Hello and welcome to episode 216 of Lanelight Linux recorded on the 13th of February, 2023.
I'm Joe and with me I've failed him.
It's spring and I have a cold.
Graham?
Hello.
And Will.
Hello.
It's almost Valentine's Daylights.
What have you got me?
Chocolate, flowers.
All of these things.
Potato croquettes.
That sounds tasty actually.
It would to you, wouldn't it?
That's racist.
You bastard.
But I mean, send them anyway.
Anyway, let's get on with some news.
And the first news is that we have a Discord server and we've already got 100 people on
it.
So I know there's going to be people who like Discord, not having that.
That's filthy proprietary.
Don't worry.
We've also got a Telegram group, which is, okay, that's proprietary.
But we've also got a Matrix room and IRC.
We've got an IRC channel.
And so latenightlinx.com slash community is where all the links are to that now.
So just pick your poison and don't fucking moan about the other ones.
Just whatever you like or none of them, you can email us still if you want to send any
feedback and everything.
Show it latenightlinx.com.
But I thought it was time to get on Discord.
That's where all the young people are.
And I can't say I love Discord so far, the experience, but that's where everyone is.
So that's where we are now.
Have you considered a bridge?
A bridge, you say?
That's a brilliant idea, Graham.
Yeah, I'll definitely get right on that.
Anyway, yet another canonical PR fiasco.
This time, ESM apps and updates in the command line that you can't have unless you pay for
them a properly bungled release of this Ubuntu Pro business.
Sorry, Graham.
It's OK.
I didn't write the words.
It's entirely your fault.
So people started reporting seeing basically an advert for Ubuntu Pro because there was
an update for image magic available.
But you could only have it if you were with Ubuntu Pro, which you can get for free as
an individual user.
But nevertheless, people were very confused saying, what are those updates available?
But I can't have them.
What's going on here?
There was already threads and ask Ubuntu questions.
And it turned out that Ubuntu Pro gives you access to updates for universe for 10 years.
So that's the universe archive, which is community stuff that previously wasn't supported by
canonical.
A classic example is VLC, which had a subtitle bug and no one fixed it for ages until a member
of the community did.
And image magic is the packaging question right now that has got some vulnerability in it,
that the canonical security folks have fixed, but are only offering to paying customers or
registered people for the Ubuntu Pro.
So it's essentially just extra updates that you can have.
But just the way it looks in the tonal, which is so fucking bloated by default now, it's
like half a fucking page of just message of the day bollocks in there, man.
I can see why people get pissed off with Ubuntu and canonical.
You need to enable Biaabu.
Then you won't see any of that.
I didn't know what people were talking about for ages, because if you have that enabled
when you log in, you just get a clean login.
Well you can go in and just delete some files and stuff.
It's pretty easy to fix it, but no one can be asked, can they?
Or very few people.
I have some sympathies with canonical here because maintaining the universe repository
for 10 years has a very considerable financial impact.
This is old software without a massive amount of maintainorship happening upstream.
And so we need to get people whose job it is to go through all of this stuff, keep an
eye on thousands of packages, find out how to backport these obscure fixes, get it all
done, push it out to thousands and thousands of people.
It costs a lot of money.
I understand that in exchange for that free software, canonical ask you to register and
have your email address on file and that kind of thing.
My view as not as a shareholder of canonical, but as an end user is I think it's fair enough.
I understand that there's a lot of effort that goes on behind the scenes and I think
it's okay.
However, the way that it presents itself in the terminal is ugly and clunky and could
be better, but it's easy for me to say that.
I'm inclined to mostly agree with you that they're entitled to advertise it and they're
entitled to get people to pay for it.
It's a pretty simple business model.
You get I think five free machines and then if you want any more than that you have to
pay for it.
But it's just the PR and the handling of it, the public side of things, just it's a series
of gaffes it seems to me by canonical here over the last few years.
