 Hey everybody, welcome to Linuxcast. I'm your host Matthew Weber. I'm joined by Martin Burke. How are you doing, Martin? Doing well. Thank you, Matt. How's things on your side of the world? Well, I'll tell you this. There's about a foot and a half of snow beside my door. I guess so much snow. I don't need any more. I'm done with winter. I'm just saying that right now. I'm just done with it. I don't want to see any more snow until like December-ish. Some more around Christmas. And then I'm just done with it. I'm seriously, it's so cold here. I'm just done. Do you guys, I don't even know, does spring get snow? I mean, like a lot of snow. I know, like, I know, like, Scott can get snow, but... Yeah, I think we've had about snow, about five or six times. Usually to be further rain washes away, but we don't get anything major. It depends where you live in Britain, but yeah, I think around here we've got about, I'd say about three inches, if that. Okay. Well, at least you get a little bit of winter. So you don't have a foot and a half outside. All right. So what have you been doing on Linux this week, Martin? Right. I've upgraded my monitor to 4k, but unfortunately I was having audio problems with the HDMI. So I decided just to try a newer Linux distro. So I tried out Geruda Linux. I tried out the KDE Dragonize version. So it's a rolling distribution based on... Oh, I'm quite impressed, actually. Really good looking distro, obviously, out with KDE, but yeah, it's quite nice. I've got to give it a bit more trial. I've heard Jill Butte booting it with Mint anyway, so dive back into it and the weekend. We've got a bit more time, but yeah, it looks all right. And suddenly it didn't solve my sound issues. So I'm guessing it's a BIOS problem because I've moved my main rigging here and there. So I'll have to go through and see exactly who the culprit is. How about yourself? What have you been up to? I've kind of had a really busy week in terms of Linux. So I I mean, some of this was last week, but I've been messing around a little bit back in i3. So I've been looking at different status bars, and I made a video on Bubblebee status, and that's been kind of fun to play around with. It's just a status bar. It's neat. It's kind of noob user friendly, I would say. It's not really anything. I mean, you can get into the code and stuff and tweak it a bit, but it's really meant for people who are just want a bar that just has a bunch of themes with it, and you don't have to do anything to it. So I've been messing around with that. And yesterday I did a video. I feel like I'm always pimping the YouTube channel, but I did the Rice in KDE to look like Mac OS Big Sur. And once you install KDE on a distro that didn't have it before, KDE kind of takes over everything. So it like changes your GTK theme and your other window managers and stuff. And it's kind of a mess. So I've been thinking about hopping again, and I really had a good experience with MX Linux. So I'm thinking about giving MX Linux a try now. Whether or not I would stay there because, you know, there you are, it'd be just gone. And that would make me astonishingly sad. Probably completely miserable, but I don't know. I'm thinking about it. We'll see. Yeah. I saw your MX Linux pop-up. I thought, all right, let's see where he's got a slighting Linux, MX Linux then. But yeah, he's impressed. Yeah, I really liked it. That was the first one that I had started on before. But yeah, it's nice little distro. I don't mind. I don't care for Ubuntu because they kind of shove snaps in your face. But I don't know. We'll see if that happens in the next week or so. My setup works really well right now, other than random KDE stuff popping up that I don't know if I really want to switch away from it. But my ADD will probably get the better of me and, you know, eventually hop. The last thing I want to talk about is that because, as you know, my audio setup is very complicated. I got the Scarlet Solo to do the mic and the input and stuff. And it took me weeks to get that fixed, you know, as you know. But I decided to make my setup a little bit more complicated and I got a DAC. So that has been a little bit of an experience, but mostly it's been fairly good. It was just mostly plug and play. It's just a matter of making sure that each application knows that the input comes from the Scarlet Solo and the output goes to the DAC. It's been a little crazy, but not too bad. I don't know. Sounds good though. I mean, sounds fantastic. All right. So, contact info. If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so at the Linuxcast on Twitter. I'm at MTWB. Martin is Martin Twitter. You can find all these links and stuff in the show notes, whether that be on the podcast or on the video. You can also subscribe at thelinuxcast.org, which transfers you over to our anchor page where you'll find all the links to Spotify and iTunes and all that stuff. