GNOME's 5 year plan, Windows Recall is a nightmare, Qualcomm beats Apple?

Hey everyone and welcome back to this

edition of the Linux and

open source news podcast.

I'm your host Nick and this is the show

where we discuss

everything related to Linux, open

source, the open web, privacy and

everything around those spaces.

So in today's episode we have GNOME or at

least the GNOME

Foundation announcing a five

year plan to get more funding, to get

more people on board, to

get more users for GNOME.

We have Windows and Microsoft announcing

a new feature called

Recall which looks like

a privacy and security nightmare.

We have Qualcomm potentially beating

Apple's latest chip in

their own ARM CPUs which have

full mainstream Linux support or at least

they are working on that

full mainstream support.

We have the first inklings of AI

legislation passed in the EU.

We have some news about Ubuntu and some

problems they might

start having with GNOME.

We have some big progress on Plasma and a

bunch of other things.

So as always if you want to learn more

about any of these topics

all the links that I used

are in the show notes and if you don't

really like waiting for

the end of the week to get

these news well you can also get them in

daily format from Monday

to Friday if you become

a Patreon member the link is in the

description of the show as well.

So now let's get started.

So GNOME has published a first draft of

their five year plan or at

least the GNOME Foundation

did that.

They published it to get a bit of

feedback from the

community, from developers, from

users and other interested parties who

might ship or might want

to ship GNOME or to even

just fund the foundation.

So they divided this plan into three big

goals each having

three separate objectives.

So the first big goal is to have

explosive growth of the

community of what they call

creators and users.

I guess creators mean developers here,

developers for GNOME but

also for GNOME applications,

maybe extensions and

everything around GNOME.

The three sub-objectives are first to

unify the community

around the shared vision.

I think that's something

GNOME has kind of already did.

They do have their own vision of what a

desktop environment is.

They have been pushing hard for this and

yes some people did

not like this vision but

at least the community around GNOME right

now is focused on the

same goals and it seems

to be working for app developers at least

because they have the

biggest and best ecosystem

for third-party apps on any

other desktop environment.

The second sub-goal is to make GNOME

relevant and attractive

to more diverse people and

probably this means accessibility, making

GNOME something that

everyone can use no matter

if they are fully able, if they have

disabilities, no matter

what everyone should be able to

use GNOME and they are already working on

that with their new

accessibility framework.

And finally they also want to increase

the commercial and

economic value of GNOME.

Now this one I don't

really know what that means.

My mind instantly went to oh no they want

to make distro space

to implement GNOME but

that's really probably not what that is.

It's probably just to make the project a

more desirable target for

fundraising and for potential

investors who would just drop money into

the GNOME Foundation to

support the GNOME project.

So it's probably more communication

around what GNOME is

doing and less trying to sell

GNOME as a product.

Now the second major goal is to create a

unified and integrated

suite of programs, services

and processes.

And this seems to encompass building more

integrated

technologies, so maybe having more

GNOME APIs that can be taken advantage of

by GNOME itself but

also by GNOME applications.

But it also seems to

target how GNOME is organized.

For example they want to reorganize their

myriad of little

events into a single annual

event that can include

more people at the same time.

So presumably maybe livestreams and

people being able to ask

questions online and them

being addressed, maybe taking more

advantage of the current

technologies to make a one

big GNOME event instead of multiple

little guadeks around

the year and smaller other

little development sprints.

Not sure what exactly they mean around

that but they do want to

conflate all events into

one.

Finally the third big goal is to

strengthen the GNOME

Foundation as a non-profit.

So presumably to make sure it is well

funded and that it works reliably.

There are objectives such as documenting

their impact and their

value which is going to be

absolutely mandatory if they want to

showcase what they've

done with the money they have

received.

They also want to double the annual

expense but also the

annual revenue budget of the

foundation.

So that just means get

more money so we can spend it.

And the final goal is prioritizing the

health and well-being of the foundation.

So probably not letting it run as it did

in the past by just

tapping in their treasury

and not really trying to

find new avenues for funding.

All of this seems to just mean we need

more budgets to do good

things with GNOME so we

need to find more money

first and then we can spend it.

All in all it is obviously not a plan for

GNOME, the desktop environment.

It's not a development roadmap, a feature

roadmap, it is a plan for

its supporting fundraising

and governance organism.

