Untitled Linux Show 182 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey folks, this week Jeff joins me and we talk about a whole lot of stuff, from the Intel Arc Battle Mage card to the Bad Ram hardware attack. We talk about CentOS, stream 9, the new Proton version and the new spin of Fedora with Cosmic. That and more. It's a whole lot of fun. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 182, recorded Saturday, december the 14th, sketchy Patches. Hey folks, it is Saturday and it is time to get geeky with Linux and open source and, well, firefox and browsers and all kinds of stuff we're talking about before the show and it's going to be a lot of fun. Now it is a little bit different. We've got it's a. It's an all star show, it's a superstars only show.

00:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's me and Jeff. Yeah, we've done this before you know on this show and other shows. Yes, we've done this before you know on this show and other shows. Yes, yes.

01:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So we got it. Oh yeah, no, it's not a problem. I've just always said please don't make me do a monologue, I need somebody else there. But the two of us, we got it, no problem. We got a lot of news to talk about. It seems like this was the week that a lot of things happened.

01:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It did, it did. There was quite a bit, and I'm going to warn you now, I got a lot of stories and they're longer stories. Yeah, we got a lot to cover.

01:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So we're going to do hardware first right, there's something new in the hardware world. There's several new things in the hardware world, but one in particular I'm interested in, and obviously Jeff is too. What's the big new thing?

01:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, in case you've not been paying attention to the tech news, intel has released a couple of Battlemage video cards. Now Michael Larable over at Phronix has been doing some benchmarking on the B580, which is the faster the cards and has results in both compute and gaming. I don't know if the embargo is released yet on the 570, so we're only going to talk to 580 today. Now the Battlemage cards use the XE2 graphics from Intel and he does make mention that to get the cards to work, kernel 6.12 or greater will be required, along with MESA 24.3 or greater. If you can run even newer, it will be better, as Intel has been pushing out updates quite frequently to fix minor issues that have come up in certain situations. Now the tests compare the 580 to older Intel cards and several 40 series NVIDIA and 7000 series AMD cards. Now first we're going to look at compute, which the results are all right, kind of rather all over the place. There are many compute benchmarks, the cards hanging with a 4070 or 7800 AMD card, and there's others where it doesn't do so hot, for example Blender. The 580 is behind the last gen Intel cards, but there is a high kernel latency bug or high latency kernel bug in the driver and expect that to be fixed in the near future. Michael even does mention that he's going to really monitor the drivers and as improvements go in, he's probably going to re-benchmark a bunch of things, mark a bunch of things. So now, in cases where it doesn't excel and there isn't a driver issue, the Battlemage cards run right around an NVIDIA 460 or an AMD 7600.

03:33
I do need to mention that this card is $250 US and that is if you can find it. As of Saturday, the 14th, as we're doing the podcast now, the cards are out of stock at all major retailers, I believe, the reason being, while it isn't the fastest card out there, it is the fastest at the $250 price point In the cost for performance, the Intel 580, for cost versus performance, I should say the Intel 580 card is crushing AMD and NVIDIA. You know it's a very high bang for your buck in that lower price point which a lot of people are at. You know, not everybody can drop monstrous amounts of money on a new video card. Now I know some of you are saying fine, jeff, compute is all well and good, but I plan to play games and I'm not going to do scientific research on my machine.

04:27
To that I say look at the second article in the show notes where Michael has the gaming benchmarks. Michael has an Intel 285 CPU for these benchmarks and he had it as well in the compute benchmarks and he doesn't make mention of it in the article. But you do need to have resizable bar to get the most out of this GPU. So you need an Intel 10th generation or newer CPU or you need an AMD 3000 series CPU or newer. Now you can use it on an older system but the performance is going to be reduced, so the benchmarks won't apply if you're putting it on an even older machine reduced, so the benchmarks won't apply if you're putting it on an even older machine. Now the games that he tried are a mix of Proton and Native and we get mixed results. So while most all of the games ran, f-122 did have a problem where the game would hang, so it doesn't have a good benchmark result on that.

05:21
One. Hardware Unboxed ran the B580 across a ton of games and while there were a few that had some issues, almost all of them ran fine. So the card isn't perfect. But the reviewers I've seen have said that Intel is acknowledging the issues and working on the driver to fix the problems. On the Linux side it's the same story, where things are not 100% perfect but they're 98% perfect and the drivers are still getting love, so we should see issues fixed soon. Kind of a side note. The first generation, from when they originally launched to current state, had massive uplift in performance because they were continuously working on the driver and they know there's issues with the driver, so it's going to get love. Now that might also mean if you're getting a card that you might have to upgrade the kernel to fix an issue, if your distribution is a little behind on kernel updates or if there's something coming out in a kernel version or Mesa version that you deem that you have to have right away. But after all, this benchmarking bottom line is a card cost per performance is just like the computation benchmarks and that there isn't anything that can touch it for the price. It runs probably around this AMD 7600 or NVIDIA 460 in performance, maybe slightly behind it right now with the current state of drivers, but it's solidly in the neighborhood.

06:48
I think it's great that Intel's getting the win across the review sites for the card, which Intel needs right now, and keep in mind the GPU and the CPU teams are totally different. So while we might have issues with our trust in the CPUs, the GPUs are different beasts and have not had any cause for concern. Temperature and power draw for the card's been good. It runs around 65C and 140 watts, throwing a little cold water on the party for Intel, though I think I would be remiss if I didn't say that we'll be having new cards from both AMD and NVIDIA coming out soon. New cards from both AMD and Nvidia coming out soon, though Nvidia is expected to come in and the Nvidia cards are expected to come out in January, or at least announce the 590 and 580. So getting a 560 series of card might take a while.

07:36
I don't know of the timing of the AMD 8000 series cards, so I know they're not going to compete on the high end. But with this series of cards, you know, I don't know when the 8600 level of card is going to come out. You know, is it going to be about the same time as Nvidia? A lot sooner, I don't know. But we also don't know the pricing. So they might come out, you know, be faster but might be a lot more expensive, or they come out at the $250 price point and Intel drops their price. So it's kind of expected that Intel is probably going to drop their price in the future when the other cards are released, depending on their performance and value.

