 Hey everybody, welcome to Linuxcast, I'm your host Matt. And I'm Josh. And I'm somebody, Steve. All right, anyways, welcome to Linuxcast. I know we haven't actually done this very much lately. We've been having a hard time getting everybody in the room. But three of us are here. Tyler is off doing something. I think he had some familial obligations or something this week, so he's off. It's just three of us, but we're gonna talk about some Linux-y things. But first, as always, we're gonna talk about what we've been up to recently in the open source universe. So, Josh, why don't you take us off first? What's you've been doing? Well, I think I missed the last two episodes. I think so. I might be wrong on that. But, you know, one of them I went to, I had a Linux festival. I got to hang out with the open-source guys where they gave me not one, but two little stuffed geckos and a water bottle that leaks water. Got to hang out with the Trunas guys, which gave me this, this does not depend. This is a screwdriver, apparently. Like, you know, I can like unscrew the back and right there, there's little screwdriver bits. I'm still going to be using my old screwdriver because, you know, these bits are a little bit too small and fragile. So, oh yeah. And I also got an open-soosah flashlight. So, open-soosah had the best swag, yeah? They always have the best swag. If you're at a Linux conference and you're, and you see an open-soosah booth, go there and get everything that they will let you take. You know, I don't, Ohio has its own Linux festivals. Anybody know if Michigan has one? I've tried to look. I know they have, there's a Michigan lug that goes on every, every two weeks or so. I've thought about, I had that saved in a calendar, so I'm thinking about joining that. So that'd be, it sounds pretty cool. I don't know if there's actually a festival in Michigan and I've never actually- There might be one for Detroit, but that'd be about a- That's Detroit. It'd be like going to Cleveland. I know. Actually, your Detroit is my Toledo. We don't talk about Toledo. It reminds me of, you guys ever seen Scary Movie 4? It was like, Detroit, before the aliens? It shows everything on fire, then Detroit after the aliens? It just shows everything on fire, but with aliens? Those are good movies. As you can tell, I'm very much not, and you know, gonna be on topic today. It's gonna be fine. I'm sure it's gonna be fine. So other than going to the Linux conference, you're running Linux from scratch? I hear this. Yes, I am running Linux from scratch. I have spent two and a half weeks working on this. We have a super basic installation of minimum viable GUI plus terminal, and everything else on top is flat packet snaps. Get off the podcast, you got snaps. So you're saving yourself from compiling everything post finishing by just using containers? Well yes, because you know, if I'm gonna make a distro, I'm gonna make the distro right, and I'm just gonna have minimum viable GUI plus terminal, everything else is on top as a container. Have you been able to, here's a question. Have you looked into getting distro box up and running? I was expecting that question. Turns out that building support for Docker and Podman is actually more of a pain in the butt than it is for Snap. Which Snap I had to, I had to apply 90 plus patches to the kernel just to be able to get the containerization working. And that's how it worked out of the box. I just saw a couple of libraries and it was good to go. I knew Matt was going to ask that question. Oh my God. I'm a fanboy, I can't help it, it's fantastic. I need to get on top of that. I need to get on top of that because I couldn't get it running on the Steam Deck, now the Steam Deck is gone. My most recent success on that is I wanted to try the Zoho mail client but there wasn't an RPM package for it so I downloaded it on my Arch container and just exported it, it works fine. I have a question regarding that. Is it true when people say if you're on Arch you don't need containers because Arch has everything? Is that true? No, Arch does not have everything. Almost everything. They have a lot of things but not everything. Also there's reasons why beyond just package availability that you'd want to use District Box, if you want things containerized with their own home directory or whatever, you can do it that way. Let's just say you wanted to have, this is just off top of my head, say you wanted to have Steam running but you didn't want it on your main machine for some reason, you wanted it in its own container and you didn't want to use Flat Pack for again whatever reason you could use District Box to do that and they're obviously more productivity, focused reasons to do that but yeah, there's many reasons to use District Box. Another reason is if an application is more stable on Debian than... Yeah, just be packaging reasons because you know Arch Linux is famous for hey, this feature quit working, we're just going to disable it in the package build and we're just going to push the binary out. Too bad you can't get Grubbin District Box, I'm just saying. Yep, too bad. All right, Steve, what have you been up to recently? Well, since I've been out of the country for the past two weeks, not much because, well, I didn't have a Linux machine. My brother was