Hello and welcome to episode 218 of Late Night Linux recorded on the 27th of February,
2023.
I'm Joe and with me I'm Faelyn.
Tomato and Bargo.
Graham?
Hello.
And Will.
Easy now.
Don't be taking the piss out of our tomato situation Faelyn.
It's very serious, you know.
All your tomatoes are belonging to us.
You bastard as well.
I think they did a deal with you a lot today but I've not watched the news every time.
But anyway, we don't care about that.
We care about the Linux news and another show, another canonical PR snafu.
This time a bun two flavour packaging defaults.
So the bottom line is that all of the bun two flavours you like, so bun two martes, a bun
two kabun two bun two chillin, etc, etc have all agreed in quotes to not ship flat pack
by default from now on.
Some of the flavours were shipping it by default but from now on they will not.
It's still just a lot of install away but they've all agreed to do that.
Is the official line on it but then immediately after this announcement we got some of the
flavour leads saying well agreed more like complied with the requested change one of
them said.
There's been a lot of outrage about this everywhere except for our little private telegram group
where you a lot seem to just think this is fine.
I hope Mazura appreciates the breathing space that we give you.
I don't know that we said it was fine.
I think we said it was inevitable.
Yeah, because this has clearly come from above.
This comes from relatively high in canonical maybe even from the top who knows exactly
where it's come from but this just seems to be just a gaff.
Why would they do this?
Who cares about the flavours?
Okay, if you listen to a show like this then you're really aware probably I use the bun
two for example with XFCE but from speaking to those in the know I've not heard numbers
but I've heard orders of magnitude let's say but a bun two proper has got millions of
users whereas the flavours are basically a rounding error in terms of numbers.
So why would they care?
Why would he care if it is the space man who's decided this?
We don't know at this stage but why would anybody care what the flavours do?
It doesn't make sense to me why this decision has happened.
You just pissed off the community by being seen to be actively hostile to Flatpack a
packaging format that has won at this point on the desktop.
I don't care what canonical says and I don't care what people on the snap team say Graham.
Fucking Flatpacks won and at some point you have to accept that.
Has it won though?
I mean looking at the numbers if we assume that a bun two desktop is the far and away
leader in number of installs and that runs snaps I would imagine and this is a guess but
I would imagine that there are more snap users out there than there are Flatpack users and
I think that the mandate to not install Flatpack by default from on high has got two aspects
to it.
There's the brand aspect where all a bun two flavours are should be seen to be doing the
same thing and supporting the Ubuntu technology.
The canonical technology I should say and the other aspect of it is that and perhaps this
is more of an excuse than anything but in order for snap to be proven across all of
these different desktop environments you need all of those flavours to be using it so that
you can prove and test and get feedback on what works and what doesn't work.
That's how I would have dressed it up if I was being paid to do it but I think that
it's entirely acceptable for a bun two to push a bun two's own mandate.
Well that's the argument isn't it that it's all Canonical's infrastructure that these
distros are being built on and hosted on etc and you know there's other support that
they get as well and so my house my rules but it still feels like a PR GAF to me it
feels like a stress and effect situation.
Why did they even bother drawing attention to this?
That basically has to be shipped by default anyway because of the browser situation Firefox
in particular so snap is going to be there.
Well if you dug up one of the replies to this thread on the Ubuntu discourse from a KDE
developer that where he said that it basically amounts to extra support burden with flat pack.
Yeah and I think for users who are maybe not as technical you go looking for Firefox and
then you get Firefox in the repo, Firefox, snap and Firefox flat pack and you assume they're
all supported because they're in the main software center whatever one you're using.
It is probably a complicated question to answer and say no no the flatbox are not really
supported the snap is definitely the way to go now and the apt package is gone.
It's messy and fair enough people don't like that it's not like they've blocked flat packs
it's not like it's very hard to install and if you're a technical user it's one command
away and you can have it the way you want and then at least you have segregated that
in your mind that you know that is not the done way it's not the supported in vertical
and it's not the one that you base your reputation on as the projects and to be honest I think
that's fine much like I wouldn't expect Red Hat to include apt to deb or apt RPM sorry
or snap as you know a default option or snap because they're just not testing them and
as this developer says we have no control over the quality of those packages we don't
know what way they've been built if there's any issues with them and then people are coming
to us saying this broke why doesn't it work perfectly and it's like well we've no control
over it it's an outside repo what can we do but it isn't presented like that inside
many of the software centers.
