Tech Over Tea - Reviving KDE 1 For A New Generation | Alec Bloss

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Today we have Alec Bloss on the show who decided to take up this project of reviving KDE 1 and bringing it into the modern world, supporting Wayland and adding a bunch of modern features.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Github: https://github.com/habaneropep2019/mideGitlab: https://centre.libranext.com/abloss==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I am your host, Brodie Robertson. And today... I don't know how to describe the project you're doing. Because most people, you know, they use like, you know, whatever. Gnome 48, whatever it is right now, KDE 6, and you're like, hey... Hmm... What if we take KDE one and then make that a modern desktop?

Welcome. Thanks for having me. Uh, it's kind of, uh, reusing what's out there already. Uh, the most basic of it. So I, yeah, go on, sorry. There's a really big delay. So if I cut you off, I'm sorry about that. Yeah, no worries.

Go ahead. I guess the best place we can start is... Just... Why? Why I think is the best place? Well, you know, I started using Linux back in the Red Hat 6 days. So this was before, you know, Red Hat Enterprise Linux didn't even exist at the time. And KDE 1 was the desktop environment that was common back then. Right.

And so I spent a lot of time on that. And so it's a bit nostalgia. And it's also a bit of a way to provide a lean and resource-lite desktop environment, which is funny because back then it was not considered to be lied. It was pretty, I remember sitting on my laptop waiting for it to swap it out and because I didn't have enough memory,

you know, but on today's computers, it just works. Yeah, that's sort of the problem you have with as you add more features, you're obviously going to have the software become heavier and heavier and heavier, but obviously these aren't bad features, right? Like, you know, maybe some of them are. I'm not gonna say every one of them is good, but you're naturally going to use more resources as you have more stuff. But, you know, having fancy graphical effects, all of this stuff, like you don't really need it, do you?

No. And you know, there's a lot of great things like, you know, my daily driver is KDE Plasma 6. And if you compare it to like version 4, it's actually pretty well tuned nowadays, but there's a lot of, you know, fluff, like a transparent task bar, all these, you know, options and the settings that I never use, but somebody does because they're there. and the settings that I never use, but somebody does because they're there.

Yeah, you picked KDE 4. 4 is a very interesting one to pick because that's notoriously the very, very rough release. Yes, it was painful. I left KDE at that time because it was so bad. I think a lot of people did. Trinity Desktop was a great drop in then, if you've heard of that. Yes, yes. And that's, I guess that sort of links into that.

Because I saw one of the comments be like, hey, why don't you just go, why are you building off of KDE 1? Why not KDE 3? It's like, well well yeah, but someone's already doing that. They've done a pretty nice job. I used it for quite a few years and they polished it really nicely. But it's still a pretty heavy desktop environment even still. I personally didn't start using KDE until, um, Plasma 6. I've used a bit of Plasma 5, like towards, I think it was, it was 5.27. So it was like right towards the end of that.

I don't have this nostalgia for the older versions of KDE or I didn't start using Linux until five, six years ago, something like that. Uh, so my experience is pretty much the, the design language that we use on the desktop really hasn't changed that much in the past five or so years. Like things have been kind of polished, but there's not, not been any real, I guess, design revolution, I guess is a good way to put it, right? Because if you go from the way a desktop used to look with KDE 1, the way that we designed desktops, where we designed icons, where we just designed just the structure of the applications

is completely different. You can still wrap your head around what they were going for. There's still that core You know, I look at this I can tell it's KDE. Same with GNOME. If you look at early GNOME, you can see this is I can see how this becomes a modern version But the way they go about it is very very different You know the needs of people change over time. I like to compare KDE One to modern Plasma like jumping from Windows 2000 all the way up to you know Windows 11. I think that's a pretty pretty good comparison there. Right because you can

even if you go back further than that if you look back at the early versions of Mac OS before OS X, you can see some of that design inspiration that follows on later, even though a lot of it's changed and it's completely different in the way you interact with it. You can see how things progressed over the years and most projects don't go through a complete I'm gonna entirely change what my what my target is going to be. There's obviously, you know, with Windows there was that brief period where they tried to do the whole mobile first thing

but besides that weird part you can see how Windows progressed. Same thing with these Linux desktops as well, which I think is you know, it's really cool to see, right? You see a desktop that's been around for... what? When did... when did KD start? Was it 98? Something like that? Some of the code I have seen as early as 1997. I think some of it started earlier than them, but the dates and the files are earliest 1997. Mm-hmm. Right, it might have been first full release

that was 98 then that's what might be all I'm thinking of. Yeah I think the version one was released somewhere around 1998 or one of the releases yeah. And then I believe Gnome came I want to say Gnome came year after that, if I recall correctly. I think so, yeah. And it's kind of funny to bring GNOME up because, you know, I used GNOME 1 quite a bit back in the day too, and it's very different than what GNOME is nowadays. We're definitely in the way. There's actually a, there's a article from a very long time, um, Gnome developer. I think it was from like 2003,

and even though, even though the desktop has been greatly simplified since then, and a lot of the toggles that used to be there, you know, a lot of the theming stuff that used to be there is either hidden away or completely gone, people early on, from what I can tell, this was the direction they wanted to take things. They just didn't really know how far they wanted to take it. And I guess also the needs of people back in the early 2000s, back in the late 90s, was definitely very different, right? Because people using Linux back then,

for the most part, especially if we're talking before Ubuntu in 2004, most people using Linux at that point are very, very technical people right? Especially if you go like even before some of the early distros, if you were using Linux before something like Slackware came along, you are a very very technical user even by the late 90s. Getting Linux to work then was a very different experience than what it is now. Nowadays, for the most part, unless you have some weird esoteric hardware, you're trying to install on like an Apple computer, for the most part, things just work.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing how far we've come. I can remember having an old ThinkPad and having to write, you know, the x386 config file out by hand. Because that's how things were done back then. I think, you know, one of the biggest drivers in the changes over the years, you know, when Linux first came out, is replacing or competing with DOS and Windows. Everything was done on a keyboard. Then things like KDE came around, we went to using keyboard and mouse. As you progressed on to newer ones,

it was more you'll point and click. Nowadays, with newer GNOME and newer KDE versions, it's touchscreen. I think that design language has followed that pretty closely over the years. Mm hmm. I do think I'd know I can do a UX discussion about GNOME for a very long time because a

lot of there's a lot of design changes they've made, which I don't really think makes sense on the desktop. I am not a fan. I've noticed them popping up in some KDE applications. Well, I'm not a fan of hamburger menus. I just, I think they are just vastly inferior way to interact with a menu than just having a menu bar. I know some developers are going to get very angry about that like they always do. I don't like them. I don't think they work on a phone either.

I think there are better ways to do things there as well. Just having a pop out list I think is are better ways to do things there as well. Just having a pop out list, I think is just more convenient. But overall, I can see what you mean there, where when, especially early on, right? A lot of people designing KDE were the developers. And that's sort of a problem you have with a lot of applications where the problem you have with a lot of applications where the developers are going to develop it in a way that makes sense for someone very technical or makes sense for them. If you don't have a outside guiding hand it can be very easy to not design things specifically around the way you use something because you might especially if you're using something all the time you're gonna know the pitfalls you're gonna know if I click this thing

in this way something weird is gonna happen you're gonna know where the buttons are laid where the buttons are laid out even if they're laid out in a like a real weird way that doesn't make any sense so you kind of need someone outside the developer to say hey do things in a sensible way. Here's a design guideline. How about we follow this? I think that's kind of interesting because even when I sit and write an application,

I'm thinking about how I'm going to use it personally. So I'm designing very specifically tailored to my needs without much thought for anything else. But I'd like to make a note on no because I have used it recently Sparingly, I Think the biggest problem there was something simple Even for somebody more technical like me trying to forget where the menu was Something simple is trying to save or open a file in the text editor was really difficult. There's no contrast in the default theming. And I don't see even how a developer

or a UI designer could miss that quite frankly, but it works for a lot of people because it's pretty popular. So it must be fine at some point. The thing about being popular, it's the default right now. And that's, that's sort of why I'm interested to see what happens with, um, did you see about a Fedora adopting KDE as a official edition? So it's going to be both Gnome and KDE side by side. I did see that. And I actually ran the Fedora KDE spin for quite some time to get kind of

a jump on the Plasma 6 bandwagon and it works quite well so I'm happy to see that they are adopting that as an official spin. I think that's a great thing. Yeah, I'm kind of curious to see how the popularity of Gnome will go because it's sort of, we're sort of repeating history now because it started off with all of these desktops, all these distros having KDE and then Gnome came along, they adopt Gnome, and then over time a lot of them ended up dropping KDE, go Gnome only, and now it's coming back once again to have both these options. And I get why, I get why KDE was um, was dropped by a lot of them early on, especially in the early days,

there were a lot of, there are a lot of licensing concerns with KDE, with the, well, specifically with the QT framework. And that's, from my understanding, a big reason why Gnome came along, why Gnome got popular to begin with, because there are a lot of people concerned with what happens if they pull the license, What happens if they decide to not let this keep being open source? And I get it, right? I do get it. Yeah, so there was a pretty big to do back in the day, you know, because of the licensing and Qt1 was under a source available license.

