 Hey everybody, welcome to the Linuxcast. I'm your host Matthew, I'm joined by Martin Burke. I'm not sure right We're day late, I don't know if we're a dollar short, but we're definitely a day late We started we were like what maybe a minute into this yesterday Martin and all of a sudden Yes, that has no lights completely completely dark here and That was not a good experience, but it happens when you live in the boom docks Anyways, so this is the Linuxcast if you want to get in contact with us You can do so at the Linuxcast on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at MTWB Martin is Martin twit to you The link to that will be in the show notes. You just click on that much You can also follow all of our feeds and stuff on the links at the Linuxcast.org and You can email us at the Linuxcast at gmail.com and follow us on Facebook at facebook.com That's the Linuxcast. There's just tons and tons of places where you can find us You should definitely subscribe to us on YouTube because they've been putting up a few videos there. That's kind of nice Been pretty fun Anyways, so This is our first week where we're actually going to go through and do our proper show structure we started out last week where we you know, just kind of did they get to know you kind of thing and Talked about our favorite apps this time We're gonna have a news link and then we'll talk about our main topic Which our main topic today is about NVIDIA buying arm and its impact on Linux. So Just one news leak not just one news link this week, which is mine The boom to 2010 is either out or very close to being out within the next couple days And it seems like this is a pretty big release for an off LTS release this time Mostly it seems like you know when Ubuntu chose gnome instead of a KDE after they abandoned a unity they You know, I was really kind of shocked to that because num sucked. I mean it was bad slow I mean you couldn't run on low-end machines like at all because those animations were just god-awful But now the last few releases releases have just been so snappy It's too bad. It's still but ugly Have you had a chance to look at 2010 yet, Martin? I've had a quick look on a couple of the youtubers. It's definitely colorful, isn't it? Yeah Hey, they really like those bright colors. I Mean that that's what put me off about Ubuntu to be fair and now I'm desktop. It was just Absolutely just crawled on any of my machines. I mean I'm not not one for top-spec machines But it Just crawled on whatever I used to try it on and to be to be fair when I put it on my new ish I'm saying new ish nine years old desktop It was still looking rather sluggish and slow, but I mean KDE of up the game definitely that that's That's what I'm currently using and not have any problems touch wood yeah, I Always am more like cited about the the Ubuntu flavors than I am the straight standard From canonical, you know version. Yeah, I come into and Maté's always been really great for some reason on my old computer before I built my new one Maté always like crashed after the first update, which is weird. I haven't tried it since because I've been addicted to window managers, but I Usually have a winter running on my laptop, which is for whatever reason just because it's kind of nice to keep up to date on what The big player in Linux is doing It really does look like they're focusing on speed on this one. So it'll be interesting to see how much snappier this is it comes with the new version of GNOME it comes with the The new Linux kernel and a whole bunch of stuff. I One thing I really want to try out is something that came out last October is does the The new file system, but it's not I was it starts with a Z Anyway, it doesn't matter. I always call it ZSH, which is not that's the shirt. That's the shell So anyways, I want to try that out and see what features I have because I've never tried anything other than the XT4 and on Linux Yeah, I've tried but I've tried butter FS That seems fine. I mean if it's good enough for Facebook to trust on the servers And especially we like snapshotting and things like that it's really quick Yeah, I'll definitely have to I've never looked at butter FFC there. I've never really experimented with file systems before Other than I have a couple external hard drives that have to be NTFS because I use them on Windows Because windows can't read ext4 which is dumb But whatever. All right, so that was our one losing. Let's jump into the main topics. No, so this is Maybe two weeks ago three weeks ago now Nvidia I mean there's been rumors for like a month and a half Maybe a bit longer that Nvidia was gonna buy an arm and about two weeks ago It actually happened for 40 billion dollars Nvidia's arm now one of the things that you'll know about arm is that it's kind of a it's they're not an open-source chip manufacturer But it's more of like a Arm itself never actually manufacture chips. They just License their design or the ability to design on their platform To other companies like Apple and Qualcomm and and Samsung And now it's gonna be owned by Nvidia. So I want to talk about today is how this Could infect it could infect could affect Linux and open-source development because arm has been a I mean in Traditional Linux fashion arm has been there for I mean we've Linux has been doing arm for quite a while like with the Raspberry Pi And other single board computers. Those are all risk-based Processors and that's what arm basically is so is what