08:17
So if you want to get a new video card, want to try something new, the Intel Battlemage is a good card. It's good value and it's definitely a recommended purchase. Across all the different reviewers I've seen, both at Pharonix and across the major, you know Gamers, nexus, jays, two Cents, linus, tech Tips and so on, hardware Unboxed they all really like the card. So you know it's definitely something people have good reviews on. Let me know your thoughts on the Discord about the Intel GPUs and I look forward to reading the comments.

08:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I've been looking very interestingly at this as well. I don't think it would be. I don't remember exactly what I'm running. I'm not sure that it would be an upgrade at this point, but for $250, it's really compelling oh yeah, especially if you're.

09:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know there's a lot of people still on 900 series cards. Yeah, you know amd 580s, you know, if you're in a thousand series, uh, nvidia, you know, definitely an upgrade and and it's basically the first um.

09:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's the first card that's really worth looking at in this price point. For a long time now it seems like this is kind of the price point that everybody has has abandoned is sort of the under 300 range.

09:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There's not been much there so yeah, and that's why you know people say, well, it's barely hangs with a 460. Well, but the 460 costs more money. When you look at frames per price or per dollar, this Intel card is just really top of the charts, yeah.

09:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's very cool, very cool. So there's a. This is interesting timing. There's a thing that I am going to talk about. I don't know how much Jeff is going to be able to talk about this, because it's sort of in the realm of where he actually works. So there are certain things that he's just not allowed to really comment on. But I found it super interesting and then we'll see if Jeff has any comments at the end of it. But I want to talk about something called bad RAM and what exactly this means and why it's important and why it's not entirely specific to Linux, but why it's related to Linux. So bad RAM is? It is an attack on AMD's secure virtualization. So, and it's all about how ram chips work, I happen to have one here now.

10:46
This is a. This is a dim from a laptop, but it is actually recent enough. I don't think I can get this close enough. You've got your memory chips right. So you've got, like you see on this side, you've got four memory chips. If you look on the back and again, I don't think I can get this close enough there's a little tiny here. I'll link way towards the camera. There's a little tiny chip right there and that is actually an EEPROM E-E-P-R-O-M and that's just a. It's a piece of memory, so a lot of times they'll be, you know, as little as like 1000 bytes or even 512 bytes. You know 1K, 2k, it's sort of in that range. It does not take very much. A lot of EEPROMs are very small and they just they store some bytes and they're usually at, they're usually I2C. So I squared C and in my experience they tend to be on address 50 for any, you know, 0x50. So hex, decimal 50. That's pretty much the standard and it's just. You send a request, you say hey, send me your bytes back, and it'll send back a string of bytes Useful for a lot of things for doing programming, configuration on hardware In the RAM, specification, the size of RAM and things like the timing.

11:58
So like it's a, it's a four gigabyte stick, it's an eight gigabyte stick. Here's the different timings that this stick supports. Those are stored on the EEPROM and so you plug it. You plug the EEPROM or you plug the entire stick into your motherboard. You turn the computer on and one of the first things it does I mean this happens faster than you can even think about it it sends out a signal and says hey, send me back the bits from that EEPROM. The EEPROM sends it back and then the motherboard goes okay, I've got three sticks of RAM, these are the sizes and these are the timings and brings up the RAM, starts to initialize the system. That's what EEPROM on a RAM stick does.

12:37
The idea of bad RAM is what if we told that EEPROM? What if we put something different in there? What if the EEPROM lied? So say, you've got a two gigabyte stick and the EEPROM says, oh no, I'm a four gigabyte stick. What is going to happen?

12:55
And it turns out that you get something called aliasing, which aliasing pops up in a lot of different contexts. In graphics, you have aliasing to you know, in graphics you have aliasing to worry about. In audio, you have aliasing to worry about. And, to put it very simply, it's it's sort of when things appear that aren't really there because of various reasons. And so in this context, what will happen is you have almost like a second copy of RAM. Will happen is you have almost like a second copy of RAM. Because you have to think about it Like if your, if your RAM say your select lines, if you were to give them a bit value, and so if you only have two gigabytes and this is obviously not going to be entirely accurate, it's just to understand what's going on here so if you have two gigabytes, your select line might be eight bits long.

13:42
It's obviously more than eight bits, but just stick gigabytes. Your select line might be eight bits long. It's obviously more than eight bits, but just stick with me here, it'll be eight bits long. And if you have a 16 gigabyte card, it's going to be, you know, longer. Let's say 12 bits or nine bits, whatever. What have you On the smaller card you can set, or on the smaller RAM stick, you can set those extra bits, the ones hanging off the end, to whatever you want to, and it doesn't matter because there are, there are, just you know there's this amount of RAM physically to get to.

14:11
And then. So what happens is if the, if the computer thinks that it has more RAM than it actually does, you end up getting the same physical RAM twice on the memory address. So like you'll have one address that points to a specific bit of RAM and then you have aliased another address that points to the same bit of RAM. And why that turns into a problem is because the processor is managing security based on the RAM addresses, and so it's saying this memory address is reserved for such and such virtual machine. We're not going to let anything but that virtual machine change it. Well, if you have an alias address, you can start at the virtual machine, the processor can do its fancy cryptography thing and then another process can use the other memory address and go in and fiddle with that memory.

15:09
So it's, it's alien, they call it bad Ram. It's all about this idea of aliasing bits so that you can get to them more than once, and it is quite a security problem. But AMD already has a fix out for it. I think it's AMD specific. They are now during boot up. They're checking for aliased addresses and if they find any, I think it just fails to boot. But super interesting security story and that's why it's Linux specific, because it has to do with virtual machines and some things like that. But I found it really really fascinating. Got links in there to go in and learn more about it if you want to.

15:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Now, is that coming from when you purchase the RAM or is it on your machine? They have ability to.

15:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Right, right, right, right right. So the deal is that what they're thinking about with it it's not when you purchase it. What they're thinking about is like if someone is in a cloud environment, and so they've got a virtual machine that's off in a data center somewhere, maybe, where someone else owns the actual hardware and they're just running a virtual machine. Well, you've got AMD's secure virtualization stuff that is designed to give you some assurances that your virtual machine is not being tampered with, even if somebody else owns the hardware, and so what this does is it can be used to defeat that assurance. Now, if you're talking about your own computer, it's nothing to worry about. You know, you've got to literally get to the RAM, either with like probes or maybe even desolder that EEPROM and hang something else off of it. Like this is not an entirely trivial attack, but for that particular instance it could be a problem.

16:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Okay, Well, I was just wondering if it was maybe something larger. They had sending out a bunch of sticks of RAM like that or something. Because that's what I was going to say Make sure you buy your RAM from a known company. That's what I was going to say Make sure you buy your RAM from a known company. Get it from Crucial, Samsung, Hynix, Corsair, Kingston, something that you know the name. It's a trusted brand. Don't go with any third-party off-brands. I don't care how cheap it is and how good of a deal it is. Just stick with the brands you know.

17:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah absolutely so. That's what's going on with BadRAM, with memory, Jeff. There's something going on with desktops. That's maybe some better news than this.

17:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, it definitely is better news. And I have another pair of stories, and this time centered around KDE. I know we all talk a lot about KDE, but it's a popular desktop and there's a lot going on with the new focus on Wayland and the version 6 of the desktop, so it's pretty active right now. The first story is about KDE Gear 24.12 being released and, for those new to KDE, the desktop is basically built into three major components. You have the plasma, where the graphics are handled, kde Gears, where the programs are, and Framework is kind of like it sounds. It's the structure that lets everything interconnect. It's kind of the glue that holds the other two pieces together.

18:16
Focusing on gear, we have a lot of updates to several programs, for example Ocular, which is a document reader. Its main claim to fame is PDFs, but it can open all sorts of files and can sign and verify documents. They've now added support for more types of items and combo boxes and PDF forms. They've made the printing faster and more correct, so now you should get the correct output when you send it to a printer, and they've also fixed the issue when signing a document where the signature window would prematurely go away. We've got Cleopatra, which keeps track of your digital signatures and encryption keys and certificates, and it helps you sign, encrypt and decrypt emails and confidential messages. They have redesigned the notepad and signing encryption dialogue and they put in the work to make sure messages and errors are a lot clearer. They also made a change so the recipients of your messages are shown beside the notepad so you can see, when you're typing something out, who this is going to.

19:15
On the same window, dolphin, which is the file manager for KDE, which, if you're a user of KDE, you know it well. In this release they put a lot of effort into accessibility and usability. They've overhauled the main view so it should now work smoothly with screen readers, something which I think will be of help to me. They've upgraded the keyboard navigation, so pressing Control-L multiple times will switch back and forth between focusing and selecting the location bar path and focusing the view. So your your window, your pane where your actual files and stuff are Pressing escape in the location bar will now move the focus to the active view. This will be handy, especially when you have a split view. You know the commander style layout in Dolphin which I personally use every once in a while, depending on you know, not always, but it's nice when you're working with a remote machine you can. You can have both things up at once.

20:10
Sorting is also improved in Dolphin. Now a file called atxt will appear before a file called atxt, so a little more human, readable sorting. You can now also sort your videos by duration, so if you have a big directory that you want to find the longest or shortest or whatever, now it's easy to do. The properties, dialogues, checksum and permissions tab have been redesigned for easier file integrity checks A change that will. That change will also appear in other KDE applications as well. Now, if you listen to this show for a few episodes, you've heard us talk about KDEN Live or Kdenlive, which is a video editor, and they've added the ability to resize multiple items on a timeline all at once. So that might not sound like a lot, but there's a lot of people that are really excited about this being able to resize multiple things at once. Did you know KDE has a sound editor? Kwave has been on the back burner for a while, but it's getting love again and it's been ported to Qt 6, so now it will work natively with KDE 6. They've also refreshed the interface by changing some of the icons to better match with the current desktop style and by doing this it will also allow for easier indication when playback is paused.

21:33
Now there are more updates that have happened, so take a look at the first link in the show notes for the full details of the applications I've skipped over, or details I've skipped over on the applications I did cover, so I definitely had some brevity in that story. The second link in the show notes talks about updates to Plasma 6.3. Biggest information coming from Nate Graham's blog is there is now better fractional scaling support. So when using scaling, there should be a sharper image now and no gaps between windows and their shadows and other weird little artifacts like that. When you're zooming in and using scaling, when zooming in at high levels, the interface switches to a pixel perfect representation and overlays a grid on the screen so you can see how each individual pixel looks. So designers and artists should love to see this feature because it should make the detail work much easier when you're designing Like you know, maybe you're into fonts, windows icons or something like that and you can really zoom in and see how it actually looks on your desktop and see which pixels you might have to tweak a little bit Now, speaking of artists, there's now an option for screen color accuracy, but it's going to have an effect on system performance, so gamers are probably not going to want to throw that switch.

22:50
But if you have to have exact color accuracy, well, there's a switch for that now.

22:57
Now, if you hate the double click on an edge of a window to maximize it horizontally or vertically, now they've added a toggle so you can turn it horizontally or vertically. Now they've added a toggle so you can turn it on or off in settings, so you don't always have to be forced with that. Now there's many more bugs squashed which I won't go into, but one thing I did want to touch on is performance increase for the clipboard. So instead of a custom internal format, the clipboard is now going to use an SQLite database. This improves reliability, support for saving many data types and memory efficiency, especially with images. So take a look at the article in the show notes for more details. It also has a link to Nate's blog for each and every change. And you know I'll be honest, I can't wait till my distribution of choice, which is Kubuntu, moves to 6.3 or later, as it seems like there's a lot of polish at this point and the desktop is really getting defined for KDE 6.

23:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've been. I've been enjoying it. You mentioned Kdenlive and I recently discovered something Ken live on fedora has had a problem with when, when you go to render something out at least the way I've been doing it 1080p, mpv, um, the audio and video is the desynced for me. So you go to some of the floss weekly episodes, yeah, like. So go three or four weeks back, go to floss weekly and just watch and you'll see like some of them are pretty bad, like a second desynced and that's a lot. You definitely can notice that. Yeah, um, and so I, you know, I sat down like all right, what can I do to fix this? There's got to be something, and I ended up installing caden live, the flat pack version through discover and the couple last couple times I've rendered out with that and it's not been a problem. So it it must be something with the fedora, because kdenlive uses, uh, your codecs from your system, right? So it must be something with the codecs that fedora is using, that you get a different codec pack inside of the flat pack version.

