Tech Over Tea - Lead Developer Of Budgie Desktop | Joshua Strobl

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

Joshua Strobl once involved in Solus project then not involved then involved again but more importantly the Budgie desktop is here to talk about the current state of the project, where it's going with Wayland support and we get a bit sidetracked with MMO discussions. ==========Guest Links========== Budgie Website: https://buddiesofbudgie.org/ Budgie Github: https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie Budgie Twitter: https://twitter.com/BuddiesOfBudgie Budgie Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@[e-mail] Joshua Strobl Mastodon: https://joshuastrobl.social/@me Joshua Strobl Website: https://joshuastrobl.com/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome to the show. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robson, and today we have the lead developer of Budgie on the show. Welcome, Joshua. How do I- is it Strobel? Is that how I say your last name? I've only ever seen it written down. You nailed it. Yes. Perfect. Before we get into anything actually important, I do want to say congratulations on the finished permanent residency yeah there we go you know I got closer yes as a translator Finnish permanent residency there we go yes there we go yeah thank you very much English is hard it's one step yeah one step forward uh one step closer to finish citizenship so yeah very excited that is really cool like i'm sure there's there's plenty of reasons why you wanted to go over there i don't know if you want to talk about any of that or not um it is the most generic thing that people can

imagine which is my wife is finished so i moved i moved here for my love that you know i respect that i've been here since january of 2014 so almost almost a decade now wow wow that's impressive yeah i have i moved here when i was just young a young boy i have left my state a couple of times and that's pretty much it i've never left the country yeah well i mean to be fair it is australia right the size of one of your what this like the states there are like absolutely enormous so it's probably the size of like a european country or a couple or you know who knows yeah no that's fair depending on which ones you see so no one lives here that's the that's the thing there's a um there's like population maps you can see of

australia where all of the population is around the coastline the entire center except for places like alice springs and a couple of other mining towns completely empty um but like i haven't even been to new zealand or anywhere like that or like papua new guinea um i am very boring in that regard traveling something i would like to do it's just a matter of you know it costs money and that's a problem um but that's a whole another topic um budgie yes i it's a thing it is a thing no um people tend to forget it's a thing uh it has a hilarious history including about i don't know 5 000 different announcements of different toolkits being used um i guess before we get into that um briefly explain what budgie is now we can get into the what it was before in a bit

sure yeah so what budgie is now is we like to pitch it as sort of a modern desktop environment for for end users that also provides a traditional look and feel, a traditional user metaphor. So you know, you have a traditional bottom taskbar and we have niceties like Raven and all that. The current Budgie, so Budgie 10.x is built on top of the GNOME stack. So this is GNOME settings, daemon, mutter, well well technically not Mudder anymore, it's a soft fork of Mudder called Magpie for now. But that, you have GDK and GNOME volume control which we use for some of the piping for sound devices and stuff, so lots of GNOME-y bits. What is this Magpie thing? I hadn't heard about that. What is this Magpie thing? I hadn't heard about that.

Yeah, so... Oh, boy. Every six months or so, the Mudder developers will come out with a new version alongside the rest of the GNOME stack. Right. And this is always going to be a different Mudder ABI slash API. Now, sometimes the changes are very simple, and it might take a day's work to adjust by G on top of it.

Sometimes it's much more complex. So, for example, with GNOME 44, not 45, but 44, they implemented some changes in mutter that split off some of the X11 code, which, as one would imagine, whenever X11 legacy code gets touched, there is a lot of regressions. Right, right. And these regressions would affect Budgie, of course,

because we use X11 at this moment in time. And we decided, hey, until we switch over to Weyland, let's go ahead and soft fork Mudder at GNOME 43, so before all these regressions happen. So you have two different tracks of Magpie at the moment. You have mainline, which is the soft fork of Mudder, and then you have our quote-unquote V1, and V1 is the WL Roots-based Wayland compositor.

Okay. and v1 is the wl roots based wayland compositor okay oh so that's the direction you're going with the wayland side yes so the the plan that we we announced is that we will be going wayland only so initially when we we were making discussion we have we're having discussions in may of last year on uh where we wanted to take budgie 11 and potentially budgie 10 um depending on on the life cycle that uh in terms of wayland support was we were going to have wayland as the primary uh that we would have an x11 fallback okay uh and we've just decided to go full Wayland because we also see the writing on the wall especially given the layoffs at Red Hat and shifts in

priorities there, it's quite evident to see that development around X.Org server is being reduced and it just doesn't make any sense reduced is one way to put it yes it's a very diplomatic way And it just doesn't make any sense. Just as one way to put it.

Yes. It's a very diplomatic way of putting it, I would say. I would say the only development that happens is in the context of Ex-Weyland, but hey, that's just me. Yes. Yeah. People don't like to hear that. Yeah. And we're like, oh, oh okay i guess it depends on the end user

and i recognize you know like color color management and all that is still a work in progress um but i would say like for most end users wayland will work perfectly fine especially when you couple it with you know xcg desktop portals and flatpak applications a lot of it does work um without too much fussing around it's just that remaining 25 percent um and a lot of that's sort of the harder work or sometimes just trying to standardize new wayland protocols um and standardizing in the linux ecosystem is always really fun um and has no problems and conflicts of interest whatsoever. One thing I will say in that regard is Budgie seems to be very willing to work with other people. Yes, yes.

I would say if I wasn't going to be using Budgie, I would be using KDE because I get along that well with KDE people. I think Budgie people and KDE people jive quite well. Because we both sort of have this perspective of user-focused customization and personalization. And my approach is, if you want to theme the hell out of Budgie Desktop and break it, go for it. If you want to make it unreadable text and pink backgrounds go for it have fun it's your desktop not mine i don't have to use your desktop so that's my that's my approach to customization and you know we try to have that approach and i think kde does as well i've seen a lot of commits um to their theming engine where there there might be

a theme that was like last developed like five years ago and some people come around and they're like oh yeah you broke you broke the window border radiusing and decorations and they're like oh sorry let's go ahead and get that fixed and it just absolutely baffles me. So love the KDE folks. I think it's hard to really say at this point because it's not done, but at least from the discussions that I've seen, there seems to be a very similar sort of vibe coming from the Cosmic side as well. Now they're shifting off of a GNOME base

and doing their own actual desktop environment thing. In the discussions i've seen them involved in if like jeremy's there it's like we haven't got anything done yet so like i guess we'll just do what you guys are doing yeah yeah i i would say i get along quite well with jeremy uh i i would say i engage with him the most around the time that. I don't quite remember what the issue was that set everything off, but Jeremy got absolutely blasted on the genome GitLab to the point where he ended up doing it in his GitLab account. It might have been around a dueta and accent colors or decorate

theming or something. I don't know. And that's the biggest one I can think of. Yeah. So so I love what they're doing with iced um and of course they sort of maintain their own fork of it uh and i believe that they they upstream stuff back yeah they've done a lot of upstream stuff yeah so i've i made a blog post in september of 2021 uh where i was evaluating uh iced and cute and efl and iced wasn't quite there yet i was really impressed with it when i used a world of warcraft add-on client called azure rip um but uh but it's evolved and matured a lot since then it's very exciting to to see that we're going to have another viable alternative another viable native toolkit for applications and especially given this one's cross-platform as well it's also really neat to see another Weyland composite implementation,

because right now it's just KDE, Genome, and then things based on WL roots, which they tend to do different things. Like Hyperland has some additional things, and I'm sure Budgie is going to have their own extensions they choose to use and choose not to use, and maybe add in additional ones that, I don't know, for some use case that maybe you come up with yeah but it's nice to see someone actually doing another thing i know there is this whole issue of the like standardization on wayland which i understand is an argument and it's a problem but but what in the world's happened to your camera? I don't know.

What happened to my camera? I might be having connection issues on my side. Oh, okay. I have gigabit, so. Okay, yeah, we had a storm here. I'm going to just drop out of the call for a moment and join back all right okay yeah i'm looking at it and it's showing red. It's swapping between red and yellow bars for...

Yeah. It's good data. Yeah, we have like a thunderstorm going on. So hopefully it's not a big deal. On my side, your camera has just been lagging pretty much the entire time. But whatever. Your voice is fine. It's just the camera that's been a bit okay um it's fine people don't need to see my face a lot of the people just listen anyway um what was i saying uh oh right though standardization on the Wayland side. It's a tough problem to solve.

Because. Like. There is a lot of issues. That still need to be dealt with. And if we standardize. It's a lot harder to. Sort of. Bring those additional changes in.

Like if. If we had standardized to the extent. That X. Org is standardized today. And. We still had all of these missing things from Wayland, I don't know if we'd be dealing with them like as quickly as we are, if that makes any sense.

Yeah. I think so. So we were referring to with, with system 76 is their, their use, I believe of Smithy, which is a rust, rust based implement, implementation believe, of Smithy, which is a Rust-based implementation of a Wayland compositor.

And it's sort of like, I don't know how many attempts there have been at either Rust bindings for WL roots or Rust-based compositors. But it's nice to see that Smithy is still being actively worked on um and what's great about that is uh they are able to sort of effectively effectively be a player in the wayland protocol discussions and at least my understanding is you need like two or three compositors to implement a given protocol for it to be standardized or moved, I believe, from like

unstable to staging or something like that. So having Smitty there, I think will help a lot because it's yet another option of, hey, you know, can we encourage them to implement, for example, this layer shell protocol, or this, you know, screen copy protocol or something and then suddenly it's able to move from a draft to something that's actually formalized so we end considering that they seem to be very open to like working with w roots especially and katie as well um those extensions that hadn't made their way up into the main collection have some sort of chance of actually making it there, especially with the backing of System76. Like, I'm excited to see what they do.

I was concerned early on. I didn't really know what we were going to see. But now that they've been doing these, like, monthly, quarterly, how often they've been doing these like monthly, quarterly, whatever, how often they've been doing these update blogs, like it's clearly been coming along really, really well.

I don't know what it's going to be like to run on a day-to-day basis, but at least looking at it, it seems like they've got something, they've got something coming together. Yeah. I would say I'm a little prepodacious concerned wary of them so heavily using their own fork

because to me it's sort of of ice because to me it sort of replays on GDK4 and Libidwada yet again, where people might just by default go with the Cosmic Toolkit, or whatever they call it, instead of just the baseline Iced, or people in the GNOME stack using Libidwada by default instead of GDK.

