 I would I would hope someone even very stone would know. Don't shove your hand in the Pringles can. Then again, there are also those idiots that drop something in the. No, what is it called? Oh, good. The. Oh, shit. That the thing that like in your sink spins like gets rid of the disposal. Garbage, garbage disposal. There we go. And like they'll drop something in there and then just shove their entire hand around and like move with the blades to try and find it. I'm like, you're an you're an insane person. What? Insane. I guess some people don't know like you can just take a magnet and drop it down in there and pull out whatever you've dropped in there. Like it's really that simple. I mean, unless you're dropping like, I don't know, like important tax papers down to garbage disposal or some shit. Man, it's one way to get rid of them, I suppose, I guess. It seems like it would have been just easier to use the shredder if you haven't got a shredder. Exactly. All right, we are live. So if you can get it from the people in the chat, a yay or nay on the audio, that'd be appreciative, appreciated, whatever. I don't know words fucking hard. Oh, that's gonna be one of those days. Tyler, I didn't notice that your lips did go out of sync there for a while and then like paused and then it went good again. So I don't know why that is. I don't know. You're fine. I'm surprised this court is working as well as it is. You'd find yourself some wood to knock on there. We've got a whole podcast to do. We'll just knock on that wood pretty aggressively. It's a particle board, not real wood. Damn it. It counts. Everyone's saying I actually I actually have audacity loaded up. Okay, or guy like I do too. I'm literally all ready to go and I just I figured out something I could say for the first section. So I did actually do something this week in open source. So it'd be fun. I mean to talk about we should be good. Damn, I got this. I have a sore on my hand that wouldn't have been a sore if I didn't pick out the dry skin on there. And then I put this new skin shit on it and it stings like a bitch. Well, what you should just do is start using cocoa butter, brother. Well, it doesn't having to do with dry hands. It has to do with my cane. It's a sick a sore for my cane to use the cane. And it's like a it's related to that. Well, you know what? Could just rub cocoa butter all over your cane. That might help. Yeah. Although then again, if somebody else grabs your cane, they're going to they're going to be so grossed out. Just grab a cane. What is that again? All right. That's funny. Oh my God. Oh, so funny. Yeah. So unfortunately, we didn't record that earlier conversation we were talking about. We that would have been great free show. Doritos. Man, we had we had the whole discussion about Doritos. We didn't record it. Exactly. For one, people would have enjoyed that to speaking of that, I had someone comment on my call window manager video. Are you stoned? And I had to rewatch it because I do look stoned, but I'm like, honest, I've responded when I was like, maybe, but to be honest, I don't know because me being stoned looks very similar to me recording it just three o'clock in the morning. I practically look stoned when I record that like some typically what I do is I'll record. I'll like do the do the editing. I won't upload it or anything and I'll just pass out. When it get I don't know if you do that to where you like record super late at night, but you just look you look dead. Like you're just sometimes you're ready for sleep. Do that way too often, man. I need to fix my sleep schedule, but it's a whole another separate problem. I've been saying that for a long time. I've never done it. When you when you work it, when you work a job for 10 years overnight. And you're like 20s, you're never going to get your sleep schedule back ever again. Mm hmm. I worked the third shift at a gas station and trust me, man, like you do that for any considerable amount of time in your sleep schedule. Just it'll never be the same. It just it won't messes you up. True story. All right, let's go ahead and get started. Why not? We're here. We might as well do it. We didn't bullshit. Sure, nearly as long as we normally do, but I'm just, you know, I'm ready and rare to go. It's a Derek. Let's do it. Yeah. All right. So you said you have audacity up a I do. All right. So let's go ahead. I'm going to hit record in audacity. I'm going to hit record in OBS and you can do the claps whenever you like. All right. Three, two, one. I was pretty close. Pretty close. I'm not bad. We've had worse. That is true. That is very true. All right. Okay. So we're going to get started here. We got, let's see. I got the, uh, and I almost, I was almost completely prepared, almost. So I got the news, our news links up and we are recording. I just made sure to that again because, you know, it would have been hilarious. I have recorded a podcast. Actually, I've done this more than once with the other guys, uh, where recorded we, we, well, we talked for like an hour and a half and then got to the end and realized I never hit the record button. So I've gotten into the habit of checking multiple times. I got the low CD going on. All right. Let's get started. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Linux cast. I'm your host, Matt and I'm Tyler. So this is the Linux cast. We record, uh, things about Linux and open source and, uh, BSD now, uh, those types of things. We also are avid Windows users. Wait a minute. Of course. That's the other podcast that I do. Windows weekly. Cause I know there's going to be people searching for that now. Well, there's actually a podcast called those weekly. I'm not on it. Uh, they, they wouldn't want me on every other Windows sucks. You fucking fools. Use Linux. Actually, I'll be like, I'm actually Paul. What you're looking for is a good news slash Linux. I don't know why I turned Bill Gates there from that. Okay. As you can tell, I don't have my shit together. I mean, I do have my shit together, but not this shit. I have the other shit together. And, uh, I have no clue what I'm doing. So if you're here expecting this podcast to be any sort of organized, you must be new. 100%. So, all right. So, all right. So this is going to be a really bad podcast. I'm just going to point that out there because I had words and Matt today are not just going together whatsoever. So just going to put that out there. So Tyler, what have you been doing in, uh, FOSS and Unix and Linux and stuff this week? Well, um, I'm, I'm using, um, open BSD seven dot one came out, um, I don't even know how long ago it was, but about a week ago it dropped. So I, I finally went back around and I did an encrypted install this time around, which was remarkably simple. Like, I mean, doing an encrypted install with open BSD is stupid simple. It's really easy. Um, but beyond that, uh, I've just been playing around with, uh, Menaphon. Um, I think that's how you're supposed to say it. M-E-D-N-A-F-E-N, which is, it's a really good emulator. Um, it's available on Linux. I believe it's even available on Windows, um, and of