And it just feels like they need a professional asshole on the internet inside the company.
It seems to be like you're trying to fish for a job there.
Well, obviously I'd be perfect for it.
You need to just have your employees at least be able to speak up and listen to them and
say, well, hang on, if we do this, people on Reddit and that are going to call us idiots
and even worse things that get you fired from dream jobs and stuff.
We probably shouldn't be doing this.
And having spoken to a couple of ex-canonical people, it seems like they used to do these
surveys, these internal surveys and people could do that.
But whether they were listened to or not, I don't know.
And either people are not speaking up now or they're not being listened to because it
could have been handled so much better.
Yeah, I don't know about these surveys, but I can say with certainty that in the past where
I've had to put something out like this and we have thought about the wording and the
or the messaging as it's called and how to best phrase it.
And you spend all of this time putting a lot of effort in and the same fucking people
still come along and moan and they're not happy about this or it's the wrong color or
it's off by one pixel.
So honestly, what's the fucking point?
That is a fair point, I suppose.
The majority of people are not going to mind, I suppose, but it is quite confusing the way
it's presented in the terminal.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think it is as well.
And I think I'm not wanting to be a canonical shill.
I think it's a missed opportunity for what is actually a really good bit of news.
I mean, universe being supported for 10 years for people is a significant step.
If it was sold as like, you didn't have this before and now you've got it if you want it,
and it's a bit of a win-win situation and the opportunity has been lost.
Yeah, just some careful wording in that terminal message instead of the clumsy wording that
we got.
But you're right, it is ultimately good and I'm sure it's nothing to do with one or two
of the IPO and be like, oh, super corporate and hey, we'll support everything for 10
years or anything.
But if we as end users get a few machines supported for 10 years, then that's got to
be a good thing.
But just for fucks sake, get your messaging better, canonical.
Can't be that hard.
Lazy reporters claiming Fediverse is slumping despite massive increase in usage.
Right.
Mike Masnick on TechDirt.
And Mike has got a serious point here.
I keep seeing these articles about how the Fediverse and Mastodonoids doing terribly had
this massive influx of users and loads them have left.
And then you look at the actual graphs of the users and you think, well, hang on, if this
was any other product or service, then yeah, obviously you're going to get this influx
of people and then some of them are not going to stick around.
But the growth that Mastodon and the Fediverse generally has seen over the last few months
has been incredible and a lot of big tech companies would bite your hand off for these
kind of statistics in usage numbers.
So fucking lazy journalists, man.
I'll get the feeling.
It's lazy journalists who didn't really kind of get how the Fediverse worked and I really
open it goes away.
So they don't have to try reporting on it anymore.
Well, and also I've seen people complaining that these journalists sort of hoped that
their massive following from Twitter would come over to Mastodon and then it didn't.
And then they're just like the rest of us over there.
Also, I think, you know, and it is quite lazy, you can look at the statistics and draw any
kind of conclusion, but you have to actually get it to be able to make a judgment on this
kind of thing.
And then I mean, I've noticed myself more and more recently going into the Fediverse
and just browsing it like I do Twitter and like I used to much more just to see what's
going on, like on the local instance or on the timeline of people that I follow.
And I'm finding it, whereas when we tried this for the podcast whenever it was, there
wasn't really much that kept me interested.
But now I'm finding it more, I don't want to use the word, then, cating, but I'm finding
it more entertaining than Twitter by quite a margin.
And that's just something that's happened.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing.
I found myself just idly browsing through it and finding lots of stuff to read, which
last time I just didn't.
I think it's interesting that reporters from the traditional news press, the new, well,
the news websites, let's say, who were once primarily printed media are now online, are
the same people that are declaring the Fediverse to be a failure.
I think the real story here is that negative news stories generates clicks.
And that's really what these reporters are interested in is selling clicks because that's
what gets them paid.
I read another article this week and I think this is the second or third time I've seen
this about a website publishing articles written by AI that is not claimed upfront to be written
by an AI.
