 it's called a stage manager. And it takes all of the applications on one workspace, like say they're behind each other and stacked on top. It takes them and puts them in the side of your screen. And so you have one app open and it can cover up the scene manager, but you put your mouse over to the side, it pops out with little tiles of all the other windows that are open on that workspace. And you can just click on them and it'll swap out the window that you've got open. It's just like, it's so nice. Like it makes even having just one workspace and like, you know, just being like one of those people who just stack everything on top of each other, like windows, like makes it really good. I still won't say that it's perfect because spotlight on Mac just like doesn't work for me but it doesn't really matter because there's like a tool called Alfred that I've started using that it's like insane. It's not okay. Like you can just like, you can use it like Rofi. It's like, well, it's kind of better than Rofi because you can put like integration into like websites. Like I can search on Amazon just using the A key. Like I just press A and then press space and start typing and I get an Amazon search result. I have that in Rofi too. Oh, you do? Yeah, it's called a bash script, man. Come on. Well, I mean, yeah, yeah, you know. All right. We are live. Yeah, we are live. I just said that but you were on a roll, man. I wasn't gonna stop you. Welcome to the stream here. That's not the most awkward beginning of a live stream we've ever had. So don't worry about that. That's for sure. If we could get some gays or nays in the chat on whether or not audio is fine. We haven't done this in like three weeks. So OBS tends to change things in the background. So we wanna make sure all the audio is proper. Some gays or nays would be appreciative. Oh, also speaking of changes and stuff. Have you updated Audacity recently? Yeah. Is there a UI changed? A little bit. So they moved all of the sources. Like, you know how there used to be like the dropdowns for the sources? They're along the bottom of the top. Those are all gone. They're in the audio setup button now. And things are a little flatter. Okay, come on. I just wanted to make sure since I've switched up computers and shit, I wanted to make sure that like, this wasn't just an Apple thing. Like it's actually updated everywhere. Oh, but yeah, like I saw, I saw that. I guess, I guess it's recent. Like, how recently did they do this update? A couple of weeks ago, I think. Makes sense, okay. The dark mode still is god awful. Which is so bad. They should not even have it. It's that bad. It's better without. I haven't tried it. Where is that at? The dark mode. Preferences, then interface, and then dark mode. There's a dropdown. Okay. Preferences in the edit menu. Yeah. Interface, come on. Interface. Analytic money. Let me guess, Tyler Hoppe again. No, he didn't. Well, kinda. That's not a hop, dude. That's a jump off the fucking cliff. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That is true. That is true. I made a major hop. Like, not just a wee one. We'll talk about it. So we're getting all yeas, which is good and excellent. Welcome, everybody. Welcome. What are you going on? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Somebody commented, it burns when IP said Steam Deck isn't winning anything, overpriced piece of hardware. Like, I'm sorry, they just got me. It's overpriced. Okay. Well, they won it for free. All right. Apparently so. So funny. But what were you going to say? I don't remember. Oh, so just before we get started here, let's talk a little bit about the schedule. So we're going to be going today. We'll go next week and then we'll go the week after. And that third one will be the last episode of the year. We'll do something special for that. I haven't decided what yet. And then we'll be off for two weeks again. So just so everybody kind of knows what the schedule is going to be going forward. And then once January pops in, we're going to put in some good, hard work and, you know, put some strings, some episodes together. Because we've been kind of laxadaisical. My everything is going wrong in my life right now. But, you know, it's getting better. So we're moving on. It's going to be good. Anyways, that's the plan for the next few weeks. It should be good. And yeah, I think we're ready to go. You got Audacity up and running. Have you laughed at the dark mode yet? Yes, I have. It looks worse on Windows, I'm assuming, probably. I don't know about Windows, but I will say I don't think there's anything good to be said about the dark mode. Yeah, I think it's still the same dark mode they've had for ages. And it's just, you know, they haven't got to it yet. But yeah, all they need to do, all they need to do is make it respect GTK themes. Now, I know that's like, oh, man, that's all I got to do is like, it's a fucking button they got to press. It's going to be a lot of work because they got to change it from the WX widgets or whatever it is to GTK. If they even, I don't even know if that's in the plans. Probably not. Anyways, let's go ahead and... Based off of the company that purchased it, I'm going to assume that's a little bit too much work for them. I'm going to guess that too. All right, I got to put some stuff on silent here. Make sure your phone's on silent. I did, I did. Mine's on silent, my watch is on silent. So don't keep beeping at me. All right. All right, you ready to go? Yes, sir. Alrighty, I'm going to go ahead and hit record in Audacity. I'm going to hit record in OBS. I'm going to tap on my mic to make sure that I'm using the right audio source in Audacity because it's been changing a lot lately. And you can do the claps whenever you like. All right, and I'm going to... There he goes. Goodbye, Tyler. Just had to, I'm going to go ahead and do it preemptively and like blow my nose because literally every single time we do this, I never have a runny nose at the computer, but as soon as the podcast starts, it kicks in. So preemptively blow my nose, just to stop that from happening. Got it covered, all right. Do the claps whenever you like. All right. Three, two, one. Not bad. We've done worse. All right. Definitely. Okay. Let's go ahead and start. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the next cast. I'm your host, Matt. And I'm Tyler. Yes, he is. All right. At least I think so. What is this? Is this a podcast? Oh my God. What is this? I don't even remember. How are we supposed to do this? Right? It's been like three and a half weeks. The last one we did was at the beginning of November. So, yeah, it's been a bit. So I made a small little recording for the audio feed a couple of weeks ago before Thanksgiving, letting people kind of know what was going on and why we were taking a little bit of a break. So we're back and better than ever. And one of us here, I'm not gonna say who, Tyler, has made some big changes in his life and not of the good kind. Tyler, what have you been doing in the open source this week, or this last couple of weeks? There's nothing. Gaming on the Steam Deck is the only thing that's inside of open source that I've been doing. And not even that much, because I've been much more productive here lately. And by productive, I mean, I've done a lot more to make money on the computer. Like I freelance with some clients and do like, I've been doing video editing for a while now for another guy. And I've also been doing a lot of like social media management bullshit, which it does involve Facebook, which thank God I'm getting paid because otherwise this shit would not happen. Did you get 666 tattooed somewhere on your body the last three weeks? I'm just. If I stay on Facebook for long, it'll happen. It's terrible. But mainly what I've been up to for the past couple of weeks has been, well, I guess I should start this off with, I'll be short here, but kind of be a little story-based. So I had issues with my big desktop computer. I've been wanting to start doing more game development in my spare time. And I've started doing that. And I had major issues on Linux because I use Unity primarily. I've messed around with the others, like Unreal Engine 5 and stuff, but I really like Unity. I like C-Sharp just because I've always used it. That's where I started learning game development. But on Linux, Unity is just, it's riddled with problems. Like it's just very unreliable. You can get it to work and you can use it on Linux, but it is hyper unreliable. And so because of that, I went ahead and went over to Windows where I know it's reliable so I can do that stuff when I want to. And then Windows started crapping out, which is no surprise to anybody at all. So I decided that if literally Linux, and I've tried a majority of Linux distros, Unity is unreliable on all of them. And so I decided instead of trying to go do Finesse some weird way and act, by the way, I also did try to fix the issues I was having with Windows. Windows would sleep, even though every setting on the system told it not to sleep. And I also tried fixing that with about 15 different ways. None of them worked. It was very upsetting. Then after I did this switch that I'll talk about here in a second, I was told that there is a fix for it, but you have to redo registry files. Fuck Windows, man. I hate Windows. It's terrible. I don't think I'm gonna piss anybody off with that statement there. But I did decide that if nothing's really working, my sister wanted to get a new computer and she was really kind of, she didn't like Mac OS at all and she had a Rose Gold MacBook Air M1 with a gigabytes. And so I decided I would go ahead and give it a shot to see if I could use it and to see if it would be better for the game development stuff. And it was. It is phenomenal. I have, I can actually pick up the device. Like that's actually pretty cool. I didn't even think about that. So I have the MacBook here and I am like using it for the podcast. Got chat loaded up right now, but it's phenomenal. It's incredible. It performs insane. I can sit on the couch and do game development and get about 120 FPS in a game