Tech Over Tea - Ranting About The State Of Linux | The Linux Cast

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

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I was going to do an intro and then I forgot what I was going to do. We're just going to go with it. How's it going? Welcome back to the show. Hey Brody, how you doing bud? Yeah, not too bad. In case people didn't see the last time you were on, just give a brief introduction of who you are. So I'm Matt, I do the Linux cast on YouTube and other places. Talking about Linux and open source and stuff like that. Nothing too special.

You know, just a YouTube channel. I did notice recently you've been talking a bit about Fedora. Are you running Fedora right now? I am. I've become a Fedora fanboy. I don't know when... I do know

when it happened. It happened about a month and... Maybe about six weeks ago, I guess now? Yeah, so I'm running Fedora. I've installed it on all my computers. I no longer have an Arch computer in the house. Oh, wow. What made you want to go over to Fedora? Okay, so I was running Arco for the longest time.

That was my distro. Okay, so I was running Arco for the longest time. That was my distro. And I got the bright idea to uninstall SDDM and start using Stardex to get into my window managers and stuff. And that went fine. But at the same time, I decided, you know what, I never use Plasma. So I'm going to uninstall Plasma. And it turns out that Pl plasma has a lot of dependencies and if you want also those dependencies usually are used by other things so when you uninstall things needless to say arco broke like it was bad so i went through

like a 24-hour period where i decided i'm just gonna install vanilla arch i had been a long time since i've been i'd installed vanilla arch just like the regular nerd based way and so i did that and it worked fine but i was having some issues and i was like you know i'm just i'm just i'm just tired it's like yes i love the you are but i i just i think there's a moment in your linux career i guess is what you say where you just distro hopping no longer has the happiness that you used to have when you were first starting i just i needed to get work done so i decided to find a distro that was just going to be stable, and Fedora was where I ended up on.

And I've been astonishingly happy. I mean, it's probably been the best Linux experience I've ever had. Well, why Fedora and not, like, you know... Most people, for the longest time, would probably go with something like Ubuntu. What specifically stuck out about Fedora? Well, first, it wasn't really that was the fedora had a lot going for it was that i can't stand snaps like i cannot stand them i know a lot of people

like them but are there i didn't know those people existed i think they all work for canonical i i'm sure i'm sure because you know listen to some of the other you know much bigger podcasts and there's people on there like oh yeah snaps are fantastic um i they're just so slow i mean flat packs really i mean i use a lot of flat packs now but and flat pack is not perfect you know not even close right but when comparing them to snaps just just so slow and i've had so many problems with it plus i'm always messing around with lsblk right and to do that and you see those loopback devices just they don't hurt anything they just drive me nuts like why are you messing with my partition schemes like you're not really but it just feels like it you can filter those out but

i know i don't want to have to filter them out like it just don't make them come up with a better system flat packs don't need them i'm sure there's something you can do to not deal with this right it it boggles them see the thing is is that and we talk about this all the time when we every youtuber does a video. I mean, you have a video on Snaps. I have a video on Snaps. DT has a video. Everyone has a video on Snaps.

And we all talk about how they're bad in certain places and stuff like that. The thing is, these things were developed for enterprises, right? They were not a consumer product, right? They were meant for people who use servers based on ubuntu you would think given that that is true that they'd be better well they're great for doing mass deployment i'll give them that like there are areas where snaps are fairly good uh but it's not like they're the only thing that does that i sure Canonical has some sort of goal in mind with Snaps, but I certainly don't know what it is.

Well, and there, I mean, it seems pretty, I mean, we always have to keep in mind that the Linux desktop is so small that Canonical really don't care. Yeah. I mean, so the thing is, though, when it comes to the Linux desktop, Flatpaks feels like they have won, right? Every distro that's shipping something like that

seems to be shipping with Flatpaks and not choosing Snaps. And then there's the Canonical guys, they're vehemently opposed to ever even considering shipping flatbacks so but that doesn't really surprise me i mean canonical has always been astonishingly stubborn with the stuff that they create i mean they do abandon things when they blatantly don't work but as long as they work they stick with them right so i did bring this up uh i didn't bring it i

think the guest i had on a recent episode brought this up that the other thing that flat packs have going for them now is they have this massive hardware user base with the Steam Deck, the main way you're installing stuff on that is through flat packs and it's not going to have an effect like, you know, early

on, but give it a year give it two years, that's going to massively affect whether developers want to actually put something on Flathub or just make something on Flathub. There might be another Reaper that pops up at some point, but get something made as a Flatpak, because if you have all of these existing users using them,

it kind of makes sense to put your stuff there. There's a reason why, even though a lot of devs don't like the Windows Store, for example, that a lot of software is on the Windows Store because a lot of people use it. So as you sort of grow that potential user base, it becomes a lot more compelling of a selling point. Whereas with Snaps,

the best you get from Snaps is distros like Mint saying we don't want anything to do with them. Yeah. I mean, we've already had examples of that. Like OBS is, you know, the prime example. Like the official way to get OBS now is a flat pack. And it's only a matter of time before there's more and more like that. I mean, Microsoft tends to go towards the Snap route right now with all their stuff. But that's just because Microsoft and Canonical have been partners for a long time.

Eventually, you'd see them probably releasing flat packs alongside. And then you're going to have companies, big companies like, you know, Google and stuff that any applications they're going to release, they'd release via FlatHab. So you're right, that definitely seems to be the way it's going to go. Especially, like you said, with the Steam Deck. One thing about... I didn't look too much into this, but there was one thing going on with FlatHab recently

that I think is kind of neat. I'll send you a link to it. It should be here. Yes, here we go. So this group working on some changes on Flathub to sort of make it easier to support

developers on Flathub. The main takeaway is adding in a Stripe-powered donation system so that if your software is available on Flathub, you know, there's a much easier way to have those donations coming through.

Which, some people, when I saw this post on Reddit, some people were sort of comparing this to like, you know, Flathub becoming something like the Windows Store. But I don't hate the idea of having an extra donation system available there if a developer wants to go and use it.

That seems like a good thing to me. I think so too, as long as it's kind of like how GitHub does their stuff, where it's kind of, it's just there. If it's more like how elementary OS does the app center or whatever it is where it says hey this

is what it costs and you gotta just yes you can zero it out but that kind of has always turned a lot of people away but as long as it's like there if there's like a giant uh like donate button on each of the page on flat hub that's perfectly fine for me um yeah there's a link on that uh on that site to see it on the current beta version of the Flathub website. And I think there are some popular tools. Oculus? Yeah, Oculus. Oculus has a big donate button next to the install button so you can just go

and send some money through if you feel like it's a cool project. I think that's the better way to do it. I completely agree that I think if you're going to have, like, an implied payment screen like elementary does, it should start at zero

rather than coming down from an existing price. I mean, I can understand why elementary does it that way. Or at least why they started to do it that way. I don't understand why they've continued to it that way but or at least why they started to do that way i don't understand why they've continued to go that way because obviously they've had so many problems making money that it i mean they're basically not even around anymore right they've had problems with their developers splitting and stuff like that but the thing is like it obviously is not the way i mean i don't i know very few people have said you know i'm just going to give them money to download their download their iso i mean some people will

but the vast majority of people i know i've always just i mean i'm never going very rarely will i give a developer money before i've ever tried their product especially when it's free and open source if i've used it for a long time then then yeah, I'll go support them on Patreon or something like that. But I think most people seem to be like, especially if there's an option for free, that's the way most people are going to go, right? We were talking about FlatHub. One of the things

I don't know if they're working on this or not, but something that they should work on is reviews on FlatHub.org. I know FlatHub, I know product reviews are notoriously horrible but some kind of rating system or something to filter out what's good and what's not would be i think really useful um and pretty much all the stores i mean just actual native stores have that but the problem the problem you have with a rating system or a review system is you

then need moderation because you can't just have it you can't just have it like floating out there because i don't know let's just say someone doesn't like uh ocula for example it would be very easy to send you know a couple hundred people over there to give it a one star and then give it bad reviews and make it seem like it's a really bad project. Or the opposite way around when you have a distro watch MX Linux kind of thing. Well, MX Linux is based on page hits. I think it's, I think the MX Linux thing is actually kind of interesting because it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy that

it's always going to be at the top now because it got to the top from page hit manipulation but then everyone clicks on it continually because they don't know why it's at the top. They're like, I've never heard of this distro. Why is this the most popular distro? So it then just keeps feeding

back into itself and makes sure it always stays there. Well, and then obviously they're not going to do a reset for the count, so. Yeah, it's definitely going to... The thing that always is weird about that is MX is a good distro. But they have the reputation

for gaming the system when it comes to Distro. I mean, not that anybody really takes... I mean, if anybody really takes DistroWatch and their rankings seriously, then they have other issues. I mean... I've given DistroWatch shit in the past.

I think as a distro news aggregation site, it does a fantastic job. I want to make that very clear. DistroWatch, if you care about whatever random distro is doing, whatever, great place for that. But you shouldn't use it as

a credible site for which distros are popular. So right now, MX Linux is at the top. Endeavor OS is second. Mint is is third manjaro is fourth pop west is fifth ubuntu fedora debbie and garuda and then open susa i think some of those sort of sort of make sense to be that high but but like MX Linux. Yeah, and I mean we can, like so

Manjaro, Papua, Subuntu, Fedora, and Debian, those make sense. Maybe OpenSUSE, but do you know anybody who actually runs OpenSUSE? I mean, very few people run it as like a desktop distro. I mean... I think the only people

who care about OpenSUSE are the sort of people who also care about Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's business use cases that really care about them. That's totally fine, but DistroWatch is the site that you'd be going to generally for desktop stuff.

If you're in a corporate setting, you're not really looking for distros in this sort of way. So what this means is that somewhere out there, people are interested in OpenSUSE enough that they're clicking on the link to go to the DistroWatch page for that distro,

which is surprising because, I mean, it's not a popular... I mean, we say it's not a popular distro, but it's not a popular in this space. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would love... Why isn't DistroWatch open source? I mean, maybe it is open source.

Is there, like, source code on how they calculate this stuff? I've never really looked into it. I mean... There's a article here... Wait. Is there a picture about how they calculate it? Um, it's linked to at the top, I think. The JustRewatchJH ranking statistics have attracted plenty of attention and feedback over the years.

Originally, each distribution specific page with pure HTML with a third party account at the bottom to monitor interest of visitors. In 2004, the site switched from publicly viewable third-party counters to internal counters. This was prompted by a continuous abuse of counters by a handful of undisciplined individuals who had confused DistroWatch with a poll station. The counters are no longer displayed on the individual distribution pages, but all visits are logged, only one hit per day, uh, only one hit per IP address per day is counted. So, it's basically just a counter of visits per day.

What? That brings up even more questions. Like, then that means that MX Linux got there legitimately. Or, at least they've come up with some way of generating new IP addresses, I guess. If they were going to...