And this one was, I believe, in Men's Health magazine, something about low testosterone.
And a real doctor had read it and said, there are many, many factual errors in here.
This is medically wrong and you should not publish this.
And it turns out, oh, and I wrote it and we just published it.
So the print media are desperate for money, they're desperate for clicks.
And so just reporting just bad shit or even made up shit is all the same to them.
They don't care.
You realize you've just pulled the big string out of Phalim's back.
Go.
No, I got all back.
I'm sure AI is brilliant.
No, I can't do it.
Yeah, that's good.
And we got some feedback that I'm out of a podcast I'm going to listen to.
And then in about three weeks time, I'll be rightly fueled up to the gills at rage.
It'll be brilliant.
But you're right.
I am having a great time on Mastodon now.
I'm finding it much more interesting than it was before because I think it's hit critical
mass now.
And there's still people, I think, waiting to see what's going to replace Twitter and
thinking that Mastodon isn't it.
But I think they're missing the boat here.
Well, they're not missing the boat because they'll be able to join later because that's
the whole point of it.
But I don't think anything is going to come along and replaced it.
I think Twitter is just going to sort of slowly decline into just a bit of an even more of
a shit hole.
Meanwhile, Mastodon is going to take off.
It's got enough of a technical barrier of entry to keep out the fucking morons.
And it's going to be fucking great, man.
We used to say the same thing about Linux and it hasn't worked.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
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So go the programming language might add telemetry that's on by default this won't do
with it.
I think we should definitely get our pitchforks out.
I agree.
You would do.
I agree as well.
I just can't believe we've got to the point where a programming language has telemetry
that you haven't actually added yourself.
It's obscene.
It really is.
It's only in the developer tools that they're talking about doing this.
It's not like in every Go program that is compiled with it or anything.
Yeah.
But you know what?
Python is one of the most popular languages to date, has never had it and continues to
work totally fine.
And they're not all going, oh no, we need to include telemetry.
It's the opt-in by default.
I mean, I usually leave the telemetry on if I'm asked because it's a huge help for people.
I know it is.
And it's probably a huge genuine help for the Go team.
But they opt in.
It just seems wrong.
Yeah.
I do the same for all the KDAps that need it and the Plasma stuff that use it because
I know what they're going to do with it.
Do I know what the Go team are going to do with this?
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure I trust them because I mean, fool me 17 times Google has repeatedly fucked
us over with stuff like this before.
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Sorry.
No, we yeah, yeah, we did it again.
It'll be fine this time though.
Well, in fairness, Ross Cox, whose proposal this is, he has detailed in a series of blog
posts this transparent telemetry idea, which does seem quite reasonable to me.
It is anonymized.
The IPs don't get kept.
The idea is that if you've got loads and loads of people contributing to this, then they only
all need to contribute maybe once a year.
It seems like if you're going to do telemetry, this is probably the way to do it.
Yeah.
Again, we always get proven that anonymizing stuff doesn't really anonymize it because
there's ways to get around it.
And you know what?
When it comes to an almost source project like KD, where they're not backed by the likes
of a company whose whole purpose in life is to find out what you want and what you do
and then advertise to you about it.
I just don't believe for a fact that they're not sitting there going, you'll believe this
one and then we'll have you again.
I don't know, man.
Is Go even really Google at this point?
I think a lot of the people that work on it are Google.
And if I worked at Google right now and I was working on a project which was kind of
a bit blurry between exactly who owns it, I would be very keen to have some evidence
that says the thing that I work on is important and lots of people use it and we should keep
all the stuff that are working on it, working on it.
I imagine that this is absolute coincidence that the desire to add the telemetry at this
point in time just happens to coincide with people getting laid off.
But it's interesting.
The other point of view is that in Ubuntu, when I was there, we wanted to do some telemetry
gathering and that we decided that that would have to be opt out by default because if we
left it as opt in, we wouldn't get enough information.
