probably should mention that. So basically there are software patents that are explicitly rigged in the US. So most distros just ignore them or don't have to deal with them at all because they are not

US based. Now Fedora is US based and simply ignore them and no one went for them. But basically someone decided to shoot themselves in the foot and announce it and then disable it. So it kills the massive issue where like all fedora and fedora based distros lost hardware encoding because fedora decided to shoot themselves in the foot. Yes, back on our story. So basically GE like gave up on trying to do free world thingies himself and he was considering rebasing the distro he needed to rebase on something that isn't US based since they don't have to deal with all these patents they can handle it for him. We agreed that I will see how we can port the Nobara changes Open Susi base So We went on ported the changes

His open Susi one was experiencing many difficulties and it was not great He was trying to patch it. Mine was going pretty well. And I was adding more features to it. There was something for Gnome. Variable refresh rate wasn't merged in. And while moving to an Ubuntu base, I found that gnome shell was way way way smoother than fedora hmm so I opened it up and basically Ubuntu has the triple buffer batch I Believe has that patch been like I think you know 48 now it. Yeah, I remember hearing a story about this.

Yeah, anyway, this is like Gnome 45 days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, it has been merged as of 48, yes. Basically, so I said this would be so cool, I just add what Nobara does to Gnome, which is variable refresh rate on top of that, it's gonna be so cool. Mm-mm-mm.

Yeah, but the patch is patches conflict and conflict massively. This is where Farah jumped in. He was helpful. We managed to get something working. It looked like the patch, the codes were so messy we had to do some scripting and dual binaries but anyways for the user side there was a variable refresh rate session, they used that and everything is great. So that's where I met Pharaoh. Anyways, I was almost done with my one-tour experiment and the OpenSusi thingy, I think it failed. But then... But... It was a hard decision for GE to make. And then...

RPM Fusion just fixed the problem. So... The crisis was averted. Now I had this fully patched in distros with more features that I needed to do something with. And then it just kept going basically.

It just got rebranded to PKS and kept going. Yeah, that's it. Okay. We were still talking about the um, the kernel manager before. Um, the second screenshot we have here is for actually selecting the scheduler you want to use. Uh, so there's just basically like a list of them here. Is there any value in like providing some description of what each of them are?

Or is this like a very technical Thing you need to mess around with on your local system The there there was a plan to add descriptions, but we I basically forgot about it I got busy with other things. Ah Fair enough But as being said before you probably would still want to go and test them yourself anyway, just... Just so you know if it actually affects your system or not.

Yeah. But adding descriptions would definitely help users. It was on the plan, I just forgot about it. Mm-hmm, fair enough. Then the last screenshot we have here is... basically just updating kernel versions. Nothing super crazy there. But you can roll back to other ones, it's cool.

Basically this... crazy there but you can roll back the other one basically this this is more useful for rolling back because the new kernel will appear in the updates manager mm-hmm right you can update from here but like the primary purpose of this is being able to roll back. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's... That's it. That is always nice to have there as an option. I always recommend to people keep an LTS kernel around just in case something goes wrong. But having a nice kernel rollback system as well also just, you know, makes things... Makes things quite easy to are quite easy to deal with

Yeah, um Okay, I do have to ask I'm sure you've been asked this many times Why do we need another Linux distro? Why do we need another gaming distro right there? There's so many of them out there that immediately people are gonna ask, okay well do we really need another one or would it make sense to you know provide scripts to put these changes on top of something else? Like obviously the dist distro exists and you've continued it, so there's there's some reason why you've felt like this is the direction to go with it.

Uh, so for scripting, this is like an entirely different base on the binary level, it has optimizations, so there is no scripting there. Also, PQOS specifically, like there is no other Debian distro that had like KDE 6.2 a few months back and that like this is genuinely something new to the Debian space, it's way more up-to-date. So it has a use and all of those gaming things just add more flavor to it. This is the PicoS specific answer but as a general answer, when you have open source software you're going to get a million forks for people making something that's absolutely perfect for them.

PicoS is like the perfect workflow for me. It's like it when I need to install, I package custom stuff and I can just through the app install them and they are managed by app. I guess just to expand on that a few of the things that we do a bit differently are we use, we don't use Grub as a bootloader, we use Refined. Which means that you don't have to mess around regenerating Grub profiles and all that nonsense. And it just automatically detects dual boot and stuff like that.

We use a different Init Ramifest generator, which I don't want to get too technical here, but... No, feel free to get technical if you want to uh it's it's it's called booster uh it's available on arch as well but not not by default um it's just uh it results in smaller files as well as faster booting ones because it's more threaded um we also have like a out of the box Hyperland setup which is extremely rare on Devion. Which again is fully up to date, latest Hyperland. On the topic of desktops, you mentioned Kde and hyperlim what are what desktop offerings are available? I believe you guys have gnome as well Yeah, we also we have no kitty hyperland and we also have a cosmic

That we don't have an ISO for yet, but we do have a meta package You can just do a one one line install of to get the whole cosmic package. Is that pulling from latest tagged? Usually, well, the way cosmic does it's a bit weird. That's fair, yeah. They don't really tag properly. They just kind of have the epoch with the sub modules. I tend to pull, I tend to look for what they're actually

updating and pull things in a bit earlier before, even before the next release, depending on what they are. Obviously test them first and make sure they're good. So it really depends on where we are in terms of their last release cycle versus when we last checked what they've been cooking over there. What are your general thoughts on the Stata Cosmic as it is now? I think it's a lot better than it started out as.

