Hello and welcome to episode 47 of Linux After Dark. I'm Joe. I'm Chris. I'm Gary.
And I'm Dalton. Welcome back Chaps. What's the one thing you miss from proprietary platforms
on Linux? And the one thing you miss from Linux on proprietary platforms?
The full steam library. Yeah. Although that is getting better to be fair. Yeah, so I'll go with
something that I miss on Linux from proprietary platforms first. And I guess it's not so much a
specific software thing as a software and hardware tie-in thing. And that's just the integration
that you get on the Mac between the software and the hardware and how that enables it to be
really performant, the battery life to be about 20 hours long, and generally for things to just
work without me having to mess with adding some kind of out of tree driver or work out why
sleep mode isn't working or why my battery is draining overnight. And that's something that
for the longest time has really plagued me. And I think we are getting there in the Linux world.
So my daily driver machine now broadly, I don't think about it, but it's definitely just doesn't
quite have that edge that Windows would on that same machine or that Mac OS does on a Mac.
I think for me, I was thinking about Windows having sometimes a check box for something
like Android apps and the same with Chrome OS to be fair. So I don't have a very large use case
for running Android apps on my desktop machine, but occasionally I have wanted to do it. And I've
quite like to be able to do that on the Chromebook when I have. And then Windows 11 introduced the
feature. Now the system requirements are quite beefy, but you can just go a bit like you would with
WSL. You can go into a menu and say, I would like Android apps. It took them a while to roll it out
in the US first and then to a wider international audience. But when you go to the Linux side,
there was an box, but I feel like that's kind of a bit dormant now.
Waiterroder's on its place. Yeah. So you have Wadroid, but I am not running a desktop environment
that's capable of a Waelin session. And so I can't run it on my regular machines that I'm using.
So that's just an example. When sometimes a feature comes along, we just go, I would like that,
and I can have that. Instead, I would like that. I'm now going to read the wiki and the read me
in the GitHub page and realize that maybe my kernel's not compiled with the right headers for
this particular feature or my environment doesn't have a Waelin session or whatever you want from
that list. And that sometimes is a little bit frustrating, I think.
For me, it's pretty straightforward. It's much like Dalton in the games. It's just certain
proprietary applications. And unlike a lot of people who want Adobe stuff, I'm not really bothered
about the latest Adobe stuff. I've got my ancient Photoshop that works on Linux. A lot of
tend to use GIMP anyway these days. But just like audio stuff, really. And yeah, I know there's
various audio tools on Linux, but just stuff that I'm really familiar with, like reason.
Like recently, I made the Linux Matters theme tune. And I used various proprietary tools to put
that together. And it would have been nice to be able to do it on Linux. And I've tried, man,
I have tried wine and proton and all sorts. And some of them just don't work. The tools that I need
they just don't work well enough. And I could do a VM, but then you know, a VM versus
dual boot, there's not much in it really. You're still ultimately using a proprietary system.
And you know, I think the question of like, what can we do about that?
Really comes down to just stop criticizing canonical, I think, for their snaps thing. Because the
only way we're going to get stuff like that is why snaps. I don't think it's very likely, but
if we are going to get the likes of creative cloud and able to turn and stuff like that,
is via snaps. And that's going to take a lot of work by canonical to do that. And every time
something gets posted as a snap for the first time and the peanut calorie just goes,
oh, this should have been a flat pack or couldn't have had a PPA blah, blah, blah, oh snap suck.
That surely puts people off from releasing their software. And a lot of people don't want
proprietary software analytics. And that's fine, man. Like, don't use it. Cool. But a lot of people
do. And I think it would be good to have proprietary software, big name proprietary software. And so
yeah, that's the thing I miss really. There's always the small name stuff too that's sometimes
just as important for people. We always say that it's the applications and we're proving that here,
but one time I wanted to get all the metadata out of my pictures on Google photos because I
download all of them in the Google takeout format. And yeah, there's a bunch of tools that I could
have used on the command line to do it on Linux. But ultimately, I bought a program that I just
took my and all of my family's pictures and shoved it in and it went, okay, I'm done now. And that was
it. I think on the flip side what I miss from Linux is I still to this day really enjoy live booting
a well curated distribution. And the fact that you can't do that on Windows or MacOS, you can't
take the installation medium, boot into it, get an internet connection and use it until the power
goes out and everything is gone from the RAM again. That to me, it still feels like witchcraft to
this day. I love having a multi boot USB like Ventoy in my backpack and being able to quickly boot
a machine if the internal drive is broken or if I want a specific tool. I've done it before
where someone says, oh, is there a way that I can grab that thing from my player because I want to
watch it? And you just boot up and you can install get iPlayer and pull it down. And they're going,
wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I could get that going on Windows, but I'm more familiar with Linux
as well. But there are lots of programs that are just a quick pull from the repos of whichever
district you've live booted. And I still find that to be an incredibly powerful feature of Linux.