There's a nice little bit of class in the message that is communicated which is that they
won't uninstall flat pack if you've already got it installed I think that that was a
decision that was made and I think that's the right decision.
Oh absolutely yeah if you do know an upgrade and you've already got it installed you can't
start pulling it out of people's installations.
There's a really good interaction between Luis Alvarado I'm not sure he is but he's a
community guy who said he has spent like 10 to 15 years promoting Ubuntu stuff and you
got really irate and annoyed and it happens to be the reply that was picked up by when
the KDA developers was actually that reply to him and then he came back after and said
that's one big huge correct answer and thanks for specifying it and gave me a complete different
look at it and yeah sorry I had a bit of a rant about it and that's a great reply it's
nice to see that.
Not all parts of the internet are quite like that.
I think that I have heard compelling arguments the other way but it still feels like this
wasn't handled brilliantly like why are some of the flavour leads coming out and talking
shit about this decision immediately afterwards that feels like it wasn't really dealt with
internally properly otherwise that wouldn't have happened.
It's an impossible situation for those flavour maintainers.
Their users who are drawn from the you know the entirety of free software ecosystem are
obviously asking for flat pack and they had it and now they have to take it away and they
have to that the flavour leads through no choice of their own have to defend this decision
and perhaps they don't agree with it perhaps they do but nevertheless they are being forced
into a position which they may not be comfortable with.
It's a very very difficult situation to be in for them.
I think it's also important to remember that lots of the flavour leads are voluntary if
all of them are they're all doing it on their own time they've always done it on their own
time and they do it for the love of what they produce and they probably feel like they should
have a say in decisions like this because they put it all together and they understand
their users best so I can understand their frustration if that's what they're feeling
as well.
Yeah but then again ultimately it is just an apt command way to get flat pack going and
and one more to get it with the gooey package manager so it's not the end of the world
it's not like they're blocking flat pack completely like we saw Linux Mint do with
Snap that again it was only a few commands but...
But challenge.
Yeah it was active hostility to Snap let's say whereas maybe this isn't active hostility
because it is simple enough to install it for those who want it and for those who have
no idea what a package management system is what package formats are that just click
install Firefox install VLC whatever maybe it is confusing for them to have too many
different options.
Defaults are really important for stuff like that.
Yeah yeah they are.
I just feel they could have been handled better and it's just yet another example of canonical
just not really understanding how ourselves on the internet work.
Why would they consult with you?
I know give me a job just you know couple of hours a week I'll do it for a couple of
greats a cider come on.
Fatum you found an article on L.W.N.
NASA and open source software and this really is just summarizing a keynote from Fosden by
Steve Crawford who works for NASA and it's all about open source software at NASA and
the challenges that they've had and how they've got a shit load of open source software that
they maintain.
They do.
Way more than you would think.
Yeah and there's a very cool talk there well worth a watch and it's from the massive
troll that is the Fosden talks and videos and yeah it's amazing the amount of stuff
that goes in there and it's exactly what tax money should do you know contribute into
a system that contributes back to people and everybody can make use of.
It's great absolutely amazing stuff.
It's sounding dangerously socialist there.
Don't tell the Americans to stop doing it.
Yes you're right.
It's interesting though that they had to get around the issue of not being able to copyright
any works done by civil servants.
I don't know if they call them that but people who work for the government that has to be
public domain and so contributing to open source projects that are copied left which
is copyright you know it's not public domain anyway that was an issue that they had to
solve and that's a company their own license and the OSI approved of it but fucking Stormman
and Co did and obviously.
So yeah it's a very very interesting talk that we'll link to so check it out.
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Steam for Linux is 10 years old.
My back hurts.
Yeah I know it sold his mind.
How can it be 10 years?
But then you look back and you think you know steam machines proton steam deck it's been
a long road to get where we are.
Maybe I'm on my own but I thought that we'd had steam for a lot longer I had to make sure.
You've a steam deck you're living the future.
Yeah but I think that's because a lot of us were running steam on Linux via crossover
or wine for a long time and I'd just kind of taken it for granted it was part of my
guess I was playing games on steam in the Linux format offices for ages before steam
was released.