So it'll be interesting to see how things play out there but crossing crossing my fingers that all all the cool stuff that they have in cosmic will somehow make its way into ice itself so and hey at least they've you know got a whaling compositor coming together Unlike XFCE's two versions away for Weyland. It's just how long there's two versions away. I wouldn't hate on XFCE. I don't hate on XFCE. They are a fairly small desktop environment at this point. And it's taking them...

So is Budgie. That's fair. No, that's fair no that's that's fair okay i mean i mean how long has like this like mythical budgie 11 been in development right like fair point i don't know about about like 6 000 years if i had to guess uh the the project that we should be concerned about is mate because we have seen basically no movement no recent movement anyways on a wayland compositor in marco we saw a very short stint where they're trying out mere but yes they have ported over some of their applications to support wayland but they're not exactly moving that quick.

Whereas the XFCE folks, I mean, as a testament to the direction that they're going, even Budgie Desktop for Budgie 10 series is actually going to be leveraging one of their libraries, which is libxfce4windowing, because it provides a similar API to like WNCK and on the X11 side actually uses WNCK, but also supports Wayland. So we're able to sort of leverage that instead of WNCK directly in order to actually introduce Wayland support in a lot of the code that we had previously used WNCK for. So I like the XFCE people.

Oh, no. I've not spoken to any of them myself. I'm sure they're all lovely people. I just don't know how... I hope they get the Weyland stuff sorted out. That's what I'll say. I really do. Because, as you said before, like, the writing

is on the wall. This is the direction we are going. Yeah. X is still going to be here for a while. But we are going to start... Is it, though? Look, there are people running 10-year-old ThinkPads. It's going to be here for a while.

But if you can't even get it in the repositories at some point, then you're going to have to even be compiling all the XStack and Xorg server from scratch. That's true. But there are going to be...

I don't see Arch dropping it anytime soon. Gen 2 is going to have it until it stops compiling. Yeah, probably Gen 2 and Slackware. It's going to be on distros that it's... I would not be surprised if in the very short

future, we don't see it on Ubuntu, we don't see it on Fedora, we don't see it on these very mainstream... especially Fedora. They've already got the whole KDE thing going down that direction. Nothing's confirmed, but Neil does not want to even touch X11 anymore, so I can't see that not happening.

And the way I see it going, the second that Gnome announces that they're dropping X11, X11 has gone from Fedora. There is no X11 on Fedora anymore. Maybe one more version after that. I don't see that happening. I think we will at some point see it be deprecated.

But they would be basically nuking i3 and Mate and Cinnamon and cinnamon and budgie I mean why would they have accepted this fancy budgie thing

only to then be like yo you guys gotta nuke it like immediately what I'm curious about because there's a whole red hat dropping support for when's that supposed to be happening I don't remember whole red hat dropping support for X... When's that supposed to be happening?

I don't remember. Isn't it rel 9 or 10? Like, I don't know. Yeah, I saw the red hat dropping X org. It's in their docs somewhere. Yeah, I remember seeing it as well. Rel 10, five years away. That's going to be an interesting point

because five years from now, think about where Weyland was 5 years away. That's going to be an interesting point, because 5 years from now, think about where Weyland was 5 years ago. OBS didn't work. There was no video capture on Weyland. That's pretty recent. Yeah, I think it was, I want to say 2 years ago, something like that. Yeah.

The past couple of years have been crazy for improving Weyland. Yeah, and by then Budgie 11 will actually be out. That I can commit to. Five years from now, you will have a Budgie 11 at the very least. You sure you want to commit to that? I think so. I don't think we're going to have five other toolkit switches before then. gonna have five other toolkit switches before then um so yeah at the very least budgie 10 will will be odd wayland so god forbid what is the um the state of wayland for you guys like what do you i i'm sure there's still a lot to work on but like what's done what's being worked on right now? Is anything done? Yeah, so there's nothing done. So the two things that are currently work in progress is the Wayland-based compositor, so MagpieV1. So Campbell Jones, aka Cerebit, has been spearheading the efforts on that.

the efforts on that um i would like to give you a list of all the wayland protocols he's already implemented but it changes like practically every day or every few days uh so i've lost track but how convenient yeah he actually made waycheck he open sourced he wrote a tool uh called waycheck as a personal project and you could actually install it. And if you use Wayland, you could see the protocols that your compositor supports, which is kind of cool. But he has been just absolutely kicking ass, I'll say, on the Wayland compositor approach. And then Evan has been working on the libxfce4 windowing

implementation, so replacing our WNCK code with it. And just the other day, he pushed a Git branch with some very early work-in-progress stuff of a new icon task list with us leveraging the xfce4 windowing instead of WNCK. So there's still a lot to be done. For example, our panel management needs to be converted. We have to get all of our keyboard input stuff implemented.

We've got to get exclusion zones implemented, so that way your apps, when you maximize them, won't then overlap with the panel. There's still a lot of work to be done. won't then overlap with the panel. There's still a lot of work to be done. But I'm quite happy with the work that is being done on that front. And just yesterday, we released Budgie 10.8.1 as a bug fix release.

So our focus now is on 10.9. And that should, hopefully, I don't want to commit to anything, but at least we'll start seeing some Wayland code approach on that or at the very least maybe some early work being finalized on ITL or Icon Task List so there's that and then something I've been working on is something that's going to be leveraged in Budgie 11 but I'm already working on some code related to that, which is our Budgie desktop or Budgie settings daemon.

So a complete rewrite. At the moment, I'm writing in Rust. And I am using Tonic, which is a gRPC implementation and protobuf stuff. So all of our internal communication, and actually technically external, because you could just import the protocol buffer specifications, all that is going

to be over protobuf to a centralized daemon. So budgie panel, that's going to communicate with the daemon. Magpie going to communicate with the daemon. The control center will communicate with the daemon. All of your configuration will be done through the daemon. So that center will communicate with the daemon all of your configuration will be done through the daemon so that's that's being worked on at the moment so you know lots of lots of good stuff sounds like this is a lot of work to do it is a lot of work and that is even getting into the fact that we also need a XEG desktop portal for Budgie

as well because the WLR one won't fit our needs, unfortunately. I don't... Look. The WLR one won't fit anyone's needs, to be honest. No. It's like a mountain of work. It's like an iceberg where it's like everybody sees just this

little bit. They don't see everything that's underneath the water. I would almost argue that the portal might be the biggest item. So Oro has actually provided an RSC for that on our discussions. And there's been some discussions around that. I probably don't need to explain who Oro is. Yeah, Oro is one of my Discord mods. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why is Oro? Oro and Neil seem to show up in every discussion I can have hoped in. Yep. Yep. Well, it probably doesn't surprise you. And, you know, he discussed this where he's in our stand-ups every week.

Neil is, so... Of course he is. So the KD stuff came to be no surprise to me but yeah look I'm happy that there are these people out there doing incredible work but like

I do laugh every single time like if I go do a KDE related thing or like ASCII Linux thing I expect Neil to be there but when it's just some random, like when I found out that Neil did work on

Lugaru for example, like okay sure, why not yeah yeah, there was even a short time where he was trying to do some work in Solus it's just like the guy's everywhere i don't understand how but he has he has his fingers in

all the pies which is actually quite nice because if you ever need to get in touch with somebody chances are neil knows that person so it's like oh i need to get in touch with the katie person you'll be like oh i know that person i spoke with them a year and a half ago at this one conference. You'll be like, great. Okay, networking. I don't know how he does it. I really don't. But it's awesome there are people out there that are this passionate

about improving the FOSS world. like this passionate about improving the FOSS world like yeah we would like we would simply not have software anywhere near as good as we have if there weren't obviously like people like Neil and Aura like that you recognize them straight away but there are so many people out there like that who may be like dedicated to one specific project like they may not be just touching everything. It's just, like, one little thing that is their, like, mission in life to make better. And, like, that's awesome. Like, that's just awesome.

Or you might have a handful of developers that are working on something like Curl that is, like, foundational to, like, everything. Yeah, yeah yeah it seems and somehow like they still have a problem actually making a living unless they get enough sponsorships and donations so it's like you know people people should be mindful of this as well like not only is there like sometimes a handful of people you might not know about but also sort of these projects that you might take for granted like throw a few bucks or local currency um their way

if you could afford it because i i know that they would appreciate that what's it like on the budgie side like i i hear about budgie fairly often but i I don't actually know how popular of a desktop environment it is. Well, so we don't collect any telemetry. Okay. So I can't tell you how popular it is. Sure. And I'm very anti-telemetry when it comes to stuff like Fedora Budgie Spin or Fedora Onyx. You're not going to have telemetry in there,

unless it's the default DNF, count me. I would say, in terms of popularity, Ubuntu Budgie is, without a doubt, the most popular operating system that ships Budgie Desktop. And of course, they do a lot of customization on top of that through our panel API system, which is very, very cool.

Uh, after that, I would probably say it's soulless, but I don't have an exact number account for you. So no, that makes sense. But, uh, but for me, I mean, it could literally just be me using it. No, that would kind of be fine. I would still be working on it regardless to be completely honest. So what are you running right now? I think you mentioned Onyx before.

