Mint disables unverified apps, Recall hacked already, KDE as ks for feedback

Hey everyone and welcome back to your

weekly Linux and open

source news show. I'm your host

Nick and this is a podcast where we

discuss everything that

happened in the Linux,

open source, privacy and open web spaces.

So this week we have

Linux Mint, disabling

unverified flatpacks all together from

their app store. We have

Windows Recall, that nightmarish

feature that is basically a Trojan or

spyware already being

hacked even though it's not even

available to the public yet. We have KDE

asking you to help them

define their goals for the next

two years. We've got some solid updates

to elementary OS 8 to

Thunderbird. We've got

Proton Pass now available as a desktop

client for Linux. We've got

some driver work being done

and the usual AI related stuff which

still paints a pretty bleak picture plus

Linux passing the 2%

market share on Steam. So if as always

you want to dive deeper

on any of these topics,

all the links that I used to write this

show are in the show notes

and if you want me to keep

making this podcast and you want to

support it, you can also find links to do

just that in the show

notes and if you become a Patreon member,

you will actually get a

daily version of that show

from Monday to Friday. Also important to

note, next week there won't be a Linux

and open source news

show because I will be on vacation,

things will pick back up the week after

that. So now let's begin.

So Linux Mint is making some moves on

their software store

and on their repos. First,

they have apparently implemented a bit of

anonymous tracking on their

repos to see when people are

downloading the most things, the speed

with which every package is

looked up or delivered and also

the various bottlenecks that might slow

down your experience in

downloading and installing

packages on your system. The goal is to

have their repos be as fast

as possible but also to try and

optimize how much they will pay because

they are moving to a CDN

instead of having just various

mirrors everywhere which should be much

faster for most people but

also will cost them a bit of money

so they need to optimize all of that.

Apparently all of this data

is completely anonymous, they

don't log any IP addresses, any data, so

don't worry about this.

More importantly, they have

improved their software manager a lot in

the current version of

Mint, it should now load

much faster, they say the window should

even open instantly which

is really nice and they have

disabled unverified flatbacks inside of

this software store

meaning that by default when you

search for stuff, the only flatback apps

from FlatHub for example

that you will see are the ones

that have been verified as in they've

been published by their

original developer, anything

published or packaged by a third party

which isn't the original

developers will be hidden.

You can show them back up because you can

take a trip to the

settings and enable those,

you'll get a little warning telling you

that these applications

are not official and could be

maintained by anyone so you shouldn't

probably trust them all

that much. Now even when you

enable those unverified flatback

applications, they will have a red

warning under the application's

name, they will not have any reviews

attached to them, they

won't have a score as in like no

score, no little stars across it, they

are just really treated

as a second class citizen.

Now as per their move away from GNOME

apps because Mint said

they wanted to fork previous

version of GNOME apps instead of shipping

GNOME apps directly

because they want to build

applications that look well on Linux Mint

and would also look well

on other desktops like XFC

or Mate for example, they are apparently

talking with a lot of

involved parties including some

GNOME developers on how best to do that

and how not to create friction or

problems or how GTK could

be adapted to help Linux Mint support all

of that and they're saying all those

discussions are very

constructive, they haven't reached any

big decision yet or a specific path on

which they're going to

whether it's forking the current apps or

I don't know maybe shipping

current apps with a different

style sheet, whatever, they didn't say if

they had reached a

conclusion, well they specifically said

they didn't but at least they're talking

constructively which is nice

because this kind of stuff can

always devolve into a little ego fight

and apparently that's

not the case here. So it's

good to see that people are communicating

and collaborating

between platforms and projects,

hopefully there won't be too much

duplication and those apps will be able

to be as well supported

as GNOME apps could be. Now as per the

Flatpak thing, I think

they're right to hide unverified

apps by default, they could be made by

anyone but honestly if you decided to

manually re-enable them

I would have left the reviews in there

because if you're going to be

exposed to apps made by third

parties you should be able to see what

other users think about it

and if those apps have been like

noticeably worse or badly packaged or

have problems, security or privacy

related problems in them

it would be nice to have other users

comments and reviews to know that hey

actually this third party

thing you should not install it is pretty

crap. And also if you think

about it what Mint provides

in their repos which are based on

Ubuntu's repos is unofficial packages,

they have not been created

by the original developers if you install

GIMP from the Ubuntu repos.