scene. That's not got a ton of stuff going on. It's got a decent amount of stuff, not a lot. So yeah, six hours on the couch doing game development and getting good frame rates. It's really nice. And then I kind of decided to go ahead and just go full in just to give it a try. And so I got an iPhone 14 Pro Max because I was available for an upgrade and it was only going to be $10 more a month to get this. So I was like, yeah, sure, let's go ahead with it. It's been awesome. Like I am full in on the Apple ecosystem. So what I'm hearing here is, is that you've become an Apple fanboy. No, because. I take, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I take three weeks off and you abandon tucks for a moldy Apple is what I'm hearing. That moldy Apple is a productivity machine. Like it is great. I mean, like, look, it's not perfect. Like I don't know if it was before we started recording the podcast or in the pre-show, but I'm pretty sure I talked about it. Like spotlight doesn't really work for me. It works, but like the shortcut for it doesn't work and it's just slow. So there's aspects of macOS that are not great, but for me, in my use case, it's been rock solid. Like very reliable, extremely reliable actually. And also there's a really good added benefit with being able to just respond to calls and texts and stuff on the laptop. Like it's really nice. And pretty much the only complaint I have with it is the fact that the MacBook M1 Air, it's so slim that it does thermal throttle after a while, but not bad. Like it still performs well. It's just, it does get warm, especially when I'm doing stuff in Unity and like play testing for like 10 or 15 minutes. But I've also found out that like if I set a tiny fan just next to the laptop while it's going, it's fine. Like it never thermal throttles. So it's like literally a $5 like Amazon fan fixes everything. So I don't know, it's been great. It's been great. I still will go ahead and say this because this needs to be said. So now when I'm sure people are saying it in the comments I haven't been reading. You don't want to read them. I'm sure. You're getting roasted. They're expensive, they're expensive as shit. Like all of their computers are super expensive and probably not worth it for most people. And also the features that I am really enjoying probably aren't necessary for anybody. Probably aren't necessary for me either, but they're really nice. Sean, that sticker that comes with the Apple stuff is not a tattoo. It doesn't work that way. I could just imagine opening them on there like. Actually, I did. I saw this in the comment. So someone said at least it's Unix like. That is one thing that I will say about the Mac that's kind of been cool. I haven't spent almost any time messing around with a terminal at all. But it uses ESH by default and I did install Homebrew like the package manager. It's been really nice. Like I installed LSD or LS Deluxe, which is what I use for like LSD in the terminal. It's great. I've installed a few different terminal applications and also themed my terminal to be Cat Poochin because I fucking love that color scheme. And I mean, the terminal experience on Mac is very, very similar to Linux. So I have a couple questions for you. First of all, well, not actually just one question, but one thing to say. First, they make when tiling window managers for Mac. You should try those out. I want an in-depth detailed overview of the window manager situation on Mac because they have a couple of them. They always look really cool on Unix porn. So give those a try. Second of all, have you tried? So when they announced the M1 stuff, like two years ago, they announced this virtualization app. It's basically like parallels on steroids, but for the M1. Have you tried virtualizing Linux? And I just wanted to know how is that if you tried it? I haven't tried it at all. And mainly just because I've just been treating this like when I switched over and I was starting to like it and everything, I decided that I would treat this like a business machine and try to maximize like how much money I could make off of my machine, which it's going well. But I haven't really been messing around with anything like terminal based or not terminal based, like Linux-y based, but I will say based off of it, just emulating other 64 like bid applications, most likely it would run a virtual Linux environment pretty damn well. I have no idea about gaming inside of it. I'm going to assume that's going to be a problem. But for the most part, it's been really, really performant emulating apps that are natively built for the app of Silicon. It'd be cool if you could try that and give you something to talk about on the podcast. Yeah, yeah. I think I'll probably try out the Tiling Window Managers because I've had one other person bring that up with me and they do, I have looked at a couple of pictures. I have no, there was one that I saw that was like, it was gorgeous. It was just, it was beautiful, but I have no idea what it was named. I'm going to have to go back through Reddit and find it, but I'll definitely do that. It's like Aqua or I don't know, actually. But yeah, I've seen those and they always look really nice. All right, so moving on to me. You know, since that was my channel, I have to, I don't have to stick with Linux, but I am going to stick with Linux because I'm a, Tyler went like three weeks and he grew up, like he's making money on his off time now. Like, what happened, man? It's okay, it's good. I don't know. Like you've become mature. It's not good, it's not good. I know, I know. Terrible. It's horrible, but how dare you grow up? You're like only 30 years old. All right, so I, me, I have installed Void Linux and I'm regretting every moment of my life since. So first of all, it has very good- If you would have said otherwise, I would have called you a liar, but- The thing is, it's like, okay, Void itself is not bad. And I made a video about it where I talked about the problems that I had. I never once said that Void was bad. I said that it was a process. It was kind of like Arch. You had to build it from the ground up and you have to do step one, step, step two and three and four and do all this stuff in order to get the things to run properly. And it's true, it's just the way, it's the process, it's the way Void works. And the shit I have gotten for that video and for the things that I've said, unmasked it on about Void, we think that the Arch fanboys are bad. The Void crew is just, wow. They are very, very attached to Void Linux. Like it is their God. And if you say anything against Void, you are Satan. Like it is really bad. There's a reason I refer to the small like handful of the people on my Discord who use Void as the Void gate because they roll through and they fire shots at anybody who doesn't like Void or who hints at like maybe Void isn't the right choice for somebody. They roll through, like it's a game. I've banned more people from my channel comments in the last three days than I have in the entire two years I've been doing YouTube. It's nuts because like I don't mind people disagreeing with me. Like you can disagree with me all you want. I don't care. In fact, I enjoy when people have different opinions but if you get mean start actually bullying people then you're gonna get banned. So yeah, it turns out obviously generalizing is bad because I'm sure there's many, many lovely Void users out there, but the vocal ones are kind of assholes. So Void Linux users don't be assholes. Your operating system's not that much better than all the rest of them. In fact, I'd say it's not any better than all the rest of them. It's just a Linux distribution. It's not anything to write home about. It's fine. It works well. Requires a lot of work, but you know. Did you have problems with the installation? No, the installation actually went really well. Surprisingly, well, I only had to install it one time. I thought about midway through because it doesn't do a very good job in the, all right, so I'll say this. I did not find the part in the documentation where it tells you how to partition stuff and the proper way of doing UFI and stuff like that. I didn't find it. So I had to wing it and I winged it and it worked fine. I cannot imagine what would have happened if I decided I wanted to do Butterfest sub volumes, which I thought about doing. That would have been a mess, but yeah, about midway through, I was like, God, there's no way, no way in hell this thing is going to get past and grow up. But it did. It works fine. I still have a problem with the display manager, but apparently that's a debus problem and I can fix it easily, but I haven't gotten to it yet. But yeah, the operating system itself is okay. It took a, you know, it's kind of like Gen2. When you install Gen2, you'll get a running system fairly easily because you go through the wiki or whatever and you get to the point where you have a loadable system, but then there's a whole bunch of steps after that where you have to install all of your stuff and all of the stuff that makes your stuff work. You know, debus and NTFS 3G in order to use NTFS stuff, you know, you got to do all this stuff after you install Gen2, same thing with Arch and it's the same thing with Gen2. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just... Wait, do you mean the same thing with Void? Yeah, I mean Void, yeah, same thing with Void. The thing is, is that I've been using Fedora now for five months and Fedora works right out of the box. You got to do that shit, you know? It just works, at least for me. I mean, it didn't work for you, but you are the cursed of, I mean, Linux, Tux has taken a crap on you, apparently. It's not really, like, look, I will give it to Linux. It is not really Linux's fault. Like a lot of my preferred applications, primarily being Unity, they're just massive applications that it's not an OS fault. It's primarily, it's made by a massive company that just really doesn't care that much about Linux. I mean, they care enough to at least make a binary, but pass that support-wise. Somebody in the chat keeps saying, Void is so fast. I've heard that many, many times, Void is fast, but guys, I use Fedora, my computer's not slow. I think you need to read his full message, because his full message is, Void is so fast, it doesn't stay on my computer. Yeah, I saw that one too. Somebody else before that said that Void is fast. I've heard that many times in the comments over the last three or four days, like the reason why I use Void is because it's faster than every other Linux distribution. Maybe on older hardware, that's exactly true, but on modern hardware, I can't tell the difference between one distribution and next. They're all super fast. Even if it's running GNOME these days, it runs fast. But I also will say, I think there probably is some credence to Void being much faster than other Linux distros, in areas, maybe because like the last time I tried installing Void, I don't know if they were just having a bad month or some shit, but I tried for a while with Josh to get it installed. And even though I could detect my Ethernet controller and like my Ethernet port, I couldn't get wifi or Ethernet working on it. So they probably have a very minimal install that just like, as long as you don't put a whole bunch of crap on top of it, even on like talking for more slower devices, even on a pretty, pretty old device, it probably is really fast. Yogurt column, I'm... Yogurt column, Colombiano? I don't know, sorry man, mispronounced your name Yogurt, but maybe it's the boot time that they're talking about because I've run it, but the thing is, if you time the difference between a system D startup time and a run it startup time, is it gonna save you five seconds? Sure, maybe, maybe it's 10 seconds, but even if it's 10 seconds, it's 10 seconds. You know what I mean? Like yeah, like what are we talking about? I mean, how often are you turning off and back on your computer? I'm the least impatient person in the world. Even I can wait that extra 10 seconds for system D. And I said this in the video, if the reason that people praise Void so much is because it doesn't use system D, I'm gonna be very disappointed. There has to be something else. Because I mean, there are 30 other distros out there that don't use system D. I mean, Devuan and MX and all these other distros out there, they use varying different NS systems and they're all varying levels of good. But the thing is like, I've heard so much about how amazing Void is, I need to find that other thing. If it's just the in-it system, I'm gonna be so disappointed at the end of it. I mean, at that, I mean, yeah, who cares, right? I mean, it just- I mean, I will go ahead and say this because we do have to give Run-It some credit. Run-It is a really good in-it system. Like it may not be for everyone, but it is a really good in-it system. It's just for me, I think a big issue with Run-It and why I'm not very interested in it, like almost at all is just because there's a lot of software that just doesn't work with it. Like a lot. A lot, yeah. Like I have a Rofi Power script for, and that will work because Run-It shuts your computer down differently than system D does. So that doesn't work. So there's a lot of like little things like that and it's annoying. But the argument between system D and all of the other in-it systems is a story for another day. So moving on to the contact, Lord, Lord, excuse me. Moving on to the contact information where I've got to remember I've taken three weeks off from this, so I don't remember how to do it. It's just gonna be like a complete noob thing again. I'm not good at it after I've had some practice with it, but now probably won't have any, you know, at all anyway. So anyways, you can subscribe to all of our stuff you can find past episodes, blog posts, a link to all of our shout out for our patrons, a link to the store, a link to Tyler's stuff, everything at thelinxcast.org, which is the website. It's the primary place where the show lives on the internet and it's done very well. Thank you, Yoris. It's very, very, a very well done website. You can subscribe to Tyler who's on YouTube. I mean, he's technically on YouTube. The boy doesn't know how to... Don't promise to. Like he doesn't know how to make videos anymore. I'm pretty sure he just completely forgot. Maybe it's just the fact that when, or you can't make a non-Apple YouTube video on an Apple product, you know, he's just gonna have to become one of those Apple YouTubers, you know. I will go ahead and say this for everyone on my channel. Okay, look, you are not gonna start getting inundated with macOS videos. It's definitely gonna happen. Anyways, youtube.com slash Zanio G. He's also an Odyssey. He has a Discord channel. All of those links will be found at thelinxcast.org slash contact, which is where all these links could possibly be found. And you can subscribe to the YouTube channel of thelinxcast at youtube.com slash thelinxcast. And I'd appreciate if you did that because we do awesome things here on the channel. I make video, you know, at one point, I could say I made videos every single day of the week, but I've taken nine days off in the month of December or in December or good Lord, I said it wrong twice in a row. November, and that's like a record for me. So, surprisingly, mostly four stays off, but I'm gonna get back into it. Anyways, I won't be Tyler and just disappear for months on end. I gotta give him shit. I mean, I will say this. I have taken breaks before, but never like this. Like, never. Like I've disappeared for like a week or two and not post anything, but like I've just gotten radio silent on my YouTube for like a bit. He's too busy being productive on his Mac book. Dude, all you gotta do is get yourself a turtleneck and you'd be like Steve Jobs. I'm just saying. Get yourself some chinos and you just go along. All right, thank you to thelinx tube for the super chat. I'd appreciate it. Glad you like to listen to us. It's appreciative. All right, so moving on to the main part of the show where we talk about the week's links news. Now, just a little proviso here. The links that you're about to see are, how shall we say? The most breaking news you'll ever see. They're definitely not from three weeks ago. That definitely is not the way that we left them in there. Technically, that's true about a couple of them. Okay, a couple of them have been brand new, but some of them are still things that I wanted to talk about them. So we're gonna talk about them. So let's go ahead and move on to Tyler, your first news link of the week. I mean, it wouldn't be an episode of the Linux cast with me on it if it didn't involve a steam in some capacity, probably a steam deck, but you know, we'll get to that. So the first article that I've got is steam on Chromebook is now in beta. And I, this is an article that like, I just, we probably will go down a rabbit hole with. So I tried to make sure the other ones that I picked out are not rabbit hole conversation pieces. But so this whole article is talking about how you're going to be able to have steam running on a Chromebook and it has AMD support, which like, okay, like, I mean. But don't most Chromebooks use Intel processors? Yeah, like Intel Atoms or some shit. Well, even like the high end ones that you can, first of all, if you spent $1,000 on a Chromebook, what is wrong with you? Great hardware, but you should put Linux on it or something, I don't know. I can't even defend that. Like for $1,000, I guarantee you, you can find a better piece of hardware other than a Chromebook, guaranteed. Yeah, anyways, we're not judging, we are judging you. Just a little bit, just a tad. Nobody could see us because we're not on camera right now, but we both held up our fingers like a little bit. Anyways, the thing about this is, is I don't understand, like even the high end like laptops or Chromebooks use Intel processors. I don't know that I've ever seen AMD Chromebook. I'm sure they exist, but everyone that I've ever looked at uses an Intel processor. But it says that it supports 12th gen core CPUs. That's, yeah, like, what are we talking also to? Can we just acknowledge this single fact for a second? I barely know people with Chromebooks, but I do know a few. And I've never, ever in my entire time of knowing them with a Chromebook have ever heard them go, I wish I could play games on this thing. Okay, so I agree with you. I've never heard anybody say that either, but then I'm not, I'm not friends with many 14 year olds. Okay, first of all, it'd be a little weird. It's in his 30s. Okay, I mean, it just, it just be a little weird. But the thing is, is that Chromebooks are huge in schools, right, and kids like gaming. So putting gaming on their Chromebooks is a win for Google because it would allow kids who are being indoctrinated into that ecosystem to realize that they can use a Chromebook not only after they're done in school, but once they're, you know, throughout their entire lives because they can play games on it. And that's what a lot of people associate computers with. Now the thing is that Valve has done a fantastic job of making Steam and non-native games play on systems that they weren't meant for. So the prime example of this obviously is the Steam Deck. So the thing is, is that at a certain point that even that magic that Steam seems to have found and Valve seems to have found, is gonna go away. Like there's only so much they can do. There's, you cannot tell me that a Adam processor is ever going to run Destiny 2. Okay, now without exploding. Like I'd expect that thing to set fire like a Galaxy Note 7. So that can't be the play here. And the thing is it's like most of the Chromebooks that I know of that are going to kids in school are very low end. I'm talking like $250, $300 laptops that run Celeron processors. Maybe I three processors, but that won't apply to this because this only applies to the brand new Intel CPUs from the I three up. Most Chromebooks don't use those. And even the AMD ones are so rare. Well, like even say the AMD stuff becomes more popular they're still gonna AMD and Intel need to make money on those things and they're not gonna sell anything for $200 or $300 not that's one