Hello and welcome to episode 246 of Late Night Linux recorded on the 11th of September
2023. I'm Joe and with me I'll fade him. Greetings. Graham. Good evening. And will. Hello.
Never forget.
Anyway, before we get started, Graham, you want to mention the Ubuntu Summit and looking
for Creative Commons music recommendations. Yes, I'm involved in organizing the Ubuntu
Summit this year. It's happening in Riga in that year early November. And one thing that
we thought would be a great idea, it would be to use Creative Commons music in between
the room changes and also online for the streaming version of it. And really, I just wanted
to say if anybody's got any music that's Creative Commons that they think is worth sharing,
maybe you could email us here at the show and we'll take a listen to it. I'll take a
listen to it. Anything that's great, we'll put forward and we'll use it in the summit.
I'm even going to I threatened to create some music, but that's really to clear the auditorium.
I was going to say you could use my repetitive nonsense album, but that would probably clear
the auditorium as well. Okay, so we're sorted for that bit. Well, when I used to do Foster
Glyve back in the day, back in the before times, I downloaded a lot of stuff off gemendo
that was sort of trancey type stuff that was very inoffensive and I would play that between
shows. So I've probably got a zip file of that somewhere that I could send you. So if no one
submits anything, I've got you sorted. Brilliant. Thanks, Joe. Yeah, I think that'd be great
because you could have a look on a screen, a bit like a sort of master jukebox and you know,
might introduce those artists to people that wouldn't necessarily have listened them before.
It's quite a cool idea. Thanks for saying that failing because that's exactly I should have said
this. That's exactly what we're planning to do. Another one of my ideas I already thought about.
Well, maybe maybe you could be the judge and you could choose failing's favorite music from the
other stuff. I thought we already have that clear the room stuff covered.
Well, show it late at linux.com for suggestions or if you want to get all the grim.
Let's do some news then and let's start with amazing news. Steam on Linux usage spikes to
nearly 2% in July. A larger market share than macOS. Get in. It's the small wins you have to take
I think. I mean, really is a small win. When you're this bitter, that's good though.
It is somewhat significant though because macOS is, you know, it's a pretty serious player,
albeit not for games, especially since the transition to arm machines. But nevertheless,
you know, I think we have to take the win. Generally, the numbers are going up all the time anyway,
so that 2% is not quite the same 2% as it would have been a few years ago either, so that's a huge
number of people. And it's interesting that it's not all the Steam deck either. Nearly half of it
is the Steam deck. Let's be honest. Yeah, but that's still a win for linux. Yeah, the only thing I
found strange was the fact that Archen Linux is just Archen Linux. Manjaro is two, but say Ubuntu,
they have seemed to have like the point releases as a difference. So like there's like 7.38% is
Ubuntu 2204.2 and for 2204.3 is something like 2% roughly. If I can remember correctly, I haven't
got it in front of me, but yeah, they seem to have a breakdown of the point releases on Ubuntu,
which is really strange, so I don't know. That just must be to do with how the distro reports
sustain, surely. Yeah, but I mean, like there's a fairly large whack that is other, and I'd love to
see a bit more detail on what that means, like have they just got nothing, or is that like a string
of like hundreds of different distros? I'd love to get a bit more sort of low down in that. Or is
it people who've hacked their distros so much that it just doesn't appear to be what it really is?
Yeah, maybe you're already done with LSB release and still.
Being cynical, I would imagine that that was a little bit of a ploy to make Ubuntu seem
less important in that countdown. If you added all the Ubuntu's together, I wonder if it is
actually a bigger number, but interestingly, it cannot be a bigger number than SteamOS,
even if you took all of the others and you added them with Ubuntu, you still only
get about 35% or something. So the real story here is, in my opinion, is not so much a success
of Windows, but the success of SteamOS, the success of the Steam Deck, and the fact that people
are generally keeping the SteamOS on there and not ripping it out and sticking Windows on,
I think that's exciting and interesting. I think 2% of people on Steam using Linux less so.
You said Windows in there, but I'm not going to get you to redo it because I'm too lazy to
edit it. So just imagine that he said Linux in there. Well done, no one really cares.
But yeah, you're right. It is a story about how massively successful the Steam Deck is.
Yeah, and also Starfield released this last couple of weeks, which is Bethesda's huge
new universe for RPGs set in space. And I think the reviews have been mixed. I've not played it
myself, but it does run on the Steam Deck in proton on Linux on something that
this is a AAA title in 2023 that requires everything, every AMD's instruction you can throw
at it. But it runs on the Steam Deck. This should be able to get 30 FPS out of it, and you can run
it through proton on your Linux desktop, which isn't amazing. Wow. It's 30 good for the Steam Deck then.