And I think it makes sense

as a bird's eye view thing.

To make that project work you need to

find reliable sources of

funding and then you can

spend that money towards growing GNOME as

a project whether it's in terms of having

a bigger community, having more

developers, having more

features, having more resources,

having more communication.

This also requires making sure that first

you have a big community, people that can

be hired with that money

to work on GNOME features.

And to do that you need a strong vision,

you need some big

events to draw people in, you

need some interesting technology people

want to use and you need

to document all of this

for potential funding partners.

It makes a lot of sense, the language

here feels extremely

corporate to me when reading

this but honestly that's probably what

people would expect from

a non-profit like trying

to find money, you need to appear like a

company but not be a

company and I think that's

what they did here.

So obviously you can submit your feedback

on that draft if you

have remarks, just remember

it is not feedback on GNOME the project,

no one is asking you if

you like GNOME, if you

think GNOME likes certain features,

that's not what this

draft is about, this is a plan

for the foundation itself, it's not a

development roadmap so don't

go around submitting feedback

saying hey we need this feature and

minimize button needs to

come back because that's not

what they're looking for here.

So there's a button to submit feedback if

you click on the link

that I left in the show

notes.

Now we also got a few interesting details

about the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and

you might wonder what that thing is and

why I'm even talking

about this here, this is

an ARM CPU made obviously by Qualcomm for

laptops and initially

it looked like it would

be a partnership with Microsoft and it

would only land in Surface

laptops but it also looks

like Qualcomm is upstreaming a lot of

that support to the

mainline Linux kernel, they

already have the CPU support in place and

they're already upstreaming more and more

parts of the entire system on a chip

including how to handle the

battery, the USB host, potential

webcams plugged into it

and everything in between.

So this is a really cool CPU or system on

a chip to follow if

we're a Linux user and

we're also looking to move to ARM or at

least interested in ARM computing.

And the benchmarks are really not bad for

this chip as well

because they seem to indicate

it will more than compete

with Apple's latest computers.

In Geekbench 6 they apparently beat the

Apple M3 by a pretty

solid margin, if I remember

correctly the M3 is like 88% of the

performance of the

Qualcomm chip, so not bad.

It also looks like the Qualcomm chip

beats an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H as well.

Now the chip seems to run a little hotter

than Apple's M3 but it

still manages to beat

it in battery life as well, apparently

the M3 gets 16% less

battery life than Qualcomm's

chip while playing local video files.

In terms of graphics though, the chip

from Qualcomm seems a

little bit less interesting,

it's being beaten in blender render tests

by the M3 and by the Intel chip as well.

But it's still pretty impressive and of

course it's just

benchmarks and Qualcomm and other

manufacturers have a bad habit of

optimizing for specific benchmarks to

appear more powerful

than they are in actual real use.

But in the end it still looks like a

pretty decent chip and

while for now I think it's

only been announced to be used in a

Surface laptop from

Microsoft, with Qualcomm submitting

all the code and contributing everything

upstream and in the right

places not with proprietary

modules and weird things like that

although there will be

proprietary firmware in the

default Linux firmware packages, it's a

good option that we

might have to run ARM devices

with Linux with native support and it

might also be way better

supported than anything

from Apple because as much as the Azahi

developers have been doing

an insane amount of work,

it's still reverse engineering and it's

taking a lot longer for

them to actually manage to

find how things work and to develop

drivers and to get these drivers to

acceptable performance

levels compared to just having the

company contribute all the

drivers to the Linux kernel

itself.

So it looks like an interesting thing and

I will definitely

keep an eye on it to see

how good of a support it gives to Linux.

Now we need to talk about Windows and

Microsoft because Microsoft

held a big conference about

AI in Windows and what they call AI PCs

which they will brand

Copilot Plus PCs and among

all the usual AI features that was one

that stood out as

being particularly bad it's

Windows Recall and if you only look at it

from a bird's eye view, this thing seems

insanely useful.

You just ask your local AI on your PC

something and it's able

to find anything you did on

that PC that's remotely linked to that.

So for example if you were browsing for I

don't know Warhammer

miniatures and you completely

forgot what website you saw this super

deal on and you just

remember the image on the

box.

You ask your AI to find this exact image,

you type I don't know

golden warriors with

lances and it's gonna find an entire

screenshot of the website you were

browsing fully analyzed

by the AI and perfectly representing what

you were looking for.

