Tech Over Tea - Wayland & Portals Are The Future Of Linux | Georges Stavracas

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Today the one and only Georges Stavracas is here, you may know him from his frequent commits to GNOME, Wayland, XDG Portals or even ending the GNOME file picker meme but he's got a lot to say and we didn't even touch on OBS ==========Guest Links========== Blog: https://feaneron.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Qw7uMu8_QMJHBw3mQJ62w Github: https://github.com/GeorgesStavracas GNOME Gitlab: https://gitlab.gnome.org/feaneron Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/feaneron ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson, and today we have someone on the show who you may know for many different things, whether it's work on Gnome, whether it's work on portals, Weyland stuff, getting OBS working on Weyland, destroying the meme about the Gnome file picker, many things. Welcome to the show. How about you introduce yourself? Oh, thanks for having me, Roddy. My name is Gorgias.

Yes, I think I do many things. I notice you pop up... We can talk about that. Well, I don't know if we'll get to everything, but we'll definitely try to at least touch on most of them. I've noticed you pop up like everywhere like i'll just be going through some like like random things like oh why are you like you i've talked about you amongst a group of other people that are these people that are really dedicated to improving foss you'll have like these different focuses like Neil for example is very focused on doing the KDE stuff and

Like does a lot of work there, but he's also involved in Wayland and these other things there's people like Dallas Strauss who do a lot of great work as well and you know Whilst there are these passing contributors that'll make you know a couple of commits here and there the FOSS world wouldn't be able to function without people like you who are doing, like, a lot of work to really get things,

you know, pieced together in dealing with these problems. Yeah. I don't know how I end up in all these places. It just happens. But really, people like me are in all of these places it happens. But really, people like me are... How can I put it? We are...

Abhor- Abhorations that shouldn't really exist. I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that if you see somebody in too many places doing too many things, this person is probably on the verge of burning out. Or has already done that. I hope that's just a theory and not saying you are close to burning out. I hope that you... Oh no, I had my cycles already. I'm in a good spot right now. I hope that you... Oh no, I had my cycles already.

I'm in a good spot right now. You're in a fantastic time of the year to talk because I'm not drowning in despair. Yeah, yeah. That's a great way to put it. So I guess the best place to start, I do this with a lot of people, how did you get started on Linux? We'll start. How did you get started on Linux?

We'll start with how did you get started on there. Do you have development experience before that? Or do you get started developing when you started using Linux? Like, how did you really get started in this world? This is a fun question. This is a fun... I think this is an interesting... An entertaining story.

For the viewers of this podcast. Of the listeners of this podcast. My story with computers is long. I started using computers when I was a super small child. And back then, computers here in Brazil, the computing world was mostly offline um so you had to have cds and those i don't know how to say that in english those um we called it diskettes biscuits oh yeah yeah it's like not sure if that's most my audience are like mid-20s, so some of them may not know. I can recommend you. Right.

They sort of look like floppies. Well, they are a floppy disk. Floppies, yes. That's the word I was looking for. For some reason, my brain thought a diskette and a floppy were a different thing. No, no, they're not. It's floppy. They're exactly the same thing.

Essentially, it's the thing that Exactly the same thing. Essentially, it's the thing that our nails have more memory capacity than those things. And I was mostly offline and when I was a kid we managed to get some

computer carcasses on the street. They were just thrown away and we grabbed a bunch of memory slots, memory processors that were broken. I was just playing with them in three different carcasses of computers and trying to figure something out. Something that when I pressed the power button wouldn't smell like burnt chips. Then eventually I found a combination that had like 200 megabytes of memory, one super

shitty processor and whatever. And it needed an operating system. What I was going to put there, I didn't have any money. I was a I could not buy a Windows license. It did not have a CD reader. I'm not even sure I can call that a machine, a computer. That thing didn't have a CD reader. So I went to a local place. I had a local technician who had a bunch of floppy disks with snake slakeware i think it would have 20 floppy disks and i installed linux for the first time i was back in 2003 i think that's a really late time to be using slackware wow yeah i guess it makes sense. I had no idea. Yeah.

It was a really rough experience, I can tell you. It was a time... I don't think people hearing this will even be able to empathize, but it was a time where you had to recompile the kernel if you wanted to enable USB. So what? Yes. Dynamic kernel module loading is a thing of the recent times. It's a modern kids technology. And then I started learning programming because I looked in the internet.

It was a dial-up connection. It was super fun. Every distro that I wanted to test took like a week to download. Super fun. When you're young and you're a kid and you have lots of free time, this is super interesting to do. It's a massive and expensive toy that I didn't have to pay because everything was on the street, literally on the sidewalk,

and I grabbed it. that I didn't have to pay because everything was on the street, literally on the sidewalk, and I grabbed it. And yeah, so I just looked how to write an EXE program, because that's what I thought programs were. Oh, right. And Yahoo Answers had a... the first answer was like, you have to learn the C programming language. So I started learning at a very early age.

I was nine at the time. So you did at least have knowledge of Windows at that point then? It's just you didn't have a system yourself? Yeah. Okay, okay. It is about that long that I haven't used Windows in any one of my devices. I just learned C. And then it is very natural when you're wanting to study and explore and do things,

and you're already using Linux, using learning a programming language and contributing just natural free software is excellent for people studying these things. So number two, rule of the GPL license, right? The right to study. Something like that. That's basically how I got into programming. Wow. A few years later I saw a project in GNOME called GNOME Calendar. Okay. Super young project.

I was contributing with translations to GNOME. I originally started contributing... I wrote lots of GTK programs before, personally, on my local system. Never published anything. And I saw this little project called GNOME Calendar. I was like, this is nice called Gnome Calendar. I was like, this is nice. I like calendars.

Then the person, the author of the program, stopped publishing comments. And I was like, no, this project's not going to die in front of me like that. So I started sending code as well. And that's how it all started. The beginning of the post-collapse apocalypse story starts here. So, the...

What a... You know, of all the things to get, like, started on, it was the calendar. If we look at the repo today you are right at the top of the contributor list it's still my little baby I'm still working on it after how long I don't know ten years nine years oh and you push them just an hour before you got here oh yeah I just just... Before this interview, I don't know when it's reaching people, but before we were recording this,

I released Gnome Calendar 41. I started Gnome... Sorry, 45.1. And started the new release cycle. Okay. 36.alpha. I had to speedrun because I forgot it was this Saturday that I had to do that and I

forgot about it and I was like, oh shit, I have to do this right now! And publish it. So, why is it that... Okay, so obviously you found your way to GNOME Calendar, but when was that? If you recall, roughly. Probably around 2013. Okay. So, obviously there's been, like, a lot of time between then, but why did you decide...

So, were you using Ganova at that point, and have you like actively used other environments or has it been primarily living within this Gnome environment I think I used KDE back in the KDE 3 days

and then like the thing that got me into Gnome, I got into GNOME by the early 2.0 days. It was even probably before Ubuntu was even released. And then Ubuntu came in with a really different value proposition of making that super annoying and complicated Linux space a little less terrible. And they were using GNOME, so I just used it for a couple of releases and then moved to... I think I moved to Arch in 2006 and then never left. and then never, never left that. But yeah, I basically used some things here and there and then went to GNOME and then started doing things

and forgot about GNOME as a thing. So I just kept using it out of inertia, you know? Right, that makes sense. Well, I guess it's kind of the same with Arch. You started using it, like, why would I change? Like, it's here. It's funny right, it's like I feel like the Linux space has this culture around distros that like when I'm doing my own streams, when I'm coding something live and doing these things, every single time someone

pops in and asks like with distribution, what distribution are you using? And my answer to that is always, the distribution does not matter. I use whatever gets me into GNOME with the least amount of friction. And NARCH has been consistently giving me GNOME without getting in my way, so that's why i use it but if there's no attachment to any particular distributions you know just they serve a purpose and that's the purpose that i have for for myself the only argument i i've spoken to a lot of developers about this and a lot of them seem to fall towards things like fedora and arch and it seems like the general reasoning is i don't really care about the distro but i want to have up-to-date dependencies so i'll just go with one reason

too gives me that because you could go gentle and like get all the up-to-date stuff compile yourself but like if arch is going to give it to you without the compiling aspect, you know, it gets you all the way there anyway. Yeah, most of the time people just want to go to their corners and do whatever they want in that particular space, so I don't want to compile my entire system, I just want to compile GNOME stuff and test GNOME stuff

and then Arch comes in and they install I don't have to install development packages because that's super annoying to me, I just have to. If it runs, I can build. That's how Arch packages things, and that's super convenient for me, so I just keep using it. But I wanted to have frame pointers. There was a controversy in the Fedora space a few, I don't know, many months ago.