course, BSDs and it's, it's super awesome. You can, like it, it supports a crap load of systems. And I've been using it to mess around with Silent Hill and, um, OG Resident Evil and buying that here, um, on open BSD. I haven't really played Silent Hill that much. Um, mainly just trying to test it out and play with it, like before I stream it or do anything like that on the channel with it, mainly because, um, there's a weird audio issue that I'm having. Like it seems like it's cutting in and out, but I have, when it comes to like old retro games and emulators and stuff, I'm not a pro with. So I don't know if that's like a problem that's easily fixed or something like that. So I'm trying to figure out if I can fix it, um, before I stream it, but that's really what I've been doing just playing around with emulators. It's about it. It seems, it seems to me that the biggest problem you have on BSD is audio related. Is that true? No, cause audio works super well on open BSD. It's super simple. Um, I've had an issue with audio because of my script. Um, ffmpeg was having an issue with audio, but I got that fixed, um, with my script. Can't remember what the final flag was that fixed it, but it was, it was something stupid with a script and the way I was recording or like mixing audio, uh, with ffmpeg, which was. And that's annoying, but really in our honesty, like, uh, on Linux, I was having the same issue with men, menafin, whatever. I tried it on my mom's Ubuntu laptop just to make sure it wasn't something that was specific to open BSD and it had the same weird audio problems. So probably something to do with the emulator itself. Yeah, uh, it could also be the game too. Cause I know there's some games that like don't emulate really well. Um, so it could be that. Honestly, I'm so stupid. When it comes to retro games, I have no idea. Like that also could be the way that it's meant to sound. I have no idea. Like I'm, it's been so long since I've played Silent Hill, but that's far as I know it could have like weird audio, like it sounds like audio glitching, but it could just be the old implementation of audio. I have no idea. I've been meaning to actually look into some emulators and play some stuff like that, but I just one of the things I just haven't got around to someday. Hopefully, um, I will say with Mednef and it's really simple as an emulator to get set up really simple. It's just I have no idea how difficult it can be to solve problems that you encounter with it. Yeah, so. All right. So, uh, what I've done. So originally I was mostly going to say I haven't done anything in terms of open source and stuff, but that's actually not true. So as we all know, Elon Musk has purchased Twitter because everyone has to know this because it's like the only thing anybody's talking about. Um, but because it's the new in thing to do, I decided that I was going to join Mastodon again. Now I was on DT's instance of Mastodon called Distritute, but he shut that down a few weeks ago. So that's not actually around anymore. So I joined a instance called Faustodon. You can find the link in the video description, although it may not be in this video description. I'm not actually sure. Uh, this is I used last week's video description. So, uh, but anyways, in normal video descriptions, you'll see that there. Uh, I have to say that this instance is pretty good because they filter out most of the weird shit. Like there's some really raunchy, raunchy shit in the federated timeline in a non moderated instance. So I'm glad that that's gone. But other than that, yeah, that's basically all I've done. Um, still the like the, the mobile app like ecosystem for Mastodon is actually pretty good. Uh, but the website for Mastodon is kind of crap. So, um, I still haven't got checked out. I've used, I've used Mastodon in the past, but I've never stuck with it. It's the same thing I've tried Twitter in the past. I just, I can't be asked. It's, uh, I don't know. Like those, it seems like those type of social media platforms are just, they're not. Interesting for me. Cause they're like when you taught, like when you talk on Twitter or the Fediverse or anything, it's meant to be like just a snippet. Like you're, you're, you're throwing out a snippet. And if we're being honest snippets, like you don't really have a real conversation, a real point there. And I don't know, it gets really boring fast. I've never used Twitter or Mastodon and had like serious conversations back and forth with people. It just, it typically ends in me or somebody else saying something and then nothing either happening from the post, like no real comments, no real back and forth, or it's a flame war in the con like just back and forth. You just getting pissed off and talking with someone and I'm like, I can't be bothered Peter in the chest as I should enable advanced mode. I didn't enable advanced mode. It's actually worse than the regular website. I'm just going to put that out there. If you, if you've ever used actual tweet deck, what that, which is what the advanced mode is model on. There's nothing, there's not, it's not even close. Like you can, yes, you can add columns and stuff like that if you want to, but you can't collapse them. You can't, you can't change colors. You can't, there's just a ton of stuff you can't do and it's just like I said, it kind of sucks, especially compared to regular tweet decks. So, but that's something that could probably be fixed if they continue to be more popular. The nature of open source software, which would be cool to somebody else and anybody can create your themselves a application for it. Maybe I should learn how to do that. We'll see if that happens. All right. And by the way, yes, I have a video recorded about Mastodon that will go up sometime soon. And I'm expecting that video to absolutely bomb. Like I expect nobody to watch that. For whatever reason, social talking about social media on the channel, just nobody cares. Like nobody cares. Well, this might be something that somebody finds interesting just because I thought I thought it was interesting. Now, I'm going to say someone's name that relates to politics. Let me make it clear. We are not going to discuss the man nor his politics or politics in general. There's that statement there. I don't know if you know this or not, but Trump made his own social media network called it was truth social is the name of the of the actual platform. Hey, here's something. Exactly. Super ironic that truth social was forced to tell the truth about what they were based on because they at first were denying that they were based off of Macedon and using Mastodon's code. Then they were essentially forced to tell the truth which is just so ironic. So funny. That's that's all I had to say about that. I just I found that bit of social media news pretty interesting. Well, that was pretty funny. Yeah, it definitely was funny. I don't know, man. It's just most people in the Linux community seem to not like unless they're on social media, they don't care about social media. Right. If unless you've actually got on there and you're part of the cesspool, then