Is that what you've got running on all your systems? Technically, no. Okay. So I have a home server as well, and that's not running Fedora Onyx. That's running Fedora Core OS. That makes sense but all my all my systems so my work laptop was actually literally the first time i the first time we started generating os tree branches for onyx i installed fedora silver blue and then switched over to the onyx branch with budgie desktop and all that

so that's been running it for uh probably eight months now i don't know how long it's been i think a personal laptop runs fedora onyx my desktop as of wednesday is running fedora onyx so i figured out a way that wasn't hacky to actually get budgie desktop to compile and install into a location that's persistent because that's not just your like you can't just blast slash or slash user because that's owned by a west tree but there's elements of like the var that get mounted to directories that you would recognize as like user local and those paths get loaded before the ones in user bin so that way i could do budgie desktop development on fedora fedora onyx and for those that don't know because who

could keep up with fedora names anymore i was gonna fedora onyx is yeah it's the immutable variant of fedora budgie spin so it's the thing that has rpm os tree it has toolbox you know you install your applications through stuff like toolbox or or flatback instead um and uh yeah hopefully it'll be called fedora atomic budgie that would be nice either either in this release or in 40 because there's actually some some movement that's been going on some discussions that have been had about shifting branding to fedora atomic again uh and we now have a fedora atomic desktop sig as well which is a special interest group uh and that is that's led by uh timothy ravier which is one of the developers no uh i don't know if he's in or not he's probably he probably is if there's a sig

just assume neil's in it um so there of course there's that and then uh you know there's been discussions with the fedora workstation slash fedora silver blue people as well so i don't know if the branding for that's gonna change but um at the very least there is hope that you won't have to remember all the super confusing names like silver blue kino white sarisia onyx i don't know if there's anything else i think those those are the official ones but then you have unofficial ones yeah which used a similar naming scheme which is yep yep yep i look so so i i use fedora atomic budgie atomic is it i get why they originally got rid of it because they wanted to distance like they wanted to distance this immutable thing

from like workstation because people have this right or wrong perception of what workstation is and by calling it this other thing it like calling it silver silver blue gave it like this sort of own i guess meaning like that's separate from what fedora normally would like make you think about yeah made sense then uh it made sense then but now where you have multiple of these variants yeah it's like is it named after a gym or a mineral or is it not like we'll never know so let's just yeah so my proposal was we would have like something like fedora budgie atomic instead of fedora atomic budgie um but i don't really care which one we go with uh so so my line of thinking with fedora budgie atomic is that at least my viewpoint is when

people are installing fedora with their desktop environment they're making a conscious choice about that desktop environment first and then anything after that is additional, it's extraneous. So if they want to choose the atomic version, it would be the atomic version of their desktop environment or of that variant rather than them choosing the operating system and then

the technology and then the desktop environment. So the non-atomic version is just called Fedora Budgie, yes? Yeah, so it's Fedora Budgie Spin. version is just called fedora budgie yes yeah so it's uh fedora budgie spin i've read this it's just called the door it's spin but yeah uh fedora budgie is just what people call it so yeah i'm sure i i agree with what you're saying um i'm sure there's a whole legal discussion they have to have about how they use the fedora atomic branding yeah um that i that's their problem to work out either way i i would be happy either way as well it yeah it's gonna make it a lot easier to explain what things actually are

especially if you know i don't know they want to bring something else on, like someone to make like an atomic version of Mate, for example. Like you wouldn't have to come up with some other like weird name to make it fit into this. Yeah, and of course there used to be Pantheon in the official Fedora repos too. And I know that there were some problems with that, I think, also centered around Mutter, which probably surprises nobody. So Gala, for those that don't know, which is Pantheon's window manager, is based on top of Mutter. So I don't know.

It would be nice to see a re-inclusion of Pantheon. I know it's more centered around elementary OS, but it's also available in places like Arch. So having Infodora again officially and having some spins, I think, would be pretty dope. Because I think a lot of people just want to use a specific desktop environment and they should be able to choose the platform of their choice. You know, if they use like Fedora server or RHEL or something at work, they might want their own fancy version of it on the desktop.

So why is it that you're actually running the immutable spin right now why did you go that uh dog fooding for one um because so so so dog fooding is a terminology of basically i'm testing what i'm working on um okay so so i i'm using it as the current beta i will continue using it even after it's officially released because we do have the final freeze coming up uh so so i like that i also sort of like some of the safety aspects of it being able to roll back without having to deal with like butter fs snapshots and and all that kind stuff, where I'm just able to pick a particular commit is also really handy for testing because I do the Fedora packaging of budgie desktop. I will install those. And then if I want to clean up my layers, I could just revert back to the previous commit of the OS tree base image. So

that helps with development. It helps me keep track of what I've installed. It also sort of forces me in the direction of Flatpaks and Toolbox, which helps me containerize a lot of stuff. And those obviously could be used outside of Fedora Atomic. But it's like a way of not polluting your base system with these atomic images so i primarily

use use it for like development purposes i use it for a clinical dog fooding um and it's just it's just badass i i think it's badass anyways uh i don't know about you i know a lot of people are just non-plussed about Atomic, and that's perfectly fine. And I also understand that some people prefer having reproducibility through stuff like Nix as opposed to immutability, which their reproducibility also has immutability, but without getting too technical. I understand some like, some people would prefer that. But, yeah, I like the immutability aspect. One thing... So, anytime someone mentions Nix,

I tend to get, like, a giant thread about why I still have not used Nix. So, thank you for that. I appreciate it. Because I think I mentioned offhand once that I was going to, like, test it out at one point, that was like three years ago i never did it um and now the next people bother me every chance to get well i am welcome they are welcome to temporarily redirect that frustration in those comments to me because i also have not used nix and i don't want to because every single time i try to take a look at the next

documentation it's awful and it always is like oh yeah but why didn't you read this blog from like 2018 come on josh like you should know this blog exists it explains everything um so there so i i haven't really messed around with it too much. Maybe improve the documentation first and actually provide like a step-by-step proper guide. And then I will. Until then, there are also solutions like Fleek by the Universal Blue people. And they provide something in a much more digestible format,

which is a YAML. And then it sort of creates Nick's stuff in the background. And you can sort of like, when you're ready, it's like training wheels. You could take off the training wheels and then have index-based setup. So that's like with Home Manager, all that kind of stuff. The one thing I do know about Nix, though, is people joke about like Arch Linux users telling you that they use arch but nix users are so much worse they will make sure they're very passionate yeah i get it like it's

there it's like a unique i understand the value yeah it makes sense it's just look i like i i personally would also like the idea of like i I say I want this version of this library, and it's going to be that version until I personally upgrade it. I think that's dope. Yeah, it's awesome. It's just the next language that I'm a big fan of. Yeah, and look, I'm happy with my absolute garbage Arch system that is cluttered with nonsense.

I have 1881 packages installed. What? How? What's wrong with you? So here's the thing, right? I occasionally will do videos on software. I've got a video planned on

WayCheck. Now, oftentimes, WayCheck is one thing I will keep around often times I install things that I don't intend to keep around and then I don't uninstall them and I've not reinstalled this system for about 3 years and over

time you just build up nonsense and yeah I would probably benefit quite a bit from containerization because eventually like you know i i can install things in like an arch container or something and then every couple of months delete the container you just blast the container exactly yeah um i i did that i did that for my past job i was running all this stuff within a container and then when i left that job, it was like, great.

I don't have to deal with like reinstalling my system and getting all the gunk off of it. Just deleted the container and job done. Like that was it. So, but I'll have you know, WayCheck is available as a flat pack. So you can just install it there. You don't have to install the Arch package.

Assuming you haven't already it there you don't have to install the arch package assuming you haven't already which you probably have because i think arch users just they just default to a ur and arch man like arch community it isn't the main repose because you know campbell has the whole like he's a he's a tu yeah he's a trusted user yeah that's not an issue no i know it's the way you are this time right maybe you should use like systemd timers to like auto uninstall the stuff see that maybe after like a week or something you know it's probably like a safe amount of a buffer right sure yeah maybe it's a very janky way it's eventually gonna cause some sort of um what would you say like what's the word it like grabs something and then just knocks out half my system i it like oh right yeah yeah it's like a cascading effect yeah cascading effect there we go well it's like the linus thing and i and i don't mean linus torbold's where you know he uninstalls

steam and suddenly his desktop environment's gone through i think yeah what happened then i think the steam package required an older an older dependency yeah it required an older dependency which ended up rolling back a package which had to roll back another package and yeah cascaded the entire desktop out which is i still i still my favorite part about that entire situation other people that were defending it as if that was the thing that was supposed to happen like no that was a bug like that's not that was not supposed to happen there's a bug they fixed it immediately and then he didn't re-evaluate it which i mean like okay fair it's your first

impression sort of thing but like come on like luke put in like all this effort he used to like daily drive mint i don't know if he does anymore like he could put in a little bit more effort did he go to menjaro after pop pretty sure that's yeah i mean that was just i think that was a fatal error it was manjaro kde yeah that's what it was yeah i mean one one the mistake was just manjaro right like i mean i know there's manjaro people that they love it. I don't know. I would say it's Stockholm syndrome. The Manjaro people don't like me. I've been too mean to Manjaro too many times. Oh, so they're not watching the video anyway.

They might be. They might be hate watching. I don't know. Oh, fair enough. But you're welcome to go over to buddiesofbudgie.org and hate watch the blog. So actually, that's one thing i don't want to touch on what actually is like buddies of budgie buddies of budgie is an open source organization that i founded when i left solus uh and the goal of it is to develop budgie desktop alongside a bunch of we don't we don't really say downstreams anymore because they're part of the process so they're not downstream anymore but alongside partners like ubuntu budgie and you know we have we have people on solos we have people on arch and on

fedora so we're we're like a very multidisciplinary team across many different operating systems and platforms. Which I think is great, because for a long time, Budgie Desktop was associated with Solus. And that had its downsides. So it being outside of Solus now in its own organization, I think, is not a lot of good. Especially since we actually have releases um and they're not just around like the gnome stack because for a while during the source days it was like yeah we're only gonna do a release but we absolutely have to otherwise we're sort of buying our time until gdk4 comes out and well it came out and I tried using it. Yeah.

Anyway, so in January of last year, I created Buddies of Budgie and brought a bunch of people together. And I think we've just been, we've been killing it in terms of Budgie Desktop since. During that whole segment, your camera completely cut out. And now like the video was trying to catch up to your voice. So there's probably an approval.

No, you're fine now. It caught up. But yeah, during that, you had no idea what to do. I love my connection right now. It's so great. Yeah, you should move here. You could get Gigabit for like €30 per month. yeah you should should move here you could get gigabit for like 30 euro per month nice i get um well i'm supposed to get 250 by 25 i get 250 by six and a half usually for a hundred australian dollars a month oh my god how much is that in a real currency though because that that is australian dollars so it's what like is that like five american dollars it's like 70 something like that oh okay right yeah so like it's it's not great

that's pretty rough it's gotten a lot better also this is a fiber connection by the way it's fiber i'm not even on fiber but so okay let me explain the australian internet situation so we don't really have isps here we do but it's not a it's not like real isp so in Australia, we have a, basically a complete government monopoly on internet. So almost all of the lines are owned by a group called the NBN, the National Broadband Network. Now, the initial plan was going to be fiber to every single house, gigabit,

you know, turn Australia into like, you know, they wanted to sort of make australia a tech hub you know like korea is for example now the problem is the government changed and when that happened they were like that's too expensive let's not do that let's run fiber to these nodes and then use the existing copper out to the houses right okay so then the government changed again and they were like that's dumb let's do the original plan and everything ended up costing twice as much because

they then had to like redo all of the like the holes and all that redo all that stuff so now we're in the process of migrating properly over to fiber but all the lines are owned by the nbn so you only get a very set like there are a set number of packages so they're like the like 50 by whatever 250 by 25 these are like set things that cannot be deviated from by the isps they can offer you like less if they want to, but all they are doing are re-bundling the packages sold from the NBN. So pretty much they're all just like resellers of the one ISP we have. So it's a great system. sounds perfect. No issues whatsoever. It's like the US system, but the entire country. Instead of like, you have these zones that are owned by specific ISPs, that's just the whole country.