Yeah, for sure. This, I mean, my main desktop is HyperLand, so it's a very different experience. This doesn't really fit my workflow anyway, even in tiling mode. But for a predominantly floating-based one, I'm quite liking it. It'll be interesting to see where they go for extensibility. Because things like the applets at the moment are all just loaded in via their repo, right? We haven't seen the applets store or anything

that they've said that are going to come down the line, which will be interesting. Because obviously with GNOME being the kind of main one that it's targeted against, because it's got that similar design philosophy in terms of how it looks. They're getting more and more in that they don't want you to mess with their design and their philosophy but it'll be interesting to see if they go that route with Cosmic or not. At the moment you can't tweak it too much outside of the theme. Cosmic actually has a lot more tweaking

than you would expect, but most of it isn't through the GUI tooling, it's through config files that currently have zero documentation. So. Yeah, I was struggling with that, figuring out documentation, just simple things like adding environment variables

on startup and things, that a session is kind of just a pain. Yeah. I would expect a lot of that stuff to start coming in the beta section. Once we've hit a feature phrase, which theoretically should happen sometime soon ish. We'll see when it happens. I've talked to Carl a number of times about how he should stop saying dates

because he is very optimistic. Cause the beta was supposed to be Q1, yeah. Yeah, I think release was supposed to be Q1. Or maybe release was supposed to be Q2 and beta was supposed to be I think March something like that No It's always it's always a difficult thing problem like you want to people are gonna pass to you for dates And you want to give one but yeah

Yeah, just don't just don't it's ready when it's ready. Yeah, I think it's far better to take that approach Otherwise you run into a KDE4 situation where it's a different reason for why it happened. They tagged a dev release as 4.0 which was a horrible mistake. They're like, oh well it's we tagged it as 4.0 but we didn't actually think people would review it like it was 4.0. Like what did you think? Like people would review it like it was 4.0 like what did you think like i don't know what they were thinking back then um but with cosmic yeah like i've been using it i've probably submitted i don't know close to 100 issues on the project over the times i've been using it um it's generally getting better and a lot of things like they recently added a lot of really nice Accessibility settings like colorblind settings things like that

And then I ran into a regression where their portal broke and now if you move a window it retains Momentum it when you stop moving so windows now just vibrate in the capture, which is really good in the capture which is really good but you know that is that is the fun of the alpha software I think for where they are in the development cycle it's quite impressive for sure so far absolutely for me like basically I got Cosmic and it had a bug where it could not display on my type of iGPU and I just forgot about it

fair enough fair enough anyway I forgot to show you about our custom installer. It's not really fully documented, but here's the whatever is documented. Oh, so you're not using something that's just, you know, the same as everyone else, where it's like, Oh, we're just going to use the Debbie other, the Ubuntu install. We're going to use the Fedora installer, things like that. Basically the Debian has that like offline full screen

installer that sucks. Yeah. that sucks. Yeah, and we didn't... and Ubiquiti couldn't handle our full feature set. It's really tuned for... for Ubuntu, like things specifically. Sure, yeah. We were... back on Naorubu on days, we were using Calamares. We used it for a little bit, but let me put it like this. Pharaoh put it like this and I totally agree. It was easier for us to write an entire installer than deal with the configuration issues of

Calamares. Okay. Yeah, so basically this is like our G libiduaita installer also written in rust. It's highly inspired by the vanilla OS installer. I thought it looked familiar. On the GUI side. And apparently it's the fastest Linux installer like that's what I'm being told. Like I think it installs in like a minute and a half the entire distro. Wow. It's uh on my system from start to finish,

you can do it in about nine seconds, from boot to... If you know what buttons to press to get through all the like, typing in the boxes and stuff. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. But yeah, it's ridiculously fast. Also, it like has features that I have never, ever seen in other installers.

Okay. The manual partitioning, the manual partitioning, it allows you to unlock your locks, your locks device and just use that instead of having to format it. That's one. It also, you also can use a BTRFS sub volumes

without deleting them in the manual installer. That's something we really struggled with with Calamares. It was basically impossible to get working for manual installation. I think like, I think these features are like only supported by Fedora's Anaconda installer. Like nothing else support them. And we just add them. Most distros, the installer is fine if you're doing a clean install. It's when you're not doing a clean install that you start running into weird oddities. Like a Buntus installer is fine, Calamares is fine for a clean install.