I can't remember the conclusion we came to.
I suspect that there was a lot of pushback, but it's tricky.
It's really tricky.
You do want people to tell you this information.
You want to use it in an honest way and all the tinfoil, hat brigade, get their pitch forks
out, don't they phone him?
You can't do anything about it.
What do you do?
You have a choice of either not even trying these days, I think you have a choice anyway,
not even trying or just doing it anyway.
Why don't they make it a forced question?
It doesn't have to be opt in or opt in, but it has to be a forced question where you have
to explicitly answer yes or no to.
I don't know maybe that is actually definition of what opt out is, but I don't think it
is.
I think that's make a choice and then understand what the choice is by giving you the actual
information in front of you and then letting you choose and make you choose.
I think that's the argument we used in Ubuntu and it didn't go down very well.
Didn't you make it so that even if you say no, that gets sent off that they'd said no.
Yeah, a flaming dog shit left inside your porch.
There were reasons for doing it that way, probably.
I just can't remember what they are.
Counting the number of installs presumably.
I know this is Google, but it would so help if it was transparent.
I know in this case, and those blog posts are brilliant.
I think they've said that there's going to be an aggregation of the data that will be
published and it seems like everything's transparent as it can be.
But I wish there was almost like a third party way.
When I first read those posts, I was thinking it was a proposal for an open source way of
aggregating or federating telemetry from lots of different projects that other projects
can use.
I was quite excited about that.
But at the end of the day, I feel like, yeah, this is probably a reasonable proposal for
Go.
If it's successful for Go, I can see Google subverting it for other things, which wouldn't
happen if things were more transparent and we could take more ownership over the data
that we're sharing because that's the bit that I don't fully trust.
I can't help but feel that people's main problem with this is the Google issue.
If this was a different programming language.
Like Java always.
Well, either way, if it wasn't a project that was perceived to be Googles, I think the reaction
to this would have been less strong.
But I think the problem there is the fact you're, if you're thinking of other languages,
you've either got the Microsoft cluster, the Oracle slash son Java atrocity, or you've
got the likes of the Python or Rust where they're all independent and they do their
own thing.
And a lot of people have called for Go to be put out properly out into its own thing.
And then maybe that could be the way that it could be all transparent and not associated
with Google because right now it just seems like maybe there's a lot of water cooler decisions
going on in the offices around the place and they're gone.
Yeah.
I do that now because payday said we had to.
It's not looking good for Minecraft.
Minecraft AI, the company behind it.
Michael Lewis, the CEO has made a couple of posts, one on the website and one on the kickstart
for their Mark two product.
That one's called the end of the campaign.
And it basically says that they're not going to be able to fulfill all of their promises.
I mean, they've not said that they've gone bust, but it's kind of not looking great for
them.
They're looking like the end of the line.
And this is really just indicative of a wider problem.
Even the likes of Amazon can't make money out of voice assistants.
And they've poured billions and billions of dollars into it in the case of Amazon and
Google have got theirs as well.
And Apple have got their one, but they kind of sell the hardware for a bit more to kind
of boy it up.
But there's just no money in voice assistants.
It turns out, and I'm not hugely surprised about that.
But the tragedy of the Minecraft thing going away and if no one takes the project on is
that we were going to have, we were promised this open voice assistant that could help
accessibility and failing my, no, this is something that you kind of care about from personal
experience.
I honestly don't know where they were thinking they would make money with this.
Like I don't know what her Amazon thought you would just randomly shout to buy whatever
the first thing that came to the Echos sort of option list of if you said, oh, car and
it just would buy you a Merc and then they get a massive kickback from Mercedes.
Like, I don't know what their whole idea was there.
It just seems ridiculous.
Well, the idea was that you just say Amazon device had some toilet paper to my order.
I know.
But have you seen the first 10 results on Amazon search?