It's great. I love it. Yeah, for me, it's like when people even discuss US issues at this point, I'm like, yeah, I don't even know what you're talking about. I haven't lived there in so long. Is that that is that how it is nowadays that's what i hear apparently yeah okay well that's unfortunate i i i did read that they're planning on bringing back debt neutrality in the u.s so or at least that's the hope so congratulations united states looking forward to that.

Yeah, I'm sure people, like, you know, when nothing explodes instantly, everyone's like, oh, nothing, nothing occurred. So, look, I don't expect anything to go well with anything like that. Yeah. But I guess we should probably get into the whole, the history of Bungiegie the history of solos all this all this all this mess because it's a mess i guess the best place to start is

the start that seems like a good place to start yeah so yep that that makes sense to me logically in my head yeah okay so yeah we could start at the start um i was not there at the start of the start i came i came slightly after the start of the start so uh ike created budgie desktop basically to be like gnome shell but also sort of gnome to like a sort of a modern aesthetic on top of the gnome stack so the reason why he did that on top of the gnome stack instead of forking it was for the obvious maintenance costs and it obviously eased development back then the culture i would say of gnomeOME was quite a bit different back then. And as GNOME Shell development has progressed and they've turned from more of a platform

to a product-oriented focus, in my opinion, we've seen a shift of culture there. But at the beginning, we had the likes of Cinnamon, where initially they had forked GNOME Shell and then they forked everything uh to have like their own x apps and their own stack of ownership there um and that was an approach that was desired for budgie desktop and he developed budgie desktop alongside his development of a volvo s so this was very early in 2013, 2014.

But I would say it really popped off in early 2015. So this was like budgie seven, budgie eight days. That's when it really, at least in my opinion, started getting more usable. And the thing that attracted me to it was

it had a Chromea west look uh which was quite quite nice at the time oh wow i'm seeing it but it actually yeah that did look really good for 2015 yeah but it turned out it's actually so the reason why it looked so much like that is because like he was just really bad at css CSS styling. So he just didn't know what to theme it as. So there wasn't. But it looked great. So I'm not complaining. That's how I feel when people ask me about my theme.

I'm just like, yeah, I have a blue accent and the color is black. That's all. I do nothing else. There's nothing fancy here. Yeah. black that's that's all i do nothing else there's nothing fancy here yeah yeah mine has just been like a dark bottom panel for forever keep it simple and then raven yeah like yeah it i don't need it to change it works literally just as it is i like this traditional desktop metaphor but for but anyways so yes so i i joined evolve os in march of 2015 so i think it was like march 15th

of 2015 uh i started doing packaging and all that and um somehow managed to get looped into that despite the fact that there was like literally no packages i couldn't even open up my password manager because mono didn't exist. So that was a big priority for me because this was before KeePassXC. So it was just KeePass. Yeah, so got started with that. I was like mostly doing packaging and web stuff.

And as that time progressed, you know, Budgie kept evolving. I don't remember the exact timeline with all the 8 stuff, but we started working on 10. I was like, hey, Aiki, I've been using this Windows thing for gaming every once in a while. And they kind of have this cool action bar, but I also want notifications built into it,

kind of like what OSx had at the time um it's i mean it does now but back then it was called osx uh so can we have a system where we could pull out a sidebar and it has like applets and notifications uh so we came up with the name so it's it's what became as raven um now initially we had had all the Budgie settings in Raven. But as we started adding more things, that became a mess very quickly. And we realized that had to be split out. So that was short lived.

But yeah, so Budgie was sort of the, so Raven was the major feature for X series. And I think that's really when things started to kick off with adoption in other operating systems as well. For example, Ubuntu Budgie Remix came out, which later became Ubuntu Budgie when it was formalized and accepted as a proper flavor, I think is what they call it. Yeah, that's the same. A flavor of of of ubuntu uh and yeah it's it's a it's evolved since then even though the name changed to source i don't know how much you want to get into when you left the project and all of that um because i'm sure there's some drama there that you don't want to get into

but so when Aiki left when Aiki left in I mean left is a very polite way of saying it when he disappeared in 20 oh man the years, I want to say it was 2019

that's what Wikipedia says 20 oh man the years I want to say it was 2019 um anyways Wikipedia says yeah I swear it was uh it was announced that Doherty had ceased communication with the Solace team for unknown reasons in

2018 2018 right my god so so during summer of 2018 i started picking up budgie budgie desktop development um so i had like a quote unquote summertime solace development session where i implemented notification groups, I believe it was either notification groups or per volume control. So that's when those got introduced. So that was quite exciting. Those were two things that were were bugging me was it was before that it was just a linear list of notifications all jumbled together chronologically. So grouping them up, as the name would imply, by application helped sort of calm the top.

Well, how would I say it? Calm the storm of notifications I was getting, especially in places like Discord. Because I could just be like, yeah, I'm just going to clear all the Discord notifications instantly. That was pretty great. And then the per-app volume control

was something I really wanted because I have a tendency to like my Spotify super-duper low, almost like faint background noise, but then all my other system volumes and all my other desktop audio normal. So that's how I typically do it but anyway so i implemented that to scratch niche and then uh when he announced that he was evidently leaving the project um i became the experienced lead of souls which basically meant all the software that he had been previously developing in terms of like graphical software, like software center and all that suddenly became my responsibility.

Right. Didn't ask for it, but it became that. So yeah. And that's ever since then I've been leading budgie desktop development. And then obviously I left in January of 2022. in January of 2022 and I created the organization and been leading it through that. So, but yeah, it was a very stressful time, both prior to my departure at Solus, but also when IQ was leaving. but also when iQ was leaving.

One thing I want to ask you about was what sort of experience had you had in programming before you got involved with all of this? Had you had any or did you just like jump into it like when you got involved with the project? It was primarily full stack development. So at that point, you know, TypeScript, JavaScript, LESS slash SAS, Golang, that sort of thing. But I actually had started, my first commits of like C and Volocode

were back in April of 2016. So I was touching Budgie desktop and Raven primarily before then, but I wasn't as involved in it. It was very small things here and there. So I did have programming experience with it. I managed to avoid most of the C. And by that, I mean most of the G object C,

which is a whole other thing, which is perfect and has no issues. And I'm sure the GLIB people absolutely love it. I do not. So I managed to avoid most of that. Nowadays, I don't have that luxury. But how convenient that we're moving away from GDK. And as a result, we're moving away from GObject and GLIB, too.

And we're able to write things in programming languages that we don't hate like c plus plus and rest what problem do you actually have with g objects i've not done any sort of there's there's a lot of boilerplate that you have to deal with when it comes to to typecasting and defining g objects and signals and macros and all of that. So it just creates a lot of noise in your application that shouldn't otherwise be necessary. I mean, I can't imagine doing GDK development with C

without G object. I mean, obviously, the two are interlinked. But just C by itself, I would say not ideal especially if you're if you're using an older c standard but i would say ergonomically i prefer vola and rust for gdk over over c for sure because vola provides you a more object-oriented approach and just as a language it's quite now you've got nicer you said oh well he's good you're gonna have the uh you'd have lots of in in in the in the in the context of in the context of widget development i think object-oriented is the logical approach. I would also have you note that I do React development

for a living, so I'm also used to the functional approach, where it's less OO. So I understand both. I understand the Elm approach that ICE used, and I also understand the OO stuff. But comparatively, from C to Vala, the Vala stuff is much more ergonomic. The problem you have with it is they do their own transpiling

down to C, and it's not perfect. And by it's not perfect, I mean in the case of for example, Budgie Desktop, we had to push out a release when it says early this year, where suddenly there was a change in VALA

that resulted in how they were freeing integer matrices caused seg faults. So whenever you tried to do a search in Budgie menu, things would explode because we were using it as part of our search algorithm for determining relative, like your search term to application names and keywords and stuff. So that's not ideal. And right at this moment in time with the latest clang, it doesn't exactly work the

best with Vala either. So you're kind of forced to use GCC. So it's not perfect, but I would say if you're going to do GDK development, you go with VALA or Rust, unless you hate yourself. Or alternatively, there are other toolkits out there. There are? You could do, there's Iced, and there's Iced with Rust.

You have Qt with about 1,000 different bindings. And of course, you could do Python with GDK. But I think most people with Qt, they use C++. And I've seen some of the Rust code with the CSX Rust stuff. It actually doesn't look all that bad. So the bindings have definitely matured around it since then, especially with Q6 stuff. It's actually pretty good.

So there's always those two as an alternative. Unfortunately, those are kind of like the big ones. EFL is sort of in choppy waters, I would say, which is unfortunate, but it is uh their wayland story hasn't really been progressing all that much it's been experimental for like two years two three years now and the last major development of it i would say was two years ago and i And I'll link you, actually. OK. Let's see if I have it. Yeah, here.

OK. This one wasn't too ideal. So this was recently done. By recent, I mean three months ago, which is the question of EFL and Enlightenment participation in Wayland Protocols. It's a very short thread. If I'm not wrong, I don't believe EFL and Enlightenment has participated in any Wayland Protocols for a long time, at least post-government.

I don't blame anyone at all, I can completely understand why this would happen and why this is perfectly fine. However, in case you don't plan to participate, I'd like you to consider your Weyland Protocol membership. Indeed, some governance decisions require feedback to vote from members, and inactive members make it hard to pass a decision. If you plan to participate in the future, or if you otherwise wish to retain your membership, I'd be happy to keep things as is. If you don't plan to participate and you're okay with dropping membership uh that helped us with making governance adjustments i believe what do you think huh i actually wasn't aware of how they handled i didn't know they had voting like that that was that's news to me and as you could see from the comment uh the individual that was basically

the representative hasn't been active in efl enlightenment for years and they to the best of their knowledge at the very least so i'm parroting what they said congratulations i am now tts um nor has efl slash enlightenment been actively pursuing anything wayland related in the meantime to the best of my knowledge so EFL is problematic it doesn't mean it's impossible of course to use EFL but they they have a lot of work to do on that front so there's a lot of front work that we would need to do with EFL as well so so that's but yeah so that's why i didn't bring up efl as a alternative to like cute and gdk at this point because it's it's not doing too good which sucks so what you're saying is there isn't going to be a toolkit swap over the efl that's not what i'm saying

i'm just saying that there's a lot of like front work that would need to be done to facilitate i like how it's still possibly how many how many times has budgie swapped toolkits technically budgie hasn't swapped toolkits at all okay because i want to sure because we haven't we haven't written any of the code that we would have swapped over to. In terms of announcements... Oh, man. So, okay. So let me provide some context. So I don't even remember when the announcement was made.

