Hey everyone, this is Nick and welcome to this new episode of your Linux and open source news podcast
And as always well, I say always it's just the second episode
But still it's a longer version of your usual linux and open source news videos that I make on youtube
But just with more topics more details and without my ugly mug in it
They also tend to be more rambling
So this week our main topics are apple being fined for violating users privacy in the eu
By not obtaining consent from them before harvesting their data
We have mastodon losing active users after its insane growth period
With some users just not sticking around after making the transition from twitter
And we have mozilla joining the fediverse with their own mastodon instance
But we also have news about gnome kde and unity for desktop environments
We have updates to pop os improving performance for everyone
And we have a lot more stuff including an open source nvidia gpu driver making good progress
Now just quickly before we begin this podcast is brought to you free of ads free of sponsors
And the plan is for it to remain this way
So if you like it, don't hesitate to check out the patreon page in the show notes or to visit the paypal link
To donate whatever you want all the links to the articles that I used to make that podcast are in the show notes as well
And you can find all my socials on the podcast website, which is podcast.thelinuxexp.com
Where you can also comment on the episodes to discuss a specific topic or to leave some feedback
okay, so we're going to be starting with apple and
Apple if you know is really hitting the privacy stuff really hard like they're saying
What happens on your phone stays on what happens on your iphone stays on your iphone?
They pride themselves on not transferring data here and there they run their ai models locally, whatever blah blah
That's their big campaign promise when you buy an iphone
It's supposedly more private now as we all probably know there's been plenty of studies that show that basically
IPhones emits the exact same amount of data per day
Than an android phone except they send it mostly to apple instead of sending it to google
And apple has a way smaller ad network than google
So they probably use less of it to target you but they still use some of it to target you
And if you're in the governments can access my data camp
Then you know that basically every single shred of data that goes into their servers is accessed by the various governments where it is stored
But now there's definite proof that apple is actually lying on their privacy claims
Because the french CNIL which is the data commission for france basically it stands for commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés
Which roughly translates in national commission for computer science and freedoms
They just find apple for 8 million euros. So that's that's a very small amount of money
Obviously, it's not much but it's still a condemnation of the company's bad privacy practice
And the condemnation is for
The fact that apple was found to illegally harvest user data
So they could target them with ads in the app store without gathering a user's consent
But they they just didn't ask people if they consented to being targeted with ads
on the app store
So they basically deposited and wrote identifiers that were used for advertising purposes on the phones
And they never asked users if they wanted to
which is
Not exactly the case because when you have an iphone or an ios device in the settings you can tell ios to not
Uh track you to not track you with targeted ads and apple will even on third-party apps
every time the application
Asks to have access to your unique id
That lets you that lets the application the developer of the app identify you and track you and serve you targeted ads
Every time a third-party application tries to access this
Apple will show a pop-up saying this application wants to track you. Do you agree or not?
Everybody's gonna say no, but they never show that for their own apps and the setting that you can turn on doesn't apply to their
Own applications, which is exactly why they're being condemned right now
They're basically just lying that you turn on a setting but they don't follow it for their own application
Because it's not third-party data. It's first-party data. It's data from a direct consumer of apple
Now, of course, they are going to appeal that decision
Obviously, uh because they say they prioritize user privacy
They say that they do more in terms of user privacy than anybody else to provide users with a clear choice for personalized ads
and
Of course, like I said that choice is just yes, it exists
But it's not applied to apple's own apps, which like it's it's not great
And it compounds with the fact that apple was already fined
Was already fined another 1 million euros in december for imposing abusive commercial clauses on french app
Developers that that was a fine that was doled out in france as well
Because well, basically the clauses that apple enforces on their app store when people sign up
To to publish their app on the app store. They're just illegal
Basically, they are abusive. They sway the relationship in favor of apple way too much and make developers way too dependent
So if you add that to the fact that they're going to have to enable third-party app stores in the eu
They're really not starting to look like a very good option right now
Or at least their marketing claims are being debunked
And yeah, of course like they can say that they track people less than everybody else
but like if the bar is zero because everybody else like
Like on the phone everybody else tracks users you have android which is basically the biggest spyware you can have
Or you have iphones and yes
IPhones do probably track a little bit less data than what google can because google has more services that that are basically enforced
When you use android but yeah, just just because you do it less doesn't mean much right?