you know, most people just don't care. All right, moving on to the contact information. If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so in many different ways. You can contact us via email at email at the Linux cast.org. You can find all of our contact links and stuff and blog posts in the latest episodes at the Linux cast.org, which is a website. It does exist and it is updated. So as of like last week, I actually did update the damn thing. So I'm trying to keep that up to date as well as I can. You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast. You can subscribe to Tyler who goes by Zany online on YouTube at youtube.com slash Zanyo G almost forgot there went a little bit like completely blank for there for about five seconds and was a little weird. Anyways, yeah, youtube.com slash Zanyo G. He's also an Odyssey and he has a Discord server and there's a merch store there to be had. So you can definitely buy some merch. You should definitely do that. We should find some more merch to put on there. Yes, we should. Anyways, you can also find all of our contact information. So the foster aforementioned fostered on link probably will be there eventually. It's not there yet, but it should be someday. The whole me keeping it up to date. Not so much. Anyways, you can find all of those links and stuff at Linux cast.org slash contact. So you should definitely do that. Oh, and don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel youtube.com slash Linux cast where you'll find YouTube videos posted seven days a week for the most part. I missed one yesterday because reasons. But anyways, yeah, youtube.com slash Linux cast. So moving on, Tyler, you and I scour the internet every single week for the most exciting and amazing news you'll ever find on the internet anywhere. And today I'm going to go first because I want to talk about the most amazing technology you've ever heard of before. It's the most modern technology everyone is using it these days and you should definitely check it out because it's just the absolute bomb. If anyone says that anymore. Actually, when these things were used, it was probably before the bomb. I'm just going to put that out there. I'm talking about floppy disks, of course. So yes, I'm talking about floppy disks because things are going on with floppy disks. Discs. I don't know if you know this, but over the last few weeks or the last year or so, many things have been going on with the code in the Linux kernel that still supports floppy disks. And the specific news here today is that there's some stuff here that is being disabled by default and is going to be depreciated. I don't really care about the news itself. I just wanted to talk about floppy disks for a minute. Did you know that the Linux kernel still supports floppy disks? I did. Why? Why? Why does it still? Why are we like everyone talking about bloat? Like bloat is the word in the Linux community and we just happened to still support these two and a half inch things that you. I mean, they're good when hardly anybody still uses CDs. The idea of still supporting floppy drives is crazy. But hey, it's Linux, but you know, you know that there's that one person out there that's still using a computer that has a floppy disk drive on it. And if if they pull. But there's the things that it just doesn't compute to me because you know that that person is who is using Linux. There's no way they're still using a kernel that is up to date like probably because the vast majority of people aren't using if you have a floppy disk thing, you're probably forced to use a 32 bit version of an operating system, which means you're using an older kernel probably. I mean, because that's what you're so true. Most distros don't even have a 32 bit anymore. Now there still are some out there, obviously, but they're left not used very much. So it's just it's it's weird. And like I have some amazing like. Amazing things stored on floppy disks around here stored somewhere in my house like all of the because when I first got on the Internet, that's the really it was just before like CDRWs became a thing that you could be used commercially like they existed, but they were so friggin expensive. Nobody could afford the writers. So you had to use floppy disks. So when I first got on the Internet, it was literally dial up like and I never paid. By the way, every single time I went and got the AOL disk, the trial would run through. I would get a new disk and just sign up for a new account every single time. I'm not paying for the shit. It's really really slow, man. But anyways, I have I have like a stack full floppy disks with all like I could just a ton of stuff. I remember I was a teenager so you can imagine what most of that stuff is going to put that out there. So and so but I can if I had to read one of those things down like if I had to figure out where I could you know, actually put that in a computer somewhere and have it be, you know, red. I don't think I have a computer in the house that has a floppy disk drive anymore. Could you imagine trying to explain to someone how you bought a floppy to USB device? You could read flop like that would just be insane. Like you. Okay, we got to find this out. We're going to go look right now. Seriously, Amazon.com and we're going to find out if there's an external floppy drive that they still sell. I guarantee you know nobody's buying them. So if you find one, I I'm going to bet it's going to be around twenty dollars in price. You were exactly right. It's twenty three dollars and ninety nine cents. There we go. That's hilarious. That's so much fun. Oh God. Okay. Yeah. Anyways. I at a certain point, we can just say that. Yeah, it's going to piss five people off, but it's okay that we don't support that anymore. Right? That's that's something that we can do. Like I could understand if they took, I don't know, CD support out of it out of likes to piss people off because I mean people still do listen to, you know, CDs on their computers. I mean, I don't know anybody, but I mean, I know people do, but like every once in a while, I would still want to put a CD in my computer. I couldn't do it because my computer doesn't have an optical drive, but I have an external around around somewhere. But it's just it feels like at a certain point and I'm not sure what point that is. There's some things we can just kind of leave by the wayside and we're not necessarily abandoning those people because they can still, you know, just use an older kernel. Like can you, I mean, you don't just because, I mean, there are still version like like version four of the kernel still being supported. There are versions of version four, like the 4.0 kernel or one of the four series kernel that are still being supported. Then that things like really old, right? So I mean, you're you're still going to get security updates and you're going to get your floppy support, but that doesn't mean the people who are using 5.17 or 5.18 or whatever it is now have to have this. I mean, it's not hurting anything, but it just feels like it's something that and also in in your article, it