Yeah, that's cool. I think even ours people do struggle with the the right the manual install sometimes just because it It's in the name. I guess manual. There's a lot of manual steps You have to do if you miss one then yeah, it might not work, right? That's understandable. Yeah the the fully automated flow is one of the easiest I've ever used And this is a this is another example of a page where Someone needs to just sit down and add some of the cool stuff to it because right now what you have you know

It's you know it explains the the basic process, but doesn't show you Some of the nice stuff you're mentioning here like the way you can handle BTFS sub volumes and other things which are nice to have Yeah, that's true Thrown up we are page Yeah, we really need that documentation team actually yeah when I was looking into a lot of the actually. Yeah, I... When I was looking into a lot of the

opinions of picares like looking through reddit threads like, hey, would you recommend picares? You know all this sort of stuff. Most of the rep- like most of the comments I was seeing None of this stuff was mentioned. It was just, oh, it's another gaming distro. Oh You know, you could use Nobara, use Bazzai, and there's nothing wrong with those projects, but nobody had any idea about any of the cool stuff this project's doing. Yeah, that's true. We're basically too busy developing it to begin documenting. So if anyone wants to get involved in documentation, you guys definitely would like that.

Just ping us on our Discord, please. Yeah, that would be greatly appreciated. I will leave those links down below for anyone who does want to get involved in that. Now speaking of things that are not mentioned where they should be mentioned, the package manager as well. Oh yeah, basically I, as I told you, like why make another dist distro like it needs to perfectly fit you remember how I used to be an Obara contributor well I still am so I need a fedora development environment and I don't really want a dual boot so basically I have APX of vanilla just to load the fedora environment and develop stuff for novelbora.

So since you have flatpacks and the app packages you like have three package managers now in the distro pick man something fair created just puts them on in one place where it's way easier to manage that's on the CLI side the GUI side is not Peak Update Manager, we called it Pikman Update Manager. And also it's supposed to have a better feature but we're still developing that. Currently it just simply wraps around the app, but we are currently developing an ala-like backend for it, so it should be way faster both in the backend and GUI. So use Pikman not apt when we ever do that. I actually I'm really liking that I'm seeing distros build off of the Like packaging bases that are here. So for a long time like every distro, you know, it's been oh I use

It's a Debian based system. So everything is done through through apt But we're starting to see distros that are experimenting with how you handle package management. Not building a entirely new solution where it's using some new packaging standard, but using the base that is there and then trying to- trying to resolve issues or trying to add functionality that doesn't really fit in that like base package manager like you would normally see like Obviously the the example everyone would normally go to is something like a vanilla OS Which does a lot of additional things over what you would normally see with a package manager

I think this is one of the areas where these smaller distros can start to experiment with things and really bring something unique to the space that isn't just... Like I think a lot of distros frankly are just skins on top of their base, but stuff like this actually provides real additional value. I sent you like that Pikman help page, you can see what features are available. Yeah, thank you for that. I think when Pika started, we could probably have been called just another gaming distro that's just a skin over Ubuntu or whatever.

But we've been building it for two years now. And if we can improve things, we will. There's no reason to just use what's there when it doesn't work that well like apt is a great but it can be slow it can well downloads one file or once which is not the greatest thing ever when you've got people gigabit connections does it not have wait really because artists had this for five years now. Yeah, currently app will only download from

more than one file at once if they're from different repositories, like different repositories. So if you've got a big update from the same repository, it's yeah, it doesn't help. That's one of the things we're looking to improve in the app changes we're doing. I think the philosophy is they don't want to cause excessive load onto the repository

or something. I read in some of the app docs, but it doesn't make any sense to me really. Not now. It probably did like ten years ago or something Yeah, that I Would understand if they said oh the Multi-threaded downloads are unstable and we can't we're not sure if it's gonna download things correctly sure that that's fair

But additional load would be a weird... That seems like a weird explanation. Like, if, again, if Arch can manage to make it work, I'm sure that... I'm sure they can manage to make it work. Yeah, they... I mean, the way that the repositories are structured is a lot more complicated for Debian than it is for either Arch or Fedora. I guess it's fair. Which doesn't help. But there's no fundamental reason why you can't...

Nala, for example, completely swaps out the download step and does it itself. And then it'll install via LibAct. So that's essentially what we're trying to achieve as well. Well, that is cool to see. That's essentially what we're trying to achieve as well. Well that is that is cool to see like again, I do think Package managing package management tools like this actually are really cool now You mentioned some of the features it has I have the scroll through here. It's not just it's not just like apt and flat packs here.

You can do AUR packages. You can do Fedora packages. You can do Alpine packages. Yeah, that's the APX thing. So I needed it for the Fedora developments. This, these all are based on it. This these all are based on it An APX

What was the project? Right? That's from vanilla OS. Yes. Yes. Yes. I That it was ringing a bell. I couldn't remember what it was though. So that's over in the yellow s project then Yeah, it's it's good and no need to reinvent the wheel Right Yeah, it's it's good and no need to reinvent the wheel Right Yeah, this is this is built off of another project that being Distro box Distro box really changed the way that a lot of people can approach pack. I Can approach like packages and links histories because you can always do this stuff with Docker if you really knew what you were doing But Docker is not approachable for a regular user

it requires a lot of work to understand how Docker functions and then DistroBox came along made it dead simple then you have things like Apex which make it even simpler and it dead simple then you have things like Apex which make it even simpler and then you integrate that into other things and now you have a case where for applications you want to install the base you have doesn't really matter anymore yeah that's true which is a very nice world to be in. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so, um, where else do you, what else do you think we should address here? I've got a couple of the things I do want to mention, but if there's anything that you specifically want to touch on, um, maybe that we hadn't brought up yet, let me know.