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube at youtube.com slash linuxcast. And you can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank our very first Patreon, Devin or maybe Davon. I'm not going to try to pronounce his last name. It's not something I could be able to do. And finally, you can also follow us on Facebook at facebook.com slash linuxcast. All right. So, each and every week, Martin and I each select one news item that we would talk just briefly about. So, Martin, your news item for this week. Right. So, I kept my news item from last week because it didn't record. So, Linux 5.11. It was out yesterday. But my news was Linus has been up to his old tricks, branding the Super Bowl as a juiced-up version of the kids' egg and spoon race, while expressing his inability to wrap his head around the rules despite being in the US for over two decades. Oh, and this is disastrous, branding the taken spoon. I mean, it's obviously incorrect as everyone knows that it's a mass advertising circus with a bit of futuristic ruby added in all seriousness, though. There's a fair few improvements on 5.11. I haven't had the chance to go through them all, but there's like some, I think there's some guitar hero things. You can start to run Linux on the Ouija console that came out a while ago that was a crowd-funded project. I know there's a couple of tweaks, I believe, to give you 5% running various different processes. So, it could look good. So, hopefully I'll be able to drop a bit more information even though once everything comes a bit more clear and I've had time to swat up on it. But yeah, all good. 5.11 out yesterday. Supposedly there's some very interesting gaming stuff that's in the kernel this time to get to because a lot of the games now come with that DRM anti-cheat stuff. Supposedly there's some stuff in the kernel now that will allow developers or whatever, specifically wine developers to work towards getting by that kind of stuff so that you can actually play more and more games on Linux. That should be pretty fun. Brilliant. Another last update. It did various different able to use different console gamepads and everything. So, it looks like there seems to be concentrated a little bit more on that. But yeah, why not? I'm sure there's plenty of people out there, myself included, that literally has got a Windows machine. It's just primarily a Roblox machine. So, I mean, that's all that mine's really used for. But yeah, I'll dig a bit deeper into that. Well, it's going to be loads and loads. But yeah, I'll dig into that. How about yourself? What news you got? All right. So, Martin Wimpris, affectionately known as Wimpy, has been leading the Ubuntu desktop team for, like, I think about two years now, maybe three. And he announced this last week that he's actually leaving Ubuntu. So, that's a little bit of sad news. The reason why I kind of put this on there is just because it seems that Canonical is going through a little bit of a problem retaining the desktop guy. I don't know if there's anything nefarious or going on here. Maybe he's just found a better opportunity somewhere else. But it just seems like there's a little bit of instability in terms of the desktop leading. It's a little worrying because, as we all know, Canonical makes most of their money and stuff by providing Ubuntu to servers and companies and stuff. So, the desktop's kind of always fallen a little bit by the wayside. And we're a little worrying that maybe the leadership there won't continue to focus so much on the desktop as they have been in the past. I mean, it's one of those chicken and egg, isn't it? I mean, if you're happy and comfortable as a Linux user at work, you might just think, oh, I'll give you a spin at home, save spending any money, or save transferring OSes. I mean, there's nothing worse sometimes if you're on a different OS that you're using constantly and you are a PC user at home. I mean, to be fair, I'm starting to forget a number of my shortcuts for the Windows desktop. But yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, I'd saw that bit of news as well that he was leaving. I've heard a couple of podcasts and things with him on there. Good guy, yeah. Shame about that. But onwards and upwards, that's the way to look at it. Yeah. All right, so let's jump into our main topic. Now, originally, I was going to have a go at Linux Mint. And just for fun. But I decided to kind of broaden it out a little bit, because one of the things that we talk a little bit about in the Linux community is that fragmentation is a real issue. So there's a whole bunch of developers. I mean, the open source community is actually really large. I mean, for the most part, I mean, not everyone's working on distros or working on servers and applications and stuff. But it seems that for a lot of the time, we've actually spent a lot of times just creating more and more derivatives of things that have existed before. So we're always forking stuff because whether it's because we just want complete control of developers or we don't agree on what direction the app is taking. So we just take it for our own, whatever. And we see this a lot with Linux distributions. Specifically, I mean, we have Debian, which is like the daddy of Linux. And it's swanned Ubuntu and it has several other derivatives, Devuan and several others. Ubuntu itself has its own derivatives, mate and tons of not mate, but mint and a whole bunch of others. Arch is the same way. We have Arch and we have Manjaro and Endeavor and Arch Labs and tons and tons. Fedora is the same way. OpenSUSE, I believe, has a few forks of it. So I mean, we just have all of these derivatives. And I don't want to be the Linux guy who says, you know, choice is bad, you know, because I love being able to have all these choices to choose where I'm going to hop next. But alternatively, I feel a lot of the time it's just developers putting their resources and time into things that necessarily maybe shouldn't exist or aren't necessarily exist for good reasons. So I guess, what are your thoughts on Linux derivatives, Martin? Just trying to think to be truthful. I mean, yeah, more choice is a better for everyone. I mean, we've all installed a distribution or something like that. And just thought, why is somebody, I