It's it's still crappy and it's a bad moment for me because I literally just switched to an iphone
like a few months ago and I just made a video about it which angered a lot of people for some reason because apparently you
Are not allowed to like stuff that people don't
but hey
Here we are
Now still we have another privacy breach, but this time from google which has been settled for 23 million dollars
This was initiated by a very old lawsuit opened in california in 2010
That google already had tried to settle for 8.5 million dollars in 2013
But that settlement fell through because while they were trying to settle it there were other
convictions that were that were basically against google google was convicted of doing other things that
Basically made the thing they were accused of in this 2010 lawsuit a lot more likely to have actually happened
And so they managed to drag this through the courts for almost 10 more years
But they finally settled it for well 23 million dollars, which is virtually nothing for google
But still it like a settlement isn't an admission of guilt
But it's pretty much an admission of guilt basically if a company agrees to pay that kind of money
it's not just to stop a lawsuit it's because they know they did something wrong and they just
They don't want to pay lawyers to keep dragging it along again and again
So this suit uh still needs court approval this settlement the court still need to say yes
Okay, we agree that google can pay that amount of money to get the charges dropped
and they
This suit is about the fact that google shared well allegedly shared search terms that consumers had typed in the search engine
With advertisers and third-party vendors without any permission and without any consent from the users
That happened on the web that happened on search bar on android
And also when the user clicked on any link sponsored or not on google the personal information of the user
Was also apparently disclosed to said third parties which had paid google to have access to that data
But google was not allowed to give that data away
Now that lawsuit also alleges that these third parties also paid google to have more information
About which search related factors led the user to actually click on a specific link
So not only did they pay to have the personal information, but they also paid to know what you did before
Which let them infer
How they can influence you basically you're paying to know okay this guy
He's this kind of age
He likes this kind of stuff and he clicked on this link
And why did he click on this link because he visited this first and this first and this first so you can now deduce his
Behavior about the behavior of the user and you can now really easily influence its decision through dark patterns
for example
So basically all of this means that google would have violated the stored communications act, which is a u.s federal law
And so they basically decided to settle it
So yes, it's all alleged behavior. It has they have not been condemned
They have not been found guilty. But if they agreed to settle that case after what?
20 no
Yeah, 12 years after 12
12 almost 13 years if they accepted to settle that after 13 years for 23 million
It's probably because they knew they were guilty and like it was an easy escape door, basically
now let's talk a little bit about the Fediverse and
Well, you probably already know about mastodon. You know that mastodon has seen insane growth recently
They passed 6.5 million accounts user accounts and there they were at some point at about 2.5 million
monthly active users in early december
Most of this growth came after elon musk bought twitter whether you think they fled twitter for a good reason or not
I don't care. That's not my point in here
But basically that's the main cause like you can clearly see on graphs a direct correlation between
every single announcement of elon musk about what he wants to do with the platform and a
Immediate direct increase in the number of mastodon users whether they're here for good reason or not. I'll let you decide that
I personally think that yes, but that's just my opinion
And it seems like these users are not necessarily sticking around on mastodon
The number of active mastodon users declined by about 30 percent between december and january
Uh, it moved from 2.5 million in early december to 1.8 or 1.9 million
active users monthly active users in early january
Which seems like a lot like it's basically 600 000 people which is
More than the number of active users mastodon even had before the twitter acquisition
So it's a lot of people that just decided that mastodon wasn't for them
Now, of course, there are multiple possible explanations. The first one is you're measuring active usage
During the month of december which as we all know is holiday season for a lot of people
They're with their families and of course the engagement is going to be a lot lower
So this might have an impact on the number of people
But that cannot account for all of that and
I don't have the exact definition of what they count as a monthly active user if you need to at least use
Mastodon once to interact with one post or even just get logged in
Once in the month or if it's more than that if it's once a month
Then no the holidays cannot excuse that
I can't believe that someone during the whole month of december that actually likes mastodon would never
Log back in for a whole month, but you never know
I don't have the exact definition. So it could be more contentious than that