You could also just be remembering hey I

saw this super cool bag

that I wanted to buy the

other day but I don't quite remember I

just remember it was a brown bag.

You type find me a website where I browse

for a brown bag and

it's gonna display that

for you.

Seems insanely useful.

In fact it's screenshots that is

displaying to you because

the way this thing works is

the dumbest I have ever seen.

It's just taking screenshots every few

seconds and it's storing

those screenshots on disk

and it's learning from those

to identify objects and themes.

And obviously this should raise a huge

red flag because this

means you will have screenshots

that might display very private

information or very

private activities stored without

your knowledge.

It can use up to 25 gigs of storage on

your PC to do so, that's

more than an entire Linux

distro's worth of disk space, and anyone

who logs into your PC

with your account or anyone

who can just access the disk's content

will have access to

these screenshots which feels

pretty bad.

Now Microsoft said that they will not

take screenshots when

you're using private browsing

in Edge but they didn't mention other

browsers or if they

could integrate with that.

And they also said it won't take

screenshots of copyrighted materials

although how it will

identify these is unknown as well.

The feature will of course be on by

default and fortunately

it seems that it might be

encrypted which lessens

the risk a little bit.

All the screenshots could be encrypted on

disk but since disk

encryption only exists

for Windows Pro and Enterprise users

because they have access

to BitLocker it is unclear

if Windows Home users will have those

screenshots encrypted on disk or not.

And if they don't it means that anyone

with a live CD or a live

USB drive could just go

and grab those screenshots and pass

through them and see any

credentials, login information,

passwords or whatever else the user might

have been doing or

any weird activity that

they might have been doing on their PC

that has been

screenshotted by this really fantastic

AI.

So obviously the problematic use cases

are plenty on public

PCs if the person managing

this PC is ill intentioned or has

forgotten to disable this

feature anyone who logs into

this PC could see what you did, including

your credentials

potentially or your personal

emails.

A work laptop will have all of that

accessible by the IT

team or even by your boss.

A family PC that shares a single account

is a major issue as well

or if you just get your

laptop stolen and they

manage to log into your account.

That last one is already a big big

problem for you even if

you weren't using the recall

feature but it only adds insult to injury

because for example

you might have a password

manager that has a master password, the

attacker that stole your

laptop cannot enter that but

they could just go and look at your

screenshots to see that

exact password that you unlocked

and maybe you displayed in a full text

which yeah that's bad.

So in the end it's another let's do AI

stuff way too quickly

without looking at the consequences

type of features and it's really creepy

in my opinion and it

also looks like there's

already some investigations at least in

the US in terms of

privacy to see if this feature

might even be legal at all.

So yeah, well done Microsoft, that's

another great use of AI

that we've definitely built

trust and confidence from the

public in these technologies.

And since we're talking about AI let's

get this other topic out of the way.

Unfortunately, or unfortunately depending

on where you stand on

AI regulation, it looks

like AI regulation is starting to appear

with EU member

countries agreeing on an AI act.

Under this new legislation any company

developing AI systems and

wanting to put them into the

hands of EU citizens will have strict

transparency obligations to

let people and regulators the

type of data they use to train with

detailed summaries of

where they grab this data, they

also will have to explain the specific

biases, they ironed out of

the model or they voluntarily

added to it, they will also have to

conduct more testing, do

audits and do some reporting

on their energy use and

cybersecurity measures.

This new act also restricts the

government's use of biometric

surveillance in public spaces

using AI technology.

And companies providing AI tools in the

EU will have to comply

in the next 12 months

if they are doing general purpose AI

models and they will have

more time, 36 months, if

they are building, let's call them more

sensitive AI tools, stuff

related to weapons, warfare,

law enforcement and the like.

This means that US companies will also

not be exempt from these

regulations if they aim

to provide their AI

tools in the EU market.

The fines can go up to 7% of the

company's global turnover.

And this law also seems to ban the use of

AI on social scoring,

on predictive policing

and on scraping of facial images from

CCTV footage or the

internet, which is also a very

good thing because it already gives

countries a clear no-no

on using AI to basically do

mass surveillance of their citizens.

There are other ways to do that, but at

least AI won't add to the pile.

All in all, it is a first barrier to make

sure that these tools

aren't trained on anything

and everything or at least if they are,

we'll know what they use.