So I had to really cast my memory back to what was the initiative behind this and of
course the steam machines and the whole kind of hedging against Microsoft seem to be the
initial impetus but yeah I thought it was longer but yeah of course 10 years it's been 10 years
I think since we left those magazines so no way.
Yeah I think that time was flown by I think at the end of this year we'll be.
Wow and could you have imagined all those years ago in the offices the number of games
that you'd now be playing on Linux?
No and it's scary sometimes you can say like better than native versions of those games
because they run better than their windows counterparts sometimes especially on the steam
deck where they're really taking advantage of like that single platform optimization
you can do the reason why PS3 games look so amazing despite the limited hardware so many
years after it's released the steam deck really feels like that it is amazing and you
know I think Valve have really found their footing with Linux and its place within their
ecosystem it feels very positive.
I just wish it worked a little bit nicer for multi-testops or multi-screens rather sorry
that's the only issue I ever have is that it pops up on the wrong screen in the wrong
resolution then I have to drag it over and it mangles itself so yeah it's amazing otherwise.
You can bodge that through some sort of X thing can you that always prefer a particular
screen?
Yeah well I've got a bug log about that that'll come up in KDCorder.
It certainly cemented steam in my heart and in the heart of my kids as well because the
kids were asking for a game satisfactory over the weekend and I could have bought it from
the Epic Game Store for I think a bit less but I decided it knows that Steam was the
place that I wanted to support and so that's where I bought it for them and a big part
of that is because I know all of the good things that they're doing to make these games
run on Linux so keep it up.
You thought you'd prefer to be locked into Steam than Epic?
Yeah.
Alright it's time to do a bit of Microsoft hating.
It's a bit like the old Linux Outlaws Microwatch they had where they'd diss Microsoft every
week.
The first one in Microwatch is Microsoft Edge has been inserting ads for itself on the Chrome
download page.
The column ads is just not even accurate it's begging sort of...
Oh take me back please.
It's pathetic.
Yeah built on the same technology as Chrome you don't really need Chrome.
You go to the trust of Microsoft what?
What does it even mean?
Well I think that kind of speaks to how little trust there is in Google that they can even
fucking make that claim that they're more trust worthy.
Oh no it's just that's just ridiculous.
Now it's not everybody who goes to download Chrome to be fair it was just some sort of
Canary builds and betas and stuff and it seems to have not persisted.
I think they've stopped it now that's been a bit of backlash but it's still pretty egregious.
We're not talking about the shit that Google does where if you go to a Google property
like YouTube or whatever and it advertises Chrome because that is their website they
are in it their entitled to advertise on it.
We're talking about injecting shit into someone else's webpage and that is just not on as
far as I'm concerned.
I totally agree but I'm sure Google does the same thing and I think not exactly the same
thing but they certainly set a precedent we're doing similar things with search results
and ads at the top of there and it did piss me off especially when it's Firefox.
Well no you see I'm not having that argument I'm not having that false equivalence here
because what Google does is advertise on its own services you're going to Google you're
going to YouTube Google on properties this is Microsoft's browser that is just supposed
to serve you web pages if you were going to a Microsoft site and they were advertising
Microsoft shit on it that's totally fine but you're talking about going to download another
browser and your current browser saying no don't do that I think that's totally different
from what Google does.
I don't think it's totally different because a lot of those ads they're made to hijack
people who perhaps don't know better from doing what they're wanting to do which is
maybe install Firefox.
I can't say what the language is now but the language is often misleading like this is
the default browser for your chosen desktop or better integration or whatever they say
and what is the browser.
If it is Google's domain well also Google aren't accountable for those ads there's no
kind of transparency on what they do to get those ads placed there in terms of how they
fund them internally the kind of data they have access to to be able to place them there
are they fairly competing with other people I don't know if I even trust them that far
anymore and so it's the platform you'd see it okay so you do see it on Chrome OS so what's
the difference between Chrome OS and MS doing this with their own browser but if you're
searching for Firefox well in Chrome OS you're going to be using Chrome on this so they wouldn't
be advertising their browser because you're already using it.
I don't know I'd have to have a look and see what it says on Chrome OS but I've definitely
seen these things before I know you can't install it on Chrome OS but that's what I
mean it's like an Android or whatever.