A few months ago. How many weeks? I don't remember. But I wanted those frame pointers. I wanted the frame pointer juice for myself too. And Arch doesn't have that, so I'm reconsidering my choices. What is a frame pointer? I've not heard this term before. Basically, when you're compiling software, you can pass... I think by default,

it enables frame pointers and most distributions, disables frame pointers, which is like when you're compiling it, it stores printers to the frame of memory that that particular function is executing. And so things like sysprof can poke into that information and like system profilers like sysprof can poke into that information and system profilers like sysprof can poke into the frame pointers and figure out which function was executing. Okay, right, right. So you can get super detailed system profiling happening at any time for any program if you enable that for everything on your system. any time for any program if you enable that for everything on your system.

You know, like my GNOME desktop environment is stuttering. What the hell is going on here? And then you just fire up sysprof, press a button, and then you get like profile of each and every app and including GNOME Shell. What were they executing? Who was taking more CPU space than others? What the hell was going on there, how many frames are missed. So you have these super interesting, detailed information

that is incredibly helpful when you're trying to optimize things. But enabling it in packages has been a source of controversy. And as far as I understand, it's because it can lead to like one or 2% performance downgrade when you, when you enable it, because, um, you have to put an extra bit of information in every function and that can be slow. And then I think part of the controversy was people saying like, but if we have this information, we're going to lose 1% here. You're going to lose 1% by enabling it, but we're going to improve 50% because we know what the hell is going on.

Yeah. And then that was this controversy on Fedora, I think. And I wanted those frames pointers for myself, too. If you go, there's a person in the GNOME space called Christian Hargert. And I wanted those frames pointers for myself too. If you go, there's a person in the GNOME space called Christian Hargert. Yep, yep, yep, okay. He did a lot of performance work over the last cycle, and specifically because he was able to do that because of frame pointers.

Now when you type a character in numshel search it shows results a lot faster and reduce CPU usage by like a bazillion percent and that's because we could figure out these things out of this information so who knows

there is there is this weird mindset in the Linux world amongst certain people where any, and I'm sure you've seen this especially with the Flatpak stuff, any sort of extra overhead is just instantly bad. It's like, you know, you'll have these different run times and while there is deduplication you're still going to have like it's naturally going to be bigger because there's going to be things in the run times you're just simply not using and any extra megabyte it doesn't matter how much storage space you have any extra megabyte giant issue can't can't have that and it's the same with that like

one percent even though it's gonna be this really great debugging tool there's going to be these people who are like no i i want that extra one piece one percent am i gonna notice it no but i want it i don't know i don't know how much i can tell about that because that's super annoying and that's basically uh i think there's an english term for that self self-owning uh like self-centered um self uh self-destructive a self whatever sure sure um like you self-destructive, a self-whatever. Sure, sure, sure. Like you self-own yourself. Right, right. You do something, you advocate for something that is fundamentally going to work against you.

Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So it happens the same when it comes to Flatpak. It happens the same when it comes to containers in general. But it's, I don't know, as a developer, you get some new and some of those things. And I had a lot of trouble with dependencies in NumCalendar, which is not even a complicated application. It has a few dependencies, but it's not even a difficult one. And I've got those problems myself. So imagine a super sensitive application like, I don't know, Bottles,

that has to run Wine. And Wine is like Belladonna. If you change one folder, it's going to break everything. So Bottles has to keep very strict. Whatever it ships has to keep very strict understanding. Whatever it ships, it has to be exactly that. Because it's exactly what they tested. I've got a little bit more new ones.

It's easier to fix bugs. It's easier to understand what's going on. And there are people that are going to go nuts. And I think that's probably just part of the nature of the Linux community. I have this expression that I say that people are too literate to be ignorant and too illiterate to be useful. They know too much to be able to contribute productively to a certain project. But not... They know too much to think that they know,

but not enough to actually do. And we get that a lot. Right. There's a... I'm sure there's a fancy yeah there is a word for that with birds or whatever it it someone's gonna mention the comments there's this concept where the the sorry the less you know about something the more you think you know but as you learn more about it,

you realize how much more there is to learn. And you realize, I actually don't... Then you prove your faith. I'm sure you got the introns back there. You first pick up any of them, you're like, yeah, this is... I got this. This makes sense.

A couple of months later, you're like, wait, I have no idea what I'm doing. This is actually way more complicated than I thought. So if you ask me, this is going to be a fun exercise because if you ask me basically any question about anything, I'm going to probably prefix my answers with, I have no idea what I'm talking about. This is super complicated. no idea what I'm talking about. This is super complicated. And I know that for a fact that because people have specifically told me that they look forward to my opinions on particular subjects because they think that I know what I'm doing and I know enough to know that I

have no fucking idea what I'm doing, what the hell things are about. You just stumble through it and it just happens to work itself out. Many things we can talk about. The cultural aspects of the Linux community and free software communities and whatever understandings and misunderstandings they have over what free software is and what people should do. It's a never-ending source of entertainment for everyone. But now you have to distance yourself from... If you want to look into this and... How can I say this? I'm working on these things. So if I want to interact with people,

I have to distance myself from, from, from those, um, from, from the people that are talking and using. Otherwise it's going to be like attacks from every, right.

Every, like every, every, everywhere I look, there's somebody with a very strong opinion trying to attack and it's all over the place. It requires a certain level of attachment to whatever you're doing. It's really easy to forget that most people that use Linux don't get involved in these discussions. There is a big silent majority who are just using GNOME.

They're using KDE. They're using whatever distro they're using. And they don't have an opinion on it. They're just like, okay, this works. But those people, you know, those aren't the ones that are getting... They're not ones who are, like, coming into repos and be like, this is a terrible idea. Why are you doing this? Why don't you do it my way? I'm not gonna submit a merge request about it. Just do it my way. When is this gonna be done?

But... Or like, you know, GNOME's bad, KDE's bad, like all of this sort of stuff. Most pe- you know, Gnome's bad, KDE's bad, like, all of this sort of stuff, most people are just, like, the Linux world as it stands today is in a great state, it's not like every single person has to be a developer, and this is a good thing. It's, you know, people can be sort of, they can miss the early days when, you know, you were saying before you had to recompile the kernel to get USB work. People can want for those days again.

But the fact that all of these people can use Linux and just not have to worry about stuff and you can just go about their day really says a lot about just how much great work has been done over these years like this is a kind of subject that has a lot to explore it is as I said it's a never-ending source of entertainment. One thing that I've been pondering about

and I have started noticing is how the question of association and identity, this might be too meta-level, but the question of association is fluid in the eyes of the

internet community. Like, right now we're talking we're talking as if I'm representing gnome or representing is a strong word but people might look into this interview this conversation and tag me as gnome

but in other occasions people are very willingly to not tag me as gnome. But in other occasions, people are very willingly to not tag me as gnome when it's, well, I see that because I am involved in gnome development for a long time. And it's like, I'm going to give you an example that you will at least understand. I merged the accent colors merge request for for the

for the XG desktop portal settings interface. It was just like a documentation comment, but we had to discuss what was going to be the setting these things but Nobody said like no merged accent colors in XDD desktop photos, you know People were saying like You know I was giving

trouble to merging those things right and I don't I don't even think that this is done by some sort of bad faith or anything. It's just something natural that occurs when people think of identities and whatnot. Like, to many people,

GNOME is bad, and whatever GNOME do, by definition, is bad. So if something good happens, it's natural that whoever did that must not be gnome. Right. Otherwise, how can I keep thinking the gnome's bad? If the thing that I wanted in that portal was merged by a gnome person, how can I say that gnome didn't merge this? Or was giving probably no. The gnome merged and gnome didn't merge this? Or was giving probably no.

GNOME merged and GNOME didn't merge. That doesn't make sense. It happens very often in many different discussions. And it's not something that people... I don't even think that people perceive themselves as doing this. It's just naturally happening everywhere. I don't know if you have opinions about that, but I keep seeing this happening over and over and over.

And it's especially common in a free software community like GNOME, where there's a lot of people, and most of them wear many hats. So I'm Gnome, I'm Flatpak, I'm wearing the Portal's hat, I'm wearing the Flatpak, I'm wearing the Wayland hat, I'm wearing the Yobi's hat, I have many hats and which hat I'm using, which label I'm attached to, which association I have is fluid to preserve a certain narrative that people have, may have in their fantasies, you know? Maybe I'm going too meta on this, but it's just something I keep noticing over and over, and it's really fun once you stop feeling bad about it.