And, you know, so Gnome came about at that time. But I do want to mention, because I see this come up a lot, nowadays there's the, I think it's called the KDE FreeQT Foundation, or something along those lines. Yeah. And there's been a licensing agreement of some kind between whatever owner of QT, starting with Trolltech, which was the original authors up until now, when it's the QT group that guarantees that QT will always have an

open source component. So, you know, those fears have long been squelched. But that's actually a important note, because you know, my fork of KDE 1, we've ported it to QT 2 because of licensing issues with QT 1. I can't fix QT 1. Right. QT 2 is GPLV 2 so we can actually fix it, maintain it, continue to work with it. I was going to ask you about that because that seemed like a weird random change to make. I didn't even consider the fact that the license would have been an issue. That's one of the reasons licensing modern QT is not an option because it is mostly GPL v3,

and that's not backwards compatible with v2. But some of the other reasons are Qt2 has a lot of fixes. Something simple we take for granted, like the scroll wheel on your mouse. Doesn't work in anything written for Qt1. But support for that's in Qt2. Other things probably don't, you know, not as important on the user's end

But your support for Unicode characters so you can actually see everybody's language properly that was improved Did we lose him Hello Did we disconnect did I disconnect? This could be having these issues lately Disco's been having these issues lately. Let me have a look. Who disconnected? Someone disconnected.

It says I'm connected. Oh, wait, maybe I did disconnect. Hello? Can you hear me still? Yeah, I can hear you now. Okay. I've been having issues lately with things just disconnecting. Okay, that's...

Yeah. That's fine. No, I think it was... Discord on my side said 5000 milliseconds thing, so... I don't know. Anyway, you were talking about going to QT2 because it offers some fixes for things that didn't exist in QT1. Yeah, so I'm not sure how much cut out there, but beyond the licensing issue, I think we covered the scroll wheel issue. Scroll wheel and Unico. Unico was the last thing I heard.

Okay, yeah, that's pretty much where I stopped there. Okay, okay. Okay, yeah, that's pretty much where I stopped there. Okay, okay. So what is it actually like? Okay, first, here's where we'll go. So you said this work is based upon prior work that has been done. I did talk about this in the video, but I don't know if there's anything I missed there or anything I got a little bit wrong there.

So what work is this based upon? So my fork is actually based on one of the KDE developers, or he participates in KDE nowadays, nice guy, Helio Castro, I believe is his online username. Back around 2016 or thereabouts, I'm not sure how I stumbled across it, but he did some work to get KDE 1 and Qt 1 running on modern Linux. And I thought that was cool. So I spent some time to compile it and it wasn't perfect, but it got it running. I think I was running Debian 8 at the time, actually. And I thought, this is cool.

And I forget, at some point, I thought, well, you know, it'd be cool to kind of keep this alive. And that's how it all started. But yeah, I owe a lot to his initial work, because he got rid of the old AutoTools build system, went to CMake, which that has its own problems, but it works. And he fixed you a lot of bugs necessary to get it to compile. So he did a lot of great work. I have talked with him every now and again about it too. So he's pretty cool stuff he did. What's, you mentioned CMake there, what don't you like about CMake?

It's difficult to maintain. And somebody who works with it every day, which KDE, I believe the main project uses CMake nowadays. So, you know, they're working with it every single day. It probably works great, but there are some old style CMake scripts, for lack of a better term, that are used in this and it makes maintaining it difficult since I don't use CMake every day. And so I spend a lot of time fixing their breakages there, which is why I'm removing it to Mason, because I use that all the time. It's easy to work with. So it's just you don't have the knowledge and the skills. You just don't have the experience using CMake, pretty much. Yeah, it's mostly matter of preference. The build system works fine.

They've made a lot of changes and newer versions, but I just don't have any real personal desire to go to that. Fair enough. Look, if you know it, you might as well use the thing you know, rather than trying to... You're trying to port KDE One to be something that works as a modern desktop. Focusing on doing that rather than spending, you know, however many hours you need to maintain the build system, I think is a much better use of your time. Yeah, that's the idea. The build system should be there to help you and not be a problem. And Mason has been reported Osiris, which is the fork of QT2 to Mason. And it's just so much easier to use.

It's easy to troubleshoot and it speeds up the building process as well. And it speeds up the building process as well. Well, on that note of a fork of QT2, what is it about QT2 that... I'm sure there's a lot of things that QT2 doesn't have that you would kind of want, but... At the base when we decided to fork it, what was it that you realized that you needed to fix? Well, there were some long-standing bugs. What was it that you realized that you needed to fix? Well there were some long-standing bugs. That work started back in 2016 as well. I had a guy help me get running, just running, and decided to take it further from there.

But there are some odd bugs that you come across in software like the clipboard. It doesn't really work all together that great. And one of the things I like to do is I have a retro computer collection. I like my old stuff. And so I have old computers I could run those old Linux distributions on. So I went back and grabbed an old copy of Mandrake, which came originally KDE 2 which is how you would have gotten QT 2 back then and the clipboard functionality was still a problem back then so that's not a new book and To spend a bunch of time trying to troubleshoot that and clipboards with X 11 is always

Been a problem and because we're going to w whale and there's no real point fixing that, because we'll have to rewrite that anyways. There's some other odd bugs with old X11 software you don't think about. One of the things that kind of perplexed me for a minute was you would start a program that uses Osiris and it would be washed out on your window for no good reason. And turns out there's this extension to X called Composite that changes the color space that's used and those old ones don't know about it. So that's another thing that needs to be fixed. There's workarounds but they're just temporary, you know? As far as things that I'd like to add,

obviously, planning to port to Wayland. So we need to make it work as a Wayland client. And I also want to add Markdown support. You know, you can write widgets that use rich text or HTML, but I want them to be able to use Markdown because everybody uses Markdown nowadays. Mm-hmm. So...

Okay. So... Wait, I had something on my mind. It just vanished from my mind. It's gonna be one of these days. Right, so when you're trying to work out how to do anything with this old version of Qt, is the documentation still easily available? Do you have to dig through the Wayback Machine to go find some stuff? What do you have that you can actually work from here?

One of the things I like about QT, and this starts at QT version 1 and goes all the way to version 6, is the documentation is really good. I would say second to none. That's true, like I said, QT 1 and QT 2. When you get the source tarball, the documentation is all there as HTML files. So all the original documentation is still with is HTML files, so all the original documentation is still with it. Okay, thanks a lot, Isaiah. And there are, there's occasionally really odd comments in the code, like you'll see a to-do fix later, or things like that in the source code from people who were Trolltech employees at the time, and some of those have been fixed since then, actually. I'm not surprised at all.

Considering the stuff that people see in like leaked proprietary code, whether you, when you see like a video game where their code is leaked, you just see just absolutely delusional comments. I have, look, every open source project is gonna be like this. To be fair, a lot of open source projects have no comments. So if you have to do's fix this later,

that's better than most things have. Yeah, you know, I like to comment in code's good. And I like to leave some unhinged comments here and there's Easter eggs, if somebody looks later. But to do as a comment is a really good thing because you can grab through those source code files for to do and you have your whole list ready there for you waiting. So that's not a bad thing to be doing that.

Actually, that's a really good point. Yeah, that's a really good point. Considering when Qt2 came out, do you know what they used as source control back then? Cause that was like six years before Git. Yeah, so I, there's no source. There's no like archives of the version control back then, but I would like to say they probably use CVS.