Or if somebody was going to game the system. VPN. It's very easy to change your IP with a VPN. But I mean, that's still... This podcast is brought to you by Croton VPN. What's the shark one that I always see on some uh it doesn't matter it doesn't matter there's there's just 900 of them none of them are very good the thing i was

thinking is though is that even if it is that easy it still took effort to do and i mean it seems like it seems like that the effort that you could spend i mean it'd be different if like mx was really bad it's not it's they got some fantastic tools honestly i have no idea what mx linux even is it's based on debian runs uh sysv and that is the um in this system uh and i mean it has a systemd like alternative but it's really good they have some really cool um dedicated tools that they've created to kind of do the things that you'd expect to be able to do with like systemd so things like create cron jobs and edit your bash config and just a whole bunch of different stuff they have they have a thing called the snapshot tool where you can create

a iso of your currently installed system and then reinstall on all of your computer. So there's tools like that. It's like goods. Yeah. It's good stuff. Which is always, you know, if they,

if they did do this thing where they game the system, why'd they do that? I don't, I don't, I don't know. And I don't know if they did it or just someone else did it. I don't actually know how they got to the top, but what I do know is it is not there.

Like, it's not there legitimately. Like, there is no possible way that a distro that no one's heard of is at the top of DistroWatch completely organically. I mean, we know it's Ubuntu. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, no, Ubuntu isn't. But the question there is is anyone checking ubuntu on distro like this is the other thing our page hits pages aren't really a great

way to rank a distro because who's going to distro watch to look at ubuntu everyone sort of knows that ubuntu already exists you can go to you go to DistroWatch to find random distros to make YouTube videos about. That's what you go to DistroWatch for. Because there's this gigantic random distribution on there that gives you video ideas. But yeah, you're right. Nobody would go to... I mean, for the popular distros, why would you... I mean, because you already know.

I mean, it's not as if it's going to give you any information that you don't have. Which kind of surprised me that, like, like, Pop OS and stuff were on there as well. Wait, here we go. What was on... Let me just check what was on the list again. I forgot what I already said. Here we go.

Oh, that's the wrong page. Back to the home page. Here we go oh that's the wrong page back to the home page here we go uh mx linux endeavor os mint manjaro pop os ubuntu fedora debian garuda and open susa i don't know what who's going there to look at debian oh no ubuntu is on the list it's just in sixth right sixth place yeah and i mean i guess a lot of people are interested in pop os and maybe they don't know what it is but maybe that's the reason why it's a it's in a place it is but that doesn't explain the ones that are above it you know like it seems like the ones that would be least likely to be searched for on distro watch would be like mint and ubuntu and debian and fedora those are the ones that nobody and why would you need to because i mean i mean i don't know about mint

there was a time when mint was like sort of considered the default beginner distro but it kind of shifted from that because for while, a lot of people were considering Manjaro, which probably wasn't the best of strategies, considering how that project has been going. But, yeah.

Do you think that the reason why Mint now feels like that is because they've been so static and it feels like there's such a slow innovation update process well yeah it means not an exciting district like mint mint is a it it's mint like you know what you're getting with mint and that's great but it's just not that like cool and exciting try out Linux, have fun

especially with the growth that Linux gaming has had there's been a shift away from the really slow release cycle that Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros have yeah it's definitely plus it's always seemed

with Mint that they are a little bit too into their protesting of Ubuntu. You know what I mean? Like, they hate snaps. They hate – basically, they hate everything except for, like, the core of Ubuntu. that they've had to do over the course of the last few years has been to undo everything that they get from basing themselves on Ubuntu, which has always made me wonder why they don't just make LMDE

the thing. It's just as slow updating as Ubuntu is for the most part, because they could base it on SID if they wanted to, if they wanted to be more fast updating, but they don't.

They could, I don't know, it's just, it has always been a very confusing distro to me, because they have, like, two directions that they want to do, like, they have a literal backup plan for their distro, which, I mean, I suppose

is a good thing, but it just, it feels like they're diverting assets from where they should. They should just choose one. Choose one. The obvious choice there is the LMD because they obviously

can't stand a Boom 2. It's obvious. You've probably read some of the blog posts. What is his name? I can't it's obvious. I mean, you've probably read some of the blog posts. What is his name? Clem? I can't remember his name. The head guy, he writes these blog posts,

and you can just hear the hatred of Ubuntu sometimes in his tone. So LMD is obviously their choice, but I don't know. I would still recommend Mint to a lot of people. Mint may not be great but cinnamon is really nice for people who are coming from windows of course zorin too zorin has the zorin is also based on ubuntu and has more customization i guess but i don't know ubuntu is just i don't know there's so many issues with Ubuntu based distros, and there's so many of them there is, yes there will never be enough Ubuntu

based distros, there will always be more and they will always do the exact same thing like a lot of the I know that like Kubuntu and Zubuntu and Lubuntu are, like... They are separate projects that are doing technically slightly different things.

But a lot of these big Ubuntu flavors, as you might call them... They are pretty much just install options. That don't really have any reason to exist as a separate thing. I get Mint, and I get Zoran, things that are trying to actually be different to Ubuntu. But when your difference pretty much boils down to it's not KDE, it's GNOME. It's not GNOME, it's KDE.

It's not KDE, it's XSE, I don't know, XSE, things like that. It feels really weird that it's a whole separate project. Yeah, it's... I mean, I think the reason why they've done it that way is because... Well, Kanonica was no interest in anything outside of Gnome. Right, they were never going to do anything else

other than what they wanted to do. They were never going to do anything else other than what they wanted to do they were never going to be like garuda or manjar or something like that where they offer multiple isos of different desktop environments and window managers and all that stuff there was that was never going to be something that because like we said like i said earlier canonical just they don't care like at one time they cared about the desktop now it it's blatantly obvious that they do not and by having the flavors which i mean they've had they've had flavors forever so this wasn't uh this didn't play into the decision but now it really helps them because it allows the flavors to care about those things so like kubuntu can keep up with all the KDE nonsense and Canonical doesn't have to worry about it

XFCE can go on being XFCE as XFCE has always been and nobody cares LMDE can transfer into LXQt and Canonical doesn't have to worry about it it's just a couple guys who are maintaining that flavor so they've taken the responsibility that they were never going to have responsibility that they were never going to

have anyways because they were never going to do it and push it onto the flavors and that can make people happy and people are still technically using ubuntu i was listening to a podcast with martin wimpress he was talking about the usage of like uh ubuntu mate and even though like you probably think that like between, between the flavors, Mate and Kubuntu are probably the most popular ones, you'd think. But he, I don't remember, I don't think he ever gave the exact numbers,

but he said that even at its height, Ubuntu Mate was such a small portion of what Ubuntu is that it never really registered on the scale right which I mean because most people they're just gonna download a boom to which I mean makes me a little sad because Ubuntu kind of sucks I mean I I don't know I miss the unity days I really do I came in it made it feel like they were

something different now they just gnome but with a unity skin it's like you remember android way back when samsung hated what google was doing and every like they had to put all the there was at one point they had that like weird like water sound every time you touched the screen ah yeah like that's basically what Ubuntu has become they use quote on quote Gnome but they put so much stuff in it to try to make it better than

I don't know it's sad well that's why you said Aura yeah it's kind of weird what what Ubuntu did with with Gnome sorry because they took over basically they took over the unity project and a lot of people weren't really happy

about it and just left the project and then when they were done with it they just like sort of threw it away and it just it left it to rot basically it's being picked up now by um i forgot the dev's name a really young dude who's really fucking bright he's probably going to be like a major figure in the post space as he gets older and then they went over to gnome and it didn't have that same problem because gnome has this like massive established like audience of developers and there was no shot that they were going to leave because they already had sort of that i guess established install base everywhere as well so ubuntu can come canonical can come in do their thing make the changes they want to change, and it just sort of keeps

going smoothly without the same troubles they had in the past. Well, yeah, that's exactly what... Gnome is like the immovable object. They are going to do what they're going to do no matter who's trying to tell

them to do otherwise. Now, all that being said, I think that probably maybe four years ago, I wouldn't have said this, but I think that in the grand scheme of things, Ubuntu choosing GNOME was a good idea, or at least it was good for GNOME, because you can see the influence that Canonical

and their developers have had on upstream vanilla gum because like there's way i mean i i feel dirty saying this but there's way more customization in vanilla gnome now than there was two and a half years ago like way more like two and a half years ago two and a half years ago three years ago whatever they weren't adding any features they were pulling things out so they were you know they pull out icons on the desktop they pull out the the tray icons at the top like one thing after another i mean it was like you couldn't go a few months without hearing something that the gnome guys were pulling out of their desktop because it was so slow like it was astonishingly slow because they had these horrible animations that

took, like... Hey, don't hate on the horrible animations. Oh, okay. They were cool if you wanted to wait five seconds for your ab drawer to open. It was fine. Yeah, fair enough. It was... I mean, they've...

It's way better now, right? The thing is, like, they were in this position where it looked like Gnome was dying. A lot of people chose, a lot of distros chose Gnome, but they had so many issues that they were trying to desperately... It was like they had the bucket pulling out water of their boat that was sinking. And all those were features that they had to throw out because it was so bloated like nautilus was like nautilus was the thing like the whole gnome shell was based on and tied into nautilus and stuff and that caused all sorts of problems and you can tell now and i hate to give canonical all the credit because i'm sure that it was was very much of a team effort, right? But it feels like Canonical has had a lot of influence,

at least more influence than I would have thought that they would have had on the GNOME developers, in that now things are a lot faster. You know, they have accent colors, and they have a dark mode, and they finally fixed those horrible brown icons that they had forever that nobody in their right mind would ever like you know

one thing after another I mean it feels you alright you wanna friendship over this is horrible seriously what is wrong with you I've gone back and used like the first version like literally the first version of Ubuntu and you know there's

something charming about the disgusting brown icons they're not good but there's something charming about them if you knew nothing else then they would be good if you've never seen if you've never seen an icon before, and it had nothing to compare it to, maybe for nostalgia, it'd be fine. But as a default icon set nowadays, the blue ones are way better now. And because of the live-at-a-wait-a-stuff, they can do accent colors and stuff like that. It's way better.

And I think that at least some of that has to be attributed to the fact that they're bigot Like obviously fedora doesn't make anything because that's them You know, it's basically, you know, the very much related project but canonical is this outside entity that said, you know We're gonna use your desktop environment, but we it as it is it's basically unusable You know, we have to we have to do so much in order to actually make this thing work. Which begs the question,

why? At the time, now it makes sense. Right now it's fine, and they've done all the work is done. They've done all this work, but if they knew at the time that it was unusable, which it was because they had to do all this stuff, why didn't they choose KDE?

KDE is the most customizable piece of crap you've ever seen in your life, right? It's buggy as hell and overly complicated. So I'm assuming that the answer to my question is because it would confuse the crap out of new users. I can just imagine. I think. What they wanted to do. Is continue that Unity experience. And yes.