of their brand name, a high end processors. Those are in the eight or $900 laptops. Like you can't even get a Windows laptop with an I three in it for sub 500 bucks. I mean, I don't think so. So I mean. Well, and even the Ryzen chips that they would put in these lower end Chromebooks they're still gonna be crap for gaming. Like they might be able to run Minecraft at a decent frame rate, but like for most things and you made me think about this because you brought it up. It's a win for Google, but I don't, I mean, I see where you're coming from and I do agree there, but I think there's another aspect to this that makes a little bit more complicated. I mean, for Chromebooks as far as I know the largest like sources that purchase Chromebooks are the schools themselves. Cause like if you're trying to equip, you know a mobile computer lab or at a computer lab in a school and you want to fill it with computers. I mean, there's literally no cheaper route than going with Chromebooks or, you know, like one of the desk Chromebooks. Well, then you can say, you can give each kid their own laptop, let them take it home. And if they destroy it, which they fucking will cause they're little hell ends. What is the school out there out $250, you know? And a lot of the schools have insurance on these things and stuff like that. So they can get them replaced really simply and really cheaply. But if you give them an iPad, which is $500, you know, it's a lot, you know, it's a lot more expensive. The way I was thinking about it is, this is probably going to be something that might negatively impact schools purchasing them. Cause I think a big plus over just the price of the device is the fact that, well, if you're going to give students, you know Chromebooks, the advantage is it can really only be used for productivity and like school work. There's not much else it can be used for. And if you, again, I know our point still stands that no matter what a $250 Chromebook is not going to run games well, but if kids are able to just install Steam and run some basic, like, you know, Hollow Knight or something like that and play some nice 2D games during school, that's a problem. And I don't know why Google has created pretty good from what I know and what I've read pretty good mobile device management. So schools could make it so that kids can't install Steam on their Chromebooks. So that's possible. Really, this is going to mostly impact people who buy Chromebooks for themselves for their kids because I've heard stories about this that, you know, the school gives them a little crappy Chromebook that's like $200 and the rich kid parents don't like the fact that they're using a crappy Chromebook. So they go and buy them a $1,000 Samsung Chromebook Pro X Galaxy Chromebook thing. And it's, you know, it's $1,000 because they want them to have a nice one, right? And that happens more often than you think. There's going to be those guys that don't have the mobile device management stuff on there that's going to put Steam on and stuff. And obviously, there's going to be a lot of schools out there because let's just face it, the IT departments in schools, probably not all that great in a lot of cases. So they might have not. Actually, someone in chat made the comment that there's no disadvantage for, I assume he's talking about, particularly for schools, disadvantage to Steam supporting it because the Chromebooks are managed. Kids won't be able to install Steam if the school doesn't want it. Trust me, there was a lot of things that the school didn't want me doing on the computer that I did throughout high school. Outside of a firewall. All right, so when I got to remember, I went to school 20 years ago, so it's been a bit. And the internet was just really getting started at that point, just becoming, you know, mainstream. But even then, the biggest thing that their IT department did was just have a firewall on there so you couldn't watch porn. You know, that was the biggest thing. And I've talked to like my nieces and nephews that were much more closer to school than I am. And basically that's still the same thing. They have a firewall on there that keeps you from going to sites you shouldn't go to. But other than that, it's not that well managed. But it's gonna be varied. The bigger schools are gonna have a bigger IT department. If you live in Port-A-Kai, they probably have one dude, maybe even not even that, you know, maybe they probably even hire somebody out for their IT department. But that's, you know, all that beside the point, you're right, this is gonna be a rabbit hole. Yep, I knew it would be. I knew it was. So let's talk about this from the other perspective. Let's just say that they do this. A whole bunch of kids and people who use Chromebooks put Steam on their laptops or their Chromebooks. And, you know, they launch up into Steam and they download CSGO, you know, and they wanna play CSGO, because CSGO is like the application that a lot of people wanna play, or the game that everybody wants to play, right? Or, you know, Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto or whatever. And they have this experience that is just so bad. What if that's their first experience playing games on a non-Windows PC? Like, that's going to give... Damn good point. That's gonna give them such a horrible experience on a non-Windows PC that it's going to, like, if anybody even mentions, hey, you know, you could use Windows, you could use a Steam Deck, like, oh no, unless it runs Windows, I know it doesn't game very well, because I've tried it on a Chromebook. Before we move on, I gotta go all the way back here. I saw a Super Chat, I think it was from Dark Zero. Yeah, zero Linux official. You guys cracked me up. Thank you for making Linux news. Fun to listen to, you nerds. Did you just call us nerds? Dude, I'm insulted, thanks for the Super Chat. Appreciate it. Somebody who can't read sarcasm will totally be like, what, why is he getting upset at a Super Chat? How dare you call me nerds, you nerd? Anyways, yeah, I don't know. I'm just kind of split on whether or not this is a good idea or not to be truthful. But I think from a Google perspective, it's a win because even if few people actually use this, they can still say that they have Steam on ChromeOS. For Valve, I'm not sure that this is a win or not. I mean, yeah, more devices that can play Steam games, but it's really gonna depend on how well it plays Steam games. Plus, the processors, as we said, the processors that they're talking about here aren't the most popular Chromebook processors. And now if they came along and said, Steam's gonna be on the Celeron processors, I might even buy a Chromebook just to try it out. That'd be, maybe they keep me warm in the winter, you know, cause it's gonna be so hot. Definitely. I don't know, man. Like I just, when it comes to this whole Chromebook thing, like I think it's a good thing for Valve because there's more devices and more places that people could purchase a game from. But also like, I think it's kind of like, it's kind of like the worst kind of tease that you could give a consumer. Like here you go, you can purchase all of these fantastic games. Oh, but by the way, if you wanna have a good experience, you can really only buy like 1% of what we've got. Yeah. Well, I mean, they made Steam Play really well on the Steam Deck, but that's a custom processor that was built for them, right? These are processors that they took out of the bin and are basically cast off and they're meant to be lower end processors, right? So it's gonna, I don't know. It's gonna depend, I don't foresee a future where Steam or Chrome OS is like a big player when it comes to the Steam hardware server. But I could be wrong. Also, he's gonna make me read his name. It burns when I pee. Thank you for the super chat, I really appreciate that. And we are both nerds. I was just messing with Dark Zero. He knows that we're both nerds. Obviously. I think everyone knows at this point. I'm a bigger nerd because I use Linux. I'm just saying. I mean, that's the criteria we're gonna use. You win by a country mile, they're good, sir. All right, moving on to the next one, which is my first one. And we're gonna go to Fedora 38. So Fedora 37 was just released and it is awesome. It is so good. But we're moving on to the next one. Fedora 38, which will come out, I believe in like April or May-ish, I think, next year. I'm pretty sure that's around their release date. It might have a sway spin, which is really cool. So I've been using sway often on various machines for the last month and a half so since Josh challenged me. And sway is pretty good. I'm still not sure I understand why Wayland exists, but sway itself is pretty good because it's basically just i3. And I love i3, so sway is good. And Fedora 38 may come with a sway iso, which is a, I think it's a win for sway because let's just be honest about it. There are no other wind demanders out there that are really playing in the Wayland space right now. Qtile has a Wayland version. I'm pretty sure nobody uses it. I'm very few people use it. There's gonna be one dude in the chat. So I use Wayland Qtile, but the vast majority of people just still using the Xorg version. Other than that, there's not that many, like Primetime, Wayland, wind demanders. Now, I know what you're all thinking. Matt, what about Hyperland? What about River? Those are very, very, still very small user bases. Maybe someday they'll grow up and being mainstream, but right now, sway is like it when it comes to mainstream Wayland-based wind demanders. So good on- Wayland-based wind demanders that also do not have problems with a lot of software. Yeah. Like River is one that I know that definitely struggles with that. Sway has done this thing where they've done a good job of creating the documentation in such a way where they've listed all the alternatives that you're gonna need. They have one page there that tells you, hey, these things don't work very well on Wayland. Here are alternatives for those things. Things like Rofi and de-menu and screenshot tools, things to set wallpapers, all this stuff. They