But it's still a lot of of a decrease, but
Honestly, it's not that surprising in my opinion because
Well, obviously you're leaving a specific platform not because you hate the platform
But because you don't like what it's becoming
Or because everybody's talking about the new thing and you want to try the new thing
Or because your friends are pressuring you to moving there or because you just want to experiment with something new
And of course all of this generates a lot of new signups a lot of new logins
But that doesn't mean that every single person will find what they want on mastodon
Some people might just have thought that they couldn't find the people they actually wanted to follow and they moved back
Some people might have been really angry at at what twitter was announcing and then realized that you know
What it still kind of works for me and went back there
And went back there
There's been a few arguments
There have been a few arguments online saying that it's because mastodon is too difficult and that people left
But the difficulty is only into finding a server an instance and signing up afterwards. It's not difficult
So I don't think that's it because then the numbers would not have gone up people would just not have been able to sign up
But what we're seeing is people who actually signed up and used to log in don't log in anymore
So it's probably not because of the instance thing
Unless like they could never actually get to grips with mastodon itself
But that would be weird because it's basically an exact replica of twitter in terms of user interface
So I think it's normal. I don't think it's anything to worry about for now
If the numbers continue to decrease again and again and again month after month, then yes, it's going to be an issue
but
For now, there's the december factor. There's the normal fact that people trying out new things for two or three months will
Some of them will drop out. It's normal. It's absolutely normal. It's not concerning in the slightest. We'll have to wait and see how long
this decline lasts if
February and march also keep declining at the same rate. Then yes, there's a very big problem
That means that basically the platform is somehow unusable for most people who just signed up
But if it's just a momentarily decrease and it shuts back up
Which is very probable seeing that twitter just announced that they were going to test out a feed that is basically just an algorithm
So some kind of tiktok like feed which surfaces things that it thinks you might like instead of surfacing the tweets from people you actually follow
This might drive more people to mastodon again, and they might drop out again afterwards
We're gonna have to see i'm personally not really that concerned but hey you do you now still on the fattyverse
This is something that I missed at the end of 2022
I don't know how because it's supposed to be in the articles and blogs that I follow
But it looks like mozilla is entering the fattyverse too
They'll be testing a publicly accessible instance, which is going to be mozilla.social
Which is going to be a mastodon instance and they'll be testing it in early 2023. So it cannot be far
From now, I guess in a few months tops and yeah, so it's it's only a mastodon instance for for now
They say they're gonna start their fattyverse exploration with mastodon
And so I guess you can infer that maybe if it goes well, they'll open instances for other things
Maybe peer2, pixelfed, castopod, whatever else
This initiative seems to be part of their pledge for a healthier internet, a healthy internet as they call it
uh, which is basically their way of saying we'd like the internet to remain open and nice and people to not act like
bastards towards each other
and so they decided that moving away from the traditional social media or at least
Bringing their support to to less traditional social media like mastodon to the fattyverse basically
They feel that bringing them their support to that is is a way of helping and I honestly agree
They're joining Vivaldi into supporting the fattyverse as well because Vivaldi also opened their own mastodon instance
And honestly, I'm all for it
If you don't like these companies or non-profits and you don't want to support them
Then you can not use their instances or block people that come from these instances if they annoy you
But the fact remains that these big names are big endorsements for such a new well
Or newly talked about social network such as mastodon or a relatively new concept like the fattyverse and decentralized social media
They're a big endorsement and when people see big names like Mozilla or Vivaldi
Maybe they think that it's more trustworthy
Maybe they feel more at ease picking these servers over servers that might be managed by people. They don't know about
It reinforces trust basically, so I think it's a good thing
I don't think these companies specifically Vivaldi or Mozilla will turn the fattyverse into a corporate nightmare
Like some people seem to think
They're basically insignificant in terms of their impact and contribution
They're not offensive companies by any means
And they're not big enough to sway the whole number of users. They just bring some big name backing
To a service that is I think a good thing. So we'll have to see if other companies follow suit though
I think it was
How is it called Flickr? I think it was Flickr that also wanted to join the fattyverse, which is kind of cool
and we'll see how it goes and if people do it or not, but I think it's good to have that kind of backing and