You could probably turn KDE. Into a Unity like experience. But. The difference between Gnome and Unity. Is a lot smaller. Than the difference between KDE and Unity. Plus with the support thing. Like if. difference between KDE and Unity. Plus with the support thing, like, if you used KDE and you

made it into Unity, and then your Enterprise person decided to change a setting in some place randomly in the KDE settings panel, which is like... I mean, it's the KDE settings panel. You would have... I mean, it's not the desktop consumers that. You know, you would have, I mean,

it's not the desktop consumers that you'd have to worry about. The enterprise, if they messed that up, you'd have to support that. And even the KDE guys can't support KDE all that well. So the support, I mean, so I always ask myself, like, why didn't they choose KDE? Because it's the most customizable thing. It would have been way easier.

They wouldn't have had to put all this effort into making it look like Unity and choose accent colors and stuff like that. But it really does answer itself. It's like KDE is to KDE. So that's the reason why. But I don't know. There have been moments since i started my youtube channel where i have been very vocal in my hatred of gnome like really i mean there have been some

very harsh words said towards gum and it has nothing to do i mean a lot of people don't like gnome because of their political stance i don't give a rat's ass about any of that stuff right just the software stuff i've come out and said that i can't stand you know i don't give a rat's ass about any of that stuff right just the software stuff i've come out and said that i can't stand you know i don't understand why anyone uses it um and over the last year or so i mean some of it has been i've just used it more often but and it's never gonna be my favorite like i'm not running it right now uh and i wouldn't although that's not actually true the computer behind me is gnome on it as it's the as the only thing it's just because i i don't know i haven't gotten around to change it but eventually yeah um because it's default right it's the one you download yeah

so but my view on gnome has definitely changed over the last year and i i some of it is just because there's more customization stuff now, but more of it is just because it really has become the default desktop environment for Linux, which is, I mean, sad, I guess. I don't know how to react to it. Whether we're talking Ubuntu with... I don't know if you can really call what Ubuntu is running GNOME, it's sort of their own

desktop environment at this point, same with like PopOS they're technically GNOME, but there's so much done to it that it's hard to call it that but let's just say it is GNOME then you've got Fedora

and it's just like all of these distros which are generally considered the the mainstream Linux distros, all running GNOME. There are certainly distros out there running KDE and like really popular distros. But when we're talking the main distros and what people from the outside see as Linux, I think you're absolutely right that GNnome is sort of seen as the Linux

desktop, whether that's a good thing or not sort of depends on how you feel about Gnome. I'm, I'm sort of, I don't really care. Like that's the thing. Like Gnome,

I don't hate it. I don't love it. I'll use it if it's there. And I sometimes pick it if I stream just to piss people off because they get very annoyed that Gnome exists, but i'm still doing that the next time i stream i'm still on that if i was going to use a desktop environment i probably would use kde just because i like my focus is on my focus on customization i like to mess around with stuff and you know it has a plug-in framework technically but you know there'll be updates that come out that break features that

people have demanded for years like a um global uh what's the thing global global context menu yeah global menu that thing that macOS has. Mm-hmm. And the thing is, like, dash to dock and dash to panel are, like, the two main extensions, right? Those are the things that everyone downloads. Like, if you're going to use extensions, those are the two extensions you're probably going to one of the two you're going to download. And those things

are always broken. Like, they're broken. Well, one of them's broken right now. Won't work. I think that has to do with wayland i'm i don't really know i didn't i didn't care enough to look into it there was two directions for conversation in what you just said and i'm not sure which one to choose but i think i'm going to go to the kde route one first i when i first started using linux my first desktop environment was budgie,

but I didn't stick around for that for very long. I moved on to Katie and I loved it because of Katie customization, right? I'm a ricer. That's the thing that I'm, that I'm known for. I rice the crap out of, out of my window managers.

The thing that I do and Katie lets you do all that stuff. Like there's a setting for literally everything. Like if you want to change it, you can change it. And I love that. But the thing is, and I know some people say that KDE has gotten way less buggy over the last year. I don't see it. Like I think a year ago KDE was much more stable than it is now. And I don't know if it's just because it doesn't like me or what.

But I have the KDE version. I have the KDEd spin of fedora that's what i'm running right now and it is the most buggy piece of software i've seen in my entire life uh icons aren't showing up the color schemes won't change i'm getting errors every time i try to to install a new uh a new color scheme anytime i try to change a different setting or something like that, something breaks. The last time K-Win completely crashed and, like, I don't understand. K-Win has been around for a very long time. At this point, it should

not crash. Like I said, I'm not sure if it's just the Fedora Spin that's the stonest thing about it, because I haven't... I remember, like, I had the KDE version. version i installed the when the archlinux gui was still around i installed that and that had a kde version yeah and i was using that and that was buggy too so it's not just on fedora so it's just it's buggy and how could it not be

like all they're doing is adding features like i understand one thing you can't say about the kd developers is they're not trying hard to fix the bugs like they put a blog post out where they say oh these are all the bugs we fixed like you don't see anything i mean the the gnome guys you never hear a word from them when it comes to bugs you would swear that there was never a bug in gnome ever but with kd they're very open here are the bugs that we have we're working on them you know it's it's very refreshing the the thing is like you can't continually add new things to your software and not expect things to break all the time and when you're adding that many features things are just going to break i i was talking about this on the last podcast that

tyler and i did we we we um we were talking about kd and it was like a child i i use the metaphor of a child who always gets whatever toy he wants but never he plays with it for like five seconds and puts it off in the corner and then never uses it again that's kd they have all these features like the very exciting features in every new version and then they go off into the corner and then never uses it again that's kde they have all these features like very exciting features in every new version and then they go off into the corner and never get touched again unless they cause some kind of phenomenal breakage so there are pieces parts of plasma 5 now that have just not been touched in ages and ages because i mean you can only do so much with a certain amount of development work sure

sure and what my suggestion was no new features for the next three years none just fix it you know i mean spend the next three years making it good because qt6 is maybe here kinda but there's one qt6 application i'm going to be running it's obs i don't know anyone else is using qt6 and i i was like there were people in my comment section i did a video on the new version of obs and we were like wow this will be the first first qt6 application i'm running i wonder when katie is gonna get qt6 it's like it's gonna be a while three years might be a bit much but i do agree that there are there comes a point where a project does need to have sort of a a feature freeze to work on the the base functionality like there's a looking at as many um open source projects i've seen

there is a lot of projects out there where devs want to make really cool and really new shiny things. And that's great because that's what gets people excited about the project. But when your cool new shiny things are built on like a pile of logs that are like leaning up against each other

and the slightest bump will knock it over, that's a problem. Yeah. Well, to take that metaphor even further it's like i mean hard to say to bring up the devil in this podcast but it's like windows you know when windows has this legacy underpinning that has been there for 30 years you know i mean and there are there are features there that not only are the logs leaning against logs, but some of those logs underneath are rotten. And they're falling apart. Now, KDE is not that bad. But it's the same situation where they've kind of built upon over and over again new stuff.

And it's cool. Like the idea behind KDE, the ultimate customizable desktop environment. It's an amazing and ambitious goal and plan to have. And I think they've even done a good job of giving that to people. But you can't take it too far. And it feels like they've taken it too far. Like, just slow down. All you got to do is just slow down.

And you're right. Three years is too long. But let's just say a year. Just a year. No new features. We're going to focus every release we have in the next year just on fixing bugs. It's not sexy. It's not going to get us in the news.

It's not going to beat GNOME. But we're not in a situation where katie is going to quote unquote win i guess that's not that if it was ever a competition gnome is has won like i think there was nothing i i think sorry i've heard you off i think there's certainly an area for that during the transition over to wayland because, because Gnome is doing their, like, their sort of, I guess, kind of being a walled garden, it's not, like, totally the case, it's not, like, full-on Apple, but there are a lot of things, like, XDG Shell, for example, um, where, actually, what was XDG Shell the example? Anyway, there are things like the debate over CSD or SSD

Where you know I'm saying no it's going to be our way whereas you have double your roots you have Katie that are Trying to like make these open standard this that other people can adopt it's not like you know me isn't doing any of that, but it can adopt. It's not like GNOME isn't doing any of that, but it seems like, at least from what I've seen, most of what GNOME's doing is focusing on the GNOME desktop rather than the Wayland desktop, if that makes sense. Well, I mean, if we're being fair about it, Katie and pretty much everyone other than GNOME has always been very much more interested and open to working with others than the gnome guys ever have you know i mean it has gotten better like they have like two or three years

ago before the pandemic and stuff like that they started working with they had like a conference where they all got together and started working on apps together but historically the gnome guys are very much a uh a tight-knit group that don't really are they're not really interested in input from other people and that's just always been kind of the way and it does hurt when that desktop environment is the most used it's like when apple gets rid of the floppy disk drive or gets rid of uh all of the ports on their laptops or something gets rid of the headphone jack you know they were the first one to do that they were courageous in doing that and now you can't buy a phone with a headphone jack right i mean it's really really hard you know mid-range phones i think some of them still

do have headphone jacks I know that my one does but to be fair I bought this one like 4 years ago it could be worse by now finding a high end phone with it on is hard and 5 years from now you wouldn't be surprised if I told you

you can't buy a phone without it oh no absolutely not the same thing could happen with gum because it is so well supported and well used if they choose a specific direction of doing something they could have influence over what is chosen for the standard linux wide and i'm not sure if it's my previous hatred of gnome but i'm not sure I trust GNOME to make those types of decisions. Because, I mean, we all agree that Weyland is going to be the future. Eventually.

Well, we agree. I don't know if we all agree. There's a lot of people in my comment section who are like, X11 or death. Yeah, I also got an email from someone saying that RISC-V is the future. So, just, I mean, maybe 30 years from now. Well, it's the future, but it's definitely not the present. Well, I mean, RISC is the future if you, I mean, consider ARM the future,

because ARM is a RISC platform, but it's not RISC-V. I mean, that's the thing, right? arm is a risk platform but it's not risk five i mean that's the thing right the it's all of it is a scenario where you just kind of like wayland and pipe wire and all these things like they're going to be the next thing yeah there's going to be something after them but we don't know what that is yet. But Wayland is the next thing. And we haven't quite figured out what that means yet. Because every distribution is doing something a little bit differently right now. And just for us to geek out a little bit, the place where it's kind of really scary is going to be with window managers.

Because we have a couple window managers like we have open box or it's called way box i guess so there's going to be a for that's the open box alternative we have sway yeah uh there's like a dwm like dwl thing yeah yeah right those are the three that i know i'm sure there are other smaller projects but as of right now the big big window managers, I mean, quote unquote, big ones like, you know, i3, Awesome, Xmonad, those things. I would put, uh, so on the Wayland side, I would also put River on that list. I would say River is way bigger than DWL, which is basically, from my understanding, a BS PWM. Which is basically, from my understanding, a BS PWM. Yeah, well, the DWM Weyland one is horrible. I mean, it's really, really bad.