I, I, I've never really thought about it like that. I think when we're talking about, okay, so let me see how I can phrase this, when we're talking about a, a person involved in a project that is clearly tied to that project, I can understand being like, say for bottles, for example, when Mirko Bromban, uh, Mirko Bromban does something this is clearly the bottles guy if you think of bottles you are thinking of

Mirko, if you think of Hyperland you think of Vaxxer, there are these projects out there where there is a person that directly represents the project it's a far smaller project than what is Gn- it's a far smaller project than what is GNOME, but even in the GNOME case, like

anytime Tobias does anything, for example, like that is going to be perceived as this is GNOME doing it or you know, you can pick any of like the the big names or like Nate Graham for KDE or and anyone like this where sort of a lot of their a lot of their sort of persona in these repos Seems to be tied to that project, but even then even then that

It gets weird when It's outside of the pro like when it's outside of the project. When it's something inside Gnome and Tobias is saying something, you can sort of perceive this as this is Gnome doing. But even then, there are these different voices

in the project. Even though, at least from my perspective, it seems like Gnome is a lot more... Maybe you'll disagree with this, but seems a lot more consistent in, like, the vision they have for the desktop, as opposed to something like... If you look at the Wayland Protocols repo, for example, where everybody has all of these different ideas, but... has all of these different ideas but I think what's important

and this is what I try to do when I talk about changes being done whilst I will mention where someone sort of often comes from if someone works at Red Hat for example I will mention that they are from Red Hat if someone, you know, works at Red Hat, for example, I'll mention that they are from Red Hat. If someone,

if someone is, at least seems in this perspective, in this occasion to be representing a project, I'll mention it. But I think it's important to focus on the individual developers because even within a project like GNOME, these individual developers are going to have their different ideas on how they can approach these different problems. Yeah, you see, it's, um, you know, I can, I can, I can infer and say that the same probably happens for KDE. Sure. Um, in fact, there are KDE folks, fantastic KDE folks who linger in GNOME spaces and we talk every time. It's not completely alien, the communities are

somewhat, they share a lot of values and things. But maybe because I am involved in the day to day conversations there's this concept of rough consensus and it is what reigns in most of these communities there is a lot more diversity in voices than people can expect when they are only looking at things from the outside. And that happens in GNOME a lot, a lot. Many different people with sometimes antagonistic views on many subjects.

But even then, at the end of the day, people will look into and perceive it as a community. The Barshi, there is a gnome contributor called the Barshi, right, wrote a fantastic essay on the mythological gnome mountain where people think and are their username is rishi i don't quite remember when they wrote about it it was probably like five years ago okay imagine a gnome mountain with a castle, you know? An evil-esque castle, you know, those ghosts walking around and people thinking in like their... um... acephalated cells of a unified organism called gnome. That's basically what people perceive, but when you enter in there, it's completely different. People are just arguing about everything all the time. Probably more than outside of GNOME in some sense. And I can tell that's probably the case for KDE as well,

in other communities. I'm mentioning KDE because it's a fairly big community and big communities have lots of disagreements that we don't know about all the time all the damn time it is sometimes even annoying i think well at least with gnome and i'm sure it's the same for kde there is at least these basic guiding principles that you all agree upon. Like, you agree that we are going to be using whatever the current version of GTK is. You agree that we're going to be writing in, I presume, is the main language of GNOME C++? What is the main language?

I think for libraries, it's still C. Okay. And for apps, there's a diversity of languages. People are writing a lot of Rust code. Right, right. Python, Lala. Oh, right. I forgot about that one.

But, like, there are these basic things that everybody agrees upon. Like, no one's going to argue that GNOME should start using Qt as, like, their main, like, library. And it's the same for KDE. Like, everyone agrees, like, we're doing the Qt thing, all of that. But where you start seeing these, like, disagreements become really, I guess, apparent is when you look into these sort of cross desktop solutions where there's all of these different maybe not competing but sort of i guess incompatible in a sense goals for what they want to see done. Like, Wayland Protocols is my favorite example because this is a mixing of so many different ideas that, whilst you all agree that we want to make the

Wayland desktop better, Gnome's gonna have their approach, KD is gonna have their approach, Cosmic is doing their thing, Budgie eventually going to catch up to Weyland Exosce will hopefully one day catch up as well but it I'm sure there is I'm sure there is more

agreement than there is disagreement like it's not like every single issue is going to turn into the tearing protocol or uh yeah dealing with like color management and things like that i'm sure for a lot of things it's like okay this is a good idea merge it but when there are these situations where goals completely diverge, that's where you start seeing... sort of... how... I guess...

How... weak this idea of like... people talk about the Linux community, but really it's these individual sub-communities that all happen to be using these similar sort of technologies. Yeah, well, Wayland is a particular source of steam, right? It is a difficult project. Portals is not much far behind. Because it intersects code and APIs and application use cases and political visions of the desktop. It intersects in all of these areas. And that's really hard to get consensus on. Incredibly

hard to get some consensus on. And specifically in the Wayland case where it is proposing different approach to how things are organized in the desktop, it's not simply like you called X11 function, you now call Wayland function. You just replace the prefix of the functions and you get the open. It's completely separate thing. It approaches problem from another angle. And people have been writing code for XR for twice as long as Linux exists. Yeah. So you get a problem of people really not getting what's happening in there.

Things are... But it's on the other... Go on. Sorry. On the other hand, I feel like things like Wayland are pipewire portals. If you look at it with kinder eyes, you're going to see lots of innovation happening there. Not in the sense of the code being written, but the approaches to different things.

Like, Waylander is my favorite. Pipewire, I don't think people realized how much of an earth-shattering, groundbreaking innovation that Pipewire is because we're still not exploring the full potential of this technology. Windows and macOS, they do not have a multimedia center within... not a multimedia center in the sense of a multimedia provider, but something that connects everything that can generate and consume multimedia

in their desktops. Windows and Mac, they don't have anything like that. I think the reason most people don't realize is because it's been a very seamless transition. Right now, with what we're exploring, it's, hey, it's a Pulse Audio server. Everything just works. Like, there were issues early on. Pipewire has had some bugs that needed to be ironed out. Like I had this issue where my master audio didn't exist. So when I was capturing things in OBS, it was using the level of my speaker as what it was capturing in OBS,

which was not supposed to happen. Luckily that got dealt with a long time ago, but during that period, I had to swap back to Pulse Audio, because, like, this is not gonna work, but Pipewire has been this very, very smooth transition.

So even though it does, like, you know, obviously the video stuff is the most notable part with OBS on Weyland. For most people, they don't need to care about it. It's like their distro swaps out Pulse Audio to Pipewire and it's fine. If your distro decides that, you know, X11 is no longer going to be the fault, it's going to be Wayland, like, there is going to be a lot more things that you notice there, especially if you were Fedora, you know, five plus years ago when they did it.

Mhm. I'm not going to comment much on the post-audio slash pipewired transition, because it was almost a non-event for mostevent. Almost everybody was smooth. And that's... I've seen people on the internet saying that, you know, Wayland should have done X or Y or Z, like, pipe wire. Wayland... we should have done Wayland should have should have been X12 is my favorite one. Like sure, if the X protocol was alright, we wouldn't have the problem. Pulse audio, the protocol was not fundamentally broken, it was just an approach. Hivewire could implement that very easily and carry on with life. Oiling is not like that at all.

But what I was saying is more like there may be bugs. Bugs may be fixed. It's just the nature of the whole thing. But imagine, I'm just going to, let's do a mental exercise here, buddy. Imagine you're in a professional streaming setting. You are streaming, I don't know, an event.

A gaming event. You have many players, many groups, like teams. They are playing their games and they are streaming their games to a local computer that captures their things and composes it into a nice video stream that you see on Twitch and then encodes it and sends to it.

So now imagine you have instead multiple OBS instances. One of those instances is capturing player one's game. And the second one is capturing player two's game and putting something on the top of it. And then you send those two things, two different OBS outputs into a third OBS that composes those two scenes, two players that are already composed with some fancy effects. You compose it in something else and encode it and then send into another OBS.

The glue that is gonna do that is gonna be pipe wire. We're gonna be able to do that it's going to be pipe wire we're going to be able to do a lot more like cross app multimedia sharing imagine i don't know you're a vtuber you got a inot2d you want to send that output to obs studio and the way people do that now is having to load a kernel module called Linux video for Linux, look back, whatever. Yep. So that they can send frames to another application. I love that. I love that module.

It's, it's, it's great. Yes. I can see from your face that you have a pat, you're passionate about it. Oh, I,

the only reason I have it installed is camera loopbacks. That's the... Because, you know, there's no... Without it, there's no way to do virtual cameras. So... Well, at least there was no way. There was. There will be.

I can tell you that a little peek into the future, I have some patches. I basically squashed lots of patches from Wim and other contributors that introduce webcams and OBS to Pipewire. There are people working on that for Firefox and Chrome and there's another member of the OBS community who's working on a portal

that allows media a peer-to-peer at media sharing that you can you know she can send VTuber frames to OBS Studio without a kernel module being involved. And then OBS can also capture the camera if you want, because when you have Pipefire,

you can have multiple apps reading cameras at the same time. Imagine that! What a crazy idea that is! You can have multiple apps reading cameras at the same time. Imagine that. What a crazy idea that is. And then OBS can compose something and export to Pipewire as a virtual camera without involving any kernel modules as well. And then Firefox can also read from your VTuber avatar rendered on OBS with sparkling effect into Zoom or whatever. That's essentially where everything is converging now.