Let me think. I mean, we talked about the origins, what we are doing, and our current issues with documentation and stuff. I guess I can give a bit of insight into the infrastructure of Pico OS, because we switched to being a rolling distro that no longer just uses an upstream existing repo. So we need to monitor package changes and build them and then ship them. We basically wrote our own package builder

that leverages Git actions that periodically, every hour, scans Debbie and Sid and some experimental packages because we use a mix of both. Checks against our repo to see which ones we've recently built. If there are updates, it queues them. And then it just goes through building them one at a time, which works pretty well most of the time, except when it's GCC and it takes an hour and a half

to build. Otherwise, yeah, so we've had to build custom software basically that I can link you to our, you can actually monitor it. We have a dashboard that's available. OK. You can look at the queue and stuff. And there's a list of the packages, these are the sauce packages

uh... okay current forty one thousand successfully built, oh god there are, I am working on improvements to this, it's not, this build is not it's never finished, Sure, sure, sure. Things like i386 packages are a bit of a nightmare because we don't want to ship, we are an x86, x64 only distribution with the exception of i386 ones needed for content creation and gaming. Yeah. Yeah.

Basically. content creation and gaming. Yeah. Basically. But then that means that we have to selectively build only the ones we need of that and that's a little bit complicated. Mm-hmm. Wait, what are... It's a bit like...

I think Ubuntu does that as well, so... What content creation ones are there? Because obviously I know about the gaming ones are there, like the Steam stuff you need, but what content creation ones are there? Stuff like FFMPEG, because if you want to... Well, Cosmo probably knows more about that than me, to be fair. Okay. the For basically two reasons. It's basically a whole bunch of multimedia packages that are already updated to the very latest. But so that's cool and better for our users and less effort for us to

update them. And on top of that, on top of that, the multimedia tends to enable all the compile features for them. So basically, for FFmpeg on the Debian build, you don't have the AMF encoder feature enabled or CUDA or whatever like OBS or FMPG build options. That multimedia just tries to enable the absolute maximum amount of build options which is very helpful to users. So on the- Go on. I think the main thing we need the 32-bit library as far as like if you're trying to hook into a and record like a 32-bit native game that kind of thing.

I don't know why you'd have one of those but it's weird, weird Steam annoying stuff for older games. stuff. So on the topic of package building, just the fact that you guys are doing package building is already something that is very different from a lot of the a lot of the distros like that are the build off one of these bases like just that by itself and some of these distros like, like Endeavor, they will build certain additional packages, but most of what they do comes directly from Arch. Whereas here you're actually, it effectively is a separate distro.

Like it is building off of those packages coming from Debian, but it's not just what Debian has packaged. Yeah, so we do use their source packages where for the base where we can, but we do also have our own gittings with around 250 things that we've either written or packaged manually ourselves as well. So it is a mix of both, but again it's Debbie and Sid mixed with experimental as well, so there isn't even a there isn't even a Debbiean flavor that matches what our base is.

Right. Yeah, we're not even ABI compatible with Debian. Because that's another thing that I've seen come up like, oh well if it's Debian based, because people seem to think when you say Debian based they assume that you're talking about Debian stable, which I like to refer to as Debian Stale because that's what it is most of the time but that's not at all what this is. Yep that's not what this is at all. We even get things quicker than like arch sometimes and stuff so it's like it depends on what it is and how much we prioritize it.

Especially things like graphics drivers, the program languages we use. We tend to get a lot earlier kernels, all that kind of thing. We had much earlier than, yeah, even Arch. That's not necessarily a good thing every time though. I mean, we do test before we push things. We don't just randomly push things up. But we're behind on the major things, like desktop environments.

Because we are still beholden to devian upstream packaging them. And they're not for outside of Gnome they're not there aren't that many people that do the packaging right like I don't think they have them they have a couple of KDE packages for example which is crazy given the amount of packages that KDE has yeah I think he has the Debian KDE team has like only one active maintainer for the entire QT and KDE package set. So we can be a little bit slow, but that's kind of the best way to do it, right? Because your desktop environment, you want to be stable. Whilst things like drivers, you can just roll back

and you've got things like we ship Mesa Git as well as Mesa stable that kind of thing right you can be on the bleeding bleeding edge or you can choose to be more stable depending what you want so it's up to the user at that point. For Mesa Git you can actually go to the device manager screenshot. You can see it as an option. On device manager, where is that one? That one? Yes, yeah, device manager.

Okay, sweet, thank you. And then I think the other thing is we testing a DE takes as longer because obviously there's only a couple of us and we do have people in our community that do help us test the voltage is great and we do ship beta sometimes and things like that. So it can take us a little bit longer for the the larger things like a decimal environments, but generally Well, well way faster way faster than devian and way that means table. I'm way faster than I've been to But I mean it's all about number go big right right right you need you need to be a stable base as well You don't you don't want to be disrupting users, don't break your users. No need for that.

When something does go wrong, how do you guys approach that? Do you send out a notification to people on the Discord? What's the protocol you usually follow here? We'll generally do a Discord announcement. It depends on what the issue is. If we get something, we can just roll back a package or something. We'll just roll back a package or we'll fix forward. It's pretty rare that we catastrophically break everybody. I can't think, since we've switched on the devium base, I can't think of a time we've done that, to be honest.