I don't even know if it's still developed or not. But the thing is, maybe there's four right now. It's going to be very, very interesting to see where the likes of like do we ever see like an official suckless wayland uh thing from the suckless guys that's that would be do we ever see that i mean it'd be interesting because right now we don't have right now we don't have a thing that everyone agrees on that is Wayland, right? We hope we have one way of doing Wayland. We have WL roots We have all this stuff that is slightly different than doesn't necessarily always work well together and I'm not sure which direction a lot of these

Window managers are gonna go I mean It's very interesting like I three has got it made in the shade because someone went through and they've made I three like i3 has got it made in the shade because someone went through and they've made i3 into a way a wayland thing right and so that's done the i3 guys don't have to worry about it at all um not not that i think that like x monad or the suckless guys are actually worried about it but it'd be interesting to kind of know what their thoughts are on what the future is because eventually x org not necessarily is going to go away but it's going to be so unpopular that people aren't going to want to use it anymore.

Either not being well maintained, which really isn't now anyways, or because it's just not in the... It's not well used anymore, and eventually they're going to have to move on to the next thing. It would be very interesting to find out what those guys are thinking

about what their future of their window managers is going to have to move on to the next thing. It would be very interesting to find out what those guys are thinking about what their future of their window managers is going to be. Because, I don't know, it's just going to be very interesting. I think the main thing that can drop X11 out of the general, I guess, Linux zeitgeist

is once enough people have moved over, there will come a point where AMD and Nvidia, I guess Intel as well with the integrated graphics, decide to no longer make their GPU drivers work on X11. Yeah, that's going to be the place that... And then when the Mesa team also stops supporting it as well, that's going to be the actual death of the project.

It seems like that's going to be quite a long ways away. Yeah. It feels more like we'd get to a point sooner than that where the support for Weyland is just so good that there's no reason not to do something with it, right? So I think we'll eventually get to the point where we can no longer use the excuse of, I use an NVIDIA card, so therefore I can't use Wayland.

You know what I mean? And we're, like, a year and a half ago, two years ago, we wouldn't have, I mean, if you used an NVIDIA card, don't even touch it, don't even try. Like, you probably wouldn't even get it installed i mean we're at that point now you can install it you know it's it's maybe not there yet but it's a lot further along than it was a couple years ago and now that nvidia's seems to not hate open source nearly as much as they used to i mean maybe we'll start seeing more

i mean i don't know maybe maybe that's something we should talk about is then video openings open sourcing their blobs and stuff i mean everybody got really really excited about that right yeah well when they oh yeah a lot of people got excited about it then it ended up just being open sourcing the kernel modules, which was a step, but it certainly wasn't the step that everyone was expecting. But then they didn't really open source it in a sensible way either. They made the repo open source,

but it wasn't going to be open source development. Yeah, because they weren't going to track any of the commits or anything on... Yeah. Yeah. Trust NVIDIA to do open source, but not do it the open source way. You want to like NVIDIA, I think, because they have really good products, but they just... It's like nobody there uses Linux. They're not quite sure what Linux is, so...

Well, on the desktop at least, data center side, like, you know, NVIDIA does have a lot of use on that, or in, like, supercomputers and stuff like that. Like, there is a place for Linux that NVIDIA cares about, or crypto mining, for example. NVIDIA definitely is a fan of that but when it comes to the desktop

it seems like they don't really know what the desktop is or what's really happening there I would be very interested to know why they decided to open source what they did because I mean not necessarily

why but why now I mean there were and I've seen some YouTube videos about this like people talking about whether or not it was because of the Steam Deck or some other thing because I mean I I mean I would like to say yeah point at the steam that's the reason why in video all of a sudden cares because I mean, I would like to say, yeah, point at the Steam Deck. That's the reason why NVIDIA all of a sudden cares. Because, I mean, the NVIDIA stuff, I mean, especially, like, their software for Linux has been bad for, you know, ever. And now, all of a sudden, they're, I mean, I hate to say that, well, now they care about open source or Linux or whatever. Because, I mean mean they're still kind of half-assing it but it's still half-assing is more than not doing anything at all sure sure

but i i'm not sure i mean we don't know how many steam decks have been sold and you know i'm not sure that i have a feeling that the steam decks is going to be the thing that we point to as the reason for a lot of things that it maybe is not necessarily the thing that it was supposed to be, you know, associated with. I, I don't, I don't know.

It'd be very interesting. One of the things that we're just never going to know the answer to of why they did it now, because there has, I mean, there has, has to be a reason why they did it now and not three years ago or, you know, three years from now. Well, I can tell you what they would have gotten out of it.

I just don't know why they cared at that time. Making your project open source is almost always good PR. Like, that's what it is. Usually you also get free developers as well, but they're doing the weird development system. I guess they are still getting some dev work, but it's much harder to know what you can modify when there are parts of the project... Like, I don't know if you've looked at the repo, but there are parts of that project that aren't the Linux code, they're the Windows code, and you're not

allowed to modify it in that repo. It feels like somebody in a meeting is like, yeah, we should open source this, and then they just give that one person the project, but he's the guy that you don't really want doing that because he's the guy who has his attention somewhere else all the time. Like maybe he's playing like an Avengers. That guy's playing Galaga.

Yeah. You know, that's that guy, you know, he don't want him running the ship, but that's the guy you chose to do the work. I don't know. It's,

I wonder if there's going to, I mean, that news gave a lot of people a lot of hope that NVIDIA won't be the second class citizen that it appears to have been for the last little while on Linux, right? And when they announced that, I was very much like, just hold your horses just a little bit. First of all, there were like mainstream publications that were shouting NVIDIA's open source, they're drivers. Like, no, they didn't. Not even a little bit. Everything that makes an NVIDIA card, you know, like,

an NVIDIA card is still proprietary. But, I mean, that's not surprising. That's the same way with AMD. Like, most of their stuff is still proprietary. Yeah. People like to scream from the rooftops about how great AMD is, but we need to remember that they're, um, they're, the workstation

drivers, the ones that support OpenCL, that I'm forgetting the name of. Radeon? Is it AMD Pro, something like that? Yeah, AMD Pro, yep, that's the one, yeah. Those ones are proprietary. Uh, AMD does not have a control panel on linux

unlike nvidia nvidia has one you can it may not be as good as the windows one but there is one that md doesn't have one it has existed and has existed for a long time too it's been around for ages like amd might generally have better support for their their like mainline consumer Consumer gaming GPU stuff. But. Outside of that. AMD is just as bad as Nvidia. At supporting Linux.

I think that the reason. Why people think that AMD is so much better. Is because. It just seems to work better. Out of the box. Right? There's been so many problems with NVIDIA stuff. I mean, to this day I still can't use an NVIDIA card without screen

tearing. Like, and even the tricks where you know, there's like three ways you can get risk for screen tearing on Linux. Everyone knows the tricks because everyone who cares about it has had to do them. And even with those things, most of the time you

still can't fix screen tearing within video cards and that's i mean i okay in this day and age screen tearing should not be a thing on linux i don't care what graphics cards you're using like that's like nice 1990s thing going on like if this was 99s like yes you're screen tearing whatever i mean we're using uh five megahertz uh displays it doesn't matter you know it's we're basically reading on e at this point it doesn't matter but in this nowadays it just it feels like there should not be screen tearing ever on on linux it just it feels that way but there is wayland yeah yeah i know wayland's the future my thing is i can't wayland hates my guts like it just i cannot get so wayland for me is like whack-a-mole. I can get the desktop running perfectly fine.

Like I've tried Sway. I can get Sway running perfectly fine and use everything just like I'd use i3. All of the scratch pads work. Everything works, right? And then I open OBS. And OBS is very, very finicky, at least for me, when it comes to Wayland. And that's even recently right and the thing is like then i will put some effort into getting obs up and working in obs i'll get

the video camera working and i'll get the transitions working and stuff like that uh and then pipe wire will act up and all of a sudden my audio just for whatever reason i'm they're counting this as a speaker you know my microphone is a speaker like, ah, no, I don't need that. So, so then I spend some time getting pipe wire working where you get basically that, uh, alternative to Jack, the, um, the thing where you draw the arrows to the source and stuff. I don't remember what it's called. So you get that thing and you,

you draw the sources where they're supposed to go and all that stuff. And then pipe wireware is working. And then OBS breaks again. Because reasons. I mean, you have no clue why all of a sudden now it won't do window capture even though it was working before. Now, I think most of my problem with Wayland and Pipeware is going to be a skill level issue. Because I'm just not to the point where I know enough about it yet. But I think that that is it for a lot of people.

Like, we've been using X.Org for so long and Pulse Audio for so long that, yeah, we give Pulse Audio a lot of shit, but it works. Like, for the most part, you can plug in... Like, I have a DAC amp on my desk, right? Really cheap, $20 for Amazon. I plugged it in, it works.

You know what I mean? I have the Scarlett Solo as my audio interface amazon i plugged it in it works you know i mean i have the scarlet solo is my audio interface i plugged it in it works you know it gets audio it has all the features i can monitor through it if i wanted to you know it worked fine and that was on pulse audio which everybody says is terrible and it just it works really fine. And then you get to Weyland and using pipe wire and it has gotten better. So right now I'm using pipe wire right now. And a year ago, I wouldn't have touched it. I mean, like I wouldn't have touched it with a 10 foot pole.

