Tech Over Tea - Developing A Linux Distro As A Meme | Luna

Starting point is 00:00:00 Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we have a distro developer on. From a distro that you probably haven't heard of. It's a fairly small thing, but I think the idea is really neat. Welcome to the show, Luna, from Xenia Linux. How's it going? Hi there, it's been going alright.

Starting point is 00:00:20 How are you? Oh, yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. Um, we were talking before about what I was saying with the Nico Loves Linux stuff, so that's pretty much been my last day or so. Besides that, though, pretty much just chilling. It's the weekend here, so it's 7.40 in the morning.

Starting point is 00:00:40 I've got to go to my sister's place afterwards to feed her cat. Besides that, I've got no other to my sister's place after with the fetal cat besides that I've got no other plans fair enough it's about 9pm here I've just been setting up some stupid thing with desk phones actually which is funny with desk phones

Starting point is 00:00:57 like sip phones so I thought you know how I know this isn't lyrics related I wanted a surround sound system I thought, you know how, I know this isn't Linux related, but like, I wanted a surround sound system, you know, as you do. I thought that's too expensive. So why not just buy five VoIP phones, connect them up, use Pipefire. So then you can make five soft phones on your desktop.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Pipefire handles it all transparently, set up a 5.0 surround system. It works great. Sure, sure. I haven't dug around doing weird things like that with Pipewire, but hey, if it works, it works, I guess. Oh yeah. You literally can create a sync device with the surround stuff and all your applications will just work like no config required it's brilliant I thought the whole pipewire video stuff was cool enough

Starting point is 00:01:54 but I'm happy that people are messing around with weird things like that as well just to see what's possible because you know how long have you been using Linux for? oh seven years, I think. Okay, so what does that put you? 2016?

Starting point is 00:02:11 Yeah, something like that. Something like that, yeah. So well into Pulse, like, being not shit, basically. Yeah, I mean, I started when I was really young, so it's like, my speaker's work time is happy. Then when I started getting into more, young, so it's like, my speaker's work time is happy. Right. Then when I started getting into more like pro audio stuff, it's like, Jack is a clusterfuck. Sorry. No, you can swear, go ahead.

Starting point is 00:02:33 We're past the seven second mark. Yeah, Jack is awful to use, but Pipewire like emulates it perfectly. So it's like to use yeah I my understanding is with Jack's stuff things are weird if you start using like high end plugins and you have these like weird custom like I spoke when I spoke to Amphar for example he's got this weird

Starting point is 00:02:56 like custom professional audio setup and things get weird then but at least from what I've used of Jack through Pipewire, it's been pretty rock solid. Honestly, the only thing I really care about with Pipewire is the whole being able to move things around with nodes.

Starting point is 00:03:12 Like, just... My capture card, for example, when I was on Pulse, my solution was so jank. If I wanted to listen to audio from my console, I opened OBS and listened to the audio playback from OBS. It was not a good solution because there was always

Starting point is 00:03:27 half a second of delay, but it worked. Now what I can do is take the audio directly from the capture card and just redirect that to my desktop speakers and it just works. It's the same sort of thing with the

Starting point is 00:03:43 desk phones. I literally just get the output from yeah i mean it's the same sort of thing with the with the it's the same sort of thing with the desk phones uh like i literally just get the output from the uh soft phones and just route it into the sync and then it's like i can use the desk phone to talk to someone on discord which is like my stupid thing but if you don't have a mic like i didn't for a couple months it was actually a decent solution you just pick up the phone like, hey, how's it going? Oh yeah, yeah, that's how it was. Okay, that's awesome. Wait, I'm sure this would obviously require a lot more work, but I'm sure someone could

Starting point is 00:04:15 think of a way to make it so when you pick up the phone, it answers the call as well. Yeah, so asterisk, yeah, you can do this. So asterisk, which is a PBX, you can set up custom extensions, which can just run arbitrary things. You could 100% just get something, use, like, a GUI, like, Python library to, like, click around on your desktop when you call that extension. It's, it's doable. There might be an easier- well if you use the custom- actually no, if you did it in the Discord web client, because that'd be easier to like get access to like the node graph, that would make it really easy actually. You would have some sort of- Yeah, it's very doable.

Starting point is 00:04:57 Maybe you could make some sort of like extension that will then give you like a easy point to access- why am I overthinking this? This am I overthinking this this is a really stupid that's a really stupid idea give me three months I'll take you on it thinking of stupid ideas um Xenia Linux started as a joke

Starting point is 00:05:17 I saw the Gentoo post the Gentoo forum post I mean everyone gets pronunciation wrong that's fine I don't even know if I'm saying it correctly I say Xenia Linux it was a joke between me and my friend Jack and he was like

Starting point is 00:05:34 oh wouldn't it be cool if we make a Linux show and I was like well not really it's kind of stupid if you don't have an actual thing to set you apart and then he just said oh you know this mascot Xenia and I was like yeah and then he was like do the math hello yeah let's do this um so literally from a joke um we started working on getting gen 2 which don't worry about pronunciation i'll talk to you about that in a minute okay um we sure. We got Gintu.

Starting point is 00:06:05 We put it in a squashFS, which is what live images use, and just boot it. But when you say just boot it, you've got to think, how do I do that? My solution at the time was, let's make a custom initRamFS,

Starting point is 00:06:21 which is, I won't do that. So I spent about a month making a custom initramfs, which would only work on VMs with virtio hard drives because those were the only modules I loaded. And it was instead of mounting the squashfs, it would actually just extract it to the disk. So it would take about 20 minutes to boot. And then I realized you can do the same thing in DRAKER with about two command line arguments.

Starting point is 00:06:55 Yep. 20 minutes to boot. I feel like that's about the time it would take to boot a regular distro off of a tape drive. Uh, that depends on how the date's on there, doesn't it? If it's, like, all skied around, it might take a while. Yeah, that's true. I say 20 minutes, so that's probably just slow virtual hard drives, but yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:23 Okay, okay. Well, I'm sure a lot of people don't know about the xenia xenia thing anyway so i guess we can talk about that for a bit so oh yeah the um most people know that the mascot of linux being tux i don't remember who actually drew that because xenia was um alan m McKay yeah okay so Tux was by Larry Ewing Ewing? one of the two probably Ewing yes

Starting point is 00:07:54 it's E-W-I-N-G it's Ewing before someone crucifies me for that absolutely so yeah Tux is generally accepted as the mascot of linux however as is often the case there's usually multiple contenders at the time people doing different things and another one of them was uh was xenia yeah so when did you find out about this thing? Was it just when your friend was like, yo, here's this weird thing?

Starting point is 00:08:28 I knew about her for, like, a long time, because it's, like, this whole thing with her being a symbol of, like, the trans community and stuff. So it's, like, it's ingrained into different cultures. But, yeah, not too long after we started on the district. Maximum six months. Okay, so... Huh.

Starting point is 00:08:49 It's just... I didn't even know about this. I found out about this when I searched for Xenialink. There's three things that come up when I search for it. One is your distro. One is the Xbox 360 emulator. And the other one is this yeah yeah it's almost like a competition with the emulator to see it comes on top of a google search um i think seniors on top

Starting point is 00:09:14 right now but yeah like the emulator is on top if you add xenia linux it definitely is because there's no oh yeah currently linux build of it. Yeah, but you also get all the comment, like Reddit posts of people saying, how can I run this on Linux? That's true. Yeah, if you search Xenia Linux, it's all Reddit posts. So you get, on Google, it's the wiki.

Starting point is 00:09:37 It's not even the website for Xenia Linux. Then a Reddit thread from three years ago, how to run Xenia online. I believe you, i think you can run it in a virtual oh no in a um in a wine i think don't quote me on that but i'm sure that's have you gotten comments from people being like why is this called xenia what what are you doing someone thought that it was a linux distribution or the xbox 360 because of the like they thought it was like linux running on the z emulator which is like it's a bit of a breach

Starting point is 00:10:15 i mean i know imalo talks about the 360 there's no way i'm no i was gonna say i'm that sounds Sounds like something Imelode had done. Yeah, no. If it's anyone, it would be him. But yeah. So, most people seem to realize... They read the Gen 2 part and they at least... I guess things run to the 360 one thing, but has anyone tried, like, confused what you're doing with that thing and come to the wrong place or something? Yeah, I mean, the main thing that happens is

Starting point is 00:10:45 most of our, like, 99% of our users are Gensou users. And this causes some confusion because everyone wants to use Emerge. Like, absolutely everyone. The first thing they do is try to use Emerge. And, like, while we've got wrappers for Emerge and stuff to integrate it with snapshots and stuff like that, it's kind of like using RPM OS tree on Fedora Silverblue.

Starting point is 00:11:06 It's your last option. But people on Gensu, because it's their first thing in their mind, you'll see users which have added like 50 packages to the base set. And then when they update the Xenia install, it just breaks like that. Of course, it's very easy to fix this because of the way we do it is an overlay. So what you can do is just disable the overlay boot in update everything then you're fine um but yeah it definitely causes a lot of confusion but that's more of an issue of our

Starting point is 00:11:37 docs not being great yeah gen 2 seems like a really weird base to like want to do an immutable system because you know how heavy how source heavy it is how compile heavy it is yeah if you if you go digging very lightly in any uh any forums like hey i use these compile flags you should use this one this one like yeah that's what just seems like a weird base to do it off of okay i mean most of the base, again, because it's a joke, was like, oh, we use Gentoo, let's do that. Gentoo has really good build tools. They have one called Catalyst

Starting point is 00:12:11 which is how they build their stuff. One that people might be familiar with is like DE Bootstrap. It's the same sort of thing, but Catalyst is amazing. It lets you set all the packages you want, your use flags, everything. And also config and stuff.

Starting point is 00:12:29 So it's a good base because the build is really good, the build tools. Also, people say all compile times are long on Gensu. They're not if you've got decent hardware. So I think if I was to do

Starting point is 00:12:43 a Xenia build now, because we have their bin host and everything, it takes like 20 minutes. It's not a long build time. Obviously longer than other things. And also they've got their binary kernels and stuff like that. So it's like, we can just

Starting point is 00:13:00 use them. I think it was a couple of years back I did a Gentleman's install stream on it i don't know how long ago i think it took me because i'd never installed it whatsoever so i was reading the docs you know and the the docs are incredibly extensive one of the things i do love about this distro is it has by far the most extensive docs. People talk about how great the Arch Wiki is, and the Arch Wiki is great, but I think that

Starting point is 00:13:30 this one deserves the credit a lot more. I think it's just because it's just because it's this source distro, and a lot of people are scared of looking at it, and a lot of people just don't realize how good it is, but because of... My understanding is the reason why the project was made in the first place is basically to automate lfs to like get you from

Starting point is 00:13:49 that you know that bootstraps part into like just here is the baseline to start getting everything working so you're gonna have a lot of control over like what you're doing so you need good documentation for that and it's clear that over the years that's been developed but i think it took me about three hours to do everything and that was mainly because i just didn't know what i was doing yeah the best thing about the gantoo wiki by far is kind of the arch wiki has a rule that you can't really repeat yourself so it links to every page links to loads more pages yeah yeah yeah whereas the Whereas the Gentoo handbook is very cohesive. It's all in one document. So it's very easy to follow.