This app is not distributed

or packaged by the GIMP developers, it's

made by the Ubuntu

developers, it's a third party or at

least an Ubuntu maintainer, it is a third

party so it should probably

have the exact same warnings

and it probably should not have reviews

either. This is something that has

surprised me quite a bit

recently with Flat Hub and Snaps and

stuff like that because yes you have

applications distributed

by like random individuals on these

stores, that is also the case of every

repo for every distro.

If you install something from the AUR

it's all random stuff from a Rendo

individual and there's

as much control on Flat Hub and the

application published there

as there is on the AUR or on

Ubuntu's repos so if you want to treat

those unofficial Flat

Paks or Snaps or app images

as second-class citizens you should do

the exact same with the

apps in your repos probably.

Now I talked about Windows Recall last

week, Microsoft's

horrendous new feature that will

take screenshots of your screen regularly

and pass them to an AI so you

can find stuff you have done

in the past. This tool has already been

hacked by someone, even

though it is not available yet,

it will only be available on Copilot plus

PCs meaning AI enabled PCs from

Microsoft, current PCs

that could absolutely run this feature

perfectly will just not support it but

still someone managed

to enable it and hack it immediately.

It's supposed to be

released on June 18 so in 11 days

at the day I'm recording this and so

obviously anything that has

been hacked here or detected

here will probably not see any fixes or

changes before it's released. So the

hacking tool is called

Total Recall and it can pull everything

that Recall recorded

because apparently the entire

database is left unencrypted and

available in plain text. So the hacker

said Recall is basically

a built-in Trojan and they share the tool

publicly to incite

Microsoft to fix the feature

before they release it to everyone. Well

at least to everyone

that has a compatible PC.

Total Recall can automatically find where

the database is located

on your system, they can

copy it while it passes its content, it

can extract data from a set time range

and it does so in about

two seconds for a day's worth of

screenshots. You can also even search for

specific terms in the

database to find anything the user might

have done in any

application no matter how protected,

encrypted or secure the app is because

these are screenshots so

they have all the info, you are

accessing a screenshot of the application

no matter how it's

secured you see what the people

see on screen. It is truly nightmarish

stuff, I hope Microsoft

will fix this before releasing

the feature or even better maybe they'll

realize no one really

wants this or needs this in its

current form and will just decide to

postpone or completely

cancel it but I highly doubt it.

And despite the unmitigated disaster that

is Windows Recall, at

least in terms of security

and privacy it looks like Google wants

the exact same feature for Chrome OS

which they refer to as

"memory". They've said that what they

think creeped users out in

Windows Recall is the lack of user

control over when and what is being

recorded which shows they

haven't read enough blog posts

recently because first you can disable

Windows Recall on any PC

that supports it, a trip to the

settings will let you disable it entirely

and second what creeps

people out isn't the fact that

they don't have a few combo boxes to say

if each app has the right

to be recorded or not. What

creeps people out is the very nature of

the feature, your computer being

screenshotted all the time and

the contents being stored in an

unencrypted database that has

been hacked less than a week

after the feature was announced that is

what is creepy now just

having a few more controls.

Now Google talked about a specific use

case which was a meeting

which you would record with their

version of Recall and at the end of the

meeting it would generate

meeting notes and the action

items which sure sounds cool but first

that's not what Recall does

at all so I don't know if they

really understood this or maybe I read

the article wrong but yeah Recall doesn't

do that. Recall lets

you search through things that you've

done so you type A I saw a brown bag

probably like in the last

month can you show me that and it's gonna

display you screenshots of

the web pages you visited that

have a brown bag displayed on those pages

it doesn't generate

meeting notes or whatever else.