It was so, so bad, but it's gotten way better. It was so, so bad. But it's gotten way better. Weyland, I think most of my problems with Weyland still are both skill level and my, like, I've had so many bad experiences with it in the last year or so that I'm very tetchy about trying it again. Because you install it and then, I mean, let's just say i decided i was going to try sway from and i you know the thing is when you use a piece of software as real that you have to use like obs that thing has to work right like if you're gonna if you're going to have a

a youtube channel at all obs basically has to work i mean unless you're going to use like simple screen recorder something like that but most of that stuff isn't available on Wayland. So, you have to use OBS, because it's like, I mean, you can use probably like, I don't know, FFmpeg or something, I don't know, if you wanted to. You can't use it. There is a

there are a couple of very little projects, like Gnome has a screen recorder, KDE has a screen recorder, there's probably one for WROOTS as well well but nothing nothing as extensive as what you would want like obs f of m peg right now doesn't someone correct me if i'm wrong but um at some point it might probably if it doesn't already so the thing is like with obs when you get up when you open up your computer you get on your computer to make a video you want that i mean if obs is broken or messing messing up it ruins everything yeah like it ruins your entire day right and and because because the the time you

were spent to do your video is going to be time spent doing the stuff in obs to get it to work again and the thing about obs is that it breaks often enough in xorg like it like you know either your transforms are gone or your audio is all messed up or you know your filters are all gone or your your luts are all gone i mean it's always messing up in xorg and it just feels like adding the wayland stuff on top of that it just makes it even more problems to deal with and i'm not in a mental space right now where i want to deal with that and the thing is is i'm not sure when that position is going to happen that's why our conversation earlier when we're saying like it's the future that future is very scary for me because because well i'm gonna be one of those guys who use xorg

probably until it's dead i have a feeling well i've made it very clear wayland is the future but it's definitely not the present there will come a point where maybe five ten years from now that wayland so for a lot of people wayland is good enough but there is still a lot of people, Wayland is good enough. But there is still a lot of those edge cases where XORG is just better. And until maybe, I want to say, was it a year ago? Wayland was completely unusable for me because it didn't support OBS. You just couldn't use it. But then as Pipewire has evolved as well, that's sort of... A lot of the problems on wayland are being addressed by

pipewire and by xtg portals so these things sort of feeding into each other so as they are slowly improving over time it's getting to that point where you can reasonably use it like i i've actually fully agreed with you on pipewire so right now i'm running pipewire a year ago i tried to use it as well and it was good and then they pushed a regression and the project completely broke so they changed the way that um that audio was being handled so inside of obs if i changed my master volume it would actually change the like the capture level so rather than have it like rather than relying on the individual levels of the program so if i was like you know capturing a game for example i want to be able to change my audio level that i hear through my earphones

separately from the audio that is being captured inside of obs and that just completely broke so like i can't use this. This is not usable. Eventually, I went back to it. And since then, it's been entirely rock solid. I think this sort of goes back to the KDE problem from earlier. Rather than adding in a lot of new shiny features, work on those fundamentals and make them rock solid. Pipeware confuses the crap out of me. So, in the old days,

you know, which is like yesterday, you know, X.Org handled stuff that was put on your screen. That's what X.Org does. And Pulse Audio was your audio server. It puts your audio thing. But Pipewire is not that.

Pipewire does put audio out to your peripherals but it also deals with stuff that's on screen uh and i think that that most people like you said not gonna care because most people like my dad uses ubuntu on his laptop oh wow he doesn't give a crap yeah he doesn't care what he uses. He just wants to use Chrome. He lives in Chrome. So it doesn't matter what operating system he uses. So he's using Wayland all the time. He doesn't know that.

And that's going to be most people's experience with Wayland. Because Ubuntu and now Fedora and eventually every distribution is going to be shipping their default desktop environment with Wayland. Whether they use KDE or GNOME. It doesn't matter.

It's going to be the default thing very, very soon. And it already is for basically everybody. Most people who don't make YouTube videos and have never used OBS in their lives, they don't care. As long as it works and will play a YouTube video well and will allow you to put output to your headphones, that's going to be perfectly fine for them. So in that case, Wayland and Pipewire, which Ubuntu is going to be shipping with by default in the next release, right,

it's going to be fine for the vast majority of people. It's when you do extra things like when you record your screen or you have extra peripherals like a audio you know audio uh a mixer or something you know it's when you have those things that it adds that added complexity that i mean like you said with your example with Pipeware last year, I still have the feeling that Pipeware is in a situation where that could still happen. Sure.

Well, it feels right now like it's very stable, but there's always this worrying thing in the back of my head that they're going to come out with an update that just breaks everything and I'm going to be screwed. And update that just breaks everything and i'm going to be screwed um and part of that is because it is very new and some of it is that i don't if i don't this is probably just my own uh sense of the project but it feels like they're trying to do so much like it feels like anything that wayland can't handle yet pipewriters you know being given that responsibility that and like xdg portals um yeah yeah

i don't want to talk about xdg portals i hate those damn things um the the the all right so they the xd portal the only experience i have with XDD portals is the file pickers and stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the GNOME file picker that is included with the XDD portal-GNOME, whatever it is in Fedora, is the most broken piece of thing outside of KDE. It is astonishingly broken. I don't understand how you can have a file picker in this day and age and not... All it does is it opens up a dialog box and lets you choose

a file, right? Sure. But it's broken. It doesn't work. And it's the same thing for the save dialog. If you want to name a file with the GNOME version of the XDG portal, you start typing in the name of the file that you want to save it opens up search like so you can't actually name it you have to

type your name in the search box cut and paste it out of there and then paste it back into the the name uh text box it's absolutely nuts like so there were there were solutions online for this, and they were all overly complicated, so I was like, F this crap. I'm deleting it. I deleted the xtgportal-gnome and installed the KDE version. That way I can just use the QT version of the file pickers and save dialogues and stuff like that.

Just as bad, but not broken. So that's my only experience with it so far. And that's the reason why I didn't, you know, just... I don't know. It's a good idea when it comes to, like... It's a good idea for other reasons, like the whale and stuff. But when it comes to, like, the file pickers, like, at least now, with the way they're doing it,

it's not, like, each application is built way they're doing it it's not like each application is built in their own thing and everyone's doing their own i mean like uh and it's still that way because a lot of soft real bars just don't care like uh gimp still uses its own thing that they develop like um uh firefox doesn't seem to like there's there's have been certain situations on certain distributions where firefox will switch between different ones on the same distro. So sometimes you'll get the GTK one, sometimes you'll get the QT one, and it doesn't know what the hell it's doing.

So that whole situation, but at least now they can use those things separately and it's kind of system-wide. That makes a whole lot more sense than the way they used to do it. But I don't know. Linux is broken. Well, you brought brought up pipewire doing too much before originally pipewire was just going to be called pulse video and it was going to be the video it was gonna be like a um it was gonna be used to handle like webcams things like that and then the project expanded over time and eventually sort of encompassed the entire

audio side as well that's that's how that happened and i don't know i kind of understand it being like that having a single thing managing your all of your media stuff. But when it's not being... One thing that really annoys me with a lot of FOSS projects is I think a lot of them need to go back and listen to Linus Torvald at DebComp 2014. This talk is going to be forever relevant. I'm sure you've seen it.

People always post questions from it like this is where linus said don't break the user space and things like that i think a lot of projects need to take that like seriously to heart if your project does something and even if that thing is a bug if the users start to rely on that it goes from being a bug to being a feature. And you can't just change that and then expect that to just be entirely fine. It's the whole putting the eggs in one basket thing, right? It's when...

The thing is that we got so reliant on xorg and systemd and pulse audio and stuff like that when those those things are things that have to work right you can i mean and there's a i think it's actually probably a good thing at least from a stability standpoint the The X.Org is not actively developed anymore because you're not adding a whole bunch of new features that could potentially break something, right? Yeah, yeah. There are... This whole episode is going to be full of metaphors. It's like a car.

There are certain things on a car that have to work, right? Your tires have to work. Your engine has to work. Your steering wheel has to work. The brakes have to work. Those things have to work right your tires have to work your engine has to work your steering wheel has to work the brakes have to work those things have to work and they have to work not only well but consistently right they have to when you press the brake pedal down it has to do the same thing every single time it's not it's not a situation where you press it down and all of a sudden your car speeds up if it did that you're in trouble right obviously something is broken uh the thing with pipewire and wayland and stuff like that is

when you start over again and that's basically what they've done is they've started over again and started building these brand new stacks up and these and if you were talking about a web browser or you know alternative to discord or you file manager, whatever, nobody cares if that thing gets broken by an update. But if Pipewire breaks, once Ubuntu switches to it full-time in the next release and an update pushes and it breaks something, that breaks audio for millions of people. You know what I mean? And same thing with wayland when when something gets pushed out and it breaks something it breaks a fundamental thing that has to work like if your displays will no longer show you what's supposed to be there that is an issue because that's like your car not starting it's just you can't the

problem with starting over is you're going to basically being so the the entire history of xorg i you made a video about the history of xorg recently right the entire history of that is them fixing stuff all the time like they've went through hurdles over and over and over again to fix things yeah yeah throughout the history and that's basically the way all software works right wayland and pipeware they're having to basically redo all that stuff. Like every hurdle, like whether it's like creating key bindings in WLRoot, right? That thing, that's something that was solved 20 years ago. You know what I mean?

So they're having to basically solve all the problems which we've already solved. And when you have to solve new problems and you're trying to figure out, you how to how do i solve the problem in a way that fix fits well with this project there's a good chance that you're going to break stuff and and that's fine when nobody uses your thing and it's in development it's like a beta or something you know whatever um but the thing is wayland and pipeware not a beta anymore everyone's using it so you can't treat everyone who uses linux the millions of people who do so you can't treat them as guinea pigs you you have to make sure that this thing is the most stable piece of software ever and you can't do that simultaneously with being a very new project that has to fix all these problems that, you know,

still need to be fixed. Like, the keybinding things is a big deal. Yeah. Right? So, it's one of the things you just... It feels like Wayland and Pipewire, despite how good they have gotten, just have become the default too soon. Like, maybe like three or four years from now, when a lot of these problems were fixed,

would have made a lot more sense than them being defaults right now, despite how good they are for normal people. I don't know. Maybe that's just me. I think people need to remember that... So Pulse Audio came out... Oh, I lost my thing. There we go.

Pulse Audio came out in 2004. and it was a buggy mess back then and distros were shipping it way too early like there's even i've said this before but i'll say it again when ubuntu shipped pulse audio as the default lenart pottering who made the project said stop doing this like this is not ready to be shipped. Like, describe Pulse Audio as the audio system that broke audio on Linux. Like, it was not ready. And X.Org, not as old,

but it has a history stemming back, like, X.11, 40 years. Like, both these projects are really old projects and if we go back and look at you know xorg in for like the original version of debian for example it was not going to be anywhere near as good as it is now and it takes a long time to get to that point i think that's that's the i do agree that we are sort of jumping onto wayland a little bit too quickly obviously people need to be using it to be testing it but right that's probably the thing that is the good part about it is yeah yeah when a lot of

people use it you're going to have a a lot of interesting hardware scenarios and stuff like that that allow you to root out bugs a lot faster, but I don't know. I don't know whether that's the place of something like Ubuntu to be doing that. Like, that's a lot of people that are going to be exposed to potentially really buggy software. Yeah, Fedora makes

sense, right, because that's the place where it's done. You know, it's where SystemD appeared first and all this stuff. I mean, it it was the rel and stuff like it but the the thing is that ubuntu is supposed to be this it'd be like debian taking all this new stuff and being like the testing ground for like it it just doesn't quite make sense and you have to think that the canonical guys have a lot of faith in the weyland and pipewear teams to make sure that they don't break stuff because they just have a lot of faith in the gnome team i don't know whether they have any faith in anyone else yeah and i'm not i don't know what it feels kind of like that um i i think that that most of my opinions about Weyland and Pipewire are colored based on the experiences I've had with them.

Sure. And it's really hard for me to say that, I mean, maybe it's the cynic inside me, but it feels like we're headed for a disaster at some point where something is pushed out that doesn't work on say a certain type of Intel processor or something or a certain GPU or something is just completely broken and you know that's fine it's not fine but it's going like it's

broken but we've suffered through that before and we'll suffered through that before. And we'll suffer through it again. And I don't want to be the old guy in the Linux community that says we should never push forward with new things. Because if we stayed the same all the time, it would just be boring and stuff. We'd have nothing to talk about on our YouTube channels, right?