I kind of see what you mean but I do feel like although it's related it does feel a
false equivalent still to me maybe it shouldn't but it still does I suppose failing you have
to be the arbiter on this who do you see the most who do you hate the most between Microsoft
and Google in this situation which do I want to die from cholera or bubonic plague I mean
really I honestly I think they've just they're sort of made for each other and the fact that
everybody who's using Chrome is now complaining about it though they brought this upon themselves
they should have all been using Firefox I think in scheme of things which do I hate more
I don't know maybe I hate Microsoft more but I just think that they're both bastards they
are though that's the thing I say I don't I don't really like Google at all I think they
they've got some real sinister side to them as well yeah what people should have been
doing is he's in Firefox and then they'd only be getting adverts for pocket and stuff but
that's open it isn't Jiole oh no oh well so Jeff Geerling discovered that his daughter's
school had somehow just taken over his Microsoft account and then he tried to fix it and made
it worse and he doesn't recall giving it any permission no sort of emails to give him a
heads up it's clearly not the school being malicious here it's clearly a fuck up but that
his Microsoft account was allowed to be effectively taken over by an organization is not ideal
is it I've had run ins with the Microsoft account on numerous occasions especially when trying
to buy Minecraft for the kids and having it just change of email address just blowing
the whole thing out of its mind and it can't cope with the fact that you've changed something
no you must buy Minecraft again it's been extremely difficult but also Google has been
extremely difficult in this way with previously bought Android apps the whole concept of having
a single account ties to a provider which it can at a whim just break or be taken away
from you or be associated with somebody else's services just scares me to the point where
I think is it actually worth bothering with having a Google account or Microsoft account
and just deal without but how how you're going to send emails if you don't have a Microsoft
to Google account I suppose you could have a proton mail stop sub propagating that myth
I think wheels right I think Vaylim's right and I think it's imagine I mean support there
is no support now but imagine when support is going to be chat GPT oh Jesus whenever ever
going to win in fact we're probably going to be told off and punished in some way by
the AI I think Vaylim might be right yes thank you the best tech support I saw was a lady
walked into the Google campus I used to go there for the odd time and did these tech talks
that were non Google things are just like tech people and they gave a room free and defecating
the lifts there is no evidence on that though you show me pictures and maybe I'm going to
have this lady walked up to the front desk and demanded support for her G-mail came she
was locked out of and they got somebody from the tech desk to come down so some poor developer
who's probably had nothing to do with it probably an AdWords developer or something came down
they sorted it out for her and she was there for ages and what she got her support I've
been to the Google offices in Dublin it was a long time ago it was there when K.D.'s academy
was there yeah I missed that Google invited us in and we went to you know the cafeteria
where they were so keen to show off all their free food and chill and relaxing it was and
the Google employees entering around the cafeteria this is then I don't know 2000s they had like
cameras on stalks the other employees elsewhere and in the offices and the companies could
operate and spy on people and they thought this was amazing you know that people could
do this kind of geekery through their web browser from anywhere in the corporation and
all of us were kind of looking at you to the game really oh no my bag is accidentally
swung into that you can't even relax and lounge on those comfy chairs it's probably a pressure
sensor in there as well measuring how you're relaxing I think Graham's point about no support
is the real issue here right that the machine has done a thing and nobody really knows why
it's happened and you can't speak to somebody who knows anything in person you have to send
a request in and never be never never ever receive a response from it and that's just
infuriating I point you to my license issues I had with Microsoft before okay this episode
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tailscale.com onto a bit of admin then first of all thank you everyone who sports us with
PayPal and Patreon we really do appreciate that if you want to join those people you can
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latenightlinx.com and if you want to join the telegram matrix discord or ioc details for
that are at latenightlinx.com slash community let's do a quick KDE corner then KDE switches
to Qt 6. As of tomorrow yeah 5 is gone and 6 is the new thing. It doesn't mean that you're
existing neon and kabuntu and archer whatever are going to immediately switch over to Qt 6
or this is like they've started the development cycle for what will eventually be plasma 6.