mean, obviously, they've probably put the heart and soul into it. But there's a number of distros out there that just seem pointless. There isn't like a twist or something special. I mean, you've got your various different categories. If you want Mac OS type, you can go to that. If you want to do it the hard way, you can do Arch. If you want it nice and easy, you want Linux Mint. I mean, more choice is obviously best for everyone. But yeah, I mean, the water does get a bit muddy. And I suppose for anyone new coming in, it's just you could get swallowed up by the amount of choice, essentially, whether there should just literally be some sort of Linux adventure type game, where you click start here are used to Windows, are used to Mac, and just click through. And then it'll say, well, here's a top five that we could quite happily recommend to you that would fit in ideally. I mean, then again, there's good things because you might will have a random distro that way down a distro watch that has got some kooky little things in it that maybe other bigger ones do borrow from. So it's a hard one. I mean, at the end of the day, there's hundreds and hundreds to choose from. I mean, you've only got to look at the amount of different flavors, types that sit in the top 50. I mean, yeah, more choice is better. But I do think that sometimes it does appear that we seem to be drowning in these new distros. Yeah. And there's no way to stop it, right? I mean, the developers are going to just going to do what they're going to do. It just feels kind of, I mean, it just feels like sometimes, like, for example, I mean, I know I pick on Linux Mint, so I use Linux Mint after making that Linux Mint is useless video. And I actually really enjoyed Cinnamon. So Cinnamon has a reason, good reason to exist. It's like the modern version of Maté or Genome 2 or something, you know, it has a lot of modern quirks, it's very easy on the eyes. It's very easy to use. So Cinnamon itself has a reason to exist. It's just that, you know, the, you know, the things beyond that, so like they basically just took a boon to and then they've ripped up the snaps capability of it and put in FlatHack and then made it Cinnamon. And that's basically what the focus of Linux Mint has become. And maybe that's a good enough reason for Linux Mint to exist. It just feels like they're also always in this kind of tug of war with canonical over, you know, whether or not, you know, certain things should be the way they are, you know, and stuff. And in Linux Mint, you know, specifically, it just feels always felt to me like they should focus on the Debian edition. But I mean, there are other examples. So like Manjaro has a lot of quirkiness to it because it is an ArchBase distro, but it's not a traditional ArchBase distro in that it isn't truly rolling. I mean, it's rolling in that it's a delayed rolling release. It's like, you know, like a month behind or something. And usually, their updates are all released all at the same time. So like I have updates come in like every Friday, whereas ArchBase comes in like every minute, you know, so I mean, they all have a lot of these have quirks, but I think actually the best example of a distribution that I just find completely unreasonably there for whatever reason is solace, I just did a review on solace and I don't understand the purpose of solace existing. It doesn't have good support for its own repos. So I mean, like if you want to install third party stuff, it's kind of hacky. I mean, the only really way to get good software and solace is to use Snap, in which case, why are you using it? Because I mean, then you just use Ubuntu and you don't have to deal with any of the slow updates and stuff like that that you have to put up with. And it just doesn't seem like there's a good reason for it to exist. I mean, other than the developers want it to, you know, it doesn't serve a purpose in the Linux community. And I know a lot of people will use solace and, you know, it has a lot of like grassroots support from people who really like the people who started it. And that's fine. I suppose it just feels like maybe there needs to be a point. I guess my point is that if you're going to develop a Linux distribution that there should be a substantive difference that you can put forth to what you're basing it on. So like if you're basing your distribution on Ubuntu, you know, be like meant and just focus on Flatpak. That's a good that's a good difference that I didn't really see when I first before I used it, you know, because Flatpaks are different. It's a different choice and it allows you allow someone to use an Ubuntu based, you know, distribution without having to have snaps shoved in their face, you know. Or if you're I guess you're using Manjar or you're you want to use Arch, but you don't want the bugs that always come along with it, you know, whatever. It's just that I feel like there has to be something that you're doing at least a little bit different. Otherwise, you're just wasting your development time on something that, you know, whatever. That's just my thoughts. Yeah, I think, like you say, it's scattered. I mean, obviously you've got one man bands that have put together a distro and basically just pretty took with various wallpapers and bits like that. I mean, like that Garuda Linux and they're already installed. Obviously it was a GUI install of Arch, which was pleasant. And then it gave me the option to get off the top of that my head, but gave you the normal welcome screen. And then I could add additional or programs to it. And it was a really enjoyable experience. I