And it also will help various countries

to ensure that these AI

companies are not just

going fast and breaking things and just

doing whatever they please.

It doesn't address the content property

side of things or the

licensing side of the material

used to train the AI, but I'm sure that

this will slowly be fixed

through court cases across

the world.

Now let's talk Ubuntu.

We have some more information about

Ubuntu 24.10, its

codenamed "Oracular" or "Riole",

which apparently is a form of small bird.

Apparently this new version will be

focused not on adding a ton

of features, but on polishing

what is already there.

The installer, for example, will finally

gain its TPM backed

disk encryption feature, it

won't be experimental anymore.

The installer will also give the user

more feedback when

issues arise, when for example

the system is trying to configure a

specific device but

fails, you will get clear error

messages and you will know what hasn't

worked when you're trying to

install the Nvidia drivers,

if there's an issue, it will tell you so.

And Ubuntu will also get a new welcome

wizard that will

presumably replace the one from

GNOME.

And the App Center from Ubuntu should

also get better at

recommending apps and displaying

user ratings.

As per using Flutter, there were some

doubts and issues with

Google laying off a sizeable

part of the Flutter team, but Ubuntu will

keep using it, they

are not abandoning this

technology and they will keep investing

on it, for example they

will migrate Flutter's

GTK backend from GTK3 to

GTK4 for better performance.

And in 24.10 there's also one major

change which is that

Wayland will be the default

for everyone, including Nvidia users,

they are probably banking

on explicit sync support

being released for everyone by the time

October rolls in, GNOME

will have support for it,

so Ubuntu also will, and if the Nvidia

drivers have been updated

then, and they're already

in beta with updates for that, I'll talk

about this later in

this episode, then probably

things should be a lot better for

Wayland, so they are gonna

move that to the default.

Now there were also some interesting

comments from Ubuntu's

desktop lead, they said they

want to focus on the desktop, and they

plan to expand Ubuntu's

desktop team by at least

50% over the next year, and this is

really good news, because

it means that they would

like to push the desktop a bit more when

it's been relatively

fixed in place for a while

now and it feels like they tried to add a

few things, but they

also aren't really focusing

a lot of that.

So yeah, it's interesting to see that

they do have plans to

make the Ubuntu desktop

a priority, or at least more of a

priority at Canonical.

And still on Ubuntu, they are having a

few problems with GNOME.

GNOME shipped a major feature in a point

release, in GNOME 46.1

they delivered explicit sync

in Mutter and the GNOME shell.

This is something they don't usually do

in GNOME, usually, or

at least for the longest

time point updates have just contained

bug fixes, security

fixes, and some minor changes

to the core applications of

the desktop, but that's rare.

Features are generally not a big part of

those point updates,

especially major features like

explicit sync.

And the fact that they changed this for

GNOME 46 makes their

relationship with Ubuntu a

bit uneasy, because GNOME shell and

Mutter will no longer be

covered by Ubuntu's micro

release exception, or MRE.

MRE is a policy that Ubuntu has to allow

releasing point updates to

certain components of the

distro without having to do any QA or,

well, no extra testing,

no backboarding of fixes

or patches that they apply.

So basically they say, okay, we have our

patch set, we can just

apply that to this minor

version, it will work exactly

in the same way as previously.

And we know that because we agreed on

that with the upstream project.

This is something that they do with GNOME

shell and Mutter, for

example, because Ubuntu

has a bunch of patches that they apply on

top of that to enable certain features or

to add stuff that hasn't been upstreamed

yet, like the triple

buffering patch for Mutter.

Ubuntu doesn't tend to ship new features

to its applications

in its repos, and tend

to not ship new features to the desktop

either along the life of a distro.

So GNOME shipping this major feature here

breaks this confidence that they have.

And this means that Ubuntu will no longer

just ship any point

update for GNOME, they

will have to look through it to backboard

their own fixes and

improvements, and to do

a lot more testing, they will have to

check every single point

update on a case by case

basis to see if it can be added as is or

if they have to do a lot of extra work.

And honestly, in this case, I'm not sure

if GNOME or Ubuntu is

right or wrong, I think

both viewpoints are perfectly fine.

GNOME needs to add explicit sync as fast

as possible, because

without it, the experience

with Nvidia and Wayland is

really bad for a lot of people.