Now, the obvious question here is, does this come with some performance overhead that the kernel approach didn't have? Is it any more performant, any less performant from what's been worked on at this point? I can't really say before having these things actually running. I would expect to be more performant because, for example, I think video for Linux doesn't require... it requires you to export opaque cameras. So Inochi, I think, has to export your VTuber avatar with the green screen behind it. And then OBS has to remove the green screen

that it has your avatar with a transparent background. You can put on top of whatever content you have. And with Pipewire, you don't have to do that. In fact, you don't even have to copy the frames, because Pipewire allows the DMA buff sharing. So Inochi just renders the thing and tells OBS, hey, this is the GPU address of my memory. Read from it.

And then OBS can render that using OpenGL. So instead of downloading the frame contents into OBS memory and then uploading again into GPU memory again, it just tells the GPU, hey, copy those frames here, those pixels in here, and then it gets much faster. That's really exciting. Lots of possibilities. Yeah, it is really exciting. I don't think we grasped how profound this change is

going to impact. And I tell you, this is an innovation of Linux desktop. I don't think Windows and Mac have anything that's close to that. Nothing under user space. You should take advantage of that. Instead of just thinking like, oh, we're just going to make OBS do the same, but using another technology

so that it does the thing with the school technology. No. What can you do differently and better? And then use that as a selling point of the platform. Because that's one... Whilst most people have swapped over, there are still some holdouts on Pulse Audio. It's like, what does it do differently?

Like, it just does what Pulse is doing. I don't use Jack. I don't need it to all be managing the same thing. But things like that like that that's That can really change the way we handle video because I I have always thought it was weird that when I open up something like What's it called? Why am I blanking on the name? The patch bay that I use that I'm forgetting the name of

Sorry Carla help you The patch bay that I use that I'm forgetting the name of Carla? Sorry? Carla? Helvium? It's not Helvium, there's another one that I use. I completely forget the name of. Doesn't matter. I've always thought it was a little odd that there's this one video thing just sitting there Nothing's using it because I it's just it's just there like the it has the video functionality, but My webcams they're just doing their own thing and they're not being passed That you know what I just realized that Okay, that's actually really yeah, okay, I

I can see the tsunami of information getting to you now. I already thought it was cool, but just piecing together the fact that there will come a point where you can just hook up your camera into different things through a patch bay. That's cool. That's really cool. Yes. Pipewire, at the end of the day, Pipewire is just a moody media.

It just exposed nodes of things that it can handle. Be it audio, media, camera, whatever. There's a list of formats that it can handle. And you can connect things together if they tell Pipewire, hey, I can handle this. I have this slot, give me audio, or something like that. But you can go nuts on the ideas. You can think of as many crazy things you want. It's probably going to be possible with Pipewire. And on top of that, it has a media session mechanism that allows people to implement policies on top of.

Pipewire is like, I just have nodes in this graph. I don't do anything with them. I don't connect it to anything else. And then comes a media session that tells, hey, connect your microphone to, I don't know, Chromium so that it can use WebRTC to speak. And then you can have a permission system on top of that. So you can say, like, I disallow using portals, for example. You can say like i disallow using portals for example you can say i disallow this application to use my microphone i do not allow this application to use

my cameras um i did see you only allow this application to use this specific camera and period and then we reach the future of the linux desktop I did see you have that audio portal that's being worked on. Yeah, it's still under discussion. We want to see how things go. It started two weeks ago. If it was done in two weeks, that would be a very quick turnover

for anything in portals. It's going to be complicated anything in portals. It's going to be complicated because not only you have to provide a desktop portal API for that, but apps have to start using them and removing the Flatpak permission to talk to Pulse Audio directly. The goal is to remove all static permissions and everything is dynamic. And you can control it. And this is one of all static permissions and everything is dynamic. You can control it.

And this is one of the static permissions that we want to get rid of. So the idea is basically the same. You request access to, I don't know, I think the proposed API allows you to request access to speakers, microphones, and audio monitoring. Either combination of these three. You can just request, your application can just request speakers, and we don't even have to pop up a permission dialog in front of you because it's harmless. But if it wants to use your microphone, it's a little bit more privacy sensitive, so it's probably a better idea to ask you if you want to allow it or not.

But these policies are also defined by the backend. So if, I don't know, I'm just guessing, but if KDE says like, nah, this is too bothersome, just allow everything, and then people can remove the permission if they want to later on, they can do that as well. Pretty nice, but we have to convince people that it's worth using it. So once you have permission, you connect to Pipewire and then Pipewire is going to magically tell you

here are the audio devices, here are the video devices, here are the whatever devices you requested. Things like that. Well, that sort of ties into what I did want to get to at some point why should somebody care about this this whole idea of bringing a permission system onto the linux desktop because this is something that's well established in android for example like if an app wants to pretty much get anything it will need to ask you about like it wants to get access to your camera it needs to ask you it wants web access it will need to ask you about it. It wants to get access to your camera, it needs to ask you, it wants web access, it will need to ask you, your contacts needs to

ask you. A lot of, like, Linux has never had this, like, this is just not a thing that we've done. Why should somebody care? I can start this. I can prefix this with that XKCD. I don't remember the number, but that one that says if somebody gets access to your computer, they can read your emails. Your Linux computer, they can read your emails, they can read your personal files, and whatever, all of your information, but they cannot access root. Oh, like that's removed. The world shuffled from one server with many clients and each one of them having their own thing going on to you using your computer, usually with a single user on your computer. And instead of trusting each other, you don't trust the things that you're running on your computer.

It can be a malicious website. It can be a malicious application. It can have a pretty front-facing interface, but on the back end, it's mining crypto using your GPU, and you don't notice. So we moved, we shuffled from a world where you had to be cautious about other users of your computer accessing your information. Not that that's not important to this day, it still is. But also within the same user, you have this level of uncertainty about what you're running.

And that's particularly bad for proprietary apps, where you cannot access the code, you cannot validate what you're running to steal something from you. A permission system is necessary. In this scenario where you cannot fully trust all applications that you're running, you have to have a mechanism that allows you to block it from accessing your stuff. Like, I don't know, whatever, you install Skype 2 and Skype 2 keeps using your microphone to figure out what you're talking and train an AI model to, I don't know, whatever.

It keeps accessing your microphone without you noticing. Well, like a simple example in X11 is literally any application can just be a keylogger if it wants to. Yeah. I had to write a keylogger for X11 to figure out... to find the root cause of an OBS bug with browser docs. of an obs bug with browser docs it's not only allowed and possible it is sometimes required even if you don't want to write a keylogger even if you don't want to be an evil person you're going to be forced to be one so it is it is important and we are lagging behind already, especially when you consider the mobile space.

They have permissions and are stricter. I think Android has one, each app is its own Unix user, even. even. So it uses a combination of permissions and Unix permissions, both at the same time. We want to have that on the desktop. And I think it is not just something cool like, ooh, this app asks for my permission. Most of the the time it's just an annoyance. You know, you don't want to see dialogues, install an app and you just want to use it. Yeah. Um, but, and, and I'm not trying to paint myself into the privacy, um, the hyper enthusiastic, uh, paranoid privacy lover. We're recording this on Discord.

We're recording this on Discord. But it is. It is a necessity these days. I feel like we don't have on the Linux desktop, we don't have corporate control over it. So much so that we can implement these things. We can implement these things without any particular company coming to us and saying, no, you really don't want this permission system because we want to do everything we want with your desktop.

And I see it like, maybe this is too far ahead, but I see that in the future, Linux is going to be one bastion of desktop computing, not in the sense of the masses using it, but in the sense of people using it because it's the only viable option, not because it's the best option necessarily. it because it's the only viable option, not because it's the best option necessarily.

Every Windows release people, um, people like it is kind of a news cliche at this point, but every Windows release, people start saying things like Windows is gonna, um, make itself into a subscription OS or something like that. I keep hearing, uh hearing software as a service every couple of months. Windows 12, we software as a service and I wouldn't be surprised at this point.

It wouldn't surprise us, right? Yeah. It wouldn't be. Who cares what macOS is doing? They're their own ecosystem. They're controlled, but I feel like most of these companies have these mechanisms. Like, Google has a mechanism, a permissions mechanism on Android because of liability. Because if Google allowed everything in their app store, and people start losing money out of that, they would get tons of lawsuits.

So it's more like a protection for Google instead of a protection for you, a person using their devices, you know, and in the Android case, for example, but I can, I can think the same for Apple when it comes to Linux that when it comes to the Linux desktop, who's going to be sued? It's a community endeavor. It is a massive number of sub-communities working because a big entity towards something else.

But now we're facing a, I feel like we're facing a point in time where we have to protect ourselves from things that are not coming from the community. And that's where the whole sandboxing and not being able to access your files and your devices and whatever come into place. I was working on the USB portal. I've been working on this portal this month. I was not aware that one existed.