do you think? What do you what are your thoughts on Nvidia buying arm Martin? It's a bit of a Marmite one. I mean you're either for or against it I mean The very forward thinking Nvidia I mean they've built themselves up across the years with the graphics card someone else had come out with the graphics card With special rendering or 3d graphics. So they're just we're quite like that will buy the company So they bring those on board then they bought other people on board So I mean they're definitely bit business focused and it will definitely be interesting because obviously the one they break into the Well, they are in the AI market anyway, but arm will give them The internet of things arms got so many licensees That are Obviously licensing the chips to It's just gonna be quite interesting to be fair. I mean obviously there's gonna be some Damage along the way that's gonna be obviously and video won't want to do business with this or that But I think that's all comes back to the anti-trust issues and things like that and Monopoly's I Mean I was looking back through and I didn't I Didn't realize that I'm actually Acorn which was a British computer manufacturer from way back in the late 70s actually designed the The architecture and it was called the acorn risk machine architecture Obviously arm And the first use of products in the BBC micro computer, which was mainly an educational computer here in Britain I don't think you've ever heard of the BBC micro over that side. Yeah Yeah, and they've just took it from there and their architecture Yeah, our computer history over here pretty much ignores anything that wasn't made here. So I mean you got a Americans, right? Yeah, it's IBM over here. That's IBM and he went Packard. That's the computer history that we pay attention to It's a You know, I can see good and bad. So I mean when you first see this like, you know, oh, no This is not a good good thing. I think this is gonna end badly for the armed standard or whatever but And there's a good possibility that it does that way because On the bad side and video is not really into open source at all I mean their drivers are closed source and you have to use them if you want to be able to game on Linux They don't do a very good job of playing oftentimes with you know developing in Interoperability with like the Linux kernel or anything like AMD is open source their drivers and it's basically in the Linux kernel I mean you just don't know you already have it So Yeah, sorry People say that about Nvidia, but I mean it's their intellectual property Let's say if AMD with a leader, do you think AMD would like Nvidia getting hold of some of their source code? But as you say, they don't really play nicely, but It's the price you pay neither does Apple and look where Apple is well and video and Apple are gonna have to Talk so to speak on me. Yeah I was just amazed Roughly came out the blue because I was still like really know about how interesting I'll be with Apple Going on to the on based in that PC's and I think they do with the iPads anyway Just be amazed exactly how much Apple will squeeze out of every last Power of it, I mean obviously it doesn't take a lot of power, which is a main reason why it's amazing and it's readily available and everybody well what 95% of phone smartphones would probably use arm Yeah, but the Apple thing will be interesting I mean you make a good point about their intellect their IP and stuff man. I can see I mean, I'm not totally against proprietary so it's just that I Mean Intel has a whole bunch of proprietary stuff and they still play well with the Linux kernel and stuff So I mean it's not as if it can't be done and still keep your stuff I There's that one way looking, but there's also the one Area, I mean outside of the Apple thing because Apple basically is just licensed arm and then completely done their own design on top of it Other companies just basically use the standard arm designs, right? one thing that arm hasn't traditionally done well is GPU and And video obviously does really well with graphics processors So it'll be interesting to see how if they can somehow bring those things to you know together and get arm up to speed in terms of You know graphical processing and stuff coming really what this is going to be doing It arms, you know arm chips are big in phones But really where they want to take them is servers because they can just shove tons and tons of course I was reading something on like it might have been pharaonics or something like that. There was like a 1200 core processor or something that they put in a servers because it was based on arm And this can just run you know trillions and trillions of operations or whatever and that's really where arm is gonna You know kind of take over the server port Intel. I mean Intel's getting it getting you know I'm losing Yeah, you can get AMD going with our rise and then they're gonna have arm in the server is poor Intel anyways But I mean following on from your point there with the servers. I mean obviously there's some arm servers, but could you imagine liking it? People's IT rooms where they've got all the server racks and everything and they've got to keep it super cool Can you imagine if all that was arm? taking up probably Tenths of the space and just not running anywhere near the temperatures and The cost in touch cost of the environment. Yeah, it's it'd be good It'd be interesting to see how this affects raspberry practice. All