 of it. Awesome. That was the first thing. Yeah. All right. I think we're live now. Everything looks like it's working, which is good. So welcome to everybody who's watching if there's anybody actually watching this. We are the Linux cast. We're gonna do a podcast here pretty soon. We're gonna talk about app images. If we could I'm gonna I'm saying some words here so people can hear my audio. Tyler, we want you say some words. Okay. This is me saying words. The burp does not count. Okay. Yeah, we just want to acknowledge that. So if we could get some yeas or nays on the audio minus the burp. Yeah. We'd appreciate it. So it's gonna keep happening. So I apologize for everyone that's like opposed to hearing a burp. I messed around with my audio on recommendation from Josh. So if anything's gone wrong, we can blame him. I gotta be honest. I I think it's genuinely on his side because I haven't noticed any issues. Like I don't I don't notice what he's talking about. Yeah. I can't change. I can't change the way I say S's. Okay. I just I can't okay. There's just no way there's that's gonna ever change. It's the way I say it's my accent. I'm from Michigan. We have an accent apparently. I don't hear it but then I'm sure if you're from Louisiana, you don't hear either. I can't do it. To be honest, I don't really hear your accent at all. Like that much at all either but they say again, I go some places and people are like you speak super country. If they think you if you speak super country, they haven't heard anybody from south of your country. That's true. That's true. Like oh shit. I've heard some people's accents where I'm like, man, I can barely understand you. It does get worse the further south you go. It's just true. I mean true. I mean, but I mean, you can't help it. People have accents. Hopefully no one else is having the same issue that I'm having but for some reason, YouTube does not want to load the live stream. It could also be a whole like YouTube issue on my side. And I will say also I am using Firefox. So with extensions. So wait, what extension did you have to like remove to fix your issues? Hopefully no one else has. Live streams were confined for me. I had to remove a link shortening extension that I was using. Okay. Okay. The old one that I was using stopped working went cropped for some reason. And then this new one started freezing Firefox. So I don't know what's going on there. Someone just said two dogs in chat and it made me think to like look. Carmen is not chewing on my sock. What a dick. Just like what? Yeah, there are people in the chat. So I'm assuming that the live stream is working just fine for most people. And it's just a you problem. Most people are saying that it won't have any issues. Well, I've reloaded the page like seven times, but it's all good. As long as everyone in chat is saying it's good, then that's awesome. As you know, me struggling with issues is nothing new. Right. Long as no one else has to deal with what I deal with, we are So are we just going to read Josh's block of text when we get to the main topic? That's probably what we'll have to do. We have a good point. I didn't even think about that. We have an invisible third host here today. He's he's at work, so he can't join us, but he want he had things to say about the main topic. So he put some stuff in the show notes. I didn't even I didn't even realize how I think of a block of text that is. It looks even worse in them because for whatever reason, the formatting went all blanked up. How about this? How about this? I will read off his block of text, but I'll do it in the same tone in the same level excitement that I would do a raid shadow legend sponsor. How does that sound when I'm I'm here for that? We'll read it off like it's a raid shadow sponsor read. What we should do is go through and just completely reverse his positions on everything. So if you like to happen, we just say he doesn't. If anything he says it's, you know, factoid, we completely turned the other direction. So it's completely wrong. And we're definitely reading all of them. The the spelling errors exactly as they have them. See, the problem is now, though, is even if I read it off exactly the same way that he said it, everyone's going to believe that I'm saying the opposite. So no one's going to have any idea what his actual opinion on app images is. Okay, this is going to be interesting. Yeah, be fun. All right. Can you summon pro bono? I'm sure he'll find this. He sent he tends to sniff out anybody who talks about ad images. And also for everybody, I guess in chat who doesn't know I'm sure Matt would have said this right like right before he got started. But this week we're not doing like the newsreads and everything will actually like be doing like a Q&A like little section with chat. So there's good questions. Q those things up. Don't put them in there now because they'll just float away and we won't see them. But right after the contact information, we'll do a question and answer session. We were supposed to do that every other week. We're really bad at it. Shit at least you guys get a podcast. Let's be real. Okay. All right, Tyler over there doesn't even remember how to make a video. I'm just saying pretty sure he's forgotten how to log into his YouTube account. That's probably why I can't get to the stream. Luckily it's not that bad yet. I will say there is content coming. But I haven't I was gonna live stream last night but we've heard started playing. I know I know I know it means nothing at this point. But I was going to stream last night but I figured it was really late and I was just playing Daisy and I figured. Probably most people don't want to watch it. And also I'm kind of working on like a cool like Daisy kind of like movie thing. So I've been working on that for a while. Hopefully people like that. Maybe I don't know. We'll find out. We look forward to the content that eventually comes. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead and get started here. Wait a minute. I gotta make sure I do. I do in fact have audacity up and running. So you ready to go? Yes, sir. Buddy, you ready to go? I don't know who the other one is. What's the one thing? Okay. Buddy's now got my sock in his mouth. Just a sock. Stop it. This is this one right here is Carmen. This is our like you could call a rescue but not really. Just some lady at the vet clinic that my sister works at couldn't keep her anymore. And so my sister thought, I mean, what's one more dog to our herd? And so we took her in. So now we've got like five six dogs. They're going to be they're going to be romping behind you the whole time. It's gonna be awesome. Oh yeah. Okay. At least at least she's not in standing heat anymore because let's just say when that was happening, buddy was real excited all the time. All the time. Do me a favor before you hit record in audacity, change your setup to mono in audacity. Who stereo one mono recording channel? There you go. All right. I'm going to go ahead and hit record in audacity. I'm going to hit record in OBS. You can do the chat or the chat. I look over there saw the chat said the word chat. Anyways, do the claps whenever you like. All right. Three, two, one. I don't think that was anywhere close to being together. No, I didn't even hear yours. If we're being honest, try again. Three, two, one. That was better. I don't know why but like discord is like completely cutting out your clap. I don't even hear it. I think it's that noise suppression stuff. It is it is enabled on my end because it won't go off. It just keeps turning itself back on because apparently they get paid for it every time it's turned on or something. I don't know. Kalini wants to know why mono. That's because the audio interface will only input into mono for some reason. Pretty much all in our audio interfaces do that. I don't know why. All right. Let's go. Let's get this done. Ah, let's cancel the podcast. I'm ready for an app. Yeah, two seconds in and we're done by guys. We are all set up and realized we don't want to do this. No, that's all right. I really, really hope we end up doing that one day because that one right there, like I will cry laughing. Like I'll spend the entire length of a podcast laughing that we actually did that guy here. Got all set up and just nope. Sorry. Like. Bye. All right. Hey everybody, welcome back to the next cast. I'm your host Matt and I'm Tyler. I always start the podcast right while he takes a drink. It's awesome. I'm really good at timing guys. Really good. Anyways, this is the Linux cast. We talk about legacy things. I don't know if you can tell that by the title. I know I always start out this podcast like why would you come listen to a podcast that's about Linux, but you didn't know was about Linux. If you just stumbled here and don't know really what know what Linux is. Welcome. Anyways, you're going to have some fun. If you stick around, we're going to talk about nerdy things. Um, you probably want to understand my half the words we say, but that's okay. We will still have fun. We will still entertain you. And that is our purpose here today. We're going to have some really good time. So actually hold on. I do have to go ahead and say this to like extend on to what you're saying. Actually, if you're new to Linux and this is your first time like the podcast, it's probably actually the best one because like we are going to be doing a Q&A. So like you could just ask, you know, like if you don't understand anything, we could explain extra things. So like kind of perfect. Don't try to get me to explain what like gen two, how to install gen two, because I can, I don't know how to install gen two. So, uh, and if your question is, when are you going to try Linux from scratch? The answer is never. I'm all men. You need to learn everything that there is to know about Sysfi and it. It's just you're not, you're not truly living until you know way too much about an init system that you don't ever plan on using. I know plenty about Sysfi and it other than, I mean, I know that I've used it before. I've never, you know, compiled it before. Yeah, that's enough. All right. Anyways, enough about that. So every week we start out the show asking a simple question. Tyler, what have you been up to in floss related stuff this week? No, no, no, hold on a second. I hear from a little bird that you've, you're actually