It doesn't exist yet, I'm doing it. Oh, okay. Well, is there an open issue about it right now or is it just like something... I think there's a 3-year-old merge request. I published a branch in my fork of the stock portal. It's not ready yet, but one point that people kept saying is that... 5-year-old. 5-year-old issue about it. not ready yet but one point that people kept saying is that five year old if five year old yeah the issue is five year old there is a draft merge request there is i think three year old oh

okay okay right right okay that makes sense and i'm basically redoing that at this point is almost from scratch but referee 64 did a fantastic work cracking this initial implementation. One of the things that people kept saying is that if an app has access, it doesn't even have to read your devices. But if it's able to detect that you have a certain, I don't know, YubiKey plugged in your computer, they can fingerprint you.

And they will probably do. Like a malicious app can know who you are, by what devices you have connected on your computer. So we have to be really careful with those things. And that's one of the major selling points for portals. The other, I think, is just providing a desktop API. Everything was in X11 days. Everything, everyone could do anything at any time.

Every app. Every app could participate in the compositing process of another app. So one app can render stuff on another app's interface. Yeah. One app can tell the other app where they should be. There is literally no boundaries. There is no hard lines. This lets you do fun things.

One of the major differences... Maybe not safe things, it lets you do fun things. Yeah. It is one of the major architectural differences from Wayland, because on X11 they gave everyone the... prescriptions. I think Daniel Stone used the term prescriptions. Apps tell X11, through the X11 protocol, they tell

put this thing here or do this in this place. And on Wayland you invert the order of things. Apps don't do things, they provide things. it's a big difference it's like instead of apps telling put myself put my window in this corner of the monitor

this is a prescription command like it's telling the compositor what to do and the wayland model is i I think Daniel Stone uses the word descriptive. So the Wayland model is like, the application doesn't tell the compositor what to do. It just tells, it just gives the compositor information. Like, I have a window. This window has this title. This window has this size. Here's a buffer for this window. This window has this title. This window has this size. Here's a buffer for this window. I want this buffer to have this size. The color space of this buffer is this.

And then the compositor takes a lot of this information and makes a decision about it. The compositor says, okay, this app has this title. I'm going to put this title into a label beneath it or things like that. But the app never tells the compositor says, okay, this app has this title. I'm going to put this title into a label beneath it or things like that. But the app never tells the compositor where to draw the title label or anything like that. No, it's just a blob of information and then compositor makes sense of it.

Maybe I'm going through a very deep tangent here. I think this entire episode is a deep tangent. I find beauty in this thing. No, this is great. I love this. It's like... I think people were discussing about the positioning... a way to position windows. Yes, yes. This is a recent thing that came out. A recent merge request. And it is... when people

look into it and say, no, this is somewhat like not matching the Weyland model. One of the reasons is this. It is prescriptive. It's telling the compositor what to do instead of providing information to the compositor and letting the compositor figure out. and letting the compositor figure out. It could be worked around, for example, if you say, like, this window has this identifier, and the compositor saves the last position of that window with that identifier.

And then when you open the app again, the app's going to tell, hey, this window is that one with that identifier that I sent you before. And the compositor will be able to restore the previous location or something like that. I'm just guessing here. I'm not sure if this is actually a fantastic idea. But this is a more

Wayland-y of an idea. That is a separate- To approach this problem, you know? Uh, there is the, um... There's a session restore. Session restore, yes. That is a separate thing that is being worked on as well. But this would be more about... That... But this would be more about that sort of that first time. Like, you open GIMP in its multi-window mode,

and if you open that on X11, you open that on Windows, like, GIMP is going to be able to assign where it wants those windows to be. But as it stands on Wayland, that's very much up to the individual compositors some compositors might try to sensibly lay them out others might say dump them all on top of each other it's very much to the user it seems like something is buggy here. Yeah, I'm not going to deny that this isn't a problem. This is a problem. I think my point is that it is better for the ecosystem for us to

embrace the different model and try to come up with different approaches to fix the problem instead of just replicating the old approach into this new model, which doesn't fit, you know, and that's, I think when you're the Jonas mentioned in one of the comments that it, it, it forbids innovation, because you're essentially applying this. I think that's what I have in mind too like this is a completely different way to do things you have to approach things from a different angle to get the same behavior that you had before you know so just dumping the old thing into the new thing it's kind of the cheap ways to get into

a working state again, you know? And we may miss some of the things, some of the fantastic possibilities that may pop up along the way. No, I do agree with that. I think it's good to have this on the backburn.

Like, as an idea, like, if we realize all of these new ideas are actually terrible and there's actually not a better way to do this then hey maybe it does make sense to replicate the old behaviour but

whilst I do want this problem fixed I don't want this problem fixed in a way that is going to limit what is possible in the future. Yeah. We don't want to paint ourselves into a corner where we're forced to not be able

to add cool new stuff because we're bound to old crafty stuff, right? Yeah. The new XR, VR slash XR, portal under discussion, trying to, we're facing the same problem. Like, how do we, how do we mangle all these different moving

parts together? And it's complicated, and people are used to working one way. Not in particular for the VR thing, because there's a very helpful person who laid out a panorama view of the whole situation. It's going to be easier to make decisions based on that. But it's difficult, right? And people have a tendency to get frustrated and irritated when things don't work. get frustrated and irritated when things don't work so there's always this pressure to get things working as fast as possible whatever it takes even if that even if advocating for

that may work against you in the future you know people people just frustrated and i can understand the frustration. I was frustrated too. I contribute to things that I'm frustrated about because I want to fix them. So I can't blame, but I can't, you know, whatever. I think you've probably heard this as well. You probably tune it out at this point but there is a lot of people that will say

things like Weyland is what 15? 15 years at this point? 2008 I think um 15 years old yeah I'm I want to say 2008 Weyland is 15 years old

and it's still not done. Like, it's not that... Firstly, a lot of the major issues have only been dealt with in the past, like, three or four years. As bad as, you know, COVID and all that was, the one thing that it was good for is a lot of problems in the FOSS world

got fixed when a lot of people didn't end up having to go to their day job turns out when people have a lot more free time they have a lot more free time to work on things so a lot of problems have been dealt with but it's not that it's just 15 years old it's that we have 30 I want to say 35 years of X11 to, and, and, and applications built for X11, around the X11 model, that also need to be adjusted to fit into what we're doing now. into what we're doing now. It's not just, let's do a new thing, suddenly everything is just going to work.

There's going to be a long and painful transitionary period, and right now, whilst a lot of problems are being dealt with, we are in the middle of that transitionary period. I'd say we are closer to the end now. When people start talking about positioning the windows instead of corrupted buffers. Sure, sure. We're pretty good.

Yeah, I often say that, obviously because different compositors will implement things at a different rate, it's not a consistent thing, but what I'll often say is Wayland as it currently stands is great if you're a normal user. everything is fine, but off to the sides there are these giant gaping holes that you may find yourself falling into, like the window positioning, like OBS was just a couple of years ago. But for most users at this stage right now, everything you need is there. Accessibility is a big one that like really needs a lot more focus and that, that I is going to be a blocker for a while

because there are some people who simply cannot use their computer without some of the accessibility features that have been built up over the years on X11 and things like that can't just be left behind without some form of

compatible equivalent replacement or at least equivalent replacement whether it's compatible or not with the old solutions is another another story but have good news for you buddy Oh what's being worked on accessibility may be fixed Accessibility may be fixed. What do we got? Anything you can say? I cannot make the... I cannot say the grandior announcement, but there's people working on this problem domain.

I am well aware there are people working on it, I just wasn't sure how far along it was. I mean, there's people working specifically on figuring out this blocker of within adoption. So we may see some progress in a very near future. Just like I myself am working on the USB portal now. There's people working on new notifications, people working on a plethora of things around portals. And accessibility is one of them. And I really hope it is fixed for good now. Accessibility was one of the areas that got stuck in the,

essentially, whatever Sun did when they implemented accessibility throughout the stack. And desktop graphics has very few people working on it. Desktop environments have very few people working on it. But it's an order of magnitude more people than accessibility. Companies have the tendency to see accessibility as a checklist. As long as you can keep the checks checked, everything is fine. More like government contracts and things like that that require accessible desktops.

Mm-hmm. So for most companies, it's just easier to switch the desktop session to X11 and have all the checks back again. But yeah, hopefully that's going to be fixed for good, like with better protocols, better implementations, sandboxable approaches to the whole thing. better implementations, sandboxable approaches to the whole thing. I really hope it's finished because it's just so annoying to... It's the kind of thing that a lot of people complain, but there's just so few people with the necessary knowledge to lead something like this. And it just gets worse because the more people complain the

harder it is to look into the problem because they're so it's so um involved into toxicity that you don't want to touch that from a tent you don't want to touch that it's difficult it's difficult well i we sort of kind of briefly words let me let me try that again we touched on this briefly earlier i only know english i have no excuse for forgetting words um so we sort of touched on this earlier where people are sort of very i guess aggressive towards the gnome developers gnome community how do you find yourself dealing with this because you're not you're not one of the at least from what i've seen, the general targets of that harassment, you're not, like Tobias, I'm sure, gets way worse than what you get.