right, so you have raspberry pies, right Martin? Those aren't several Those are just a risk-based architecture or do those actually use an arm processor. I'm not sure. I don't know It's on I May well be corrected. But yeah, it's arm that they run on But what was a maze was I didn't even realize that Nvidia went down. It's not a single board computer, but it's just as good as And it's called the Jetson Nano and they released it. It's a four gig version. I think it was 99 dollars But what are you gonna buy a $50 raspberry pie or a hundred dollar Nvidia? Yeah, but the interesting thing is at the end of the month and they've trimmed it back and they've knocked it down to two gig They've done them development courses online. You can do this and do do that with it. It's gonna be $59 It comes with the Nvidia Tegra X1 chip. It's got LXDE installed with open-back box manager So they'll be nice and light anyway But as you say it's gonna be interesting with it the power in videos got with the GPU could be Compute and the arm base if they could just meld that together and get that Working, which I'm sure they will it could just revolutionize just revolutionize Whether it's a single board or desktop or ideally with laptops and things like that It can only go two ways really, but then they're not playing games really I mean softbank paid 32 billion. I think it was four years ago Edvidia's came in with 40 billion and stocks and this and that But I don't think softbank particularly wanted to sell them just the climate we're in at the moment I think they'd heavily invested in Uber and a couple of other people before all this kicked off. So I think it was more Getting a bit of return for their investors. Yeah It was really shocking to me that it wasn't Apple that bought them. I mean, I understand why they yeah because of the The regulatory stuff because they probably wouldn't got proved because of the monopoly and whatever But it didn't even look like they're interested in buying them at all Which is I mean, it just I figured they would at least have looked at it But I mean then Apple I mean I mean we go on on about on about how this might affect the Nvidia purchase might affect You know other people who use arm if Apple had bought them. It would have just been the end of Anyone else using the platform. It's not gonna Well if Apple bought arm then You can imagine how much a Raspberry Pi or something like that Yeah They'd still obviously license it because you've got a captive audience, haven't you you're not gonna say Oh, no, you can't have that but they definitely Put the price of licensing up. It's Apple. Isn't it really good products? I'm not against Apple, but it's a premium product in it. It's quite a very expensive price you pay Another way of looking at the Nvidia thing is that this will spur development for arms in terms of software Maybe the Linux kernel and all that kind of stuff and the more process more development you have on risk-based architectures That'll really help the open source chips makers like risk 5 and other ones like that Kind of get started off because I'm a really the chip design is don't is like half the problem The other half is always getting Software to run on those things so I mean if Now the arm may become more mainstream in the Like actual computing space and just not on phones It it's possible that other open source risk architectures have the opportunity to become a little bit more Mainstream, I mean not really mainstream, but you know more popular at least Yeah, I mean hopefully in video or realize I mean we've got all me of developers out there Using arm and and giving up their time for free. I mean Microsoft's realized it eventually I mean there's the enemy got those only years ago, but even Microsoft for coming around to it because it's they just know There's that many people out a lot Oh, you don't have to worry about Linux because he it doesn't break all the time like Windows Yeah, because you've got thousands and thousands of people testing these reporting it the community is brilliant You Could you ever imagine dropping Microsoft an email to fix a bug or anything like that? Microsoft aren't particularly bothered about the home user. They all guinea pigs and open a Microsoft user for years and years and It does work says and that's about it, but Linux have got like Soldiers and soldiers of people actually sit there report bugs It's too two-way conversation people readily available developers. You wouldn't they know exactly that well They're testing the stuff for us and and actually be able to what write code to fix things and update things Be interested if Nvidia does embrace this I mean, they'd be crazy not to it's free workers. Isn't it essentially yeah Very interesting. Oh my only The really big thing I can see going bad with this is if they if this does the distill does go through and They decide that they're gonna be like Microsoft was ten years ago and just decided to sue anybody who uses risk You know to develop their own chips. So I'm without licensing it. I mean, that's it's Yeah, I mean Google Google did that with a lot of things Microsoft has done that before trying to stamp out Linux So I mean, it's there's a possibility for this to go terribly terribly wrong and all the hope and flowers that we You know, we've been talking about you might not actually go through because who knows Anyway, so why don't we go ahead and jump into our apps of the week Martin? Why don't you talk about