24:57
Yeah, maybe there's an ffmpeg version or something that's off, or one of those libraries that just either either picked up a regression or is one behind and there's a bug squash that hasn't been picked up yet, or, honestly, it might even be where fedora does not want to ship some version of a library because there's there's patent issues, and you get that a lot with codex, so it could even be something like that.

25:24
Um, there is. There is one other little bit of news that is, that goes along with this and, uh, you know, we've been, we've been watching the wayland color management protocol and that's, that's basically the, the thing that's got to land in wayland before we start getting hdr across all of the desktops and then also supported in browsers. Um, and it has now hit three acts that's what the term they use acknowledgements, and that is essentially the requirement for something to land. One of the big requirements is three of the right people have to say yes, we agree, we sign off on this, and that has now happened, and so I expect, within the next probably couple of weeks for this to land, and I also expect that once it lands, you're going to see things like um, hopefully, hopefully, uh, engineers at google, with google chrome, will start adding support for it.

26:19
so, hopefully, soon hello, hdr, yeah, yeah all right, I want to talk about a desktop option. Uh, that is not kde, I am not running it yet, but boy, I'm really thinking about it. Um, and that's cosmic, and cosmic not on pop os, but cosmic on fedora everybody's favorite. Well, some of our favorite distros. I guess it's not everybody's favorites, it should be everybody's favorite. Well, some of our favorite distros. I guess it's not everybody's favorites, it should be everybody's favorite distro. Uh, so they. I've got a, I've got a link off to the Fedora wiki. Uh, I think I originally saw this on phronix, but the the actual stories on the wiki here, and that is that they are.

26:59
They are proposing a change for Fedora. What is this going to be? Fedora 42. Fedora 42, coming soon To do a full-on spin of the Cosmic Desktop. So they are already planning. There's already a SIG. They are already planning to add support for Cosmic for Fedora. In fact, I think in Fedora 41, you may be able to run it already, and so there is the plan. Is it's a proposal? You may be able to run it already, and so there is the plan. Is it's a proposal? It's not approved, but I imagine it's going to get approved. Yeah, the plan is that there's going to be an actual spin so you can get a live DVD. You could do an install of Fedora Cosmic now and I'm pretty excited about this and I find it fascinating that Cosmic is so new and there are so many people as excited about it as they are, and I think having a Fedora spin is going to be just kind of the next step in really it coming into its own. So it's going to be cool.

27:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think that's going to. Really, you know, it seems like KDE has kind of got its legs now and it's really, you know, it stumbled there for a while. Gnome, I don't know, seems like they're in a stumble period, but Cosmic seems like it's really coming up fast and I can see it being a number one desktop. Give it a couple more years, you know, get it polished, you know, and get it kind of ready for production, as they say. I could see cosmic taking over, you know, surpassing kde and gnome and or at the very least, hanging right in there I.

28:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't think it's ridiculous to suggest that in another few years the big two desktops on Linux are going to be KDE and Cosmic.

28:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I hope GNOME just really kind of gets their legs back under them and kind of gets a direction and stops breaking compatibility, because it seems like every so often they rev up and then it really upsets a lot of people which just think you've written some application widget, whatever, and you know it. It took hours and you worked, your, you poured your heart into it, yep, and then they went oh, we changed the api, it's not compatible, so now you have to rewrite everything and you're just like, oh, do I even want to go through that again? Yep, you know it was working great.

29:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And it's not that, it's just. It's not even just gnome that's doing that, though. Uh, you know, there's been. There's been deals, especially kde, on a six. There's been some things that had to be rewritten to get 6 working. I think the thing that really annoyed people with GNOME, though, is that in KDE there were still ways to do it. In GNOME, there were some of those features that they kind of just removed, and there suddenly weren't ways like some of the theming. Things just went away altogether, or at least it was threatened to well and I think I think it's a little different.

29:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So kde went through this from version three to version four. They had to do a major rewrite and it was painful and it was long and arduous, but at that time they wrote in, uh, the ability to be more flexible. So any future major changes were a lot smoother. So four to five was not near the issue that three to four was, and going from five to six isn't as bad as it was going from three to four. Now you could also argue that going from five to six I mean you're going, you're changing from x to wayland that's a major overhaul versus some of the gnome stuff. They kind of change things, but I don't know that. I mean it's not like they were going through that big of a. Okay, we need to break compatibility or really change things because we're going strictly to wayland or we're going.

30:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean sometimes they kind of just well, we're kind of changing direction and break things and so I would say that gnome is more opinionated than KDE is, and when they change things and they're opinionated, that is where you tend to run some people away. I would say that is the main difference.

31:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That. Well, I, you know, I, I can't argue with that. I mean I can totally. I can totally see that viewpoint and I can totally see how, being so opinionated, it kind of you know, when you really put your stake in the sand and say, here's the line and this is this, is it? Some people are going to go? I'm not, I'm not on your side. Some people are going to go, I'm not, I'm not on your side.

31:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's not it for me. Yep, yeah, yep, all right. Um well, let's, let's move on and let's talk. Let's talk gaming a little bit and a proton. I see there's a new proton release out.

31:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There is, and you know, I guess I was kind of really glomming on this because if anybody didn't know if, if you're using steam, it was, I believe friday night they had the steam game awards. So if you like to see what's coming and, you know, see all that stuff, it, uh, it's on there so you can see it on youtube, you can see it on steam. But what we're going to talk about right now is proton 9.0-4 has been released, and you know I think my propensity for gaming is rather well known on the podcast, so you know, just always love to see this. Do protons and make things play better. Now this release comes three months after the Dash 3 release Starquest, sniper, elite, nazi, zombie, army 2. Now, only that's AMD GPUs, only Total War, shogun 2, warhammer 40K, space Marine 2, which requires disabling the Steam overlay.