Starting point is 00:14:30 Miguel, I see your point. When people were scared of Gentoo, because I was as well, I only installed it for the first time two years ago. That's a funny one, because I got my new ThinkPad and I watched the Imolo streams so he made a poll which is a very fair poll of five options which consisted of

Starting point is 00:14:52 Gentoo, Gentoo, Gentoo, Gentoo and Gentoo so yeah it's very fair very fair and so I was forced to install Gentoo it's not as hard as people think. It's probably around the same difficulty as Arch,

Starting point is 00:15:10 like, if you're not doing Arch install. Yeah. Yeah, it's not bad. Okay, the thing about Arch install, though, every other update Arch install breaks. Last time I used it, it just didn't work at all. The first time I used it, it didn't work at all. There was this brief period where it worked really well,

Starting point is 00:15:28 but it seems like there's just always these massive changes being made to it. They're not really sure how much they want it to do, how they want it to do it. And I don't know how tied the UI is into the functionality, because it seems like every time the UI changes, some of the backend functionality changes as well, so I'm sure I could work it out

Starting point is 00:15:49 it's just a Python script, but I have a feeling things are very, very coupled together I used that script once, and every time I made a choice I wanted to change, I'd go to change it and it crashed the script I don't know if you...

Starting point is 00:16:06 Did you ever use it back when it first came out? I didn't. This was after that. Okay. When it first came out, it had zero error detection. So if you entered... So if there was a prompt that was like, hey, yes or no, and you say

Starting point is 00:16:21 P, it just crashed. Yeah. That's like our old installer was like that our old installer was a bash script and the way to change options was to edit the bash script um so and like the most glaring issue um so for example like if you attach like a sata disk to linux it's gonna be like sda1 or sda even whereas if you attach an nvme when you add a partition it has like a SATA disk to Linux it's going to be like SDA1 or SDA even whereas if you attach an NVMe when you add a partition it has like a P1 well we didn't account for that at all because like

Starting point is 00:16:52 you know so if you put in like an NVMe disk to the first installer we made it wouldn't work and there was no errors at all so it would just fuck up your disk it was great best software oh's why I have virtual machines. My best software on the hook. Oh yeah, well I mean at this point I only worked on virtual machines, so. Right. Before you mentioned getting a new ThinkPad, do you actually mean a new ThinkPad or a new for you ThinkPad?

Starting point is 00:17:18 T410, quite old. Okay, I was gonna say. Yeah. And LBM took around two and a half hours, I think. T410, where old. Okay, I was going to say. Yeah. And LBM took around two and a half hours. T410, where does that put us at? 2011. 2011. Think pad.

Starting point is 00:17:34 Let me see the specs. Unless you happen to know the specs off the top of your head. It'll be like a first-gen i5. And like four gigs of RAM mine has. This is a terrible website. It says i7. That's not very useful, thank you. Yeah, I put a 13th-gen i7 in my ThinkPad, obviously. Here we go. i5-540M, i7-620M. I'm guessing it's either the 520 or the 540, one of the two. Yeah, I've got like a 620, so I don't know.

Starting point is 00:18:06 It's one of the two. So a old CPU, but still relatively competent, I guess. Relatively. It works. Yeah, I mean, it was my first intro to Gensu, so it's kind of like that normalized my brain's thinking, three hours LLVM. So it wasn't like it was long for me, it was just kind of, oh, my dog's barking, sorry Mark. Yeah, so I think

Starting point is 00:18:36 WebKit GTK, which is like the web engine for LLVM stuff, took roughly a day, I think. But yeah, and if you can imagine building xenia specs on that which at the time started from a stage one not even a stage three so you'd have to do stage one three and four probably took like two days to do a xenia build so for anyone who hasn't done gen 2 i guess i think most people probably assume it's going to be as slow as using something like the T4. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:11 On modern, what is your CPU on your, the system with the 40 series GPU? I use the Ryzen 5 5600. Okay, so it's a new CPU, but it's not like a high-end CPU. Oh, yeah, I mean, it's not even that new anymore, is it? They've released AM5 and stuff, so it's it's a new cpu but it's not like a high-end cpu oh yeah i mean it's not even that new anymore is it they've released am5 and stuff so i would yeah no my my headspace is like three years ago isn't it when did that come out because i've got a 3600x so mine's even yeah yeah i mean it'd be roughly equivalent to yours yeah like a yeah because at that time the the Yeah, because at that time, the even numbers, I think, were the mobile chips.

Starting point is 00:19:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like 4,000 series. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm not finding the number, whatever. Yeah, it's kind of old now. I think, is 7,000 the current series, or is there a newer one after that? Yeah, so it skipped 6,000, because that was like mobile and then 7 600 technically there's 8 000 series now but it's just like a single cpu i think uh okay so so on that system how long if you obviously if you account for someone being new to the documentation not really knowing what they're doing, how long do you reckon it would take a new person

Starting point is 00:20:26 to install Gen 2 just from scratch? Assuming they have at least knowledge of how to use the command line, they know how to read, you know. I mean, if we assume they're going to use some, like, window manager to avoid web engine stuff, I'd say it's going to take anywhere from, like, an hour to three hours,

Starting point is 00:20:44 depending on how used to, like, the command line you are and stuff like that. Like, if you're coming from Arch or something like that, or, you know, you're just used to using command line. It's not going to be like... Yeah, you could be up with a desktop in, like, an hour. So it's not too bad. That is still, like, it's still a lot of time for some people and it I think the big thing that is scary for some is going from a

Starting point is 00:21:12 distro where all of the stuff is pre-configured to you pre-configured for you and then going to something you know where it's just like well now I have to write a bunch of configs like if I was to move over to Gentoo, nothing would change. I would install Hyperland, I would install all the same software I have, and I'll just git pull my configs. And I would have a system pretty quickly. So I went from Fedora to Gentoo, so sort of the same sort of thing. You kind of get used to it as you go along.

Starting point is 00:21:43 You don't do anything at once. You kind of just get your desktop, okay, cool. And then you figure to it as you go along like you don't do anything at once you kind of just get your desktop okay cool and then you figure stuff out as you go along it's it doesn't you know it's not like some big commitment where you've got to get everything right the first time it's it's very uh it can be like fairly easy actually yeah i started way back on i3 when i first started i think the only thing... Yeah, I don't like manual trailers. They're not fun. No, but no.

Starting point is 00:22:10 I think the only thing with a window manager especially is just make sure that you have a couple of things set up firstly. Application launcher, terminal. Assuming you have those on hotkeys, you'll be fine. Do not open up a window manager

Starting point is 00:22:26 without at least an application launcher especially ones where they don't have context menus because you're just going to not be able to do anything, you'll be like why do I have a black screen right now or just control alt like F3 into another TTY who needs a desktop

Starting point is 00:22:41 don't even have an application launcher, just run the command to connect directly to the Xorg Who needs a desktop? Yeah, don't even have an application launcher. Just run the command to connect directly to the Xorg display and just open up applications like that. All you need a window manager for is to display your background. Who needs anything else?

Starting point is 00:22:58 Honestly, desktops are a weird one nowadays, right? I assume that you have experience with using Windows in the past. past i do but it's been so long that it's like kind of a like weird memory sure my the point i was going to get out here is on windows it's pretty common to have a bunch of desktop icons and you know i by the time i stopped using windows i had less and less but you see some people and their entire desktop is covered in stuff.

Starting point is 00:23:26 But nowadays, the idea of a desktop doesn't really matter, because especially on Linux, none of the major environments have icons. It's just there to look for. I mean, like, I'm personally very against desktop icons. I do not

Starting point is 00:23:40 like them. Kind of like, the whole metaphor of a desktop has kind of just faded away. Especially since, because I'm quite young, we never had that explanation of why it's called a desktop. It's just been called that because that's what it is. It's like, yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:58 Yeah, well... It's not going to go anywhere, right? Unless you were to start... I don't know, I, it's not going to go anywhere, right? Like, I don't, unless you were to start, I don't know, I could imagine an environment where you always have an application open, like, there's never a situation where it's closed, like, let's, actually, here's an idea, maybe, as soon as you close, like, the last application you have open, it just gets replaced with, like, a full-screen app launcher, or a terminal, or something like that, there's never actually the concept of just fully being on the desktop. I know people

Starting point is 00:24:28 have experimented with like weird designs. Um, one thing I saw recently was this scrollable window manager where instead of having, uh, I think it was, it was based on that. It's called, uh, Niri. Okay. Um, or maybe I get it backwards is that the GNOME extension or is that it's based on that this is like a standalone window manager for anyone who doesn't know it's this idea instead of

Starting point is 00:24:56 having a window manager where you have these explicit workspaces the windows are just placed next to each other and you scroll horizontally along. So it gives you a lot more space to work with. And it's just a different way of computing. I haven't tried it out myself. I don't know if I would like it or not. I tried it and it just didn't work with multi-monitor when I tried it.

Starting point is 00:25:21 So it's like, I couldn't get it to work. But it looks cool in theory, I think. This one, I believe, explicitly treated each monitor as a separate workspace. Oh, cool. Yeah. But, you know, there's only so much you can do with an extension to an environment. Yeah. This one was like a standalone

Starting point is 00:25:37 whaling compositor specifically built to do this. I mean, on Xenia, we only really support Gnome and Plasma. We do have Hyperland coming, which might excite quite a few users. I do actually have it running, not on my main desktop. The reason we do it though is like, GNOME is what I've always used, so it's very easy for me to debug that.

Starting point is 00:26:04 When you're a destroyer developer, it's kind of's very easy for me to like debug that like when you're a destroy developer it's kind of like you can't go too far from what you do because you can't test it adequately like if I'm not using this thing every day I'm not going to be able to find the bugs that other users are going to find yeah yeah like um and plasma for example I wasn't planning on doing plasma um but someone just pr'd like mr'd it into a gitlab so it's like cool and then it's like oh now i have to use this to make sure i know it's working right so then it's me forcing myself to use plasma for like a week it's not fun i understand you having used you know from the start but what is it you don't specifically

Starting point is 00:26:45 like about Plasma? It's not that I don't like it as a desktop. I'm so used to GNOME that I have to make it feel and look like GNOME. That extra config I have to do is just like, and the slight differences just really annoy me. And it's like, it's nothing to do with KDE being objectively bad or anything because of course it's a great desktop it's just like personally I cannot use that desktop and when you're using Fedora uh yeah you said Fedora before yeah yeah were you using

Starting point is 00:27:18 like a fairly stock version of GNOME or did you have some extensions like i mean even right now i probably have like three extensions i uh i i really i just love gnome like it just works so well for me that it's like i mean i used to be on mac for a long time so it's like it's quite similar in that way um in how everything just works like perfectly fine it's like what i would it's what i imagine is like a proper linux desktop because it's like everything just works it's it's great that is a very interesting take because i'll often hear the exact same thing being said as a bad thing yes um it's it's an opinionated desktop it's you're either gonna love it or you are going to hate it with your life you are you know it's like it's especially like this is why you're either going to love it or you are going to hate it with your life you are you know it's like

Starting point is 00:28:07 it's especially like this is why you know the community gets a lot of flack they're not going to do something that they don't agree with like if you like try and say oh i want this feature they say no it's not going to happen because it's like this is how they want it and it's like i see why people go oh well then it's like not good is how they want it. And it's like, I see why people go, oh, well, then it's not good because they're not catering to what I want. But then again, it's like, it works so good for the people who use it that it's just like, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:33 it's a great desktop all around, really. Yeah, I don't think everything has to cater to everyone. Like, it's, you know, no one would go to a window manager like DWM and be like, hey, why are you not catering to the GNOME users? I'm sure most people know DWM. This is a window manager where you configure it

Starting point is 00:28:50 by changing the source code and patching the code. This is not made for most people, but it is made for the DWM fans. Hyperland is this... It's got a bunch of fancy compositor effects and all of these neat things. And it doesn't do manual tiling, for example. But that's okay, because it's made specifically for what this group of people want.