Our Discord is active. We have support sections that we maintain, and we're constantly helping people. But yeah, at this point, the main distribution of information is Discord, which probably isn't great. We do have the change log on the website as well but that only Because we're rolling we can't list every package that changes. We just list the main ones there when we do a new ISO build generally

It'd be interesting to see how we can improve that going forwards It'll be interesting to see how we can improve that going forwards. This could do things like a mailing list but then it feels a bit like 1980s at that point and I don't know. If anyone has any great ideas on how relying on Discord feels doesn't feel like the best way. Yeah, I guess you could always just put a little notification on the website as well. Like just mirror whatever notification you would have put on Discord. Yeah, but who's constantly visiting the website?

That's true, but if you have a problem and if you sort of make it clear that things will be posted on the website, there is a newsfeed on the website, then if something goes wrong, that would be one of the first places people would start to go. Yeah, and maybe a status page, I guess, that as we found out with Discord earlier, they're very useful when things do go wrong. Yeah, yeah. I saw... I sent the message, like, like hey you're ready to start Literally when I pressed enter My discord client died like oh lovely perfect timing

Yeah, I mean it's better timing than my lock fucking exploding Yeah, this is a good good start we had today very good start we had Like um, so regarding the whole notification thing, this is one of the things I like to discuss because I have been Quite critical the way that like arch handles it Arch will only put a notification on the website on the most critical of critical things. Even when there are cases where most people are affected by it and most people need to do some manual intervention, they just don't mention anything and it ends up being that the unofficial channels like posts on the forums or like the Reddit end up being a better newsfeed

than the newsfeed of the distro itself. I guess the other option is having like an in distro notification thing, but then... That feels a bit weird. Yeah, that's kind of Microsofty, isn't it? It just feels a bit invasive at that point. We don't have any telemetry or anything running. We don't even have donation pops or anything nothing like which probably we have a

donation burn in our welcome app that you're welcome to press yeah I think I think the only thing that really needs to be there like in the full notifications are that's too much but having a having a having a news feed of some sort that people can go to, I think that's fine. Like if people, even if you wanted to have like a PicoOS news app, right? Like I think that would be fine as something that people could choose to go and open when they want to.

But maybe, maybe if we added a status page to the website, we could then have a tab in the welcome app that just loads that in like a GTK web. I guess that makes sense, yeah. Yeah, I could add that. So let's shift gears a little bit. I want to talk a bit about the Hyperland edition. So, what do you guys actually do with Hyperland to make it approachable? Because it's a tiling window manager.

These can be, especially if you're dealing with them out of the box, can be a bit of a... a bit of a problem to initially get running. Initially get like, maybe not running, but get it into a state where it's comfortable Yeah, so the the high pond version is kind of my baby in a high fun main We approach it a couple of ways so Like the bar we use is a quick show and it's a custom bar that we wrote. It's not just way bar skinned. That means we can tailor it to what we think people want and what people need and only have those things.

Same with the application launcher, we use Walker, just because it's feature rich. We also have a quite a large amount of things like window rules, automatically set up. And we have like an Nvidia defaults if you're installing by the Nvidia ISO that sets some of the variables up for Nvidia for you, because that can be a bit of a pain on HyperLand.

I didn't want to go full GUI settings apps and helper apps and stuff, because I think the idea of you, if you're wanting to switch to Tiling Window Manager, you need to be embracing that workflow, rather than just trying to turn it into a weird version of floating. Right, right. Which there's nothing wrong with those approaches, but I think there is kind of a middle ground you can achieve.

Our default HypoAnk package, like desktop package, it just includes a lot of like a file manager, a GUI file manager. Yeah, that's reasonable, yeah. Fonts, icons, BTK themes, all this kind of, all the kinds of stuff that's just a chore to set up. Without doing too much because yeah, we want you to get used to using it and understanding it rather than just providing everything for you and you're

not actually learn anything right this is something I see with a lot of um because a lot of this sort of had like I3 spins for a long time or maybe you'll see like an awesome WM spin things things like that. And it ends up basically being they're trying to build a desktop environment out of a window manager. And some people like that experience. So if that's what you want to go with, like, hey, that's cool. But I do appreciate the trying to Trying to keep that idea of what a window manager is Just at its core as a way that it's approachable but not

Not a whole different experience built on top of it Yeah, we are also leaning into the hyper ecosystem as well. So there's like things like hyper idols automatically set up hyper lock hyper paper that kind of all those kind of things that if you were doing it manually you'd be like, oh, why doesn't my screen block after a while that kind of thing? Right, right. If you need to Tyler. But yeah, we don't want to I don't

want to do everything for everybody because I mean end of the day people aren't people aren't gonna want my exact setup anyway right so there's no point just including everything for everyone right just use gnome at that point. With the the gnome and KDE editions, are those, like, how are those configured? Are they relatively clean? Are they themed in a certain way? What's been done with those? Oh yeah, I handled the Gnome and KDE editions. Basically Gnome, it used to be themed. the I think it's fixed now. Gnome, we dropped theming when they added the new accent color system.