So if they had the opportunity to ship

that in a point update

instead of waiting for September

for GNOME 47, I think they really should

and they really did well

shipping this right now.

But on the Ubuntu side, they had

basically an unspoken

agreement as far as I can understand

that GNOME would not break or would not

bring major features to

certain parts of the desktop

in between big releases.

And this unspoken agreement is apparently

now broken, meaning

that Ubuntu cannot just

grab the latest version of GNOME, apply

their patches, do some

automatic QA and publish

that because they know nothing has been

significantly changed or broken.

Now in the end, I think GNOME doesn't

have just Ubuntu to work with.

They ship GNOME to a lot of other

distributions and those

distributions tend to ship a much

closer to vanilla experience of GNOME.

So they absolutely should bring more

features whenever they

feel they can, and they should

not really limit themselves to having

features only every 6 months.

I'm sure a lot of people will think that

it's GNOME being GNOME

again, GNOME being little

dictators, but if you look at Plasma or

KDE, they always

shipped major big features

in point updates.

Plasma 6.0 got some big big updates as

well along its life, and

Plasma 6.1 will probably

have the same.

And no one really said that Plasma has a

problem doing that or

that Plasma is dictating how

distro should work.

So I think it's the distribution's job to

adapt to the desktop that they decide to

ship, it is their job to backboard their

patches or to apply their

patchset or to tweak their

patchset for every version of the desktop

or to decide to just

not ship a point update

if they feel it's

gonna break the experience.

But I don't think desktop environments or

applications should just limit themselves

because distributions

might have more work to do.

I think it's fair to let desktops and

apps do their work and

it's fair to let distros

apply an update policy that they won't

and that they decided upon.

But let me know what you think.

Now we gave GNOME some time in the

spotlight, so it's only

fair we do the same with KDE

and Plasma.

And KDE developers are still working on

Plasma 6.1, it should be

released in a bit less than

a month.

One of the things that they fixed in 6.1

is theming of their

applications on other desktops,

notably on GNOME.

I reported on this, I think it was two

weeks ago, but some

applications when run under

GNOME with the Advita theme as the

default just had no icons

in a lot of places because

they assumed Advita was a complete icon

theme when in fact it was

just an icon theme designed

for GNOME and it never wanted to have all

the icons KDE apps could want.

So this is going to be fixed in Plasma

6.1 and with

applications released after that

point.

The reason why it will be that KDE

applications will first try

to use the user defined icon

theme whether it's Advita or not and if

certain icons aren't in

that theme they look at the

theme that it inherits from.

So for example if you used I don't know

let's call it Tango icons

and it inherits from Advita.

They're going to look in Tango, if they

cannot find what they

want they're going to look

in Advita and if they cannot find what

they want in Advita

then they're just going to

use Breeze icons instead and Breeze icons

will always be

provided alongside KDE apps

that implement this.

For now only Kate, Console and Dolphin

support this but any

application could opt in to do

this as well.

On top of that in 6.1 Dolphin will be

able to generate well

I'm saying 6.1 it's also

in the KDE Gear Compilation

that should land a bit later.

So Dolphin will be able to generate

previews for remote

locations although it will warn

you that this is very very consuming in

terms of network resources

so it might be very slow.

Discover will let you know when a Flatpak

app is end of life

and has been replaced by

a new one and it also will let you switch

to that new app in one click.

And also you will get a much easier way

to get admin

privileges in Dolphin, you just

have a menu entry to act as

administrator, you get a

nice big warning pop up telling

you if you delete anything well we won't

stop you so be

careful and once you've done

that you're in admin mode and you can

browse Dolphin and move

files around just like you

were using Windows.

Now there are also some details on how

you will be able to

edit the desktop in Plasma

6.1 and how you will change the widgets,

how you will add more

widgets or tweak the current

panel or add a new panel.

Currently to do that you right click on

the panel or on the

desktop you choose edit mode

and then everything just layers on top of

your existing desktop

meaning that some elements

are hidden behind others if you display

for example the widget

sidebar and you wanted

to drag a widget where that sidebar

appears you have to drag

the widget out of the sidebar

then close the sidebar then move the

widget right where you want it.

If you have a top panel it's gonna be

hidden by the configuration

bar that appears in Plasma

to let you tweak the entire desktop.

It's a bit messy and it's hard to notice

when you're actually

in or out of that entire

mode so they're gonna

tweak that entirely.