using Linux this week. What now? The Windows fanboy Bill Gates, baby. Oh my God. Is actually using GNU slash Linux. What is this? Actually, I've recently taken a call in GNU plus Linux. I actually also find it quite offensive that this podcast gets uploaded to a platform that is not completely licensed under the GPL. But it's, it's okay, the licensing of the videos. I'll let it slide and let this get posted. I won't, I'll just let it slide. But yeah, actually I am using Linux now. Bill Gates kind of pissed me off. You know, his man boobs just started getting to me. So you're having some daddy issues is what you're saying? Yes. Yes. I've always had, but they've just gotten a lot worse recently. So I've moved on over to my old love, Adora. I've, I really started liking it around 30, like 36 was like when I really started liking Fedora. But I didn't like stick with it for too long. I did end up getting my, my grandmother on her laptop. I switched it over. I can't remember what she was running before, but I switched her over to Fedora. She loves it. My mom's computer now runs Fedora. My sister will most likely be getting Fedora put on her computer the next time I have to work on it. And I'm running it now and it's fantastic. It's, it's really, really, really nice. Like really nice. I was, I've just been running it mostly vanilla like anome just the way it comes. Um, I've done, I think I installed the dash to dock extension and made sure that the dark theme was in the legacy applications. That's about it. Like I really haven't done much. Um, I've been getting work done. Like I've been doing a little on and off game development and I played like eight and a half hours worth of Daisy last night and it was awesome. No problems whatsoever. Just like it, it would be on windows. So yeah, the gaming is great. Like workflow is good. Genome is fantastic. Like GNOME stock, vanilla, GNOME is finally to a point where I'm like, I could really use this and not have an issue with it at all. So yeah, that's, that's my week. A whole family is now on Fedora. Yeah. Art center direction brings up this funny cause they just made that announcement where they're killing GPU acceleration in the next version of Fedora. So yeah, yeah, they're killing, they're removing an API which allowed you to use H.264 and H.265 as GPU accelerated. And that's in that's an OBS though. No, that's in the API. That's in Fedora system wide. No, I know, I know, like what I'm saying is like there, Fedora is removing the VA API. That's like, you typically use that for video encoding in OBS. OBS and Kaden live and a bunch of other places. Yeah. Well, Kaden live already, like Kaden live, I've almost never set up Kaden live to use my GPU because it like never works right. Yeah. So like, Yeah. Anyways, they just removed that and it caused a little bit of a brew. Haha. Well, I will see how much of an impact it actually has on people. It'll be interesting to see. I'm sticking with Fedora for now. So. Oh, I'm going to stick with it. I'll let you guys, like I'll be honest and let it and let anybody know if it causes an issue or if I ever even notice it. I am taking, I'm taking bets on over or under and when Tyler Disder hops next time. So. I don't know why you always bet. Like it's always, it's always not the same amount of time, but it's always not long. Like it's never, it's never a long time, but it's like you can't guess exactly when it's going to be. Tyler, you're my friend. You're my bud, but you have a reputation. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. For being a bit of a disder hopper. Just, just for the record, it was, I'm pretty sure like Tuesday or Wednesday, it was like Tuesday, we were chatting in Discord and you told me you were installing Debian. So. Yeah. Well, before I installed Fedora, I tried, I guess I could have said that because that's something I did this week in Linux before I went to Fedora. I was going to try Debian again because I've, I've tried in the past and like Debian is one where sometimes it doesn't work right for me. Buddy Shush. Sometimes it doesn't work for me, but then when it does work, it's really nice. So I was going to try it out. It ended up, it ended up working right. It was having a lot of issues. I think it was around like the current likes some issues having like with a kernel or something. But since it didn't work out, I tried Gen2 too. I was going to do a custom kernel with Gen2 and just see if I could get my own custom kernel booting, which I've gotten it to happen once. I didn't stick with it, but I've gotten it to happen once. So I was trying it again. It didn't work. So it ended up on Fedora and I'm liking it. Well, you guys can put your bets in in the chat on when he decides he's going to switch to the next distro or back to Windows. I would love, I would love it if he proves me wrong. It'd be so cool because I love Fedora too. I want you to be a Fedora fan please. Well, but very, you know. Well, also what makes it really hard for me to like leave Fedora now is every single person in my family is running Fedora or is very open to me installing Fedora on their computer. So like it will make like just working on all the different computers in the house like much easier because they're just all Fedora machines. So I don't know. I might end up sticking with it because it's it's really nice. That'd be cool. All right. So moving on to me. So I've been a couple of things this week. So one thing that I've been working on and this is something that I've been promising for literal ever like months and months, I've been working on my ButterFS video and I'm still not there. Like I'm still getting my head around it. And the thing is like so I've been discovering some things. So Fedora does ButterFS really weird. Like it has different us different sub volume layout than almost any other distro and it causes some issues. So like time shift out of the box just will not work for me. I don't know if it's just me or if it's just the way that Fedora sets up their sub volumes or their way they lay out the drives. But I couldn't get it to even read my main NVMe as actually using ButterFS. So I've been messing around with that for a little while trying to figure out how Fedora is different than like Arch using you know is not zippered Zabrak. Can never remember what that thing I know it's called with a Z completely you know going blank on that but anyways the when I use it on Arch it was a completely different setup than with the way it is on Fedora. So that video has kind of been back and forth in my mind the last week because I've been trying to understand it and doing some research on it. So that has been progressing. The other thing that I've been messing around with is I've been doing a or I'm working on a comparison video between LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and I have to say this like I've always had this preconceived notion that OnlyOffice is completely proprietary but it's actually not snapper that's the word I don't know why I always want to call it zipper. Yeah I'm dude I was trying to I was trying to figure out what what in the hell you meant to say because like I was like zipper. So he's talking about on Arch like hold on give me a second he's talking about butter FS like I was trying so hard and I couldn't come on. I don't know zippers the package manager for open suicide. I don't know why I wanted to my brain works in weird ways guys don't try to figure it out it was just hurt. Okay and anyways I've been messing around with the open office only office and like I said I always I've always thought that it was a closed source application but it's actually open source and it's actually kind of nice it if you like Microsoft Word it looks almost exactly the same only works better in some ways like it has tabs like you could open up a word doc or word processing document and a spreadsheet all in the same window it's kind of nice so that is interesting. So I've been playing around with that video as well. Hopefully that that may be out tomorrow. I'm almost done with it. So anyways Nate has a super chat. Thank you for the super chat. Hey Matt and Tyler love the content. I'm already supporting DT and can't afford to support others but I can donate a little question. What app packaging do you think might win in the future? Obviously it's going to be .exe packages. I'm just no I don't know. No bro it snaps like let's just for you. Cold snaps is just they're so good. They're so like there's nothing better than just canonical like there's nothing better than a cold snap in the morning. Anyways Nate we will answer your question once we get to the question and answer session. We'll answer it seriously then we don't want to just make fun of it but also I will say thank you Nate. Thank you. It does mean a lot. We don't see Snapchat very often so we do appreciate it. We usually don't know what to do with them because they pop up like oh wait a minute. What are we supposed to read these things or I mean we don't we don't know what to do. We're very new YouTubers. Well I mean Tyler's not a YouTuber anymore at all because you have just checked out you have to make videos and I am seriously an asshole. No you've just been extreme like you have the reason it's okay is because you have a lot of room to talk because you've been on top of your video like sketch like your video like schedule is really good. Three days off. Hardly three days off this month is like you are extremely consistent you like most people wouldn't have any room to talk because like maybe you put out one video a week like you're you're almost an everyday Andy like that's I don't know I don't know where I come up with the ideas so eventually I'm just waiting for my my brain is completely dropped. There are days where I was like God what do I want to make a video on and those are usually the days where I decide I'm going to bitch about something and you can tell the days where I don't really have a good video idea. Those are the days that I decide I'm going to rant about something because it's easy for me to come up with something that I you know I'm very cynical about or I hate or I want to just rail upon. So yeah you can you can tell and there's usually about five of those videos a week. So and also the like the great part too is like those kind of videos is is what you'll normally do like when you don't