Late Night Linux – Episode 248

Hello and welcome to episode 248 of Late Night Linux reported on the 25th of September 2023. I'm Joe and with me are Fanim, Viva Forever, Graham, Good evening, and Popeye, Nanu Nanu, or is it Alan what we're going to call you today? Yes, excellent. It all works. I answer to everything. Well, thank you once again for stepping in while Will is not here. People may know you from Linux Matters.sh, the excellent Linux Matters podcast that they should definitely listen to. Yes, stop listening to this and go and listen to that. It's happier. It's cheerier. Yeah, you don't mention Brexit quite as much as we do. I think we mentioned it once, but I think we got away with it. Right, before we get into the news, presumably you want to thank everyone for their music suggestions, Graham. Yes, that's an excellent point. Thanks. We've had some really great suggestions, actually, and I kind of take it back that nearly all CC by assay music is rubbish. There are some good pieces of music out there. What? Have you not listened to both my albums, Graham? I'm still working through them, Joe. That wasn't me, yes. I'm going to create a playlist, so when I've done that, I will share it with the internet and you can all completely destroy me. Okay. Well, also thank you to everyone who suggested Firefox Containers for my Patreon login problem. I was aware of this and I should probably use it, but I have a crime for YouTube anyway, so that's why I have that for the other Patreon that I'm logged into. But yes, thank you to the thousand people that told me that. Right, news time then. For Dora 40, I is dropping GNOME X11 session support. So the Plasma 6 desktop is not going to have X11 support. That's going to be wayland only. They are considering making the GNOME session wayland only. What do we think about this then? Kill it. Now that I use it and it is working fine on all my things, I'm happy for it to be killed. I'm quite pleased for Dora's doing this because I know sensible heads of Ubuntu will do what their user base want and what their user base want is to continue using a functional display manager. And so they'll carry on shipping Xorg for a while. I imagine. I can't picture Ubuntu dropping X11 in 2020 for the next LTS, but maybe they will. I don't know. But I can't imagine them dropping it to a point where you can't actually install it or they remove all the possibility to build it by default and it makes it hard for you to use it. I can't imagine a Ubuntu doing that yet. But someone has to. Someone has to be the first to do it. Yep. And I'm fine with that being for Dora because I don't use for Dora. I feel similarly and I feel that for Dora is the place for it. It is a mainstream distra. It's not quite the popularity of an Ubuntu, let's just say. But it is the place for stuff like this to happen, I think. Exactly. You've just said the friendly version of what I said. I think it's about time as well. I mean, how long I don't even want to think about it, how long have we been talking about this? And yes, we just need to be forced. I mean, I keep trying it. It doesn't work well enough for me. I use Nvidia hardware on my main machine, which still causes problems. But the worst thing for me is that I've got this really nerdy, finely tuned kind of mouse acceleration in X that I just can't recreate in Wayland. So it's going to force me to confront those kind of things and I probably should. Because the tiling stuff is all going away in Plasma and I need to switch to Wayland. Your main machine, you said, didn't realize Max had Nvidia cars these days. My main machine isn't my Mac, actually, I have a desktop PC that I use day to day. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think go for it, Flora, and good luck with it. There's going to be a lot of edge cases get found and hopefully fixed. And then as Ubuntu Scrum can benefit from them in the future and we can finally move on. That's the spirit. I might finally have to get rid of Startex. All right, Grim News then, finally, the online safety bill has been passed through Parliament. And the final version isn't quite as bad as some of the drafts, but it's still pretty grim. And even the government are admitting that a lot of the stuff around undermining encryption isn't really practicable. But it's going to be on the statute books very soon. And who knows where this is going to go, maybe Signal and Meta will pull out of the UK market. And that'll be funny, won't it? It's great. I think the UK deserves absolutely everything it gets. Yeah. You're a lot of voted for these clowns and this is the reward. Wait, you lot. I think you were a voter here as well. Well, the UK, enough of the UK in enough places voted for these clowns and this is the result of it. I don't think most people are going to care. I mean, that seems to be the general kind of stance. They won't understand. They won't care. Those of us who do probably will still be able to use Signal and nobody will, well, if you've got, you know, nothing to hide. Yeah, classic argument. Those of us that really care, I don't know, we were just talking about it, moved to Canada. Yeah, maybe. Or moved to Ireland. At least then I could maybe get you used citizenship after a few years. Given there