running Windows because my brother is not a Linux person. And... He's a model person. He's running Windows 11 and he was playing his game. But I did do a little bit. My brother gave me a Dell XPS 9360, a 13 inch laptop from 2017, a Core i7 7th gen with a 13 inch 4K touchscreen for whatever reason, who would run a 4K resolution on 13 inches? I don't know. But I installed zero G on Weyland using Weyland. So I do have, I'm starting to dip my toes into Weyland right now. So let me get this straight. Josh is using Snaps and you're using Weyland. It's like- And GNOME. And GNOME, and GNOME. It's like you're not even my friends anymore. What's wrong with you? You're betraying me. It's like stabbing me in the back. I've never really hated Snaps, to be honest with you. I just had some pain points with them. And you know, since you know, they switched Firefox to the Snap, they fixed the biggest complaint that I had about them. Still slower than it needs to be, but it's definitely faster than it was. I'll just fix the annoyance a little bit. It's temporary. GNOME, Weyland is temporary. I want a full fledged Weyland session with Hyperland for now. I want to mess around with Hyperland. And then I want to mess with other Weyland, like KDE, Zero Linux KDE edition on Weyland on the laptop. It's an experimentation laptop device, basically. So I'm dipping my toes into Weyland like I promised everyone I would. I'm keeping my promise. Just not on my main rig. The GPU is still, I'm still gonna buy the GPU, but not right now. I'm waiting for the prices to go a little bit lower. But for the time being, I'm using that laptop to dip my toes into the whole Weyland situation. And for whatever reason, there's an issue currently with Arch. There's a VPN package. They decided to move to the AUR because for whatever reason, the maintainer is no longer maintaining it. And one of the dependencies is stuck with the old version. So I need to build new ISOs. So I'm working on that. And other than that, I'm enjoying some gaming on Linux. So first thanks to Nate for the Super Chat. I appreciate that. But for me, what I've been doing, so just one thing that I did is because I've been testing the awesomeness that is ButterFS. I uninstall, so I made a snapshot, a manual snapshot. I uninstalled Plasma completely for fun and installed GNOME. I was surrounded with GNOME, raced it and got all the extensions. Remembered why I hated GNOME and then did a rollback to the snapshot that I created before I installed GNOME and uninstalled Plasma. So that was fun. It worked flawlessly, by the way. There you go. You're right there, Steve. Your chair looks like it's both. It's my chair. It's doing some weird shit, but see, see, GNOME works. GNOME works. It worked. I got rid of it very fast. It was there for like just long enough for me to take a screenshot. Anyways, that's what I did. Other than that, mostly I've been just working, so. Anyways, that's it for that segment. Let's go ahead and move on to the main topic. And this week's main topic was brought to us by our friend Josh. So Josh will be taking over the hosting duties from here until the end. So Josh, take us away, please. Well, you see, Matt said that, hey, y'all need to help me pick topics because I don't know what topic we're gonna pick with this weekly podcast that we do here because a weekly schedule is really tough to maintain as I can personally vouch. But, you know, I've decided, you know what? Let's pick an interesting topic here. Is the Linux Cast Evil? Well, I don't think that he said that right. I don't think I did either. What, what, what, what just happened here? He just asked if the Linux Cast was evil. I don't think the Linux Cast was evil. Oh, okay, well, maybe the Linux Foundation. See, this is why I'm so glad I took over because if you've been practicing the sentence for a whole week and you still got this one wrong. No, actually, I was reading this Cryo Oxygen coming. That's where I got that from. Oh. Here's a million. Here's a million for that joke. Oh, I thanks, bud. Thanks. Then. So, is the Linux Foundation evil? Okay, so for those of you that don't know, the Linux Foundation is a foundation that was started back in the year 2000 by two, and it's a combination of these two different groups that were helping fund not just the development of the Linux kernel, but several other projects as well. And basically what they are is they're the foundation that currently handles the paychecks for Linus Torvalds, the guy that originally created Linux, and Greg Crow Hartman, which is the maintainer of the Linux LTS project, and several other developers that work on that, and they also help fund initiatives, and but they're basically just like the business people behind Linux. That's generally what they are. Now. When you mentioned LTS, sorry, I saw this today. Is it true that the LTS, switching from six-year schedule to a two-year schedule? Yeah, that's the way it used to be. Now it's two years. Yeah, it's back to two years, because it turns out that maintaining something for six years is kind of painful. Take it from somebody who's been maintaining something for three months. Because there's like four or not, whatever, like one of the four series, several of the four series is still in support, right? Yeah. Four dollars. It's