But that was written... I think I published it, but it was more or less written by Ike, not to throw him under the bus, because it was a team decision. 2017. Yeah, so the decision was

made to explore and move to Qt and away from GDK. However, it turned out that at the time, most of us just really didn't like C++. And there really wasn't anything like Rust in terms of bindings for...

I mean, Rust hadn't really even popped off by then. So there wasn't really any bindings for it. Yeah, that was only two years into Rust at that point I think I was just hearing murmurings about Rust around then yup so that wasn't really viable and there was a lot of early work in

like Qt 5 with Qt Wayland things have matured obviously a lot since then over the last few years in terms of Qt and now we have Qt 5 with Qt Wayland. Things have matured, obviously, a lot since then, over the last few years, in terms of Qt. And now we have Qt 6. But then it just wasn't ready. So all of that was practically shelved as soon as it was announced,

which at that point, it's like, oh, boy, why did we even bother to announce it? And then IK leaves. And the rest of us are like, it's like, oh boy, why do we even bother to announce it? And then IK leaves. And the rest of us are like, okay, well, we're not the biggest fans of C++. GDK4 is right around the corner. It should have all this cool stuff. Look at all these libhandy widgets.

Surely all those will actually be in GDK. So it could actually be usable like some of these widgets will actually just be upgraded to the handy variants no that didn't happen we got libidwaita instead uh which is probably not a mystery i'm not a fan of libidwaita but i'm not a fan of eduada but i'm not a fan of lib eduada for the widgets the widgets are awesome i just don't like it being forced to use the eduada style sheet and i know technically speaking you could use a gdk environment variable or you could you know load up a gdk css file and overload some of it um but that's not really the same as what we have with GDK3, which is a proper theming support, or at least in my view, proper theming support.

The GDK developers would argue differently, of course. So we had made the obvious announcement of like, yo, we should do it in GDk because we use gdk currently the new gdk4 should be dope when it comes out it comes out i write an application with it it's super buggy because like i don't know if they fixed this instant i don't think so but like list boxes if you had a certain number of children in the list, it would reset your scroll position randomly. Which is not ideal if, for example, you're trying to write like an audio player and you're scrolling through artists and suddenly your scroll position's at the top. So, you know, and they haven't exactly been very quick to work on that because all of their focus has been on Edwida.

So, but that went out the door and also around that time stuff was happening in terms of accent colors the proposal to remove theming entirely you know eduada was starting to become a thing um jeremy getting absolutely blasted just in general a lot of major community uh community in conduct issues i would say in gnome and i was like yeah this isn't something i want to be part of and like we discussed it internally and some people were against the idea of c++ so i was like okay well that doesn't really leave me a choice i I guess if we can't use C++ because some people don't like it, then it can't be cute. So I guess it's just EFL.

That's just a process of elimination. I tried out Ice, it just wasn't ready. It's obviously matured since then. Now, fortunately, Budgie is outside of Solus at this point. We have a much more diverse amount of people, and we also like C++. So that puts more things back on the table. We like Rust, so that keeps ICE on the table. It's just unfortunate to see efl in its current state so if we if we go with efl

which is still still the plan but it will require more work for us but who knows what i will say is nobody will nobody will know until we make an announcement with something that's actually just immediately usable that's a good plan that's a very good plan because let's be real i i'm i'm tired of making these pre-announcements of switching to things for the ground to fall out underneath me right everybody else is sick of it and so it's a freaking laughingstock like let's be real here it's like i've i made jokes about it like even during our stand-ups and make jokes here like i don't know 5 000 different toolkits who knows maybe by the time we do budgie 11 a new toolkit will be invented but um yeah so we're just going

down the approach of you'll know when you know and right now our focus is wayland and budgie 10 so and we still have a ton of work to do in terms of uh in in terms of budgie 11 like before we even get to the graphical stuff so i was so the nice thing go go ahead i was gonna say say, the post I saw about Budgie Desktop moving to Qt, that was from OMG Ubuntu. And the post was from 2017, but someone commented on it three years ago saying, I guess they're happy they never did this. Oh, yeah.

uh yeah it's i i mean honestly i i wish we just never made any announcements about any of it that would have been much better because then i wouldn't have had to make announcements and then oh i mean though to be fair i made the mistake of the obvious choice which is sticking with gdk4 um and then regretting that immediately but uh yeah so at this point it's just no no no no no more pre-announcements we're just gonna write things in our little corner and you'll know my favorite pre-announcement is uh gimp 3 which is supposed to happen at the end of this year i don't see it happening at the end of this year maybe next year i i look i look forward to a gimp that has finally moved over to an eol version of a toolkit that'd be nice super super dope yeah and then everybody could be like hey you should rewrite in something like cute

honestly like i i look gimp is an incredible tool right but like i i don't know like what their future plan is because i don't they're not gonna do gtk4 or gtk6 or 7 whenever they get around to it um i don't know because like 3 made sense when 3 was still like the main version but like that was a while ago so and i don't want to imply that gtk4 is bad it's just a lot of the things that you would want 4 is bad it's just a lot of the things that you would want are in libid wayday and i get it that's perfectly fine for a lot of people i just want people to theme the hell out of my desktop and whatever apps i make like yeah okay it risks them breaking you know what that's a problem for theme developers that's not my problem so i can just close the issue and be like, hey, sorry, talk to your theme developer.

That's not a big deal to me. I know it's a big deal to some GNOME developers. But for me, it's like, yeah, it's just another issue, whatever. It takes me two seconds to copy, paste, to comment, and close it. You don't even have to do that. Just put a label on it and get Apple Auto to close it. Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see

what happens with gimp i i'm hopeful that they'll switch over to to cute i would like to see that i don't think it's likely but i hope call it um i've got to rename it then. I've got to come up with something for it. I mean, so long as they keep their licensing, it'll still technically be something related to GNU, right? Because it's the GNU, not GDK. It's the GNU image manipulation program. That's a fair point. Yeah.

So they don't have to i have to but it'd be funny they should they should take that opportunity to rebrand because gimp is a terrible name i mean there's a reason why they've changed their desktop file to get a new image manipulation program in long form instead of GIMP. Like you could- there's- there's plenty of names! Like remember there's that- that Glimpse project, I don't know if they actually do anything. Uh, no, Glimpse- Glimpse got archived years back after- they had some- they had support initially and then uh i think they just devs kind of stepped away from the project and just couldn't really keep going that's my understanding so just ask them hey can we use this thing i i bet they i bet they won't decline

you know just i mean it's not like they it's not like if their trade they trademarked it so you know you know you can change it anyways you could just drop the g just call it imp that works imp yeah why not does it doesn't imp have like negative connotations too though it's not True. I guess it would be an improvement, yes. Um. I don't know. Call, you know what, just call it pimp, right? You know what? But it would be photo and image, right? Like, I know the two are kind of the same.

But, you know, manipulation progress, call it p called pimp you know pimp my photos you know i can get behind this if anyone from the from the gift project happens to hear this you full license to use the name pimp absolutely i'll give you that one for free the next one will require a donation to buddies of budgie but this one i'll give you for free any day uh like no i look honestly i feel like gimp right now has bigger problems to deal with than the name like the whole not being able to select layers thing that they're finally dealing with in like groups of layers how that has taken like 20 years to implement i it's it's it's been a journey it was finally happening i mean it's better than not happening right that's true like uh i'm i'm more than happy when because have i donated a g Should I? Yes. They don't owe me anything. I still use their software on an almost daily

basis. The fun thing about GIMP is it is a resounding success about how easy it is to work with the GTK toolkit. It's taken 20 years to implement collecting layer groups.

Yeah. I do wonder if that's a result of GDK itself, or if that's other libraries of GEGL or Gaggle. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, like Cairo and all that stuff. I'm sure there's plenty of reasons why it's like that. Also, they don't have the funding. People often talk about how developed Critter is, for example.

I'm pretty sure Critter right now, or at least was sponsored by Intel. They have money. They have money for full-time developers. They can do things at a much faster pace. Same with OBS. OBS, they have... I know you mentioned on your Mastodon, like there's something like OBS show, what was it like, OBS shows like what's capable with open source or something, I don't know exactly what you said. Yeah I could pull it up on my Mastodon. It's pretty recent.

I said, whenever I fire up OBS Studio, it's like getting a shot of hopium that the development, adoption, and quality of open source software can absolutely crush or rival proprietary alternatives. Yes, I know there are a ton of other amazing examples like Blender and LibreOffice, but OBS Studio just hits differently for some reason i think that's also because i kind of remember the days when like you streamed through vlc is that what you did not even joking on linux that's there's that was one option that you had i think it might have been one of the only options i somebody could correct me if i'm wrong

i'm sure there's somebody out there that used to be an AV specialist that used to do an FFmpeg CLI bash script that they had. But that's at the very least what I remember. And then OBS Studio came around, and this was at the time of other... I'm trying to remember some of the other streaming solutions that nobody uses anymore at this point uh x split would have been the big thing there's like x split i think yeah i think exploit was a big one um i think black magic had their own thing as well right once again that no one uses because why would you because obs studio exists or stream labs obs like either which one or maybe they call us i think they call it like stream labs studio or something

yeah the drop b the obs thing well that's the that's the reason why logitech sponsors obs to make them uh i don't know how many who remember that there was the whole there was this big drama about streamlabs obs like last year or maybe i don't know covid lost my sense of time over the past couple of years somewhere in like the past year or two um where streamers realized i actually didn't know this myself at the time but streamers started to realize that streamlabs obs is not actually affiliated with obs besides the fact that it's a fork but they were using the name of obs and i believe i want to say like pokemain or someone like that was the face of streamlabs at the time found out i was like hey actually like

support the main project or drop me for like completely out of your marketing um yeah and to make this problem go away logitech who owns stream labs donated a lot of money to the obs project now they never said that's the reason why they did it but the timing was very convenient when logitech did that i mean like the problem with if i was in obs studios like shoes and i got just a crap ton of money i think i would probably stop complaining as well because they're a pre a premier tier sponsor which i think means they donate like at least a hundred thousand or something like that oh that's pretty good yeah it says somewhere on their website how much- it's definitely a lot of money, like they paid for a couple of full-time devs for at least a year or so. Um, I don't know, I'm not gonna be able to find it on their website. Maybe if I click, wait,

Premiere tier? No, I don't know, it's somewhere on here. But like OBS, like like obs has a lot also stream elements who is competitive stream labs also donate to obs which is funny um like obs like they are i i don't know how how many people they have working full-time on that on that project but just looking at like the sponsors they have like they clearly have the money to be putting some like people on there like on their premier tier they have youtube logitech twitch and facebook and their diamond tier nvidia amd and stream elements like that's there's a lot of money yeah just just add intel here and you probably have everybody that's relevant right like man so like youtube youtube twitch and facebook i get because they all have their own streaming

solutions um like logitech obviously makes sense amd like i'm curious why, or what the business value is to AMD for sponsoring. I wonder is it to ensure that, like, APUs and AMD GPUs remain, like, they continue to have proper, like, acceleration and transcoding capabilities? That would be my assumption.