have a pre-planned video idea and surprisingly those kinds of videos typically get better engagement because there's nothing that makes somebody want to talk more than being pissed off. I know it's great. What was the what was the video that I did a couple of days ago that really pissed people off. There was some there was something about it. There was I can't I know which one you're talking about. I can't remember the title though. Of course you don't want to find it. YouTube doesn't want to load any of that and any of my content which is awesome. YouTube is uttered garbage by the way. Actually before we started the live stream like nobody in the live stream who's watching now or afterwards will know this but before we went live I was actually talking about how YouTube's recommends for me make me genuinely worry about YouTube's opinion of me as a person. They recommend stuff to me where I'm like really that's what that's what you think I need to watch right now. Yeah they're they're recommends there are really bad so anyways let's go ahead and move on to the main topic or not the main topic meant it's like I've never done a podcast before. That's not what's next. I'm really bad at this. My brain is just all over the place today. I don't know what is the problem. It's just really weird. Anyways contact information contact information. You can contact us. There are ways of getting a hold of me and Tyler usually will even respond. So like if you send us an email at email at the next cast at org I will get that email and usually I'll respond to you sometime within the next six months. Okay well I was doing a little iffy sign here if the response time is a six months then no yeah you'll get a response. It's usually faster than that. I was just being funny but there have been instances where I've got an email. So I look at you know I was like I'll save that email and we'll respond to it on the show. But then you know we don't because yeah things happen. So I eventually didn't do a respond. But anyways email at the Linux cast at org is email address you can find all of our Twitter message on Odyssey all those things things link to at the next cast at org slash contact speaking of the Linux cast at org there you'll find all of the most recent episodes and along with all the episodes that we've ever done except for the first three episodes one two and three have are in the Disney vault you'll eventually get them when Bambi shows up I did find them by the way I found one two and three did yeah they're on my hard drive I have access to them eventually I will release them as like golden versions on a something I don't know but yeah I found yeah yeah we could definitely do that like you can release them as like special editions. Yeah so yeah I found those I didn't listen to them I guarantee they're horrible so Ricky and I who's Ricky's helped me start the podcast we he and I have been podcasting together since 2009 we do a movie podcast together along with our friend Vince so we knew how to podcast but we didn't know anything about Linux he knew more than I did but that was like right after it like literally right as I was switching to Linux full time and I'm positive I was still trying to use app on like arch or something okay I want I really want to hear these bad I like that I haven't listened to I'm sure that they are just full of very very wrong information so we still give wrong information on the podcast it's just now we're it's informed wrong information like we know now we know just enough to be dangerous and anyways that's a link cast at work all the stuff that you'll want to find there you can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast Tyler is on YouTube I don't know why bother giving out this link because he doesn't make YouTube content anymore because he's too busy playing Daisy and killing zombies priorities man okay he's saving us from the zombie apocalypse you guys should be just freaking thankful okay anyways youtube.com slash as any og he's also on Odyssey and discord and that's pretty much it you know like he doesn't do Twitter and that stuff so all those links will be at the links cast dot org slash contact you can subscribe to the next cast at youtube.com slash Linux cast thanks to everybody who does so you guys are all amazing and just awesome people so thank you for subscribing if you haven't subscribed yet hit that button because seriously what the hell are you waiting for you will not find better Linux content on the internet anywhere except for every other YouTube channel but it's still really good anyways moving that's probably the most realistic sell for this podcast I've ever heard it's so good it's really good but it's not as good as everybody else it's alright anyways so chat you're up we need questions and answers well ask away you guys have questions we have answers maybe we'll have questions you guys have answers and maybe our answers will be right so let's go ahead and move back up and see if I can find Nate's question he gets to go first so what's at packaging method do you think might win in the future Tyler do you think there's going to be a winner no I don't think there's going to be a winner but I it depends like if your definition of winning is like one's more popular than the others and yes like there will be a winner but like not like one's going to like annihilate the others and then like just flat packs like if it's app images than the other two just like fucking disappear like no I don't think that's ever going to happen but yeah I do think there's going to be a winner and I think it's pretty obvious that it's most likely going to be flat packs like it's just most likely going to be but to extend off of this because I know for a fact that neither one of us think that snaps are going to be the one to like actually win and become like very very popular or closer to a standard because Brad actually asked in chat feelings about canonical aside is there any technical disadvantages to snaps or is the shade based entirely around canonical versus any technical merit like extend off this question for one I think there is going to be a winner and then also to answer Brad's question I think the reason snap is probably not going to be the like winner is not just because of like canonicals like control over it or Technic like it's technically not as great as other ones like slower or whatever I think it's mainly just going to be because of the way canonical did snaps out of the gate like a lot of people don't understand this like technical merit doesn't actually mean as much as marketing in a lot of cases and snaps has fucking atrocious marketing out of the gate almost everyone hated it because like you didn't actually know if it was like is it actually open source or is it proprietary like like there was so much confusion over snaps when it first came out and then also snaps out of the gate were extremely slow. They're still slow. Okay. They're still slow but like they were way worse when it first came out like way fucking worse. So to be honest like I think snaps like I don't think there's nearly as much of a technical disadvantage nowadays with snaps but canonical would have to spend a lot of money and a lot of PR effort getting people to start thinking about snaps in a different way than they have been. And for me, I think that's why flat packs are probably going to win because we'll get into an app images here a second. A couple of a couple things. So first of all to answer the Nate's question I'm with you. I don't think there's going to be a winner when it comes to Linux and open source stuff. You things just stay around even if nobody uses them. So like app images are never going to be very popular. There they have a very fervent and very vocal user base but there's like 12 of them. Okay. I'm talking about people. It's like 12 people that use app images and they're very very loud and they're very very enthusiastic about app images. The rest of people don't really care. Don't use it or maybe they just use one or two or whatever because they have to. So I things just kind of stay around. So these are the three package formats. Eventually we'll have three more package formats because that's what open source developers do. They realize something doesn't quite work the way they want to do. So they create something new. That's just there's a reason why we have you know, 400 distros, you know, that's the reason why we have that many. So that stands for that question to just comment on what you said about snaps. First of all snaps are still slow and they are finally fixing them but it took them releasing the Firefox as a snap in order for them to do it. Up until they release Firefox as a snap canonical basically said snaps are fine. Don't worry about it. That's lowness is just in your head. You know, I mean that's the reason why snaps has have such a bad reputation because canonical did not give a crap about how slow they were. Up until they released the most popular Linux browser as a snap and people were people started actually using snaps and realizing this is a snap problem and you need to fix this because it takes a minute to load, you know, like if it just like this is not good so that once people started using an actual snap and realizing that they had problems like the mainstream, then they started fixing it and realize, oh, oh, maybe this is a problem. You know, that's the reason why snaps have had such a hard, you know, like reputation is because canonical ignored the problem for years. But the thing about snaps is the snaps are not a consumer product. They were never meant to be a consumer product. They were started as an enterprise thing and snaps have significant enterprise advantages from being able to be easily rolled out amongst multiple clients and easy management and update for all those clients and all this stuff that just is significantly better than anything else because it was designed for enterprise and enterprise users. They don't really care how slow they are as long as they're secure as long as the IT department can easily update them and manage those things. Those things are the things that matter the most. They were brought to the consumer market simply because, you know, they wanted a, you know, package format that would compete with that package would get rid of the PPA problem. So that's the. Honestly, I think mean