been a long time ago. Okay, so. I just wanted to mention that. The support of the Linux foundation is what you would claim made it evil. What's your rationale behind thinking that it might be evil, Josh? Okay, so Matt, if you can take a moment. I think in, I think in like the topic proposal in the Git repository, I actually put an article link in there, or which is basically just a covering of the Linux foundation board. These are the people that control the Linux foundation. If you look at all the names, they also have all the company names that those people work for underneath. That's where you see Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, and a few other big names that you might recognize from the tech industry. Did you just mention Microsoft? Yes. Microsoft Linux. Oh. Yeah, Microsoft loves Linux, right? So we're gonna have a Microsoft Linux one day? Yeah, something like that. Here, I already found it. I'll post it in a YouTube chat for you. Microsoft Linux. Yeah, Board of Directors. Interesting. VMware, Sony. Two people listed in the Atmarder director. I think they're just the Linux foundation employees. We have Intel, hallway, Renaissance, Fujitsu, Tencent, Qualcomm Technologies, Meta, otherwise known as Facebook, Hitachi, Panasonic, Microsoft, Samsung, GitHub, which we all know Microsoft owns GitHub. Erickson, NAC, Intel, Red Hat, Oracle, and Jim Zemlin with the Linux foundation proper. You said Tencent. Tencent is as in Tencent, people behind PUBG and stuff like that? Yeah, they own PUBG, Fortnite. They have like a 90% ownership of right games. They also own TikTok. Well, because my brother who handles Papa John's signed an IP with them, an IPO or something, now they have PUBG on the boxes of Papa John. Yep. Now, the reason why I ask is the Linux foundation evil is because not that long ago, they actually used to have a chair that was dedicated for the community. And generally people from the community would elect a developer to sit in the community chair of the Linux foundation. Well, VMware, which you might know for their product of ESXi, which is a hypervisor, is a Linux-based operating system. And basically, they never contributed anything to the Linux kernel, nor did they post any of their kernel patches to a public repository. So they weren't contributing to the GPL. And this marks the largest GPL violation in the history of the GPL license. I was going to say, I was going to say it's a violation. Now, the Linux foundation, you can buy a chair in the Linux foundation for $500,000. You can buy a seat on the board. You can buy a seat, buy a seat. So even if you don't do anything to contribute anything, you just buy a seat. Yeah, so what VMware did was they bought a seat. And when they bought a seat on the Linux foundation, they pushed forward a proposal to the board of directors to eliminate the community chair, of which they approved. Uh-oh. That's a big no-no. Yeah, I would agree that this is something negative. What the hell? So basically, you can buy a place on the throne and then you propose evil things and you can get away with it because you bought a seat. I mean, are we surprised all that much? But also, the Linux foundation is not a community-focused thing, at least I've never seen it as one. So I'm not surprised that that happened. Since they've been more corporate-wise, has it always been corporate-sponsored since the beginning of it, Josh? You know the history, but I don't know. Initially, no, it was not, but the corporations have basically moved in. Also, I think I saw comments. Somebody's like, what does this have to do with regular everyday Linux users? The thing is that one thing you have to understand is that they, this isn't a desktop Linux thing. I don't, I mean, they're- It trickles down, the decisions, we suffer the decisions that trickle down because you got Intel, Microsoft, like specifically Intel because they're responsible for the CPU microcode and their CPU microcode and a lot of hardware-based microcodes and drivers and stuff like that. Mainly the ArcGPUs that Josh keeps shoving in our face every episode. I've still got the box, it's sitting back down on a shelf. Okay, so to help guide you guys in that, they pay for the development of the Linux kernel. They control the group that runs Automotive-grade Linux which is basically all the US automakers are moving towards besides Tesla because Tesla already made their own thing. They also have a controlling stake in the Open 3D Foundation which those are people that guide projects such as Blender and then the OpenJS Foundation which I'm not 100% certain but I think that they have something to do with the several JavaScript libraries that are very popular. Yeah. Now, how this would affect the user is say that like Big Daddy Linux Foundation, you know, who pays for the Linux development of the Linux kernel says, hey, Mr. Linus, can you just like approve this patch without actually reviewing it? Well, we'll grab our wallet here and we'll hand this corporate credit card to you if you do. Of course, Linus, you can only say. Okay. Now, in the event that you don't know, open source developers typically don't make a lot of money. Duh! Linus makes it probably the nicest paycheck out of anybody that actually develops open source code. Plus he made a mint