have this whole list of things that you'll need. And that's really nice that they've put that together. It works really well. So I've been enjoying Sway. I don't think that I'd install this spin simply because I'd much prefer to have something that runs Xorg by default and then Wayland on top of it together. If I wanted to switch between them, I could, which is the way I have it right now. But it's good that that ISO is going to exist. I'm happy about that. I'm not really happy about it, but I am happy that people who enjoy Sway are getting Fedora with it, just set up form out of the box. That's nice. I'm a Fedora fanboy. Well, I mean, like, look, I gotta be honest, Fedora is one of the best Linux distros, in my opinion. Surprisingly, because I genuinely never thought that I would think Fedora is, like, really up there, because it is a testing ground for Red Hat. But it's phenomenal, man. Like, it is a very modern and sleek distro. It's very good. And honestly, like, I think the only thing about Fedora that could be improved is their selection of spins. And also, they kind of also do need to do a little bit more work with their spins in making them seem more official. Like, they're obviously official spins. Yeah, they do kind of bury them. But I think that's because... Yeah. I think it's because they don't want them to compete. I don't think that they want them to compete with the main workstation ISO. They've kind of done a Debian where they've buried a lot of their ISOs. And they have that one main one on the front page. If you want the spins, you have to go kind of many layers deep. I agree with that. But I don't think that they care all that much. They want that workstation one to be the ISO. And if you are knowledgeable enough about Fedora to know that the spins exist, you can hunt those out. It's not like Debian where they buried the ISO that everyone absolutely has to use. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I don't think that they'll ever change that. So they're redoing their installer. And I've made a video on this. They're redoing the Anaconda installer. And it's okay. It's basically like three steps. It's the simplest installer you've ever seen. It's more modern than the one we have now. But it's still very, very simple. And I made a video about this too, but I would love to see them somehow incorporate the spins inside of that. Maybe like an advanced mode or something like that where you could choose to spin right from the installer. They're never gonna do it. I know they're never going to do it. But for me personally, I'd love to see that work. You download one ISO and it's like a net install. You can just choose the spin you want to install and it will download that particular spin and go. Other than having 12 different ISOs that you have to choose from. But that's just, that's me personally. So I don't think that they'll ever do that, but yeah. I don't know. Yeah, Fedora and Sway, coming soon. We can hope. Yeah. So Tyler, what's your next one? The next one I've got, and please don't kick me off the podcast for this, but it's a Steam Deck article. Not gonna go nearly as in-depth as the last one, but Steam Deck pushed Linux to the highest share on Steam in years. And that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. I mean, it's their own product and they're selling out the Wazoo right now. And almost nobody's putting windows on them, like if we're being honest. Like look, I'm a guy who's very finicky and if I can get like, you know, more stuff working on a device, I will switch over most of the time. But with the Steam Deck, like the OS is so good and the game compatibility is so good, there's really not any reason to jump through hurdles and put what we can pretty much all agree is a subpar OS on it to get more games that use services that, you know, shit on you. Easy anti-cheat, that's what I'm talking about. But yeah, there's no real reason to go over and do that. So it makes sense that people are getting these devices and it's going up. The percentage has gone up about like, I think it's like 8%, like over just like what? Like, like half a year, like seven or 8%? Yeah, it's rose almost 8% since the last time they did the survey. It's now up to 20, almost 25% total, which is the second largest behind other. Yeah, and I will say it is most likely going to keep going up by a large portion because I know a handful of people that are waiting to get their Steam Decks. I know more people that are waiting till after the game awards because if you don't know this, public service announcement for everybody here, watching, if you want a Steam Deck, you can sign up, Steam is giving away a 512 gigabyte Steam Deck every minute to a random viewer during the game awards. So if you want to get a Steam Deck and you want to get a free one, watch the game awards and sign up. I don't have a link to share with anybody. I would do that if I had it handy. But yeah, you can go sign up and maybe win a free Steam Deck. So I literally know five people who are ready to order the Steam Deck but gonna wait to see if they can get one for free during game awards. So that percentage is just gonna keep going on up. Just great. I still haven't bought a Steam Deck and I still don't think that I will. It has nothing to do with this. I don't blame you. It's still, it has nothing to do with the Steam Deck. I'm sure it's wonderful. I just, I'm not a gamer. And the one game that I play wouldn't work very well on it. Like it would run probably perfectly fine but City Skylines is something that you need a mouse and keyboard for. And I have a computer for that, you know? So it's not, it's really not anything that's in my wheelhouse right now. I probably when they come out, if they, see, here's the thing is that I'm very worried because this is Valve we're talking about and they've never come out with a sequel ever in terms of hardware. Like there wasn't a gamepad too. There wasn't any of the, you know, Steam Boxes too or the index has been around for like four years. Still hasn't seen a sequel. So I'm very worried that there's not going to be a second when they said that they're working on it but I don't trust them all that much when it comes to actually making a second version of something. So that's also been in the back of my mind. Like is this thing still going to be, I mean they do a pretty good job of supporting their hardware for a long time but are they going to continue to work on it? And I don't know if that's true or not. Yeah, we'll see. Maybe I'll get, if the second one does come out maybe I'll get the second one. I don't know. Maybe it'll make me into a gamer. And well, and also like I think kind of the biggest thing about the Steam Deck is like a lot of it's, like it's got a lot of cool factors if you're not gaming on it but the majority of the cool factor is being able to take games that you shouldn't be able to just play like, you know, on high settings on a handheld device and just walk away from the computer. That's like one of the biggest cool factors to it and for you I don't really see you using that. So I don't really know if it'd even be a good product for you but I will say I hope that they do come out with a second version and I do hope you end up getting it mainly because I think it would be interesting to see you do a review on a product that you don't necessarily need or anything but you've waited and seen the reaction through all of the first generation device and now you get to see the new one. Like how did they improve? Like, you know, did you really miss out any on not getting the first one? I think that would be a great piece of content. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. They got to come out with a second one first. I mean, it really only gets troubling when you need to count to three with Valve. That's the problem. I know, for those of you who don't know that's a half-life joke. Yeah, those jokes honestly don't have a half-life. They just keep getting funnier. That was bad, man. All right, moving on. So here we enter into the part of the podcast where I'm gonna lose about half of you because the vast majority of you guys don't give a crap about Twitter and this was much bigger news three weeks ago when I put these links in the show notes but I wanted to talk a little bit about Twitter. So there are two links in the show notes about Twitter. I'm not even gonna show them on screen. We don't need to really talk about the articles themselves, but, and Tyler, you're not, you're not and probably never have been a Twitter user, right? Have you ever, ever even? Turns out, actually, interesting question. I thought I had never been a Twitter user but when I got the MacBook, I went ahead and did Dashlane and just went ahead and used a password manager because I needed it and secured up a lot of my accounts and I checked in on Twitter and it turns out I do have a Twitter. I have no idea, like I just signed in, changed the password and everything and secured it but it's not like I did anything with it. It's not like I checked up. I have no idea what I've ever posted to Twitter and I'm kind of a little scared to even check because knowing me like this account is probably from like when I was like 16 or something. So there's no telling. We gots to know, man. There could be horrible shit on my Twitter. Like I have no idea. That would make an excellent video. I should do that. That would be great. Thank you. I'll do that. It'll be an awesome video. I'd watch that live. It'd be so good. Anyways, Elon has bought Twitter. No one really cares anymore that he bought Twitter because it's really is old news. We don't need to talk about too much about the purpose. It's like he's driving it into the ground. It's like watching a car crash. It's fascinating. Even if you don't use Twitter, watching him make all these fast paced changes is just very fascinating. If you're reading about any of this stuff, you probably had a really good time. And it's really weird. It's really bifurcated the Twitter audience. So there's half of them that are Elon fans and think that he's going to save the platform. Either they got