It's old enough. They may be used RCS. I really don't know either way, but those are some of the more popular things back then. So you're basically just using whatever the source code has as to do as your sort of starting point And then as you run across your own issues Then you deal with those to come because like some of those to do is might also just be wrong They might have put a to-do there fixed it and just left the to-do there Yeah, so one of the ways I overcome that actually is

No, I forked from the last release of Qt 2 which was 2.3.2, but you know the source code archives contain all the previous versions And so I can I've imported all those so if I get treated so I can compare or you know diff between different versions To see what's happened. Actually that's a good point yeah um that is a really good point so what ha what is the state that you have qt2 in right now and what does it say you have uh kd1 in like I know you've said you needed to port stuff over to Qt2, has that effort been mostly done? Where is that sort of at right now? So as far as Osiris goes,

I just did a release not that long ago, we're on version 2.4.3 now. That was actually to fix minor security bugs that were caught when I was packaging it for Debian actually. So there are packages available for Debian and Ubuntu distributions now for 32-bit, 64-bit and also ARM. It runs on ARM platforms too, surprisingly. And as far as the port to Osiris goes, that's been done actually. So KDE1 runs on Osiris. There are some bugs to work out before it's really usable. Something annoying like when you click log out it pops up a logout screen except you can't click log

out again. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a bit of a problem. A little bit. You could still hit enter, but it's kind of counterintuitive. If something basic like that, that you would expect to work. And I'm not sure where the bug came. It could have been in the port. It could have already been there or could have been introduced, you know, unintentionally. Compilers change quite a lot.

So it's hard to say where those come from. So at this point, you could, you could use KG1 as current state. The, well, I guess, what are you calling it now? What's the fork you've called it? Uh, you know, I, I, I say me death. I heard you on the video saying my DE and quite quickly, I like that pronunciation better. It sounds great. I wouldn't have guessed. I would not have guessed the one you said.

Yeah, that's probably following the Japanese pronunciation more closely, but I really liked the thought of my DE because it's intended to be somebody's desktop environment. But I don't know if you can see a screen share or not. Yes. It will kind of mess with the overlay, but you can try to show me. I can set stuff up. I have no idea if this will work, but.

Should work. See if it shows up. Just. I don't know if you can see that or not. Yep, that's fine. So this is actually the current fork. I've got it running in a little XNest window. And you can see there's some bugs running

under XNest, like the desktop. Numbers are gone. They were there early when I first started. For some reason, they're not there. But it's, for the most part, usable. Obviously usable obviously some application you're missing the icons on the desktop they crashed at some point long ago but the general rule let's see you know usable there's weird things you see happen like if you start Firefox in it it will suddenly...

Firefox will extend beyond the available screen, like it will extend to infinity. It'll maximize to infinity, well beyond your borders. But yeah, it's usable. Wait, it extends to... Why would it do that? Well, I don't know exactly. You would have a bug there. And at some point it stopped working.

I don't know if it was a Firefox update or just an odd bug I happened to run into. But what it'll do is KDE One isn't aware of multi-monitor. So it'll show up on both monitors. You can drag windows, but you could set a window squarely between both monitors, and it thinks you're on the same one. And I think something to do with that, Firefox somehow thinks that that means that monitor extends indefinitely,

so it will continue expanding off to one side till you close it. Mm-hmm. And if you start Google Chrome, it used to work at some point too but now it just occupies half of one screen and you can't change it. So Okay. Yeah, sure. Who knows what's happening? Little gremlins. Well, that's actually a really good thing to bring it up, the multi-mon thing. Because X11 and multi-monitors has always been like a real weird thing. And because original early X11, what is it like, 19... 1984. Yeah, 1984 is the first release of X11. Multi-monitors were not a thing with that at all at that point and then basically what people like people take for

granted the fact that X render exists they really really do X render makes things very very very convenient but still at its core the idea of multiitors is kind of like, it's kind of like something glued on way after the fact, and it mostly works. Mostly. Yeah, you know, X11 has actually done its job quite well, you know, for as old as it is. I mean, it's so many decades old, I'm still running it. On a multi-monitor setup has its limitations

but you know everything we use in modern X 11 is an extension tapped on top of a very old base and You're right, you know once XR and R came out that really changed the game because before that they had I believe What was called Zenerama? Mm-hmm, and that was really painful to get working So it's great that we have those tools nowadays. And now that Wayland's here, those are kind of going by the wayside, but it still works. It still works, is about as good of, where do you even begin to approach that problem? Because there are different ways that, like Cinnamon for example, they are, I believe they're approaching the Wayland issue by building their applications to work generically on different compositor

bases so you can swap out the compositor it's using. Then you have something like Gnome with Mudder, where Mudder and the tooling above it is all like very tightly, you know, grouped together. Then you have KDE where you can swap out the compositor, but things are intended to be used with this specific one. So before we even get into the idea of whether it's going to be something like WLroots-based or Mer-based or maybe Smithy-based if you want to do Rust stuff, I don't know, it might be that thing you want to do. How do you consider approaching this problem? How do you consider approaching this problem?

That's kind of a hard one actually You know x11 is Obviously deprecated at this point, but there's quite a few people using it still and I Haven't really decided yet to be honest, but maintaining two code bases like that's kind of hard. So what will most likely happen is we'll probably deprecate X11 support sooner rather than later. Qt2 has some support for multiple backends because back then you had either X11 or what was called DirectFB for embedded devices. Right.

And that's been reincarnated today as Direct FB too, which it doesn't support. But yeah, that's kind of a tough one because I know people are going to want to still keep using X11, but that's a legacy broken code base even as it sits. So the first place to start is Osiris that's the most your bottom layer of everything Will probably start the 2.5 series and that will probably be wayland only Okay, you know if there's any fixes or security issues will just backport them to 2.4 for those who want to use it and then Once my DE is ported to Wayland,

it's probably going to be Wayland only, because we're going to have to rewrite so much code to make that work. It's just going to be difficult for me and a couple other guys to work on it. There's just not enough time to go around to maintain both at the same time. So would you consider having your own compositor for it?

Would you want to build off of an existing compositor out there? How would you, or do you just not really know how you're going to approach that yet? I've got a few ideas, but it's not set in stone yet. I've got a few ideas but it's not set in stone yet. Probably kind of see when it comes to it but most likely what will happen, KWM is the window manager and KDE1. Most likely that will be rewritten to be both the compositor and the window manager. So probably write our own compositor. Mm. OK. OK. I'm sure that's going to be introducing its own fair share of challenges.

Yeah. I've never written a compositor, so that's going to be interesting. That's kind of why I'm, you know, another reason why I plan to start with Osiris. So once Osiris can, youis can use Wayland as a backend, any application using it, besides a window manager, should in theory work with Wayland.

So that's a start, to learning how that all works and kind of figure out what we need to do. Right, so deal with the applications first. That's a much simpler problem. And then deal with the compositor once you've sort of got your head more wrapped around the way that Wayland works. Pretty much. And as far as I know, that's how like XFCE is actually doing their port as well. Looking through their roadmap. You know, they did most of the applications first and then went, you know, to the really nasty parts of it later.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, they're coming along pretty well, to the best of my knowledge. They've still got a lot of work and that's sort of the state a lot of these old X11 desktops are in, where I know that Ubuntu wants to get rid of XORG sometime in the next couple of years. So a lot of them are kind of scrambling to get things done. Um, Budgie, I'm pretty sure is the furthest along. Uh, I don't think Budgie's got its full Wayland release done yet.

Um, but things like, uh, did I just, I didn't disconnect again, did I? Did I? Oh my god. What is happening today? This is a great, this is a great recording. This is a great, this is a great recording. Seems to have. Oh, we're back.

There you are. What is happening today? I don't know. Um, what was the last thing you heard? Oh boy. Uh, I forget to be honest. Okay, I was talking about Ubuntu wanting to get rid of Xorg, so a lot of the desktops are kind of scrambling to get things, get things ported over to Wayland. Budgie's the furthest along, XSE, they're doing pretty, pretty good on their side.

Cinnamon, I believe, has an experimental version. I don't know if good on their side cinnamon. I believe has an experimental version I don't know if Trinity is even trying I got no idea about Trinity My understanding of Trinity And this is mostly hearsay reading the mailing lists and one comment on reddit So that's taking with a grain of salt My understanding is there is no current plan for the Waelid, but I could be wrong. That'd be really, it's big enough for me, you know, for them it'd be absolutely massive. My understanding though is they're trying to make it play better under ex-Waelid.

So you can still use it that way, I guess. Yeah, that seems to be a... Again, that's sort of the approach that Cinnamon stuff's taking where they are not doing their own compositor, they're relying on a compositor that already exists. So if they can at least get their application suite over to Wayland, even if it's just getting to ex-Wayland, but playing nicely with those Wayland protocols, you're pretty much most of the way there anyway. So X Wayland actually is a pretty cool tool. And I test, you know, MyGE and OSIRIS, and it's literally an X server sitting on top of Wayland.