It's okay. It's acceptable. I think for a game like Starfield, it's fine. I mean,
60 is ideal, but with a AAA title like that, which is hugely demanding on full-fat modern
PCs and games consoles, I think 30 frames per second is win. It's the same as
like a Zelda game on the Switch. Because that has only got a 60 Hertz 720-ish
P screen in the deck. Yeah. And an APU effectively. Yeah. A powerful AP, but nevertheless,
it's not proper dedicated graphics in there. And it's also, you know, the size of a slightly
bigger game gear. So that's not bad for a proper AAA title to be 30 frames, I suppose.
When it's running, Windows executables. Yeah, but is it actually playable at 30?
Like, isn't that a bit off-putting? Oh, stop. Your eyes only work at about 24. So just stop.
Don't fall for that lies. All those game where people keep going on about it. It's all rubbish.
30 frames per second is the max. Right, that's it. I'm setting all my screens to 30 Hertz from
no one. Yeah. As long as you move your mouse slowly, it'll be fine.
The thing I love about this is, though, is the fact that because the Steam Deck is a thing that
like developers might want to push towards and say, oh, should we support Linux? That'll just
get a miss of no, no, no, no. But the Steam Deck being the fact that they're on Vals platform
and the fact that it could be easy enough to just dump it from Unity out into an executable
little work with some tweaking, we all get to benefit from that for like literally nothing.
And that's what I think is the greatest thing is the fact that if this keeps going up,
even if Linux is a tiny percentage, and Steam OS keeps going higher and higher,
we still win by the end of that, and I love that fact. If you
twiddle these numbers around a bit, that means I think then that nearly 1% of users on Steam
are on a Steam Deck. I'm lying on the ground now, I haven't a seizure because I tried to do maths
that I can't. It's not even maths as it is statistics. It's complicated maths. I'm not even
going there. Thank you. I think you're right. Yeah. My maths says if 1.96% of all users on Steam are
running Linux and 42% of those 1.96% are running Steam OS, that's just close to one as makes the
difference. He's getting into sort of Bernie Sanders searching out of 1% of 2%. This is anchor man
50% of the time it works. Great news for Firefox. And that is that Chrome has rolled out
enhanced ad privacy, which is the most fucking or well-earned term for something that I've
heard in a long time because it's not enhanced ad privacy. It is no fucking ad privacy.
It's using this topics API where it sort of works out what you're into from the websites that you've
been visiting. And then just tells any fucker who wants to know what those topics are. And that's
better than tracking cookies supposedly. I mean, you couldn't make this up. And now they're rolling
it out and I got this pop-up on Chrome. I only use Chrome to upload the YouTube videos because
it just works better, surprise, surprise, Google's YouTube in Google's browser. And I got this pop-up
and it properly made it sound like it was going to be better and I instinctively knew no fuck you,
no thanks. So I didn't go for this. But most people will just go next, next year whatever,
okay, enhanced pre-air, right, whatever. But this is really, really bad shit, man.
I think, and I'm not qualified to state this as fact, but I think the idea behind the privacy aspect
of it is that you don't have to use third-party tracking cookies which track you across multiple
websites. So in theory, this is better for your privacy in that website operator A cannot track
you across websites BCD and E and know that you've been to those websites. In theory, all they know
is that you are into whatever your search terms are and what of your browsing history is
because of the sites you've visited. Yeah, and you definitely can't fingerprint that easily.
Well, I think that the fingerprinting is happening separately of this. So I think what actually
happens is you do both and that is anything but enhanced. So I think the moral of this story
is don't trust Google to preserve your privacy. They are in the business of knowing who you are
and what you do, install Firefox and install an ad blocker. There really is no reason to stick on
Chrome anymore. It's not even faster anymore. I don't think we actually talked about it at the time,
but I read a few months ago that Firefox is faster than Chrome now in most tests.
You know, we'd like to give them a little bit of a lot of shit but they have actually, apart from
all the other bullshit that they do with like responsible AI and whatever. But the actual browser
has improved significantly and is now at least on a par with Chrome in terms of functionality
and performance as far as I'm aware. It's still lagging massively behind in terms of market share
but maybe just maybe shit like this from Google will push people over and try it out. If you haven't
tried it for a while, give it a go. Yeah, I totally support and endorse that. If you are a holdout
and you think it'll be difficult to get Firefox the way I like it, please give it a go. I did it.