back in the 90s. Yeah, but you know, if it's say like a million dollars for a one time thing. Wow. So basically the way you're describing the Linux Foundation is don't call your own. Something like that. Yeah, don't call your own. I'm gonna make him an offer to get reviews. Well, he can refuse it, but you know, I honestly would, there's probably plenty of people that would say you should just take in the money for Linux and do something else. Dude, recently with the 6.2 kernel and the ArcGPUs, that's what Intel did with Linus. They went through the Linux Foundation and they brought him a very handsome paycheck to include proprietary code in his kernel. Well, there's all kinds of proprietary could have been in kernel, even stretching from before the Linux Foundation establishment, so that's not exactly untrue. Well, I'm not saying this is the first time I'm just saying that it's one of the situations that confirms what you are saying, is they sat down Linus and the Intel guy and they were talking, including new proprietary code in the 6.2 kernel. So, and he was like, yeah, of course. Critically, if I'm wrong though, Intel does quite a bit of Linux development and contribution as well, so it's not as if they're just saying, hey. Yeah, they do. They're open source, they're contributions alone for not just Linux, but like the various BSD kernels that they contribute drivers towards. Of all the GPU manufacturers, Intel is your friend. Well, yes and no. Yes, when we say they have the highest number of open source contributions, but they also have proprietary stuff on the other side. Well, yeah. So, and proprietary stuff in the kernel. So, I'm like, how can Linus accept such things if the whole ideology behind the Linux kernel is to be open free and open source? Well, that's where the Linux Foundation comes in. He needs incentive to do that and that incentive is the Linux Foundation. Well, also the Linux kernel, yes, is free and open source, but it's not as regimental, it's not as regimental, it's not as, what's the word that I'm looking towards? It's not, they're not as tied to free and open source as like the new project is, for example, right? That's the reason why there has been proprietary blobs in the kernel for quite a long time. Yeah, not like the GNU Libre project. Yeah, or GNU Herd, if I remember correctly, I could be wrong. So, we were talking about corporations and their contributions to the Linux kernel. I just found this, this is not very recent, but this is from the 5.10 kernel. So, Huawei was the number one employer of Linux kernel developers at 8.9% of commits. Intel was number two at 8%, 6.6 and 5.9 were unknown and none. Then he had Red Hat, Google, AMD, Leno, which I've never heard of, Samsung, IBM, NXP, Facebook, Oracle, Sousa, Code, ORA, Forum, ARM, Renaissance, Electronics, NVIDIA and Texas Instruments. NVIDIA? Uh-oh. Good old NVIDIA. Well, that was also about when they were starting to rewrite their driver into the open source driver too. So that might be why. I didn't find the more recent ones. This is just why I found first. So yes, corporations do influence through the Linux foundation, but a lot of them also contribute back to it as well. And what I was gonna say earlier was that a lot of the corporations are interested in this because they use it on servers. It's all enterprises, the reason why they're interested. No, no, no, it's not one of them care about the, the Linux foundation has no interest whatsoever in desktop Linux. That's the reason why they all use Macs. We know that. Right? Whoa, they use Macs? Yeah. I mean, they're business people. They're not really developers. True, true. But if you go to all of the Linux conferences, all the people that are giving presentations, they're generally not using Linux computers to run the conferences. Yeah, but what I was going to say was that, yes, corporations kind of help and are needed in some areas for Linux to somewhat grow in the enterprise world and the server world. So I don't see them as evil in that area, but where they are, where they can tend to be seen as evil is when their iffy decisions, corporate decisions, trickle down to desktop Linux. Because sometimes they do. A lot of some of their decisions slip through and end up affecting desktop Linux. So that's how it is. That's how it can be perceived as evil. But otherwise, I don't see it as evil and nothing but evil. This is my point of view anyway. They are only evil if their decisions end up on the desktop Linux realm. Otherwise, who cares? Let them do whatever they wanna do. I do agree that these corporations should probably be involved in Linux kernel development. Yeah, they help the kernel grow. But I really do think that with the Linux kernel being maintained in this open source manner, the only company that is on the Linux Foundation board, or at least the only company name that I see on there that I particularly don't mind being there, because they do have some interest in desktop Linux is Red Hat. Because Red Hat, they also maintain the GNOME Foundation. They are big drivers of developing and maintaining GNOME itself on both Red Hat Linux and Fedora, which I think there's something like 50% of the people that make contributions on the GNOME's GitLab page. But I think that they're the only ones that