32:57
But that's just a few of the games that are that they've now added to playable. I cut out several that, uh, you know I didn't, you didn't want to hear me read for that long. Now there is even some regressions fixed, like star wars, knights the old republic no longer launches to a black screen when in full screen mode and games now launch on the correct screen on setups with multiple monitors connected to multiple GPUs. Again, many others are fixed. That's just a small sampling of things they've fixed. There are other fixes to games that were playable, but they just made things better, such as improved font rendering in Spellforce 3 Versus Edition and reliable mod support in Doom Eternal, along with improved video playback in games like March of Empires and Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition. You know who doesn't love smooth cinematic sequences. Now you've got them back. Now they've also added things which are a little more under the hood, such as adding support for NVIDIA Optical Flow API and DLSS 3. And if you don't know what DLSS is, it's a technology that allows smoother and faster frame rates in games that are demanding, while it's keeping most of the visual quality. It's a way that they can kind of fudge textures, you know, add frames in between. So if you're having a video card that's kind of struggling to play the game, this can get you up to your 60 frames or higher to make it a smoother play by kind of fudging things a little bit.

34:34
Also under the hood are several updates to components that are used in Proton. So they updated Xyla or X-A-L-I-A to 0.4.4 and enabled it for several games such as Oddworld, stranger's Wrath HD and Fallout New Vegas. They've updated updated wine motto to 9.3.1, which gives better dot net support. They've upgraded dxvk to version 2.5.1 and they've also included a regression fix from that version, so they patched the new version. They've updated dxvk nVAPI to 0.7.1-94, so that's for NVIDIA integration. The VKD3D Proton moved up to version 2.13-241, which improves Direct3D 12 support. Now they've also updated the VKD 3D dash shader to VKD 3D dash 1.14. And they added a hack to make sure it runs with optimal performance and stability.

35:47
So take a look at the article in the show notes you know they also have a link to the release notes and there's a ton of things I left out. I'm just trying to hit the high points here. There's a ton of games which had regression fixes. Many have been added to the playable list and there's a big number which ran but might have had a little niggle. That needed fixed. You know, improve performance, improve stability or, you know, enabled some features. So take a look at the article and see what changed. Install a new Proton and go enjoy some features. So take a look at the article and see what changed. Install a new Proton and go enjoy some games.

36:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I'm going to tag on a quick little story that I saw this week and that is the NT sync driver. There are some differences between the way that Windows NT and Linux does synchronization and because of those differences and because they're having to be dealt with excuse me in user space it slows games down and there has been some work done to try to essentially port the Windows NT synchronization things over to Linux specifically for use in Wine and Proton and the patch set. We just got a version 7, and it's coming along. It's being, if I see correctly, it's being fairly well received in the kernel mailing list. No one is throwing a fit over it and it's good to see this making its way through and hopefully eventually landing.

37:18
But the thing that really caught my attention is if you go to the Pharonix article, there is a kind of a chart. It's not one of Michael's normal charts, it's just a text chart taken right from the mailing list, I think. But it shows the improvement for some of these games in frame rate. And the one that really got me was the 678% improvement on Dirt 3, which jumped from 110 frames per second to 860 frames per second. And then you also see here Resident Evil 2 was running at 26 frames per second, and with the patches it's running at 77 frames per second. That's 196% improvement. So this is not a little deal, this is a big deal. It is a big improvement for some of these games and I would love to see this actually land.

38:12 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah, well, I mean, I'm just looking at the data here and the lowest improvement is 21, which is metro 2033 goes from 164 frames to 199 frames. That's significant, I mean that's.

38:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That is a significant change and that's the smallest one on the yeah, that's your worst case in in the sampling that is here.

38:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So yeah, that's, that's huge.

38:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I am hopeful that that will eventually land. Hopeful, hopeful, and michael seems to be as well. He talked about maybe within the next couple of kernel versions we'll see it finally.

38:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Uh, get into the uh, into the kernel well, it's good when nobody nobody's complaining, nobody's throwing a fit. I think that really should. Uh, it's a good sign, that that's. That's a good sign. That's a good sign. Yes, yes.

38:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, let's see. I think it is time to talk about, oh yes, my weekly screed against hardware manufacturers being terrible. Present company excluded, of course, qualcomm, thank you, yeah, yeah, so this one is Qualcomm. Actually, qualcomm makes ARM core processors, and even ARM core processors had problems with the specter flaw. That was one of those speculative execution. Basically, there is a way to read RAM bits that you're not supposed to be able to read. This is different than the alias thing we talked about at the beginning of the show. This is, you know, this is a. It's a side channel attack. It's the ability to to look at timing things with the cache and figure out what's inside of ram. Uh, super interesting. If you want, we've. We've talked about it before, I've covered it on hackaday. You go and you know, look for spectre and you can find all kinds of more information about it.

39:55
The problem here is that Qualcomm CPUs some of them have problems with Spectre and need mitigations to really run securely, and Qualcomm never bothered to upstream any of that information into the Linux kernel. And so you've got Douglas Anderson from Google. An engineer at Google sent out patches for the kernel for the Qualcomm CPU cores and he said just so you know, he says I've made an attempt at guessing and he's got that not in quotes, but very, very bold guessing what the right patches should be to enable mitigations from Qualcomm CPU. This is mostly me searching the web to figure out what ARM cores various Qualcomm cores are based out of. He says the patches get more and more sketchy as the series progresses and I've noted that the later patches don't even compile.

40:52
I've included them to make it obvious that I think these cores are affected, even if I don't have all the right information to mitigate them. Hopefully Qualcomm can come and fix this mess for me. Oh, come on, qualcomm, get with it. This is just your, as I said, your weekly reminder that some of these companies are just terrible members of the community and are not doing any of the community and are not doing any of the things that they're supposed to be doing with getting their products supported in the linux kernel. Shame on you, qualcomm, do better, yeah guessing.

41:30
Oh, that's that's not what you want to hear yeah, we got a secure security mitigation.

41:35
Uh, maybe this will work give it a shot, you know, although so to be to be clear, no, no shade whatsoever thrown on, uh on on douglas anderson. I almost said douglas adams, that's somebody different. No shade whatsoever on douglas anderson. He's doing the right thing here he is bringing, he's letting folks know that it is a problem. He's doing his best and he is making it quite clearly known when it is a guess and the state of things. So I should say it's.

42:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
it's a sad state of affairs that he has to try to pick up the slack. Exactly, if only they had, you know, billions in revenue that they could just, you know, take a little time out of somebody's day to go hey, why don't you fix this?

42:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I tell you what. What's? What is interesting to do is to pull up the Linux maintainers file, um, and then search for it and see how many um, how many at Qualcomm addresses there are. I'm sure there are some. There have to be some, um, you're hoping now. I hope so, oh uh, well, maybe Qualcomm is not at Qualcomm, um, because that didn't come up with anything. Uh, arm Qualcomm, let's see. Do, do, do, do.

42:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I may well. I mean Arm Qualcomm. Let's see, they had to get the original drivers in there and the original codes. I would think there's got to be somebody.

43:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You would think so, you would hope so. At kernelorg, At kernelorg, At kernelorg yeah, I'm at gmailcom At poorlyorg, at kernelorg, at kernelorg. Yeah, I'm at gmailcom at poorlyrun. There's some hilarious email addresses in here too, by the way. Yeah, I will look in the next story and see if we have any actual Qualcomm employees. You know, I went kind of on a rant against Rockchip back a few weeks ago and made it clear even then though that there's like two or three at Rockchip or at Rock, you know, whatever their domain is in the kernel maintainer's list. So they're doing some. It would be kind of sad if Qualcomm doesn't even have any in here.

43:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Unless they're thinking that the end companies are going to, you know, be the ones that will supply all the code and they supply the hardware. The equivalent would be like Intel supplying a CPU and then the Dells and HPs having to write the code to handle this stuff.

44:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know, yeah, all right, let's see what is up next we've got. We're going to talk about kernels. Well, kernels and arch. Linux is jeff. Are you going to run arch, by the way?

44:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't think so yet. Actually, in all honesty, if, if, uh, kubuntu doesn't go with a more, a much more modern kde on uh 25.04, I would probably jump to, there's a good chance I might go to fedora. The water is the water is nice. Come on in. Yeah, I mean well and partially, because when I ran 40, it ran good, even when it was, you know, kde 6.1 and beta and you know it was pretty rough. But it, man, it was smooth, it was good, it was. You know. I don't know that possibility. Or maybe go nuts and go and get on Cosmic or something. I don't know. We'll see in a couple months what happens if, if, uh, they're gonna update, okay, what they uh, what they use so I do want to make clear um, there are quite a few at lenarocom email addresses.

45:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, that appears to be qualcomm, so there are some lenaro employees working on the kernel stuff, and and those appear to be the Qualcomm people. So, no, no rant needed. Yeah, but it's kind of cathartic. Well, yeah, it was Okay. So tell us about the kernel.

45:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So once in a while we talk about Arch in the show and I know it can be a bit of a decisive distribution and you know it generally boils down to it's too cutting edge and breaks too much. You know too hard to install, versus you get the latest software and have more control of what you install. So I'm not going to answer that today. But since our audience is made up of people taking their first steps into Linux to people hacking the kernel, I thought today we'd touch on the mid-level of person. You know the person that you know your way around a distribution and you're looking at getting into the next level of playing. So the fourth story I have in the show notes is about installing and switching between kernels and Arch. Now I've done this with other distributions but I didn't realize there are multiple flavors of kernels for Arch. I learned some things while writing the show notes today. I didn't realize all this and honestly it kind of made Arch a little more appealing to me. One of the first things I learned was there are five official kernels for Arch and these are kernels that are either supported directly by Arch or trusted contributors. The first, of course, is the, the standard kernel, and that's the default. And when you load up Arch that's what you get. But if you happen to be on something else and need to go back to the standard vanilla kernel, the command line default for that is sudo pacman-S linux-headers space pacman, space, dash capital S, space, linux, space, linux dash headers. So that'll install the generic kernel. The second kernel is the LTS. Basically, if you need more stability, you can load up an LTS. You get a kernel that doesn't change much other than updates for security fixes and critical bugs. Now one could argue why are you running Arch if you need server stability? But I'm not one to dictate what you should or shouldn't do and I just give you the tools and let you decide what's best for your situation. To install the LTS, it's like much like the previous commands, only dash LTS is added to the command. So you'd get sudo pacman-s linux-lts and it's all lowercase linux-lts-headers. That'll get you the LTS Now.

48:08
Third on the list is the hardened kernel. Now, this kernel is as it sounds. It's all about security and comes with patches and configurations which make your kernel as secure as it can be. To install it, replace the dash LTS from the last command with dash hardened and again all lowercase. Fourth on the list is a real-time kernel. Now, we've covered real-time kernels in the past, but what they are is to make sure tasks get handled when they need it. You know they get kernel attention when they need it. Now, this isn't a faster kernel, it just prioritizes things differently. Main use is in audio production, video editing and other time sensitive tasks where delays can be disruptive, such as you know, like if you're using the kernel in a self-driving car or some medical situation. So now, this is the same as the last one change the LTS or the hardened out for a dash RT again, all lowercase.

49:07
Fifth one is one that would appeal to gamers. It's the Zen kernel, which is a community-driven project. To get the most performance out of the kernel, if they can, it contains multiple performance enhancements, scheduler tweaks and other modifications to improve desktop interactivity and system responsiveness. Now, this would be a kernel for gamers, multimedia users, things like that. Now, installation, of course, is the same pattern Pseudo space, pac-man space, dash, capital S, space, linux, dash Zen, space Linux, dash Zen, dash headers so easy to go between the kernels.

49:45
Now one side note here. There might be someone who's wondering what the difference is between the RT kernel and the Zen kernel and I think a decent analogy is people at a restaurant With a Zen kernel. It's like you have a server who's trying to serve a dinner rush and there are a few large tables. Now the server's working as fast as they can and balancing extra plates to try and serve everyone. And balancing extra plates to try and serve everyone, but they're taking care of some of the large tables first because they can get more stuff out of the kitchen. The person who's at the corner table alone could be waiting a while before they get attention. Now, while in the RT example, a person sitting alone at the corner table is going to get taken care of much sooner, but because the server's running all around to take care of everyone, the overall service is slower. So I think that's kind of a high-level, decent analogy between the RT and the performance kernel.