In 6.1 when you enter the edit mode your

actual desktop and

wallpaper will zoom out, your

panels will still occupy their current

places on screen but

they won't be on top of your

desktop and wallpaper and everything else

that appears the

widget sidebar the little

pop-ups that appear when you try to edit

your panels they will

appear outside of your zoomed

out desktop meaning that they will never

hide the desktop itself

and you are able to interact

with elements without hiding whatever

you're doing and it's also

a lot clearer that you're

actually into edit mode when you're done

with edit mode the

desktop zooms back in occupies

the entire screen and

you know that you are done.

I think it looks pretty good I think it's

a lot clearer that

you're entering a special

mode when you're trying to customize your

desktop I think it's

an improvement over the

current way of doing things in plasma

there's a little video

you can watch in the article

that I linked in the show notes so you

can see how it looks

like it's pretty hard to

describe but basically if you know what

the overview looks like

in KD plasma it's gonna

look the same your desktop will zoom out

and you will have

elements to customize it on

the right and on the

left side of that desktop.

And finally on KD they just dropped the

KD gear compilations

version 24.05 because we're

in May and they use kind of the same

numbering scheme that Ubuntu does.

So updates to the core KD apps include

first improved

animations for Dolphin when you're

moving through and navigating through

files and folders when

you're dragging and dropping

items animations will convey what you're

doing in a more user friendly fashion.

You will also get more detailed

information about files for

example in the recent files

view you'll see the modification time and

date and if you're in

the trash you will see

the origin of the file.

Now Kdon Live, the video editor now can

let you apply effects to

multiple clips simultaneously

which is really important for

productivity and they also have an AI

powered tool to translate

subtitles automatically and they have

some performance improvements.

They also updates to NeoChat, the Matrix

client, it has a

dedicated search pop up and it can

now scan PDFs and documents for travel

related data and they

will display this information

in the conversation.

Tokodom, the Mastodon client will let you

write new posts in a

separate window, Elisa,

the music player now gives you either a

list or a grid view to

navigate your music collection

and there are also updates to the archive

manager arc, to the

aggregator RSS feed reader

and there are some new apps joining the

compilation, there's

Francis, a Pomodoro timer to know

when to take breaks when you're working,

there's Calm, that's an app

to give you guided breathing

exercises to reduce stress and there's

Odex which is an app to

let you rip music CDs.

So depending on your distro you will get

these updates more or

less quickly or not at all

until your next major update, there's

nothing revolutionary that

everyone absolutely needs

right now apart from maybe Kdon Live

users and if you absolutely

need that you can probably

install any and all of these apps through

Flatback or Snap to

always use the latest version

available.

Now this week there was also an

interesting blog post

about fixed kernel versions, as

in a distribution ships with a specific

kernel version and they

will not move to the latest

stable version, they will instead back

port fixes to the specific

version that they decided

to stop on.

And according to this post, this is not a

good way to build a kernel at all.

Now the research was conducted by CIQ,

that's a company that

offers commercial support for

Rocky Linux and their analysis seems to

point to the fact that a

frozen kernel is less secure

and a lot less secure than the stable

kernel the Linux team

makes and it's also buggier

and it does tend to get

buggier and buggier over time.

So they have a white paper on the topic

and as with all white

papers, take it with a grain

of salt, there's generally an ulterior

motive, it's made by a

company, it's why it's not

called a research paper, it's a white

paper, it's made by a

commercial for-profit company.

But the data behind it seems sound, they

took the example of Red

Hat Enterprise Linux 8

and they tracked the number of open bugs

against their fixed

kernel version and that number

has been increasing to insane numbers and

we're not talking about general bugs that

everyone has, we're talking about bugs

that do have fixes in the

more recent stable kernels

as well, meaning that the fixed version

of the kernel shipped

by Red Hat Enterprise

Linux 8 just did not get bug fixes that

could have been there

for more than 4000 bugs and

if they had just used the latest kernel

available, then they would

have had those bug fixes.

Now first, CIQ is a company built by the

person who created Rocky

Linux, they provide commercial

support for Rocky Linux and their

incentive here is probably

to just say hey, you know

what, we're making clones of Red Hat

Enterprise Linux 8, we have

to be fully compatible with

it, so we have to have the same problems

they have with their

kernel, so maybe if we say,

if we tell people that hey, you know

what, this kernel is

really buggy and problematic,

maybe at some point it will change and we

also will be able to ship better versions

of the kernel.