And you can boot Chrome OS Flex and use it live, but it's very limited in terms of what you can do
as an operating system. I think that same thing too, being able to just take Linux, you know,
for me, who's done a bit of embedded before, just being able to take Linux and have a single
use boot disk that you can do a thing that you want with. Like I made boomstick for the purpose,
which is a purpose built tiny Debian distribution that just wipes all of the media in your computer.
Don't use it unless you specifically want to do that, by the way.
Well, you hate someone to just plug into their machine in the back so they can't see it.
So what like D-band, but without having to type auto Nuke or whatever it is.
If you don't type anything, it does take about a minute, 30 seconds before it starts doing
anything, but yes. It's slightly cleverer than that. I'm going to blow Dalton's Trombone for
him here. So basically it will detect the different types of media in the machine. It's worth looking
at Dalton's Git repository for this because I think it's an impressive piece of software writing.
It's a bash script. Well, I still think Debian is for Rust. You shouldn't Debian an SSD. You
should be using the other things that Boomstick does, like sanitize or there's ATA Secure Arrays
and things like that. Dalton's basically strung on this together so that it will go through the
best possible options it can find and then fall back to other things. And then Debian. Exactly.
That's it. It's like with Joey playing around with Doom. This one's just boom. Yeah, boom or
do. But there's also Kiosk distributions that do similar things and you know, Portius Kiosk
for a couple of clients that had small businesses, that kind of thing or a Raspberry Pi which you can
write a script for that just runs X and dumps a browser window there. All of these kinds of
things, the adaptability is a real win, I think, for Linux. Yeah. And I think that adaptability is
the same thing that I really enjoy, but not in the same way as building my own district because
I'm not going to do that and I'm probably not going to build an embedded thing like Dalton has.
But just the way that if I've got a Linux box, I know that if there is something I can do,
there's a way that I can do it on that machine. So like you said, Chris, you're just being able to
boot a machine, download something from iPlayer and then shut it down and then that's it. But
when I'm working on the other proprietary platforms, I know that there's probably, if I need to do
anything system level, going to be something hacky that I need to do or even getting proper
administrative access on some of these systems is a real pain. Whereas on Linux, I just feel like
I'm in charge of my machine and that if I need to do something, then that's the machine I can do it on.
I don't get that same feeling when I'm using Windows or Mac OS, especially on a corporate machine
where there's all sorts of stuff that ends up locking those down. Whereas even on my corporate
Linux laptop, I've got re-access. I can pretty much do whatever it is I need to do.
Yours are both so vast. I just like middle-click paste. I always miss it. Whenever I'm on any other
system and I just go and highlight some text and go somewhere else and middle-click it and I'll do
that a few more times if I realize that I'm an idiot. I miss middle-click paste.
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I've got a pretty simple one on Windows. I miss networking because I am not connecting windows
to my network. No, thank you. That's just for music stuff and whatnot and no, I'm not connecting
that to the network. VLANs or whatever. No, thanks. Transfer stuff over via flash drive or a shared
partition or whatever. And yeah, it's sometimes quite a bummer to not have network and I've got a
reboot into linux. But it's a rule that I try and stick to and so fast. I'm good.
You know, it really grinds my gears about that is how difficult it is to get files from one
computer to another over the network or even with a flash drive sometimes. I don't know why we have
made it so difficult to take a bit of data with an extension on it and move it across the network.
The best I've seen is warpinator from the linux mint community, which has a client for everything
at this point. It's great software. Someone fixed this problem or just use warpinator, I guess.
Well, isn't our sync the solution to that? Well, no, because there's no binary for windows.
Yeah, but windows don't have the networks. That's not a problem. Well, for you, yeah, of course.
But we have this problem, you know, at my job, we have users that are on windows machines and
if they're on a managed machine, they've disabled WSL because there's various potential vulnerabilities
there. And so our documentation points to asking because it's such a powerful tool. But you don't
have access to that on a windows machine unless you have some kind of VM or WSL or SIGWIN or
any of those things to run a Linux binary. And so they have to fall back to filezilla or something
else, which just isn't quite as good. And that's why I was thinking as you were saying,
Dalton and Gary, like quite often, the best ways to achieve things are written with
a fuzz stack and a Linux stack. So one of my friends who's a windows user was trying to get
videos from YouTube and doing what most windows users do, which is to Google YouTube video
downloader and go to her horrendous website, which fills their computer with malware and pop-ups
just to get this video, which on the back end on the server is clearly going to be running one of
the fuzz tools that does that. But she said, why do you get those things so quickly on your machine?