doesn't make it clear that they're not carving out support for floppy disk. It's just disabled by default. Yeah, you'll have to go in now. It's been marked as far as I as far as I could tell by reading that it's been marked deprecated and will eventually be removed. It's not now like it's not completely out of the kernel now. It's just you'll have to enable it. It's just hopefully it's not too bad. I saw this article. I just it just reminded me of the fact that there's just stuff in the next kernel that I mean, eventually it's possible that it needs support. And we talked a couple of weeks ago about how Fedora is thinking about removing legacy BIOS support and like like that's something that everybody uses like a lot of people use legacy BIOS and they're thinking about removing that. But floppy disks get removed and people are like, oh my God, you're taking away floppy disk support. You know, how dare you? People that haven't used a floppy disk in like eight years are like, why, but why? I mean, there's going to become a certain point where the floppy disk is basically like like the cassette tape, you know, the people who are old enough, they know that when you use the cassette tape for first of all, the players were unreliable. They ate the damn tapes all the damn time, like all the time. Like it wasn't even like if you went a week without it happening, you were probably pretty lucky. Also, and usually that's because you were trying to rewind the thing in the tape player because you know, you're not, I mean, you could do it, but you weren't technically supposed to do it. But really what you're supposed to do is take the thing out, get yourself a pencil and rewind it that way. It's like, it's like we still have literally in my house underneath our TV, a VCR tape rewinder. Like the thing is, you put it in there and all it does the whole entire purpose is to rewind VHS tapes. It's still out there. It's not plugged in. Thank God. It's not very direct drawing power, which would have been hilarious for like 20 years. We haven't used it in 20 years, but we dust it like once a week. Cause we live on a dirt road, right? So we had to dust a lot. But the point is, is like, we see this thing. It's still sitting there. We haven't used it in, in 20 years. We have a DV of VCR sitting like right on top of it and that hasn't been used either in 20 years, but we have a whole closet full of VHS tapes just in case when you want to pull those out and watch them very there. We've tried, we've so we've tried to get some like so we like we thought, well, maybe good will take them because maybe somebody will want them, but nobody wants them. You can't give these things away and you can't recycle them because all of them have like weird like chemicals and stuff. So you can't really recycle them. So there's just in my closet like boxes upon boxes, these things like it's just weird. Anyways, you just, you just tell that I wasn't really interested in the news. This my head to talk about old stuff. Anyways, Tyler, what is your news for the week? Mine is the RX 6400 on Linux. If you guys haven't seen this card, it's a low power card. It's really nothing special. Based off of the actual specs of the card. It seems to be very close to like something like a 7770 from back in the day. But with some obviously better clock speeds and obviously more RAM. It comes with four gigabytes of GDR6 memory, which is the freaking nice on the memory side, but it's a low power card. It does not require any PCIe extra power and it's it comes in at a price range about 150 bucks after tax and everything more close on the 200 side. But it makes it super interesting is it's a low profile one slot graphics card, which is really nice for people who want to build something like I've built a super a super compact mini ITX build. This is something where if you don't have an APU or you're not really interested in something like an APU, you can get this and have at least a decent 1080p gaming experience. And the fact that it's just a single slot low profile card means even in a larger computer build, you can you can throw in this card and really not have to worry about cutting off a one X lane or anything like that. You can slap this in and not really worry about anything. And as far as I know, the TDP of this thing is like really low. I can't remember. It doesn't mean you don't need dedicated power for this. It's a 53 watt TDP card. And I think you can draw like 70 for my something like that. I believe it's 70 watts, which is nice. I mean, it's it's a round 50 watts of of load like power being drawn like that's that's pretty nice, especially when you get an 80p gaming. So I was watching Gamer's Nexus when they talked about this during their hardware news thing and it is definitely overpriced like but everything is overpriced states like this. If this was to if this was two years ago, this would be 80 bucks. And people would think that was perfectly fine. But nowadays, $140 for graphics card seems like oh, that's pretty good. Like no, no. Well, especially when you want to go, even if you went older used with something about this performance level, we're probably going to be spending the same amount of money on it. That's the real problem with the graphics card market right now. Can't even get pre-owned and get a good deal on it. Well, apparently they are coming down, but we'll see I was I was listening to the the Kraft Computing podcast and they said that they were talking about the the graphics card prices coming down because the chip shortage is something that they've kind of worked out now. But now there's going to be a PCB shortage. Like that's the new word shortage. Like everything's in shortage. Like eventually everything like. I've even heard like I heard I'm not going to say names because I don't even know if I should know this or whatever. But as far as I know, Honda has cut back their production like cars by a lot and their main their main dealer for for chips for their onboard control units have dropped out of the contract. They can't fulfill it anymore. And so they're having like air drop in or like airship in all of their chips, which has cut their margins like a ton. It's it's nuts trying to get like everything's in shortage, especially when it comes to like computer parts for cars even it's crazy. Yep. It's weird times we're living in. All right. So let's go ahead and move on to the main topic for today, which is is electron good or evil? So just briefly before we move on, let's just go ahead and talk about what electron is. So in very layman's terms and non technological terms, because I remember neither one of us are really developers. So we're not going to talk about the developer side of this. So if that's what you're here for, we'll have to apologize on that. But from a user perspective, what. Electron is is a chromium based wrapper that allows you to create applications. So that's basically what that is. It's using a lot of Google technologies and it allows you to, like I said, create applications. And chances are every single one of us use at least one electron app. We're using an