It will bring more attention to mastodon
But it will probably also bring more attention to various fattyverse services like PixelFed, like Castopod, like Peertube and that can only be a good thing
Okay. Now a really small thing. We talked about AMD desktops last week, full AMD computers
And now we have a full AMD laptop being announced by System76. It's their refresh of the Pangolin which is
Sort of their workstation laptop
It seems to have a new chassis, which is magnesium alloy. It's 15.6 inches and it is
Using an AMD CPU and a dedicated AMD GPU as well
So from what we've seen is just a press release and an announcement right now
They have a teaser page with a few specs, but we don't know all the configurations that are possible
We don't know the release date yet
But from what they've already talked about and announced it seems like it's gonna have a full HD
144 hertz display. It's gonna use a Ryzen 7 6800U, which is a pretty good CPU
And it's going to be coupled with a Radeon 680M GPU, which is
Not a power workhorse, basically. It's about on par with a GDX 1050 Ti
Which means it's probably going to be more than enough for some professional workflows like small 3D modeling, video editing
3D whatever work, modeling, I already said that, CAD work or
Basically these kind of activities like digital painting or or stuff like using GIMP
It's going to accelerate those tasks really well, but for gaming that's just not going to be enough at least for modern gaming
And yeah, you're not going to use that as a full powered workstation desktop replacement
Still, they managed to bring 10 hours of battery life, they say at least, 10 hours of battery life instead of the 6 hours
of the previous Pangolin model, which is in my opinion really nice for something with a dedicated GPU
It is kind of chunky at 1.8 kilograms
It has a 70 watt-hour battery and you got the usual two slots for M.2 SSDs
It apparently supports up to 16 terabytes of RAM
You get DDR5 RAM, you get a good enough port selection with regular USB, USB-C, HDMI, Ethernet
Headphone jacks, of course, you get the usual potato 720p webcam, which is, I know it, it's going to be underwhelming
And that's about all we know for the time being, we don't have a release date
We don't have the various configurations
We don't know if you have the option to have a better display than just full HD
I know some people on 15 inches really would prefer 1440p or even 4k
We'll have to see. Technically this laptop, I should get a review unit
I rarely, no, I never got a System76 device because I live in Europe and they are in the US
And they don't generally ship where I live, they ship their laptops, but it's kind of expensive
Apparently this time I'm getting a review unit
I've been talking with System76 a little bit more these days ever since I reviewed their keyboards
And it seems that they're willing to send me some stuff, which is cool
So technically once the Pangolin is out, I should be able to have a video review of it, which is nice
It's going to be my first System76 laptop that I can review
So you can look at the YouTube channel for that because yes, this podcast is something
But my main activity is the YouTube channel called the Linux experiment
Some of you might know it, some of you apparently don't because someone on Patreon just subscribed exclusively for the podcast, apparently
So yeah, if you want to see video reviews, of course, there's a YouTube channel called the Linux experiment
Now let's move on to some desktop environments
We're going to start with GNOME
And if you thought that they never listened to their users or they did whatever they wanted
Well, they have this new initiative that might be of interest
They're basically thinking about making a change on the current GNOME desktop
But instead of just deciding on their own or with their own design team
They decided to let users test that change and give some feedback by releasing an extension that you can install on GNOME 43
And use it and just give your feedback on how you like it or how you don't like it
So the change that they're planning is the little application name menu. They want to remove it basically
And yes, I know it's yet another thing that GNOME is removing
If you use GNOME, you know that there's the activities button in the top left corner of the top panel
And next to it is the name of the application that you're currently running and clicking on that generally doesn't have many options
You can show the details of the app in the app store in GNOME software
You can shut down the application and you sometimes get the same options as in the jump lists that the application might have
So for example, the options that you could get by right clicking on the applications icon in a dock
So for example a new window for firefox or a new window for a file manager stuff like that
So they're planning to maybe remove. Well, they're testing the waters on removing this menu
The rationale is
This menu used to be more useful. It used to contain everything that is in the hamburger menu of the application
Well what used to be the hamburger menu of GNOME apps. This menu has been deprecated since I don't know
6 or 10 versions and is not used in in GNOME applications anymore
They do have a hamburger menu, but they don't have the application menu that they used to have
So this menu in the top panel doesn't really have much of interest
That you cannot already replicate either through the hamburger menu of the application a keyboard shortcut
Or the bottom dock that you can get in the activities view