Second this should be an

application-based feature the video

conferencing app should

handle doing those things generating

meeting notes and action

items the operating system

should not be able to access that kind of

data and potentially let other

applications also access

it because it's stored OS wide.

Personally I think those Windows Recall

efforts are misguided at best

the feature in itself is very interesting

having full system-wide

ability to search for things

that have been categorized and analyzed

so it's there's like a whole

cementing thing around this

meaning that your OS recognizes or your

applications recognize

what you've been doing

it's not a find me this website it's I

don't remember the website

I don't know when I saw it

but I remember there was a photo of a

superbly well painted

landscape and it's gonna look for

that through what you've browsed I think

that's cool. The problem is

this should be application

based not OS based the applications you

trust should be able to

access their own data as they

already do and to display it in a way

that is relevant for the

type of content they handle.

For example if you're looking for a

document the app handling this document

is the best place to

recall what you've worked on and

displayed the proper way if you're

looking for a website the

web browser is the right place not the

operating system and if you

want to have an OS wide feature

then sure develop the AI and the API

around it at the OS

level but then use something

akin to portals that we have on Linux to

let each application send

that data through the portal

to the OS analyzing tool the results go

back to the application

itself where you trust them

because you use that app so obviously you

trust that app technically

and then the app is in charge

of displaying everything and then the

system could also display

a full recap through all

applications but the OS shouldn't be the

source of the of the data storage and

shouldn't be the one

to analyze everything applications should

be the source of all of

this and the OS should just be

able to collect that without really

knowing what it is they should just

display it OS wide having

this done through screenshots is a

terrible terrible thing and

it's it's pretty lazy as well

because like there are other more

intelligent ways to develop this but of

course they take a bit

longer now of course uh Microsoft and

Google will never do it in this way

because the real reason

why they're developing these features is

not to give you an OS wide

system history they are doing

this because they want to use those

screenshots to train their own AI tools

and that's very likely

what they're already doing with those

features well Microsoft at

least Google hasn't implemented

it yet or what they will do in the future

at some point Google

will train Gemini with those

screenshots and Microsoft will train an

open AI replacement because

there have been inklings that

they want to get more independence from

open AI and chat GPT so

they will never do it in an API

based privacy based portal based way they

will always do it in a way

that lets them grab all the

data and don't let apps handle that data

instead now more fun stuff

Kady is asking you and all the

Kady plasma community to help them define

their goals for the next

two years they created a board

where you can open a ticket to explain

your idea that would improve

Kady so active contributors

will then go through all those ideas and

proposals they will

identify issues request

clarifications they will refine the goals

if maybe some of them

could work together or just

be grouped in one single one they will do

that they will just tidy

the board up and then they

will vote on these goals and the selected

ones will be announced at

academy in early September

the process is open to non-Kady

contributors and also to

non-developers although the person

submitting the goal is sort of expected

to be the champion of

their goal and to rally people

around it to ensure it can get done now

it could be someone that

hasn't written the goal on the

board but you will need to provide

someone that is the champion for that

goal and pushes it forward

even if it's not through code or

development you have until

July the 5th to submit yours

there are already a few in the board

including for example improving

compatibility between Kady

desktops and mobile devices polishing

things up like adding for example a

visual representation

for the clipboard letting people

configure touchpad gestures stuff like

that there's an idea to

sandbox everything that is Kady related

so everything is nice and

compartmentalized and

access to portals and a lot of stuff to

rework workspaces and the

tiling managing feature and

stuff like that so if you want to

contribute you absolutely can there's a

board where you can just

create your idea goals can be very small

like a new feature or they

can be much bigger so don't

hold back as long as you're ready to

potentially get involved after that to

help guide that goal

so it can be reached now we also have

some interesting updates

for elementary os8 first