50:48
Now, in addition to the kernels I've mentioned, there are five more unofficial kernels. In the article they do say that there's a lot of overlap on the unofficial kernels with the official, but the unofficial ones are more focused for a lot more specific use cases. Because they're unofficial, you will need to use something like YAY to install them. Now, while they're not official. They are in the AUR, which is the official ARCH repositories. The article in the show notes goes over how to use YAY. We have the LICORIX kernel, I think L-I-Q-U-O-R-I-X, which is best for gamers and desktop users who want snappier performance. There's the XANMOD X-A-N-M-O-D, which is a performance kernel but more targeted at heavy multitasking. The Libre kernel, l-i-b-r-e, which is kind of what it sounds like. It removes all proprietary firmware and drivers. Everything in the Libre kernel is going to be open source.

51:56
The Clear kernel, which is like the kernel which is found in Intel's Clear Linux distribution. It's known that the Intel Clear Linux distribution is known for having performance improvements and being a very fast distribution for Intel CPUs and, to a lesser extent, amd CPUs. But Clear Linux isn't friendly to being a general purpose distribution. It's geared more for like cloud computing, database work and other enterprise tasks. It's also kind of a playground for Intel, so it's not always user-friendly for newer users anyway. But this way you can have the performance of the kernel, of the Clear kernel, in a more friendly distribution.

52:45
And finally we have the CK kernel, which is also meant for heavy multitasking and intense workloads. So not only do you have a lot of things you're doing with your machine, but you have the machine maxed out with what it can handle. You're basically hammering the hardware as hard as you can. That's where the CK kernel would come in. So now, if you take a look at the article in the show notes, it does go in how to switch between the kernels with grub and systemd-boot, and in both cases they give you examples how to save the last kernel you booted in as the default until you use the menu to pick a new kernel which then makes that one the default. So it's got persistence across reboots. So that's kind of good if you're running a few different ones based on workloads and you want to boot into you know several different ones.

53:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's a lot of good information in there and really go, go, have a look and have a great time playing with kernels. Yeah, very cool. Uh, one one quick. Um. Maybe I misheard or you misspoke, but the, the AUR, that's the Arch User Repository. That one's more semi-official and I think technically anyone can upload packages to the AUR. I know they're pretty aggressive about getting rid of bad ones and they've got some things in place to try to keep that as safe as possible, but not exactly the fully official repository, that is the user repo.

54:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Okay, so it would be trusted.

54:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, okay, that's a good word. So, okay, so it would be trusted. Yeah, yeah, okay, good work. Um, yeah, that's, that's neat. I don't know, I don't know if I'm ever going to take the arch plunge myself, but uh, definitely interesting to see the different kernels they've got there.

54:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, I've talked to people that love it and I've had friends that have ran it and had you know it was. It was painful, oh yeah, I'm sure, and and they had a lot of issues. And you know, I'm personally it, I'm to the point. I, you know, I used to really play a lot in my distributions, but and I still do somewhat, but I'm okay with, like, taking a step back from the edge and, yeah, rather than being on the alpha edge, I'm okay with just playing with betas. You know, yeah, yeah, maybe even refined betas. You know that's good enough without you know, because, lord knows, I've rebuilt my system from, you know, after I've messed things up multiple times.

55:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So refined betas. That's an interesting unintentional segue, actually, or maybe it was intentional. It was not intentional, but it was still. It was good, so really just fell into that one. Then CentOS Stream 10 is now out for general availability, and that means, or it comes along with, the fact that RHEL 10 just hit beta and some other things that you may be more interested in running than rel 10, things like alma, linux 10 are also in beta.

55:34
Uh, and just for a quick reminder of the way this works, over in red hat land you have fedora will, have a release, and then after a couple of years, the fedora code um will will then get and it's not even a couple of years, it depends upon where exactly things happen in the schedule. But the code from a Fedora release I think in this case it's Fedora 40, gets worked on and refined and any bugs that are found get fixed, even after support for Fedora. The Fedora version ends and that now becomes a CentOS stream release, which is basically a continuation of what was in Fedora, and the stream release then also becomes the beta for the next Red Hat, red Hat Enterprise, and so we've got CentOS Stream 10. That is the same code that's going to be in CentOS 10. But the, the if you have kind of like a flow chart, right Like, things land in Fedora first and then they get a little more stable.

56:40
They land in CentOS stream. That gets more stable and then it lands in places like red hat and Alma Linux. So it's very, very interesting that stream 10 is now generally available and so if you want to do CentOS Stream, which is a completely decent operating system right, like for doing even enterprise stuff, centos Stream is going to be a very decent way to go and the plan is to maintain it until something like 2030. Of course, there's been a few of us that have been burned by trusting Red Hat's CentOS plans for how long they're going to maintain things. So you know you have to take it with a grain of salt, but anyway, centos Stream 10 is out and planned to be around until 2030. So definitely something interesting to think about.

57:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know I would honestly question the need for that length of support on something that's not an industrial item.

57:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I've got bad news for you Jeff 2030 is like only five years away.

57:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh damn it. I thought the exact same thing.

57:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I thought the exact same thing. I'm like. 2030? That's a long ways from now. Wait a second it's almost 2025 already. 2030 is only five years away.

58:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I thought we had a rule on the show don't do the math.

58:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We, we did the math this time. Um yeah, and and the reason, the reason why sent to a stream will be developed for that long is because sent to a stream is the upstream of rel and so it's going to be, it's going to be supported for as long as rel is supported well, in five years, isn't that I?

58:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was, yeah, I was thinking, oh, that's going to be a lot longer. And then you said that I'm like, oh yeah, it's not 2020 anymore man. I was living almost half a decade ago.

58:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, Maybe gotten a show title out of that little exchange. We'll see. All right, let's do some command line tips. Jeff has a Rust command line tip.

58:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I can't believe we haven't covered this yet, indeed, and this one's going to be short kind of, but this is one of those that could go into. You know, all of next year could go into covering this one. So my tip is cargo. So the link in the show notes, even though it's going to be kind of short, today goes to a book. It has seven sections, many subsections and multiple pages in many of the subsections. So what is cargo?

59:23
Cargo is the rust package manager. Basically, it downloads your Rust packages, dependencies, compiles your packages, makes distributable packages and uploads them to cratesio, you know, which is the Rust community package repository, and you know it does a lot, even more than I just listed there. So where this came from is when you have a Rust library or executable, it's called a crate. Running a crate can be as simple as calling its name, but then there can be dependencies, external libraries, command line arguments which need to be added To simplify this. There's a higher level of abstraction, called a package, which bundles up things that we're talking about into a nice neat package. So you can almost think of it kind of almost like a. I mean, it's not necessarily the equivalent, but you can think of it kind of like a flat pack or a snap, where they kind of bundle a bunch of this stuff up for you so you don't have to chase down dependencies and things like that, and that's where cargo comes in.