The second thing that this app
App app name menu. Let's call it this app name menu was doing
Is as a focus indicator basically by looking at it, you knew which window was focused
So for example if I have right now like right now i've got my firefox window with my next cloud note
For my podcast notes. I have my audacity window
I'm using dark mode, which means that both windows are pretty dark at a glance
I don't exactly know which one is focused if I look up. I know that audacity is
Focused
Now you could also argue that this is a problem with the theme
That gnome is using that applications in focus are not distinct enough and I would agree
Whether it's in light mode or dark mode. I think the application that is in focus isn't super well
Focused basically using the theme
The non-focused windows aren't dark enough in my opinion, but that's another topic
So basically they're saying this menu was supposed to do that
But since it's tucked into the top left corner, it's not immediately visible
And they they think they can do better to show which application is focused, especially when you change
Windows and so what they're proposing is that you install the the extension
I think it's called
I have the name right there. It's called focus indicator
And this new extension will basically remove that app name menu and give you an animation when you switch windows
So if you press alt tab, for example, the window that is newly focused will have some kind of little rebound effect
It's going to grow bigger and smaller once or twice just to show you that yeah, it's vibrating a little bit
This is the one that you're currently using
I haven't tested it yet
So I don't know if that animation is also reflected when you click on a window and not just when you use keyboard shortcuts
But I would expect it to be so it's clearer to know which window is currently focused
And so basically you can try it out and test it and give your feedback
The extension lets you adjust a few things. It lets you tweak the animation parameters
Of what the window does when it's focused, but that doesn't mean that these settings will make it into the final implementation
What it just means is that you have a way to test this change before it's applied in gnome 44
And say that you absolutely hate it if you do or that you absolutely like it if you do
I will say that you don't care in that case. You probably just have to not send any feedback
Personally, I would rather have that app name menu be actually useful like maybe containing
Everything that is in the in the hamburger menu
Or maybe being the content of the menu bar of older applications
For example audacity is a gtk2 app I think and it still uses an old menu bar
I would rather have that menu bar get out of the window and be tucked into the app name menu
Instead of having no app name menu and that menu bar in the middle of my window
Or the contents of the hamburger menu could be duplicated in that app name menu
But since they seem to think that this menu doesn't serve any purpose
They might as well remove it I guess and give us a good animation
Right now I never clicked on it to interact with a window ever since I started using gnome on fedora
And I don't really see why you would do that
Now still on gnome topics, there are a few nice updates to their applications this week
So there's that extension that I talked about. There's also a new version of tangram, which is written
t-a-n-g-r-a-m
g-r-a-m
Sorry, it's a web-based
A web app based browser that lets you access a bunch of pinned web apps
So basically instead of having all your web apps in your main web browser window in normal tabs
It gives you a sidebar with a list of pinned web apps that are all accessed in the same window
It's basically a secondary web browser designed to run web apps and it looks kind of cool
Especially if you interact with a lot of people with various communication tools
It's going to let you have all of them at the same time in the same place
It's pretty cool. And so this new release uses a newer webkit engine because as with all like gnome applications
They tend to use a webkit in their browser
Components and it also updates the gnome runtime and there's also a beta for tangram 2.0
Which will be moving to libadvita and gtk4
Now there is also a new application called carburetor written c-a-r-b-u-r-e-t-o-r
T-o-r-r, which is designed to connect to the tor network. So I guess it's pronounced carburetor
It's mainly meant for linux phones, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work on desktops as well
There's also a new version of graphs, which is a math data and plotting a statistics data and plotting application
It has a new update and it basically lets you get the integral or the derivative of your data
And it lets you perform fournier transforms. Now my math classes are so far away now
that I cannot even remember how you would do that manually. I used to be able to do it because I just
I had my main exam with a math specialty
So I was able to do pretty crazy stuff at the time, but I forgot all about it
So I guess if you're like me, that's a very useful tool to have
Now you also have a new version of money, a new beta of money, which is the personal finance manager
Which lets you create repeat transactions
So you can say I've got this recurring cost every two weeks or every month
And so you don't have to re-enter it manually or every month or duplicate transactions, which is better
And it also has some design tweaks
And more importantly gnome developers have fixed an issue in the desktop portals