electron app right now to do this call. So Discord is an electron app and it shows a lot of times it definitely does show like Spotify. Spotify is an electron app. Slack, if you use Slack, Microsoft Microsoft Teams is an electron app. I'm not actually sure about that. I could be just pulling that out of my ass. But there's, you know, there's just a ton of these things that you probably use that are usually Windows programs that are actually electron apps. And the hilarious thing is that a lot of times even on Windows, they're electron apps. So they're not actually native apps. They're either. So that's what electron is. So Tyler, what do you, what's your position on the whole electron thing? Do you think they're good? Do you think they're bad? See, that's a tough, it's a tough question to say, like, electron apps are ad because in a lot of the cases, if the app wasn't electron, there's a good chance that it wouldn't, wouldn't exist just because of the development power that needs to go into it to make it. I mean, like as again, from a user's perspective, from what I hear about electron, it sounds like electron makes it very easy to implement a web app. Like discord is most of everything that is doing is over the like most primarily web based applications are easier to implement in electron. However, I wish that most developers and companies would not like elect not to use electron and actually develop a good application because if we're going to be honest, electron is essentially a easy way to implement your application. It you all you essentially have to do is wrap your website or your web app in electron and it's going to just work. Except for on the user side because electron apps perform like shit. They are really aggressively bloated like even we don't even have to argue about what does bloated mean from pretty much every side of the like however you define bloated. It's bloated. It uses more Ram takes up more more space. It just in general that you're going because it's essentially a web as far as I know, electron is essentially trying to emulate a browser. That's essentially what electron does and so you're going to have functionality built into electron that the app doesn't take use of doesn't need. So I don't know like electron from a development side might be good because you can simply not have to do a lot of the development work to get it functioning and send it out to people and have it at the very least open and function. I'll be not well, but it will still function. Um, I think that's easier from a developer side, but my user side spend the time to develop the application please. Okay, so I'm like I'm right there with you. I I'm of the camp of that if electron didn't exist, there would be a much bigger problem on Linux in terms of software like there'd be a lot of stuff here that we just wouldn't have. We wouldn't have discord you. So you'd have to use the web app if like in actually in the browser. If you want slack, you'd have to use it in the browser. So some people would say that that's better. Like some people would say that was just it would just use a web tab like a tab in a browser. Just use Firefox. You'll be fine. Personally, I like things that at least appear to be a native client. Like I'd prefer to have like even if it's electron I would prefer to have discord installed on my system even though it's electron I'd prefer to have it actually look like a native application. That I can launch from Rofi and move along my day. The thing is, is that you're right. They do often perform that and it's not that they're bloated in terms of features or anything like that. It's that they're based on chromium and chrome. I the nature of being, you know, chrome takes up a lot of memory against its takes up a lot of memory. But this is not a even a chrome problem. Firefox takes up a crap load of memory. It's a it's a nature of being a web browser. And because you're basically running a web browser when you're running electronic up, you're going to find that it takes up a lot of memory. So for example, I get to remember I have a ton of stuff open right now. So right now I'm using 13 gigabytes of RAM like right now and get granted that's part of that's going to be OBS, but it's just an it's an insane amount of RAM and part of that's going to be because I have a discord call open and using electron. I'm trying to think. Do I have any other? Oh, you and I do have other electron apps open right now. I have to do is to open right now and that's an electron app. So I have to elect to electron opens to electron apps open on my system right now. The thing is, is that it doesn't bother me near bother me nearly as much as other people like I can afford in terms of RAM costs to have my computer use 13 gigabytes of RAM all the time and it's fine because I have 64 gigabytes of RAM and I have RAM despair as they say, but if you're on like a laptop that has four gigabytes of RAM, you're screwed that things got going to perform worth of damn and that's where the electron argument kind of falls off in that it works fine. If you're Dylan and you have access to all this hardware, you know, or if you're me and you have 64 gigabytes of RAM, you know, but most people don't and most people are running 8 gigabytes. I think I think if you look on this team survey, the vast majority of people run 8 gigabytes, 16 gigabytes is slowly becoming more popular, but very people have more than that. And if you're dedicating 2 gigabytes of RAM to run your electron apps, it could be a definite problem. If you also want to have this court open while you're gaining or anything like that. You know, RAM is precious. And if you only have 8 gigabytes of despair and go around, the thing is, though, is that despite that, despite the fact that you have to deal with the bad performance, I'd still rather it exists than it not exist. And if you know, because the number of people, I mean, yes, Linux is still not mainstream. It still doesn't have a ton of, you know, market share. But the number of people who have been able to switch to Linux because electron exists is at least somewhat significant because they can say, well, you want to I really need Slack. Like a lot of companies just use Slack all the time. It's their method of communication. And for whatever reason, they don't want to have it in the browser. They want to have an application and having that available on Linux has enabled them to switch to Linux where otherwise they may not have done been able to do so, right? So I think it's important that it does exist. What I'm not, what I'm surprised at is that it's been around for a long time and it's developed by very large corporations. You know, like a lot of people contribute to it. What I'm very much surprised at is that they haven't fixed it. Like how is it that this thing is 10 years old or however long, however old it is and they haven't put the effort into at least make it somewhat good. Like it doesn't have to be perfect. Like somewhat good. Like they cut the RAM usage in 50 by 50%. Everyone's happy. Like everybody would dance in the freaking streets if they cut it by 50% and