So for the most part, any application that ran on X before, you could still run in Wayland under X Wayland. You can run a whole window manager, but it's confined to one little square on the screen. You know, it doesn't go to your full screen. That's kind of the drawback there. Yeah, there's a mode in X Wayland specifically for doing that called rootless mode, where you can... You could theoretically just not do anything and just run it on top of a whale and like that. Obviously it's not intended. You're basically at that point using your... you're using a regular desktop as a bootloader for your desktop.

Which is then just running additional desktops for the sake of it. But it is like a... it's a... it is a stopgap that you could do if you really wanted to. But it is like a, it is a stopgap that you could do if you really wanted to. You know, I think there's some possibility there though, because there are window manager-less compositors like, I think it's called CAGE. Yes, yes. It's intended for kiosks. I'm not sure that it would really work entirely for a full window manager yet, but you know, somebody could take that and run with it,

and possibly make, you know, a full-size X-Wayland based off of that. Well yeah, there's that, but also there's from Valve they have GameScope, the thing they use for making games run a bit better, dealing with things like having scaling and forcing anti-aliasing, things like that. GameScope is Whalen Compositor as well. It's a very very lightweight one But it's basically the same concept as Cage But just not intended for like, kiosk usage Yeah, you know I heard a lot about Valve I didn't know that That was actually a Whalen Compositor, so I didn't know if they'd made it that far yet, to be honest.

Yeah, no, it's been like that for a long time. That's... That over a couple of years at this point. I mean, I don't keep up much with gaming, to be honest, but that's pretty... What they're doing is pretty cool, you know? Yeah, no, that's understandable. That's understandable. You're way too busy trying to port KT1 over the past.

How many years have you been working on this? So I started back in roughly 2016, I think. There's been a few years that are in there where I've kind of let the project stifle. And I should also say I'm not the only person working on it. There's another guy who's done a lot of work, Keith. He actually did the bulk of the hard work of porting it and great guys done a lot of fantastic work. You know, without him this wouldn't happen, you know. It's been a great learning experience for me, but there are some technical, you know, aspects of understanding code written in the 90s versus now, that you just takes that experience and he has that and it's been great to have it help.

Well that's, yeah, I actually want to kind of know why that. What is, what are some of the oddities about 90s code then? Because I know that obviously people, the way people develop code, the way people manage code, the way people just source control massively changed over these years, but I assume the way people write the code as well also probably has changed. To some extent, yes. The biggest changes in the case of like what I'm doing is C++ standards. I think it probably was originally like C++98. And know now we're targeting C++11. But as far as you know the general code, I don't think much has changed really to be honest. The well written code back then which QT and KDE were only worked today because of how good of a job they did back then. The code is formatted well, it is commented well, it is pretty clean.

So if you wrote good code back in the nineties, it probably still work today. Well, there's a lot of, there's a lot of X11 applications, which you can find on places like the AUR where they haven't had an update in 15, 20 years. And you know, it's usually going to be fine. That is one of the nice things about Xorg where because it hasn't changed in so long, because we haven't had these new protocols brought in or protocols removed, a lot of really old software just works exactly the same way that it did back when it was first written. It does.

And that's one of the things I think a lot of people miss in the Xorg-Wayland transition is that backwards compatibility. When reviving all of this, up until we tried to fix the keyboard, there was not one error or a compiler error, no bugs that have been caused by the x11 libraries it literally just worked out of the box with no changes Well that makes things a lot easier that's definitely makes things a lot easier

Because you're gonna have your hands full dealing with the stuff that you know is not there having unexpected things right because you said like a Desktop files also want a thing with that version of KDE as well Where did this files even become a thing? I don't even know I don't know but you know I did some digging into that and KDE 1 uses these things called KDE link and if you open a KDE link file It looks suspiciously like a modern desktop file so I Don't think there I need to you know verify how much difference there is, but looks

like that, the basic idea for that goes a long ways back. Well, yeah, a lot of stuff that Free Desktop did early on was kind of, there were unofficial standards, like the XDG desktop entries where where you know, you have your like your download file at The home slash download you have your documents at home slash documents music home slash music I get this is stuff that people were already doing a lot of the stuff Was just a formalization of those ideas Yeah, the the free desktop specs

actually been pretty good for helping that. And I don't know if you've seen, they're actually kind of a little bit of a tizzy with their servers trying to move on with that. Yeah, I just put a video out about that today. Yeah. Yeah, they are. I hope they can find another provider,

but, you know, it just amazes me how much resources they have put forward to doing that. Well, I have been told that their servers are considerably more expensive than they need to be. They probably could host everything on much cheaper servers with a better layout of their infrastructure. But you know, if someone's sponsoring the hardware and they're throwing, you know, $20,000 of CPUs at you, you can kind of just like brute force stuff. You don't really need to have a great structure. You know, that's one of the things about a lot of these projects is even like me, you know, I have a server.

All my stuff is hosted on my own server, which is just in the other room. And there's only so much time, you know, we have to sit, you know, manage GitLab and, you know, all the stuff behind that. And so we end up with, you know, a lot of unoptimized setups because of that. So the time split between maintaining infrastructure and code has to be balanced. But I think they could probably move to another data center and improve it quite a bit though. Yeah, they've been talking about wanting to move to Hetzner, I believe. Um, and they've gotten quotes for it, even using the same layout they have it's gonna be like

$10,000 cheaper than it was before which Yeah, it definitely is a nice improvement if you ask me Yeah, I think that's there's a good option to consider I've used them They've got pretty good hardware pretty good support. So that would be a great thing to see there But this isn't the first time they've had a problem anyway. Back in 2020, they were on Google Cloud, and Google Cloud was sponsoring them back then as well, and then they stopped doing the open source credits program, and suddenly they had to pay the entirety of the Google Cloud bill, and then they moved to Equinix and they

have the same problem again. So like this is a thing that happens every couple of years. They've dealt with it before. It's probably a good idea to have a contingency plan in place. So if it does happen again, they don't suddenly have to like come up with an idea of what to do. But I have no doubt that they can they can deal with it. Yeah, yeah, I think they've got a lot of great people in the community to help them but even still any migration is just it's a really hard thing to do to move that much data over. So you know a lot of people sponsored like they said, you know, Echo Nexus provided them service for so many years. That's a great thing that they've done that.

I believe it also, it's not just affecting Free Desktop. Alpine Linux also was on Equinix Metal as well. And they now have to move somewhere else. And I'm sure there are a bunch of other projects that were also using Equinix Metal, whether they were sponsored, whether they were doing it themselves. Any time you have a server provider shut down, you're gonna have a lot of people that are working overtime. I'm not mistaken, I think FlatHub has some other stuff on Equindex as well. I haven't seen any of the FlatHub people mention it, but if Free Desktop's on it, I wouldn't be surprised if some of FlatHub's on it.

Yeah, I could be wrong on that, but I believe some of their stuff is on there. Uh, wait, yeah. No, you are right. Yeah, four days ago, one of them mentioned, uh, yeah, Equinix Metal has been one of them mentioned, yeah, the Equinix medal has been one of their sponsors as well. So they also have to move. Is it? I don't think it's the store itself. It looks like it's their build pipeline.

Yeah. Which is, you know, annoying. Anything like this is going to be really annoying to deal with and I have no doubt that these projects can find something new and I know AWS was offering some open source credit programs so some of them might move to that. I know AWS has like a review process though and that's kind of the reason why Free Desktop

didn't want to go over there because they didn't want to have to deal with like the, I think it's like a monthly review of whether the way you're using the credits is like sensible if you're like trying to go over how much they're offering you, things like that. Either way, you know, hosting is important, but also hosting is expensive, especially if you're a big project. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's... I think people don't realize just how big free desktop is and just how much is under the banner of free desktop. I've talked a bit about the shortlist of it, but pretty much every Linux user is using probably at least two or three things on free desktop.

Excuse me. Yeah, free desktop covers quite a bit, you know, everything from XOR, to Wayland. I believe things even deeper than that like libinput, base, I think are all on Free Desktop. So every Linux desktop user is depending on their services at some point. Both Pulse Audio and Pipeline are also part of Free Desktop as well. I don't think there's any love lost for Pulse Audio if Pipewire also part of Free Desktop as well. I don't think there's any any love lost for Pulse Audio if it goes away. I don't know, Pulse Audio is a weird one, right? I think a lot of the hate for Pulse Audio is kind of like the hate for KDE where... Follow along with me. So... A lot of people think KDE is really buggy because...

They either remember KDE 4 or they've heard people talk about remembering KDE 4. And KDE 4, that was a development release, release as a full release. Like that was, that was entirely them screwing up. There was no reason that KDE 4 should have been called the 4.0 release. That was entirely a mistake. But Pulse Audio is in a similar way, where if you go back to the adoption of Pulse Audio, you will hear people like Lenart Pottering, who worked on Pulse Audio, saying, Pulse Audio is the audio system, uh, the audio system that breaks your audio, because distros like Ubuntu were shipping it with completely broken configurations.