So because I'm using the tools that are behind all of the nasty websites to get that stuff.
And I think that's why it's going to be difficult for her to run a tool like that directly.
There are good fuzz front ends for that kind of stuff now. But again, people wouldn't think to go
to GitHub, then download and install it, then install it. They're just going to Google the actual
thing they want to do, not a program to do the thing they want to do necessarily.
Well, when it comes to the Mac, what I miss is a decent file manager,
something that can actually cope with Samba shares. Because I mean, apart from the Samba
share thing, find it is just a train wreck of a file manager. I've complained so many times about
this, but like just why do people on Macs want to rename files often? I just don't understand it.
Just no matter what you do, press enter. Right. Rename. Okay. Not open the file. Cool. And just I
just cannot stand it. Press space. Quick look. Okay. What backs up that assertion, Joe, is that
every Mac user I've ever supported has as many icons on their desktop as they can fit. And they
just keep changing the zoom level till they fit more and more and more and more on because they
are not using Finder. They can't bear to use it. They just want everything on their desktop.
And it's easier to look through the smallest zoom setting of unsorted files to find your file
than to use the file manager that's built into the operating system. It is shit. I agree with you,
Jay. Can you prove install Thunar? I think I might have tried one. Or maybe it didn't,
it didn't work very well with network stuff, but I just wish I could have Thunar just exactly
as it is unsurban to on the Mac. And then I would use the Mac a lot more, I think.
Well, I've solutions to both of your problems. Jay, your problem is use the command line.
And Chris, your problem is solved by stacks. Stacks? Yeah. So the solution I have to this on a Mac
as someone who also stores a lot of stuff on their desktop is if you right click on the desktop,
there is a use stacks. And there is also a sort by kind name shared by last modified by.
And what I then have is a thing on my desktop called JPEGs. And I click it and there are all of the JPEGs.
Do you have another one for monkey kinds? Yes, clearly so. It seems like you cannot
brew install Thunar. Unfortunately, Joe, either I just tried. It's not in brew.
There just isn't a culture for alternative software in the same way as well, I think, on Macs.
There's very good alternatives of software, but it's often paid for. And so there are less options,
but when there are options, they're good. But I think you've had suggestions before from people
writing into late night Linux about file managers for Mac OS. But I'm not a Mac user, by the way.
I just have never owned one that has been a daily driver. It's just what I've observed other people
kind of jumping through to get themselves to their files. Yeah, how have had people suggest
various file managers for Mac OS, but they're just a little bit better than Finder, and just so much
worse than Thunar. And people might say that dolphins much better than Thunar, whatever. They're wrong.
Yeah, I'm in kind to read and Kaha, whatever, Kaja, the one on Marta, which is roughly similar to
Thunar, I've found I'd take any of them over Finder, or even any of the other ones that people
are suggested to me quite frankly. And you've reminded me of another thing I always miss when I'm on
one of the proprietary operating systems, well, specifically Mac OS, because I haven't daily driven
windows in about 10 years, is decent window management. Why is it so hard? And why do I need to install
a third party thing to do split screen or quarter tiling or anything else? Why is that not just
built in? This is really just telling into the like shit on Mac OS podcast, but screen management as
well, like I want to output to my screen, close the lid and have it not go to sleep. Oh, we'll just
plug it in. I don't want to plug it in. The thing lasts for 15 hours. I don't need to plug it in.
But it's clamshell Joe. Clamshell. Everyone knows about clamshell. Just that we close the lid. Clams
don't only have shells during the umbilical cord phase. Yeah. Also, they're not mammals.
Yeah, that's true. Every mixing things up a bit there. But yeah, I just think it comes down to
what I miss on proprietary platforms is the ability to do what I want with my computer and not have
someone else tell me what I should do with it. Yeah, I think that's the most frustrating thing,
isn't it? Is when you find something you don't like, there is always going to be a way
you might annoy the maintainers of the project. So there is that side of it. But there is always
going to be a way to push and shove and wrangle it and mangle it to get the things that you want out
of it. And you can make your own little jigsaw puzzle because you can. The file manager example is
a good example. You can pull the file manager out and put a different one in. Now there might be
problems with that sometimes. But you know, people spin up distributions where they used to use a
PC Man FM. Is that what it's called? Yeah. Yeah. And so that's why we are the 1% or the dwindling 1%
maybe who knows what this percentage of desktop Linux users there are now. But that's why we're
drawn to it, I think, for a lot of people is this is a different way to do things. And if I don't
like it, there are lots of other different ways to do it as well. Right. Well, we've got to get
out of here then. Remember, show at Linuxhouse2dark.net if you want to send in your feedback. We'll be back
in a couple of weeks. But until then, I've been Joe. I've been Chris. I've been Gary. And I've
been Dalton. See you later.