there's confirmation that they won't lock

you into wayland they said

they wanted to have wayland as

the default session but they will let you

choose in the login manager

between x11 or wayland they

hadn't really talked about that so now

it's a nice confirmation that

you will be still able to use

x11 if you want their dock will also gain

a new feature which lets

you just launch apps by

pressing super plus a number like most

other docks out there the

system settings also received some

work judging from the screenshots they

look really nice really

legible basically they look

like GNOME system settings but with a lot

more color better icons

and just a more visual flair

that is way more user friendly in my

opinion they also moved

the page to let you install

additional drivers like the proprietary

nvidia drivers to the

system settings so they're no

longer in the app center meaning that the

app center has nothing

to do with the dev package

repos anymore it just handles flat packs

it won't offer apps from the

Ubuntu repos just like in the

previous version but more importantly

they will offer flat hub as

a remote by default meaning

that when you start elementary os you

won't have to go to the flat

hub website download a flat a

flat pack ref file install it manually

and then you'll get flat

hub you will get flat hub by

default so you will have all the apps you

need out of the box and

you can still obviously use

the repos from the command line even

though it would probably be

better if they still let you

use the repos in the app center now as

per their developer

platform to make elementary os apps

they've also updated that one it is now

available from elementories

flat pack remote meaning that

developers can either start working on

new applications or

update their current ones

this developer platform is based on the

GNOME 46 platform it

includes all the things that makes

elementary os apps look like elementary

os apps so there's their

own style sheet there's their

granite widget library which is sort of

like libviter but for

elementary os and there's lib portal

to work properly with all the system

features even when sandboxed with a flat

pack now i think the

elementary os app ecosystem used to be

really fantastic before

GNOME started with libviter

now as far as i can see most apps that

would have been distributed

as elementary os apps are now

distributed as simple GNOME applications

which obviously will work

on elementary os but won't

look right because elementary will not

theme them and since GNOME

also doesn't support the accent

color portal then they also won't have

the right color either so

yeah it's nice to have flat hub

it's nice to have access to most

applications because the elementary os

app ecosystem has not

grown all that much since the release of

elementary os 7 probably most people have

gone to developing GNOME apps instead

still i am very interested in

elementary os 8 i started this

channel on making elementary os videos i

think it's a fantastic

well polished good looking

operating system and desktop and they are

fixing the mistakes that

well what i consider it as

mistakes which was not shipping flat hub

by default for example so

if that's corrected that's

going to make the system way more

accessible for most people and visually

it does look really nice

so i am excited to try it out when it

officially releases hopefully it's not

too far in the future

because they tend to take a long time to

release those new versions

after the LTS they're based on

actually sees the light of day now in

terms of applications

we'll start by talking about

thunderbird they're making good progress

on a bunch of cool

features chief among which is

exchange support this is almost finished

with the main workflow now being

implemented you can set

up your exchange account in thunderbird

it will automatically grab

all your folders all your

messages when you click on an email it's

going to display it

correctly and they still have some

work to do on making sure messages are

properly sent properly

stored and then there will be a

broader call for testing before this

feature goes out to everyone you can

enable it uh in the i

think it's in the nightly releases of

thunderbird already but obviously if

that's your main like

work account you probably should not test

that on that account because well you

never know they will

also add support for the system tray on

linux in thunderbird for

people who use the system tray

this is apparently due to thunderbird

using rust to build certain

modules in thunderbird i don't

really know why they needed to use rust

to build a system tray icon a

lot of apps that don't use rust

have system tray icons but maybe it made

it easier for them i don't

know other things include

letting you choose an accent caller in

the application itself

hopefully they will integrate

that with the accent caller portal that

exists the accent caller

preference that exists in kde and

other desktops they will also add

multi-folder selection probably for

reorganizing your folders

and they will rewrite folder compaction

entirely to save some space

for windows users they will add