And also they are advantages for a

distribution, to stick to a

specific kernel version, you

have a stable platform, your users know

that their hardware

support isn't going to break

from under them, a specific feature will

also not break along

the line of the distro.

This is a good thing, sometimes when you

update to the newer

version of the stable kernel,

some drivers are removed or some drivers

just flat out don't work

with your older hardware,

it happens sometimes, but also this

research seems to indicate

that the frozen kernel model

is really not a rock solid option that

most distributions want

to emphasize, and it's

pretty understandable, if you have bugs

that you have to backport

fixes for every single day,

you basically need as many developers as

the Linux kernel has to

maintain your own version

of the kernel, you have to track every

single day which patch has

been applied and backport it,

except if your current version of the

kernel is end of life,

you probably have to modify

these patches as well and change the code

to make it fit to the older

version that you're using,

that is no longer officially supported.

The new patches are for the newer

versions of the kernel

that you're not using, so you probably

have to rewrite a bunch of

that stuff and that's probably

why a bunch of those bugs never get fixed

on the kernel, they're marked as low

priority and they're

never dealt with, and they will only

concern themselves with

real big security problems and

bugs that impact a lot of their users,

meaning that the end

experience is still worse than just

using the latest stable kernel, so I can

definitely understand

CIQ's point of view, I can also

understand why distros would want to

stick to a specific kernel

version, but personally I will

always prefer using a distro that has the

latest stable kernel or at

least is not too far from the

latest stable kernel, instead of using a

distro that has a fixed

version that they backport fixes

to, because it's just worse for

everybody, except maybe for the distro.

Now Mozilla also published

this week a roadmap for the features they

would like to implement in

Firefox over the course of

the year and probably into the first half

of 2025. Among these

features there's a big one which is

tab grouping and vertical tabs, this is

something a lot of other

browsers have, you can just create

tab groups, reopen those tab groups

automatically, you can display your tabs

vertically instead of on

the top of the window, which is also

pretty useful in some use cases, those

are good solid features,

you could already do them with

extensions, but having the

browser do it by default is cool.