have an interest in desktop Linux. So I do think that the corporation should be there, but I also think that there should still be a community chair. You know that the seats are bought and paid for when they have levels. So they have Gold Director and Silver Director. Like they have like, oh, you know, those guys paid extra money for a special colored seat. So I think that what side you come down on this really does depend on where you are and the whole corporation influence on Linux things. So we've talked about on the podcast before about how big corporations like Canonical and Red Hat and SUSE, how they have an enormous influence on desktop Linux, because they control the largest, you know, distros that are out there for the most part. You know, it's out of Arch. Like Arch is like the big distro out there that's not corporately influenced by corporations. The rest of them. Can I raise you Debian? And Debian, I forgot, sorry. Yeah, Debian, sorry. Debian is bigger than Arch. I forgot about Debian. How do I forget about Debian? I think I've been spending too much time with Debian. They just wanted to forget about it for a little while. Anyways, yeah, Debian and Arch those are the two examples of non-corporate influenced distros out there. And the rest of them basically are run by them, the big ones anyway. You know, I got a bunch of small ones, obviously, that aren't, but, and where you come down on the whole evilness of the Linux foundation, I think is kind of tied to, do you think that the influence of corporations period is evil? If so, then your answer to this is obviously yes, or do you think that in some situations, corporate influence can be positive? So for me personally, it's a weird proposition for me to be in, but I think, yes, corporations do evil things because they're influenced by one purpose only, which is making money. But also, that doesn't mean that they're necessarily always evil because obviously, every time something comes up to me and says, Matt, I don't like the influence of Red Hat or Canonical with Linux. I asked them, do you like Linux? Because without Canonical, without Red Hat, without the developers that work for them, without their money financing the development of these technologies, Linux would be back in the 90s still, right? We'd still have horrible audio. We'd still be using XORG, but worse, like really old, old XORG. And we'd have, for all of you Waylon fans, there'd be no Waylon, there'd be no System D, there'd be, you name the technology. There'd be no Pulse Audio. There'd be no Pulse Audio. You name the technology that has made Linux usable over the last 15 years, it was probably developed by, or at least financed by a corporation of some kind. Now, you can take the argument in another direction and say, yes, we can put up with the influence of Red Hat and Canonical and SUSE and whatever, because they have a, they have a iron in the fire, they have a interest in Linux themselves because it's their business, right? Whereas like Microsoft or Facebook or Fujitsu or something like Huawei or VMware or Sony, first of all, Sony, what the fuck Sony you got a chair on the board for? You make cameras, bro. TVs, dude, TVs. The TV is based on Android and Android uses the Linux kernel. Somebody was gonna say PlayStation, but PlayStation uses BSD, so. Yeah, they're built off of free BSD, so I don't really know what they would be using Linux for. The smart TV is Android, smart TVs. But they don't, they're just using Google TV. That'd be a reason for Google to have a chair on the thing, not. Yeah, maybe something with the cameras. Could be. Maybe the cameras have a Linux kernel running on them. That'd be hilarious. Oh, no. Anyway, so you can kind of, I guess it really does depend for me personally what corporation is having influence because I'm perfectly fine with Canonical and Red Hat and Suiza and I'm gonna say something horrible, maybe even Oracle, that tasted bad. But when it comes to Microsoft and Fujitsu and Tencent, like what the, why do you need influence over the Linux kernel? It feels more nefarious when they do it than the other guys does. That's just my point of view. Well, I do think that Fujitsu and Huawei, while they seem a little weird, I do believe that they are using a Linux stack for their embedded devices. Well, and networking, right? A lot of that stuff is, a lot of their interest there is networking. And a lot of these companies you can see, like VMware, you can understand, because virtual machines and stuff, that Intel obviously has a big deal because of the CPU processors and GPUs and stuff like that. Some of them, you're just like, what? Like Tencent, what possible, I mean, Tencent's not developing games for Linux, I don't think, are they? I don't even think Tencent does anything themselves. They buy other companies and things for them. Yeah. And like, I guess Meta, you can kind of understand because they're probably running Linux on their servers and stuff. They're Oculus, they're Oculus stuff. Don't they run? That's Meta. Oculus is Meta. Yeah, that's what I said, Meta. Yeah. Yeah, that's. When then you have some weird ones, like you have like Panasonic, like is it Panasonic, is it Panasonic still the thing? Yeah. It's like they have those. They have those. They have those. They have those. Of