Starting point is 00:29:14 And that's the same with GNOME. I think the thing with GNOME, though, is it's more explicitly opinionated. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Like, KDE is going to have a bunch of use cases where people you know i've had discussions with kd devs where every single one of them thinks that single click to open is a better way to handle files instead of double click to open and even that's the case they're like okay we understand that this that most people are just switching to double click anyway let's just make this the default distros are shipping it with double click to open so let's just make this the default but they still have their opinionated design decisions it's just i think the other

Starting point is 00:29:54 thing with gnome is they are a lot of the the big people in the project are very active in social media so it's a lot easy to see what the opinions are. Yeah. And also with GNOME, the only thing it really gets compared to is KDE. So it's like, you're comparing it to this thing, which is like ultra configurable to something that is like set as it is. And people are just like, they see that and they think that GNOME needs to be KDE, where it doesn't. Like that's how people like think about it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:24 Yeah. I'm happy that Gnome does the way they do. I don't particularly like a lot of the design decisions that Gnome has, but I'm happy that somebody is doing it. I'm happy that somebody is like, you know what? Let's actually have a

Starting point is 00:30:40 strong design team. Let's have a strong design language. We don't really care for theming. We are going to do our thing. There's have a strong design language. We don't really care for theming. We are going to do our thing. There's going to be things missing. And that's okay. Where I do take issue, I've mentioned this plenty of times, is where that starts to butt heads

Starting point is 00:30:56 with the more open sort of spaces where it's like, you know, people involved in the Wayland project, you'll often see some KDE devs who are like, hey, let's project you'll often see some kde devs like hey let's do this thing and the gnome devs are like no this won't fit in gnome and like we're not talking about you know we're talking about wayland like let's let's do this um yeah a big thing about it's like the drm stuff for like vr um and i'm like on wayland does not have like er and stuff because my understanding is i'm not i'm not a Wayland dev, I don't understand this very well, but, like, in KDE and WL roots, it's integrated into the protocol itself, I think, whereas Gnome wants to make it as a portal, and this discussion has been going on for, like, four years. The portal? Okay. You're actually slightly behind on the fun here.

Starting point is 00:31:47 Yes. So, they wanted to make a portal, and then they realised the portal was a bad idea, and now they're making a protocol to be the backend for a portal. Nice. Right. Yeah, I... It's a mess. Also, on Valve's documentation, they

Starting point is 00:32:03 specifically mentioned installing KDE as a fix for this. Yeah. Also, when you said DRM, we're not talking about digital rights management. That's direct rendering manager. It's annoying that they're the same thing. Same with DWM. I mentioned DWM on Windows sometimes,

Starting point is 00:32:20 which is their window manager. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I think it's called... Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I think it's called... What is it? DWM Windows. Desktop Window Manager. Yeah. Right, yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:32 So they have that and then there's the DWM Linux project. I think they called it DWM Linux on Windows. It seems like XP or something. Something like that. Yeah, it's been a while, but... Yeah, the VR stuff's a fun one. Um...

Starting point is 00:32:49 That, I... I don't know when that one's gonna be solved. It's gonna be a while, I think. I mean, like... I mean, even, like, as of recently, like, Steam Link has come out for, like, Quest headsets, but that only works on Windows.

Starting point is 00:33:05 So it's like the only reason I even have a Windows install at this point is for VR. Oh, you do VR stuff then? That's cool. Yeah, just like, you know, I've got a Quest, so I may as well. Right. But it's like, it's that one thing.

Starting point is 00:33:22 People will say in the comments, I'm sure, about ALVR and stuff like that i've tried so hard and it's like it's that one thing that i that's keeping me having to use a windows install like and i think that's probably why a lot of people don't switch to linux in the first place it's like it's always that one thing i mean for a lot of people it's like online gaming of you know creative cloud and stuff like that but yeah for me it's vr yeah i i specifically when it comes to online games i don't play that many in the first place but when i do maybe i'm just lucky but the games i've chosen have pretty much always worked well

Starting point is 00:33:58 on linux i'm playing like a lot of path of exile right now and monster hunter world both of which don't have anti-cheat path of exile i don't think it has anything like you go if you look at that chat it's a mess uh i don't think they have any like any um checks on names either so people just have those wild like it's not going to be any like racial service that way that will get you banned but there is so a lot of people will make jokes on crowd control and call their character, like, something cock, this cock. Or you go to someone's hideout

Starting point is 00:34:33 and the teleport point is just inside like a giant bikini anime girl. It's like, clearly nobody's moderating this game. The devs are from new zealand so i guess they just don't care at all they're like whatever they're not hurting anyone just leave them yeah oh yeah but that's a fun one isn't it yeah linux is linux is a fun space right like there's it's it's nice to see when things you well. There's all this cooperation. But maybe it's just a me thing.

Starting point is 00:35:08 But I do enjoy just digging through the absolute hellscapes. There's a lot of these threads. Because I've talked about the Weyland icon thing. The icon protocol. And I've slightly gotten involved in that thread. Now I just keep getting emails where it's like, within five minutes, there'll be 20 emails still talking about, hey, should we set, should we let Windows set icons? It's like, how are we still having this discussion?

Starting point is 00:35:41 How? Stop. Yes. Yes, we should. I think they've now, they've now agreed that setting icons is a good thing and they're now arguing about what the file format of the icons should be. Should we use SVG? Should we use PNG? It's like... Stop. Talk about like, it's a bit unrelated, talk about weird things in the

Starting point is 00:36:02 Linux space. So, you know how Imalo has done gentoo on weird things yes oh i bet he didn't say about getting to the 3ds um i so me and him have this thing where we try and one up each other right um so he posted about his ps2 or whatever you know sure standard stuff you sure. Standard stuff, you know. PS2 has a Linux install anyway. I'm sure it wasn't any effort at all, you know. So I did it on the 3DS. I cheated, right? It's a CH root. It's like I downloaded a stage 3 and CH rooted into it.

Starting point is 00:36:36 So I've done no work at all. Posted it on, like, the big subreddit. It's got, like, 2K uploads. Oh, God, wait. I wonder if I can find it. you probably can uh from about a year ago or is it someone else doing it i think i'm the only one if it's just like going to on the 3ds it's probably why i put time on it yeah that's what it's called yeah okay yeah yeah so that's a bit of a running gag.

Starting point is 00:37:05 That's so stupid. I wonder how long it would actually take to do the compilation with the 3DS. Um, well, you can't. So, SD-COP drivers are read-only. Makes sense.

Starting point is 00:37:24 Yeah. I mean, you can if you set an overlay, but you're going to run out of RAM like that. So it's like very hard to do. Oh, there is a way. A 3DS has infrared. You can get an infrared receiver on your desktop and use that to set up a network.

Starting point is 00:37:39 So then you could run like NFS over the top of that. Do you know what you could also do? Not install Gen 2 on your 3DS. Oh, I should probably explain why I've been saying it wrong. Yeah, that's fine. I assume that maybe you were saying it right and I'm saying it wrong. Oh, no, no. I'm allowed to say it like that for the longest time.

Starting point is 00:38:03 Okay. And I learned against gentoo from him so he has infected me with that pronunciation I cannot get rid of it and then when he

Starting point is 00:38:12 got in touch with like all the gentoo devs and that he switched pronunciations on me making me look like the one who's been saying it wrong

Starting point is 00:38:19 all along well you know what uh you're already in this deep might as well just keep going yeah i'm sure you're not the only person that says it i'm sure there's got to be someone else out there no 100 if there's people out there who actually has a fun one I've noticed that a lot more of the newer people that come to Linux base have no idea that gnome is gnome like people like why are you saying it is gnome it's it's pronounced gnome I'm like I've had these conversations of real life yeah like you'll be using it oh that's cool you're using gnome like I're like... It actually has infected... On the rare occasions I need to mention a gnome,

Starting point is 00:39:08 it has infected my speech a couple of times. Same... Mate hasn't, luckily, because mate is such a common word here, but it's gotten very close to... Yeah. I think I still say it's mate. I don't like all to my pronunciation on that.

Starting point is 00:39:28 Put an accent on it. If you want it to be mate, put a little squiggly line above it. Otherwise it's mate. You have it on your keyboard, work it out. I'm sure you can do it. Yeah, we use that word like every five minutes here.

Starting point is 00:39:43 We're not going to change pronunciation as far as I'm desktoping for. I think there also might be... Have you seen Mr. Robot? Yes, yes, I have. Okay, I was going to say, if you hadn't, I was going to say, had you at least seen the scene from the pilot?

Starting point is 00:39:57 The executive running... Yeah, yeah. And he's like, I bet you're wondering why I'm using... Yeah, it's a great show, by the way. If you haven't wondering why I'm using yeah it's a great show by the way if you haven't watched it watch it it's a brilliant show I've seen all the seasons except the last one

Starting point is 00:40:12 I yeah I've been saying I was going to watch the last one for a while and I just didn't I'm even like ah yeah but I can go play Monster Hunter or I can go do this it's mental yeah that's if I work go play Monster Hunter. Or I can go do this. It's mental.

Starting point is 00:40:27 Yeah. That's if I work. Go watch season four of Mr. Robot. I have a ton to do this weekend. Maybe I'll check that out. How many episodes in the final season? Maybe I can't watch it today. It's about the same as the rest. Mr. Robot season...

Starting point is 00:40:48 Maybe watching it all in one day is a bit much yeah in Mr. Robot they have this like command line utility with like ask to or something and it's like it's used to do like normal like basic commands like copy and like ls it's like this weird thing so people have actually tried to recreate

Starting point is 00:41:03 that as like a script from the small like scenes i'll see if i'm if that's the right thing um sorry yeah astu people have like documented it um yeah i found the okay what i like use the command in the show called astu i've never seen this command so i searched for Yeah, I found the door. Okay, what? I like you used a command in the show called AST. I've never seen this command, so I searched for it and found a blog on Fedora 19 that pays homage to Mr. Robot and the utility.

Starting point is 00:41:33 What? Yeah, it's mental. Wait, that's so weird. Because a lot of the rest of it is just like actual command. Why is there just random command that's just not real? Maybe it's just a script he has in his system. Yeah, he does seem like the sort of person to make himself.

Starting point is 00:41:58 ASTU trace PID 34... What? ASTU LS... Okay. ID three what AST LS okay no no I didn't I didn't notice this at all also I love this this path that he has LS root slash F society like why is just a random root folder inside of your like your dump file oh yeah that plays a part in the plot so i won't uh oh spoiler's him but yeah that's metal it's been a while since i watched it maybe maybe i just forgot about that part it's very early on and i don't think it again I don't think. But the problem with Mr. Robot is you know there's especially early on where it's like Elias just tweaking out the entire time.

Starting point is 00:42:52 What's actually going on in the story? Well yeah the great thing is is like Mr. Robot gets better on every reroute. I've watched it like four or five times and in one of the first episodes they leak the ending of season four. Okay. Huh. I won't go into that because obviously you need to watch it but like yeah it's mental. Yeah I watched

Starting point is 00:43:18 the first season back when it first very first came out with my sister. But I never got to continuing it after that and then i came back to it like five six years later however long it's been since the first season probably i came out a long time ago at this point um and when i watched first season again i was like oh this is actually really really good like yeah it even though i knew a lot of the stuff that was going on because of like how much how much like especially when when you haven't really clicked on like the full overarching story it's going there's like a lot of little details you

Starting point is 00:43:58 just don't pick up on the first time we're like oh yeah that makes sense yeah huh yeah We're like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Huh. Maybe just rewatch the entire thing from the start again. Yeah, it's like you need a lot of the context from the previous season. That's true.

Starting point is 00:44:15 That's true. But speaking of weird commands, this website you have... Oh, that's... I love the website for Xenia Linux. The only issue with it is it's shit as a website. Because like, it's just loads of links. You want to see the new one.