Now to balance these very useful features

they will also add a

pretty meaningless one which is

tab wallpapers, you will be able to

change the wallpaper inside

of your empty tabs I presume,

who cares about this, menus in Firefox

will also be streamlined to

make the more important items

more visible and more accessible, I don't

really know if that one is

very important because Firefox

only has a hamburger menu, unless you're

using it on MacOS where

you have a menu bar, and that

hamburger menu is already pretty

barebones so I don't really see what

needs to be improved here,

but why not, and more importantly they

will focus on speed,

performance and compatibility,

they apparently already have something

that should improve

responsiveness by 20%, although

reading the article I'm not sure if this

is supposed to already

have landed in Firefox

or if this is something that is ready but

hasn't been shipped yet, and

Firefox has also been working

with the Interop project which aims to

make it easier for

developers to make websites that work

on more than just chromium but also

support Firefox and Safari and other

alternative browser rendering

engines. Finally, and because it's 2024,

Mozilla and Firefox will

also be working on AI features,

but fortunately they will run locally

without infringing on your privacy,

one example at least that they give was

generating alt text for images inserted

into PDFs that you're

reading in your browser, this is a pretty

useful accessibility

feature for people who need what's

on screen to be described or read to

them, having those alt text being

automatically generated

could be good for documents that haven't

had this alt text added

manually. And it all depends on

whether you stand on Firefox, personally

I'm getting a bit tired

of it being way slower than

other things I talked about it in my

weekly Patreon cast, but

basically on my gaming computer

I used Nobara, it came with chromium by

default and I was just

blown away by the speed of that

web browser compared to Firefox on the

same machine, a lot of

patrons and youtube members

told me they didn't have any speed

difference, I tried with a brand new

install, with a brand

new profile without extensions and yes

Firefox is absolutely slower than

anything chromium based on

multiple computers for me, at least for

the websites that I

visit, so if Mozilla delivers

this 20% responsiveness increase, this

might be enough for me to

stick with Firefox, if they

already have delivered this 20% increase

then I haven't seen it or

felt it at all in the past

two years or three years that I've been

using Firefox, oh no it's

way more than that five or

six years, I haven't noticed it at all,

so I don't know I hope this

is something that is coming and

not something that has already been

shipped, I wasn't really able to

understand that from their

blog post but let me know if you know,

apart from that this

roadmap is pretty limited, I mean

I don't know if Firefox really lacks that

many features but the

only big thing is like an

accessibility feature which is certainly

needed but not necessarily

insanely useful for everyone

and also tab grouping and vertical tabs

that's cool but that's it,

like it's not a lot, it's

really not a lot, when you compare it

with what the Thunderbird team has been

doing on Thunderbird

and how fast they've been moving with

updates, I don't know if

Firefox is still a priority for

Mozilla these days, it feels weird. Okay

let's finish this with the

gaming news, first we have

an interesting project called Netris,

it's basically Stadia but it's

self-hostable and it's open source,

it's focused on using Steam so it works

with your existing game library, you

don't have to buy games

from a specific store and you can then

stream your Steam games to

other devices either from

a server that they host or from your own

server because you can

self-host it, it offers Steam

library sharing, it offers HD streams,

parental controls and

apparently low latency thanks to

something they called Quick, QUIC, which

apparently helps with streaming quality

and with responsiveness.

Now this solution doesn't support games

that use a third-party

launcher like EA Games, Ubisoft,

Rockstar or Battle.net through their own

launchers, I suppose Epic

Games, they are not sighted but

they're probably also like not gonna work

if you use heroic or

something and they do use Proton GE

to run games so you will only be

streaming and playing games

that work on Linux obviously,

it is still experimental and if you want

to self-host it, it

does require an NVIDIA GPU,

probably because their streaming

improvements rely on CUDA but it is still

an interesting project,

if you like cloud gaming but you would

like to have actual control

over the game library that

you have, you don't want to pay monthly

for access to a catalog, you want to own

your games, you want

to be able to play them on other devices

when you're not streaming, I

think it's a nice solution,

the NVIDIA requirement will probably be

an issue for a lot of people,

it is not the most loved GPU

manufacturer out there on Linux but yeah

it seems like an

interesting project nonetheless.

And since we're on the topic of NVIDIA,

they released a beta for their

proprietary drivers,

it's version 555 this time and it is a

big one, it is not the

version where they will switch to

their open source modules by default for

recent GPUs, this is

probably going to be with version

560 but 555 is the version where they add

support for explicit sync

on Wayland, meaning that with

these drivers, most if not all of the

graphical glitches,

slowdowns, artifacts, latency and

performance problems you have with recent

NVIDIA GPUs on Wayland should have

disappeared. At least

for all NVIDIA GPUs that will be

supported by version 555, if you were

already stuck on drivers

390 or 435 then obviously you are not

going to get any improvements anymore,

these are unsupported

GPUs from NVIDIA, it sucks but that's

just the reality of how hardware works

these days unfortunately,

but if your GPU has access to the latest

NVIDIA drivers then you're

getting those improvements,

meaning that you will get a decent

Wayland experience at last.

These drivers will also move

to the GPU system processor firmware by

default for RTX cards,

that's something I thought was

already the case but apparently not and

you will need at least the

kernel 4.15 to use these drivers

which should not be a problem because if

your GPU can use those drivers you

probably want to run

that on a distro that is not stuck to the

kernel version 4, it's

already very very old and the new

drivers also implement support for 10 bit

per component over HDMI and

a few more Wayland related

features. So obviously these are still

beta quality drivers, if you absolutely

need to run Wayland right

now with NVIDIA you can definitely get

them from NVIDIA's website and jump

through all the usual

hoops to install those from this .run

package. Personally I will

wait for my distro to package

and release them because I have not had

many or any problems with

NVIDIA on Wayland but if you

have and you really want to use Wayland

well you can try and jump

in on those beta drivers.

Okay so this will conclude this episode

of the show, I hope you

enjoyed listening to it,

as always if you want to dive deeper into

any of these topics all the

links that I used are in the

show notes and if you want to get a daily

version of these news you can

also become a Patreon member

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to 10 minutes from Monday

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everything that is in here is in the

daily shows plus a few things

that I just cut out of those

weekly episodes because they would be way

too long if not so if that's

something that interests you

the link to the Patreon page is in the

show notes as well. So thank

you all for listening and I

guess you will hear me in

the next one next week. Bye!