So I think at the end of the day taking my curmudgeon out of it Weyland and Pipewire are good things and it's probably a good thing that we're switching to them now even if I still feel that it's too soon

and we're going to have a lot of problems along the way but the problem here is that 10 years ago, when you wanted to push a new hardware or new piece of software like this out, there were way fewer people using Linux then. Like, way fewer, right? Now, if you push out a thing like pipeware to the masses you're not only going to be pushing out to a lot more people who use desktop linux but also things like the steam deck

which have people who they don't even know they're using linux they're just playing their games and now the thing is is that i don't think i mean valve is a very intelligent company they're not going to push out a uh they're going to be far enough behind it feels like to catch those like problems before they would push them out to their devices but maybe not i mean well it's not unheard of for that's get passed through that's one of the benefits. I'll give shit to distros like Ubuntu, but one of the benefits they do have is that when something breaks, they don't experience that breakage for a long time.

Yeah, they're looking like, ah, you archfuckers. Except for those cases, there have been cases where they've shipped, like, broken versions of browsers, for example, and then they stick with it for an entire year. Or they broke app images lately right yeah yeah yeah um that is one of the things you get from that uh steam deck as well with uh with steam us and i think in valve's case they're going to be very particular about

what they ship out so recently there was the change with the way Glibc gets built by default and that was breaking every- like it was breaking all EAC games, it was breaking a bunch of other projects, and I actually don't know if the Glibc devs have I'm gonna check right now. I don't know if they've made the correct decision, but for anyone who doesn't know basically the Glibc devs made a change to the way that it's getting built by default and it pretty much broke every EAC game

and every distro decided we just have to fix this downstream because we can't you can't just break you can't break all the Linux game it's just not a thing you can do but because they are so far behind on distros like ubuntu on distros like steam os it's not really a problem to like

be concerned with for a while and you can always ship a different version and mess around with stuff like fork the project just that specific version things like that just to make sure everything is good i don't know there's definitely benefits to come from that system but i i personally like being on more up-to-date stuff okay uh anyway so answer what i was saying uh they haven't confirmed whether they're going to fix it or not it is still just like yeah we'll see what's going to happen that's that's weird to me i mean it feels like i mean a lot of people rely on that software like maybe you should be a little more reactive when you break like everything like if you're gonna break the world at least you know don't go radio silent yeah yeah absolutely i mean it's like uh when these places get hacked or whatever

like they lose millions upon millions of of accounts and stuff and credit cards and stuff the worst thing you can do is not talk about it like if you if you just completely clam up like maybe if we don't talk about it it will go away it's not going to go away um so yeah so i have a question for you what is your opinion on um immutable distros what do you what do you think about that stuff i have been kind of getting interested in this topic recently i i don't think it's something i would run on a regular desktop system like that's just not what i would want to do with the exception of a i was thinking that if i make a capture pc i'm probably going to run something like silver blue just because it needs to run obs and that's pretty much it and you know you can still fly back um right i think it

it opens up a a really interesting way to work with a distro. So you sort of, the thing that I'm interested in is the shift of focus on where the customization is. Now, the tooling isn't there to make this easy, but you don't customize the distros like that once you've installed it. If you want to customize, you can actually make a custom

image and then go and install that. And there's actually projects like um... Uh... Fuck, what was it called? Kinoit? Is that it? Kinoit, yeah. Yeah, Kinoit, whatever. I always pronounce the name

wrong. And there's projects like... I think it was like marden pitts workstation or something like that pity workstation where it takes an existing fedora silverloom installation and there are places with a new image that's this like sway desktop with development tools things like that i think that is the most exciting thing from from my perspective the idea where rather than you know having to build up this distro and make this weird install script to install everything you could generate an image and then just stick

that image onto a new system and everything you want is just set up the way you want it that's that's super cool to me i don't i don't really care as much about the immutable properties. My main focus is on the image side. So I've used Kino White now on a hard drive for three months. Yes. And I think part of this is KDE's problem. But it is the buggiest ever. And we've spent a lot of time trapping on KDE's problem, but it is the buggiest ever. And we've spent a lot of time

trapping on KDE in this, but you can tell that that project is very early stages. So the silver-blue is much more stable and reliable than the KDE version of it. And the thing is that

from the immutable standpoint, I found it okay. I think one of the reasons why now that I'm on Fedora that I've been using flatpaks more and more is because of my time on KinoA. Because you install everything from a flatpak there unless you can't. You know what I mean? I know Silverblue supports overlay packages. Does KinoA support that as well? supports overlay packages does kinoa support that as well well they you can basically install anything from the fedora repos that you want as long as as long as they're available to rpm

austria or whatever it's called um there are certain things obviously that just won't work like if you're installing something basically anything that's going to affect the root file system so anything that like if you want to install like dmenu or something like that from the Fedora repos, you can't do that because it puts it in OPT, right? And that is in the root directory, right? So you can obviously build that from scratch and put it in the home directory,.config or whatever. It worked perfectly fine. But you can't do it from the repos because all that stuff is put in OPT. And that was where i i never really ran the thing is is that when it came to a software perspective on kinaway i never really had a hard

time getting the things that i wanted to use there right obviously i was never going to like be able to install i3 or anything like that but as long as I was happy with the image as it came to me, it was fine. So I was able to install the program and stuff like that. Most of the stuff is from Flatpak. And then when you can get like Btop or whatever, you just go to RPMOS tree and

install it. The weird thing is, of course, having to reboot your computer in order to actually use that thing. It made me feel like I was on Windows. but if you are so if you anything you have to install from the terminal with rpm monster you have to reboot afterwards it would modify the image right and it was okay basically what excuse me basically what you learn to do is have like an install software day and you install all your software all at once and then you reboot your computer. That's the way I just ended up doing it.

I kept a list of the things that I wanted to install and just did them all at once and then rebooted my computer because it's on a separate hard drive in this machine that I'm on now. And I have to get in to deal with boot menus and stuff like that. It's just kind of a mess to get into there. And it was a fine experience the immutable part didn't really bother me as much as i thought it was going to do i'm not sure that i'm happy with it being considered the future i'm not i'm not sure i'm not sure if i'm on board with that yet i think it is very interesting what you were talking about like i can see tools that will allow you to build your own image in the future where those things become more popular.

Say I want to build an i3 version of Silverblue. You can do that, and then it will do the ISO thing for you. I'm not sure that we'll ever get there for all the little pieces of Linux that we all enjoy right now. So to be able to install like the random, like Hyperland window manager. Have you been getting the Hyperland comments as well? I have. And I'm like, I tried it

and then it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. Like it just, it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. Like I can't do a video. I like, I know that all the problems I'm having with it are because of this virtual machine i can't do a video and crap on it because it doesn't work well in a virtual machine and i'm not in a position right now where i can put it on a piece of a piece of actual hardware yeah so yeah i have it all the time like along with the gen 2 and lin from scratch comments, Hyperland has been right up there. Install Gen 2, not going to do it again.

Never, ever, ever will I touch Linux from scratch. I watched some of your live streams, never going to do that. You're a masochist, I don't know what's wrong with you. You just answered that. That's a whole other conversation. And I think people, I mean, I can understand if you want to learn all that stuff, it'd probably be really good. But if you're, I mean, you'd never want to do that with the expectation at the end of it, you're actually going to use it for a daily drive. But I think that a lot of people who leave those comments expect you to do that. Like some guy told me to,

could you live in Linux from scratch for a month? Like it would take me a month to build it. I mean, I mean, I, I, I'm not Linux smart enough probably to do it. Like I'm sure it has really good documentation,

but my ADD wouldn't mix up numbers and stuff like that. I would follow things out of, you know, it would be a disaster is what I'm trying to say. I have no clue what I was talking about earlier, so. I just got distracted. Image tolling. Oh, the

Kino White stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure if it's, I'm on board with it being the future. Yeah. I've heard a lot of people say, like, oh, this is the way Linux is going, and every distro in the future is going to be immutable. And I think from a certain perspective,

like, if you're going to put this on workstations at an enterprise, it makes a hell of a ton of sense. Yeah. Like, this person can never ever not only not only can i install this on every machine and have to be exactly the same i can do updates to them and it be continually be exactly the same and and on top of that things tools like toolbox will allow developers to get in there and basically create whatever environment they want do their basically it's wSL on Linux.

You can install your own distros right there, and it will just work really well. And that stuff all makes sense from a developer's point of view. If you're a developer, even, this makes a lot of sense. But for the guys like me and you who like to tweak stuff, like to install random packages, things that you might have to interact with the root file system on a daily basis.

It's going to be guys like us that are going to have a big problem with that because we want to do those things, and because it's immutable, you can't. Once you've installed it, that root file system is not your thing anymore. It's entirely the purview of the package manager and the distro itself you know and that's okay but i don't know that it's necessarily for me when it comes to those corporate settings i think that's another place where the idea of a custom image can definitely be super useful so like you might not want it to be like silver blue deploy for example you might want to have like whatever company tooling specifically installed

on that and that i think is a great use case and i i i think there's definitely gonna be a place for more of the um more of these mutable distros as a entry point to linux there's never going to be a point at all in history where Arch or Gentoo or anything like that is going to be an immutable distro. It's just not what those projects are trying to do. There's going to be more of them. And as Flatpaks gain a

lot more software in their repos and people sort of get more used to installing through a package manager like that, it's going to be a more accepted way to try out Linux. I think anyone who says it's going to be every distro might be like, they might be huffing a bit too much copium. They're a little bit too into it. Yeah, they're a little bit too into it.

But, yeah, that's pretty much where i stand i think there's gonna be a lot of distros that do you uh do use a mutable system but there's always going to be options for people like you and me who want something else like that's the one of the great things about foss if you don't like what another project is doing you can just not do it and make your own thing. What would be cool, and there might be tools like this now, but it'd be really neat to be able to have, like, say you wanted to install Arch Linux.

You got everything set up the way you wanted to do. And then there was a tool, like, that you could download that says, make this immutable. You know, everything that I have right now, make it immutable. This is my ISO.

This is the thing that I'm now going to have like you can still do the updates and stuff like that but you you are in control of everything and i mean obviously it'd be very very complicated and you know it wouldn't be for everybody but it would be very neat to be able to create not only just like a random image that does like says has sway on it or something like that but also has all of the stuff that you would normally have on your in your root file system and that's there you know i mean and then you obviously you'd have to figure out how to manage that stuff but it'd be interesting to have a tool like that that would allow you to make your thing immutable and then be able to transfer that from one place to another and always make sure that it's exactly the way

you wanted it. And maybe that's a future that I could get into where I could do all the tweaking and stuff like that. Like you were talking about earlier, where you could do all the tweaking you wanted beforehand and then once you had the image exactly the way you wanted it, make that thing immutable, and now this is my ISO

forever and ever, and you just have to do the updating and stuff. Well, Valve is using OS True for the Steam Deck. It's entirely possible to do. It's just, there's documentation out there. It's just, like, it's very technical documentation, and the tooling isn't there to make it easy. That's the main concern.