Yeah and they've done an awful lot of work to sort of make that transition as easy as
possible but i think still it's probably about half a year to nine months away that's why
5.27 so much effort was put in to make it as stable as possible so that should be a nice
solid base to stay on for as long as needed. And you've got a couple of youtube videos to
link to. Yeah so Niko which we've had links to before he's had some interesting ones there's
a quite a cool theming one there which there were some questionable ones where people had
done XP 10 and 11 which you know okay it's like trying to copy a Nissan sunny or something
like that he is like why why would you do that but fair enough but there are some great themes
and just to show the amazing ability with all the dock tools and things like that that people
can add to kd to change it to where they want to and i would say grem has a very good video where
he does his crazy setup ages ago and compared to my toolbar at the top and i'm done it's not quite
the same thing but he also then goes on in his other video about some of the hidden features now
i knew a fair amount of these but even i got a few nice ones out of this there's like one
effect plugin called invert colors and for things like pdfs which aren't in a dark team you can
invert the colors with a hotkey and then it turns you know the background to black and the text
to white which i thought was such a simple way to get around the retinas getting sizzled out the
back of your eyeball at night time when you're looking at stuff that hurts my eyes more to do
that way does it yeah like i was technical i put that back to black text on white background i find
that it just fucks my eyes up trying to read white text on black background i find harsh white text
on pure black is not great but i kind of go for a sort of a graze and charles and it seems to work
out for me but there's another really cool one called i think it's thumbnails insider thumbnails
aside i've never used it but i will be soon and it is to convert any application into a thumbnail
view that you can sit in the corner and if you've got a bunch of them like a website or a video or
something that you want to keep going all the time in a little sort of you know those picture
in picture things that some tv's can do you can do it with that and it's just a quick shortcut key
and there you go you have it it's really really nice and then another simple one where like
middle click on a maximize horizontally expand something or right click on the maximize vertically
expands a window which i didn't know about so some cool stuff in there all right plasma mobile
five dot 27 that's been chugging along nicely they put a lot of work in to get that out and
it's paid off quite well and the mobile team has also taken advantage of that most of it is bug
fixes in the background but it's sort of like polishing the thing as best as possible and it
looks really cool and i i really want to get a device as soon as i can to try and try it out
some of the things are just making a lot of the features like the kcm's like the control
pound stuff a bit more touch friendly and there's new pair off stuff but it's a lot of work on in
there and it is really nice to see that so hopefully get to try that soon and stop shouting yeah so
one of the developers axelmo talks about they did the fine line outlines that is part of 527 and i
really like that because for a dark team actually really makes a difference out that just that fine
edge it's like a one pixel liner in the window and i think it looks quite good but apparently a
lot of people have been annoyed by this but it's sort of a reminder a gentle reminder you know you
don't hit the developer with everybody that you can muster on reddit and then go through their blog
and comment like mad on it and then use their blog as essentially a bug feature request form to
change it back and you know log proper bugs or feature requests if you have them and just think
that these are all contributors in their spare time doing this and not to be a dick i think is
the main takeaway from that for enough and the obligatory how to add flat packs on kabuntu or neon
yeah yeah literally a one liner and it's not been taken away and it's very useful and i'll use a
mix of boat snaps on flat packs and yeah i'm sure loads of people do all right and a couple of updates
from nate as usual yeah he's got a whole lot of stuff all the bug fixes all the work that went into
527 some of the stuff that's coming in plasma 6 that they're already starting to see and there's a
list of the critical bugs that happened after 527 like the bug count is quite low but there's been a
few and a bug 465 396 is my bug which is about my multi-manner's not sticking with whatever i
pick as the primary display and my game is popping up on my vertical one and that just messes all
the resolutions up and i just wish i had a giant single screen but i don't well just play gala
girl what's gala girl gala is a vertical shoot him up don't stop just stop do you play that on
a vet tracks do you turn your head sideways while you play it no i turn my monitor sideways
all right and two very last minute tools in neon kio admin which is for editing in files as
root be careful and an i notify survey which lets you know if there's watchers that are running out of
processes for monitoring files you know if you might have directories where you're copying files
into stuff to let you know and ironically that pinged up at the start of this show for me which
is bersara i've never seen it before so there we go and that's quite cool and there's a couple
applications in testing as well Ariana a new e-book reader and plasma 2 which is a youtube video
player and they're coming soon so quite cool right well links to all that in the show notes as usual
but we're better get out of here we'll be back next week when we'll probably have some discoveries
and some feedback and that sort of thing right until then i've been drunk i've been firm i've been
crayon and i've been well see you later
so
you