It'd be more likely to get a fucking sheet, 80 rain sandpaper and it would actually fucking
toilet paper.
I think these things are absolutely fantastic devices for disabilities where people, you
know, if they have a physical disability where they can't have good fine motor control for
switches and things, you know, Alexa turn the lights on.
There you go.
Bang.
That's fantastic.
We've been dreaming of a system like this for helping people out for so long, but actually
getting it done is very difficult because as we've seen from the Minecraft devices,
those early devices weren't great.
And it's all that microphone technology.
I think our gym talk about the deep field microphones or something like that he was
talking about.
So the actual hardware in the echo itself is really good for picking up your voice wherever
they want to spy whatever you're listening to 24 seven.
But it's a real shame that they will go away and become essentially paperweights on us.
We can maybe inspire a bit of fast project going on in these things because it would
be a shame to lose what we right have right now.
And I'm sure there's loads of people out there who are blind, partially sighted or whatever.
And they are getting things done that they couldn't do before easily.
I think the saving grace here is that the software is going to be available to people.
They wanted to put it into a product to make money and finance the development of that
software.
But that just wasn't to be.
And it didn't help that they get fucked by a patent troll to the tune of a million dollars,
which we can link to post from Joshua about as well.
We link to the names of all the people in that company where they live and if anybody
wanted to maybe fly a balloon over the house.
Maybe with some near filled mics to listen into it.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel at least that home assistant are still forging
ahead with their project to kind of create the same sort of deal but with a more smart
home focus I suppose than a general purpose one.
I'm not sure what their financial goal is here.
They do have a commercial entity to make money and they do have a couple of services
that they sell.
So maybe this will be an enabler.
But generally speaking, this is an open source project going into an open source product.
So maybe they're not going to try and commercialize it and therefore it would be more successful.
I'm also putting my sci-fi hat on and I'm sorry for mentioning this failing.
If we get some kind of open source locally installed AI for language interpretation
like stable diffusion for art then surely this kind of thing becomes a lot easier to implement
if you've got some kind of locally hosted API that something like this can just plug into
without all of the huge investment needed.
I doubt it'll be AI.
It might be machine learning.
Who knows?
But here's the thing.
I mean we have the open voice project from Mozilla and what's happening with that?
That's a massive resource of data there that could be used.
I don't want that to wither away.
Well, I mean there were so bad at doing loads of things like mobile phone OS's.
That was one thing that was actually decent.
That training data or trying to decipher poor audio recordings of sentences,
I mean it'd just be such a shame if all that goes to waste.
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On to a bit of admin then. First of all, thank you everyone who
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All right, lads. It's time for a quick KDE corner.
Fuck off. Where did you get that from? Where did you get that from?
What? That is the best 10 quid on Fiverr I've ever spent.
No. It's not really him, obviously. It doesn't matter. It's fucking good enough.
I was convinced. Anyway, right. So plasma 5.27 Eve. So this is nearly out.
Yeah, well, according to schedule, it should be out tomorrow.
Probably wouldn't be packaging time for most intros, but yeah, it should be on
barring any sort of accidents.
Crayam, I'll have it in the AUR probably.
No, it probably hasn't already.
Hold on, let me try.
But there's been some good stuff. There's been a few bits of come out already.
And multi-monitor is going to be a big fix for this.
And Nate links to a post by Marco Martin on how to log multi-monitor books if you've got them.
And there's a thing there I didn't see before called K-screen doctor,
which can output lots of information about your monitor setup and stuff.
So that's quite cool. And yeah, I guess if there's going to be problems and we're going to have to
run this for a while, we really want to have a nice and solid set of fixes going in.
So yeah, make it as easy for people to report bugs on.
There's been the time zone, convert's going to be in this,
discover's going to have flat back end that's faster, loads of lagging stuff for dolphin,
and one for plasma as well.
There was a sort of reuse of pretty place names that was getting regenerated each time
that took a long time to build.