Nobody knew what they were doing with Pulse Audio back then. It was a giant mess. So you have people that have been around since the start of Pulse Audio who've talked about it being really buggy. But like last time I used Pulse Audio it was fine. It's just because it was buggy for so long and people... it's really easy to convince someone of something rather than change their mind. So once something becomes good, now you have an issue of how do you make them realize it's good. It's really hard to kill, you know, it's really hard to kill bits on the internet. And you're right, you know, it works pretty good these days. Uh, it definitely earned its reputation in the early days, but, uh, it works pretty

well, you know, I'm using it right now and nobody would know the better. Well, actually on the note of a pipe wire and pulse audio, that's another thing that would be part of the Wayland porting process. Dealing with the whole, like, desktop portals, pipewire video capture stuff, that's a whole another thing you're going to have to, you're going to have to learn about and how to deal with. Yeah, so sound support in KDE 1 obviously existed, but it obviously doesn't work right now. I... It's pretty low priority to get sound working as far as KDE is concerned.

You know, back in that day, OSS was actually one of the main audio servers. I didn't even think of that. Also, you know, it was just a baby back then. So KDE One is probably capable of using OSS at some point. But sound, screen capture, those are all really low on the list for now. Sure. You know, I just want to be able to show a desktop, you know, have working clipboard, those basic things,

and then we can implement from there. But, yeah, sounds come a long ways, and it also works pretty good these days. OSS made a version 4 some years ago, and that's kind of died again. these days. OSS made a version four some years ago and that's kind of died again. Right, so... Obviously it's from 1998, right? I'm just forget... like I... If you put a list of things in front of me, I'm gonna realize like, yeah, okay, these are things that are not there. But like, as you're going through this, I'm realizing there's more and more and more work that I didn't even consider that would have to be done here.

That's kind of the same thing I say I go through in Yotalia, but I probably have to go through, but you're basically touching every facet of the desktop in a transition like this. Talking of legacy code, QT2 still had support for Netscape plugins. Okay, sure. That's been removed, but that was a thing back in the day. I'm having a look at Ulsa right now. That released in 98. So it released the same year as KDE1. Yeah.

But it wasn't introduced into the kernel until 2002. So KDE1 just didn't have support for Ulsa at all, if I'm correct here? Not that I know of, not that I have seen. Okay. I'm actually done with the sound components are working yet. Any of the K Multimedia applications have not even been touched yet. All we have is just base. Right.

Well, you mentioned being able to run Firefox. Does running a modern application on this desktop, obviously besides the audio stuff, that's a problem. But besides that, does it mostly just work? Do you have any issues there apart part yeah everything that works in x11 works okay my de okay so that just works too the pulse audio doesn't depend on the desktop environment it just has to be launched so you can play YouTube videos but you have no volume control because

there's no mixer well I guess you could use like the Pulse Mixer then. You know, be a terminal, run Pulse Mixer, do that, but the actual controls built into the desktop don't work. Yeah, there's no keyboard shortcuts when it's at 100%. Everything works, you know, as far as running any X11 app. You can run KDE 6 applications in MyDE. And the first is true, you can run the old version of console on modern KDE. What is a terminal something which most people don't really think of, but what is old console

like? You mentioned the whole not having proper Unicode support back then, which I obviously is a major issue for a terminal, but still a problem. But how has console changed then? KDE 1 would have been what they called KVT or K Virtual Terminal. I believe this would have stood for it. Console is more or less a copy of that at the time. There's some changes in the code, but as far as the user is concerned, it looks and acts identical as to KVT. So nothing really, nothing really really going on there. Well, considering that the way we do terminals is basically emulating systems from the 80s

anyway, it should be fine. You can do, you know, most of the basic things. You can set, you know, your color schema. So if you like a dark background and green text, you can do that. So the desktop is coming along is a good way to put it. It's step by step. Gets better each day. So what is your long term plan for the desktop? Let's say you know, plan for the desktop. Let's say you keep working on this, you keep progressing, five, ten years from now, whenever you get bored with the project, what is the end goal you want to get it to? You know, I'd like to work out obviously all the bugs and as it sits.

My initial, you know, initially I don't really plan on making much changes but you know long term I'd like to polish it up a little bit while still keeping you know the original aesthetics and not really you know change it. If we want a whole bunch of fancy features we have Modern KDE. It's aimed at somebody who wants minimalist, we have Modern KDE. It's aimed at somebody who wants minimalist, undistracting UI, or somebody who's running something old and wants to have a more featured desktop environment. In the long run, I'd like to offer some things.

Like in KDE One, you have your bottom toolbar, is your menu and your application launchers, but your actual Windows taskbar is actually at the top of the screen. I'd like to retain that option, but Corel, which is still a company, had their own Linux distribution back in the day, Corel Linux. They tried to make it more usable for Windows users. One of the things they did was they modified KDE 1 to have all that in the bottom taskbar like it is nowadays.

And that was actually all open source. I have the source code for Corel's modification, so eventually I planned to integrate that so you can choose either the classic KDE 1 layout or you can have a more modern all at the bottom layout. Also plan some updates to the file manager. Again, probably get a bar from Corel's code where they did some improvements to KFF because it's really basic. So some basic quality of life things like that. Making so you get notifications, you know, basic quality of life things like that making so you get notifications you know that doesn't exist in KDE 1 there's no notification area or dock per se. Well yeah that I believe is I believe the the notification protocol is based off of what KDE did like the one part that's part of Free Desktop but I don't know when they first created that, probably like KDE 2 or 3.

KDE 2, one of the big things came with KDE 2 was what they call a DCOP. That was the precursor. I'm not sure if dbus was based on it, but that was inter-process communication for the desktop, and that hung around all the way through KDE 3 and obviously Trinity still uses it, but we have dbus now so we'll probably try to integrate that within some reason. Okay, so basically you want to keep the desktop basically as traditional as possible, whilst making it more usable on a modern system, basically. Pretty much, yeah. I don't want to change a whole lot,

but I want to have enough so it's comfortable to use. That's fair, that's fair. I can respect that. I respect projects that want to take an old version and then turn it into something new like a cinnamon for example, but I think it is really cool that you just want to keep this old experience alive. Like that is really cool to me. Yeah, it's, you know, there's many other options if we wanted to you know fluff up the desktop there's so many other options There's really no need to duplicate that work

You know, just plasma. There's no like you said cinnamon. There's also LXQt is a great lightweight modern desktop environment. Mm-hmm Um Again I had something it it's just, it's gone. What was I gonna say? God damn it! Um, shit. I, I, I, I, shit. I- I- I- I- Uhhhh...... Say it's Friday, you know?

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is Friday for me. Yeah. So, okay, okay. What- what- what? This is- this is- this is a great episode. We've had multiple disconnects. I don't remember what I'm trying to say. Um, yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so, you know, let's go into your, your history using Linux. You mentioned you used a lot of Red Hat 6, was it? I misspoke when I said 6, actually. I started on version 5. 5, OK, OK. So was that your first version of Linux? Actually, no. OK.

Not Linux, but I actually learned computers on PC DOS 7. I actually still have my original. These are the ones I learned on the exact disks. They still work. Oh, wow. But so I learned on DOS and then I went to Vector Linux, which I don't believe is around it. I, wait, I feel like I'm pretty good at the early history of Linux. I have never heard of this one.

It was based on Slackware. Supposed to make Slackware easier. Kind of a cool, nicely worded installer. So I learned on Vector, and it was just command line only at that time floppy disks and you were installed From there I learned red hat 5 and Susa 6 was where I went to from there and Obviously the internet wasn't usable on those and at some point

Obviously the internet wasn't reusable on those and at some point made the jump to newer suits and used Ubuntu and Debian. One distribution of note, which I'm really fond of, no longer around, was one called Libranet. Libranet. And... You've really tried out some ones that I don't know about. Librenet was, uh... before Ubuntu, Librenet was kind of a flagship distribution. And it was called Devian on steroids.