you could, I mean, I don't let me know if you disagree with this. I'm going to assume you agree with this. I think like that whole statement that you just made is like the biggest issue that people have with canonical nowadays period is everything they do is focused on enterprise and the consumer market is just like, it's like they're completely oblivious to what they're doing there. Like they're just like, oh, yeah, that's right. You guys have computers at home. Oh, right. There is something called the Ubuntu desktop. I didn't even realize that still existed. Yeah, we forgot we even had that project. Like there's 12 people sitting in a room somewhere that's the desktop team and they didn't they get paid every once in a while. Maybe if they remember to set up the paychecks, you know, just, you know, doesn't forget them. Like, and obviously, I mean, they're in the worst part of the building. The bathroom has never been cleaned. You know, it's just everything's falling apart. They're still developing on old gateway computers from the early 2000s. You know, so I mean, that's that's the Ubuntu desktop. They've completely completely lost interest in it and it's blatantly obvious. And that's one of the reasons why I kept recommending Fedora is because Fedora shows interest in developing the Linux desktop, you know, whereas canonical and Ubuntu really doesn't. All right, moving on to the next question. JJ says or has asked what's easier free office software, what's the easiest free office software to use LibreOffice only office or open office. So open office is basically LibreOffice. It still does exist, but technically only gets two updates like a year or something like that. So it's I wouldn't suggest open open office. I've always used LibreOffice as my office suite of choice, but if you are coming from Microsoft Word and you need great office, Microsoft Office support, only office is probably the best one. Not only does it look almost precisely like Microsoft Office, but it has very good like DocEx support. So that'd be my answer. The only thing I'll say though is like, is like, if you don't really like, if you don't have a ton of stuff that you're already doing in like Microsoft like Word or like, I guess, don't they have like 365 like Docs or something like that? Like the same office app and online, whatever. If you're already working with like the Microsoft suite, like LibreOffice is not a problem. Like it's not like you're going to run into issues. It's just more different and like it's more different than office and the compatibility is not as widespread. So like for most people, like if you're doing very light office work, LibreOffice is plenty fine and like if you're concerned about like what office suite to give to somebody who's not very technically savvy, almost any of them work. My grandmother, it took me like 10 or 15 minutes to tell her like, because there's only like a few different buttons and stuff that she needs to know where are and everything. So about 15 minutes to let her know. So I mean, most of them are fine. You shouldn't have an issue. JJ also asks, is app image like a Docker container? I don't know enough about Docker to answer about the similarities, but I don't think that they have that mention common to be honest with you. Yeah. App images are much, much closer or similar to a way Mac, like Mac OSes dot DMGs are like the way that you installed their apps because they're like they're just the executable and you drag that into your applications folder and then met like on Mac, you just open like from the applications folder and it opens up binary. It's pretty much the same way like you can pretty much think of app images like exes on Windows. Like if you, if that's where you started out on computing, like think of it like an exe, but without the installer. So like there's no installing it. You just have the app. You just open it. We'll talk more about app images and stuff here in a few minutes. Nate has a follow up to his question. The reason why I asked is because it looks like valve is going to be supporting flat packs. Yeah. I think that's the reason why we both agree that flat packs is kind of be like give me the most popular one, but I don't think I think the answer of whether I think it's going to be a winner remains. It's like there's I mean, technically we'll have a most popular one. So for example, when it comes to like in-nit systems, like let's just gloss over the fact that system D is not in this system. It's a suite of stuff that happens to include a system, but system D has one quote unquote one, but that doesn't mean that there are another other in the systems are just being knit. There's run it. There's open RC. Those things still exist. Even though they're very, very rare. Most people don't use them. Most people don't know what they are, but most people don't know what system D is either. So I guess it doesn't really matter. So it's a bad thing. But the point is that we may have something that's the most popular that's used vastly by the vast majority of people, but that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be alternative snaps is going to live. So I was thinking about this earlier when you first asked the question snaps are like cockroaches. They're not going to die. Canonical will be sticking with snaps probably forever because first of all, Canonical is very, very stubborn when it comes to that kind of stuff. But also this from what I can tell Canonical does not see snaps as a failure simply because they're not widely used. They never created them for being yes, technically you can install snaps on any distro, but that wasn't why they were created. They were created for use on Ubuntu and as long as they're happy with them, they're going to continue to use them. And again, their enterprise products and as long as they're successful in the enterprise, that's all Ubuntu and Canonical care about. So that means snaps were developed for Ubuntu server not desktop. So like if you're you're trying to run it on desktop and having issues. I highly doubt Canonical gives a shit like it's just like sorry, brother, that sucks. Yeah, I mean, that's also why they didn't think of speed was an issue. All good. Yeah, I mean that and I mean also when I mean if you work in like a cubicle, you're probably only using the same like four apps like all day long. So when you open up them, open them up in the morning. You just leave them open forever. Like you open up a browser, you open up your spreadsheet thing, whatever, and you're done. You know, you don't have to worry about closing open, closing them open. Most people aren't like me. Like I leave my browser open all the damn time. So, but most people close and turn their computers off when they leave. So and. So I think username zero said, have you tried Ubuntu Unity beta yet? I try. I don't know if I tried the beta, but I've tried it recently. It's okay. Unity beta. Yeah, there's a unity remix. That uses Unity as the desktop environment. It's created by the like the 14 year old kid. It is. Yeah, it's going to become an effort. It's going to be an official Ubuntu flavor with 22.10. Really? Yeah. Also that guy is going to be 14 years old for fucking ever. By the way, we just know him as the 14 year old genius that creates all the great Ubuntu stuff. Even when he's like 27, he's still going to be 14 because that's all we're going to remember him as is the 14 year old Ubuntu kid. Yeah. Well, I mean, the like the unity Ubuntu like distro like that he's made like the first time I checked out like there's issues with it, but I couldn't believe that it like not only actually existed, but like it booted. It mostly worked like it was very like I had very few bugs with it like as wild. I'm all down for that. I won't ever use it. I don't want to use the unity desktop as like my daily driver. I think the fact that it still exists and I can go still play around with a refreshed version of unity. Pretty dope. It's pretty awesome. For my brief time using it, granted, I only use it in a VM because I could not get it to install hardware mainly because my the hard drive that I was trying to install it on was a dud. But the brief time that I spent with it was really good, but it was nostalgic. Good. It was like using Windows 98 for a little while like, yeah, oh, I remember this is good. I'm going to play some DOS games or something like that. And then you realize you're just using something that's kind of old and if it kind of feels like mate, you know, I mean, like mate's never hasn't changed forever. I guess some refresh technologies and stuff like that's based on more modern technology, but it still looks like you know, I'm too did 15 years ago. It's kind of the same way with with unity. If you liked unity when unity was around, you'll like the unity remix. If you don't know if you don't know what unity is or you've never used it, it's hard to recommend. I mean, maybe you'll like it, but you probably be better off with just regular Ubuntu. The the the best part of unity always was the thing that I always call the hub. Even I'm pretty sure it was called the HUD. I'm not actually sure which is actually called now. I've completely messed that word up in my brain somewhere. It's like the the wires just aren't properly wired there. So I don't remember what it's actually called. But the thing that you can press the medic here, whatever it is to drop down and you can search through everything. That's really cool, but it's not anything you can't I think people like it because of the way it's designed, not necessarily because of what it does because you can search through pretty much anything on any district like you can bring up K runner if you're in KDE the applications menu in, you know, searches through at least applications. I don't think it does. Like I think it doesn't do like documents stuff like the HUD does, but in KDE you can do that. If there's going to be a standard links issue for OEMs pre-installed, what do you think is best? Also should flat packs be the focus for software centers? Holy shit. That's probably the best question we've been asked yet. Like if there's going to be a standard distro that like gets widely installed on like Dell, Lenovo, like laptops and stuff, which distro would it be? Okay, so my aunt, so I have to answer to possible question to possible answers for this question. The first