mean, if I didn't know anything, obviously it wouldn't be so enjoyable, but it was nice to actually have a welcome screen that go into a store, right? I don't know, the audacity, download Skype, or do VLC. It roughly guided, right, what graphical, what games I could do, the Steam, Lutris, Play on Linux, all things like that, different repositories off the back of that. I mean, by the time I'd finished, I mean, it was downloading about four gig, but that was really quite nice, just to save scooting about. And I mean, bringing it back to Linux Mint. I mean, I believe, I mean, it's up there for a reason. I mean, I really don't know why it isn't number one, because straight out of the box, you've got so many packages available to you. I mean, as soon as you log in, you've got Redshift for backing up your system images, you've got Warpinator for transferring to another PC, Running Warpinator, you've got the web apps, Container Eyes programs, won't talk about hypnotics. Straight off the gauge, you've got a USB writer. So if you don't like it, you can download an ISO straight away and just burn yourself another one, the amount of bags of rubbish of downloading and have to download a decent USB writer to get rid of the thing is amazing. But I do, I mean, it's horses for courses, isn't it? Everyone's got the favourite, oh, well, you should use this or you should use that. But I mean, it just, it all brings down to comfort. I mean, you're obviously comfortable at Archer, installing it, carry on doing it the hard way from my point of view. But what I want is just to have a package it downloads. I mean, I won't call it bloat because they've got to install it with maybe a couple of readers, VLC, JPEG viewer, bits and pieces. It's just whatever you feel happy with. I mean, I've tried out, oh God, was it Ubuntu Studio? And that was brilliant. Everything you could ever want for audio and video was built into it. So if you're on that side of the spectrum, audio, video enthusiasts or whatnot, I mean, there you go, you've got a distro, just install it. And you don't, you won't be wanting to download anything else because you've got everything in one distro. I mean, if you want just something for your old, eight, nine year old laptop, you could do, well, MX Linux and Mint's fine on it, but you could go to Puppy OS or things like that. It just depends on what you're comfortable with with just finding that comfort blanket of knowing what you're looking for. I mean, if you're on to wanting to sick and tired of whatever operating system she's on, you obviously wouldn't chuck a Solus FreeBSD or anything like that. You would either give a Ubuntu or Mint. I'd like to think, I mean, everyone seems quite happy with Ubuntu, but it just depends what people's comfort is. I mean, if people want to start with bare bones, Debian, they just do the plain vanilla Debian and build on to it. I mean, that's got, it's a bit of a nightmare to install, but you get your selection of your desktops and everything as you're installing it. But yeah, I think it just is unrambling there. It's just literally your comfort zone, but it's actually knowing what you are comfortable in, whether it's endless customisation with KDE or quite happy with Budgie. It all depends. I mean, you wouldn't want to give it a newbie KDE straight off the bat, but they'll probably progress to something like that. They'll all find their own distro that does suit them. But I think we just drowned in in choice at the moment for anyone new to it. That's really what they, I guess what we need is, I mean, we're never going to stop the problem of having distros that are very niche, I guess. What we need is a good way of showing users, especially new users, what distros they should use. I mean, if you Google best distros for new users, you're always going to get the same answers. You're going to get mint. You're going to get Ubuntu. Those are probably the main ones. I mean, every once in a while, maybe you'll get Manjaro or whatever. At the end, I mean, and those are good articles to allow those blogs or whatever to get views and stuff, but you get along to the question of who made them the expert, right? So, I mean, you really don't know. I mean, how do you know that they know what they're talking about? So, plus you have to, I mean, if you're coming from Windows to Linux, you have to be willing to do the research on what, you know, that transition is going to mean for you. I mean, and it can't just be, you know, I went to OMG Ubuntu, so Ubuntu is the best choice. So, I mean, the challenge is finding, I guess, new Linux users that are interested in going that extra little bit to do the research and saying, you know, this is the amount of work that I'm willing to do. This is, you know, these are the applications that I need. So, I mean, it's just, you know, it's just, it's one of those things that you think about, because, you know, it's, there's just so many distros out there, and like, prior to using MX Linux, the only place I'd ever seen it was at the top of distro was, and like, I was like, why is it always at the top? And I used it, and it's really good. And it does add, it adds a lot. It's one of those examples of things that they've taken Debian, and they've made it better. And I think of, I think if we always saw, you know, the derivatives of stuff of the main distros do that, they always take the mothership and then somehow improve it, somehow make it useful for our surf, like Ubuntu Studio is a good example, because they've taken, you know, and maybe Canonical has done it, but somebody has taken Ubuntu and said, you