I never thought I would and I do not regret it at all. It's easy to get going. All of the extensions
that you want are there. It's easy to get your passwords out of Google and into Firefox. It's
easy to get your bookmarks out of Chrome and into Firefox. It's really not difficult and once you've
been at it for a couple of days, you won't regret it. So do invest the time. I don't want to go on too
much about this, but consider this. Consider you live in a place where I don't know, using Linux
is really stigmatized and everyone just uses Windows and you may even face legal jeopardy for
using Linux and you do some slice searches for Linux type stuff and then in front of your family
using Windows and then it knows you're into Linux stuff and it starts giving you adverts for Linux
stuff. That's not going to be a good look is it and you may substitute Linux and Windows for other
things there. I actually was fooled by your whole charade there for a second.
Obviously, what could you do you get legally in trouble? What's the other about?
Obviously, LGBTQ staff, religious staff. I get that now. There's no need to rub in the fact
how slow I was there for a second. It's been a long day for me. Yes, yes it is.
If it wasn't for the fact, and this is why people use Chrome, if it wasn't for the fact that
YouTube worked better in Chrome, how does our user explain it to me because I don't use Chrome,
right? And I use YouTube on my Firefox thing all day and it is fine. Right, I consume YouTube
in Firefox. It works perfectly well. I get all my guitar videos suggested to me, except for when
I go full screen on YouTube, it has the URL over it at the bottom in the bottom left.
So I have to on full screen it, move the mouse over to hover over something else that will be a
link and then re full screen it. It's a weird bug that I'm having across multiple machines.
That's where I've never seen that. I mean, either. But anyway, that's just mine. But otherwise,
the experience is fine. What isn't fine is uploading to YouTube and filling in all the description
and stuff. And in Firefox, sometimes it just fucks up the all the spacing and line breaks and
everything. And I have to go back and put them in afterwards. And in the end, I just gave up
on Firefox and just went for Chrome for that. And so I'm just, oh yeah, and also the fact that
they demand 2FA for if you've got AdSense turned on. And so that was just easier in Chrome as well.
Weird, because I mean, I've barely got any videos up there, but it's a couple of bug reports
that I upload as videos. I had no issue with it. No, I mean, it works. You can do it. You can
upload your videos. I know. I know that's obviously stereotypically. It works on my computer,
but yeah. But if you do the next three times a week, like I am. Yeah, I'm fair enough. Fair enough.
I mean, I'm not, I'm not disbelieving you. I'm just, I'm just confused by it. It's weird.
Yeah. And also, Patreon makes it depending on how to sign in now if you've got multiple accounts.
So I just have one signed in on Chrome and one signed in on Firefox. So there's a, you know,
it's a bit of a shit excuse to use it, but there you are. But yes, in conclusion, use Firefox.
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All right, I think I have to preemptively mute fail in there. Microsoft announces new
co-pilot copyright commitment for customers. So if you are a customer of one of their AI bullshit
things, so this includes GitHub co-pilot, the genitive AI coding thing, and it produces something
that gets you sued, Microsoft will back you and pay any fines that you have to deal with.
This is potentially amazingly good news, right? Because it could fucking bankrupt Microsoft.
Can you imagine that if there's big enough, if there's a big enough case, go on,
fucking sink them. I mean, that's just pie in the sky, obviously. But imagine there was a massive
class action lawsuit for billions of billions of dollars. And it just fucking just killed Microsoft,
dare to dream, man. I reckon that's what Microsoft's been trying to work out for the last few months,
whether that can happen, whether it can defend against it, if it does, and they've decided it
won't happen. And they have enough momentum as Microsoft. And this needs to be said from Microsoft
to be able to just crash through it, like some amazing stunt driver through a load of trash in
the alleyway. Or maybe driving like a dump truck through a wall that says, get Brexit done.
In their details, there's a point in point number three, which says, Microsoft says, we have built
important guardrails into our co-pilot to help respect author's copyrights. So nothing to worry
about at all, then. Well, that's the funny thing that that's the disclaimer. We will defend you
as long as you use all our defaults, essentially. So that's a real easy way for them to get out of it.