answer off the top of my head would be Papa less simply because it's already designed by a hardware manufacturer. So they're already designing stuff that goes along with things like being able to control and update the firmware and things like that. So they know what's going into their operating system is for actual hardware and it could be easily transitioned to other manufacturers. In fact, we've already seen it with the HP. I haven't the hardest fucking time with names today. I don't even know your name is anymore. Omen. Is that what you're looking for? No, there's a there's a Linux based HP laptop. That I can't remember, but I just heard that HP came out with a new Omen computer or something like that. So I was like, is that the one? But but anyways, the they come up with a HP laptop. It runs Papa less. They didn't choose a boom to they chose Papa less. And I think the reason why is because they have these extra tools that is makes it easier to control like the firmware and stuff like that, which is nice. So Papa was my first thing. My second answer to that question was is fedora. Now let's ignore some of the video shenanigans that they've pulled in the last couple days and assume that that works out just fine. I do think that fedora works really, really well for a lot of people. And I don't know if that's just my bias because I'm a fedora fanboy now HP Dev one. That's what it was. I knew it was from HP. You guys should be really happy that I knew something about it. I mean, you can't even like partial credit here. Anyways, I think that fedora would be a good option. I don't know if it would remain a good option because the thing I think that you and I forget sometimes because we have really good experiences with fedora a lot and especially me fedora is meant to be an experimental dish distro for red hat. So eventually right now it works really good. But eventually those guys are going to come up with some off the wall technology that they're going to need to test and they're going to test it in fedora and it's going to ruin everything. And I'm going to be very sad when that happens, but that's the way what fedora is really meant to be. It's supposed to be a very for far upstream version of red hat where they test new technologies. They've done it before pipe wire, you know, Wayland, all those things came to fedora first. And when they first came to fedora, they were terrible. Eventually they got really good, but it took a while. So I don't know. Some people are going to say meant to answer this question. I don't I don't I'm not a meant guy. So. Well, I don't know. Like I I think I think those three there are the real contenders. I want to I want to agree with you and say like Papa S is probably the best one. But the thing that keeps me from doing that and makes me want to lean more towards fedora meant probably meant for stability and like wide. Um, if we're being honest, cinnamon, Linux meant probably for most people is going to be the most familiar like experience. Um, but. Papa S has a theme that you're either going to love or you're going to fucking hate through. And if we're being completely honest, I know people make purchasing decisions based off of the look of like distros and what I'm sorry, I said purchasing, but I should have like said decision like you not purchase, but get like you pick based off of like aesthetics. I we all know this is a thing when you first start out on Linux, you pick the desktop environment that looks the best to you like you think looks the best because even though you can change desktop environments and change the theme and everything, typically when you're first getting started or like you're not really interested in pricing and customizing and stuff, you just want the thing that looks good from the get go and you're just going to stick with it. And like I really like Papa S's theme, but I know for a fact it's extremely divisive. You're you're either going to love it or you're going to hate it. Oh, yeah. Um, there's another option here that we didn't we there's a distro out there that nobody talks about. It's called Zoran. No, no, the thing is that it is pretty though, you know, it looks very nice. So I don't I don't know that a lot it appeals to everybody because there's not one. It's going to appeal for everybody, but it just uses GNOME and it's just a boon to. Well, yeah, like that that's the problem with Zoran. It's like it's not really a problem, but as far as I know from everything that I've heard about Zoran OS is like I again, this is all me completely speculating. This could be completely bullshit. I am just repeating things that I have heard on the internet and let me say this again. People lie on the internet. Keep that in mind. Okay. But from everything that I've heard my trust in the internet has not been shattered just because of what you just said. Obviously I trusted everything good. Um, so Zoran OS is dev team is a little questionable. Like from everything that I've heard there like they've just had some shady things happen like and not a lot, but just a few different shady things. And I've never done like a lot of research into Zoran, but I know it's not very unique compared to a lot of other distros. So they've done a lot of work to make the GNOME very usable and very customizable and they've done it in such a way that it makes GNOME look very unique even though if it's just GNOME. I think the reason why Zoran gets painted with a shade of shady is that they are very much a distribution that wants to make money and they very much push off a professional version of their distribution and includes like support and extra applications that are installed. And in the open source community when you are a money first distro similar to elementary OS, you get the reputation of not being free. You know, when you're not absolutely free, you get painted with a reputation of not being very good. Now, obviously I don't think that that's fair, but it is definitely something that is true when a distribution has a professional version of their ISO. People start thinking of Windows because you know, if you have different SKUs and one of them is that you have to have like a license for it doesn't feel very open source. You know what I mean? Well, there's also the big problem of like you're paying for support and that's like that's a big thing with Zoran and all right, if I'm going to choose a distro and and I want the option to be able to pay for support. So if anything happens, I've got someone to talk to and walk me through the issues I'm having. If if Zoran OS is doing that, that's fine, but the problem is they're competing with Red Hat. Yeah, like from a consumer perspective, it's known it's different because you can you as a person can't go to Red Hat and buy support. Okay. I mean, maybe that's not even true. You probably could, but it'd be enterprise support. Right. They'd be thinking of you as an enterprise person because Red Hat is an enterprise person. The Zoran guys are providing support for consumers. It's consumers first only and that it's good. But people don't pay for support. Okay. Out of the box. Not from an unknown company. Not that Dervish is going to for the first time, especially when it comes to Linux people aren't people don't pay for Linux upfront for the first time. Okay. So maybe after you've used something for a long time, you'll they said, Hey, you know, I really like this thing. I'm going to support it or I want this extra support or whatever happens to be. But right up front, you're going to use the free version and that's the you know, it's just the way things go and you have to get the whole thing is like people and I mean, maybe if you're Microsoft, you have more success of this because you're, you know, you're a big company. But if you went to the Zoran is a very small company and they want to give you support, but you're getting support from the operating system vendor. Not the like if if if they're providing support like system 76, for example, they provide support for their hardware. It also includes support for Papa less. I mean, it's kind of like think you expect to get support when you buy a piece of hardware. You nobody really thinks about the support that comes with their operating system. It's very it's very different, right? So anyways, we we have got to stop. Unfortunately with the question and answer. So think if you guys like the question and answer thing, let us know. We'll continue to do them every other episode or so. So it should be fun. But we do need to move on to the main topic. We've been going for 48 minutes. We have not even got there yet. So we've touched on it. We just haven't actually technically started. So the question that we're posing today is why do people love app images so much and the the genesis of this question came from a Twitter thread that I started from a tweet. Like first of all, I don't know if you guys know this, but I have almost 2000 followers on Twitter, which is and and that doesn't sound like a lot. I mean, not Mr. Beast or anything, but people interact like my stuff is seen by some people, which is just really weird to me. It's just really weird. But anyways, I tweeted out if your app only releases as an app image, I'm not going to use it or to some extent to some variation of that. And that tweet that got 150 to 200 likes and got retweeted all the time. Brody did a video on that tweet, which is really weird. So and and of course it got responded to by the maintainer or creator of app images. So we've had we had a really interesting conversation there, which we're never going to agree on. By the way, he's obviously an app image guy. I'm obviously not an app image guy. So Tyler, first of all, before we jump into the meat of the conversation, what are your opinions on app image? Um, I want app images to be great, but they're not and it's looking like the app image has just like completely missed the mark. Really all all we need, like for app, here's my opinion on app images. If app images wants to be the best packaging format period, all they fucking have to do is make it actually work like Max DMG's work. There should be a specified folder, directory, whatever on the system that I take my app images and I chuck them in that bitch and I can add it to my path or whatever and like just have an easy simplified system of setting like installing app like a package