So all those things, loads of stuff.
And there's been some documentation stuff that's going to automate everything thing.
A cool one that's gone in there for now is one of the K developers,
Wakaar Ahmed, I think I'm saying it right.
He has a tutorial for how to write Kate plugins, which is quite cool.
So yeah, lots coming and it's going to be a big release and fingers crossed, it gets out nice and easy.
And speaking of Kate, Kate's get features.
Yeah, I mean, I can only assume this is really nice to use because I'm still on SVN.
What?
Anyway, well, look, I could move everything to Git, but then I'd have to find time and effort to do that.
And I'm only on me on anyway, so it doesn't matter.
It's fine, but it looks really good.
Lots of stuff there, how to handle all the diffs, the merges, history of files, really well done.
Looks nice, lots of features there for anybody who's willing to try it out.
All right, and Fosdam, a couple of KDA things and all the talks are available now.
Yeah, it's an insane amount of stuff that went on there.
It would have been an awesome weekend to go to.
I think it was the first time in three years and there's like 780 events at the thing,
which is just mental.
I don't know how anybody goes to it and picks a track to follow because by the sounds of it,
even if you get into one room, if you manage to get in there, you're kind of foolish to leave it almost.
But there was some good stuff and Katie obviously had some good representation there.
They had the sustainable software stuff was really popular as well as the Steam Deck stuff.
The Vision 5, 2 stuff, which is the, what's it called?
Risk 5.
Thank you.
Yeah, that and the Yacht-O stuff was really popular as well.
Because of all the people that were there from the various projects of the Unified Push and Matrix,
the KD team were able to work on the K Unified Push stuff, which we were talking about a while ago
for getting push notifications, especially if there's a Fano S, very cool to have,
and some open transport stuff that was done.
And Matrix 2.0 was announced there, whether at it, and it seems they're doing a whole load of work on that.
So fingers crossed for them that they can actually make it profitable and keep themselves going.
Well, Gary from Linux After Dark went to Fuzz Dem and he gave us his report on the upcoming
episode later this week. So stay tuned for that.
Oh, winner.
All right, KD packaging recommendations.
Yeah, so this is a useful document that has been produced to help distros who don't sort of know,
or I mean, I think the admission is that it's quite complicated to package KD.
And sometimes things are not obvious what should be in various packages.
And it's a recommendation list of how the KD developers would like things to be laid out.
So everybody doesn't end up with a sort of a broken install or things not working the way it does for everybody else.
The usual story of, well, it works in Fedora, but not in Debian.
You know, try to avoid that type of stuff.
And it's quite a cool wiki page.
And it's quite good where it links in the various things, which are third party packages,
which are not what you need.
And a cool thing I found was that there's a couple of Firefox options that need to be set to
one for one of them and false for another, which they're at the bottom of that list.
And one of them, it fixed my multimedia key stuff not working because I use the plasma integration.
And I used to end up with two bloody tabs showing up on it where
it was a random hodgepodge of whether my YouTube would start or stop the video or my audio play
or something, you start and be like, what the fuck is going on?
And it was because of this.
So I had to set it to false and that fixed it.
So it's probably something I've carried over from a very, very long time ago and installed.
So yeah, that was a very handy wiki page for me.
So happy days.
All right.
An Academy call for proposals is open.
Yeah.
So that's a leaky grease call for papers.
It's on the 21st of July.
So if you think you've got something that might be worth them having you do,
take a look and there's even a list of all the various videos from previous years.
And there's a participation page.
And if you think you can do it, go for it.
And I'd say probably try go for it.
If you don't even think you can do it, maybe you can.
Right.
Well, links to all that in the show notes as usual.
So we'd better get out of here then.
We'll be back next week when we'll have some discoveries and probably some feedback.
But until then, I've been Joe.
I've been Phaelam.
I've been Graham.
And I've been Will.
See you later.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
♪♪♪♪