Sorry if you can hear a bunch of birds flying over, I don't know if that's coming through. No, it's not coming through with the audio screen. The gnome edition has a program called Pika GNOME Layouts. It basically was used to configure the accent color of our custom theme. And with a single button it would configure your extensions to be like Windows 10, 11, Mac OS, Ubuntu's Unity, revert back to the GNOME experience. It's inspired by the Zorin OS thing. Asko? Yeah. Now it's only for this layout because the accent buttons are just another copy of the ones in GNOME system settings.

Yeah, like we really like themes and making the distro pop even more. But there's not a lot of JTK for themes that are standard compliant. Right. We used to use like themes from Vinsuline. Vinsuline, whatever, the one that makes Whitesur. Which themes are they? Orcus. Whitesir. We used his Orcus. Whitesir. Oh that one okay. Yeah but we didn't use that one we used the Orches. It looked cool but when Gnome got to version 46, his CSS were way way off standard, stuff like dark mode wouldn't work normally and the new accent model, it doesn't work like you have to change the CSS for both of these things in Gnome 46 and 47 now.

Gnome 46 and 47 now. Uh, so we dropped it. We dropped the IKND to have a better default experience. Uh, so basically, uh, the DE's are st- are stuck right now, but they weren't always like this. Mm. Yeah, especially with Gnome, like that's kind of the direction they want you to go in anyway. I would not be surprised if sometime in the relatively near future, uh, I would not be surprised if GTK 5 does not support user theming. If that happens, outside of like accent colors, if that happens I don't think anyone would be surprised. Don't switch to QT7. Hehehe. Uhhh, fork off of GTK3, that's what uh, that's what distros like Cinnamon are working on.

I didn't like that because like, JTK4 is like still themeable, you could just perhaps improve the standard. And GTK3 like is an older technology that GTK 4 renderer is way better like 4k like at least 4k GTK 4 why GTK 3? mm-hmm yeah that well I don't know a lot of people felt like the the GTK 4 was a big break in direction. Like GTK 1, 2, 3, it felt like a continuous line and then 4 for a lot of people felt like they had a very different focus. The focus was no longer just on the desktop, now you had that mobile focus there as well and you're gonna have mobile design language going into it. Which I get as a complaint. I personally don't really use...

...LibidWader applications especially, but mostly don't really use GTK 4 stuff at this point. But that's just me. I'm not gonna tell someone not to use if they like the direction things are going Hey more power to you do that No, that's what I mean as a developer both Liba Dwight and GTK are still Themable yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they are as a code as a code base like I would start more modifying that Mm-hmm Like it has a Vulkan renderer and the fonts became better and such, and it has way better Wayland integration.

Like, why did you go with JTK3? I was confused when you covered that. Ah, covered what? The... The mint forking GTK 3 oh that yeah yeah yeah right happened a while ago I hate those fun people remember them videos I make more than I do I forgot I even made that made that. Yeah I I get it right like they've they've like Mint likes to be very slow and particular about how they move and they don't they they never want to have a big UI upset that is gonna...

Is gonna break from what they currently have. Yeah, I mean that's like the mint ideology which is perfect for giving Linux to your grandma. Yeah. Hey, there's a place for that. Yeah, absolutely. Mint has always been a really popular early recommendation. I get it. It looks like Windows. Especially during the days of Windows 7. It really looked like Windows 7.

So it was a very easy shift to make. Um, hey, it has a place clearly and people like it so uh, again I'm not going to tell people not to use it. It's not my kind of thing but I know a lot of people that started on Cinnamon, even if they didn't start on Cinnamon on Mint, that just kind of like that experience. Yeah, that's cool. So one thing I did actually want to talk about, this isn't really directly focused on the distro itself, but I want to talk about the idea of distro reviews because I personally don't make them and I feel like a lot of I feel like a lot of the

distro reviews out there are fairly surface level not really looking it's like hey look at look at the wallpapers we have look at these very these very early things You're gonna see but a lot of them don't really look deeply into the tech behind the distros if I was to do them That's sort of the direction. I would prefer to take But as I was saying a lot of distros don't really they don't really have any tech behind them. It's kind of just in a lot of cases The config files are the distro oh did i dc Oh, did I DC?

God damn it. Thank you Discord. Um, okay. Hello. Working though? Yes. Discord will sometimes do this thing where I jump up to 5,000 milliseconds ping and then not reconnect, which is fantastic. I usually, you guys can hear me, yeah I was when I was talking yes yeah it does I've had a number of times what was it you last word um I didn't hear anything that you guys started saying oh yeah I think that thero reviews usually suck unless the reviewer has communication with the developers of whatever he's reviewing. We had a reviewer who streamed it, it was a stream like installation and he just stumbled

upon it and communicated with us. It was Air Max. Air he stumbled upon it and streamed it. After that we communicated with him. He was able to show the things and the stuff about this distro which due to us not having a documentation team, put a lot of our features which were unknown on YouTube. So it was something that's really deep level that no reviewer would have. It was a good video. Yeah, Air Max does really good work.