are other countries with similarly oppressive regimes where it's difficult for people to use end-to-ending cryptid tools, but they manage to anyway. I suspect that whatever they do, the nerds will figure a solution, whether that's, you know, VPN or additional side loaded third party apps or whatever it might be. There will be solutions to this, but it'll be your average Joe who doesn't have the now's or a good technical friend who can explain to them how to work around this stuff. He'll be left out of the loop. Surely it's the people deciding that they're now going to break the law though. That's a sort of barrier you have to cross where there's a difference between getting past region blocking on Netflix versus I'm now going to sidestep government regulation all of my own and wait for the people to turn up at sack of spanners to beat it out if you're like. Right, but the government in this country already have laws to make you divulge your password for your phone. So it's not like they have to decrypt your phone. They can compel you to unlock it for them. If you don't, then there's ways and means of getting the data off it and you're in prison in the meantime, so you lose anyway. And also, I think a chat will be the thing that's most affected. And I know from kind of trying to have a principled stance on not using WhatsApp, how badly it affects your kind of social media mobility, I mean, it really causes problems, I have to be honest. And it's just going to get worse if we're saying, well, you know, you could try chatting to me on signal via a VPN, it's just no problem. Have you heard of Warigard? I don't think you're necessarily missing out on much not having WhatsApp Graham because I got joined to a group chat recently, which is a bunch of people I know because we're all going on a stag holiday next year. And the naked pictures started appearing and I'm like, oh God, I mean 30 years ago maybe, but now, no thanks. But you have to be part of that group, don't you, to go on that stag do and have a social life? I mean, I could not have joined the WhatsApp group and just like asked them to send me a letter with the details and all. Sometimes that's how it feels, yeah. Yeah. And I'll get a tram there. Burn me a fax. Yes. Exactly. I really hope that meta does pull WhatsApp because signal, no one's going to know this. The people who use signal will work out a way of using it with a VPN or whatever. But if WhatsApp disappears, that's going to really open some eyes, I think. Yeah. There'll be already a tick tock and a little matter of that point. I don't know. All the boomers love the WhatsApp, man. And they're not going to be on tick tock and I think you want to see where the youth are. That's the popular social media thing and they started, yeah, they were on Facebook, then they moved off of that because all their parents arrived and they went to Instagram and they moved off that because all their parents arrived. And then they moved to Snapchat and they'll move off Snapchat straight away as soon as something else comes along. And if the selling point is privacy and security and your parents can't see anything, then they'll go for it. And that's where the mass market, the network effect will start with teenagers and their devices. Right. I better ask my name, sir. I think it gives up on six year LTS kernels, says that too much work. This comes from a talk about the open source summit Europe from Jonathan Corbett, where he just casually mentioned this and it's sort of blown up a little bit. And then on social.conal.org, Jonathan posted about how he found it a bit weird really because he thought everyone knew about this because it's been public knowledge for over a year. So it's all a bit of a strange situation. I wasn't aware of it. I must admit. But either way, this is pretty bad news mostly for embedded stuff like Android particularly because a lot of Android fans have very old kernels. I guess it wasn't super well known among the user base or even among nerd user base because nerds don't get their kernels from kernel.org and they're not involved in the minutiae of release management on kernel.org. People get their kernels from the hardware manufacturer in terms of Android devices or the Linux distribution in terms of desktop Linux. And from a user point of view, it's the distribution that supports the kernel, not kernel.org. Now I'm not dismissing the work that the kernel developers do, but that's how it's perceived from a user point of view. I get my kernel from the Ubuntu kernel team, right? I don't get it from kernel.org. Now I know it originated there and there are lots of thousands of people who've contributed to that. Yeah, I get that. But that's not where I get it from. And I think that's the perception. And that's probably why people didn't know about this. Right. In the case of Ubuntu, that kernel team maintains the kernel for up to 10 years anyway. So that's not really related to the LTS kernel. So I don't think Ubuntu even uses LTS kernels today. No. Annoying. Sometimes, but they didn't say for 2204 is a six up to now, which is annoying because I swear, well, no, I don't swear. I know Debian beat them with that patch series for the recent vulnerability that was out. And I think Debian was able