banned or they just left because they didn't really care for it because of the politics and whatever. Don't care. There's that group that have all come flocking back to Twitter and have flocking back to Twitter. Did you get the bird joke? Anyways, they've all come back to Twitter and they're all using it and they're singing its praises. And then there's the other half of the internet that thinks that this is a disaster to match every other disaster that's ever happened on the internet and they're all flocking away from Twitter as fast as possible and moving on to things like Mastodon, which is good, and moving it on to HiveSocial. I don't know if you've heard about HiveSocial, Tyler. I have no clue what it is either, but I've been reading about it. And apparently their security is so bad they had to shut the entire service down because there was such a massive security hole that anybody could waltz in and take all their data, like every bit of their data. And the thing is that the security company that found that data and alerted them privately so that they could fix it before they released it to public, like, you know, a good security research firm should do. And HiveSocial did nothing about it. So yeah, there's the thing that I wanna talk about that relates to open source because most people, like I said on this channel, do not give a rat's ass about Twitter. What I wanted to instead talk about that relates to open source software is the benefits that this has had for the FedEverse. Now, I hate that word. The FedEverse is a horrible word we should not use it because it confuses the fuck out of everybody. But this whole idea of federated social media was a pipe dream, just like a month and a half ago. At least that's when Elon bought Twitter or if everyone flocked to Mastodon, I keep using that word. And they've grown like by millions of new users. And it's nuts. And not only has it helped to bring Mastodon to the forefront, but things like Peertube and Matrix and PixelFed and stuff like that, they, people have started paying attention to this more, this idea of a community-controlled social media experience. And it has been good. So I've been on Mastodon for well over a year, but my account now has been there since April. And unfaust it on. And when I first signed up for it in April, didn't use it. But now it's really, really good. Like, yeah, they still have some like moderation problems and that stuff will get sorted out. But I've had more legitimate, real-world, great conversations on Mastodon than I ever did on Twitter. It's just been so good. Like the people on there are just, now granted, just like with Twitter, it really does depend on who you follow. If you follow a whole bunch of assholes, you're going to interact with a lot of assholes. If you follow a lot of really weird, like hashtags, you know, you're going to have a problem with that. But if you follow the people who tweet and toot things that you are interested in, it was very good. So yeah, Mastodon is winning. It's really good. I think it, I just think it's hilarious that like Twitter is a place that we actually pull a lot of like news from. Like Twitter is like, it's gone from a social media platform to like a, this is where your news comes from place, which is like insane. Like I don't know if you know this or not, but like a multiple news networks have pulled and like done entire pieces based solely off of the Twitter posts and feeds. Like that's wild to me. Like that's like your local news channel deciding to do a piece on Linux. And like they pull all of the information off like for Linux Mint off of like what people are saying on Mastodon. It's like, it'd be more like they pull all their information off from Linux, based on one video they watched by this guy called the Linux cast. And he like really didn't like Linux Mint. So that's, that's their basis for, for everything on their news thing. That'd be hilarious. Okay. Okay. I don't want to get, so there are people in the chat talking about how I'll just give Elon, you know, a few minutes he'll, he'll turn around. I don't really want to get into that because people's view on Elon is, he's so polarizing. Some people think he's like the, the T, like the basis for Tony Stark, right? He's this genius or whatever, right? Like he's, he's the best thing ever. He's going to save humanity. Some people think that other people think he's like the devil reincarnated, right? He's, he's really, really bad. And you know, personally, I don't have any, I like watching the dumpster fire. That's about all my opinion comes in on Elon. I don't know whether or not he's really smart. I don't know if he's really dumb and just happens to have a lot of money. I could, I can see both articles. I think it's funny that people get so upset and like invested in this kind of stuff. Like, all right, look, let's be honest. Most of us, probably all of us don't have Teslas. So you're not invested in like him as a person in his company. And also, like, who gives a shit about Twitter? Like, all right, like, let's be honest. For one, if you're going to fight like with someone else or bicker over like your opinions on a person with another person, like it's the same thing as bickering about a piece of cheese with someone else. It's like, yeah, your, your opinions might differ and you could argue about it, but you shouldn't like at all. And also if Twitter dies, who the fuck cares? Like, look, I know there's a lot of people that have jobs at Twitter. Like, and people losing their jobs is never a good thing, but they'll find new jobs and some other social media app will become what Twitter was. Like, it doesn't matter. In Twitter's defense, just a little bit, there are people who rely on it for actual important things. Like people who are in countries where the freedom of speech thing is not really a thing. Being able to be on Twitter and get news and stuff like that in some form or fashion is important. But also, we go back to the whole thing, is if you're getting news off from Twitter, you have some issues because it's like getting all of your news from cousin Ricky at the Thanksgiving table. Like that guy, he doesn't know what he's talking about, okay, and everyone knows it, but there's that, but grandma really likes Ricky, right? And she believes everything he says because he's just the apple of her eye. And she'll believe everything he says, even though he knows nothing what he's talking about. That's Twitter in a nutshell. Most people on there have no clue what they're talking about. And even if you follow a legitimate news source on Twitter, I mean, you really gotta pay attention to what you're reading and do your own fact checking as much as possible. That's always been the case, but it seems to be something that people have forgotten. I guess Twitter should just be the thing that brings like a topic or situation to your attention. It should not be what educates you about a subject. It shouldn't be, if everything you know about global warming came from a 250 character tweet, you probably don't know anything about global warming, you know, whatever they're calling it these days, but this, I mean, honestly, but the thing is, first of all, the point I was trying to talk about is just that Macedon and the federated social media sphere now has more attention on it than ever before, more users than ever before. And as they get into Macedon, they're looking at all their things. And Tyler, this is where I wanted to try to kind of transition. You and I have tried Matrix a couple of times. We've tried to download Element to do this thing. And it is bad. Like, it is bad. Like, we've tried, we've tried at least twice, probably three times to try this, because we wanted to get away from Discord because Discord is terrible. It's a piece of crap, but that's the problem. Like, everything else is also a piece of crap. It's a bigger piece of crap. At least Discord is a shiny piece of crap. The rest of them just haven't been shined yet, right? The way that I like to put it is at least Discord puts sprinkles on their pile of shit, you know? It's like that moment in one of the American pie movies where Stifler eats the dog. All right, we don't need to talk about Twitter anymore. I just wanted to mention it because I think Macedon is still really good. Follow me on Mastodon or Faustodon. Faustodon.org slash at the Linux cast is where you can find me. It's amazing, and I tweet about all sorts of things there. I keep saying tweet. It's called toot. Toot is the stupidest word ever. I'm gonna continue to say tweet. Anyways, moving on to the last article of the day, Tyler, your last article. Mine is about System76's Cosmic Desktop Environment, which by the way, I will go ahead and say, if GNOME is similar to macOS, PopOS is like an off-brand macOS. Like it is, it's very similar to macOS. I do have to be honest about that because a lot of their touchpad gestures are extremely similar to the, if not the exact same that macOS uses. So like that's a thing. I don't think that's a selling point. I'm just pointing that out. It's designed extremely nicely. And so this article talks about how the fact that they're going to be coming with HDR support and better, well, just ironing out some of the NVIDIA problems that has plagued pretty much every Wayland-based bullshit but not something else. They're not using GTK anymore, right? They're gonna move it over Iced. Is that right? Yeah. Mm-hmm, yep. That's insane to me. But it's wild because it's System 76, which they have, they have very talented people at System 76, but they don't have a lot of very talented people. Yeah. So it's like budgie. The budgie desktop has tried several times to change to a difference away from GTK. They tried, they thought about going to Qt for a little while and then the licensing was all messed up there. And now they're going to the Enlightenment, the EFL libraries. And the GTK guys and the GNOME guys must have really pissed off PopOS, the System 76 guys. Like, there must have been a big fight there for them to say, you know what? Screw this, we're starting over. Like, we're gonna take everything that