I've been meaning to reach out to him and bring him on the show as well. People have asked me to do so for quite a while now. Yeah, he sure is a nice guy. I think... Especially when we're dealing with diss reviews where they're just covering every new version like you'll see Every time there's a new Ubuntu Version or a new fedora version you get this rounder reviews where it's like, oh, hey look Here's the new default wallpaper. Here's

May be like a couple of surface level things that change. I do think especially the big distros level things that change. I do think especially the big distros would do a lot would do themselves a lot of like a lot of benefit if they sent out like a basic like press kit or update kit to people in this space so they know like the things you actually want to highlight not just the things that you immediately see five minutes after installing the distro. This is something um System 76 has been pretty good with when when they first revealed cosmic they they sent like where they did like a press call Talking to everyone obviously a press call takes a lot of time You got to like take a couple of hours out of the day

but even just like send like sending out the release notes and like the things you wanna highlight to people who are like on YouTube or who are doing written journalism. Like just that I think would do a lot of benefit for pretty much any distro out there. Yeah. Yeah, I think we might start from the major reviews.

I see what most Ubuntu reviews, like the 22, whenever the GNOME 45 shipped, the whole thing was about the new activities button, which is a GNOME feature, not a new one to own. Right. Yeah that's the other thing especially with with gnome they end up they end up just being reviews of the desktop and that's fine like if you want to do a review of the desktop like that's great but it's not a review of the distro it's a review of gnome. It's not a review of the distro, it's a review of GNOME. I mean like flip side of the coin for a new user just searching up Ubuntu, whatever the latest version is. That's true.

Yeah. It's better for them to see what the desktop looks like rather than like, yeah, we added a new backend for Act or something. I guess that's true. I guess it depends on sort of the audience that you're trying to. Trying to target with the review, whether it's the the new users or someone looking for interesting tech, because if I was doing one on, like if I was going to cover Gentoo, for example, I would do a deep dive into source-based packaging and You know the the value at least from their perspective in doing this if I was to cover something like

Vanilla OS I would be talking about like Apex the way they do their ABRoot system things like that Let's talk about Peeker OS Well, I wouldn't talk about any of this stuff because I wouldn't know it exists to the website needs updates but assuming I knew about this stuff, I would talk about the device manager, the kernel manager, the way Pikmin works all this sort of stuff that I think makes it look cool. But it's not that stuff that you immediately see upon booting. It's not, hey, this is how KD is configured. This is the extensions they have installed. This is the theme they have preinstalled,

things like that. There's a place for both of those type of reviews, but there's the other one as well. There's the third type. There's the, this is my new favorite distro, where the same YouTubers have a new favorite distro like every four days it's like what are you talking about it look it's it on YouTube you kind of have to play the game. The game is the algorithm and yes, it's stupid and yes, it looks, it's obviously really dumb from the outside. But that's the game. That's how YouTube works and maybe there's a better way to do it that people haven't tried yet, but at least right now that seems to be the thing that appeals uh that like

appeals to the algorithm gods it looks still better than uh well the old way distro watch where you don't even get on their website unless you either pay them a bunch of money or i don't know the guy likes you or something because he's got an infinite backlog. Mm-hmm of things to add Yeah, it's no sense because how hard is it to just add a distro to a list? I don't I I'm not aware of the distro watch stuff, so I I wouldn't have a clue there aware of the Distro Watch stuff so I wouldn't have a clue there. It is, Distro Watch is an interesting website, I always like to see what's at the top right now, is it still there?

Um... It used to be MX, wasn't it? It's Mint now. MX is second. What's top? Ah, Mint. Yeah. I mean, that's perhaps true I'm mint. Yeah. I mean that's perhaps true I think.

Mmhmm. That's way more reasonable than MX Lennox. Yeah. Is MX Lennox another debut in the store with like hidden features no one knows about like us or is it just a theme? I... Like it seems so weird for it to be at the top. Uh it spawned off of the anti-x project which is like one of the distros aiming to be like hyper small but I don't think mx has that goal so I'm not act honestly my entire knowledge of mx linux

is the fact that for like five years it was at the top of it was on top of distro watch yeah same i think that's how most people discovered it yes i don't know i i think distro watch is a it is a it is a useful website as an archive of distros, but that's about it. Nice to see Cache at third anyway. Yeah, well that actually is a relatively popular distro. I get it. I've had people bug me about Cache for... or Cachey, I don't know how to say it. I say Cachey, people have corrected me on it. I've had people bug me about catchy for Cache-y catchy. I don't know how to say it. I say catchy people have correct me on it I don't know if they're right or I'm right

People have bugged me about that for a very long time. I Think it's I Spelled it as catchy because like cash you just change the E for a Y. Right, right. That's how my thought process was. That makes sense, yeah. Actually one more thing I did wanna discuss is being in the position of the distro

puts you in this interesting relationship between upstream packages and the user. Being in the position of the distro puts you in this interesting relationship between upstream packages and the user and This happens in both reviews and in like just general like discourse about about a project but You're in this position where the users position where the users interact with your project as the way they get these pieces of software so in a lot of cases you end up being the thing that is blamed when there are problems even if those problems aren't with the way that

you've configured things but instead are problems with the upstream project. Yeah, we must be gone. I think like most people who use Pico less were already nice enough to look at the debbie and base this true. Like, there is really not many instances of toxic people I deal with Who just blame us right right right? It's not toxicity though, it's they don't know The average user doesn't know that where the code is coming from so they don't know where to point the point the finger But we do have quite we have an active support section and we do Try and help people even if it is an upstream issue we'll try and help them I've

contributed fixes myself to upstream projects as well in the past based off of user reports so and filed reports on the behalf of users so it's I don't know instances of upstream being contacted because of a problem with our packaging but I know that has happened to other distros. Abuntu especially. Abuntu likes to cherry pick stuff which is fun and leads to upstreams dealing with problems. Gnome especially, Gnon has a bunch of terrific patches where they're just like, yeah, we know that the patch that doesn't work.