TVs back in the day. Panasonic still have those portable audio players like Sony's Walkman line. They run a sort of a Linux thing. Panasonic is also the IEM distributor for Chrysler car radius. Yeah. How do you know these things? I might own a couple Chryslers and maybe that's how I know. You need to get on Jeopardy or something, man. I'm telling you. All right. That's Joshy boy. That's not even a Linux thing. I just know that off the top of my head. Weird, weird trivia topics. But yeah, Panasonic in general, like they still sell and make cheap home audio equipment. Like a lot of the sound and they work as an IEM distributor for a lot of other projects too. Like, you know, they might just remove the Panasonic label and put like a TLC logo on the sound bars. This is like having RCA on the board. Also RCA still in business, by the way. Going strong. So let's come up with a different, it'd be like having Kodak on the board because I don't think actually, I think Kodak is actually gone. No, they're not actually. They're not actually. They're still around. So I know for sure they file for bankruptcy, but they are still actually still. I know that they're the only company that still produces film. Yes, the reason I know that is because I'm into the technicalities behind filmmaking. There are still directors that refuse to go digital. And they use Kodak and Kodak film and Fujifilm. I don't blame them for not going digital. There are some advantages to film when it comes to like image quality. You can still get them on the New York Stock Exchange for four dollars and 16 cents. Yeah, there we go. There's our Wall Street bets right there. How many people are undervaluing that? Let's, yeah, I'm not gonna take a moment to look into that, not right now. So they're 52 week high at six dollars and 34 cents. So you could have made some money, man. I got it, I got it. Yeah, but I think they should, The Linux Foundation is evil, yes. But is it evil for us desktop Linux users? Not so much, that's simplifying it. For us desktop users, we just sit back and watch. But when it comes to VMware buying a seed, when you said VMware bought a seed, well, VMware has a lot of their technologies running on Linux. Okay, they did not, they did a felony here where they're not sharing. Yes, but at some point they will and their input will be super helpful because we do use VMware all in it. So yeah, other than that, I don't know, this topic is kind of weird. There's a lot of silence. I'm trying to think of something to say, but I mean, nothing I can come up with. Well, I think we already read the subject down. Let's change the topic for just one moment. Let's talk about Microsoft and specific because Microsoft is the big, and technically, I suppose you could consider Google also equally as big in terms of the influence on Linux, but you hear more stuff about Linux and Microsoft together, right? Because Microsoft's always doing things together, you know, W and W, and they're talking about, you know, their own little Linux distribution and stuff like that. So let me ask you this question, just kind of fill this out a little bit. What do you guys think the future of Windows actually is? Do you think that the Windows will continue to use the current thing that they do, or will they go to a Linux kernel in the future? Windows will still continue using the NT kernel for as long as they possibly can. Yes, I agree. 100%. Because there are some advantages to the NT kernel. For one thing, they know how it works. Another thing is there is so much software that uses hardware kernel calls directly that I don't think for legacy support reasons, which, you know, Microsoft does a fantastic job of legacy support, I don't think that they can never switch off of the NT kernel or a translation layer for the NT kernel. That's why they're having problems with ARM, right? Yeah, that's actually why they have so many issues with ARM. They're gonna continue doing it the way they are and WSL will continue to grow. They have already a Linux technology that works on Windows called WSL. So that covers that. Yeah. Oh, I tried to get us to talk more. All right, let's go ahead. I'm sorry. It's fine. I thought it would be kind. We're actually gonna end on time for once. I thought we were gonna have a little controversy here, but it didn't happen. Anyway, let's, before we jump into the thingies of the week, let's talk about the contact information you can find us at all sorts of places online. But the best place is the website, lilinxcast.org is the website. There you'll find previous episodes all the way back to season one. And you'll also find blog posts when I post them. I have several posts that are on Patreon that have been exclusive there for quite a while, but I haven't posted them on the website yet. That'll happen eventually when I remember. I do get that habit sometimes. Anyways, you can find all that stuff there. You can find Josh at 10lyj.com slash you changed it. It's contact. Slash contact. I like stalker because I could remember it. So 10lyj.com slash contact. Well, stalker still works. Okay. Stalker still works. Okay, good. So if I mess that up, I'm not screwing anybody. Good. Steve is on mastodon at flasodon.org slash at zero Linux. I'm doing this without in front of me by the way. So I'm