Starting point is 00:44:40 Oh, okay. Someone's making it for us called MintTuner very nice this one is a lot more informative again this is like staging some stuff isn't done but yeah oh this is an actual website

Starting point is 00:44:58 yeah instead of just it's neat I like the command line here. It's a cool idea, right? And like, you know, there's a couple of commands here you can run. It's just not great

Starting point is 00:45:15 for showing off the project. It's awful. You said that to someone, they're like, okay. Yeah. I just tried writing a bunch of random commands to see what commands were there. I was like, oh, okay, LS works. What else can I actually do here?

Starting point is 00:45:30 There's like three commands at work. It's like, it's not even fully featured. Our main website is the wiki. I like how you say that. But the other day I had someone on he's making a a hacking game uh where it's like really so you know you know how a lot of hacking games are very like they hide a lot of the details about like network structure and stuff he's going like super deep with it he's re-implemented like three layers of the OSI stack.

Starting point is 00:46:05 He's basically made Wireshark the game. But also he ported the Suckless Terminal to Unity along with porting Bash over to it. So he has a full Bash shell inside of Unity. That is insane. Oh, I love that. So, you know, there you go. That's for the website. Do that.

Starting point is 00:46:32 Yeah. I mean, you can actually with WebAssembly. You can run, like, full-on x86 simulation. Did you see the, um, recent uh... There was, at FOSDEM, there was a talk about Greenfield, which is a whaling compositor for the web. Oh that's cool. Yeah it supports X-Whalens. You can

Starting point is 00:46:53 literally run X-Whalen in your browser and run full desktop applications in it. Oh I found the GitHub. Oh that's cool. It's wild that's really cool yeah yeah i wanted to try to bring the devon ages back but he never got back to me about it oh that's sad yeah that it's an html5 whaling compositor for anyone uh who doesn't know um it's still fairly early on and it's like it you know it's it's a long work in progress but things like this are so cool with web assembly well this is completely unrelated but let's talk about this because um right so as you know in a distro you obviously have to have stuff to be able to build it. Sure. So you need to have build servers. The issue with that is obviously I don't have

Starting point is 00:47:59 proper servers really. So here's how Xenia Linux solved this incredible issue. I bought some rack mount servers and I went into my college with them. They didn't know. And they have like two Cisco racks because we learned about Cisco well. Took some of the routers out, put them on top of the rack, racked our servers in, texted it up to the internet,

Starting point is 00:48:17 got some IPs. And then we, after we did it, we're like, can we run this? And they're like, sure. So then that's how we have build servers.

Starting point is 00:48:25 But like, oh, it's a mess. This is like quite... So Catalyst is the Gentoo build tool. And I'm going on a tangent. Oh, sorry. The entire show is being a tangent. Don't worry about it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:41 With Catalyst, it sort of creates a C-interface, so it mounts like slash dev and slash proc and everything like that. And it needs loop devices, which normally allows for easy, right? But when you run it in a... So we use GitLab. When you run it in the shared GitLab runner, the slash dev is read-only, so you can't make loop devices. And also there's loads of other restrictions. So what we've had to do is like catch Catalyst to be able to use a separate like slash temp

Starting point is 00:49:11 slash dev instead of normal slash dev. And like, yeah. And also to make it a bit quicker, we've sort of patched the official bin host into Catalyst. So instead of having to compile everything on Catalyst, because it has a local package cache, you can just pull straight from the mirrors. So it's like,

Starting point is 00:49:34 it makes it quicker, but it's a lot of patching. Catalyst is all in Python and Bash. So it's a bit of a mess to try and figure out how to bash. You mentioned loop

Starting point is 00:49:50 devices in there. I see these loop devices every time I try to use a snap. What in the world is a loop device? What does it do? I don't actually know. I know that when you mount a squashFS or an iso or something, it's

Starting point is 00:50:08 going to use a loop device. That is my extent of the knowledge because people probably won't know this. Xenia Linux, your whole system is one singular file is a squashfs that gets mounted so um which is cool because like i could reboot right now select like a kde one and i'll be in kde with all my stuff so like it's it's useful for that also means like if an update doesn't work you just kind of reboot and like go to the other one um it's different to like most immutable distros which are going to be using OS tree, which is like Git for file systems. It's mental. So, yeah. But yeah, Mountain Squash uses a loop device. I don't know what a loop device is.

Starting point is 00:50:52 It's probably some magic in my CPU, you know. Okay, good. I'm happy that you don't know any more about it than I do. Yeah. Maybe I'll bring a Snap developer on and they can answer the question. Oh, God, Daniel.

Starting point is 00:51:08 I'd like to see the comments section of that podcast. Oh, it'll be exceptional, without a doubt. Yeah. People seem to think, like, to develop a distro, you need to be, like, mega fine. Most of my work is, like, I add a package to the Cat spec file and it works and then yeah it's like i don't i'm not particularly like skilled in linux i just know how to get around

Starting point is 00:51:34 the terminal um i think like if you've got an idea it will take you like 90% of the way there right right yeah a lot of the honestly a lot of distros aren't that crazy like obviously if you're doing something like vanilla os like that's obviously a big endeavor blend os you're doing you want to make gen 2 like gen 2 like that that's a big endeavor you're making a whole new package manager all of this stuff but a lot of distros are basically just a... It's just an ISO of someone's config, effectively. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the lucky thing with us is, like, if you're doing a distro like Fedora or Debian,

Starting point is 00:52:16 you're making your own package. You have to package every single package that someone wants to use. Whereas we just kind of say, use Flatpak or use DistroBox, which is, it's like, we just have to work on making the system work good, like getting to work well as an immutable system and everything around that, like user space utilities and stuff, like how do you update the system. Which by the way used to be a manual process, you used to just download the new squash fs and reboot um oh i'm gonna go on

Starting point is 00:52:48 a ramp here all right i'm very sorry about this no go ahead so draper which people might not know this is the thing that creates an init ram fs in fedora and also the gentoo disk kernel uses it by default um if you're on arch you probably wouldn't have used it as you'd use the Arch ones or whatever it's for. Updating or unfair, I don't know. Anyway, so we use Drakar to mount the squashFS. There is an option that if I open a terminal

Starting point is 00:53:15 at my proc command line, there is a one called rd.live.overlay.overlayfs equals one. Ah, okay, yes. Very convenient. That used to be a zero. Okay.

Starting point is 00:53:32 And then we updated, and you would get thrown to a Drakar emergency zone. So this is when we're doing manual updates as well. So we obviously did not push this image because, you know, and the way I figured this out was the worst thing, because this was when I was initially doing the ARM64 builds for Xenia. And I thought, oh, maybe my frame buffer just isn't working. Because it doesn't, right?

Starting point is 00:53:58 On the Mac OS VM or whatever, it doesn't work. So I just thought, oh, it's taking its time. Come back 30 minutes later, still got a black screen. SVM or whatever it doesn't work so I just thought oh it's taking its time come back 30 minutes late still got a black screen so I open a serial console and I see the the like dreaded you know you're an emergency shell um and it's like it's one of those issues where you don't know what's going on like at all so I just on the off chance go okay I'll change that to a one and it just boots like that and it's like I I don't know what's going on because the Drakar documentation

Starting point is 00:54:27 is like awful. I'm sorry about the people who make it, but it's just not great. This is also why I spent a month making my own one because I didn't realise it could do the things we needed.

Starting point is 00:54:39 So you don't know what's going on, you change it. And then, yeah, so that means we had to make a user space utility to do updates because we needed to update co-op at the same time, which on Xenia is weird because you have to go into CH to do it.

Starting point is 00:54:52 So somebody wants to update now, what is the process of doing so? So you would type sudo fox update. And so I'll type that now. You type in your sudo password if you've got one. And then it will just say what you're using. And an update is available. Run this command to update.

Starting point is 00:55:11 And you run Fox update, tag you, and then it will just update for you. You just reboot. That's much simpler. Yeah. Everything around Xenia now is like, we've got the basics done. It's just making it seamless for users. Like we don't want a user to have to make a CH root to update their grub.

Starting point is 00:55:30 We want to do that automatically. Yeah. We don't want a user having to edit the install file cause they use an NVMe drive. That's like, you know, half of my work now is like making Python utilities to do this because I know Python. So, obviously there's a lot of documentation around immutable Fedora. There's a bit of documentation around immutable Debian now. Was there anything on immutable Gentoo?

Starting point is 00:56:01 So, a lot of immutable distros are used in something called called OS3, which I've looked into. It looks so complex that it's just not an option. It's essentially Git, like a file system. It's very weird. We had to just come up with a way to do it. So it was like, okay, how do we get this to work? So we need something to boot and it needs to be read-only. I was like, oh, that's too easy.

Starting point is 00:56:32 Let's do something weird. So what do live images use? Okay, they use SquashFS. Okay, let's make a manual Gento install, SquashFS that, and then try and boot it on the same system. And every time I make a change, I have to undo the squashFS, make a change, like CH3 into it, make a change, squashFS it again, and reboot. It took forever. And this was when I was building the custom init RAMFS. It took ages, right? But yeah, we did that. and then we got a system that was read-only.

Starting point is 00:57:05 So you go into it, you log in, you can't do anything. It's great. And we had Flatpak installed, but we didn't have a desktop so you couldn't use it. It was a perfect system. So our first release was like bare minimum had GNOME, slash ETC was not writable, slash var was not writable. Well they were writable but as an overlay so disappear when you reboot. So you couldn't add users, you couldn't change your password, the only thing you could do was install Flatpaks. That was our first release.

Starting point is 00:57:37 We very quickly realized maybe that's not the best, you know, on multiple levels. So then we worked on like, OK, there's some weird things because the way we do things is called an overlay, which is when you boot a live image, it creates an overlay in RAM. And that's how you have it to be writable. So we do that story consistently. So we do that, but store it persistently. So the issues you come into is like, if your base system updates something, your overlay is always going to take precedent on that. So if we just have an overlay over the whole system,

Starting point is 00:58:16 say if you install some package, but then the system updates and your version is out of date, but something is depending on that newer version being there. I know it's a bit weird. Your system will then just not boot. But it will boot, but you won't be able to do anything. And this is, as I said, the issue of people just using a merge. So the way we tackle that is, how do we get this to be a pleasant experience, but also doing all the safeguarding we can and luckily Portage has

Starting point is 00:58:47 a thing called sets so if you've done Gensu you know you emerge at world now up world is a set it's basically a list of packages so what we do is create a custom set called our Xenia and we have a wrapper called Fox Merge everything's fox it's kind of a theme so if I run like fox merge now I'll do sudo fox merge list we don't need a sudo there but anyway it'll just list the packages I have so it means when people go to update it instead of updating app world and completely screwing your dependencies over when you next go to update we only update the packages that people install themselves.

Starting point is 00:59:27 In a nutshell, that's kind of how Xenia is progressing. It's just trying to make this work well. They started as a meme. Yeah. I'm in too deep now. It's like

Starting point is 00:59:45 this is what I do now before this I just used Fedora and I was happy and now I make Xenia Linux yeah it's always fun so if people want to install applications what is the

Starting point is 01:00:02 suggested way yeah so we have a wiki document on this. I can send you this. I found the link, right? It's all good. So, first off, if there's a Flatpak, please use Flatpak, because it's going to be the best way to do things. Flatpak works well. It's actually recommended on Gensu for stuff like Steam. And then you've got, so if you're installing like a CLI application, right? Like, that pack isn't the best for that.

Starting point is 01:00:31 So we have this thing called DistroBox. If you've used Fedora Silverblue, you know Toolbox. DistroBox is very similar. It just lets you have different distros as well. So you can do like, don't know boon su for example um destroy box is really cool because like i can have that yeah it was super i was i like when it first came out i was gonna get um lucre on the show and things just didn't uh work out we're both busy and it just never happened but yeah just rocks is awesome this yeah apart

Starting point is 01:01:04 from like the surface level stuff of like, oh, I can have the AUR on my Xenia system. You can export applications and have them appear in your desktop and just work. Like, for example, I needed the Mega Client for something. I think it's got a flat pack, but I didn't realize.