something that sets up the system for app images and then I just and I download my app images. I do just like I would do on like a Mac where I well, not exactly the same thing. I don't open up it and then drag it over. I just slap it in that folder and bada bing bada boom. Everything works there. I can just load up my app image like it was any other app. It'd be great, but that I don't think is going to happen. I genuinely don't. I don't think it's something that is technologically not possible or difficult, but I don't see it happening. So for me, that's why app images I don't think are going to go all that great. It could be amazing. Yeah. Okay. I think I agree with you. App images had the potential if they came out of the of the gate as fully developed. It would have been good. If the the problem are so and this is this is the main problem with app image is that people want to install their applications and by install, I'm not talking about technologically like have tie-ins with all of the system functions and all this stuff. I don't care about that when I say install what I mean is have in the system menu. They want to they want to want everyone and I I'm generalizing here, but 99% of people when they launch an application, launch it from a menu of some kind. If you're in a window manager, you're using Dean menu or Rofi or something like that. If you're in KDE, you're going to use the menu that comes with KDE. If you're in Genome, you're using the applications menu. However, you do whatever menu you use, you use a menu. Okay. The vast majority of people, there's going to be the nerd in the chat that says, well, I launch all my applications from the terminal. Go back to Alacrity and leave us alone. Um, yeah, it's just we understand you. We're comrades, you and I, but the vast majority of people do not launch their applications from the terminal. And similarly, the vast majority of people do not want to have to open up a file manager. Double click on an icon to launch their applications because that's not where applications go. Now, there's going to be that image guys out there. Well, Matt, you can put them in the menu system. You just have to do this, this and this. Um, no, no, just just make a packet like here's here's a wild fucking idea. How about app image? Just make a package that does that shit automatically. Wow. That's crazy. Why not as part of the app image, just put a script at the front of it or whatever when you double click on it. It installs it moves it to wherever it needs to be in order to be in the menu. That's all that's literally 90% of my problem with that app images. There's an updating issue like because the way that app images work in order to get the new version, you have to download the another app image to replace it and then you have two app images then of the same program, one old one new. Um, now again, there are solutions for that problem. Like they have an app image updater. It will update apps image for you. And they have app image launcher like Springles says in the chat. I don't care. Okay, because first of all app images are at least five years old. Okay. App image launcher is like a year and a half old at this point. Maybe two years like that. So that means there was a good period of time where app images existed before app image launcher existed and the vast majority of people who still use app images still launched things from the file manager. And let's see the the main problem too is is like we're talking about all of these separate different pieces like. So you've got app images, but then you you need to get a separate program or something like that so that you can actually I don't know fucking manage your app images like a normal human like just bring it all together. I can't remember who said it's Springles said it goes back to the old phrase do it right the first time or don't do it all and like Springles high five brother. Fuck yeah. Yeah, it would write exactly right. So I know I come across as severely anti-app image and that's mostly because I am I guess I know that there are these tools but when I download an application to use on my system, I want to be able to use it. I don't want to also have to have tool tool two, two, three and four in order to actually manage that thing. And now the people will say, well, Matt, you need flat pack in order to manage packages from FlatHub. You need snap D in order to manage snaps. So there are every package thing system has an extra tool that's used to manage them. And that's absolutely true. But I hate to break this to you people, but you can't install a FlatHub package without flat pack on your computer. That's a prerequisite. You have to have that first. So if there was a if app image store app image launcher, whatever was a dependency for app images, you have to have that on your system to use app images. It makes sense to me because that's the way packages package management systems work in order to install something from the AUR. You have to have an AUR helper or Pacman or something, you know, you have in order to install stuff from the Ubuntu repositories. You have to have apt or a package manager of some kind. You know what I mean? They're had there are you. Everyone's right when they argue. Well, you yeah, you you complain about these tools that you have to have. But the thing is, is that with app images, you have to you get these applications after you've already have the package. You know what I mean? And they don't feel like dependencies and it feels and because that's true, it feels like extra steps, you know what I mean? It feels like something else you have to install. Now, granted, you only have to do it once. But still, it just it feels like in that Twitter thread that I was I was a part of. They may the the maintainer of or the creator of app images said, well, you know, you just have to do this. You have to install app image launch. You have to install app image update or you have to do all these like just make the app images do that automatically. Yeah, that's not the way people want to use applications. They don't want to have to install tools after the fact to get to a point where the package that they downloaded has been maintained. And that's the reason why a lot of people still including the developer of app image still launch everything from the file manager. And that that's my biggest thing about it is that no one launches applications from the file manager. It's just I or it just gets tedious. Even if you're even if you're okay with doing it and you've signed up like this is how I'm launching applications now. We're doing it. We're doing it from the file browser all the time. You can do that. It's totally fine. It just gets tedious after a while, right? And also like what we're talking about like this is why app images like actually will get me like a little like not a lot, but a little upset is because they're so close to being perfect. Like absolutely perfect and the things that hold them back are not tech like technological feats that need to be accomplished. They're basic like quality of life features that you would assume most people would want and they're just not there at all. And the and the solution that's given is just install five different programs and manage it in this different way. And it's just come on dude like have the app image do it even if let's just say even if it was okay to have all of your applications in a folder in a file manager. Let's just say it's okay. The they're not executable by default. So you have to make them executable. That means by one by one. So let's just say you have 10 of them. Each of them has to be made executable. Now, if you are a terminal ninja, it's really easy to make them all executable at the same time. If you're using it from the file manager, it's not as easy. You have to do one by one by one, at least as far as I know in every turn every file manager that I know of. So that's another added. That's another blockade to people actually using now one thing that was said to me is that app images were not created for new users. These were never meant to be for people who are new to Linux. That may be true and that's okay. Okay, hold on. I'll respond to that but I'll let you finish. Like I think that like not everything has to be new user friendly. Python for like anything any any coding language is not necessarily new user friendly. If you've never coded before, you know what I mean? If you have no idea what a class or an array is, you're not going to be able to do anything in a coding language without significant research, right? And you know, it's just it's not that new user friendly. Maybe maybe if you've done some coding before, then you know, you have some background information. It's you know, but it's not everything that is on Linux has to be new user friendly. And that's that's fine, but I don't think that this is any user friendly. You know what I mean? It's just it's there are too many barriers, but also the one that I keep coming back to is I have. Let's just say I have 500 apps on my computer. Most of them I don't ever use, but I, you know, I let's just say I have that number. Every single one of them is launchable from Rofi or D menu or the menu in my desktop environment. Every single one of them except for one. That one is in my file manager somewhere in my downloads folder along with 700 other things that downloaded off the Internet. You know, I don't know about y'all, but my downloads folder looks like a freaking 14 year old bedroom, you know, it has stuff in there from 2014, you know, there's stuff in there from crazy long time because my home directory comes with me from distro to distro from different places to place and my downloads folder just stays the same. It just keeps growing and growing and growing and growing and I'm sure there are app images in there that I have no clue actually exist. Like the it's like the the room of lost treasure from National for, you know, the first natural treasure movie, you know, it's just there's stuff in there that you could splunk and find for ages, right? That's the biggest problem I have is that it's in that folder and I'm supposed to remember that it's exist and that's where I have to go to find it the exact name of the file that it is. I have to go find that thing, then watch it from there and then I use it for my one time and then I completely forget that