completely off memory. So you can follow him over there. He also has a YouTube channel which he no longer uses for a while. He's taking a break. He's on discord and Patreon. He's on Ko-fi and all those places. So all that stuff. You'll find all of our contact information. You can do so at thelinxcast.org slash contact. There you'll find links to the discord and all that stuff. If you want to support the channel, you can do so at shop.linxcast.org. There you'll find some merch, which is awesome. You can also do Patreon or Ko-fi, both of those links again at thelinxcast.org slash contact. Also like and subscribe. So I appreciate that. So there's the contact information. Let's go ahead and move into the thingies of the week. Josh, your thingie of the week, please. My thingie of the week, might be something after your near and dear heart because you're using KDE, which means that you're slowly gonna be using more KDE specific applications. So I'm going to bust out the good old faithful MPV plus a client and that's called the Haruna media player. Basically all it is is just a graphical front end for MPV, which if you use Linux and you're especially a big fan of the Tiling window managers, you've probably used the MPV once or twice in your life. It is honestly like the best video player that you can have. That's not called a VLC. And this is just a front end for it. Have you also MPV have a GUI already? It does. This is a better one. Technically it does, it just doesn't have a ton of options. Most of your configuration and stuff is done in a configuration file and stuff. So if you want to have a KDE like experience when it comes to configuration, Haruna is the best way to go. Oh, cool. If you want to have a more GTK, like there's a front end for GTK as well. I don't remember. It's called Celluloid. Celluloid, that was the name. Yep. So yeah. I've actually made a video on Haruna. I've made videos on everything apparently. Apparently. I mean, you've definitely got a lot of videos on your channel. None of them are any good according to Josh. All right. No, they all suck. They all suck. Thank you. This is my friend, guys. I appreciate that. Steve, your thingy of the week. My thingy of the week is a game. Everybody heard of it. Everybody's playing it. It's called Baldur's Gate 3. I'm not playing it. Wait, wait, there's a third one? Yeah. Yeah. So the reason I'm making it the thingy of the week is because I just got into it today. I played for, I don't know, 45 minutes total. And I already fell in love with it. Because you can create all sort of characters. All genders are accepted just to be YouTube friendly. I'm not going to go into detail about that. You can, and the best part of the game, I saw it at my brother's place. He's very far along into the game. Like, you can, if you don't have enough gold to buy stuff from the stores, you can pickpocket the shop owner. You just have to do it with tact and you have to figure out how to do it without getting caught. And there's another thing. You can be one thing. Let's say you're an elf while pickpocketing. You can transform into a midget or a hobbit or whatever you want and go hide somewhere so you don't get caught. It's so big. This game is so big and so well done. And the story is amazing. And so, I'm enjoying every part of it. I enjoyed every minute of those 45 minutes. I'm just waiting to download the rest of the updates because I have the GOG version and it has received a total of 13 patches so far and the patches total 17 gigabyte. So I'm waiting to finish downloading those. Update the game to the latest and resume. And it's running at 70 plus FPS on my old aging 1080 at ultra setting. This is a well optimized game. I haven't enjoyed a well optimized game in ages and it runs flawless on Linux. I'm using, I'm launching. And this is the very first GOG game that I cannot launch directly from the shortcut it creates on the desktop. So I'm launching it using bottles and it just works. It just worked. No need for shenanigans or special configurations or anything. It runs and it runs beautifully. So if you haven't checked that game out, check it out. It's awesome. Cool. I'm not buying any more games right now. I can't. That's fine. One thing that I really appreciate from Baldur's Gate is back when I had a less reliable internet connection, the day one download of Baldur's Gate actually worked, which is not something you can say about modern video games. Everybody note that every time he mentions his internet connection, he has to rub it in that he has now has fiber, okay? I do have fiber. Well, it's a fiber back end. It's not actually a fiber connection. I'm still connecting via DSL over a fiber back end, but that's going to change. He'll be mentioning this now for the next three years at least. Every episode. All right. I'm going gigabit. Like I've had gigabit for, and it's not fiber, but that's the reason why my uploads speed suck, but I don't mention it, because I don't have to mention it. It's coaxial? Yeah. Oh, okay. Like I had in Ireland. I could go up to 1.2, but they want it like a lot more expensive, a lot more money for the extra 0.2 of a gig. I don't really need it. So honestly, I don't need gig, to be honest with you, because I think it'd be more impressive that internet speed if the upload speeds