to rely on the fact they were prepared a kernel upstream LTS on 6.1 and not have to backpour all that stuff themselves or I don't know what you do with it. Backpour upwards. Up portals? I'm not sure. Anyway. I wish LTS software actually used the LTS kernel upstream as well. I don't know. I would feel better about it, to be honest. I think it's a bit moot because the Ubuntu kernel team patch the living hell out of whatever kernel it is and they backport stuff. So it's not the whatever kernel you get from a distribution is not always super reflective of whatever the upstream kernel was originally unless you go for mainline kernels, which are not supported anyway. So I think it's a bit sad that this announcement was was ever made that happened, but I can kind of see why because it is work to maintain a project for a long time. You need warm bodies sitting on seats with keyboards going at it constantly. And I don't think they necessarily had the resources to do it for the payback they got for doing it. Yeah, I think that's fair, but as I said, it's bad news for Android because by the time you get an Android phone, usually the kernels pretty much out of support anyway. So they're not affected. So who cares? Well, that means it's perfect at that point. Well, related, the maintainer of the new Vow kernel driver resigns and that was quite a big story, but then it turns out that someone else is taking over. So it's all fine. It was a bit of a storm in a teacup really. Is it though? Yes, it's fine. Someone's taking over. Sounds like IBM to me, those evil strings in the background. Could we change the name to new Vow, new Vow? It's art new Vow now. So I just thought it was worth mentioning that because I'd seen some people getting up in arms about it. Oh, it's Red Hat, this, that and the other, IBM, this, that and the other, but no, it's just someone moved on and someone took over. It's fine. Come on. Can we not leave it at Red Hat Beneval again? That was fun. I keep it going. No, no, we can't. OK, this episode is sponsored by EntroWear. Go to EntroWear.com EntroWear sells computers with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Marta preinstalled. They've got a range of desktops, laptops and servers and most parts are configurable so you can pick the CPU, RAM and storage that's right for you. If you can't find exactly what you want, then do contact them and they'll work with you on a bespoke solution that's perfect for your needs. The ship to the UK, Republic of Ireland, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. And if you do buy one of their machines, there's a little drop down at checkout and you can select late night Linux so they'll know that we sent you. So go to EntroWear.com for all your Linux computing needs. On to a bit of admin, then. First of all, thank you everyone who supports us with PayPal and Patreon. We really do appreciate that. If you want to join those people, you can go to latenightlinux.com slash support and remember that for various amounts on Patreon, you can get an advert free. Or access feed via just this show or all the shows in the late night Linux family. And if you want to get in contact with us, you can email show at latenightlinux.com. All right, let's talk about Unity then. This has been a huge story that's rumbled over the last couple of weeks. It broke just after we recorded last time. We did talk about it on turn half admins. But the long and short of it is Unity, the game engine, they decided to change their terms so that people who make games with that engine are going to have to pay per install of their game. And all sorts of questions were asked about, well, what about if people pirate my game and stuff like that? There was a huge outcry and now they have walked it back and everything's fine and you can definitely trust them to never do this sort of thing again in the future. It's been good news for Goddo that's got an awful lot of extra funding because of this, got an awful lot of attention and probably a lot of people looking at it as an alternative to Unity. Unity's made some, well, they merged with INSource, which is like a mobile app ads monetization framework. And if you look at the average, my daughter recently got an iPad and so she's installing all the free games, most of which are probably built with Unity and if you see how invasive the ads are and those things, I don't know where this is coming from. I'm assuming Unity is seeing millions of users of those apps and not getting any return on it. And you know, they took a whole load of venture capital, hundreds of millions, they're making hundreds of millions of loss. And so they've tried to do this for their own survival. The communication's been terrible. I don't know. It's a proprietary game engine. Yeah. And the moral of the story is, if you don't want to have the rug pulled on you, use something up in source like Goddo. Yeah, I think that's why a lot of us use Linux in the first place. Even if you do use proprietary software, you assume that when you start off with a contract for what you're going to use, you know, if you're going to use the Unity as an engine, that it maintains itself through the life of the product, but this just seems bizarre at a way to change midstream, you know, all