native notification support as well but

we don't care about that

here because we use linux now

that's pretty good progress on this

application thunderbird is

still my email client of choice

for my work email my my personal email is

handled through protonmail

so i use the desktop client

which is just an electron app but for the

rest i use thunderbird it's

great having exchange support

doesn't matter to me but it will

definitely make it easier for people to

move to linux or just to

move to open source applications instead

of using outlook so that's nice the

system tray has been a

well requested feature for a while for

thunderbird so cool for people who need

it me personally the

only thing i really want them to change

is the search the current

search i think is really bad

not super usable really doesn't return

the things i want i have a hard time

finding what i need so

if they could improve that i would be

happier than with all

those features but i guess for

most people the features they're working

on will be much more

useful and still on applications

this week we've got the release of proton

pass the password manager

from the makers of protonmail

as a desktop client on linux there are a

bunch of caveats here and

i'm saying this proton is a

regular sponsor of my youtube channel

they never sponsored a podcast those

things are now completely

sponsor free they're just reliant on your

contributions but yeah i

will say this beforehand

proton does sponsor the channel from time

to time and i do use

proton mail and proton pass

but that doesn't mean i can't complain

about a few things first proton pass is

only distributed as a

deb and an rpm you don't have a flat pack

you don't have a snap

you don't have an app image

meaning that there are a bunch of distros

that just won't be able

to use that desktop client

and that kind of sucks second it is an

electron app meaning it will not

integrate properly with

your system it won't support your accent

color your theme whatever

it will just look like the

web page where you can access proton pass

and third it is not

completely well integrated with

the systems authentication system meaning

that when you unlock your

session you won't automatically

unlock the password manager as well

that's something they want

to do in the future whether

you use a password a fingerprint face

unlock with howdy or

whatever else at some point it

will support that for now though it

doesn't in terms of features

though since it is an electron

app you get all the features that you

might know from a password manager or

that you might use from

proton pass on the web it supports pass

keys sharing passwords

two-factor authentication

email masking aliases and handling of all

your logins and passwords

and of course you obviously

have the web browser extensions to

automatically fill those

passwords inside your web browser

now proton pass is the password manager i

moved to i used to use a

firefox account but to be more

portable and since i'm starting to look

at other web browsers i

wanted something that would work

everywhere and since i already pay for

proton mail for my personal email i

decided to go with proton

i'm happy about it i just wish the

desktop client would be not

electron just look like a normal

linux app that follows my theme and and

the look of my system i

wish they had sandboxed it into

an official flatback but it is a first

step now really what i

reasonably need to be super happy

with proton is the proton drive desktop

client for linux a

syncing client that syncs in the

background automatically when they get

that i will be 100 happy

still nice to have the desktop

client it's not the best it could be but

at least it exists now we've got some

good news for nvidia

users as well in the linux kernel 6.11

the nouveau drivers which

are the open source drivers for

nvidia will gain support for using the

command line to pass

options and interact with the gpu

system processor firmware or the gsp this

is the thing that lets you

control your gpu properly so

things like changing the display

brightness through the gpu or changing

the performance levels of your

nvidia gpu should thus be possible at

least through the command line but it

also means that anyone could

develop a graphical tool that lets you

manage your gpu properly at least for

recent nvidia gpu's the

rtx 2000 series and newer it also means

that desktop

environments could decide that their

performance profiles like for example a

battery saving or

performance could also automatically

change the power level of your dedicated

nvidia gpu even in hybrid

graphics mode meaning that

the system should just be more reactive

in general and should just work better

even with open source

drivers and since the nouveau drivers

will also be used if you use

nvk the new open source vulkan

drivers for nvidia which are shaping up

to be really really nice

that's pretty cool you can

already change those settings to the

proprietary drivers if you

have nvidia settings app but it

tends to not really save the changes from

session to session that there's

apparently a method but it

never worked for me ever and also if you