it would be great. Like people would stop badmouthing, you know, electron or most people would start badmouthing. It's the same thing with snaps, right? If Canonical cut the boot time of snaps that cold launch by 50%, the vast majority of people who complain about snaps now would stop complaining. Whether or not they'd use snaps or not, I don't know. But they'd stop complaining about it. It would stop being a news item, you know, all the time, like snaps are slow. It's the same thing in this situation, right? If they cut that memory usage in half, you know, the vast majority of people would have nothing to complain about in terms of electron because that's the thing that people complain about. But see, that's the problem. If they cut, if they cut that RAM usage in half, well, they're going to, it's really hard to do that because it's electron is essentially a browser. Like and for electron to support most of the things that it does support, the web apps that it does support, it has to be a browser. Like it has to function as a browser. And as we all know, browsers eat RAM. They just do. And actually, I think it was Jimmy Wills posted a comment talking about how like making a good application is really hard to do cross-platform. And that is the idea behind electron. A developer does not have to work on, you know, making an application in Windows and then ordering that application over to Linux, BSD, every operating system underneath the sun. You don't have to do that. You just make it once as a web app. And then it works not only in the browser. It works as a dedicated app in Windows, Linux, everything. But I don't know that that's a good thing for a developer, but it's not a good thing as a user. As a user, that means every single one of your applications that is electron-based, you're essentially running another instance of a browser. And so I think that's kind of the things. It's one of those things that people complain about quite a bit is we have development practices that are requiring users to essentially buy beefed up machines. You essentially, in this day and age, if you want to have a machine that will run 90% of the applications available, you need to buy a new machine or buy a machine or buy parts for your machine that will upgrade it so that you can do that. And it's all unnecessary if developers would make the effort to make those native applications on each system. I mean, as a user, I agree because it's not me doing the development, right? It's perfectly fine for you and me to sit here and say, well, if you guys weren't such lazy bastards all the time, you could be developing all these apps for every single platform out there. Why are you so lazy? Get off your ass, you know? But honestly, we know that that's not the case. They would much rather spend their development time on new features and stuff like that than over all the time having to support each and every version of their application. It's much easier for them to have this thing that allows them to create it and just push it out for every single platform. And even as a user, I think that that, for the most part, is a good thing because it does allow them to spend their development time on things that really matter. Like the main features, the... But I mean, I understand, obviously, I understand where you're coming from and I do agree partially. The thing that I was talking about earlier is making it better. But maybe... And this is something we've talked about before is that they should make browsers better. The thing is, Tyler, as you talked about all the forcing people to have another instance of a browser, that only matters because browsers take up a lot of memory. If browsers didn't take up a lot of memory, nobody would care. The vast majority of people, your mother probably has never opened up a task manager in her life and maybe once or something like that. She absolutely had to, right? My mom's exactly the same way. Maybe she accidentally did it once. So they don't know that Firefox... Like if I opened up Beep High Top right now and looked at the number of processes that Firefox is taking up, it's probably like 80 or 100. Like it's nuts. Every single instance, every tab creates its own process, everything. It doesn't bother me because, again, a ton of memory. But if you're really slow on the memory, of course, that's going to bother you. But it's not going to bother you that there's a ton of processes. It's just because it's the effect of there being a ton of processes of your shit slow. It makes everything slow. And that's the user-facing problem that we have is that when something takes up a lot of memory and you don't have a lot of memory to spare, you're probably going to experience bad performance. If they fix the performance, whether it's from a browser perspective, like they've done it before. Like they've made it so browsers created... Like there was a big push about five years ago to make Chrome better on battery. And the thing that causes Chrome to eat up so much battery is that it uses a lot of memory. Running memory turns out sucks your battery dry. So five years ago or so, they cut the amount of memory that Chrome uses by a significant amount. But since then... And Firefox followed at the same time. But since then, people have stopped caring about that so much because they have bigger batteries or whatever. So Chrome has started and everyone else because everything is based on Chrome has started to not care about that so much and it's crept right back up to where it was before they made the changes. So they can make it so that their browsers use less RAM. Like it is possible. And they can do that without like removing features. Like it's possible to do. It's just they have to have the will to do it and that's where the problem comes. Like they don't seem to care so much that their browser takes up so much memory as long as the browser is fast. The easier solution for them is just to say, hey, if your browser is slow, go buy a new computer that has more memory in it. That's the... It's easier for them because it puts the honest on the user to increase their performance rather than the developer. And that's the problem. That's the whole issue with Electron is that it's a good idea. I think that I'm happy that it exists but the effort to make it and to improve it, whether it's on the Chromium side or the Electron Foundation or whatever hell it is, they do something. The effort to improve it just doesn't seem to be there and that's disappointing. I completely agree. Completely. Sadly enough, I think it's very odd but true that for Electron to improve, I don't think necessarily there's something that clearly needs to be fixed about Electron itself. It's if browsers improved, Electron by nature would improve itself. And I don't know that Electron itself can do something special saucy enough end up improving over browsers. I don't think Electron can do something where it's the applications that are made using Electron are going to run faster than they would in the browser. That is a big task, a big undertaking. And they're also like, this is something to do with