Starting point is 01:01:19 I installed it in a Distrobox, exported it, and now I can just go in my application menu and just open it and it will just work like even if the container isn't started yet it'll work and then you can also do like development on it because you can give it root privileges like which is like privileged um in podman or docker so if i want to build a xenia stage manually i can just go into a gento environment like that like i have an avia set I type G and now I'm in Gento.

Starting point is 01:01:47 It's like, this toolbox is cool. And then if all else fails, you've got Fox merge, which is using the system portage and overlaying that on top. An important thing to note with Xenia, you are never editing the system directly. It's always an overlay.

Starting point is 01:02:02 So if something does go wrong, we have a recovery mode, which basically just turns off the overlays and boots you into essentially what is a live environment. What is really cool about this, my ThinkPad, when we were setting up encryption with Fresenia, I completely converted it without a USB

Starting point is 01:02:19 or anything from a normal ButterFS install to Luke's on ButterFS, like without a stick at all it's it's a lifesaver sometimes that's really cool yeah yes distro box i i think has really changed the uh has changed the game for immutable systems because yeah before distro box yeah you know there are overlay i can't i can't speak to every system, but I know with OS 3, if you start heavily using the overlay, it will really slow

Starting point is 01:02:50 down your update process. And also, OS 3 handles it very nicely with ETC, because it does a three-way merge. Say on Xenia, if you do that, and something in ETC gets fucked, because your overlay always takes precedent, it can really break things.

Starting point is 01:03:08 So it's like, you've got to be careful. Yeah, and, you know, there are flatpaks, there are snaps, you know, you can do these little things, but then Distrobok comes in, like, okay, so now you can have... Well, you could already do it before, right? Like, Docker and Podman were already there, but like like who wants to make a dock container no one wants to do that that's stupid okay well sure okay someone wants to do it but like most people i look at i i will look at docker for like one specific thing and i'm like okay that's all i don't know anything else here it's like okay so we set up dock we set up our pod man it also supports lilypod which I don't know oh that's Lucas thing okay it's a new thing that Luca made

Starting point is 01:03:49 oh yes I don't know what he made another one sure whatever but it supports those things but also it's not just a dock container it's a dock container that nicely integrates with your host system which isn't how a dock works out of the box.

Starting point is 01:04:06 So you can now run a full... You can install an application from Ubuntu when you're on Fedora, and it just works. If you're on a Moodle system, you can have this totally fine Moodle system, and then in your writable area, just have the AUR and then in your writable area, just

Starting point is 01:04:25 have the AUR, and just install it like anything else, and if something breaks, just delete it. Nothing bad happens. Something bad can happen if you start messing with your home directory. Keep in mind, it will access your home directory, so don't do something stupid like that.

Starting point is 01:04:41 If you use you can also, you know,d your block device if you want yeah it's nice um but like if an application breaks like you're not gonna you're not gonna break your entire system you mentioned um dd that i saw a disgustingly terrifying command the other day um i'll send you the command uh where is it there was someone oh i think a stack exchange asking what does this do like what will happen if i run this uh oh no they said is this safe yeah if you have to ask is this safe usually the answer is no you just run it and find out oh that's nice that is brilliant i might i might run that and find out. Oh, that's nice!

Starting point is 01:05:26 That is brilliant. I might run that and see what it does, actually. Not now, obviously. So the command for anyone listening is ddinputfile slash dev slash urandom outputfile slash dev slash memory. Yeah, this is basically going to rewrite your RAM with random data from Urandom. Do not run this. You will

Starting point is 01:05:50 probably break your entire system. You may break the hardware. I cannot confirm whether you will or not, but you might. I wonder what the chance is of it completely replicating what's already in memory. I need someone to work that out because that would be funny. That would be pretty funny. Actually, here's the more fun version. This is the Russian roulette version. Oh, I've seen this. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:21 Oh. That is great. I love that. I should put that in Xenia as, like, a... I think it's installed. Yeah, I'm sure... I'm sure the one person... Just make it, like, one in a hundred thousand.

Starting point is 01:06:39 No one's gonna see it for a while, but, you know, someone might see it. Yeah, don't doubt the stupid things i've done with senior like senior is cool because like i can do like the most stupid things i want with it like um i used to run it as a server like i just made a custom spec work and i'm just like it takes like two seconds to make it's brilliant oh talk about distro box so i love it um um i'm addicted to distro box it's like not only can you do that you can pass through nvidia gpus so like you can without without using brute like so i can run like llms or whatever i want on like my nvidia gpu using a distro box it's like it's the coolest

Starting point is 01:07:20 thing i saw this it has like config you can just make your distro boxes as, I think it's an I9, and just like take that config wherever you go. It's super cool. One of the things I think is neat is you can just, if you want, run a window manager from it. Like it's just, it's fine.

Starting point is 01:07:41 You can. Yeah. I did try it. It was a bit weird but like yeah yeah i think that those are some i think some weird stuff i saw with like there's something in here about clear linux yeah um it's just so cool like if i wanted to i could install like i3 install like i3 in the distro box this is the one um this was listed on the distro box page yeah um let's have a look so japanese input on clear linux with mozg via ubuntu container with distro box so you can just do japanese input this is one of the great things with like the

Starting point is 01:08:24 pass-through stuff. Like, and it just being integrated with your system. Like, it just works most of the time. Yeah, it does. I really like how, like, Distrobox and, like, Flatpak and everything like this, they're all cross-platform. They all work on everything.

Starting point is 01:08:37 It's like, I don't need distro-specific stuff to do what I want. Like, it's cool to see. It's cool because i like the distinction between a stable base system and then having like some wildly unstable i don't know like fully testing get to like install if i want to like for example i want to do like musel llvm sure do it in a different box and it will just work yeah i've been really tempted when I eventually, if I eventually move away from this arch system, to just stick something more just boring on there. Whether it's Fedora, whether it's, probably, it probably wouldn't be Ubuntu just because the dependencies are a bit too old,

Starting point is 01:09:17 but maybe like, like, I, I don't know. I, I, something, yeah, you know, like, the sort of like stable, some Ubuntu, uh, some like, sort of immutable system, for example, maybe. And then just do all the fun stuff inside the distro box. Yeah. I'm guessing that's part of the reason why you're interested in this immutable stuff, that you can just have this

Starting point is 01:09:39 neat little system and then just do the crazy stuff. The immutable thing again. It was just a joke. It's not a joke anymore. we can't keep using that. It's made me realize like before I did this I was like oh I would never use something like silver blue or something like that because it wouldn't work for me. No it does, like there are going to be those people who don't want that and that's perfectly okay you know linux is all about choice you can use whatever you want but the the choice of using it that we have is is cool like it's cool that i can do this because probably immutable systems have been around for a bit but i think the tooling to make it really useful realistically it's probably only been around for like

Starting point is 01:10:22 my flat pack's only gotten a wide selection of applications maybe in the past couple of years. Distro Box is... I don't know when that came out now. I want to say at least a year or two at this point, surely. But now, these immutable systems are genuinely viable. I think for a lot of people,

Starting point is 01:10:43 they're still not going to be what they want. Because there are some people out there like me right now, I like having this system where it might just die. If I do something wrong, it might do the break. Yeah, it's like how I run Unstable Xenia. It's fun.

Starting point is 01:10:59 If something breaks, cool. I get to fix it. That's fun. People don't like that. And with these immutable systems, a's fun people don't like that so it's like yeah and with these immutable systems a lot of people don't realize like they are customizable they're just customizable at a different point people want to be able like you know the the traditional way of customizing a system is you are modifying all the packages at runtime you are you can you have this installed system and you can just change whatever you want but the way you do it with an immutable system is all that stuff tends to be modified but you're

Starting point is 01:11:30 modifying it at the image creation time so it's it's a very different way and i think the reason why a lot of people are worried about them is the documentation on that isn't as extensive like everybody knows how to modify you know then everybody knows how to modify, you know, everybody knows how to install an Ubuntu package and all that stuff, but most people don't realize how to modify an OS tree and how to, like, build a squashfs image and all of this sort of stuff.

Starting point is 01:11:58 And there are some projects like UBLU that are trying to make that a lot more accessible. And I think with time, it's going to happen but right now you know we we are trying to like at the um with with senior especially we have like this tool called fox build which you give it a config file which is like four lines it's like just what git repo you want to build from uh you can look this up on wiki if you want it's under router first generation um um so like obviously this is not going to be for the average user you know the average user is not going to be creating their own images but we've made it like pretty easy to just get in there and go okay i want to add this package or for example someone who had never used Gentoo before,

Starting point is 01:12:46 never used Xenia, within the first two weeks had made an XFCE stage for Xenia. Wow. Yeah, most of this is the credit to Atalyst on Gentoo. It's good. But yeah, I think BlendOS have a similar sort of thing. It's very interesting for me me because especially with Gentoo, people are used to that customizability

Starting point is 01:13:09 down to the system level. So it's useful for me to expose these tools for people to be able to go like, oh, you want i3? Go ahead. Do you want to run LLVM as your system compiler on Xenia? Go ahead, do it. It's how we offer OpenRC and SystemD at the same time.

Starting point is 01:13:27 It's like, because we can do that, and I think that choice is cool. And by having this separation between the modification and the system, if you break something, like, you make an image, and, I don't know, Grub dies. You have, like, a broken Grub config. You could just go back to the old image that worked. So, Grub is always going to be fine. You mean like if you're building your own image

Starting point is 01:13:53 and you do something stupid with it? So, well, even then, the way we install Grub only happens at the install. We only just read the figure. Okay, sure. Yeah, that's safe. You break GNOME or something. Bad plugin.

Starting point is 01:14:09 I don't know. I reboot. I change root.image to root.image.back because Fox Update creates a backup for you. Well, not creates. It's just the old one as a backup. It's always got that safety net. And then if you... Because we have an overlay over user for like

Starting point is 01:14:25 fox merge somebody read only say if you make that read right you do something stupid you know you rm-rf your user directory i don't know because it's just an overlay you can just go into recovery mode um because it's just a sub volume on like butterfs delete the sub volume create it again reboot you're fine. Because of the way Fox Merge works, Fox Merge works with the ported sets. I reboot, I run Fox Merge upgrade, and I've got all my packages back on the base system.

Starting point is 01:14:56 So it's like, we've got those options. And that's what's cool about the mutable systems. There's not really a way beyond deleting the root image itself that you can actually mess up the system. Hmm. Maybe... Okay. Besides, as you were writing that command we saw before where you brick your memory. Yeah, if you do something like that, yeah. I mean, I think it can technically... Okay. If you unmount slash root, which you can do, technically Xenia can survive an rf-rf on root. So it's like, you've got those options there.

Starting point is 01:15:32 But it's one of those things where you have to actively go out of your way to break it. You're not going to accidentally, oh, you know, I ran this thing. If I generate a grub config for example and the grub config is pointing to the wrong thing it's like well I guess we're in recovery mode now yeah well you don't even need to do that with grub you just press E at the menu

Starting point is 01:15:55 you can just change whatever you want so it's like yeah and like with the people that use Xenia now which is mainly Gensu users they're not gonna run rm-rf on accident there is obviously you know if we get users that are like new to Linux yes that is going to happen because they're going to fall for some bait it's happened countless times

Starting point is 01:16:19 but yeah it's luckily we don't have to worry about a lot of that stuff because our users are very like they want to use Xenia not because, oh, they got recommended it by a friend. They want to use it because they see it as a cool thing. So it's like they're already kind of invested in it from the start. If you ever see a command that has a giant string of numbers and a command that looks like it might be converting those numbers, do not run that command.