If there was just some, like, very simple tool that could, like, just generate... Actually, there might already be one that I don't know about, but I have not yet found one. If there was just some very simple tool that could either take your existing install and generate an ISO, or, like, generate an image from it,

or there was a tool that you could, like, had good documentation that you could go through and make this thing that you want to make, that you could like. Had good documentation. That you could go through. And make this thing that you want to make. That would be cool. That would be very very cool. And I wouldn't use it on my daily system. Like that's just not what I want to do. I want to be able to modify it as much as I want to.

But I would absolutely use that in the context of. You know. A capture PC. Or a secondary PC. That's for maybe like a a NAS or a media center PC, something like that. Yeah, and

for me, I'd probably put it on my laptops because I don't need to do any I don't need to do any tweakings on my laptops I just want those things to work all the time. That's probably where I would be the happiest with an immutable system on my main desktop probably that kinaway has been where i've been using that is on my main system

yeah and i part of my dislike of it is because it's been so buggy but also like i want to be able to install hyperland i want to be able to install i3 i want to be able to install you know random window manager when i want to try it and you can't really do that i mean you can get ways of doing it but it's not going to ever be the experience you have now and there's something to be said about linux would not be where it's at without people people's ability to tweak stuff right and one of the reasons why we have so much FOSS is because people tweak something and like, Oh,

I need this tool. So I'm going to go build it. Yeah. Um, I'm not sure that immutable stuff doesn't take away some of that ability because you need to, um, it feels like they're being too much stuff is being done for you at that

point. And it's, it kind of takes away some of the do it yourself but i mean i can also see the other side of it where you know they want this to be as stable as possible for everyone and when you tweak and you know randomly mess around with stuff on your system you break stuff sure sure we like breaking stuff but i mean it makes it really hard for fedora and the people in those forums to support you when you break stuff on your mean it makes it really hard for fedora and the people in those forums to support you when you break stuff on your own they don't really know what you broke so

i don't know it's one of those things right and it's i have mixed feelings but i it's definitely a good idea in some cases i'm not sure that it's going to be you know for me in the near future well yeah yeah like there's a i i think it's always especially when you are doing the youtube content sort of stuff to step back and think about actually this is true if not just for this but also if you're like a you know hardcore everything must be fast everything must be libre that sort of person as well to sort of step back and think about what a regular person using linux is going to want from their system are they going to want hyper customization is that something that the people like typically care about and for those people probably not and maybe silver or like a silver blue like system

actually might be a good experience that's where that's why i said before that there's always going to be these options that exist that are not the immutable system because yeah, even if it's just like testing software or anything else like that, immutable systems are just, they're not suitable for that. It's just, they're just not. Even if they became the main thing,

if they were like the, like Ubuntu decided they were going to be immutable and Arch and all this, let's just say we're in that future. There's still going to be the anti-SystemD guys. Yeah, you're always going to have that. You're going to have the guys who are like, I don't like this. It's obviously controlled by

evil corporation guy. So I'm going to go create my own thing. And, you know, even if we were in that future where everything was immutable, there'd still be the you know, the system being knit and, you know,

if you have anti system D and anti pulse audio, you're going to have anti image. That's always, that's going to exist as well. Gotta love those guys. You know, you gotta love those guys. You know,

they're good. They're keeping the spirit alive. I, I've had some people come through my discord who are like hardcore anti-system d and i've never i've never actually heard a good argument against system d it's usually i don't want to categorize everyone in this camp but it's usually a dislike of red hat a dislike of how much system d does and a concern of a system d size those are the main concerns that i've heard and i think they are they're valid concerns they're just not concerns that

i share or a lot of other people share yeah so the thing is with sys and d let's just take those arguments and butcher them one by one first of all uh without red hat and canonical and these corporations that a lot of these guys hate linux would not exist like i'm sorry it just okay maybe it would exist but it would be so small nobody would use it okay almost? Almost every piece of software that Brody and I have talked about on this podcast, you know, SystemD, Wayland, Pulse Audio, Pipeware, all these things, every single one of them was developed by a corporation.

You know, every single one of them. Your computer would be very dysfunctional right now without corporate backing. It's always fun to let people know how much work intel and google do on the kernel that's always always amusing and microsoft like and microsoft yes with a passion and to find out like microsoft's like the biggest contributor to the the linux foundation like it freaks people out, right? And understandably, we all know that if you're a corporation, your primary thing is to make money. That's your goal, to make your shareholders money.

And you can't... The ideals behind open source software and capitalism are fundamentally opposed. Because on one end, you have to have all the interest in your of your shareholders in open source you have to have all your interest in the people who use your software and they're not necessarily always the same people so i can understand why people dislike canonical and red hat and stuff like i understand it like you say but i also can be of the opinion that without them we wouldn't be where we're at like we wouldn't be we'd be we'd all be using windows right now you know it's just that's

just the case or you know open macintosh or maybe the free bsd might still exist you know like yeah i think they they would still have a place, but... Well, they're a weird one, because no one on the desktop cares... Okay, there's going to be some BSD guys here. Most people on the desktop don't care about free BSD or open BSD. But if we actually consider what's being done with those, they basically have control... Like, sort of share control with Linux when it comes to cars, when it comes to consoles, when it comes to consoles,

when it comes to any sort of embedded system, there is a lot of FreeBSD out there. Like, the PS4 and PS5 are FreeBSD systems. They're, like, very modified, but still FreeBSD. A lot of servers, though. Yeah. The Nintendo Switch is a...

It's based on the 3DS OS which was based on Android and FreeBSD and it's just like there is FreeBSD is a weird one, I've never understood like, I've never understood why no one cares about FreeBSD on the desktop

when it has this much usage in the corporate space I think it comes down to software availability because a lot of like BSD would have a lot more people caring about it if they were able to get like flat packs working on if you had flat pack available on BSD now they're not working on that all they're not interested in flat pack whatsoever but they're not working on that at all. They're not interested in Flatpak whatsoever, but they're working on app images.

So, I mean, that's interesting. I can't stand app images, but I know a lot of people who like them. But, yeah, that's, I mean... BSD... I think it's fantastic that BSD exists, and I think it gives...

It gives the people who can't stand the court how corporate linux has become a place to go because bsd i mean bsd has probably corporate sponsors but they're not it's it's not as blatant like you can tell that linux is controlled by corporations because that they're the primary users. Like that. They're the ones that use Linux for the most. I mean, the desktop people don't care. The thing,

just to go back to the system, the thing like after, after you get past red hat, the other argument is always bloat. Yes. And I can't, I cannot stand that argument. It is,

it's pedestrian, okay? You're not trying hard at this point, okay? If your argument against using something is because it's bloated, that is not a real reason. You need to tell me what the real reason is, okay? It's just... Okay, does SystemD do too much? Define too much.

Does it do things... I mean, for me, and and for you systemd works fantastically it's a really good large suite of software like and that's the important thing it's it's a suite of software it's managed in a single repo but it's not a single binary right and there are a lot of distributions that don't they pick and choose right they don't i are a lot of distributions that they pick and choose. A lot of distributions don't ship the entire systemd stack.

They pull some of it out and use their own things. That happens all the time. Ubuntu does it. Arch does it. I mean, it just happens. So you can't use the argument that is bloated because it's not one thing. It's like saying Linux is bloated. I mean, technically, I suppose you could make that argument.

It has like 30 million lines of code, okay? If you want to look at it from that strength, sure, fine, whatever. It's bloated. But from a perspective where the GNU and Linux stuff comes together and creates a functioning thing that you can use, it's not bloated because every single piece that it has is useful for something. And you can only really consider something bloated if it has pieces that are useless, that are not necessarily something that is functional for any reason.

It's just there for whatever. I mean, even Linux still has floppy disk drive support in some areas, right? It still exists and it's still maintained, but it's useful. I mean, maybe not for very many people. Do you know what the oldest supported CPU by the Linux kernel is? Couldn't name it, but I know it's cool. It is the Intel 486SX. So,

there you go. The thing is, like, you can't just use the term bloat because you don't like bloated things. You have to... We're intelligent creatures, supposedly, and you're going to have an argument against something.

Bloat is not a reasonable or intelligent thing to say about anything because there has to be more to it. What is it about System D that these people don't actually like? Other than, oh, it does too much. Okay, fine. But these are the people who don't seem to understand that there's a difference between an init system and a suite of software.

Like, yes, SystemD is an init system. It's also a hundred other things under the same umbrella. Okay? It's just, that's the way it is. So what these people want is just an init system, which is fine. Like, you can have just an init system if you want. But all the other things that systemd does, you have to find something to do those things.

So you're not actually solving the problem. You're just having an init system that is separate from the rest of the stuff. You have to still have something that does everything else that systemd does. You have to still have something that does everything else that system D does. And basically you're, you're breaking, you're basically, you're taking Facebook and breaking it up into little, little pieces.

You're breaking system D up into little pieces and calling it other things. You still have all the stuff that system D does just under different names. So you're not solving any problems. I don't know those. I hate to have a portion of the community that I just can't really stand, but those people kind of get to me. Like, I understand wanting to have something different. Like, I'm all for it.

I like Runnit and Sysvianet, perfectly good in their systems. They work really well. OpenRC is also very good. But your reason for existing has to be good. And if your reason for existing is because bloat, it doesn't really get me on board with your argument.

It just doesn't. That was a fun rant. Yeah. I've refrained from making a video about it because I know that it would piss a lot of people off because I know a lot of... There are not a lot of people who hate SysMD, but those that do are very, very vocal.

Yeah. It's just more trouble than it's worth to get into that thing. So I'm much happier to do it here where they're going to be your problem and not mine. Well, that implies that I've read the comments on this channel oh ouch burn so all you trolls out there you system d trolls just uh just know you're you're being you're you're in an echo chamber it's fine i'll come over to the main channel and just be annoying there like usual or the disc or whatever or what yeah all that or what will happen is some will take this clip and post it on reddit uh which happened with a clip that from the uh the nicolo episode

we were talking about um submitting bug reports and then someone took the conversation out of context like brody hates submitting bug reports like shut the fuck up that's not what was being said that's okay it's better than going viral for talking about uh ding dongs and zingers like dt did today i'm pretty sure i was not the only linux youtuber that took a clip of him explaining what a ding dong and a zinger were he flipped that part of it and shared it all over the place like what he was talking about i don't know if you guys have them in australia but they have these hostess little snack cakes they're uh little chocolate cupcakes with cream filling filling and they have anyways he did a video on it today and he was comparing it i i don't even remember i don't

even remember what the rest of the video was about because I got hung up on that part there. I love DT, but that video was a little out there. He said that's how he came up with the idea for this video, was talking about ding-dongs and zingers. Linux is like a box of ding-dongs and zingers. What the fuck is... Wait, he's fixed his white balance now, I see. Now he's not orange. I know he's no longer an Oompa Loompa! He finally worked out where the

white balance setting is on his camera. It took him like three months. He was having fun with Lutz. I think he discovered Lutz and decided he was going to... Ah, that explains it. I think that that's what happened there. He was playing around with it and I think we all go through that phase where we just

kind of, ooh, new feature. Yeah, yeah. Cool. I might have to go watch this video afterwards. I mean, he spends like two minutes at the beginning just explaining what the cakes are. I would have swore that this was an April Fool's joke, but it's like August. It was fantastic.