it's there for forever more until I someday decide I'm going to do a strict spring cleaning. You know what I mean? It's just, you know, it's not the it doesn't feel like the proper way. Now, some of that is not. See, here's the thing. It's tedious for everyone. It's tedious for new users. It's tedious for people who know what you're doing. It's just all around tedious and it could be made way easier and it should be. And like, I think the biggest thing because like I do, I do have to go ahead and address the thing you said about app images is not technically made for new users. If that is true, that's stupid. Like actually stupid because it is a packaging format is perfect for ease of use. I agree. Like it is a perfect like you don't have to install it. You just you get something and it runs. The only thing that it needs to be perfect and absolutely undeniably the best packaging format is just have it where every single app image when it's packaged, when you download an app image and run it for the first time or whatever, like every time you run the app image, it does a check to make sure certain directory exists so that it can put itself in there and make sure it makes it so that that direct directory is where like everything can run. Just do all the setup for for app images down the line every time you open them up. And so every time you open an app image, it does that check and does all the stuff. Just make it do that. I mean, it's fucking perfect. It's the best. I can understand why. They don't do it that way, but there's another way that they could have done it. Wait, hold up. Why wouldn't you do it that way? Well, I mean because our app images aren't created by the same person so that they can't actually make have a standard like checker. Like, you know, I mean, you'd have to have some kind of enforcement level that says every app image should do this and developers aren't always necessarily great for following the rules. So, you know, you may have the vast majority of app images that do this just fine. It's kind of like having screenshots in a app store, you know, a lot of developers will do perfectly fine putting screenshots in their description in an app store. Then you have that one douche bag who just throws their application in the app store. No screenshots. No description. You know what I mean? So, you're going to have some app images that just won't have the stuff that you're talking about at the beginning. I don't think it's, I don't think it would be impossible for them to make it a standard in the app image like format, like the actual format itself, like app images themselves. Maybe at the beginning. Now, that's not an option. I don't know. I think they could. Too many app images exist that every person who has ever maintained an app image would have to go back and put the new stuff in their app image into a new version. But there's another way. Instead of worrying about changing app images at all, instead, work with the distros or the desktop environments. There's only two of them that you really need to matter about. Okay. Just I'm sorry. I'm not paying XFC guys, but you maybe you can implement this later on, but work with GNOME and KDE so that their menu systems recognize a folder somewhere. Okay. Whether it's the application folder. I mean, seriously app image launcher creates an application folder in the home directory when when you create it creates the folder where we're talking about like all you have to do is have the menu systems in GNOME and KDE recognize that folder. Whether it's being put in the path or however they do it and then tell users put your stuff in that folder. It's done. The application will show up in the menu system. You're done. Move on. Job done. That's all they have to do now. It would take obviously see my thing is is like we're still pushing off work onto other devs or potentially I understand, but it's it's it's one time work and I mean and you have to remember both KDE and GNOME are open source. So the developers behind app image could do the work and just push it towards the here. We've we've done the work. All you have to do is push it in. It's done. You know, we'll even maintain it. You know, I mean, we'll maintain the code and make sure it continues to work. You know, it'd be done. It'd be good and app app image was then launched just like any other application. They'd have all the benefits of app images. So before we move on, I'm I'm sorry. I can't weigh them. I'm not sure what you mean. Dude, the title. Why do people love app image so much is kind of what we're talking about. We're disagreeing with them and why they love it. So I'm not sure why. What's your problem with the title is, but thanks for the super chat. Um, so if they fix these problems, like Tyler said, app images are really good or they have the potential to be really good. And because their premise of just being able to launch the thing is really good. That's there's a reason why Mac OS does it that way that where you just put things in the application folder and it's an app equation menu and it works really well. You don't have to wait for a wizard or something to install, you know, because people who use windows eat wizards installation wizards. It's horrible and half the time in windows you have to restart stuff. At least it's not at least it's not that bad in Linux where you have to restart your system in order to get things to work. But you know, the idea behind having to install stuff is kind of a pain in the butt for a lot of people. They don't want to wait for things to compile and stuff like that. Um, so the idea there is good. The execution so far has not been good. And the thing is, is here's the thing. Um, and Brody said this in his video app images seem like they were created for the use case of the developer. He likes launching things from the file manager. So that's where they way it was designed. And that's fine. It was if it was never meant for anybody else. That's good. And and if it had just remained a really small project, which is still a fairly small project, but if it just remained a really small user base, we wouldn't even be talking about this because who cares? But there is a fairly small number of app image users out there that are very, very vocal about their support for app images. They really, really like it and they will fight the death over this packaging format. And that's the reason why we're talking about it because there are those people who are very interested in this format. And what I what we wanted to talk about today was why people love it when they have all of these issues that really do I think that these problems that we've been talking about really do affect a lot of people, you know, and maybe maybe the like I've used app images before. Obviously, I have them in my my my downloads folder. And that's where they remain, right? And it just it feels like the it feels like a one use app. You know what I mean? You download it because you need something to do one time. You download it, you click on it, you use it and then you never use it again. And the developers of that app are probably pretty would probably be pretty sad about that because they developed the app that they want you to use over and over again. And you just downloaded it and use it that one time. Even if it's something that was actually like meant to like, for example, P cloud is the service that I used to back up a lot of my stuff, right? Only available via an app image unless you go spelunking for an RPM package. It's not great because when I was using just the app image before I found the RPM package, every time I open up my computer, I have to open up a file browser, go click on that so that was running on the background. So it would automatically do my backups and that's not a good experience whatsoever. No granted, that was before app image launcher and all this stuff. So don't at me about that. Oh, you could do it better now. I know that was a couple of years ago, but the point is it still remains. That's still the way a lot of people still have to launch stuff. If they are just most people aren't going to download. If you're if you just have one app image, you're not going to go through and download three applications to manage that one app image. Now, if you order, if you're not, if you're not going to dedicate yourself to the app image format. If you want to download everything as app image, then it makes sense to go ahead and get app image launcher and app image updater. You can do that if you're just going to use the if you just need one package, it doesn't make sense to get three more just to be able to run it. So I don't know. And I'll go ahead spring sprinkles or sprinkles said my question is if it ends up becoming so user friendly, what's the point in it existing? It would basically be flat pack or would have the same capability and like that's a good question. My answer that is going to be in notes. So that's a really good reason for existing and it also has a really good reason for being more user friendly. Look, if people can like just download an app image and then have it set up to where from then on every app image that you download and run, it gets put in a specific place. Don't that's awesome because app images are by default much easier to hop into than flat pack. This flat pack, you got to make sure that you got a flat pack installed and then if you want to install a flat pack or like set it up from a terminal, it's a lot more difficult because you got to have like the com.name and yes. So it's just it would be easier than flat pack to like manage. And so yeah, I think it would still have a reason to exist and I think it would benefit greatly for us. Plus app images have significant advantages over flat packs in that they're transferable. You can take your flat pack from one computer to another. You if you have them all in one folder and you you back up that folder and then move to another computer or another disk or whatever. They're all just work. You just go in there and click on them. It has, you know, the application there, you know, so that transferability is really nice. It's not something that you have. You get with app images because app images you have to install, you know, you have to go to a terminal or you have to go to a software store and you have to download those with app images. They're just there. You just