Starting point is 01:16:45 Oh, absolutely do run it and see what happens, because it's fun. Yeah, I... Everyone, right now, RM-RM. There are so many times I've seen these commands where it's like, ah, yes, this is, um, this is like, some basic

Starting point is 01:17:00 basic encoder. This is passing into a bash shell or something, like... Yeah. Okay. Just run the part without the bash and you'll work out very very quickly what it is Yeah, it's like some base 64 encoded. Yeah. Yeah, exactly Installing like malware on your system He's making up his fight on Xenia in the figure installing malware new system Have you seen... It's occasionally used in GitHub repos where

Starting point is 01:17:27 the way they recommend installing something is we have some install script and then just curl it, pipe it into Bash. It's like... I get why people want it because it's like a one-line thing and they don't need to do anything, but please don't do that because it's like a one-line thing and they don't need to do anything but please don't do that because it's like and i'm guilty of this as well everyone has done this

Starting point is 01:17:51 yeah right but it is not worth it like what if it's just like what if even if it's not actively malicious what if it's just not written well and it has some bug which can kill your system? It's like, because it can happen. It's like, I quite like, I know it's a bit weird, but like the Docker documentation, when it tells you to use a convenience script, it's like, download this first. Now check the script. Like, look at it. Because like, just run that one line.

Starting point is 01:18:20 You don't know what you're running on your system, like at all. Yeah, the same is true with the AUR as well. I don't think people realize that a package build, you can run any command in a package build. A package build is just a bash script, basically. Yeah, it's the same

Starting point is 01:18:38 sort of thing with eBuilds. I will say the way Gensu does it is a bit nicer, in my opinion. Gensu has Guru, which is the Gensu user repository something. I'm sure you'll figure that out. It is just an actual ebuild repository. So it just installs on your system and you just use a merge like normal. So the good thing about that is you've got all the safeguards of a merge.

Starting point is 01:19:00 Like people don't know this, but a merge builds your package in a sandbox and it will tell you if it has violations like in an e-build you can't access the network at all so it's like it's it can be annoying like especially if you're using something like go which actively downloads stuff from the yeah um but there's ways around that but like the good thing about that is like it's gonna be sandboxed but yeah you need to be careful like especially in au on like as you said the package build just basically being a bash script you run whatever the fuck you want it's like i'll often see these like there'll just be these long lines of rm commands like deleting build files and stuff it's like

Starting point is 01:19:42 i have no doubt there have been cases where someone has put the wrong path in there. It's caused some damage. It's happened. It's definitely happened. I'm looking at the Guru logo right now. That's a logo. On their GitHub. Oh, look.

Starting point is 01:19:59 Let me, uh... Let's see. Oh. Is that... Is that just the Gensu logo in a box? Oh, do you... Are you looking at a different place? I don't know. Oh. Oh!

Starting point is 01:20:14 Oh. Yeah, the MS Paint drawing? Yeah. I think someone might need to contact the Gensu media team about that. It's something, guys. It works, you know. It's a logo.

Starting point is 01:20:30 It is what it is. It's GVRV, you know, my favorite repository. That drawing of Larry the Cow, perfectionized. Larry the Cow? Yeah, that's what it's called. Larry the Cow. I didn't know. It had a name. I had no idea.

Starting point is 01:20:54 Larry... Wait, what? There's lore behind Larry? Larry and his youngies wearing designer suede hooves. Larry after he grew his black and white patches. What? What? suede hooves Larry after he grew his black and white patches what what in a badge yeah he's got some more behind him he's used in like the documentation if

Starting point is 01:21:17 there's like a user and again two dogs it'll be Larry huh there are a lot of these like Linux mascots that I I've never really looked into most of them. I'll play something like Super Tuxcart for example and there'll be a bunch of characters and like I recognize like the there's Tux there okay there's the the BSD pufferfish and it'll be like the the painting application I'm blanking on the name on Critter Critter thank you yes and the rest

Starting point is 01:21:51 I'm like I have no idea who these characters are like who are any of these oh it's brilliant the funny thing that's happened so obviously with fetch tools I know this is going to sound really out there they have have to be coded for the different distros. And if you don't know, I know you will, but like other people, NeoFetch has been dead

Starting point is 01:22:12 for a long time. It's not actively maintained. So like to do NeoFetch, we have to have a fork. But anyway, the funny thing that's happened as Xenia the mascot has got popular, people have put like ASCII art of Xenia the mascot has got popular, people have put Asciiart of Xenia in different fetch programs. So we have like mascots, if you run fast fetch on Xenia you will get a Xenia, not our one, but you'll get like a mascot. If you run high fetch you will also get one. I'll send you the high fetch one because my fast fetch is broken.

Starting point is 01:22:44 Oh yeah and if you didn't know fast fetch was made by a Gentoo player. So with high fetch you have like... Xenia, we didn't do that. It just happened because Xenia has gotten so popular. Oh, okay. I actually wasn't even really super aware of the project until you brought it up. No, no one really is except for the high fashion apparently well no because this is just for the mascot not the distro oh i thought okay okay right right i thought you meant the yep okay that makes sense

Starting point is 01:23:18 i was confused so it's like just because the mascot has got so popular, we haven't had to do nearly as much work. Mmm, I mean, so it's just like, you just sort of changed over and say, ah, here we go. Like, I didn't even realize this had, um, we had stuff in like, HiFetch and stuff until very recently. Yeah, I wouldn't, I don't even know what Fetch program I'm using at this point. Why not be using airfetch? I changed- I changed what I was using a little while ago, because I- the one I had... There was like a bunch of configurations I wanted to do that I couldn't do with- I think I was using fastfetch before.

Starting point is 01:23:56 Um... Mm-hmm. This is the only thing... What am I running? No, I used fastfetch. Okay, no. Yeah, fastfetch was good. No, I was running pfetch before. Yeah. Right, yeah. The, uh, I think pfetch was- Yeah, fastfetch was- Sorry, I'm- Okay, no. Yeah, False Fetch was good. No, I was running P Fetch before. Yeah. Right, yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:06 The, uh, I think P Fetch was... Yeah, False Fetch was very good. Sorry? Oh, sorry, I was just saying False Fetch was nice. Right. Um, I think P Fetch was the one where it all... I think you have to explicitly say what distro you're on.

Starting point is 01:24:22 Like, the... Oh, right. Yeah, it's one of those very, very manual ones, but because of that, like, it's not doing lookups the yeah it's one of those very very manual ones but because of that like it's not doing look up so it's really fast yeah whereas neo fetch neo fetch was a bit rough neo fetch is just a bash script so it's like it is very slow

Starting point is 01:24:38 um especially because people like especially on window managers i've noticed we'll just put it in there like bash rc It's like having NeoFetch is genuinely gonna slow you down If you're using it Never did that. Nope. Nope. Never Oh no, no FastFetch is fine because what is this written in? I don't know something not bash

Starting point is 01:24:58 C++ or C, I don't know Yeah, something not terrible Yeah Played by a Gensu developer. It's quite cool. Uh, C. I'm thinking of another one that's written in Rust. I'm blanking on which one it is. One of the, probably a million of them.

Starting point is 01:25:13 There's gonna be hundreds. Yeah. And every, every one of their githubs is gonna have, like, three rocket ships next to their own. Blazing fast memory safe system fetch written in Rust. And then you're like, I want to write all my configs in Python. It works, I know it.

Starting point is 01:25:32 Oh dear. I like Python, Python's nice. I love Python, yeah, it's brilliant. Oh, pfetch was actually written by the same guy who did NeoFetch. That's cool. Oh, Pfex was actually written by the same guy who did NeoPhex. That's cool. There was one other project written by him. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:25:54 It's called Hello World. I think it just prints Hello World. Some highlights here. Let's have a look. How big is it? Yeah, it uses... A clean build is 3.8 gigabytes. It needs 33 gigabytes to compile

Starting point is 01:26:15 in the target folder. It takes two and a half hours to compile. What? Wait. It's basically just a mockery. Like, for us. what wait it's basically just a mockery like russ okay no i found it uh memory safe blazing fast configurable mini minimal hello world written in rust under one line of code with few 774 depends yeah that's your average web project right there i use guess what is the react create react

Starting point is 01:26:46 project or whatever it is yeah node modules being like it's how it was what how I have to examine this afterwards. There's a translations folder. What? Oh, it just translates hello world and other languages. Yeah, and also, like, half of it is written, like, so in Rust, I don't know Rust very well, but you can have, like, unsafe stuff. So it says it's memory safe, but, like, everything's

Starting point is 01:27:19 just unsafe. It's like, yeah. It's hilarious. What the hell is this? If you've seen this bit, I'll just send it to you, so you know where I'm looking. It's just

Starting point is 01:27:37 one by three, as you can see, is the number list. It only says one, because that's how that works. Just one leaves you you see a number list along... I was just looking at the code for this. This is terrifying!

Starting point is 01:27:55 Yeah, it is. This is like when you see is odd or is even, you're like, I'm gonna take this to the extreme. My favourite version of is odd or is even you're like i'm gonna take this to the extreme my favorite version of is odd or is even is the um the one where there's a billion if statements yeah my one is one where it's just um it's like it is prime and it just returns no and it's like it's like 90 correct so it's like that's a great one actually.

Starting point is 01:28:25 And there's like, there's like issues on the GitHub where it's like, well, for this number it did work. And it's just like, yeah, but if you run it over like so many numbers, the average comes close to 99% and we don't care. Not fixed. You know, it's not wrong. Yeah. It's not wrong. You're right. I'm good. I'm good.

Starting point is 01:28:53 Yup. I love the open source world. It's so stupid. Oh, it's pretty. This is what I, like, as much as I enjoy the, like, arguing about stupid things, when people are like, like I'm just gonna have some fun with my code like this there's nothing serious here like it's just it's intentionally dumb it's

Starting point is 01:29:12 intentionally broken and it's just like writing it because you want to have some fun with it not because you need to do it not because it's your job no you just want to write some fun code yeah I mean like Xenia started off like that it's like you just No, you just want to write some fun code. Yeah, I mean, like, Xenia, that started off like that. It's like, you just take something that you think is, like, just funny, because, like, being able to say you have Gensu but it's

Starting point is 01:29:32 immutable is inherently funny. It's just like, that's why open source, I think, is, like, so cool in this community, because people aren't, like, 90% of people aren't doing it because it's, like, their job. They're doing it because this is fun and this is what I actually want to do. But, you know, when you've got users asking you to do stuff and, you know, I get it. I get why some people get jaded by it. Yeah, yeah. Especially those developers that are making these crazy big web libraries.

Starting point is 01:30:07 Not even crazy big, like crazy important web libraries. It's used by like Netflix and Amazon and Google and then they don't get paid a cent for it. I know. Oh, CoreJS I think you're all about. I can think of 10 different examples.