Like, AMD is very, we'll say far behind NVIDIA when it comes to the streaming actually they're far behind with a lot of the GPU stuff like they have dropped the ball entirely when it comes to machine learning they have dropped the ball entirely when it comes to um GPU video encoding like they've just let NVIDIA own that space. This is true, but you know where they haven't dropped the ball? Where? Wayland support. That's true.

That's very true. I know people are going to wonder, hey, what about that NVIDIA support on Budgie desktop when you go WL routes? We'll be in the same position as everybody else, which is tell you to buy a amd or intel graphics card just uh and i know like that that's easy for me to say you know i'm european i i have like a nice salary where do the european purchasing well it's just like we have good purchasing power for in a lot of the EU member states at the very

least. So I know like a lot of people can't just afford to go out and buy another GPU. Like, come on, NVIDIA. Like get with the program. My understanding is it's better than it used to be, but it's still like. It is better, but they apparently it's the performance is not great because they are lacking some like gbm apis that they need to implement um at least on the wl root side i'm not quite sure about the um the k win and butter side but at least for wl roots well

you have that that arc box back there yep are you actually using that or is that just like a shelf decoration no i don't i i actually use it yeah okay i have an intel arc a770 um and you're probably wondering why would you do that amd is vastly like amd is vastly superior yeah i know but uh i also like i need to scratch the itch that i scratch this itch of of kernel testing and mesa lib git testing and all that because for a while i was doing kernel maintenance and a lot of the mesa stuff for for Solus. So I was running a Linux Next, which was always the release candidate kernels. I was dogfooding Mesa lib stuff just to try to catch some issues before other people,

before we tried to push it to unstable. And when I left Solus, I was like, oh man, I need to have my stuff break. Things aren't exciting enough for me and intel came out with the gpus and the support for them was not great and it required kernel patches and then it required an rc kernel and then uh eventually you had to run Mesa Git. Nowadays you don't have to do any of that. You can run the latest kernel

and just normal Mesa lib. So it's a little less exciting. So I might have to find some different hardware to run that causes breakages. But that's the main reason why I went with Intel Arc. I'm not like some Intel shill or any of that. Go to a second hand shop

and buy yourself like a GTX 660 or something. Just run Waelum on that and see what happens. I don't need to actually. My home server I have a NVIDIA GPU and I also have like a I also have a 1060

just sitting here that I could just Yeah but that's in the range of, like, supported cards. I love whenever... Okay, I love every time I talk about Weyland and someone's like, hey, my 13-year-old NVIDIA GPU doesn't support Weyland properly. Like, yes, but NVIDIA doesn't support that GPU properly either. Like, I get it. You're going to keep running X11, but, but NVIDIA doesn't support that GPU properly either. Like, I get it. You're going to keep running X11, but like...

Some of us like buying modern hardware. Well, it's not even modern. Like, I get having to buy second-hand hardware. Like, that's totally fair. Sure. Like, it... But, like, we... I mean, even the NVIDIA 10 series is, like, still really good.

Yeah, the rest of the Linux desktop is not going to wait behind for basically e-waste. Like, I get it, you're running it, like, it's what you're going to run, but, like, let's be honest about what we're doing here. Like, it's e-waste at this point. gonna run but like let's be honest about what we're doing here like it's a waste at this point yeah we're talking about underperforming power hungry gpus in a lot of ways i mean that that that said it's not like nvidia 4e series as you know like a knight in shining armor when it comes to power efficiency and consumption either um you know

like i another reason why i went with intel arc over what amd had at the time was lower tdp of the gpus and this was around the time uh well of november december of last year when prices for electricity were excruciatingly high here. And I wanted an upgrade, but I also didn't want to have to pay like 2, 3x in electricity costs either for it. So I went with that instead of 40 series. But AMD offerings at the moment

are quite comparable at the very least in terms of TDP. I luckily don't have that concern because my house has solar, which is nice. In Australia, we just have sun. It's just always sun. We get a power bill, but it's like, oh, you want to pay like $80 for three months?

Sure, I can do that. Why not? Man. I would love to have solar. Yeah. So my line of thinking is I would love to support NVIDIA GPUs. I think users using NVIDIA are

well within their rights to have that. But also, we can't keep waiting around for NVIDIA. And I think we stopped, at least in terms of Mudder and KWIN, we stopped waiting around for NVIDIA. And we're like, yeah, so if you guys don't get your act together, our enterprise Linux operating systems are going to be inadequate in terms of like running with NVIDIA hardware.

And NVIDIA is like, oh, well, we better get some stuff sorted then, huh? Because we like our enterprise customers and we definitely don't want them switching over to AMD. So that's what we need more of in this community, is a good old Linus middle finger, you know, and just roll with it. AMD, Intel, and when NVIDIA wants to get their act together completely, then welcome aboard.

I had not thought about that when it came to the whole rail-dropping XOR thing, but I guess... I guess that's a fair point. Maybe that would be what they actually need to have happen. Yep. And if you have default support on Fedora workstation, and KDE is slightly less relevant when it comes to most consumers, Rolex consumers,

or Linux consumers, especially in the business space. But that, or any sort of stuff around CentOS, then it's going to be GNOME and Mudder. So I know NVIDIA and the Mudder and GNOME team have been working hand-in-hand quite a bit, but I'd like to see the rest of the ecosystem be carried along with that Maybe one day maybe one day everything will be

equivalent but until then I would love to have an NVIDIA card if I had the additional money I would just get a NVIDIA card just for the NVENC encoder. For me, that would be valuable enough.

But... Right. I really hope that AMD sorts out their encoder because it's not terrible, but it's also not good. Plus, also, it's not terrible but it's also not good plus also there's just a lot of additional things that nvidia is doing especially in the gaming space like they've got their whole um the the thing that's not fsr dlss yeah that one um yeah they DLSS 3 and 3.5 which from what I've seen

of that it's magic I do not understand how it works why it works so well I know the direction they're going is like not rendering like actual proper frames but generating things based on ai model i don't

understand how it works but it's it's black magic to me yeah it's really cool and yeah look if you can go from games being barely playable to actually working really well like that's awesome and considering that especially now with a lot of the ue5 stuff a lot of game and a lot of game devs are like pushing things very graphically like we are getting to that point where we're sort of getting back to those like hey will it run crisis sort of thing where like high like mid to high end cards are struggling to run like a lot of games like you actually want to be going like really high tier if you actually want to be pushing a game for a while like for a while it just was not the case like you could buy like a mid-tier card it was going to max out most things um that's i don't know like also

then there's a whole like people wanting to reduce their power consumption as well so if you can get a lower tier card that might have a lower tdp and then get high performance out of it that would otherwise be possible like that's also really cool as well or even getting like a slightly That's also really cool as well. Or even getting like a slightly like higher end GPU, but then underclocking it slightly. Yeah. I mean, that more affects thermals, but it can affect TDP as well. Well, thermals, by extension, because of the rescue system also,

is going to increase power consumption as well. Yeah, exactly. I am excited for the new FSRr though because i you know when i tried just i don't remember if it was fsr fsr2 with cyberpunk 2077 on my nvidia gpu like last year i went from and i play at 4k uh so things have to play at that resolution because aside from new okay not everything new world is the exception that i'll run at 1440p in a window because i'm not gonna 1440p upscale the but fsr2 took cyberpunk at 4k from completely unplayable to 60 fps stable and honestly i didn't notice the texture difference i think it was like 1080p textures but it could have been less and i wouldn't have noticed or

another example no man's sky that somehow went from completely unplayable to i turned it on and it was actually using textures at 720p. And I somehow did not notice. That's how good the upscaling was. And I'm more on board with these open source vendor neutral alternatives like FSR as opposed to DLSS. as opposed to dlss but just because i want to be able to have the flexibility of say oh tomorrow i want to go out and buy an amd gpu or for example have intel and yeah like intel has their own xdsx xess or something that like nobody nobody supports i didn't know that i think the only i think the only game i've seen it in is like Diablo 4 and you know

nobody plays that at this point so yeah but in the list of games you mentioned you mentioned New World is anyone playing New World at this point? true I'll have you know they have an expansion coming out I'm not trying to show it they do have

I think it's Angry Earth so I've been playing a lot of New World just to get my gear score up and all that and prep for the new levels and stuff I don't know if it's your maths and all

one of your things maybe it was your YouTube channel one of your things you mentioned being an MMO junkie. I was going to ask you what you played. Also Elder Scrolls Online. Okay. So that's the tall guy right there, Moloch Ball. And this is from the latest.

So this is Daydream Mora. i don't remember her name or it's named technically because it's a danger but her may is mora um so i i play elder scrolls online as well not so much nowadays but um i come back during a lot of the patches and i'll come back during this one but i know you're a final fantasy junkie uh yeah i will say that um i look here's the thing right i have not finished the story i'm like a patch behind in the story so i'm like almost caught up but i've probably got a couple thousand hours in that game um my the the mmo i My... The MMO I went hardest on was RuneScape. I played that from... Are we talking old school RuneScape or new RuneScape?

I played from 2006 until RS3 beta came out. I didn't play RS3. I quit when the beta came out. Yeah, I'm honestly surprised whenever I hear people still playing OSRS. Like, wow.

Like, it makes sense to me. I really liked it when I played it. Well, no, that makes sense to me because they're actually patching it. What confuses me are the people that play Classic WoW. Like, it's just a done game. Like, there's nothing being added to it. Like, yeah, not that, like going people who were going through like um wrath and like all that makes sense but the people who are still playing like the classic servers

like nothing's added to that it's just classic i never but that's the nice thing i would argue that's the nice thing because you don't have to deal with Dragonfly. You don't have to deal with having to worry about... It's not corrupted armor, but corruption and all that with Shadowlands and the terrible raiding and dead tier sets and tiers there. You don't have to worry about any of that with Classic. It's the simpler game. To be fair i

never played like the difficulty ramp in in world of warcraft in terms of like raids or it's just like unnecessarily difficult and time consuming like red like having to get res then run all the way through the raid or the dungeon or to get back to where you're supposed to be you know you have to deal with consumable... It's awful. I don't like modern World of Warcraft rating whatsoever. To be fair, I'd never played WoW, so I can't really speak on that.