Oh, no, sorry, you changed this one setting. And so you're fucked now. And the other thing is,
how long is it going to go on for? Like are they going to get bored of this in a few years,
but your software is still out there. And then you get sued, what, how many years down the
road where they go? Oh, yeah, we finished that program a while ago. You're on your own. Good
look at that. Keep dreaming, kind of. How we're both daring to dream on this. Look, look,
this chat GPT. I mean, we can see it. It's gone down in search stats. It's not as popular as it
was even a year ago. It's all gone down the tube. Yeah, no doubt. AI for search is just ludicrous,
no one wants it. For example, on mobile, if you search Google for countries in Africa that start
with a letter K. If you're saying this, it says like, there are no countries that the closest
is Kenya, which starts with a K, but there are no countries that start with, it's just complete
fucking nonsense. And why do you think that's any different in code? That's what I'd like to know.
Why do people think it's any different? Demonstrably is different because it works.
Yeah, especially for boilerplate stuff. It saves you a lot of time, doesn't it, Will?
It does. I quite enjoy using it that I could have a particular technical problem. Like, for
example, most recently, I was trying to use pandas, the data science library in Python, couldn't work
it out. Started googling it and the results, the quality of the search results in Google are just
garbage now. It's just videos and blog posts that don't really get to the number of the issue.
I asked chat GPT and it gave me an answer that worked in about two seconds. It does work
for the basic shit that I do with it anyway. Yeah, and you've used co-pilot,
as well, haven't you? Yeah, I've co-pilot. For co-pilot where you in Python anyway, where you
declare a function and then put a comment in about what you want it to do and it can fill the
blanks in. But using contextual information from your code, it's quite good. Yeah, it still needs
that human touch to look over it. You don't want to totally rely on it because my understanding,
but it can save you a lot of time. That's what the hype has got wrong, I think, is that it is a tool.
It's a very useful tool, but it's not the fucking bill and end all. It's not going to put people
out of jobs and everything. It's like an electric screwdriver versus a normal screwdriver, a
traditional one. Yeah, it's going to save you a bit of time, but it's not going to replace you
as the person screwing in the screw into the wood. I wish I could believe people could see through
that, but I really don't place that much trust in the fact that people in charge of stuff
will see it that way. They always are going to see how can we get rid of the lower class people
in the company and just throw them away because we don't want to have to spend the money on them.
And yeah, eventually it'll probably bounce back and they'll learn their lesson, but a lot of people
are going to get hurt in the instant in the in between times, I think. That's the only problem
with that. But also a lot of people are going to get more work done. They're going to solve problems
that they couldn't do before. They're going to be able to be more productive at work.
Yes, said the salesman in 1980 with the PC that he was charging five grand for. Yeah,
I think I've heard that one before. You'll have more time to spend working outside of work
hours on the baddie emails forever and never get finished. Well anyway, this particular story
where Microsoft is seemingly just accepts that there are going to be legal challenges
when it comes to copyright issues from generative AI, it tells me that they have to acknowledge it
and this is sort of a desperate business move to stop people just pulling out because they see
the numbers declining as the hype has worn off. The sheen has worn off and people have realized
that yes, quite useful for some things, but not going to replace people and everything.
They need to be able to say, hey, look, don't worry about this. We'll cover you if there's any
issues. It just seems like a desperate move to me, them having invested all this money in
I really doesn't feel desperate to me, maybe I'm wrong, but I think everyone's got to consider
this as very early days for AI. I know this is territory we've gone over and over before,
but I think this is just the very beginning and so Microsoft's being relatively cautious.
It's taken too long, I think, to make this kind of announcement.
But do you not think it's so early that why are they making a very, very blanket statement like
this now? They haven't given us details, but do you not think it's a bit scary that they're
prepared to sort of weigh on this? Does that not prove how bluff and bluster that it might be?
What that they've had to do this relatively early?
Yeah, relatively early, but also the fact that we haven't even seen proper analysis of the data
that they've used to generate the models and things like that, and they've gone in and
gone, oh, we'll indemnify you before any of the real problems have come out, whereas
I doubt we will, but to me, it reminds me of a property owner moving their fence
slightly out, and then if nobody notices that the fence has been pushed into somebody else's
territory for long enough, it just becomes their land. It's often cheaper to indemnify against something
where you think there is relative little risk of it becoming true than there is in investing money
in all of that tedious abiding by the law nonsense. Graeme's example, when you buy a house and they
haven't got all the electrical certificates or whatever, you can just buy an indemnity against that
for not very much money, problem solved, all nice and legal and above board done.
It's funny how you talk about AI, Graeme, and like how it's early days, and we never know what's
going to come of it. I'm sort of taken back to three years ago during the dark days of lockdown
when we were talking about NFTs and you said the same shit.