Starting point is 01:30:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we don't get like too many annoying issues because again most of our users are pretty like they know what they're doing sure like the worst thing is when you get an issue and people just send you a screenshot like worse they get a picture of their phone of their desktop you can't read any of it and it's like and half the time it's like say in a merge for example, it tells you if you want

Starting point is 01:30:46 support, do this and send this to the person you're asking for support. And they will take a

Starting point is 01:30:51 picture of that. It's like, how do you deal with that? Or in Xenia,

Starting point is 01:31:00 for example, we'll get users who have installed like 50 packages to their base set and they update. It doesn't work. And then we're like, right, we'll get users who have installed 50 packages to their base set, and they update, it doesn't work. And then we're like, right, if you look at the documentation,

Starting point is 01:31:11 here's how you fix this issue. Or, please don't do this, because we literally have this for the FoxBirds. If you need a VPN or you need some drivers, that's what it's there for. But anything else, it isn't. and it's just like yeah it it i can see why people get very you know jaded i think the way you put it it's probably the best way to describe it i don't know how you even get yourself onto an immutable version of gen 2 and just treat it like it's a normal version like what do you let's get the gentry right there like just go use that one what are you doing here i'm not sure i think i think the main thing is like people in gento want to compile like a lot of things like not everyone some people really are hellbent on

Starting point is 01:31:54 actually i like use flags are cool right and people want to use that and it's like so they think xenia is just going to be all the benefits of an immutable immutable distro but they can still use what they used to. Which is like, I've seen how it trips people up. I mean, you see it on Fedora Silverplume. People will try and use DNF, and it's like... And it's like, yeah, it does take a bit of an adjustment. But yeah, some people just treat it like it's Gantoo.

Starting point is 01:32:20 They don't even use our wrappers. They just use straight up a merge. And then they're like, oh, why isn't telling me my system is read-only? Because it's amusable? Well, here's what you do, right? So you do all the normal Xenia stuff, get it all set up. Distribox, Gen 2. There you go. Boom. You compile everything in there.

Starting point is 01:32:40 That's what I do. You're going to install 300 packages in there, compile them all you want, you'll be fine. And if you really want to, make your own image with whatever use flags you want, because you can do that on Xenia. Or you can just use Fox version. If you really don't want Firefox to have telemetry built in,

Starting point is 01:33:02 and you want to just disable that with a use flag, go ahead waste your cpu for two hours every week compiling firefox i don't mind but please don't come to me when your system is so broken and then i have to point at the documentation and be like i told you so so you offer both a umRC and a SystemD image. Do you actually have opinions about the two of them? Or is it just like they're both supported

Starting point is 01:33:32 by Gen 2, might as well offer them? I'm very much of the opinion that I use SystemD because I'm used to it. I don't use it because it's like one or the other. I've used both. I was on OpenRC when I made Xenia, so I did OpenRC.

Starting point is 01:33:48 Catalyst integrates a bit nicer. So with Catalyst, when you use OpenRC, you can define what services you want in the spec file. For SystemD, you have to do that in the FS script, which is essentially just a script that runs afterwards. And you just run SystemD, SystemCTL enable. OpenRC in Xenia right now is kind of deprecated mainly because i don't have time really to check if stuff works with it and it's like this is obviously why system d is popular right everyone uses it um it's like the

Starting point is 01:34:19 network effect essentially um but yeah i think people should use whatever they want. If you like SystemD and you want to use it, go ahead. If you want to use OpenRC, use it. I just don't like when people get so adversarial against it. They genuinely will see you use SystemD and go, you're a bad person

Starting point is 01:34:40 because you use SystemD. I'm like... I'm sure you've seen the, you're a bad person because you use GNOME. I'm sure you've seen the you're a bad person because you use GNOME as well then. Oh, yeah. That's funny because like, so I used to

Starting point is 01:34:54 be in the Arch Linux Discord for a while and I posted some screenshots. People were like we're using Gentoo. Why are you using GNOME? I'm like, you do realize Gentoo is about choice, right? It's not about putting 10 different compiler flags and your C flags and then everything about choice, right? It's not about putting 10 different compiler flags and you'll see flags and then everything runs slower. No, it's not about that.

Starting point is 01:35:09 You know what I mean? That's so weird. Like, what, you have to be using DWM? Like, what is the argument here? Why are you using a window manager? Like, okay, but I like GNOME. Like, let me use GNOME. I want to use it.

Starting point is 01:35:24 Like, be my guest. Use DWM if you want. It's just not for me. I think as soon as you realize Linux is fundamentally about choice. It really opens you up.

Starting point is 01:35:39 Even I was given to this. I used to be like, well, why would you use a window manager right but then i used it for a bit and i was like okay this is cool i can see why people want to use this it's like yeah i'm just i get tired of like the arguments oh there was one in like the gentoo discord server where people were tying it to political beliefs they were saying if you use system d you're you know we we use OpenRC because we're ex-political, like, whatever.

Starting point is 01:36:08 And got, like, so heated because it's tying, like, politics into a niche system. It's like, how does that make any sense? That's where you close the Discord window, you go outside, and you stare at the sun, and just just, just

Starting point is 01:36:23 get some sunlight. Just go outside, touch some grass, just don't even worry about it. It's not, like, it's taken me a long time to realise it is not worth engaging with some people. Like, there are some people that are just too far gone that no matter what you say to them,

Starting point is 01:36:40 like, I, there are people that, if they're willing to come to the table and have like an actual discussion sure but of course we're not agreeing like on the core fundamentals if it's like yeah you think that your knit system's a political belief like i don't know what i can say to you yeah you're a crazy person yeah they always try to make it personal as well. Everyone's trying to get their last words in and trying to be morally

Starting point is 01:37:09 on top of this argument. At the end of the day, they're not going to change someone's opinion by shouting at them that using OpenRC is like, using SystemD is like some fundamental wrongdoing. You're not going to get anywhere. And then there's been some

Starting point is 01:37:26 nice discussions where it's like, oh, I use OpenRC because I like the init scripts because they're cool. And some people are like, oh, I use systemd because I like writing, I like their service files. And that's constructive. I wish people would be like this, but they're not.

Starting point is 01:37:41 This is a lot of the discussion about Wayland and Xorg. Like, it's just there's a lot of the discussion about Weyland and Exorg it's just there's a lot of people that are at this point very ingrained in I'm never going to leave Exorg I don't care what Weyland does I don't care what my distros are doing

Starting point is 01:37:58 I don't care that Red Hat's pulling out of the project and no one's gonna maintain it, I'm gonna keep using until the end of time and that's okay. Right? Like, if you are running, here's the thing about Xorg, if you are running a T410,

Starting point is 01:38:14 Xorg's going to keep working until the dependencies on the rest of your system start, like, misaligning. But, like, the hardware-wise, it's never going to stop working on that hardware. Yeah. I mean, Wayland works okay on the T410. The only issue is you have to use the legacy renderer on Hyperland and that meant my colors were inverted. This is fun. But yeah, the thing is like I'm on X now and people will like scream at me because of that, but it's like, yeah,

Starting point is 01:38:40 but Wayland right now is working right for me and it's like that's fine I'll switch when it's like ready for me personally then we'll be like saying Weyland's been ready for two years yeah but if I open Discord and it like stutters everywhere because I'm using an old NVIDIA driver then yeah I don't

Starting point is 01:38:59 clear okay it's been ready for certain things for a while do you know how long ago when Fedora defaulted to Wayland it's been a long time 2016

Starting point is 01:39:12 it was not ready in 2016 the thing is it was ready for me when I was on an AMD GPU and we got gifted we got gifted in... But, like... We got gifted in NVIDIA. I was like, I need to use this now to make sure it works on Xenia.

Starting point is 01:39:30 And it's like... Oh. It was ready for... Like, I was... Oh, sorry. No, sorry. I had you off. It's all good.

Starting point is 01:39:39 It's like... With Wayland on, like, an NVIDIA GPU, it's like... I was previously... I was like, oh, Wayland's ready for everyone. Switch it now. I don't care if you're using it. It's all Wayland on, like, an NVIDIA GPU, it's like, I was previously, I was like, oh, Wayland's ready for everyone. Switch right now. I don't care if you're using it. It's all Wayland.

Starting point is 01:39:49 And then I went on an NVIDIA GPU, and I was like, oh, this is why people were like, yeah, I'm going to have to stay back to work. And it's like, yeah. But I think we are definitely close. Like, very, very close. It's going to be soon. Yeah. As we talked about, I don't know if it was before

Starting point is 01:40:06 the show started, but we mentioned the 550 drivers. Carl from System76 is he is hoping he is, well, System76, because they're a manufacturer, they get early OEM drivers. From what he's told me, from what I've heard,

Starting point is 01:40:21 they are really good. I don't know. I don't know what range of hardware they've tested on. If it's like just, you know, 30 series and newer, it works great. And then if you're on like 10 series, because 10 series is like seven or eight years old at this point. It's a fairly old card. But my understanding is at least on the new cards, 550 is supposed to be like the holy grail

Starting point is 01:40:45 yeah I mean with us I'm on 535 because it's getting too stable but with like what I'm really looking forward to is NVK NVK is cool the new Novo stuff that's coming in with GSPs and stuff

Starting point is 01:41:01 for the longest time if I load up Fedora say that's going to use NoFu on a 30 series, it stutters everywhere, it's unusable. But then now, when it's ready, obviously I know it's still experimental in Mesa and stuff, the new

Starting point is 01:41:18 card comes out as a GSP, so it will work on day one. And it's like, I think that's been one of the big things that stopped people physically switching to Linux is like they see the horror stories about NVIDIA and it just works like from a live USB out of the box people will realize that you know that's when NVIDIA has got there in Linux. For you personally when NVK is ready would you

Starting point is 01:41:44 completely switch to it or do you have some usage for CUDA that you would need the Parade Hacker Drivers for? I don't need CUDA apart from doing stupid testings. Me personally, yeah, I'm going to switch as soon as I can. I will try it out, see if my games work. And if my games work, yeah cool, I work yeah cool i'm gonna switch to it um because it's just so cool i i don't really want to have to deal with the nvidia driver like from a distro development standpoint getting nvidia working has been hell like it's awful

Starting point is 01:42:19 so not only are the boot arguments on gr, you have to be completely different because you need to. Because Glome specifically needs like so many requirements for it to even show you Wayland in the like selection thing. So you need to do so much stuff as a district developer. But also because we're Xenia, we can't tell people to do this themselves because they physically can't. So we have to ship this in an image and it's like when i don't have to do that like and i don't have to make separate images for nvidia users it is going to be the best right now if you're on xenia and you've got an nvidia card your only option is gnome systemd unless if you make your own um specs right but on everything else you have all the options so yeah Nvidia like it's weird right

Starting point is 01:43:08 because Nvidia has had support for Linux for such a long time and early on Nvidia's support was really good because AMD's drivers back then were garbage yeah ATI was horrible yeah it's only in fairly recent years that with all of

Starting point is 01:43:24 this support for the mesa project like you know you have people from amd directly contributing to mesa it's not like you know oh we just happen to give them some documentation all that like that there is a little bit of that from nvidia like very very light not as much as they really would like. Honestly, what I want to see is I want to see NVIDIA, at least one full-time developer that they can let work on the NVK project as a paid position.

Starting point is 01:43:55 Yeah. The thing is for them, it's like they want to... They have... The funny thing with NVIDIA, when new games come out, they are in contact with the devs and they make changes to their drivers to like make the games run better like so the the issue with nvidia fully open sourcing is it will break so many like patterns and like not patterns

Starting point is 01:44:19 but like copyright from like game dev and it's like whereas with amd where they have it open source for so long nvidia like they are actively not wanting to do this like i think they're only really doing it now because of like people using linux in like hpc and using nvidia cards for like llms so for example like the open source nvidia drivers they don't support um like sleep states at all um so it's like the open source nvidia stuff is basically useless right now as a desktop user i understand them not wanting to open source their drivers because most people don't realize this but amd does have proprietary drivers the pro drivers are proprietary and you need them to use OpenCL. At least the OpenCL implementation they had this some like rustic the rustic stuff yeah yeah yeah all of that annoying yeah yeah I am being

Starting point is 01:45:12 rockin' this school yeah the documentation a lot better than it was now it actually lists which cards are supported which is crazy yeah it's like seven of them. They still don't support them. I'm lucky what card I have supports ROCM. Like very lucky they don't support a lot of them. The thing is they do. That's the weird thing, right? Because it's not officially supported, but the Debian Rock'em team has their own documentation and lists most cards as supported,

Starting point is 01:45:39 but because they don't officially test them, because there's such... I'm not blaming the rockham team for this because it seems like amd just has such little interest in like funding this project and actually making it good because there's like three people responding to to issues on their github yeah no it's nvidia have a like stranglehold on the market for like with kuda stuff but it's like amd are fighting a very uphill battle yeah it's it's not especially because they're a smaller company anyway and they're not just making gpus like they've got everything else it's like they don't

Starting point is 01:46:17 have a lot of sign to rocm yeah and it it was bad before but now that Nvidia's look Nvidia's not a GPU company anymore they're an AI system integrator basically and with the AI stuff and it's only getting bigger they're getting more and more and more money like there's a reason

Starting point is 01:46:38 why I want to say it's like the sixth biggest company in the world it's like the sixth biggest company in the world. It's some stupid number. Uh, top company... Sixth most valuable, yeah. Yeah, it's... It's a wide, like...