Okay. It was kind of... It was famous because they had a easy to use installer and this really cool tool called Admin Menu. It was all graphical at that point and that was something Linux really didn't have at the time unless you went to Mandrake or the likes. But as far as Debian was concerned, Debian was kind of a pain to install back then. So, LibreNet wrapped the installer in something nicer. They came with a nice package set. I've actually got somewhere, I've got the original disc set. It was a two disc, you know, two CD set and I had everything you needed on it. And that's actually kind of where

Librenext came from. Oh, that makes sense. That makes sense. For anyone who's unaware, that is... where is the tab? That... there it is. That is the domain that you're... get labs on. Yes. Probably should mention that. Just mention like LibreNext. What is the context for that? Yeah. Yeah, and Libre-next has kind of been my side project for years. I've always wanted to kind of continue on Libre-net as a distribution. That's what that was supposed to be.

You're making a distribution is a lot of work, really hard. And so I've not really had anything to really show for it other than a couple, you know, small releases, but it's not, not really been the same thing as Libra net That was just as good as it got many bunch you came and it wasn't a need for it anymore So I used a bunch you probably up until Nadine our way Mm-hmm. That one is very easy to remember because that's when they switched to unity. Oh And it was a disaster. And I haven't used it much since then, other than the occasional use for packaging. So.

Some other distributions I've used along the way. Peanut Linux, which I think became A Linux along the way in a sense, but discontinued. Obviously I've used some of the major ones, OpenSUSA and Fedora. Used Red like to dabble around. I have had, what is this? 200 and close to 260 episodes. A lot of them have been people that use Linux. There is maybe two people I've had on who've mentioned distros they've used in their history

that I didn't know about. You're one of those people. I've never heard of Peanutlytics! Yeah, it was uh, I think what it was even based on it was kind of its own thing really. Let's see, what is Distro? Kind of had a nice theme to it and uh, It just wasn't usable anymore by the end though, because they were so far outdated. They didn't share the common tooling system. Kind of a shame to see it go. Used Lendos back in the day.

Yeah, that's a fun one. There was count there, OpenLinux I used as well. The lizard, the Linux wizard was on that. Mm-hmm It's probably more I've forgotten at this point. Mm-hmm You brought up you brought up unity there unity such a weird one because I Can go back and find forum post if you were being so angry go back and find forum posts of people being so angry about Unity coming in and how Unity is ruining everything. And then I could find the exact same forum post a couple of years later about how Gnome is ruining everything and why are we leaving Unity?

You know, I think the biggest disaster at the time was Unity built on Mer, which was supposed to be its own display server Didn't support something as simple as Intel integrated graphics. I had a thinkpad t23 that I put run on right and Quality control was kind of bad at the time too, but you know unity is still a thing but for mobile phones actually Mer Mer is still a thing you mean? What do you mean? Unity is still a thing. I think it's called Unity 8 now, I think is what it's called,

but it's designed for mobile phones. Well there is a developer who's taken over the Unity desktop as well. There is a Unity spin of Abundant orell or Unity flavor. Oh, wait, do you mean... Ah, yes, yes, yes. So, okay, it's going by Lemiri now. That's why I was confused. Oh, okay. Yeah. So Lemiri is the one on mobile, and then there is somebody else

who has taken over the Unity desktop, who is basically trying to basically do what you're doing. Bring it like turn this desktop into a modern desktop, keep it going. Because that was the first version of Linux that he used. So he just kept it going. He's like, hey, I like Unity. I'm going to keep doing this thing.

It seems like whether people liked Unity or hated it, it depends on whether you started on it. Because the people- I don't think the idea was bad. I mean, from what I remember, it's not much different than Dome 3. No, if you put them side by side, especially the way that Ubuntu configured it,

they're very very very similar looking um I like the idea they had back then so the whole the whole thing they were trying to do is this idea of convergence well, they wanted to build a GUI that could be used across every device they had because at the time Canonical had this idea where they were gonna they were gonna make phones, they were gonna make TVs, they were gonna make tablets and they had demos for all of this stuff. They actually had

one of the most popular was it Kickstarter or was it one of the other websites? Canonical you probably remember this. Canonical tried to fund the development of a phone. probably remember this. Canonical tried to fund the development of a phone. I don't remember that actually. Okay. Uh, there was a phone called the Ubuntu Edge. They may, they, they raised, uh, $32 million in one month.

Wow. Wow. Yeah, it was, I think it was the, either the most or one of the most successful Indiegogo campaigns at the time. It was really, I'm just afraid you didn't hear about it. Maybe you're too busy doing things that actually mattered. I was pretty checked out of Ubuntu and Canonical at the time. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah, the Ubuntu... Like, the other thing with the Edge, the reason why it did so well...

They were all... Like, the specs they had on this thing just didn't... Oh, sorry. They... Okay. They had a goal of 32 million. They didn't... Oh, sorry, they... okay. They had a goal of 32 million. They didn't reach the goal, right. That's... that's what it...

That's what it was. Okay. Um... So this thing... They were... ... The specs they had on it just didn't make any sense for a phone at the time. So the... this was during the time the...

Galaxy S4 had storage of 16 gig, the iPhone 5 had 64 gigs. They said they were going to have 128 gigs of storage. They said they're going to have twice as much RAM. And they're also going to do it like $200 cheaper. You know, I do wish we had more phone choices these days, you know, with your Android or iPhone, iPhone, there's no choice. I mean, you just choose from one of the same three models. Did I disconnect again? What in the world is... What in the world is... Oh my lord. Oh my god, what is happening? What these days?

Discord! Why are you like this? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. How long till I reconnect? How long till we connect? Are you back there? There we go! There we go. Are you back there? There we go. Hi. You were saying, um, iPhones you have three choices and then, uh, I guess Apple must have DDoS'd you. Or DDoS'd me.

They, uh, yeah, there's basically three models you don't have iPhone to choose from, but, you know, Android you can choose from one of the three basically same brands nowadays. And I wish there was more choice, not necessarily even Android, although that'd be nice because, you know, back in the day, we used to have flagships from half a dozen different Android brands and you just don't really have that much choice anymore these days. Mm hmm. Yeah, I remember, like, during, what was probably like 10 or so years ago, you would see a lot of companies sort of like leapfrogging over each other and doing a lot of really cool stuff. Like I know LG used to have some really high-end phones as well. Motorola when they were independent as well used to do a lot of really cool stuff.

Actually speaking of different phones, I actually have a, this right here is a Linux phone. This is fun. It's running a modified version of Droidian and Fosh, which is built off the Gnome stack. Huh. You know, there are a few alternatives. You know, there's like one, one plus phones. And a lot of people, you know, don't realize that you could run Linux on an Android phone with some work One of my past projects for fun I had a devian crude on a Would have been an HTC What was the model E Evo 3D. Mm-hmm.

And, uh, had an X server running on as an Android app, and then would launch the Debian crew, and you could have Trinity desktop environment on your Android phone. That is cool. So that was kind of a fun experiment there, but it wasn't really designed for the phone. Right, right, right. No, definitely not Trinity. But like, this, so this is my main phone, this was sent to me to like, demo.

My actual phone is like a $200 phone from Oppo. I'm not really much of a phone guy. I- I think like, you know, I- I try to minimize the amount I use my phone. I know there's a lot of people out there who like to spend a lot of time, you know, customizing their phone. A lot of people like to jailbreak stuff and then, you know, do whatever random stuff they do. I just- it's a phone to me. It's a it's cool, right?

But like I have one I've run arch. I have my art system to to deal with I focus on that The you know phones are a great tool You know a lot of us started flip phones, but you know by day I work in agriculture and A lot of the stars phones but you know by day i work in agriculture and. Your opera equipment is so handy nowadays all my manuals are on the phone goobles right there at your fingertips. And it is me how much a thousand dollar phone differs from one to the other when you actually put it to the test of the elements. Mm-hmm. Mm. I've had iPhones. I've currently got a Samsung. And I've had Google phones.

And you know, they all work at the end of the day. They're just a tool to get the job done. But one of them might break a little bit quicker. Well, you know, if you had a Samsung Note, I mean, it's a ham grenade, a really handy ham grenade. I don't think they're ever going to have people forget about the battery issues those phones had. That's not the first exploding

thing they made they made exploding washing machines at one point too. I don't know I've ever heard about that one. Washing machine wait what is this? Uh... Wait, this is... This... Like... What? I actually- I'm seeing like 10 different stories over multiple different years. So... Recalls 2.8 million washing machines after reports of explosions. That's 2016. Then there's a different one in 2023.