Tobias is just the example, because he was involved in the stop theme in my apps as well, which obviously made him a big target. But how do you find yourself dealing with this? It's complicated, isn't it? Um, I have moments where I deal with those things well. And I have, I had moments where I just burst it out and screwed everything up.

Um, it is, it is difficult. and screwed everything up. It is difficult. I feel like it's one of those situations where sometimes it's not even... How can I put it? How can I express this? I had to explicitly remove myself from social media and comment sections and not participate

in these things, in these places. And to some degree shut down communications as well. To only a very straight subset of places. Because the attacks come from everywhere. I can tell you I have so many stories of abuse.

It's not even fun. The Linux community treats its maintainers and its developers really badly, even the better ones, the people who just shut up and do the work. People can be nasty online. I got everything. I got a full list. I got job harassment.

I got doxing. Everything you can imagine. My dog was death sentenced by email a few years ago. I think my dog. It is complicated and I don't really know how much what else to say because

putting ourselves online exposes you to other people and that can change people's mind because when you see a face and a voice in a tone attached to a particular avatar, you humanize that person better. And then you can hear that person's voice in your inner fantasies.

When you're reading a comment, you can attach a real human voice instead of just fantasizing whatever tone you're projecting a comment, you can attach a real human voice instead of just fantasizing whatever tone you're projecting into that person. Generally, what worked for me was to withdraw myself from most of these places. And I'd say that our community does pretty bad in terms of treating people... Oh, the audio died for a second. Did it? Oh, we're back.

Oh. Just repeat what you said the last five seconds. I was just saying that I think that people in the Linux space are pretty bad at treating those who provide them the code and the desktop that they use with some incentives. I know that there's a negativity bias in the human brain and that you have a tendency to remember bad experiences much more intensely than the good ones but it happened enough times for me to have to like make those decisions to not have a Macedon account, a Twitter account

or whatever new social media they have never had Facebook or anything like that I basically just am online on very specific rooms in Matrix. It's kind of nasty. I don't really know how to fix this. I have thought about this subject for a long time.

A really long time. You will find my, I think in 2018, I wrote an article about what it feels like to be a free software maintainer. So this is not a problem that has made itself better over the past, how much, five years or so? Like, my expectation is that people... Let me take a step back.

We have a big problem in our hands, you know, because the Linux desktop is not cool. Companies are not throwing tons of money on the Linux desktop. It's not a cool thing anymore. It wasn't the mid 2000s. It is not the cool, the hot new thing anymore. Companies are moving to the cloud and to like specific niches, like Linux on automotive, Linux on embedded space. That's not the Linux desktop.

And I think that if people want to have a functional desktop, we have to have a change in culture in how Linux users, desktop users, interact with the people producing the desktop that they're using. Because right now, I feel like there's this very strong sense of, you know, a consumer and a consumer and a provider relationship, people come with this mindset, like you're providing me a product. And I have to have, I have to co create the product like you're providing me a product and i have to have i i have to co-create the product that you're doing and my feedback is valuable as is because i have an opinion and that's not useful and i think we're gonna see less and less companies investing in the Linux desktop.

And more and more, the community is going to have to budget for their desktop. If the community wants to have a functioning desktop in 15 years from now, in 10 years from now perhaps, they're going to have to stop looking at the Linux desktop developers as a free asset, you know? Just somebody who happens to do the job and start paying the developers that they think are doing a good job, like, seriously paying. Because I don't think we're going to have much more funding in the future. But what I'm seeing is the opposite.

People coming with this mindset of, I use your stuff, even though the license says in the very first line, this software is provided with no warranty and may not fit the purpose. People are coming with this mindset of, this particular mindset of, you wrote the software, I am using your software. Why don't you do what I'm telling you to do?

Why don't you write the feature that I want? You know, and just that. Not, I'm willing to sponsor you to work on this feature or things like that. I don't know how much of a tangent this got into, but I'm not going sponsor you to work on this feature or things like that. I don't know how much of a tangent this got into, but it is a difficult situation. Not everybody stands the peer pressure. Many people, and this is not specific to GNOME. I have to be clear here.

GNOME is a famous target, but every single community has this kind of issue. It is generalized. You can ask, I don't know, XFC people, and I'm sure they will have 15 different stories of abuse to tell you. I know for a fact that many KDE developers, even though the KDE community is perceived as an outsider, as a lovely and adored group of people, I know that by talking to people in the community, they suffer a lot of abuse as well. That's the current situation. How do we change that? I have no idea.

It's been 10 years that I'm contributing to free software and i have no idea how to change perhaps talking about the problem is a good first step yeah it's certainly worth mentioning even though i'm sure just mentioning it's going to get people be like why are you saying that i'm going to be angry at you now. I think what you're saying is a lot of people see themselves as customers, not just as a user of this open software. They see themselves as a customer even without having done, you know, even without having done, you know, the first step to being a customer, which is actually some sort of monetary funding. Now, I do want to be clear that when anyone talks about monetary funding,

there is the caveat of we are well aware that there are people out there who simply do not have the ability to do that like there are people from developing nations who just do not have any excess income or people even from you know places like america who are living like bill to bill who simply cannot spare any extra dollar like that's totally understandable but there needs i i've talked to a couple of people about this recently but there needs to be this shift in the shift in the idea that everything that you're getting that is free software is the idea that everything that you're getting that is free software is actually free a lot of people have really the i i i don't want to place the blame entirely on this people are aware of the difference and just ignore it but i think part of that does lie on the fact that we use this term free.

And I do see people that conflate the two. You're always going to have these, I don't know if you would use the term, maybe you wouldn't want to be as inflammatory as this, but you are going to have these users that do feel like they're entitled to a developer's time, entitled to their software working in a certain way. And I don't know if there's really a way to ultimately deal with that. I do think that there is some there is some onus on these software developers to better put forth a way to fund projects because a lot of projects are really bad at

soliciting funds Thunderbird is a great example of one that did it really well when Thunderbird unveiled the new UI they have this pop-up show up like hey if you like what thunderbird is doing give us money and from my understanding they 10x their funding when they did that which is they were like thunderbird was already very well off don't get me wrong but like they have a lot of extra money now and a lot of people see this i didn't hear anyone complain about this but a lot of people i know will see this as some form of like you know i don't want pop-ups i don't want advertising on linux desktop but i think there is a there is a a middle ground here and I think what Thunderbird did is probably probably a a great point for it and I would like to

see desktops like you know I would like to see projects like OBS I would like to see you know all of these things make it clearer that there is a way to fund these projects because most, look, most people aren't going to go to your project's website and find the donation link or that that's a that's a giant hassle and even with things like getting involved with development a lot of projects and I know this is a lot of work to to do but a lot of projects don't really provide a easy way to get involved with them it sort of expects that you are already an established developer in this project before you've even started. And I know that doing beginner issues is a lot of extra

overhead for the maintainers, and I don't know if there's a better way to do it, but that's also something that I feel needs to be improved upon as well. Yeah, talking about money in the Linux community is always a tricky thing to do, right? Yeah. Um, personally I've considered, like, I never put them in practice, but I consider doing things like, if you want me to fix a particular bug, I can put a contract or like a little box for people to pay with their wallets for whatever they want to be fixed.

Otherwise, you're just hoping that I do my best to fix it. And when it comes to not being paid, I'm going to follow what makes me happy more than what makes whatever internet random person happy. It is always difficult. On that subject, I think FlatHub is cooking up to have paid apps. And I hope that helps. You probably cannot see that, but I have an Ogata light here, a key light. And I wrote a little app to reverse engineer the network protocol that it used and wrote a little app to reverse engineer the network protocol

that he used and wrote a little app called Luminon that I haven't published yet, but it works. You can control these lights. You can connect them to network. And I was thinking, when Fahub publishes, enables the payment thing, I might want to try this. You know? I have asked Elgato for development samples so I could make their software work for them on the Linux desktop, but they haven't sent

me anything. Fortunately, people, like, we did a mini fundraising and we got people paid for this light. So they paid for the light. I got the app done. You can build it yourself. It's free software. Of course, I'm not every single line of code that I have done in my entire life is free software. Either I lost it or published it in a Git lab somewhere. There's no middle ground but um if you want to have the convenience of installing it from an app store you can you know

give me a dollar for that don't feel too bad about not getting developer samples when i talk to the developer of open rgb a well-established project that a lot of people know about in the Linux space, even he struggles to get developer samples of anything. All the hardware that he's gotten working in OpenRGB is hardware that either someone has contributed support for or he has directly bought himself. The one thing that he did get a developer sample for was something he had already bought

So he he got given another one after he already got one On that on that subject I can tell you that Logitech is a much better player than most of these companies that I have ever dealt with they sent I even had streams or Oh, you got some Logitech stuff in there. Yeah, got a bunch of Logitech stuff. Big fan. Yeah, we're working on the... Logitech has some lights. I don't know if you can see this thing here. It's a little light that you put on top of your monitor, you know, just like on other cameras.