Which will let applications use the document portal to let users choose where to save documents
There was a bug previously in there that opened the files in read only
When you were using the the desktop portal with the document portal in a file picker
So this meant that you could open files, but you couldn't save them using that file picker which
Obviously sucks because it's more secure to use that portal than not
So now it's fixed and so it should be all better and so applications should also be moving
to the document portal for save operations
and now we're going to talk about unity as a desktop environment and
You probably already know or at least I talked about it
Maybe in the last podcast or or two linux news videos previously
I talked about unity 7.7, which is going to be like the next major update
It brings a few redesigns, a few improvements
Well, apparently they're also working on something else, which is a variant of unity 7.7
But it's going to be called unity x so you're going to have unity 7.7
Which is the mainline release and you're going to have unity x 7.7, which brings a bunch of changes
It's basically the exact same desktop as the current unity
But it's going to let you customize it and and use it with more modularity
So you can replace the window manager with anything you want including something that supports Wayland
For example, you could replace or remove the top panel that contains the indicators the global menu and stuff like that
And you could also tweak a lot more things
In the settings than what unity currently lets you do
So basically unity x is the exact same thing as unity, but letting you mix and match components which begs the question. Why?
Why would you keep working on the standard non-customizable unity 7.7
When you have work on a much more modular unity x 7.7, which is already
possible to test
If you go on gitlab on the gitlab project of unity, you can already download it and try it out
I don't really understand why you would keep working on the older project if the new one has feature parity, but is also
More advanced and has more modularity and features, but I guess they must have a reason behind that
So basically in terms of features
You still have the same dash as you used to which is the thing that lets you search for files applications
And and videos and stuff like that on your hard drive
And it still works as you would expect
But now you can adjust the opacity of it something that you could not do in regular unity 7
You still have the HUD which is that that heads-up display interface that lets you search through menu bar items
You just type the command you want and if the HUD finds something in the menu bar of the application
It surfaces it and if you press enter it actually launches that command which is pretty cool
And so this thing is being completely redesigned. It's not part of the dash anymore. It's a floating window
It apparently supports way more applications than the regular unity HUD which had issues with applications that were basically non-gtk
And or which did not expose their menu bar to the top panel
And it can also be opened on multiple apps at the same time, which is pretty cool
And you also get the same control center as unity, but it has more options to change more settings
And there's also a new yaml file that you can edit
To replace the window manager to change some settings to replace the settings daemon to replace the panel with something else and more
It looks like a very interesting thing. It looks like basically moving unity into the modern era
Which is more modular more customizable. It's probably also a very good thing for various distributions
Which will now be able to probably better integrate unity with some customizations
Let's say for example fedora wanted a unity spin
You might let's imagine but they didn't want to ship it because it meant not having wayland as the default
Well now they could ship a version of unity x
That uses a a window manager that is not compass and that is compatible with wayland
For example motor the window the window compositor the window manager for gnome
And maybe that would work well, and maybe they could have a unity spin now
So it's a good thing, but I still don't really understand why the normal unity keeps existing in that case
Okay, now time to talk about KDE. We have a few small updates on KDE as well
With the system settings lending yet more UI improvements
Yet more user interface improvements
They now let you add custom commands to keyboard shortcuts with a way nicer interface than before
The launch feedback page in the settings
Which is that thing that lets you tweak the bouncing icons near the mouse cursor when you launch an application
Your mouse cursor was moving around and you could see a small icon of what you just clicked
Bouncing next to that cursor. Well, this used to have its own settings page
Now it's being merged in the cursor settings, which makes total sense
So you have one less settings page, but you still have the options. That's really good
The highlight change settings button has been removed from the sidebar and moved to the hamburger menu
Which is a change i'm not a fan about because it's far less visible
And so people will probably not use it as much
And that's about it for the system settings basically as with every KDE week or KDE release we can expect 5.27
To have a much better system settings with more improvements more legibility and stuff like that
Other UI changes to KDE include improvements to the touch mode