There was a time... So back in high school, a bunch of my mates were playing WoW. I think this would have been... It's been around Mr. Pandaria and they're like, hey you should come play WoW. And I thought about it and I was like, that wouldn't have been that long after I stopped playing RuneScape or around the time. I was like, I don't need another MMO right now. It doesn't need to happen. Yeah, that's fair um what i can say at least my understanding and

you can correct me if i'm wrong but i don't know if they're called raids in final fantasy but at least my understanding is that the downtime between boss kills in final fantasy is much lower than in in world of warcraft you have to deal with just less ads and trash and less like res stuff and there's just less nonsense that you have to deal with so i think is why a lot of people are attracted to final fantasy so 14 has dungeons which are just they're very hyper linear that's what i will say about the Dungeons 14 there were a couple in Realm Reborn the first of the expansions where they've reworked

them over the years initially you could get a little bit lost now the only way to get lost is to stop pressing W like it's yeah that's one thing I will say about 14 they've streamlined the dungeons a

little bit too much like they're fun like set pieces and like casual experiences hyper hyper casual um and still you somehow you have tanks that don't read the the aggro list and then yeah i yeah let's blame it on the tanks tanks are healers it's not it's not my problem yes i play healer half the time um fair enough but uh then you have trials which are your eight men i i guess they'll be the equivalent of raids. Yeah, that's what we have in ESO, but I think it's like a 12-man sort of trials, yeah. So you just basically have the boss and then the boss will have different stages. Maybe they'll have ads on certain bits,

but they'll be very mechanically tied. It's not just ads for the sake of ads. And then you have the savage and extreme versions of those which i guess would be sort of like your mythic equivalent um and then your you've your casual raids which are the alliance raids which are the like 24 man um which is basically split up into three groups of eight and then usually the mechanics are like one group go here one group go here one group go here and then different sets like the um the near raids in shadow bringers for example like there'll be a mechanic where uh each of the tanks will be

targeted by like a big death laser if you point at the other party i hate you um because if you do that the party dies uh basically you have to like make sure the tanks are just facing away from the other parties and you know simple things like that um from what i and then there's the ultimates which are like your pinnacle high tier content right like you you have to be going in with this yeah you're not like you're not plugging ultimates except for like the like first ultimate you every everybody has a particular thing assigned to them with particular gear assigned yeah yeah you know they have certain skills on their hot bars or whatever yeah yeah pretty much so you play all that under linux as well like 14 doesn't advantage

you it just runs just fine now to be fair um for a long time the main launcher didn't work i think it works now but no one plays the main launcher because do you just launch it through steam i guess or uh so i okay let me explain to you the nightmare. And I'm genuinely curious. No, I need to explain to you the nonsense that is 14. So, the Steam account and the Windows account are not the same thing. So if you buy the game on Steam,

you did not buy the game on Windows. So if you want to use the Windows launcher, you need to buy the Windows version of the game. I think you can, like, migrate them over now, but, like, it's really stupid. So I have the... But why? Because Square Enix doesn't like your money.

Also, if you buy the console version, that account is not the same account that i kind of understand though or is there cross play there's cross play yes okay then that doesn't make any sense it's yeah square enix doesn't like it's not real cross play to me if i can't like then buy it on windows and then log into my account that was playing on console they don't like your money and then just trying to work out a buy the game's kind of confusing just in and of itself that i have heard yeah it's it's fun um but you know what okay one of the main reasons a lot of people don't use the main launcher as well is there is this problem in the game called animation lock also known as if you don't want

to like be coping about it called input delay um there are certain abilities in the game that have a built-in animation lock that is ping independent so basically certain things will just feel delayed when they shouldn't be and if you're playing like i play on the american servers because the australian servers are dead and yeah i don't play in the australian service um i don't want to queue for a dungeon for 30 minutes as a dps it's not going to happen right um so yeah this is built-in input delay now luckily square enix doesn't like it but there are there are plugins that fix the input delay uh that will queue things up and send to the server like they should be sent uh which you guys can find if you want to do very little bit of

searching um but most people will not talk about like the whole thing with plugins unlike wow from my understanding is nobody talks about plugins it's because the whole console crossplay thing like console's not gonna be able to run plugins but everyone on pc sort of acknowledges that everybody else is running plugins um yeah i've seen uis for like high tier wow raiders i'm like what what are you guys even what are you guys even playing here yeah typically it's like louis extended or or some other frames yeah um so do those plugins work under linux as well or all fine huh so well are they just like lua plugins or something like um i'm not actually sure what they're written in let me have a look uh let's go

because like for elder scrolls online you could use minion i hate minion absolutely with a dying passion hate minion technically runs under linux so you could do that for elder scrolls online um and i think most people use the curse forge one for world of warcraft um and yeah with with those two games it's like if you play on pc which of course with world of warcraft that's that is what you play on but elder scrolls online is console as well but it's like you you play with add-ons yeah like if you if you want to be relevant when you're doing raids you play with add-ons or with like with trials because there's's call outs on mechanics and that sort of stuff. They've been gradually adding that to the game,

but as just a native feature so them console plebs can enjoy it too. But yeah, it is nice. Like when I hear about Final Fantasy, it's there isn't that sort of culture. And as far as I'm aware, even, like, the use of DPS parsing and, like, DPS metrics

is also, is, yeah, like, I was gonna say frowned upon, but damn, like, yeah, no, Bannable is great. If you bring it up, like, you know, if you're doing it in, like, a Discord or whatever, like, that's... Right, all your friends or whatever. If you mention it up like you know if you're doing it in like a discord or whatever like that right all your friends or whatever if you mention it like in the chat in game like that's bannable offense um right see there is this i was just having a look it's uh i've seen some

plugins written in c sharp some in c plus plus um but i so the main thing people use is a system called dalamud which provides like apis and stuff i haven't looked into my into it myself so i'm not really entirely sure it it doesn't seem to be there seems to be bindings for a couple of different languages from what i can tell though um but i think that one of the problems that XIV has is kind of the... The opposite problem, like... Where a lot of people are... How... What's a good way to put it?

So on... As opposed to being like openly toxic... Like just telling you you're terrible... It's more like a lot of how would you say it um that's what i'm trying to think of like uh it's like well you're being nice but you don't actually mean it what's what i'm trying oh like passive aggressive yeah yeah that you pass basically a lot of passive aggressive stuff and there's a lot of people that will like sort of do things kind of like skirt the rules like in pvp for example in uh there's a mode called crystalline conflict which is a poorly designed pvp mode but it's what screen is really

obsessed with developing right now i wish they would just do rival wings um so crystalline conflict is basically you know in uh like team fortress 2 there's like a one of the modes where you can like push a cart to like the enemy's base yeah it's basically that but with the crystal um in this mode there isn't like regular text chat the text chat is set commands now Now, oftentimes you'll have people that are like spamming specific commands or they'll start like, they'll start spamming good game when there's like halfway through the,

like the match or something. Oh, so it's just like general like BM stuff. Yeah, it's just- Like bad manners. Yeah, it's not like, you know, you're not getting get called racial slurs but it's it's not like the game isn't toxic in its own ways and look it might be an improvement over what you used to um but it's it's a weird game like one of the things that's really weird to me especially coming

from a runescape background is nobody talks in public chat really like most of the chats are in like link shells which are basically like 14's group chats or they're in guild chats which is like a free company chat in 14. basically nobody talks in uh like public chat right it's the problem with new world is there's a global chat so no matter where you are on the server no matter the territory you have to read what people are saying because people also fail to use the proper recruitment channels so you just get all the noise fortunately other schools like they have zone specific chats but oh man the global chat in your world is awful i think isn't it wild though like all this runs on linux yeah

through like stuff like proton it's just we've come so far since like I remember like when steam for legs was announced and that was like a Revolutionary like oh man. This is it like a year of Linux on the desktop here We go you know we're gonna get all the native ports. I mean that didn't happen and steam machine They were a part of our history yes they were a part of our history yes fortunately the steam deck has seen much better success i've heard some people make fairly good arguments for why the steam machines whilst being a failure weren't a bad thing per se it's sort of like it gave valve the push they needed to actually you know go down that

wind direction which i guess is like an it it's it's it's copium that's pretty much what it is trying to find an excuse why no it is copium it's a path of least resistance yeah yeah like but the fact that i can like just fire up elder scrolls online and it works i could fire up world of warcraft you could fire fire up final fantasy like that blows my mind because i don't know about you but i hate windows and it's kind of funny because you know then why why josh are you mimicking practically the windows 10 user interface it seems with but this budgie thing 10 user interface it seems with but this budgie thing um but like windows as an operating system i will only use as a last resort and basically if it's like after months of pressure from the wife to play one particular game that i know doesn't work on proton then i'm like fine i'll

install it so we can play it for a little bit and then it's gonna get nuked immediately off my system so I don't even have to worry about this thing called Windows. The wildest thing to me is like a lot of anti-cheat games just work now like Elden Ring and Armored Accord they both have EAC and they just like the multiplayer just works like there's no additional tinkering around it just works now there is the whole stuff works yeah i don't know if you saw what ea has been doing in that regard though because they've got their own anti-cheat system now i really hope that doesn't i really hope that doesn't come to apex yeah that i that that is a big well it's not just

it's not just Apex that's the thing it's not just Apex that EA owns because they could decide they want to bring in Deforza they want to bring it

into like they've got a bunch there are a lot of IPs under EA yeah they're already doing it on Battlefield all the sports games

that people really like well if if they're going to do it in FIFA it's going to probably happen to all the sports games that seems pretty like well if they're gonna do it in fifa it's gonna probably happen to all the sports games that seems pretty obvious to me fifa there is their main one because that's the like the big one they really do not want people cheating in their biggest money maker but if if it goes well for that which it didn't because there was so many people on the window

side complaining when they first added like. Like, this does not work. Like, just get rid of it. Good. I hope it continues to just work absolutely miserably. So all these developers are like, okay, kernel-level anti-cheat, really bad idea. And then Valorant, maybe they could swap away from it to something like EAC or Battle.ai

and then we could get it working properly under Linux. You know, I really... Sounds great to me. I kind of wish that we just stopped calling it kernel of antigen just call it what it is which is a rootkit because it's well it's it's it's malware it's malware yeah like that's the way i look at it i only just sort of tolerate battle eye and eac because that's just what people like we decided at some point as an industry that's what we're going to be doing this anti-cheat stuff instead of trying to do it with strictly server side um but i i yeah i'm just happy that it works eac and battle eye

because for example like arc survival evolved so a story about arc survival evolved uh back in the early steam days uh they used a really old ubuntu runtime i don't know if they still do because i i use it through flatpak um now this the steam runtime which I believe was using 12.04, was already quite old when they started even shipping it. And IK had the brilliant idea in the Solus land of doing this thing called LSI, or Linux Steam Integration. So he wrote a system called lib intercept so when certain api calls or certain libraries were requested it would redirect it from the runtime to our system libraries so what we were able to do is actually see proper uplift in terms of performance in some games by optimizing some using some of these libraries with like PGO, or Profile Guided Optimization, or LTO,

or so link time optimization, that sort of stuff, for on-roll loops and all sorts of random GCC flags to try to improve performance in some of these libraries. And it also really improved just the Steam game compatibility. Something else we did, which is a little interesting was with some games like arc survival evolved if textures for example water would fail to load we would load them from a different location so for example uh with arc when you were playing on some of the maps like island the water textures would fail to load.