from now on, you know, almost blah, blah, blah. It just seems really strange. Yeah. And that's what they've walked back. If you are using an old version of it and LTS or whatever, then the changes are not going to affect you. Not from future versions onwards, this new pricing will apply, which I think is fair enough. That's what they should have done in the first place. They should have said that if you use this version that's coming out next year or whatever, the terms and conditions are going to be different, but trying to change the terms and conditions out from under people who were already using it, no wonder there was such an outcry. Yeah. And seemingly retroactively almost as well. I mean, if they're making that much of a loss, then yeah, they have to make a business decision. If people chosen to use a proprietary games engine, then somewhat have to expect this type of stuff, but you should still have fairness involved in a business agreement. But it's been great to see for Goddard's sake, the two, the big donation and the extra work that they've gotten from them, even though I'm a bit pessimistic to think that that's going to be like some sort of golden chariot that they're going to ride in on and save today for everybody. I think a lot of people look at it go, ah, yeah, okay, well, I guess we're going to have to go back to Unity now because that's not going to work. But, you know, maybe you change a few. I mean, I'm sure Blender at the start was no use to anybody either. I think the interesting thing about Unity is that the whole changing the terms plays on the fact that game developers often build a game with a particular version of Unity and maintain that game with that version of Unity. They don't upgrade the version of Unity unless there's some super compelling reason to do it because there are bugs that are introduced that could delay your release of the game in the new version of Unity. And so often a developer might have multiple projects on the go, each one using a different version of Unity, Unity even have their own application called Unity Hub that allows you to maintain on your workstation multiple versions of Unity. So each project has its own version, right? So they know that their developers or their customers who are developers are sticky on particular releases of Unity because they have to because they can't upgrade because as soon as their grade Unity breaks their game or there's some change in the behavior of like the random number generator, for example, which completely changes the playability of the game. So developers are very averse to upgrading their Unity builds. And for Godot, I think this is great because not only is the funding going up, but just visibility of it. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who had never heard of Godot or had never entertained the thought of looking at it because they were so baked into the Unity landscape, whereas now their eyes have been opened and they can have a look at it. It may not fit, but at least they've got it as a potential tool in their arsenal for the next project that they work on. It's a bit like when Musk bought Toyota and it opened people's eyes to master on. Yeah, exactly. I think it'll take a lot of time. Yes. And investing in games development takes years. I mean, it's a bit different with Blender. The brilliant thing about Blender was there were no, everything was expensive, all the proprietary alternatives are really expensive and you couldn't get into that world without spending a fortune or pirating software. And it would be wonderful to see Godot be that kind of option for games development. And I actually, I think it will. I see we've reverted to the American pronunciation of Godot now to Godot. What is it? Godot? Yeah, let's just say Godot. Godot. All I know is it's Irish fellas fucking play that I didn't have to do in schools, so I don't care about it that much. Well, is it back at? Is it not? Yeah. I've had it pronounced all three ways by people involved in the project. So, whatever, just like Ubuntu, etc. Ubuntu. There you go. Godot. Grime, gnome. That's cool whole thing off. Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to the Linux and open source community. I think you mean Linux. Sorry. I think you mean GNOS slash Linux. Yes, so this is according to Michael at phronics and I don't think he's wrong, is he? I don't know. I don't tend to keep an eye on companies upstream contributions. The only time I'm alerted to this is when someone wants to make a hit piece about the lack of contribution that canonical made upstream or the glorious contribution that Red Hat made upstream. It's not a thing that weighs heavy on my mind, which companies are contributing the most to open source projects. Until someone writes a piece like this and then I go, oh, interesting. And then close the tab and forget about it all over again. Do you need some vinegar without saltiness? Yeah, you can tell that you're just slightly jaded from your previous roles. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. But I do sometimes feel like we give Valve too much credit and praise because they are a fairly big company. And we're mean with praise. That's what you're really saying. They've got a closed app store model. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, why don't they open source the backend, eh? They're waiting on that white paper from Mozilla on how to open source pocket. Yeah, exactly. But I think credit where it's true, you know, it's I think it is for commercial reasons. It makes just business sense to be a good open source citizen for Valve because they want the Steam Deck to be a success. And if you upstream as much as you can, it means that you don't necessarily have to maintain it all. What I like about Valve, I think, and after having just talked about Unity in its kind of post IPO world is that Valve is obviously privately owned. And there's a personality. There's a character to the way that it operates, which I think is really refreshing. Part of that is its upstream contributions. And it's also it's the support that it gives to its products and the way it goes about innovating. And I think it is a great company in all those ways. I'm sure there's an awful lot wrong with it. And the certainly lots of rumours about what it's like to work at Valve. But it is a good contributor. It's great for Linux. I think we can say that. Yeah, and even the the choices they've made, you know, they could have made something super locked down. But it's not. It's super open and hackable. I absolutely love the Steam Deck. And I love the software choices they've made. And the hardware choices as well, obviously. But it's a really well put together piece of equipment with well thought out software stack that makes it really useful. As a byproduct, they're contributing upstream. So I get better performance maybe or better experience on my desktop as well. So yeah, win, win, win, everything's great. I love Valve. Yeah, Fair enough closed ecosystem, whatever. But I like the fact that they're involved in all their own sorts of companies in this. Like Calabra, there's a guy here from Galia who's a source consulting firm. They're working with the code reavers guys and wine. I mean, it's not just trying to take it all in house and say, oh, no, no, we're going to do our own thing and fork it like absolute mad. The whole ecosystem's actually getting to benefit from it and people in their companies. I mean, the partners ecosystem, whatever you want to call it. I think that's a good thing. Because I think there's far too many companies trying to just go their own way on their own and throw it over the wall. Android style. I do maintain that it is in their commercial interest to operate this way though. It's not out of some sense of altruism. Yeah, I know it is. And it's for so many other projects too. But you'll be surprised the amount of companies that just don't do it. They have to keep in. Oh, it's our secret sauce. We can't let that out there. Even though, you know, it doesn't help them. It's kind of perfect because the games are the bit that they worry about and the developers of the games. And that's fine. And we don't have to care about that. We still get the benefit overall with the open source bits getting developed on. All right, you've stuck a KDA corner in. It's only one thing, thankfully. Well, I have to be wrong not to really. So Sponsored Work is a new category for support that you can do. It came up with an idea in one of the sprints. And they developed a new donations page, which is much better. And the idea was, oftentimes, you are not looking for a big change. You've got a couple of niggles or maverick. We had a guy who had a problem with Firefox where it didn't accept certain types of keys or whatever it was for the key cars. You know, you could pay a developer certain quantity of money and get that one thing fixed. Well, they have that now available too. So if you have small things that need to be done, and if the developer themselves, even wants to just contribute that back to KDEV, they can do that too. So if they don't need the cash, that's quite cool. And nice to see the project push forward with these donations and stuff to try and help people actually do this for a job. Right, I'm going to post now. Could you please make it so the options are not completely confusing and there's 1,000 things for everything. I'll give you 200 quid to fix that. Thank you. That's the only thing that worries me about these kind of things. Is people have very elevated expectations of what their 25 quid donation is going to get them. You don't have to do the work, though. It's not payment and then you get no choice. No, my point is that people throw money in and think that gives them total ownership over the feature, and that they want to have full control over the direction of that feature or that fix. And they want it yesterday. And I think people need to set their expectations accordingly when they're donating to an open source project. That is fair. But this is definitely good news. It's a good thing. I'll put it at the end because it's, let's end on a high. Sorry. Thanks, Popeye. Right, well, we better get out of here then on that super high note. Thank you very much for joining us, Popeye. You may well join us next week as well. Excellent. I look forward to it. But until then, when we have some discoveries or something, I've been John. I've been Ferlam. I've been Crame. I've been Alan. See you later.