That's why it's not in the project yet. I mean, to be fair, Noon just stole perfectly good patches, even if they're important. Yeah, well, that's also true. Yeah I think you have to do some level of cherry picking and like modifications of the dish row because the upstream isn't always gonna fit a hundred percent what you need. Especially with gaming stuff, you need to pull in mess patches and ex-whaling patches

and the random random stuff sometimes just got like otherwise a game doesn't work. Game scope is a big one as well, you've always got to be updating that, pulling in patches and not have you... And we can sometimes make mistakes and pull in broken ones but usually we're testing it and we'll fix it and we'll let the user know. I'm not aware of anyone getting angry at us because of us doing the Ubuntu thing Well, maybe they won't get angry in the Discord, but you know, people will go to Reddit to vent their frustrations about whatever project it is they are, they just recently installed and for whatever reason didn't play nice with their hardware.

Yeah, I mean we have had... We do have people that raise issues that are clearly like either num-bugs or KDE bugs or whatever. There's always a number of known ones around for whatever version, right? And we do get those raised and we'll point out that there are issues upstream, there's not a right lot we can do about them. They've already been reported, they're probably going to be fixed in the next version. There's not a right lot right like I can say really. The worst issues are people the curse started with. Do you have any interesting examples of that?

We had like a person who had an Nvidia card. It was like from the 3000 series. But for some bizarre reasons it had all the bugs like that the 900 series was stuck in. Like it had the Wayland bugs, it had the ex-orgus, fresh streaming bugs and it wouldn't fucking shim properly with the open drivers. Like literally not the 900 series bugs just spawned upon this 3080 card. No one could explain why like what the hell uh I did he get scammed I don't know hey you said it's fine in windows okay sure and to be then the same user like I think got a laptop with a UHD and hit a plasma bug and asked us about it.

Yeah the user is cursed, not the hardware I think. Yeah I've run into those people before. Had a really weird one where this guy kept buying USB sticks from Micro Center, the really cheap Micro Center ones, and there was for some reason just SegFault on our ISO when he wrote it, and then like you bought a SanDisk one and it was perfectly fine. It's just, no reason, just whatever reason, it just hated our ISO, it worked fine for like mint and stuff mm-hmm just so random just cursed USB sticks I wouldn't have a clue why that would happen that's uh yeah that's a new one so I think that's pretty much everything I wanted to talk

about it was there anything else you wanted to mention or is that? Or you guys you guys good You know, I think I explained what the destroy is about And that a nice chat with you. Yeah, I enjoyed this. This was fun So if people want to get involved in the project, get involved in the community, where can they go, what can they... If there's anything you desperately need to help with, we mentioned documentation before, but is there anything else you want to mention there? Yeah, go ahead. Documentations, translations, we do host a web late.

Instance, our GUI packages require translation for other languages. We need more package maintainers. Currently we have only two active developers which are standing with you now. the is done manually because they are a Git instance where we cherry pick patches and stuff. So package maintainers are also welcome addition. Coders we are not desperate for, but you are free to do pull requests on our Git D. For all of these, you can just reach on our Discordty. For all these you can just reach out on our discord and bingos.

And that is linked on the website? Yes, yes it is. Yeah, we do also have a blog where I'm starting to write more technical details and stuff. Another thing that is not linked on the website by the way I do had to I found that through a Google search I asked you put should definitely probably because the website links back to the wiki but uh yeah yeah that has a explanation for that is basically like a TLDR of The stuff we talked about today like refined the improvements made gaming innovation The packaging stuff like that Yes

Cool So is that pretty much all that you guys wanted to mention nothing else you wanted to direct people to oh didn't you also have a you have a donate page as well don't you yeah coffee yeah we got a coffee so if you want to go support the project um yeah go check that out as well. Um, nothing else then? That's pretty much everything? Yeah. Okay.

Um, okay. So my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream as well when I feel like doing so. The gaming channel is Brody on Games. Right now I will be playing through Portal 2 and I'll probably be done with Stranger Paradise by the time this comes out. So I'm gonna say Ori and the Blind Forest. Yeah, maybe. Check out the channel. We see what's there.

Blind Forest. Yeah, maybe. Check out the channel, see what's there. I've just got the react channel where I upload clips from the stream. So if you want to just see those, that's cool as well. If you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version on Spotify, there's an RSS feed. Every podcast platform imaginable, there's video on Spotify Spotify which is neat if you care about that. I also, if you're listening to the auto version, you can find the video version on YouTube at tech over T. So I will give you guys the final word. How do you want to sign off the episode? Thank you, Rody, for hosting us. It was very cool. And I couldn't get my mic working just to say thank you, so that was embarrassing. Oh, I know. So good, so good.

Mero, anything you want to say? Thanks for having us, mate. Sweet, perfect.