Like, seriously, it was very good. Like, DT has run out of ideas for video. This is great. Oh, man. Wait, are people actually taking this seriously? They're not the same. Each one is a different flagship edition with customs. Wait, are there actually taking this seriously? They're not the same. Each one is a different flagship edition with customs, but they're actually people taking this video seriously.

They're in the comments debating the differences between the two different cakes, even though they're made of the same ingredients. This video is just an excuse to eat a ding dong and a zinger, wasn't it? He just wanted to go to the store and buy some. No, I think this is where DT's,

like, I feel like i feel like where dt's channel shines is when he's doing these sort of like not super serious videos when it's like this or it's when he's done the skits in the past i think that's what makes dt's channel stand out when it's just like doing the same thing that every other linux channel does like that's fine and all but i think this is where like you can certainly put in a lot more creativity into what's going on well dt is the creator who can do that kind of stuff if you were not you or i did a like a trailer of people who supposed to use linux it was all about, I don't know, Rednecks or something using Linux. It was like 30 seconds long.

We'd get a couple thousand views. He got almost 300,000 views on that trailer. Like, he put a lot of effort into it, obviously. But he's the creator that can do that, right? I don't know that you and I would get away with it. You know, it's... I mean, maybe eventually. Worth a shot.

See what happens. For me personally, I don't have that type of creativity or editing chops when it comes to... Like, KadenLive looks at me when I try to do something complicated and crashes. I wouldn't even try to do anything like that. It would be horrible. That's a whole other discussion i i think we talked about caden live and stuff in the last the last time i was here i don't know it seems like that feels like a rant i've had with you before we talked about how horrible

video editors are on linux i've had this conversation with a bunch of different creators. I have no idea who I've talked to about at this point. Cause it's a, it's a problem. It's a problem that we haven't solved yet. You know, it's like, it's just like,

if I can't stand the idea of subscriptions, right? Like I will not like, I mean, there are some things that I'll be happy to pay a subscription for like netflix it makes sense it's a service right something that you have provided but when it comes to an application i really don't like the idea of paying for a subscription because i want to own that piece of software or at least quote unquote own it right so when it comes to the adobe creative cloud first of all entirely too expensive a hundred

dollars a month or whatever it is utterly boggles my mind for how much you pay for that. Even if you are a professional and are going to earn that money back. Yeah, yeah. The thing is that Linux video editors are so bad, I would gladly pay Adobe money for a good video editor. At one point,

not too long ago, Kdenlive was doing some weird things. they put a shout out update as kate as kate and live does yes and it broke it broke everything as it does and as it does like so so i uninstall the so i always install from the repos and i was like well screw this i'm gonna uninstall it i'm gonna install the flat pack and see if that's any better it wasn't any better um it like wasn't a bit any better so i was like, well, screw this. I'm going to uninstall it. I'm going to install the flat pack and see if that's any better. It wasn't any better. It wasn't any better.

So I was like, you know what? What do I do? I was like, you know what? I'm going to get a VM, and I'm going to get a VM of Windows so I can actually edit this video. And that didn't last very long because I hate Windows so much. I'd rather have my video editor crash all the time than actually use Windows. So Kdenlive is very lucky that I hate windows so much i'd rather have my video editor crash all the time than actually use windows so kate in life is very lucky that i hate windows so much otherwise i'd have a permanent windows vm on my computer just to edit my videos and i know a lot of people do

that i know uh chris titus tech he edits all of his stuff in like mac or something uh i know i know um mudahar he edits all of his stuff in a VM. He doesn't edit it on Linux. You name it, a lot of people just can't... I mean... It's a KDE project. That's definitely going to be the title of the episode. It's a KDE project. They've added too many features, and it always breaks.

Stop breaking the software it's not please my experience kdenlive is a lot better than it used to be i haven't had any major issues in a while i do remember back i want to say a year ago where my render queue broke and if i added more than one thing it would crash Or if I tried to make a title, it would crash. Or if I tried to change the profile, it would crash. The one thing KDE does really well

is it has great crash recovery. They know it's really buggy and it will crash all the time, but you almost always get the work back. Yeah, I'm glad for that. So there's two spots that are bugging me with kate and life right now and they've been consistently problems for at least two years one of them is when you move around a panel somewhere so if you move the effects or

composition things somewhere else uh for whatever reason crashes the thing it doesn't do it all the time but it's you you move it or may you know you know you kind of have to hover in the right place in order to get to the place where you want it to dock yeah and if you take too long it like crashes it does not like that i don't know why it seems like a stupid thing it's not that big of a deal things how you're not going to move around once you get the panels where you want them that's fine but if you're going to uh edit if you're going to install caden live on new distros like when you do a distro review or something like that and uh you want to do the editing right there on that distro that i always want to tweak the layout so that it's you know usable i don't first of all all

i do not need every single one of those panels open by default just a few of them would be fine i don't need undo history and all this stuff just They need to calm down on that stuff. So that's one area. The other one is much worse. So when I do a video, I say um and ah and you know and going through and long periods of silence all the time. to edit the videos there otherwise they'd be 40 minutes long and they'd be horrible or more horrible than normal the so when you edit those when you do those jump cuts like when you stuff and if you didn't happen to leave space between your words like oftentimes i talk like this i talk really fast so there's you know um there's not a lot of space between words so you cut sometimes you have to cut in the middle of a word or in the middle of a very loud exhale or something. Yeah, yeah.

And you have this really loud, annoying freaking squeak that happens in between where you cut it. And it's been doing that for me for ages, and there's no fix for it. I know Tech Cut had the same problem. That's why he started using DaVinci Resolve. I think he's back on Kdenlive now. But I'm still having the problem.

And apparently the solution the community has come up with, because apparently Kdenlive's not going to solve it, is to put fades on both ends of the cut. So that the squeak just doesn't show up. It's the most hacky thing ever but it works it's so much better than having this loud pitch squeal every time you do a jump cut it's annoying um but the thing is as much as i bitch about kdenlive it's still miles and way better than any other video editor on linux it's just all the rest of them are so bad. Yup.

And somebody was like, use Blender. I'm not going to use Blender. It'd be like using Emacs. Blender? I've heard it better now, but when I used Blender, it was so painfully slow. The issue it had is, like, scrubbing

through the timeline, it would lag just going through the timeline. I don't understand the interest they have in having a video editor in that piece of software at all. Blender is a it's a media creation suite.

It's not just a 3D modeler, it's not just 3D animation, it's a meat it's like a it's a media creation suite it's not just the 3d model it's not just 3d animation it's a it's a whole they used to have a game engine like that a while back they had a game engine in there as well basically what you're saying is is it's like system d okay except that it's all one binary it is all okay um yeah i guess did. Every time I've opened up Blender, I've done it a couple times, because I wanted to do an animation or something, and you Google how to do animations on Linux, and they say, oh, use Blender.

Yeah. It's fantastic. And I open it up, and I stare at it dumbly for about 30 seconds, and then I close it, because I'm obviously not intelligent enough to understand how it works. And normally with that kind of software, okay, you know, OK, so I don't understand what works. So I'm going to go to YouTube and look up a tutorial. And there are a lot of Blender tutorials on YouTube and some of them actually really good.

It doesn't matter how many tutorials I watch. I'm still too much of an idiot to understand how it works. It's just there's too many buttons. There's too many words that I don't understand. I mean, it's like I can't get my head around it. And maybe if it was something that I was like, all right, I'm going to become a Hollywood animator or something, you know, when I grow up.

Then maybe I'd put some effort into it. But because I want to do this one thing i want to get in and get out i'm i don't have the time to broaden my vocabulary to figure out how to use it um so that yeah that's my experience with blender good lord i own i've done some basic animation in blender as well i only know what i need to know nothing else that i i've no idea how to do anything else in that project and I'm never going to. It sounds

cool to learn, but so does learning how to do some Lisp or learning how to code in Rust. Those things sound fun to learn, but I'm probably never going to do it. One of those things, yeah, sure, it sounds like a cool, fun project, but I got other shit to do it. One of those things, like, yeah, sure, it sounds like a cool, fun project, but

I got other shit to do. Well, that's as good a place as any to end off the show. Let people know where they can find you. Okay, so I'm on YouTube at youtube.com slash Linuxcast. I'm on Twitter, which is

a thing people give me problems for. I don't care. I'm on Twitter, which is a thing people give me problems for. I don't care. Because it's Twitter. I don't know. People have a thing against Twitter. I'm also on Mastodon. I'm on Mastodon, too, so if you have a problem with Twitter, you can follow me over there.

I actually do stuff on Mastodon. I don't know a lot of people who do, but it's there. Also, I have a Discord server. I have places. Those are the main places, I think. I have way too many places. I'll leave them linked down below anyway.

If there's anything you think about, you want me to add, I'll go and do that. Just those three main ones will be fine. Awesome. As for me, I've got my main channel that is Brody Robertson I do Linux videos and other things there I've got my gaming channel Brody Robertson Plays

that I think right now I'm probably playing Slay the Spire and The World Ends With You probably I'm playing Dead Cells because of you right now Dead Cells is a great game. By the way.

Not so great with a trackball, but it's good. Trackball? What? I'm using... I have a trackball that I use as my main mouse. Here's a... I'll come huge. And I'm much too lazy to plug in a mouse in my game

because I don't game that often. So... Yeah, gaming with a trackball? Not as fun as you you think it would be yeah I didn't have high expectations in the first place um it's been a big experience as for the

podcast if you're listening to the audio version the video version is available on YouTube at Tech Over Tea if you're watching the video version the audio version is available anywhere you can find podcasts. There's an RSS feed to chuck it in your favorite podcast player and you'll get updates whenever

they come out. Yeah. Got anything else you want to mention? Nope, but I'm almost at 20,000 subscribers. I'm really happy about that. That's cool. Oh, nice. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. You're at 19.4 wow I think the last time I was on I just almost quite got to five I think so I'm growing I'm happy about that was it that long ago 10 months jeez time flies when you're having fun

well i'll give you the last word what do i say um don't use windows it's bad for your health yeah i'm out