Which now lets you access all the features of the plasma panel editing mode, which wasn't the case before
You also have the kickoff main menu which shows separators that you might have added
You can edit that main menu the contents of that main menu by right-clicking it
It opens an application that is called KMenuEdit and so you can reorder applications add
Launch options to various applications or change categories and you can add separators, but these weren't displayed
On the menu when you opened it
So now it's going to be the case
And that kickoff menu will also switch to a more compact layout on very small screens
Which I guess is okay if you have like a netbook of your and you want to keep using KDE on it
And they're also the usual bug fixes
133 bugs were fixed this week, which is enormous and they have a new documentation page, which will let people
better understand how to package KDE apps with Flatpak which
I heard is a big problem with Flatpak like some applications are really tricky to package and getting started isn't easy
So it's cool that they have more documentation about that because well Flatpak is great
But it will be greater if every app uses it. It will greatly improve the development speed. So that's really cool
Now let's finish our roundup of desktop environments this time. It's just desktop environment adjacent
It's about Pop! OS. If you're using Pop! OS, they just delivered a brand new update to your system
Which enables ZRAM support
If you don't know what ZRAM support is, like I was before reading the article from OMG Ubuntu
It's a system that compresses the RAM that is currently not used
So for example, you have three apps opened. One has been untouched for let's say 30 minutes
Uh, that's just an arbitrary number, but let's say 30 minutes. The RAM it occupies will be compressed
uh with with the ZRAM software
Which means it's going to use less space in your physical memory
So you have more free space to do other things, which is a good thing and when you resume that application
It's going to be uncompressed
By your CPU and so you're gonna take back that amount of memory
But another application might be compressed in its place to keep some free RAM at all times
It's basically really great if you play video games because it means that all the apps that are running in the background can get compressed
At the cost of a little bit of CPU when you resume them
And it also means that the system has less need of writing to the swap file or the swap partition
Which is basically fake RAM, which is located on your hard drive or your SSD and hard drives and SSDs are generally
slower to read and write than physical RAM
Which means that the more you use swap the less your computer acts quickly
So being able to keep as many things in RAM as possible
Even if it's compressed is beneficial compared to using the swap file or the swap partition
It's going to cost you a few CPU cycles to decompress that RAM and recompress it on the fly
But generally CPUs are good enough and have enough cores available. So that isn't really an issue
Apparently it's gonna help
Well, obviously it's gonna help older system like old potato computers that don't have that much RAM, which is good
But it's also going to have a nice impact on computers with more RAM
If you tend to always saturate the RAM that you have which is good
Now some people have said that ZRAM can actually decrease performance in certain scenarios
Especially in video games and i'm guessing it's when the game is split between many different processes
Some of them might be put to sleep too early and so they have to be resumed and decompressed
And so your CPU is always compressing or decompressing something and this might reduce the performance
I would think that's one of the main
Problems that you could have but system 76 said that their implementation should not suffer from that problem
Which I mean is pretty cool. And I also learned that apparently fedora already has ZRAM
Included and enabled and i've been using it without knowing it for the past year or so
And so I can't say I found any issues on my end
My computer has always been very well all my computers running fedora have always been very very responsive
Okay, last little tidbit before moving on to the gaming news. It's about chromium
If you use chromium on linux, you might have been frustrated by the scrolling speed
For some reason on linux, they only scrolled by 53 pixels pixels increments
When on windows they scrolled by 120 pixels and firefox on linux scrolls by 130 pixels each time you scroll
This meant that scrolling on chromium could be
Extremely slow. You had to move your your scroll wheel a lot more
Or you had to move your fingers on a touchpad a lot more to get to where you wanted to go in a web page
Especially considering that now a lot of articles have the first three paragraphs being completely useless recaps
Just written for seo and and google and not for the actual reader
This means that you often always have to scroll to get to the part that you actually want to read
So now finally chromium 109 version 109 fixes that thing moves the scroll step to
120 pixels just like on any other operating system
And so all other chromium based browsers should benefit from that as well
Including chrome itself if they didn't already had patches for this. I'm pretty sure that edge
And and brave for example had patches for this because I don't remember
And brave for example had patches for this because I don't remember them
Scrolling very badly the last time I did my browser benchmarks