transfer the folder over. You have the application. It's done. Another thing app images include all the dependencies and flat packs do as well for the most part for the most part, but it's not always true. A lot of times you download a flat pack and you like for example, I can't remember what I was downloading the other day. Oh, I was downloading that the the news, the RSS feed reader that I looked at the other day in a video, you download that it has three other things that it downloads. So that downloaded four flat packs when I was only downloading one because had dependencies had genome dependencies. So app images don't do that. They include everything right in the package. Our part point today was not to bash app images, even though it probably came across that way, but I think both you and I agree app images have potential to be really good. They're met overwhelming potential. They're met the problem. They're method of user interaction is where we have a problem because it's just it's not well done. Okay, let's let's just end there. It's not well done and it could be it could be better in any number of ways. There's any number of ways to solve this. There's your way of making every app image basically check for the dependencies that it has like app image launcher and stuff or again, you could work with you could work with a D the desktop environment maintainers and get it so that an application is recognized if it's in a certain folder that be. I mean, I really do think that that is the best solution just have a folder on your computer. It can be right in the home directory. I don't care. I mean, I don't really don't want you to mess around with my home directory, but I'll live with a snap. Does it and people put up with snaps having a folder in the home directory all the time. So why not have images? You know, put everything in this one folder. It shows up in the menu. Done like you fixed the problem. Um, the promise is they don't think it's a problem. Like they think it's perfectly fine to launch from the file manager and that's fine. If that's the way they want to do it. That's fine. That's but that's the reason why I don't like app images and why I'll continue to use flat packs as my package manager with you. All right. We've been going now for an hour and 15 minutes. So not a record, by the way. Not right. Oh, before we move on. Damn, Josh. In your, that's right. In your wish. So we have a third podcast host that shows up when he can, but he had thoughts on app images. So Tyler's going to read out, um, in his best voice. Yes, Josh's thoughts on app images. Take it away. And today's sponsor is Josh, the backseat host checking in. Um, he is just our, our awesome regular, uh, well, semi-regular. Okay. Sometimes regular host. He's been here. Yeah. Okay. He's got to stop working. He's got to, he's got to quit his job and come do this. Yeah. I mean, as soon as we start making enough money for that to be viable. So essentially here in about 10 years, he'll, he'll be joining the team full time. Right. But so our sponsor had this to say app images are all right. Or the old school business model of downloading a paid for binary off of the internet. They're basically the best option other than a deb or RPM file. However, this does not mean that they're, they're, they're the best option for an end user. The biggest. Hold on. The big ads, uh, advanced advantage of the app image format has compared has compared to snaps and even flat packs is that app images support a manual upgrade process. How is this an advantage? Well, that means you can find a version of Kaden live that works for you and stay on that one version of Kaden live. The trade off is of course that, that same upgrade process of course is kind of tedious. However, the app image API does account for this has evidence by bit warden, which will prompt to update plus the third party tooling around app image is far and away better handled than flat pack and snap. Personally, I do use app images. Again, this is Josh, um, uh, today's sponsor. Um, uh, uh, however, I do wish the spec handle dropping a desktop file in, you know, dot local share applications and not to have, uh, use a tool like app image launcher, which has a system D requirement, which you didn't even talk about that when we were talking about app image launcher earlier, um, or a script to do it. Uh, that said, I do actually have, uh, an app image that contains ST and Firefox because sometimes things do break. And I even have a proprietary binary. I package myself as an app image, so I don't have to use a bunch of Docker on my desktop. That said, app images handle system theming accessibility features much better than flat pack and snaps, but that's because app image didn't take a secure by default approach like its, uh, competitors have also mapped for the record. This is not a gen to install stream. However, I think that's fine as I've slowly and steadily be been entering the void. Um, I didn't even read that last sense. I didn't know it was there until you read it. So, uh, that, that is, uh, this podcast sponsor, um, who is not giving us nearly enough money for the sponsorship spot, but it's okay. We'll work out a pricing agreement later on. Oh, but, um, yeah, uh, Josh going into void. I find that interesting. Josh, Mr. Hopps more than you do. So I'm not worried about it. He'll be back and Jen and Jen to eventually the problem is, is the last thing that my discord needs is more void gang members. Yeah. Um, we have plenty of drive by void shootings all the time. Um, and if you don't know what I'm talking about in my discord randomly, sometimes a group of like 15 to 20 people will just come through and be like, yo, I use void. Like you should use void. Like essentially threatening people into using void and then they bounce. Um, it's pretty nice. We call the void gang. They come by from time to time. All right. Thank you, uh, Tyler for that message from Josh. Uh, that last line is just, I mean, pure. I mean, that's 100% Josh. Anyways, moving on to the last section of the show that we call this the thingy of the week. Now, uh, we could call this any other things apps of the week, picks of the week, uh, whatever, but we chose creatively to call this the thingy of the week. So Tyler, uh, what is your thingy of the week? Mine is really simple. Web Court. Um, if you're using Wayland and you want to do like screen sharing and stuff with discord or you just like want a more secure and better discord client. Um, web court is fucking awesome. Um, they use a better, um, implementation of electron than the actual discord app does. Um, it's technically just the, the actual like web client. Uh, but it, it, it like it's really good. Like it is really, really good. It performs better than discord has ever performed ever. Then I've ever used it. Screen sharing works on Wayland. Um, there's privacy improvements. Like they like quite a bit, um, because it's also just the web client. As far as I know, you could theme the shit out of this and not have to worry about getting like and or like whatever, like yeeted and deleted off of discord. So yeah, web court is really awesome. I will have to give that a look. So mine's actually something kind of similar. Um, mine is Ferdy. I'm now Ferdy was around for a long time, but the developer went off into weird land and stopped developing it. Um, but there's an open source, uh, like continuation of it called Ferdium. And if you haven't ever heard of it, it's basically a electron wrapper around a whole bunch of different social clients. So there are tons of different apps you can put in there along with custom apps. You can put in there. So like I have a bunch of studio in there, but you can also do things like tweet, deck, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook messenger, just a ton of different applications and they're all like in one place and it's really nice. It has integrated like dark themes and notifications and things like that. And if you use multiple different social media networks, like I happen to do, like I also have Macedon in there and stuff like that. It's nice to have them all in just one place using one notification system and it just works really, really well. Um, I have noticed that it's been very crashy in this last release. So I don't know if that's just something that is happening on the flat pack version or what, but for the most part has been very, very steady and very good. So that's Ferdium. All the links and the names of the stuff that we talk about will be in the show notes, which you'll find the link to in the video description or in the podcast description. If you're listening to the audio version, of course, this podcast is available on youtube at youtube.com slash Linux cast, but it's also available in audio form on pretty much any podcast catcher that you can think of. It's available on iTunes, Spotify, a pocket cast, all those things. You can also go to the website, the Linux cast at org and find all of this stuff there. Any episode you want to go listen to, you can do so there. You can also find eventually and there is an RSS feed of the podcast. All you have to do is click on the one of the icons there at the top. That's where the RSS feed is for the podcast. The RSS feed for the blog post is at the bottom of the website. So all that stuff is there. The Linux cast dot org is where you want to go for that thing before we head on out of here. I have no clue what we're talking about next week. We'll choose that later. But I should take a moment to thank my current patrons. So patreon.com slash Linux cast. Thanks everybody does support me on patreon. You should be guys are all absolutely amazing people. It just astonishes me all the time that you guys support me. So thank you so much for your support. It's just amazing. So thank you. Thanks to everyone who left the super chat as well. I know we still get very brazzled when a super chat comes in because it's just so rare. It's like a spotting away yeti. But so thank you for the super chat as well. Thanks everybody for support. Thanks everybody for watching. Oh before we go record this live every Friday round three o'clock PM Eastern time. So if you want to catch this live version make sure you hit the subscribe button because you'll get that notification and we'll we'll have some fun. Anyways, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.