know, we're going to take this and make it extremely focused on being really good for video and audio production. That is a good use of a derivative. It's when you get to a derivative that's, you know, we're just going to, we just don't like Ubuntu, so we're going to run our own, you know, distro, you know, just so that we can have control over it. That's when I get to that, you know, having a bit of a problem with things, but it's just one of those things, right? So, I don't know. It's one of those big topics that's going to come up, you know, time and time again. How do you fix fragmentation on Linux? And I think that if you ask an Ubuntu guy, their solution to fragmentation on Linux is going to be snaps, right? So the biggest fragmentation on Linux is always package management. And because, I mean, Ubuntu has apt and, you know, Arch has Pacman and the AUR and, you know, OpenSuicide has Zipper and Fedora has DNF and it's just over on and on and on. And it's one, I mean, that's the biggest hurdle users have moving from one district to another is because the applications are all probably all available, but you have to learn how to install them. So canonical's answer to that is going to be snaps, Fedora and Red Hat, their answer is going to be flat hub and flat packs. You know, it's just one of those solutions and there's not really that maybe one of those are the solution for the fragmentation on the package management side, but there's not really a solution for fragmentation on, you know, the distribution side because there's just always going to be that abundance of choice. I think we beat that horse to death is what we did. I don't know if there's anything more to say about that one. All right, so let's go ahead and just move past the big topic and move into our apps of the week. So Martin, your app of the week. Right, it's an app called Haruna. So it's a QT client for MPV linked below to the GitHub page. It also might be in your software center. It wasn't mine on Mint, but it can be found in the AUR or installed as a flat pack. So it's basically a usual MPV player. You can copy and paste YouTube addresses. So it supports YouTube DL, which allows playing online video from over a thousand sites. I just couldn't believe how many sites it used. I've never actually used YouTube DL, but the amount of sites that you can copy and paste into I'm guessing YouTube DL obviously, but Haruna, whether it's BBC and obviously copy YouTube addresses in and watch YouTube videos with no ad breaks. That's my pick. Looks cool. All right, so I'm going to be bringing you surprise surprise a terminal based application called Pulse Mixer. So my continued quest to make my setup, my audio setup as complicated as possible. I found an application called Pulse Mixer. Basically what this is is a terminal version of PAVU control. And basically I've just bound this to a key binding and it allows me to just to change volume. I mean, you can change source and stuff in it too, but it's not, you know, whatever. Basically, I just wanted to weigh because for whatever reason, when I plugged in my DAC, I had it automatically sets the volume at 100%. And the only, and it doesn't respond to my media keys on my keyboard for whatever reason, like it will change the volume up and down, but it always stays at 100%. So I wanted an application where I could just quickly get into the key binding and just use the mouse or use the use the VIM keys in order to change volumes up and down so that I don't have to actually go through and have my ears blown out by 100% volume. The DAC itself does have a volume control on the front of it, but sometimes I'm just much too lazy to reach the, I don't know, five inches away that it would take to get to the volume control. So it's much easier just to do a key binding away. And it's so much easier. So that's my pick. It's on GitHub. I will find a link before I put the show notes up. So that's it. Okay, so I think that that's it, right, Martin? Anything else to say today? No, I wasn't all ready for a Linux mint off to be truthful, but you let me down. I didn't want to pick on Linux mint. I was like, because after using it, it was good. I like cinnamon a lot. I think that cinnamon Linux mint go hand in hand so that my original argument that Linux mint doesn't need to exist is is not valid because cinnamon is good. Like there's a good reason for cinnamon to exist. That's the reason why I think that you know, Linux mint is actually better than what I originally thought it was. I still wish that they would focus on the Debian edition just because I want less support for canonical. I want fewer Ubuntu distribution derivatives and more Debian based derivatives just because it's not canonical, a huge corporation and I'd much rather have a community based thing. I also think that Linux mint eventually would be happier to have a little bit more control over what they get not only from downstream, but what they have to send back upstream. It just makes more sense because Debian focuses mostly on FlapX as well. It makes more sense to me than always being in this constant fight with canonical over snaps and trying to figure out who's supposed to package Chromium and all this nonsense. I am sorry that we didn't get into the fight that you were looking for. So sorry. Make sure you subscribe youtube.com slash linuxcast.org and our next topic is file backup. We're going to talk about backing up your files, where you should do it, how you should do it, all that kind of stuff. That's Martin's topic so that will be next week. Thanks for watching. Stay safe. See you later guys.