Just plug it in here. They sent me this sample. I'm trying to work a a module out of this i did see um i did see you're doing that i don't know where was it somewhere i don't know somewhere um project kind of stalled but it was fun and they they were pretty responsive be happy more companies should do things like that oh it's the i see where it was. It was on your channel. That's where it was. Yeah. Yeah, developer stream. Yeah, it's one of those boring things when you see me cracking my head to get...

to get through difficult... I don't understand why people like this, but people seem to enjoy seeing me suffering through development. Just keep doing it's fun yeah i i personally don't understand the dev streams myself but you know people like what uh what lena does i see people seem to like what you're doing and hey like if if you can i think I've tried to do some dev streams in the past I have this

trouble of staying focused so I end up just interacting with the chat more than actually working so for me it's completely unproductive but if you can make it work yourself and you and people like it just hey go ahead and do so

yeah i don't i it's fun because i don't i myself also do not watch development streams of anybody but apparently people like this i don't i don't know people think it's fun i'm just gonna do that then maybe it's sort of like i i maybe it's the idea that they're also working on something themselves so it feels like they're not working by themselves you know they're working on some homework they're working on some dev stuff whatever they're doing like it feels like you're working alongside this person to both try to get something done. Sounds like a co-creation feeling. Yeah, yeah. Companionship.

Yeah, that sounds really sad. It's like, I don't have any friends, I'm going to watch this dude stream programming. But yeah, you know know people like it's fun and it helps the project because people see that there's a face behind the gitlab avatar so been working so far well a lot of the stuff that you do seems to be stuff that you're just trying to get working for yourself like you were mentioning working on the stuff your lights like that's part of the reason why i didn't want to buy any like fancy controlled lights like my lights they have knobs on them i turn the knobs the lights change color that's all i need to do but it's it's nice that things like they work on things like that and then you've

got the what do you call it boatswain which is also nice but I think the proper way to pronounce it is bosun as far as I learned yes you learned yeah it's

I think it's sailors speech it's a boson not boatswain sure we'll go with that but for anyone who doesn't know what that is that is a tool to control the uh stream deck not steam deck i don't know why Valve called it a Steam Deck when the Stream Deck already existed. Marketing. I'm sure that was SEO nightmare early on. Stream Deck is a little street... It's basically like a keypad that has little LED screens on it.

You just light up, tell you what, like your chat button there, whatever other button you want to use. And before things like this existed like it was basically like a paperweight on linux i think there were there might have been something that like half can show you this this is one of the i don't know if you can see from the camera there we go coming up it's literally just buttons. Just literally that. This is a mini version. I use it for my streams.

It's pretty fun. And then obviously, you know, a couple of years back, there was the whole getting OBS working on Weyland situation, which, you know, was very nice to have. I agree. That honestly... I had to... do you know why I did that? Uh, so you could use Weyland and stream? Exactly. I had to switch back to X11 whenever I wanted to stream and that was so disgusting to me

that I preferred to spend valuable time on the making of the Aetheric Wayland. So back then you'd fully swapped over to Wayland? Well actually when did you... Yeah I've been using Wayland... I used Wayland, I compiled and used Wayland back when it was just a multiple XR sessions launcher back in 2008. Like you can even say, depending on how strict you

are with the associations, you can say that that's a GNOME project because Christian is the person who ported all of GNOME to Git from CVS, I think. C-S-V-C-S. From SVN, the sub whatever. I don't recall the acronym. But yeah, I've been using it basically since Comet number 15. Jeez! It was not useful at the beginning.

Sure, sure, yeah. You could just launch different X11 sessions and that's it. And it took like about a year to get into this point. sessions and that's it. And it took like about a year to get into this point, but I found it really fantastic and I kept reading the back of the comment log every day I joined, I entered the website and saw that. It's pretty fun. Yeah.

Sorry for interrupting you. No, no. Um, and, uh, and, and now, yeah, nowadays it's actually, it's actually useful. No, no. And nowadays it's actually useful. Not the state it was in then. Yeah, I first... I think I first discovered the work that you do when you did the OBS Pipewire Portal Weyland thingy. Because that was one of the reasons why because I was

interested in Wayland like I was already thinking of trying out Sway at the time but I I simply could not switch to Wayland at that point because I I don't do a dual capture system I don't use a capture card or anything, I- I- To use OBS? Capture my desktop. So for me, that was the first thing where- that was like the first complete blocker. Like there are these- there are these things that are gonna stop certain people and for me, like I simply could not use Wayland. Now, it's more of a matter of not use Weyland. Now it's more of a matter of W.O. Roots has this issue where their

portal doesn't allow window capture so that's also a problem. That's still the case? It is still the case. Hyperland has a custom portal that does their own custom thing so for me my next exploration is going to be

when Plasma 6 comes out because that's their portal actually does the things I need it to do and Gnome does it as well so I could use Gnome but Plasma 6 is where I'm going to be it would be funny if I actually swapped to Gnome I would just

my comments would be incredible I often times when I do when i was doing streams on the main channel i would if i was doing like a virtual machine i would intentionally pick gnome just because i wanted to see the comments i would get like when i did my linux from scratch series my host vm was gnome for no particular reason. Um... Nice. Along with having, um, sounds enabled in the Gnome terminal, just because I want to be extra annoying.

That's how you do it, buddy. That's the sole purpose of Gnome is to annoy. You're using it right. I really don't like the fact that you can have a bell in the terminal. The purpose of gnome is to annoy. You're using it right. I really don't like the fact that you can have a bell in the terminal. I hate that so much. You can disable that. You can!

I hate the sound too. I always forget. It's one of those things that when I'm not looking at a terminal, it just completely vanishes out of my mind. And then when I'm using it, it happens rarely enough that I don't disable it on spot. But it happens just often enough to piss me off. So I keep in this eternal loop of suffering without doing anything about it. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, it's fine. just remember to get rid of it and then it won't be a problem

i forget five seconds after we move on so yeah you know i feel like um you're you're mentioning like do things for yourself, and that's basically a lot of what I do. If you go to my website, the subtitle of myself is Free Software Allows Me to Scratch My Own Itches, and I do so intensely. I feel like that summarizes the free software culture, or at least what it's supposed to be. Um, if you have a problem, you just go there and say, do you have all the permissions, you don't have to ask anybody, just do whatever you want. Somehow that shifted towards, you have to do that for me because I don't know how

to program and I'm not learning them. So, yeah. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that most people on Linux aren't programmers. Like this, it would be nice if there were more of, there were like everybody was a programmer, everybody did commit. But it does say a lot about the current state the desktop is in the fact that there are people who don't have this technical knowledge who can actively use linux like this is it's a great thing in a sense until it comes back and gets all of the problems we talked about earlier. Yeah. Yeah, don't take me wrong, Brody. When I was young, I enjoyed coding. I hate

coding now. I only do that. I think at this point, I'm still I'm only still in coding. Because the pains that I suffer force me to do so. I wish I could stop.

I'm not kidding. There's a lot of musical instruments behind me. You can see from. I wish I could spend my entire days on them. Not fixing the goddamn USB portal because I cannot use audio and I don't have a portal. I'm going to have to do that too. Or somebody's going to have to do that. And I'm going to have to review that and make that happen.

I'm tired of this. I don't like this. But it keeps scratching me. I keep itching. It keeps itching, you know. See, look. You've only wasted your time if you give up if you never give up you never wasted your time

you have to think like a gambler right if you keep spending money the second you stop spending money that's when you wasted all your money because the next spin you might win it all back the next line of code you're right from the big blow right the next line of code you're right

might be the last line and then everything is fixed oh boy that's how we do it here right exactly please don't take what i throw about gambling. I actually do that. I do not encourage gambling. We do not condemn gambling, please. Coding is not gambling if you don't treat it like so. Oh, God. No, I get what you're saying, though. Like,

whilst saying though, like, whilst... How would I say this? When you do something for a long time, you're going, like, pretty much anything, eventually the initial joy you had from it is, that's going to fade away. Like, you're not always going to be going to be hey look here's this exciting new thing that i learned obviously you can try out new things but once you start getting involved in like a specific set of projects there's only so many times it can really excite you like there's only so many times you can look at G object and be like, alright, let's go. And it makes sense, but

as I said earlier, I am happy that you keep it going because it means that a lot of these things that you know like those lights you're talking about a lot of these things can actually get dealt with at some point because someone feels like they want to spend time out of their day on this specific problem on this you know i can't imagine that many people running linux happen to have those lights but you have them and you want them to work so you're gonna go and make them work i'm gonna curse elgato for not providing the driver for that and then we go to work on that that's usually the order of events one thing i feel like that's the hacker culture you know yeah yeah essentially the hacker culture

one thing i definitely did want to do want to touch on is so you're involved also in like the brazilian side of the gnome community and i i i mentioned earlier i am i am a boring monolingual person that only knows english so i have no idea what the world looks like outside of the english speakers what sort of like how big is Linux in that Brazilian community? How, like, you know, are the... Yeah, just go on any sort of tangent you want about that. A lot to talk about. It's a pretty big community in here.