your app? Yeah, could I just say one most point that I haven't really saw readily available We'd like tell sir, and you knew breed of smart cars that use arm Didn't tell sir kick Nvidia off their books So now tell sir gonna have to deal with Nvidia Yeah, I Don't pay much attention to smart cards because I can't afford one if I wanted to Oh gosh, no, it was all down to like the AI and then video was Probably did some underhand dealings but tells just turned around and kicked them off the project and It's stuck with arm and then it's come around that Nvidia's bought them. So that'll be interesting. Yeah, I'll be in it We'll be interesting Right. Sorry back to Up of the week right way up this week's called mellow player This is an audio and video player Which focuses on your cloud music YouTube? Disney No, it might not be Disney. Sorry. I haven't got it open Definitely Netflix It's basically a containerized Page just open it up. You can pick your favorites log in and De-select what you don't want so you've just got it there on one click instead of having one for Spotify one for YouTube all that So I mean you've got YouTube Deezer Google Play Various others you've even got pocket casts, which is a favorite of ours So you can have it all in one stop shop I'll leave a link in the notes and to use it with Spotify Netflix because a DRM you will have to download We divine prop pop that like linking down below us also You might work what you got for us this week. All right, so I'm starting to learn Python and I've been trying to get away from VS code so and use them more so This is actually is in an app. It's a Some users configuration file for Neo Vim. He's basically gone through and put all the plugins you need in order to make Vim the perfect ID so, you know, it has COC, which is your auto completion and Surround and tabs and all the kind of stuff that you would see in our graphical ID it's all in them so you can use your your key bindings and stuff that you're used to in Vim so that's what I've been playing around with if I'm not like if you watch YouTube like Vim users They have like fly around on the computer and around their keyboard and they just like oh look at this I've just edited 10,000 lines all at once and I'm awesome like I can't do that I'm not the I'm still a noob when it comes to Vim, but this is very And it's just all put together and I didn't have to do anything So I'm very much into taking other people's config files and then making them my own which is kind of I think is well a lot of people do for when you're using Vim and Window managers and stuff like that you just take other people's and then kind of mold it to Whatever it's because that way you don't just start from scratch because I tried to start from scratch and it's not good You know, it's not easy. So anyways, that's mine. It's it's my guy named Christian I can't say his last name Shirley, maybe I don't know it doesn't matter the link will be in the show notes It's on github. It was really easy to install you just create a end Vim file and that can in your dot-config folder and Get clone this and start up and Neil Vim and it installed everything right for you. It was all automated. It was very easy So what would you use that for it's okay? I'm not that high level where you can you tell I've just done a couple of scripts Any type of program you want you from bash to python to HTML CSS anything basically any type of programming or coding that you want to use it for It's also cool for if you get into Window managers a lot of times basically The best thing I've noticed from is that it uses COC that's a Vim plugin And if you're like a click see you're an I3 configure BSPWM or whatever it will go through and it will see all the Things you put in there and if you have to type in that thing again It will give you a pop-up of the things you have in there that are close to what you've just type and you can auto complete it So that's really cool. Yeah And that's not something that Vim offers out of the box. You have to use plugins in order to do that Basically, this isn't like a this guy that hasn't created created anything. It's just he's gone through and compiled all of these Plug-ins that allow your Vim to be so much more extensive Extended and it would be you know out of box So anyways, I'm really looking forward to beginning my Python journey. I'm not a good coder, but I like playing around with it Anyways, if you so anything else on your menu for today Martin or we've set to go Nothing that's all good. What's the topic we're gonna choose next week? Oh, right. Yeah, that's a good point Thanks for reminding me our next one. Let's see if I should have had this open beforehand But that's okay Preparing it's the dangers of Linux elitism. This is your topic. Yes So you'll get to put in the your ideas and stuff like that into the show notes so that we know what kind of the direction We're going anyways that is That'll be next week. Well dangers of Linux lead at them. Linux is awesome Windows is terrible. Don't use what don't use Windows I Anyways, that'll be a topic actually just briefly if you want to subscribe to us make sure you do so on YouTube on Anchor and Spotify and Apple podcasts all that stuff you can find all those links at the linuxcast.org If you want to support us in other ways, you can follow us on our social media links Which we gave at the beginning of the show so that is It's for us this time. We'll see you next week Thanks, thanks, guys