Then there's another one where they had to recall some... Oh my... What? ... Okay! Sure! Maybe they shouldn't make washing machines. I don't know. I don't know. I- I- You never think of something like a washing machine explode, but I guess they figured out how to do it. Well, yeah, you know, it is basically

You've got like an engine in there rotating a big barrel. So if that if that barrel loosens, I think you can have some problems Sure, okay. Well, that's uh, I learned something new today. I learned about peanut Linux and I learned about exploding washing machines from Samsung I learnt about Peanut Linux and I learnt about exploding washing machines from Samsung. Not exactly what I planned to learn about, but hey, I'll take it, why not. So before you mentioned you have a bunch of retro systems as well, what do you actually have sitting around? Half my collection is kind of buried, but probably one of the most easy to get things is this. This is a dual slot one board. So slot one, currently I've got two Pentium 3s on here. And you know, the processors are actually a slot card instead of a socket. And this board originally had Pentium 2s on it, which I have, you know, Pentium 2 slot card. That's kind of my most prized one.

That is real cool. It works. I have Debian 12 on it. Or it did when it was all plugged in. But yeah, it still works. Okay. It's kind of high end at the time. 2 gigabytes of RAM is what it maxes out at. What year would that be from?

Uh, I'd like to say 98. It's a Intel board, uh, L440GX plus, I think. Yeah. Two gigs of RAM for 98 would definitely be a, you know, pretty, you don't pretty well for yourself. Probably have no money left, but you know. I have no idea what originally retailed for. It's probably way more than I could ever afford.

I've got a PC somewhere with an original Pentium 66, so pre-MMX. And I've got my ThinkPad collection. My oldest one is a 770Z. That's kind of my prize one. Oh, wow. I still want to add a 760 XL, because that was my first laptop. That's the one I was running DOS and SUSE and Red Hat on. I still want one of those.

But the 770Z critical unit, you can still use it to some extent. I mean, you can install Debit on it, get on wifi and things like that, but you're also- You could use it as a weapon as well. It is a pretty- You could. ... pretty big one. Yeah, that would knock somebody out. I think the newest ones I have in my retro collection are probably like an IBM NetFisto with the Pentium 4. I have another one actually, it's a server board. It's a Pentium 4

32-bit. So this is before they changed. And it supports 32 or 64 gigabytes of RAM. So the boards has the OPAE support, which was really hard to find at the time. So that's another cool one I have. That is really, all of that stuff's real cool. I don't do the retro collecting stuff myself, but I can certainly appreciate a retro collection. There's a lot of stuff that I had when I was younger that I kind of wish I kept around. Obviously nothing is old as like the 770Z but like you know, I kind of wish I kept around like my old game consoles things like that, my old game collection. Um, because it's- I know you say don't pay too much attention to the games, but if you go look at like video game retro pricing, it's It's stupid because that that space has turned into Basically speculators all just fighting over how much everything is worth

What do you have here, what is this? This is IBM. This is how IBM used to ship their software and manuals. It's an IBM. I believe it is DOS 3. And it's a whole guide. And I still have the original five and a half, five and a half inch floppy. Oh wow. That is really cool. I don't think I have anything old enough to run it though. And I've got, in the same set, I've got a basic and basic compiler which I didn't even know the basic compiler existed.

I think the only, Hmm. Actually, well, I do have one cool thing that you might appreciate. Actually two cool things. Give me a sec. They're not, they're nowhere near as cool as, uh, as cool as that, but it's still something I like to show people when I get a chance to. So this is the Complete Idiot's Guide to Windows ME. And I also have the Complete Idiot's Guide to Linux as well. This originally came with Caldera Open Linux 1.3. I really like that.

That was such a cool thing to use. Speaking of old Linux, you know, Norton Antivirus? I'm aware. Was originally written by, I believe his name was Peter Norton. He actually wrote a really good book on Linux back in the day. It was kind of funny because, you know, they always thought Norton antivirus, you know, anti Linux and he wrote a really good guide on Linux. Do you know what the book was called? Oh boy. Is it Peter Northen's Great Guide to Linux? Yep, that was it.

I'm actually, I might have to see if I can find a copy of that. That's kind of funny. You can still buy, actually you buy a copy. I don't want to pay $65 for it. No, I'm not going copy of that. That's kind of funny. You can you can still buy Actually, you buy copy. I don't have a $65 for it. No, I'm not gonna do that It's crazy what people ask for some of this old stuff I've got my old red hat hat book and people are selling them, you know for hundred dollars and plus, you know sealed or whatever Geez. Oh Wait, here's one for $24. I might do that. You know, that might be worth it Or you know the Never Forget Windows 2000.

Hey, nice. You know, there's something they don't do anymore, which is these just absolutely beautiful holographic discs. I miss that. I mean, it doesn't get better than that. That, yeah, I remember, I think there were a couple of games that were printed like that as well. Those are always really cool to see As much as I appreciate how convenient it is to get software now, you know, I

So when I was a teenager that was sort of like the tail end of So when I was a teenager, that was sort of like the tail end of physical media. Like that was that was towards the end. Like that was when like CLO CD stores were shutting down, DVD places were shutting down. I remember when I was a kid. Yeah, I was kind of born at like the perfect end point of all of this. I think by the time I was a teenager, that's when like blockbusters and stuff were shutting down. So I got to experience that which is something

that a lot of people just have no idea about anymore. And you know, it's nice to be able to just go online and five minutes later you have a distro or five minutes later you have a video to watch. But I don't know, there's something that I do miss

about going to a store like that, going and like having to pick something out. And I don't know, there's something to the inconvenience. It was nice to see the effort put into those box sets. You get a nice box that was put together nicely with the short manual. There's something about that that you don't get with digitally downloaded software these days.

Yeah, definitely. And I don't know, one of the kind of... I don't know. One of the kind of I don't know it are again are Back going back to what I was saying about video games. I remember when you would see these like really really nicely printed manuals where it's just full of like Concept art that they use for it and it's like little notes from the developers and it's the same way with any like

software package as well you have like hey here's some like random quote from someone here's like some early development screenshots like now if you're gonna have a long manual it's just gonna be like it's long because there's five pages and then like 70 extra pages of different languages pages of different languages. I don't know, I would like to collect some old stuff but again going back to the whole speculator thing there's a lot of areas where he'll just like to they like to trade around these old items as a way to make money so they end up just getting massively inflated in value. Yeah, you know retro computing seems to have gained a lot of popularity and the price of some of that stuff has gone up quite a bit. Of course the price of modern stuff's gone up, you look at like the latest Nvidia cards. Yeah, what is... I have not even looked at the

5090 price, I don't even want to know You know what I've seen is some scalp, you know, they've got these scalper pots running around I've seen some eBay listings where they're selling a cardboard Printout of the card, you know, it says it's that's what you're gonna receive We have the scalpers are just seeing 50 90 within that price range and they're buying these cardboard cutouts Mm-hmm. Yeah, I did see someone was like, I promised to give you the card after it comes out or something stupid like that. Like, what? I don't know why he will rush to buy the new GPU straight away anyway, because you're gonna that's when you're gonna have driver issues. Just let everyone else beta test it for you

Yeah, I'm still running at quadro P 400 it does the job I Was thinking of GPU prices I remember when the Titan was first announced and All of the tech youtubers were freaking out about how this was a thousand dollar GPU How no one's gonna buy a thousand dollar GPU. How no one's going to buy a thousand dollar GPU. That's crazy. And now it's not even the top end card that's a thousand dollar card. Now, you know, I like Intel is branching into that market again, though, because I think that they're going to make better and better cards

and they're, you know, actually affordable. Mm hmm. Yeah, Intel affordable. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm Yeah, indels in does in a weird spot. I'm kind of curious to see what they do with the next generation cards because amd As much I like amd they kind of are left alone in the mid-tier space Nvidia is more than happy to like Make some two thousand dollar cards that aren't made for gamers But they're they're made for like AI stuff, and they have no competition there. And then on the mid-range, they, you know, they kind of compete in the mid-range,

but oftentimes AMD is a better value in the mid-range, but when someone is the only option there, you can be very, uh... You can be very lazy with what you do. And this is what happened with Intel back in the early 2000s as well with their CPUs. Where, before the uh, before Ryzen came out, Intel, it was like, oh, 5% improvement. 5 watts less used in this generation. It's like, why are you releasing this? But AMD was so far behind that they could do whatever they wanted. I remember I got a laptop, new HP laptop with a AMD Phenom 2.

And I used it to do audio processing in Audacity, which is really not that intensive of a task you would think. And it took forever. And one day I didn't have it, so I had to go back to my old ThinkPad T23 with that Pentium 3 and it took a fraction of the time. I mean that's how terribly behind AMD was and now I've got Ryzen system and it's pretty amazing. And then Intel nowadays they had, I don't know what was it, I don't know what generations it was that were... The CPUs were just killing themselves. They were just completely unusable. Was it like 13, 14, something like that?