browsers and Electron. There has to be an incentive for the developers making the browsers, making Electron to do that. And I because the general consensus is if something is not working for you or you're using too much RAM buy more RAM. That's the mindset that we're currently in. The only thing I was going to say to finish that off is pretty much I think the only incentive that would push developers towards fixing this issue is RAM prices to just skyrocket. That is one way that it would work but I don't think that they care because RAM a couple years ago was insanely expensive like even way more than it is now and it didn't change anything. So I don't think that they care. The only, I think the only incentive that could be offered that would get the people who would be responsible for fixing the browser and therefore Electron to actually do this is the developers who develop their apps for Electron. So if you're Slack, if you're Discord or whatever those developers have the power to raise a ruckus with the people who are behind Electron and the browsers to actually make things better. If their development experience their experience in developing their applications is poor and their users are complaining to them maybe that then would push them to complain to the browser and stuff like that. It doesn't seem to be happening though. Like they're the ones they don't seem to care either. Like you get on the Discord forums and tell them that their app is slow because it's using Electron. They don't give a damn. They don't care at all because they're much more interesting figuring out new ways to push $5 Nitro subscriptions. You know? Like that's the only thing Discord cares about is how many subscribers can they show their $5 subscription to? And let's just transition to that for a second. Don't ever buy a $5 Nitro subscription. Don't do that, okay? There are much better. Especially don't do that if you're doing it to support the creator of whose Discord you're on because we get nothing of that, right? If that's the reason why you're doing it take that $5 and give it to them on Patreon or PayPal or whatever. It's much better because they actually get something for that. If you're doing it because you want more emojis then do whatever you want with your $5. That's fine. At least then you're going to get something for it. Somebody's getting something for it because otherwise it's just Discord. Maybe because to hit a certain level like one person if they wanted to do it where we could do 1080p streaming on Discord. I believe you have to spend like 30 bucks a month. You'd have to do multiple $5 Nitros up to that certain level. It's ridiculous. I really want 1080p streaming too but it's just it's not there yet. Anyways, that was a complete tangent but it's still kind of the point is that the developers behind things like Discord they don't care that Electron is bad just because they... That it's performance eating. They're like, well, and it seems like a lot of devs have the same kind of mindset as Dylan. Luckily Dylan popped in here and he said, Ram's so cheap. You might as well buy more. That's pretty much the sentiment for everyone especially in the Electron space is if you're having problems just upgrade Ram. Dylan and I had this conversation the other day in Discord where just because $99 is cheap for you like for a lot of people, $99 is like half their paycheck. Like that's not cheap for a lot of people. So like I would love to say like I could spend 99 bucks. Sure, I could do it but I don't want to. But some people even don't have that kind of disposable income but maybe those people aren't... Maybe those people don't even care. Like, you know, I don't know. You have a good point. It's one of those things where in your case, it might make sense to just buy more Ram but I feel like there needs to be a push in the development space where decent excuses for not making something more performant shouldn't be made even though you have... Oops, sorry, I forgot the microphone. Even though you have a valid argument in that Ram's not that expensive, go buy more. That shouldn't be an excuse to not make something more performant when you can. And kind of that goes with my argument of with some things it makes sense to use Electron for that cross platform push so everyone can access your program on any platform. It makes sense to do it that way but when you have the capability you have the development power to do that like Discord. I mean, if we're going to be honest Discord can definitely afford the development manpower to make a, not proprietary but it's going to be proprietary anyway but a native application. They have the power to do that. It's yeah, it's not economic. Yeah, you're going to have to spend some downtime some of your development power not working on new features like let's be honest everybody uses Discord we could give a flying fuck about a new freaking feature. There's already too many in Discord. Just spend the development power on it. I know that there are valid excuses valid arguments for not doing it but you would definitely get a more good experience for most people. Even somebody like me I'm not quite as crazy with you as Ram. I don't have 64 gigs. I have 32 gigs. That is still upseemly more than I need like that's plenty of Ram but I would still like it if the Discord app didn't eat up a shitload of that Ram it would just it would be better. It's not a problem. It's not so it's a minor gripe I have. If you could improve it you can afford to you should at least that's my opinion. Yeah, I excuse me. I think that one of the things like the problem around this whole thing is that it gives a lot trying to bad name despite it being a good idea despite it being something that everybody uses nobody uses an electronic app and thinks well this is a fantastic perfect experience. You know, especially if you're technological enough to know you know what's kind of going on and you know you pay attention to your system monitor you'll have the even if you have a lot enough Ram you're still going to you know kind of know that there are things about this application that could potentially be better if you know they just put a little bit of you know effort into it. I mean I just got to remember as we said at the beginning of this conversation neither Tyler or I are developers. So we very often when we talk about these conversations these topics we can't adequately put ourselves in the place of actually being a developer and know that well you know maybe they spend all the time actually doing important work. I'm sure they actually do. I know we bet you about the you know tons of new features and you know them pushing their subscription service or whatever but I'm sure that the developers behind Discord do spend time on things that are actually important and saying well you guys should you know set that aside and make this thing better. I mean some of that I still think is true but we don't want to say well you know obviously they're just sitting around collecting a paycheck that's probably not true. You know so it is hard from a user's perspective who has at