Look closely, you're going to find Brazilians everywhere. It is. I think we are like SCPs, you know? Before you know about them, you don't see them. But once you start seeing them, they are everywhere. Every corner, there's one. Free software has been... You mentioned that, and then I just remember the fact, it's not Brazilians,

but there's like three Filipino people in my Discord. Like, I don't know where they are. I have like 1% Filipino audience. I don't know where they all came I have, like, 1% Filipino audience. I don't know where they all came from and why they all happen to be in the Discord. We are a legion, Roddy. You may be one and you didn't even notice.

It's a big community. We have... It's quite active. There's people contributing with code. There's people doing engagement. There's people doing marketing. There's quite active. There's people contributing with code, there's people doing engagement, there's people doing marketing, there's people just talking about it. It's pretty fun, it's pretty active. South America and basically all the Latin America sections of the planet are pretty... I feel like we are pretty deep into software. GNOME is a Mexican project for all the matters.

Um, I don't know if you know about that, but it's essentially a Mexican project. Um, Federico Mena and Miguel de Icaza both created it with a bunch of others in a Mexican university somewhere. I don't remember the name of the city. Yeah, Federico is still around, by the way. Pretty active in the community. I'm not sure if there's much more to say, because if you look at only Brazilians, I think we made a mistake in the past

where the software was promoted here in Brazil as gratis, you know, as cost-free software instead of the liberty to hack on this thing. And then it had a golden moment and then the wave fell. And then it's raising again much more slowly, but I feel like it's much more on topic with the values of free software. The people joining are getting the whole concept, I can say it like this. There are tons of Latin Americans working on GNOME.

I'll say, I don't have numbers. We don't have numbers, but I'll say 30% of the community. But the fact that everybody speaks English is, hides that away. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

Huh. There are sub-communities. I think French people are also... massively into free software. And they have local communities. I participate in the local communities. The problem with Brazil is that it's such a massive country. It's hard to get people together. If you take the northernmost point of Brazil, it is closer to Canada than it is to the southernmost point of Brazil.

That's how this place is. It's difficult to get people together. Wait, what the hell? Fact-checking that? No, no, I just looked up the size of Brazil and it's not that much smaller than the United States. What the hell?

I did not realize it was that big. Yes. It puts a lot of constraints on how much we can do in terms of, like, hackfests and in-person events and whatnot. There's people that are...

I am closer to, like, Argentinians than to most... a lot of people here in Brazil. But it's not as, it's not wildly different from other places. Like I'm sure somebody in North America is going to complain about the wide country they have. I live in Australia.

Oh boy. Don't you guys have like a massive desert yes unbelievable if you look at the um population map of australia along the coastline it's all population and there's like a couple of dots in the middle where there are like um aboriginal communities where there are like mining towns but the rest of it is completely empty sounds like a good place for free software to flourish empty place no annoyances that's fair we can even grow our potatoes together together but yeah it's pretty active if you look close if you look hard enough you're gonna see that

we're everywhere people just don't notice i guess as you're saying before the fact that you know english is sort of the default language on the internet and if you're gonna get involved with a lot of projects you kind of have to know English to some extent. Obviously, there is, you know, even if you're doing translation, you still need to be able to speak the language that other people involved in the project know so you can communicate that you want to do the translation. But yeah, I guess.

And a lot of people don't use their like actual names as well so that also makes it a lot easier to hide it as well so yeah there's that too but um no i tried to get people together because for a long time especially when i was starting to contribute to gnome i thought i was alone in Brazil. And for about two years, I didn't even realize that there were other people in here who were contributing as well. Nowadays, I have, like on Fridays, I have a show called... There's no good way to translate it, like Fridaying with GNOME, something like that, where we just sit down and talk and get the community together in a virtual fireplace. I tried to mix streams of English content and Portuguese content

so that nobody's left out, and I wish I could know more languages. I was planning on doing some Spanish streams. I even thought about doing a Japanese stream, but I don't really know too much Japanese to do that live. It'd be complicated. I can do an introduction. And I can order some food and get directions, but don't expect me to do any sort of

like actual discussion that's not gonna happen no gonna be complicated in that life not gonna happen well it's happen. It's 2.30 in the morning as well. Oh. If you try to get me to think in anything besides... Look, I can barely think in English at this point. My brain's going to fall apart.

We're actually almost coming up to the two hour mark. So, unless there's anything you want to touch on, I guess we can start wrapping this up. Yeah. I think we covered a lot of ground here. Um, not sure if there's anything more relevant. I complain about a lot of stuff and I feel a little better now.

Thanks for the free therapy. I just, I just sat here and listened to you you're acting like a therapist now look the whole it's it's weird to be able to sit down with someone for two hours and just talk like Like, how often do you just... Like a one-on-one conversation with someone for two whole hours? Probably not that often. It's not often, yeah. And... I'm gonna be pretty tired.

My social battery is not the biggest. But I enjoy this. I... Kind of activity that I have to do a little bit every so often. Otherwise, things derail, but I cannot do much more than that. Well, I had a lot of fun. There was some interesting philosophical discussions about open source free software foss whatever term you feel like you want to use and i hope the people got something useful out of this and

yeah i i'm sure there's going to be i I will make sure I specifically clip out that segment on harassment and stuff. And I'm sure people are going to have some words to say on that one. But until then, direct people somewhere, your blog, anything you want to send them to, any links you want to give them. Mm. I think people can follow me on GitHub, it's, um, georges.stavrakas on GitHub. Um, cause I've been doing a lot of work in that particular space. So you- whoever follows in there can check what's going on

I've been doing some I've been working on portals recently but I also do some mockups for OBS Studio I just realized we didn't even talk about we talked about OBS for like a little bit we talked about most of it

I guess that's content for next time I've been trying to send some mockups to the OBS community so that they can have some guidelines for new interfaces that they want. Apparently people are enjoying this, so I'll keep doing them until... As long as it's useful, I'll keep doing this. And it's pixels on screen. It's much easier to see that than code. So feel free to...

People should feel free to check that out i have a website i blog sometimes not very often what was the last one fianeron.com oh the last one was last month extending the month to infinity yes and i did some pretty artwork with Blender for that blog post. I'm pretty proud of that. Even some animations on Blender. It was difficult. It was not easy. Oh, wow. That is really cool. Pretty proud of it. And then you have the YouTube as well, if anyone wants to pop into the live coding sessions. Have a look.

Yeah. If people like seeing other people suffering with coding, you have my YouTube channel. It's also George's Tabrakas YouTube handle. But you can just search for like, you know. Oh, you can search for the last stream search for, like, Gnome. Oh, you can search for the last stream's title, like, Popcorn ASMR, and you're gonna find it. Yeah.

Have multiple links. People should feel free to reach out if they want to talk, too. Thanks for having me, Brody. It was super fun. Yeah, thank you for doing this. This was awesome. And, uh... uh wait it was it was skelly yeah it was skelly that mentioned you wanted to do you'd be interested in doing this wasn't it yes i think it was kelly bridged us yes yes thank you skelly for i've been meaning

to get in contact with you for a while um i'm just lazy uh there there are there are a lot of people in the fos what i want to talk to um so it's good to have a filter on who definitely wants to do it so that's less people to getting contact with um so if there's nothing else you want to mention i'll do my outro awesome um i've got the gaming channel brody on games uh right now i'm playing through the new game plus of armored core 6 and i probably hate my life and i'm playing through kingdom hearts dream drop distance uh which is less hate my life assuming my internet connection is working which is a uh big if right now, uh, we're getting some stuff dealt with, and hopefully I will have more than a six megabit up when my ISP decides to do their

job, uh, the main channel is Brody Robertson, I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week, not a clue what'll be out there, uh, check it out, maybe there'll be something fun, I don't know, I, this comes out in a while, like, week or two, uh, there'll be something there. I don't know. This comes out in a while. Like a week or two. There'll be something there. I don't know. If you're listening to the audio version of this. Tech of a T on YouTube at.

Yeah. This is going terribly. If you're watching the video version of this. You can find the audio on any audio podcast platform. There is an RSS feed. There's iTunes and stuff. Put the RSS feed in your favorite app. I like AntennaPod. Good to go. Give you the final word. What do you want to say?

I saw you laughing there the entire time. Just laughing out of her suffering. Nothing else you want to say? Just that? I'm just gonna leave it. Okay. I saw Brody suffering and I was happy with that. See you guys later.