weren't like not gig. I feel like 60 megabits per second. Also, when you have a fast internet, you would need to buy a lot of hard drives because you'll be downloading shit on. So I don't find that I do, really. I'm fully expecting to attempt a couple of downloads. You know, once I actually have something greater than a 25 megabit download speed. So what he's saying is he's bragging about having fiber, but he doesn't actually have the benefits of fiber yet. Well, I already said that. Right, I know, but what I'm saying is that we just wait until he has the benefits of fiber, then it's gonna be 10 times worse. All right. It'll be weekly streams. Guaranteed. That's gonna be some distro hacking right there. He's gonna compile the entire Gentoo repository. You just gave him an idea. I've done it before. What did you just do? All right. My thingy of the week is Ivory. I've been using Ivory now for a little while. It is a Mastodon client. And if you have an iOS device and you need a Mastodon client, it's probably the best one. It is very well designed. It's the same guy who did tap bots for Twitter back when third party Twitter clients was a thing. Like I said, it's very well designed. It does cost money. So if you are wanting to use it. It's on iOS, so it does cost money, definitely. Well, I mean, there are free Mastodon clients on iOS if you wanna use them. Yeah, I'm using one. But Ivory is good. Has all the features that you want and very well designed. One thing I'll say after going back to iOS is that I often forget after having been on Android for three years is that the applications on iOS are 10 times better than Android. I'm just saying it's just in terms of design and functionality and performance, way better than Android. Matt, I bow to you now. I just bow to you because you said the magic word, the applications, they're like, it's like GNOME. On GNOME, the GNOME suite of applications, they're amazing. Okay, I don't care if you hate GNOME, but if you compare the GNOME applications versus the KDE applications or the Qt applications, GNOME just beats them hands down. Same thing with iOS. I still can't find a good music player that is written in Qt. They all kinda suck. Yeah, they all kinda suck. But on GTK, I've settled on Rhythmbox for 10 years now. I'm not switching off of anything else. I've been using Amarok for the past year, but anyway. And Clementine is fucking ogling him. I hate that design. When there's another thing about, when you said, I'm doing the opposite of you, I have the iPhone, but since I traveled the past couple of weeks, I realized that eSims suck. Oh, they're horrible. Bad. No good. Sucks. So I'm currently looking for a phone, an Android phone as a secondary travel phone, and I'm gonna be using it here as a hotspot thing. There are inexpensive phones that are good, I realize. Well, that's one place where Android has the win, is if you want a cheap phone, you can go there and get one. Yeah, I found a $100 phone, $100. Just a $100 bill will get you a phone that has eight gigs of RAM, 128 gigs of storage, 120 Hertz display. Dude, to get those specs on the Apple side, that's a minimum of $700. I'm like, but the caveat with Android is very apparent, is when you buy those, like in Lebanon, the major brand is Techno. So those have two-year software update with one extra year of security updates, so a total of three years. So after those three years, you can chuck this phone in the garbage unless you wanna flash it and put some weird OS on it that would help. I'm not interested in all these things. So, but those phones are cheap enough to, once they're done, chuck away by no one. So I'm doing that, but yeah. Ivory on iOS is an amazing application and there's a tidbit, nobody knows, the guy who created Tapbots and, by extension, Ivory, the main guy, the head guy, is from Lebanese origins. Hope everyone was wearing headphones when they did that. All right. Well, we Lebanese are all over the place. You can't get rid of them. Nope, we're a virus. All right, that's it for this episode of the Linuxcast, guys. We've had a good time. I know the topic, you know, we had some trouble getting into the topic. We'll, it's just because it was such a blatant, obviously thing is obviously evil because Josh came up with it. Well, first of all, hold on a second, hold on a second. No, no, just to shut up, see. Look at that shirt that Josh is wearing. How dare he wear that shirt on my podcast? Well, guess where I'm going right after this podcast? Oh, how I hate Ohio State. Ghost Spartans. All right, anyways, that's it for this one. I will talk, we'll talk to you guys next week, record this live every Saturday, and it's every Saturday, I guarantee it's every Saturday. We never miss an episode at three o'clock p.m. Eastern time on the Linuxcast at youtube.com slash the Linuxcast where you can find that, you can subscribe, hit the notification bell so you know that we do go live, even though it's definitely every Saturday that we go live, you'll never, you'll never miss it. Anyways, thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly, truly do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. Again, we never miss an episode. We never have missed an episode. And anybody who says otherwise is a big fat liar. We'll see you next week. Bye.