So we would load them from a completely different DLC. You would have to install it. But that's the effort we went through to get it working. Because up until Wildcard just dropped support for the native Linux version and just switched to using proton it was like constantly broken every single dlc had some new magical awful air so in a way like them giving up on on a native port was a real blessing in disguise because i have like 3 000 hours in our survival world um yeah and um and not having to boot up into windows anymore to to play that was was really nice because the

the dlc's all the workshop items and mods worked as well which was really surprising so all the workshop items and mods worked as well which was really surprising so but i am really yeah so that's a little oh go on we don't have to do that stuff anymore which is quite nice i i'm happy this whole like no tux no bucks things is kind of like faded i i get it like it made sense like people thought they could actually push for like actual native ports that were actually going to be supported yeah but i'm i'm perfectly happy with the proton direction we've gone in the end like there are games i've played native like hollow knight has a perfectly fine native port but then i've played black mesa which is a rough, we'll say. It's not terrible, but it's a bit rough. But then there are other games where the developers just don't care at all. And it's like why... They'll do the bare minimum. It's an export option for them.

Some of these are not even just an export, they just stop exporting at some point. And just... Yeah, that, it's years out of date Yeah I've seen that as well I think the I've had the best luck when games have been developed with either Godot

or Unity which is a completely other bag good job Unity in shooting yourself in the foot there but um so for for example like i i've had really good experience with halls of torment which is a good old game i believe or or with uh 20 minutes 20 minutes till dawn which is a unity game uh so so i've i've had some good experience with that what i find a little weird is even some of the companies that really do put a lot of effort into native ports like for example uh paradox with uh city skylines or with um with hearts of iron 4 uh sometimes those native games just

don't run as well as the proton versions or they'll end up being like more susceptible to crashes um so sometimes i just kind of have to fall back to the proton variants even if there is a native version and when that's happened enough times i just don't care anymore yeah it's like if i could install it and it works like i don't care if it's native anymore i just want to play a game i don't want to have to spend hours debugging something or like going and fetching some random library because it assumes it's on my local system like no just just give me the damn game i pay for yeah yeah no no i can i can let you agree like and for most things it is just like it's just like that with your own approach on now

like it's so rare at this point I I'm struggling to think of the last time I played a game where it had issues I think I want to say it was it takes two and that's only because the EA launch was playing up.

Right. It was Diablo four. I gave up and I was like, okay, I know like this game ain't doing so hot. Um, and it's going to be dead pretty quick anyways. So like,

I'll just temporarily install windows i'll give it just the bare minimum disk space it needs i'll have like diablo 4 on a separate partition so i could also use it on like the linux side when i want to install uh install and play it for a bit but like on the linux side i think it was primarily because of xcss actually so thanks intel um but i think it's primarily because they were trying to use xcss and it was failing to load it would just crash everything but yeah it's it's all right it's one it's one title and yeah i'm not even really terribly surprised but if i was to fire up my steam which i think i will do you can just wait till season eight when it comes out of beta yeah yeah exactly

when it actually has you know proper end game content and then you don't have to play the same thing over and over and over again um it's kind of funny i don't actually have a lot of games installed at this point but if i look at my favorites it's like colony survival uh elite dangerous so you know i have my i have my over here so i stopped playing when odyssey came out because performance and odyssey was garbage fire but before that with horizons it was beautiful and it worked just flawlessly uh eve online i've played some factorio i think is actually i don't remember if it's a native game i i think it's a native game and it's one that just just works to him yeah it does um yeah civ games oh division two division two is one that i play that's a proton game that just works

flawlessly as well like i i wouldn't if you were to tell me it was running through a compatibility layer instead of being a native game i would actually call you a liar so actually my favorite in that regard is that i don't know if you saw it there was some recent stuff about um cyberpunk running better under linux with an amdg or something like that i'm not even surprised i think it's something to do with the difference with how windows and linux handle caching or something i don't remember the exact details right um and for whatever reason on an amd gpu the test was getting like 30 better performance on the linux side like maybe it's better at like shader loading and

shader compilation yeah i'll see if i can find that or something cyberpunk 2077 runs better on i think liam did a article on it. It would, I mean, it wouldn't surprise me. He does a, he does an article on. Probably, well, I found one from Tom's Hardware. Basically everything. So user tested it on Nibara, which is cool, they tested it on Nibara.

Mind game, blah, blah, blah. It's the mind game blah blah blah. What is the reason? Whatever the case. Okay, thank you Tom's Hardware for not giving me any explanation. Yeah, it's somewhere around here. Someone will tell me in the comment section, I'm sure. Yeah. I don't know. Please do, because I'm looking at gaming on Linux as well.

I've not seen it. Yeah, I thought maybe Liam commented about it on Mastodon or something. Maybe, yeah. I need to play Cyberpunk at some point. I hear it's gotten a lot better. I have heard the same thing as well. then there's a dlc coming out soon as well which apparently people are yeah was it the phantom liberty or something yeah i don't know maybe we'll get at some point i have so many other games to play i still want to catch up

on the yakuza games so like that's gonna take a bit of of time. Yeah, I mean, when I'm not busy with, like, either work or budgie stuff, I think it's typically, like, New World or ESO or something like that. Yeah, MMO Grind will catch you. Yeah, the problem with games like Cyberpunk is, like, I have to stop at a very particular part in like these sort of games in terms of story so i even remember what happened because it might be like three months from now and i like actually return to the game right unless i like actually make an effort on like a daily basis or you know a regular basis at the very least to go back and play these games

or you know a regular basis at the very least to to go back and play these games um so i don't i don't remember like anything from from cyberpunk which i guess is great because i bought the game and i get to experience it all over again so well on that note we should probably be ending this off at some point just or just pass it to our mark a little bit ago and i want to go to sleep at some point so that'll be nice what time is it there it is 2 18 oh my god not that not that late this is my normal time for the podcast right now well well thank you for like one having me on and two also just having it at a time that's sane for both of us when i was on the fedora podcast it started at midnight my time so i've been in your shoes but it also wasn't a two-hour podcast so last week i had um the executive director of the godot foundation on so it was very similar time for that one as well because he's in somewhere in europe i don't remember right um anyway uh i guess direct people

to budgie stuff your stuff bro if you want to send them to give them i guess i mean i could i guess that's why i can't right we i know we talked a lot about gaming, but I suppose there's this Budgie thing. If you want to use it, obviously recognize, yeah, it's only with X11. We're getting there with Wayland. Going over to buddiesatbudgie.org, if you hit the big Get Budgie buttons, you can't miss them.

You can choose what flavor you want. They're all going to be flagged as outdated at the moment because we literally just released Budgie 10.8.1 which is a bug fix release on top of 10.8 uh but if you use like arch it's available there uh if you use fedora with fedora 39 it'll have the latest and in fact um neil unsurprisingly, helped with merging in my updates for Budgie Desktop for Fedora. So if you're on Fedora 38 or even 37, it'll be available there too. So yeah, you could do that. We have a Mastodon.

In fact, that's the only place we communicate in terms of social networking because i'm not a fan of elon musk uh so buddies budgie at floss.social so and i run my own instance if for some weird reason you want to follow me uh it's me at joshua strobel.social so yeah awesome that's it um yeah is anything else you want to mention is that you reckon that's it that's it okay uh cool i'm a simple man was also your website as well for any other things you didn't explicitly yeah you don't need to go there that's updated yeah ignore the fact that my website exists we'll all be much happier for it yeah well my website's even more out of date um and i i just use it as a link tree basically and like redirects to other things like half i've got like brody robertson xyz slash youtube slash twitch slash other things that just go to my different services. Anyway, that's pretty much all I use it for. Anyway, main channel is BrodyRibbleson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. I don't know what's going to be out when this comes out because we're... I don't know, this will be out in like a

week or so. But there'll be Linux videos there probably. And the gaming channel is BrodyOnGames. I stream on YouTube and Twitch. Right now, I'm probably playing through Armored Core 6 still. And I reckon I'll be playing Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance. I think. Unless I finish that already. In which case, I don't know. Maybe I'm playing Birth by Sleep.

Or some weeb game. I don't know. I might be playing Neptunia Sisters vs. Sisters. Check it out. See what's over there. If you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech over Tea. If you're watching the video, you can find the audio on pretty much any podcast platform. Not Google Podcasts because that's being deprecated soon, apparently. I didn't know this. But there's an RSS feed soon, apparently. I didn't know this. But there's an RSS feed and other things. Go to your favorite podcast platform, search for it, you'll find it. And yeah, give me the final word.

What do you want to say? Yep, thanks for having me on. I would also quickly like to mention we are on Buddies and Budgies on TIL vids now, which is a Peertube instance. So we've uploaded our back catalog of content, which is basically nothing, but it's there. And in fact, that's the only place we are going to be uploading to going forward because you respect your own privacy and I respect your privacy too.

So feel free to head on over there. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's been a great chat. And I look forward to showing off Budgie 11 at some point. EFL? Cute? Ice? Some new invention?

Who will know? So maybe keep an eye on the blog for that. We have RSS feeds as well. Awesome. Well, I'll catch you guys later.