01:00:35
So now I'm just going to go over the simplest use case that there is for this, and I think it's the install command which will install a Rust program that you want to have. So a simple sudo space, cargo space, install space and then your program name. That will get you and I mean that's what you need. I mean it's kind of almost like apt or something where you just you know sudo, apt, install whatever package you know program you want to have, whatever package you know program you want to have, and it basically in this case, in this, in this small subset, it kind of works like app.

01:01:18
There's an install, uninstall and search, which I think are the most basic. Now, uninstall is just like install, where you just replace install with uninstall, so you just you know pseudo space, cargo space, uninstall. So you just you know pseudo space, cargo space, uninstall space, program name and it removes it. And search is just a pseudo space, cargo space, search and then your query whatever you know, maybe you know kind of a program name and it'll. It'll just kick back what, what it can find.

01:01:48
Now there's, of course, switches to go with all those and I won't go into any of those, but at least with the link in the show notes and what we've just talked about here, this should get you started if you're new to cargo. And, like I said, there's many other commands and options for creating and publishing Rust programs and and uh it, it, uh, really, like I said it, this, this hole can go really deep depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to get with, you know, handling your rust program. So take a look at the book linked in the show notes for the details to to the full power of cargo, and we're probably going to cover a lot more of this in the future, but until then, happy rusting, yeah.

01:02:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool. When I was doing the advent of code on Rust, I was using Cargo quite a bit, the repository. I found it's set up to use Cargo to do things like scaffold out the solution and to download the the different steps. Um, so doing some, doing some cargo stuff there for one thing but two, it was real fascinating to me the flexibility of things that you could do with cargo because, like that you know that was, that was pulling from something that wasn't necessarily a rust package, it was. It was adding files. Like it's got some flexibility to do what you need to do oh, yeah it.

01:03:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know, I was kind of perusing through and I'm like oh, wow, yeah this, there could be command line tips out of that thing for the rest of the year, of just different, different things.

01:03:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, absolutely. Um, all right. So my command line tip is uh, I I just saw this, because it was one of the other distros put out a new story that they were encouraging people to use this. The name really tickles me it's Switcheroo CTL, and so you know, that's one thing that's real interesting about it, and it's got a couple of uses. So, first off, it's probably already installed. All three machines that I've tried it on now have already had it installed on it, and if you just run it, it's going to tell you about your video cards. So if you've only got one, it's going to tell you. So I ran it on the desktop over there and it says you've got a Radeon RX 590 Fatboy 8 gigabyte card. I think that is the one that's in there.

01:04:14
Yeah, but what switcheroo CTL is really useful for is if you have more than one video card. Switcheroo is the program to use to launch something and pin it to the right video card. And so this is specifically for like laptops that will have a built-in AMD graphics card in the CPU and then also has a standalone NVIDIA card, and that's been a problem on Linux for a long time. Honestly, it was a problem on Windows for a long time too. For the longest time it was not a great solution and there were programs like Bumblebee and other things. And Switcheroo is the new fanciness, the new useful thing, and so you can just run Switcheroo CTL and I think you give it let's see here dash dash help.

01:05:12
Dash H does not do what you want it to do. Dash dash help is what you want. You can just tell it launch, switcheroo CTL, launch, and then you give it a GPU and then the command you want it to run and, yeah, it'll launch your game, or what have you. You can specify which GPU to run it on. Yeah, it'll launch your game, or what have you? You can specify which GPU to run it on. So if you happen to have one of those devices, or even, I suppose, a desktop with more than one GPU in it, that is the way to go about it.

01:05:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Now you know, very cool.

01:05:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I like it.

01:05:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It tickles me that it's useful just to list what GPU you've got in the system. I find that fun. Well, you know, it's funny how you stumble. I mean, I only got cargo because I was looking at another program. I'm like, oh, I'm going to include this. And then like, well, then there's cargo. I'm like have we ever talked about cargo? And I looked and I'm like wow, we've never actually mentioned it. Yeah, which I thought never actually mentioned it. Yeah, which I thought was surprising.

01:06:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And you know, you never know where those tips are coming from. It's true, usually. Usually we get our tips from working on our linux system throughout the week. That's where I try to find mine at. I find that to be the best kind of tips like oh I figured out how to do this cool thing, let's write it down.

01:06:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We'll talk about that on saturday a lot of times, yeah, sometimes, you know you got to do a little searching, sometimes see what's out there, or you just stumble across them.

01:06:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, true, true all right, is there anything you want to plug or any uh ending thoughts you want to leave us with?

01:06:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
uh, actually two things. One. Well, one is just going to be poetry corner. The other is, I forgot to mention, on the intel art card. It is a 12 gigabyte card which there are some people saying with the, you know, say, 4060 being a eight gigabyte card, it can cause a problems because there's a couple games now I think there was a raiders of the lost ark or you know, one of those kind of games that it now doesn't run as good on 8 gig. It wants more. So the how much memory do you need? Argument is kind of resurfacing again. So just heads up that it comes with 12. So it's got a little more room than some of its competition. The other thing is Poetry Corner. So roses are red, dirt is brown. Users lose their minds when the Wi-Fi goes down. Have a great week everybody. I like it.

01:07:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I like it All right. Thank you, Jeff, for being here. It was a lot of fun.

01:07:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Thank you for having me. I really enjoy it. I mean, this is kind of almost getting old school here, yeah.

01:07:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, all right, appreciate everyone that's been here. If you want to follow my stuff, there's, of course, hackaday. We've got both Floss Weekly and the security column is there. I've also got a YouTube channel, which, if I can find some time sometime this weekend, I've got a little hardware hack that I'm going to record a quick video about. You can find me there on YouTube and, uh, give me a follow. We will be uh, I think, back. Yes, we will be back next week. I think we're going to take one week off right around christmas, but we should be back next week for yet another untitled link show. We will see you all then. We appreciate everybody that watches us, both live and on the download, and we will see you then.