I think it affected some 13s and a lot of 14s. Yeah. They say they have it fixed. I guess we'll see. Well, they have a... My understanding is they have a firmware patch, but With the damage that's been done. It's not gonna address the damage So yeah, you can't fix burned out silicon. Yeah So if you experienced issues with those CPUs It will mitigate further damage, but if enough damage has been done

You know you basically kind of screwed Yeah, it's kind of a shame to see that happen because I Mean as long as they've been at it. I don't understand how they could have left that Through well you say that but then in video was releasing GPUs that were lighting on fire because their new connector type, I don't know what they were thinking with it. Yeah, I always think about that because I work in like automotive electric, 12, 24 volt DC, which as your graphics cards take 12 volts in that range. And I can never understand why they've come out with a newer connector because you see

the automotive area where they have connectors that are big, you know, pins like that, and they can't handle large amounts of power. So I'm surprised to see these new Nvidia cards come out with a connector that hasn't been modernized in decades. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Some engineer's doing something. I don't know. I'm not an electrical guy. I cannot explain it. Yeah, I think it was more the name of standards, you know, compatibility, because they introduce a new connector. And you know, that'll be a big to-do in the world, because now everybody's got to buy adapters or,

you know, new PSUs, but as much power as those cards consume, that's a problem if they go up in flames. Yeah, yeah. Definitely want that to happen. And I remember there was like a big drama about what whether it was like third party cables that were the issue or people not seating their cables correctly or what it was and I don't know it was just it was just a big mess and I don't know like the GPU space is is so it because of you had the whole crypto boom and now you have the AI boom GPU prices are never coming down GPUs are never going to be cheap again people there was like a brief period in that like that period between the crypto boom and the AI boom where they came down a bit but uh yeah with it's not happening again. It's, they're gone.

Yeah. I think that's where like Intel can come in. If they, you'll keep up their progress, they can kind of swoop in and maybe pick up some of the share from Nvidia. I don't know. Very possible. I would like there to be more competition there. Cause I remember the first generation cards

were actually pretty cool. They were one of the few cards that had, for me, kind of important, having AV1 encoding, which AMD didn't have, I believe, until their current generation. But to be fair, Twitch doesn't support AV1 so I can't even stream with it anyway. I could record videos and upload them to YouTube, but that was like the main thing I cared about. I know there's also this push for a little like game related like AI frame generation and stuff like that. I don't know, I've considered buying an Nvidia GPU because crude is really cool and I would like to mess around with some of this like AI stuff. But I, you know, I don't want to buy a new car and stick it in my computer.

Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. The costume kind of puts me off, like mine just continues to work. Mm hmm. Yeah, if it works, it works. Um, I have been meaning to upgrade my system at some point because I'm running a Right. Well, my GPU is fine, but I want to I'm on a Ryzen 3600X right now and I'm I'm kind of considering upgrading um, I Don't know it again just money. My my goal comes down to do I want to spend the money? Yeah, you know

I've got a Ryzen 5 1600 It works, it works It works pretty good. I think next one I'm gonna go for an epic system That's enough, okay sure You know when you're doing software development the faster I can make the build times the faster I can see if something is fixed. Yeah. The Ryzen's pretty good, but in terms of building something every second that you can shave

off and build time helps. So that's, it's not good for gaming. I don't do much gaming, but for software development, that'll help out quite a lot. Yeah. What is the, what is the build time on Osiris and on KDE One? It's a couple minutes on the Ryzen system. Okay, okay. How long would it have taken on the early systems they built it on then?

You know, I don't know because I haven't compiled it then but I do remember compiling the Linux kernel 2.2 on a Pentium 133 processor. Mm-hmm. Took all night Yeah, I have a friend who So there was an official release of Linux for the PS2 and he decided he wanted to install Linux on the PS2 and he decided he wanted to install Linux on the PS2 and yeah it uh it takes it takes a little bit of time to compile it on that system. You know it's nicely about virtual machines now because you know like I build packages of Osiris you know for multiple architectures you know I could do it on from my old 32-bit

machines but I could just spin up a VM and it's just as fast, you know, but it still works pretty well that way. Yeah, that is nice. That definitely makes things a lot easier. Um, I think we've pretty much hit on most of the things on the hit on actually, I don't think there's much else I wanted to talk about. We kind of just like went down some random tangent for a while talking about whatever. Is there anything else you wanted to bring up that we hadn't really touched on yet? I don't think so. Oh actually sorry one last thing we didn't actually talk about was I know there was a

discussion when it came to the the whole Wayland thing. I don't know how this didn't come up during that discussion. Have you looked at whether you're going to go down like a, if you are going to build your own compositor, whether you're going to go down like a Mer or WL routes route, maybe do something with Smithy, any idea there at all? Or not really thought about that. with Smithy, any idea there at all? Or not really thought about that. You know, some of that I have to be careful of licensing, because pretty much everything we're working with is GPLv2 only. In the case of Osiris, it is GPLv2 only.

It was brought to my attention, I mistakenly thought Mer was just GPLv3, but that had changed since the web page I on so mer is an option. WL roots is another viable one it's MIT licensed. No Rust. Your Rust is a good language I mean it's necessary to have that but I don't know if you've seen the latest discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list. Oh, I'm well aware. Do not worry, I'm well aware of that. People send me links to a lot of things. Yeah.

You know, all the societal politeness aside from that was missing, you know, the point still stands that maintaining a multi-language code base is hard. You think of how big the Linux kernel is, this is a small project compared to that. Sure. Probably won't include Rust at any point or bindings of any kind. I do plan to bring Python bindings for OSIUS out

at some point though. Just be nice to have. Why the addition of that? What's that? Why the addition doing that? What's that? Why why the Asian of Python? Pipins nice to prototype applications quickly and sure and you know like Qt6 and pythons pretty easy to work with you. It'd be nice to have something similar to

Write something quick and then you know you can later you write rewrite it again sure sure fair enough Okay, so you're thinking either Mer or WL Roots. You're not really sure which one yet. Most likely one of those two. I have a hard time seeing it fitting in with another compositor. And maybe that'd be something to consider. But we'll probably use one of those two.

WL Roots is implemented pretty well. It's got most of the stuff thereWroots is implemented pretty well. It's got most of the stuff there we need. It's documented well, so we'll probably start with something like that. Mer is cool, but right now a lot of this... because there was that kind of like weird period where it was doing the whole, being its own thing and not being Wayland. There is a lot it needs to catch up on. And there's some stuff that I know is not available in Myrrh.

I don't think they have... I don't know if they have their desktop portal sorted out yet. There's just like a bunch of other random things which, you know, W.R. Rutz has just had for a long time. It's had... Even if it's not... Even if it hasn't got like a perfect implementation, it's had a lot more time to iron out some of those bugs. I think WL Roots is probably a better choice just from the fact that it's more community driven than backed by a large corporation.

Being more favorably licensed is always a good thing and like you said, they've had a lot of time to iron out a lot of the bugs. So it makes a pretty easy choice there, really. Sure. Um, yeah, I think that's pretty much everything then. So if people want to follow the project, see where it's going, all that stuff, where can they, where, where can they find it? So they can go to Librenext.com and on the front page, I can't even look at my own website.

There's all my projects listed on the front page and they can download Osiris, there's instructions for installing packages and my IDE, there's just some basic information. You can compile it and run it, but it's not straightforward. So I haven't really advertised that really. Eventually there'll be packages. Probably see it on Reddit. If people are interested, they can look there. We have a forum, community.librenext.com. For anybody else interested, we also have our GitLab

interest if they have, want to contribute or file bug reports, things like that. You're getting more eyes on it is always a nice thing to have. Awesome. Um, yeah, anything else you want to mention? I don't think so. Sweet. I think we'll do my outro and then we'll sign off. So main channel is Brody Robertson.

I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. I did a video about this project and maybe at some point in the future when it's further along and there are packages and stuff, I might do a stream of it, mess around with it on there. We'll see. I've got the gaming channel it mess around with it on there. We'll see I've got the gaming channel Brody on games where right now are we playing I probably finished nine souls. I might be playing through Strangers of Paradise and also end of Magnolia. So check that out I've got the react channel Brody Robertson reacts which I blew clips to and the podcast you're listening to right now This is tech Over Tea on

YouTube. You can find the audio release on basically every podcast platform. It's on Spotify, there is an RSS feed, search Tech Over Tea and you will find it. I'll give you the final word, what do you want to say? Eddie, want to sign us off? Well, I mean, thanks for having me. Thank you for bringing awareness to the project. That was really cool to see. To anybody listening, these projects are fun to play around with. And I encourage everybody to do something similar.

It's a great learning experience. Sweet. Yeah, that's a good message.