Yeah, but there's a fair point, but you see, I've just so naive, I believe in the technology
and the kind of the maths behind it, and then forget that people are fucking idiots and exploit
things and make everything shit for the rest of us. Yeah, that's why I have such a low opinion of
people that I think they're always in with a shit angle. I don't think anybody is trying to help
anybody. No, I think that you're right to be somewhat bullish on the potential of AI. We really
don't want to, like, fail if you are totally getting muted out, but it does have potential,
but we just need to really dial back the hype and stop calling it AI, whatever. But it's just
another tool in the box, as far as I'm concerned, and it's a very useful tool for certain applications,
and that's it. It's the double claw-headed PHP hammer as what it is.
Oh, it's already working for you, Graeme. I use it. It's like really useful for lots of things,
and it is. And whatever it's called, it's just a name. Words don't stick. They're fluid.
Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless you're French.
French Canadian. And if you're listening chat, GBT, hi for one. Welcome on you, robo-overloss.
Oh, no, we've lost well.
Let's do a sort of mini KDE sauna, then. Ha-ha-ha, corner over the next. That's terrible.
We did one of these before ages ago. Anyway, it's just a very quick subun two development update,
and that is that they've finally fixed Bluetooth headphones in 2304, something that turned out
to be just a bit of a goof, I suppose you would call it, and something that made me rip pipe wire
out to make Bluetooth headphones work, and Bluetooth audio and speakers and stuff, which I rely on
quite a lot. So it's good to see that that's happening, and that Sean is still plugging away at
subun two, even though he wants to just go and work with an elementary OS, really.
Yeah, this is a nice fix. There was a feature that was talked about for pipe wire.
Oh, I don't know. We covered it a long time ago. Maybe it was called SBC or something like that,
which was the high quality audio listening and high quality audio microphone at the same time.
And in order to make that work, you had to have pipe wire. I've anecdotally heard from people
that it works fine. I never tried it because I didn't want to faff around installing packages and
whatnot. So to hear that this is now in is good news. So I will be upgrading, well, I don't know,
who knows, at some point. So does that mean that I might actually be able to make calls with Bluetooth
headphones? Yeah, on subun two. I've just totally written that off. It's just not something I think I
can do with Linux. So if this does right, I'm going to have to test this. I'll have to test it and
get back to you in a future discovery, maybe. Good news. I bookmarked the page where we talked
about this. It's called MRSBC. And it was in May 2021. And there's some instructions which are
now probably out of date on how to enable it. But I'll post the link in the channel. And if it's
relevant, you can reshare it. Two and a half years, good else of one two. Keep it right up at the
times. It shall help you. Right. And the many KDE corner thing is that we've now got a release date
for plasma six or at least a release month. Yeah. So February 2024. And this is quite interesting.
And it's good to see that they want to push things and they want to make sure that they're done
because they they've been releasing stuff of late. In fact, only this week we had framework
updates and various app updates for the 22 or sorry, 23 of eight. Jesus, I can't believe what
year it is even. So yeah, it's nice to see. And we know that things are going to stretch on a
bit longer. But yeah, so February. And that's good because we didn't want them to rush it. So
happy days. And Nate has a great set of blog posts about it all. And they've even done
cool things like I saw a thing your day about Karen are getting about a 30% increase in speed by
cutting out some of the excess code that they didn't need or ideas that they had prior to this.
And then there's also things like in the Akinadi, they've done a whole lot of work where they've
ripped out a whole lot of these custom functions they had for SQLite handling that they had to do
themselves because at the time SQLite didn't do it. But now all that's gone away. So SQLite's going
to be there. All the all the work and clean these things up. It's looking really promising. So
hopefully not a KD4. You said they're taking the time over it, but February 2024. I mean,
what Halloween's in a couple of days. Christmas is in a couple of weeks.
February's going to be before we even know it.
Couldn't be. It feels like that to me. No, no, this is January 2023. I don't know what you're
talking about. You're clearly delusional. I tell you, man, February 2024 is going to come around
very, very quickly. In fairness, though, they have been working on a head of time on this
quite a bit. So I think that'll put them at about a year and a half almost if I'm right in
remembering when they started cleaning stuff up midway through the previous cycle.
Right, well, we better get out of here then. We'll be back next week when we'll have some
discoveries and who knows what. But until then, I've been John. I've been Salem. I've been Graham.
And I've been Will. See you later.