we've learned and make our own. And we're not even gonna make it a GTK-based desktop. We're gonna use something completely different that no one's ever heard of or used before that is not as well-developed as GTK because ICE does not. You know, it's developed, it's just, it doesn't have the resources that GTK has because GTK is financed by the GNOME Foundation, which is, you know, a huge foundation that makes millions of dollars. So there must have been something that went down that just, like, I mean, part of it- Well, I mean, I will go ahead and say that I know for a fact, GTK, with it being obviously from the GNOME guys, they don't really do anything to help outside developers who rely on GTK. They just kind of, like, tell them to, you know, suck it up and get with it because it's whatever the GNOME guys want. Like, anything that team needs, they get it. And I know that's pissed off a lot of other developers before, but when it comes to, like, System 76, I genuinely do think it's one of those things where they've had one of those run-ins, like, plenty of develop- I mean, if you can read up on it, like, there are plenty of developers who have, you know, talked about their poor experience with GTK, but I think most likely what it is is System 76 has the people there that are smart enough to do this and have the resources to do it. And this is just a spike move. Like, it's not like it's not, GTK is not working for them, but it's like, if you're gonna treat us like shit, screw you, we'll make our own. I think part of it was they got so sick of every time a new GNOME version came out, that every single one of their extensions broke. Like, every single one. And there was no... I actually posted about this on Massadon is I, because I, you're right, I have done a complete 180 when it comes to GNOME. I'm not saying I'm gonna use it, but it's not as bad as I thought it was. But there's something to be said for the fact that if it feels like every time they come out with a new GNOME version, it breaks every single extension ever. That's an overexaggeration. It doesn't really break all of them. But a lot of extensions break every time there's a new version of GNOME. And I've posted about this. It feels like they do it on purpose. It feels like they break them on purpose. Now, one of the GNOME developers actually replied to me on Massadon and said, no, we don't do it on purpose. This is the reason why they break. And there was some technology talk about how version numbers and all this stuff has to match up and yada, yada, yada. It read like a basket full of excuses to me. It's just... And this is the primary... There have been many complaints that I've had about GNOME in the past from lack of customization to the fact that they always seem to pull out features and stuff like that to the fact that they sometimes decided to delve into politics when they really shouldn't to the fact that their desktop a year and a half, maybe two years ago was absolute garbage. Well, this has been longer than that. Before Ubuntu started using GNOME again, before Ubuntu basically fixed the GNOME and pushed it all upstream, GNOME was the slowest piece of garbage crap you've ever used in your damn life. It used two gigabytes of memory on average. And because their animation speeds were so slow, it felt like you could watch them frame by frame. God, I remember that time. That was a fucking terrible time. It was so bad. And the thing was like it was that way for years until Ubuntu started using GNOME and said, no, we'll fix this for you. And you can use the code, okay? So there have been many hits on GNOME over the years. But the thing that has been routinely consistent that you can always criticize them for is that they do not like outside influence on their product direction. And that's what extensions are. They don't like extensions. And it's blatantly obvious that they don't like extensions. They don't want those things to exist in being army. They grudgingly accept that they exist and have to exist, but they don't like it and they're not gonna go out of their way to support them. And that's just the way it always just feel. And I don't have a lot of hard evidence for this, but I've talked to people and I've seen posts and talked to developers who have had this experience. And it's just like they do not, the GNOME guys just do not want that experience to, they don't want other people, really they could give a rat's ass about any other people using GNOME other than Fedora. You know what I mean? Fedora uses vanilla GNOME and that's the only way the GNOME guys think that it should be used. If you use it in your distro and do other things on top of it, like Ubuntu does, like Papa West does, then you've bought it as is and it's your responsibility to fix it. And I think that that rubs a lot of developers the wrong way simply because the GNOME guys are antagonistic towards people who use GNOME in a way that they're not necessarily okay with. I don't know. You wanna be, you want to be cheerful about GNOME because it is the primary Linux desktop. As sad as that freaking is to say, but it is. But- Well, I mean, I will say, I think, I think GNOME has done a really good job of not making mistakes, but from learning from them and they, I won't give them too much credit. It takes them quite a long time to learn from like their errors and the things that the public doesn't really give a shit about when it comes to them. Like their political opinions. No, like I genuinely don't wanna talk to a person who really cares what GNOME has to think about the political landscape. Like, what, no, like, no. But I think they've done a very good job of like toning that down almost to completion. Like they don't really talk about that stuff anymore. Maybe someone can show me something that they have been doing recently. It has been a while. Since the Richard Stallman stuff, they've been pretty silent on it, but from time to time they'll delve into it. Yeah, and I think that's kind of what's made GNOME a lot better over the past. I would say at least a year. Like it's gotten really good on the GNOME side of things. But if they can get to a point where they really do care about not making extensions feel like they're something that GNOME, for whatever reason, decided they had to be there, but they don't like. Like I think a big thing with extensions is GNOME, it's not like they don't want them to be there, but they're not willing to support them at all or don't go anywhere out of their way to not break them. Which if they can come up with a system where they don't really have to support extensions or be there to hold them up and keep them working, but also not break them with every single release, that'd be great. There is like an environment variable or something that you can run that will ensure your extensions don't break. It's like one line. That's how they fix it, because that's what they told me on Massedon when I tweeted that about GNOME purposely breaking things. Like you can fix that with this one line. I don't know if it's an environment variable or something like that. And I was like, if it's just one line, why isn't that there, like why isn't it? Also, why is it, the thing that truly breaks the GNOME extensions is that they're version dependent. So every extension has, we work with this version of GNOME. And when a new version of GNOME comes out, that version number changes. So all they really need to do, again, not a developer, so I don't know how much work this would be, but really what they really need to do is get rid of that requirement that GNOME extensions have to be version dependent. Just remove the version check on it. And that, I mean, I believe that's all that one line is doing, is removing the check on the extension and just letting it run. Now, obviously, they want a smooth experience. That's what they want. They want an Apple-like experience. And by removing the check over whether or not that extension works with that version of GNOME, they have a, there's a possibility that it causes instability inside of the desktop environment. And of course, the extension's not going to get blamed for that instability. It's going to be GNOME that gets blamed for it. I can see that perspective. It just seems like there's got to be an easier way. Or here's a novel idea. Here's a novel idea. Don't take out features that people like, like icons in the desktop and icons in the taskbar. Those are the two extensions that most people want. Just make them toggleable in the settings. Like if you want to keep them off by default, sure, but make them an option. Have them there. If icons on the desktop and icons in the task tray were things that were default in GNOME, the vast majority of people would never use an extension. Like, period. Like they wouldn't. Maybe they want some more customization with the dock. But you want to know what? They're working on that already. Like it's already a thing, you know? Ubuntu did it. So there's no reason why they can't build that in later. That can be a feature that comes later. Most people wouldn't even care. They're perfectly happy not having the control over the dock, but they want icons on the desktop or at least the option to have them. And they want the task, the icons in the task tray, because some applications still need them. Those two? You completely, I mean, people would still want extensions and some people would still use them, but the vast majority of people, you get those two things. They wouldn't care about extensions at all. Yeah. But to your point that, you know, if they were to start going ahead and actually making it to where, like there was no version compatibility like blockage and just letting them come through, if that extension breaks because it's not true, like it doesn't truly work with a new version of GNOME, that doesn't really matter for them. Cause like, I mean, if you think about it like this, when your extensions break on GNOME, no matter what you blame GNOME, like no matter what. So the systems like that are put in place right now where you have to add an environment variable to like keep that from happening. Like I don't