Starting point is 01:46:58 And I wouldn't be surprised if within a couple of years they are like the top. Because everyone is talking about AI. Everyone's like, ah, AI, this AI, that, and you know,

Starting point is 01:47:11 this is, this is the, the, the, the old saying where it's like, when there is a gold rush, you don't want to be digging for the gold. You'll be selling shovels.

Starting point is 01:47:19 Nvidia is the shovel. Like everybody needs Nvidia. Like if you want to do AI stuff, you don't come buy an AMD card. Maybe there'll be, like, some market there for Intel. Maybe. AMD have their, like, instinct line. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:33 And Intel do this, too, where they have accelerators on the CPU to, like, specifically for this. But, like, everyone just goes to NVIDIA because what works on, like, Hightorch, for example. NVIDIA. What works in, like, what does everything like Hightorch, for example. Nvidia. What works in like what does everything use under the hood? Huda.

Starting point is 01:47:49 Which is going to be Nvidia only. And it's like you see the servers they sell which have got like H100 or something and they're selling for like millions of pop. Yeah. It's sad but I don't know. There's no way I can fix it. I can buy one card. Yeah, it's sad, but...

Starting point is 01:48:05 I don't know. There's no way... Look, there's no way I can fix it. I can buy one card. I bought one card every three years. I'm not going to change anything. Yeah, I can scream it in video as much as I want. They're not going to listen to it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:18 Hopefully, with Red Hat going hard into Weyland, that'll be some sort of push from Nvidia to sort their stuff out. That's my hope. But maybe it's just hope. Red Hat just want a workable GNOME desktop and not too worried about much else, I don't think. As long as it works for them as a development environment,

Starting point is 01:48:40 they don't care. So it's like, they're not going to push for gaming, for example. Yeah, that's true. But, I don't care so it's like they're not gonna push for like gaming for example yeah that's true but i don't know i will get there eventually yeah or mvk support the mvk and nova project i mean yeah i didn't i don't willingly have an nvidia gpu i was uh i was happier on my AMD GPU but I kind of have to support it. So it's like I may as well run it. If you have the choice, don't buy it. Yeah, no. I could buy whatever card I wanted.

Starting point is 01:49:15 Specifically your AMD. I don't need to worry about testing weird things for users on different hardware. So it's... I go with the thing that I know is gonna work yeah yeah but um with okay with with xenia linux what are you planning to do with this because as you said earlier it started as a joke and now you've spent a lot of time working on it and you got this whole new website clearly you're like gonna keep it going and like for some amount of time in the future.

Starting point is 01:49:46 But what are your plans with it? So the main plan right now, immediate plan, get our build system back up and running because that has broken. Yeah, it's a pain. The underpinning of every distro, you need to have updates

Starting point is 01:50:00 because when security updates come out, your users are going to scream at you if you're not up to date. The main stuff is you've got the base there. We don't need to worry about the really underlying technical stuff anymore. It's more about making it more of a seamless user experience. Right now, for example, we don't have an ISO. We tell users to go, oh, go get a Fedora ISO, boot into that,

Starting point is 01:50:25 and then download our installer from there. Which is, yeah, it seems stupid, but it's like it's the easiest way for us to do it at the moment. But that is not friendly at all to new users because everyone, when they search, I want a Linux distro, what they really want is a bootable live image.

Starting point is 01:50:41 Yeah. So, I mean, that's a big plan. I think Jack, who's also on this project with me is developing that. A lot of it is just getting it stable. Like right now we are still in alpha, there's issues, as everything has issues. Trying to get those issues that are actually going to affect people and stuff, them fixed Getting them through the new website is a big one because our old website it looks cool. That's about it It's not useful at all. So That's that's nearly done. Yeah, I suppose from there. It's just like continuing maintaining it and seeing where we go

Starting point is 01:51:22 I mean, there's some funny things you can do right now Like you can actually install Nix on senior Linux um it's a bit stupid because the way it works because it's your overlays a systemd unit is installed on an overlay so it doesn't pick it up on boot because systemd integrates with the interim FS um with drake up so the next demon will not be started um you need to run systemd damon reload and all stuff like that so like writing documentation on like the weird things is is probably quite good and also our documentation needs a rework it's uh some things are good the install guides like decent for example you can manually install xenia and we've got guys to do that but like we kind of get people installed and then it's like where do i go from here and we definitely need to document some stuff with that you have a documentation though

Starting point is 01:52:16 which you know is is is something could be worse we didn't um when we when we first released, it was, here's how you use our horrible installer, and you're good. So it's definitely better than it was. I do kind of focus on documentation though, because it's like, when you come from where we were, which is Dentsu users, you can expect them to be of a decent, like, you know, they're going to get by on their own. But as new people come in, which haven't used like Gensu or haven't used something like Arch, it's like we need to have that support in there for them, because if we don't,

Starting point is 01:52:58 if they have trouble installing it and they're not going to use it, you know, if it if they see, oh, I need to download Fedora, they're not going to use it straight away, we've lost a user like that. So it's like making it more accessible is probably one of the biggest things. You know, we don't want to become Ubuntu. We don't want it to be some like a beginner distro because it will never be a beginner distro. Right. It will, we want to make it more than just some niche thing that about five people in the world have heard of well hopefully after this people have you know more

Starting point is 01:53:31 people heard about maybe maybe someone's tried out and see see what it's actually like see what a mutable gen do what you could really do with it yeah i'm pleased to because I'll always be here to help, like anyone. If you need help, we are absolutely here for you. If you need us to, we will guide you through the install to get it working. But also, I love seeing what stupid things people do with it. Like, I love seeing when someone downloads it and two weeks later they're showing me XFCE on Xenia or like they've completely ruined their system somehow like that's cool as well so it's nice to see stuff like that

Starting point is 01:54:12 one thing I did see in here was there was a specific comment about OpenRC and Flatpak I didn't I actually didn't realize that Flatpak and OpenRC didn't actually work properly I actually didn't realize that flatpacks on OpenRC didn't actually work properly. I had no idea about that. Right. This is a Dbus thing.

Starting point is 01:54:29 Right. This angers me. We've had this issue. I'll send you the link. This issue was created like let's have a look. Six months ago. Christ, that's a long time. So if the Flatpak

Starting point is 01:54:46 has got, like, in the desktop file, it has Dbus activatable, which is set to true, it will not launch on OpenRC. Because the, I think it's, like, the Dbus broker, you know, like, Dbus on OpenRC

Starting point is 01:55:02 is a bit different to SystemD. And it doesn't look in the place where Flatpak installs like the desktop files or the Dbus service files even. So if you install like most GNOME like Flatpaks, for example, use this, you click it and it does nothing. So we can't fix it. We've tried. Like we can't even fix this in config.

Starting point is 01:55:25 So it's probably... I don't want to put blame on anyone here because I don't know the root cause of this issue. But yeah, this is one of the reasons why Systemd for us is the main one we support because it works like that. We don't have to do anything. I had never

Starting point is 01:55:46 even heard there were issues. I guess because OpenRC is such a small use case anyway. It's like, it's the main one that people talk about against SystemD. The only real distros that I know that pretty support it is like,

Starting point is 01:56:01 there's that Arch one, like Arctics or something, but there's Alplane and there's Gantu. It's like, that support it. There's that Arch one, like Arctics or something, but there's Alpine and there's Gantu. That's it. I'm sure there's some other ones that I'm missing there. Devouin is the Debian sort of thing from Arctics. There's definitely ones out there,

Starting point is 01:56:18 but the main ones are very niche. Gantu and Alpine are probably the biggest ones there, and people are genuinely scared of Gantu normally anyway, so it's like most of your users aren the biggest one then, and people generally get scared of Gentoo normally anyway, so it's like most of your users aren't using OpenRC, and it's like yeah, it's and then again, you've got

Starting point is 01:56:34 the whole thing of Gentoo, everyone wants to use the packages from Portage so not many people are using Flatpak on OpenRC, so it's like because it's a niche community, they're also not using Flatpak, they're not testing Right. So it's like, because it's a niche community, they're also not using Flatpak. They're not testing all these things that we're doing.

Starting point is 01:56:50 So, yeah. And that's the problem we were getting to earlier, where if you're going to add something, you have to also be there to test it. So if you wanted to add, you know, XFCE, now all of a sudden you have to mess around with XFCE

Starting point is 01:57:02 to make sure there's not specific issues with that. I mean, that's why, like, we don't have XFCE supported. Even though someone did it, it doesn't mean that we can support it. If we publish images for XFCE, people use them and find an issue and I go, what does that mean? And it's like, that's not going to look great. And that's also why we did support like nvidia for a long time unless it is using novoo because i didn't have an nvidia card

Starting point is 01:57:31 i can't confidently say like i can't just add the drivers in there expect it to work but yeah oh nvidia's a pain i said about this earlier but i had to like make the we said about this before so i had to make the image i was going to use before i put my new card in because otherwise i would not get frame buffer so stupid yeah but vk will save us hopefully hopefully but um i guess on that note we should probably end off the show we're closing in on the two hour mark now I spent that long we felt like 30 minutes

Starting point is 01:58:09 well that means you had some fun alright thanks for having me on yeah absolute pleasure let people know where they can find the project and if anything else you want to mention if there's any people who want to shout out to help you out with the project and if anything else you want to mention if there's any like people who want to shout out to help you out the project anything else uh seniorlyrics.com is our main website

Starting point is 01:58:30 which is not helpful staging.seniorlyrics.com go there um you'll find at the bottom there you also find links to our gits lab and our contact email and everything like that. There is a Discord server there as well, so if you like Discord, you've got us there as well, and we're all like mastered on. Sweet. Anything else you want to mention or is that pretty much it?

Starting point is 01:58:58 I think that's it. Thank you so much for having me on. It's been an honour. Absolute pleasure. As for me, the main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six days a week. I've got the gaming channel, Brody on Games.

Starting point is 01:59:13 Don't know what I'm playing there. Probably still making my way through Neptunia, but I'm getting close to the end. So maybe I'll be playing God of War 2? I don't know. Work it out. Also, the world ends... Neo, the world ends with you. I really hate the way they named the sequel. If you listen to the audio version

Starting point is 01:59:30 of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you're watching the video version, you can find the audio version pretty much any podcast platform search for Tech Over Tea. There is an RSS feed as well. Stick in your favorite app and you're good to go. So, give me the final word. What do you want to say?

Starting point is 01:59:47 If you're using Gento, if you're using Fedora, if you're using Ubuntu, I want you to rm-rf your system right now and install Xenia Linux for me. Absolutely. I hear a rooster outside. See you guys

Starting point is 02:00:03 later. See ya.

Tech Over Tea - Developing A Linux Distro As A Meme | Luna

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.