least some kind of technical knowledge over how Electron acts and how it could potentially be better to put yourself in the place of a developer who makes an Electron app and then puts it out into you know to their audience and then doesn't seem to care that it does these things that are obviously a sub par you know so I don't know it's just one of those things and I don't like I would bet you that outside of this audience like outside of the people that we're talking to most people don't care like they just don't like if they're on Linux they download Discord and as long as it runs okay you know they're fine you know they probably have enough RAM it may be a little slow they might notice that every once in a while but probably not because I mean for the vast majority people who just use Discord they're probably just chatting and you're not gonna I mean if you're just if you're just text chatting back and forth with a bunch of people it's not going to you know you're not gonna notice a bad experience probably it's only when you get into doing other things that it might affect it right so it's it's it's most people also sorry to cut you off fine it can definitely be even more confusing for people who just come over from Windows because Windows eats up a lot more RAM out of the gate Linux does and you know I'm taking a gigabyte of RAM like you open up Windows it's like four gigabytes of RAM like what nowadays it's like six it'll start off at just eating up six gigs of RAM it's ridiculous but for somebody who's coming over from Windows to Linux when all of that Windows overhead is gone you're running an electron app that is an electron app on Windows anyway oh my system is really fast yeah exactly I've been trying to get my mom to switch to Linux she's having so many performance problems like you'd be so much happier on Linux but she doesn't want to do it all right moving on to the thingy of the week so we call this section the thingy of the week because well for two reasons one it it was funny to begin with I mean I don't know that it's funny more but it's definitely something it's just kind of stuck but also because we were much too lazy to come up with an actual name for the section so Tyler what is your thingy of the week mine is Helix which is described as a post modern text editor excuse me and it's really nice I I've seen I've talked with someone somebody else today who uses it I believe I was talking with Felix over on Discord about it but it's it's got multiple selection support tree center integration it's got code code completion language server support it's built in Rust so no electron no VIM script no JavaScript so it's nice and it has a lot of modern insane built-in features like fuzzy finder the symbols project wide search it's got a lot of stuff I'm basically just reading off the main website right now but I'm going to be checking it out live like in-depth trying to use it see how well it works for me because I've been looking for a text editor that has a lot of the features like Neo VIM or just a heavily customized version of VIM without needing to learn a whole bunch of new shit customize it and build it up from the ground myself and this seems like a really it seems like it's a really good suit for me personally so I'm going to be live streaming and checking it out later on so if it seems interesting to anybody else definitely come over for the stream I don't know I think it's going to be really good it seems very appealing that's why I threw it in here I figure there's probably like me quite a few of people who have just not heard about it and it at least looks very interesting so yeah that's my thing you have the week okay mine is something called blue Griffin all one word B L U E G R I F F O N and what this thing does is it allows you to edit websites and by edit websites I mean like it will literally load up all of the HTML and CSS in the top two directory of your website so that gets all of the like the theming images and everything there and then you can edit it and what you see is what you get at a style editor so you can add links you can add pictures you can add pages all the stuff in a like an actual like editors and you can move things around like you would in like a wizzy wig editor and it's it's really good and I've used it a couple times and it's just like I know I'm I'm I'm I know I'm a vim guy like I'm a big vim guy but this was an amazing experience editing this thing without having to edit a lick of HTML like there was no tags for like doing like a list item or a link or whatever I didn't have to do any hrefs or any of that stuff it was just you know type in the title of the episode and highlight it click the link button paste the link and it was done and that was so cool my biggest complaint about it my biggest complaint is that they put a hidden file in your home directory and it that wasn't bad enough the name of the file let me see if I can actually find this thing the name of the file is called dot disruptive space innovations dash sorrow and that's not even the full like name it's like truncated so the like the name of the the folder they put in there's like three or four words long it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of like I love your application but you got to stop that that's really really really really bad anyways the blue graph and it's good I do not know if it's open source or not so I can't speak to the license that is under I did enjoy using it I have a feeling that that folder in the home directory will probably keep me from keeping it on my computer because it just pisses me off but it's still really good so give that a try if you edit websites at all and you're lazy like me so that is it for this week coming up next week we're going to be talking about whose whose topic was today was this my topic or your topic you remember I think this was my topic but to be honest I am not sure I at this point I don't even I don't even know so next week we're going to be talking about are there too many distros so that should be fun okay I again I don't I don't know whose topic that is either so this whole going back and forth thing I don't I don't remember we just throw things in there it doesn't really it doesn't matter all right anyway so before I go I should take a moment thing with current patrons you can support me on patreon and patreon.com slash linux cast you can actually these are my current painters I like to thank them Robert Sid Devon Patrick Fred Traymer Maiglin Jackson tools TV so regular next Eric same old KB tgb Keith Andy Uncle Bonehead try devil Mitchell J Doug carpeted Jamie shown Odin Marnie Ross Eduardo art center Elliott Merrick Kamdash really Peter a Crucible dark binnis X primus p.m. Thanks everybody for watching we record this live every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern time around this time so if you want to join us live and join in the chat which we most ignore sadly but you can do so at the Linux cast dot com excuse me youtube.com slash Linux cast we will see you next week adios people and I he's the red in the face man he's right in the face