Okay. Now let's talk about some gaming. Uh, we first we have the release of proton next 7.0-6
Proton next is the very next release of proton that is coming. It's not a stable release, but it's close enough
And it's making a bunch of new games playable this one like the uncharted legacy of thieves collection
Uh gotham knights or heroes of the dark
And it also brings the usual slew of bug fixes and performance improvements for existing games
Now they also updated proton experimental, which is like the very unstable version of proton the even more alpha quality
Testing release that you can use and this one fixes a bunch of stuff like alt tabbing being broken on gnome 43
And uh letting halo infinite run even though there are still plenty of graphical glitches on nvidia
Apparently on amd it's okay, but on nvidia plenty of texture bugs and rendering glitches
But at least the game can run which is pretty cool
Now another thing is about emulation, uh, specifically wii and gamecube emulation dolphin
The emulator is getting a nice big performance boost using vulkan
They've been switching to the vulkan memory allocator to better handle ram and well not ram graphical memory on your gpu
And this should result in performance being massively better for certain titles, especially the super mario galaxy titles
Which should now be able to reach 140 fps on the steam deck when before they were at about 80
And most games should also see better performance, but not necessarily of that magnitude, of course
But it's still nice to have better emulation running now on that note
I tried running the wii u emulator on my steam deck using emu deck and using the wine version and using the native linux app image
But I could not successfully run a single game
They all failed with the same exact error message
Which was very frustrating and prompted me to actually buy a switch to play my old wii u games that I just re-bought. So yeah
stupid me
And the last news of this video is going to be about nvidia open source drivers
I kept the best for last if you're an nvidia user
So a while back I already talked about it in an old video. I think it was in october last year
Somebody decided to start working on a new free and open source driver for nvidia using vulkan
It was based on the sources that nvidia released they had nvidia released an open source driver themselves
But it's not really compatible with the linux kernel format and it's just not usable in its state in its state
But it still reveals enough about nvidia's architecture
That the developer could think about implementing a competent driver without doing any reverse engineering compared to the nuvo driver
Which is the current free and open source one, which really doesn't work all that well because it's basically a big giant hack
Based on reverse engineering they did an excellent job for the data they had but it was never going to be a good option
This new driver is called nvk and it could already run a graphical desktop environment, but now we can even run some games
Using vulkan which is cool
Now apparently the performance is still completely horrible
They showed the talos principle running at 5 fps, which is definitely not something that you want to play
But still it can render the game and the game looks rendered pretty nicely
Now the developer already knows how to fix the performance issue and they're already working on it
Which means that we might have a first functional version of that driver
In the not so distant future probably during this year. It probably will not be
In feature parity with the proprietary nvidia drivers. It probably will not have the same performance
But it might allow some people to do what they need to do without resorting to a proprietary driver, which is cool
Now for me personally, the thing that i'm interested in is will it support opencl so I can still run davinci resolve
Or is that going to be limited for some reason to the proprietary driver? There might be licensing issues or copyright issues
But basically why I need nvidia is because no other graphics card can run a good enough opencl implementation
That davinci resolve supports. If the open source drivers support that I am moving to the open source drivers in a heartbeat
Because well, I don't really want proprietary stuff on my own desktops and laptops if I can avoid it
So yeah, pretty good news on that front
And that concludes this podcast. I hope you enjoyed listening to it
It was a little bit longer than usual well than usual than the first episode that I released the previous episode
I can't exactly say I have a huge track record with this podcast. It's only episode two, but still thank you for listening to it
I hope you enjoyed it
If you want to discuss any of these topics, you can hit me up on mastodon at thelinuxexp
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I think you will need a Fediverse enabled account. So mastodon, pixelfed, whatever
But you can leave a comment and we can discuss that thing
And if you really enjoy the podcast and you want me to keep doing it
Don't hesitate to check out my patreon page in the show notes or to visit the paypal link to donate whatever you can
Every little bit helps. This thing is not funded for now. It's extra work
It's basically a full day of work on top of the channel
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So thank you all for listening to the podcast
Thanks to everyone that supports the channel and makes this podcast possible
And I guess you will hear me in the next one next week. Bye