think it does nearly as much good as they think it does. Like if you, if extensions are gonna break period on an update, that's a problem. I think it's better that there's just a chance they break and stop working on the new version. People are perfectly willing to see things break when there's an update. Cause that's just normal, right? Some pieces of software, when you move to a different version of Fedora or Ubuntu, whatever, stop working because they don't, you know, there's a library that's missing or a library version that's, you know, different than what it needs. That stuff happens. If you've used Arch Linux at all, you know how this feels when you're using an application that just stops working after a Python update, you know? It happens. You know, people are willing to see this happen from time to time. The problem is that it doesn't happen from time to time on GNOME, it happens every time. Like Dash to Dock, Dash to Dock is the primary one. It's like, if those two extensions I talked about before, like the main ones, like the ones that everybody watched, Dash to Dock is like the third one that everybody wants, right? That's the third most popular. It's the one that a lot of people really want. But that thing breaks every single time GNOME updates, every single time without fail. And yes, that's partially the developer of the plug, the extensions problem. That, you know, they're usually pretty slow when it comes to updating that thing to get to the new GNOME version. So that's part of the problem. But also, it happens every time. Like that's the thing is like, it's not just every once in a while, but now it's expected. You know, it's expected behavior. You know, if an extension that you need, you know, is not going to work because of an upgrade, you're going to not upgrade. You know, I know a lot of people who are still on Fedora 36 and using GNOME 42 because they need a specific extension and they know that it's going to be broken in GNOME 43 for a while. So that's, I mean, that's an issue. All right, we've talked about GNOME way more than I ever want to. I still, I like it more than I did before. Still not a fanboy. The thing is though, here's what GNOME really needs to do. They need to take Ubuntu's version of GNOME and use that. Ubuntu's version of GNOME is really, really good. It gives you options to change where the dock is and how it looks. It gives you accent colors. You know, it gives you all these customization options by the way, through extensions. I feel bad for those guys because they have to keep those things up to date. But yeah, Ubuntu versions of GNOME is way, way better than Fedora's. It just is. Unless you like the pure vanilla GNOME experience, Ubuntu's version of GNOME is better. And you guys all know that I'm not an Ubuntu fan. Ubuntu's not my thing. I love Fedora, which is ironic. I want Ubuntu's GNOME on Fedora. Give me that. I'd use it. They do, Canonical does do a great job of that. They take a lot of the weak points of GNOME for most people, not for everybody, because they're still gonna be most of us who prefer a vanilla GNOME experience. And if you want extras, you'll add it yourself. But for the majority of people who aren't interested in tinkering around with shit, like there's just a lot more features there for them, a lot more like convenience factors that are nice. And I don't know. Like I think GNOME could benefit from that, but I do see their design, like their design goals are very similar to Apple's. They want a very clean UI. They want something that at the very least is intuitive for most people. Probably not everybody, because everybody's different, but for most people it's intuitive. And it's, I don't like saying dumb down, but it's simple. Like there's not convoluted menus and sub menus and shit. You got to dive through like KD settings. For example, that's a perfect example. But yeah. I think Fedora could benefit from looking at what Canonical's doing, which is odd for me to say. I never thought I'd be seeing that. And I agree with you, it's just never ever gonna happen. Because the Fedora and GNOME teams are cross-pollinated. A lot of them work on both projects. So Vanilla GNOME is on Fedora to stay. That's just the way it's just gonna be working. All right, so moving on to the section we lovingly call thingies of the week. We could have called this thing any other number of things like apps of the week or picks of the week or tips of the week. No, we decided to go with something unique and recalling them thingies of the week. So Tyler, do you have a thingy of the week for us this week? I do, I did not put it in the show notes, but that's just because I'm an idiot and I totally forgot that that was even a thing in the show notes. It's been so long since we did a podcast. Exactly, yeah. But mine is, it's called Tinker Tool and it's a Mac specific app. But the reason I'm gonna put it as my thingy of the week, even though I know most likely most people watching this stream are not using a Mac, or if you are using a Mac, it's with Linux loaded on it. Tinker Tool is an app for Macs that allows you to get a lot of these settings that Apple allows you to change, but they don't have a goo, like it's not in the settings app or anywhere else on the system. They're like kind of like GNOME's hidden settings. You know, like there's some settings in GNOME that don't really show up, but you can run terminal commands and it'll work. Same kind of idea. But Tinker Tool takes those commands and gives them a gooey. And so it's a very simple and very easy tool to use. It's very well-organized. Like they have categories on the top and each section doesn't, it's not littered with different options, but there's a lot of great things that you can do with it. Like one of the ones that the main reason I even ended up getting the tool was you can, there's a delay, like if you hide your dock and go down and go and try and pull it up and, you know, unhide it, it takes like a little bit under two seconds or something like that for it to show up. Like it's a very slight delay that you have to hold your mouse at the edge of the screen before your dock will come up. You can just click a button and it removes that delay. So that's like one of the main things features of the app that I really do enjoy. So yeah, on the off chance anyone is watching this and uses a Mac for work or, you know, just uses a Mac in general. Check it out. It's a really great tool. The site is that you get it from is a little sketchy. And by a little sketchy, I mean it's some dude's personal like website. Now he's a doctor, his credentials seem pretty good. I checked him out. He's legit. Like he actually exists and there's a real guy who does everything. So, and he's mainly just a software engineer developer for Mac OS, but yeah, it's a great tool. I love it. Cool. All right. So mine is a feature of them. So I participated in NaNoWriMo this past month. The fact that I'm just now getting to this tip of the week, even though I discovered it like three weeks ago is entertaining. But basically what MK Session does, it's M-K-S-E-S-S-I-O-N. And you should Google it on how to use it. But basically what it allows you to do is save your session in VIM. Now, this is not really all that useful if all you have is one buffer open. If you have just one buffer open and it's just like one document, you can find other easier ways of having them remember your position. But if you use splits or tabs, you can use make session to have a file saved of that session. So basically what it is is you would open up that session file when you come back and it would remember how your documents were split. It would remember what tabs you had open, all the buffers you had open and then just open them all in the exact same position you left them in. So if you use T-Mux, T-Mux has this feature and it obviously expands it beyond them. But if you just are using them and you're not using T-Mux, make session MK, I think it's actually mark session, but it's MK session. It just allows you to save your session in them so that it remembers your splits and your tabs and your position and all that stuff. You just open that back up with a specific flag and it will take you right back to where you were and it is amazing. So if you're a coder or a developer of some kind, if you do writing of any kind and you have multiple documents open at the same time, this is really, really cool. I used it for an entire month and I probably will never go back to not using it again because it's amazing, it's really good. So I can have the, you know, I was using it for Nano, like I said, and I could have my timeline and my outline and splits on one side and the main document on the other and I always could shut my computer down and come back to where it was before. So it was really, really good. Also, Vim is awesome, suck at E-Max. Yeah. That's definitely where we should end the show right there. Yeah, so that's it. It is a good place to end it. So if you want to, we record this live every Friday between three o'clock p.m. Eastern time and around five o'clock p.m. Eastern time, we are going to be doing two more shows this year. We have, so the next two weeks we'll have shows. If you want to watch live, you can do that at youtube.com slash linuxcast. Make sure you're subscribed. Hit the bell icon, all that stuff. Hashtag YouTuber. All that stuff is there if you just hit subscribe and you won't miss a show, which it's awesome. Before we go, I should take a moment to thank my current patrons. Thanks to everyone who does support me on Patreon and YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing. If you want to support me on LiberaPay, that's also a possibility. That link will be in the video description. I keep getting reminded on Odyssey that I should say LiberaPay from time to time. That link is in the video description there. Job done. Anyways, thanks to everyone who does support me on Patreon, YouTube and LiberaPay. You guys are all amazing. We'll let you to the channel just to not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much. And thanks everybody for watching. We'll see you next week.