use wayland most of those settings are

just not available in

the nvidia app but they would be with

nouveau and nvk and any

interface anyone could develop

around that so it's really cool to see

and it's going to make the

open source experience of using

nvidia gpu's much much better and still

on the topic of drivers

there's a new one for apple

silicon max and it is a vulkan driver

this time which is what was

missing from the azahi linux

experience to really have solid graphics

support on apple silicon

max so the driver is called

honey crisp with a k probably for vulkan

and it is apparently

derived from nvk the open source

nvidia vulkan driver it's been started by

azahi and mesa developers and

it hasn't been upstreamed yet

it is very early days and i say early

days but they've already

done a lot the driver already is

vulkan 1.3 conformance meaning it does

pass the test suite and

supports most of the necessary

extensions to be considered a valid

vulkan driver it does need some more work

to support extensions

needed by dxvk and vkd3d but at some

point in the near future this should let

people run steam games

or just win those games in general on an

apple silicon mac running

linux at least if you use an

x86 emulator like fex which proved it was

quite capable already as

the developers for this thing

already showed a god of war running on an

arm computer using the

x86 binaries through protom

now the reason the developers based their

work on nvk isn't that

apple's graphics platform has

anything in common with nvds it's just

that these nvk drivers are

brand new and there's a lot of

vulkan code that isn't specifically tied

to the nvidia architecture

and probably at some point that

more generic vulkan code will be moved

into the common vulkan runtime of mesa

that they're working

on that all drivers could take advantage

of so they grabbed the

nvk code they removed nvidia

specific stuff and they developed the

apple silicon specific

stuff there's a giant blog post

talking about it it seemed like it was

really hard i'm making it

look super easy but it really

really wasn't if you read the blog post

it's insane work that they

did but using nvk gave them

a pretty big head start so it is insane

work here again from the

azahi developers if you use azahi

linux if you use fedora azahi well at

some point you will get

access to this driver meaning that

you will be able to run some apps with

their vulkan back end instead of the open

gl back end which is

way faster and way more optimized in

general because vulkan is

a much more powerful api

than open gl or you will simply be able

to run games through an x86

emulator meaning that these

devices will be fully usable by most

people apart from a few

hardware related things that aren't

supported just yet so great work from the

azahi developers again

now it's time for our little

ai related section of the podcast some

employees of open ai

apparently wrote a public letter

warning that ai companies are moving

forward with their ai

tools with undue risk without

any good oversight and that they're also

silencing employees who are

witnessing or want to report

irresponsible behaviors with these tools

so the letter talks

about these ai tools having

a lot of potential for harm in our

societies for example

increasing current inequalities

by making rich people richer and like

poor people not even

having a job anymore there's

also potential for manipulation and

misinformation through the use of those

ai tools because if you

train them on completely biased data they

will spit out biased

answers all the way up to warning

about the loss of control of an

autonomous ai system if we

ever reach a global ai that does

more than just answer a few questions now

this public letter comes

after open ai threatened

to strip employees of their equity if

they didn't sign

agreements that forbade them from

criticizing the company entirely and also

prevented them from

talking about these agreements so

presumably some people refused to sign

and said hell no i'm going

to talk about this publicly

because that's really not a good sign if

my company tells me to

shut up and not discuss

anything that i might have as a concern

open ai ceo even said that

the clause would be removed

from the from the employee agreement but

that was only after all

that information was made

public so it was probably to avoid apr

disaster on top of that at

open ai the ai safety team was

disbanded very recently i talked about

this on this show the

current ceo was fired a few months

ago and then rehired and he was fired by

the board specifically

because he misled them and

failed to disclose information and when

he was rehired the board

immediately disbanded and said

you know what we won't work with this

person or how he's running this company

that's way too risky

not a good sign either and the open

letter signed by open ai

employees was also endorsed by

employees of other ai companies having

the exact same worries it

was endorsed by some leading ai

researchers and some former open ai

employees as well some who left

specifically because they

felt open ai would not behave responsibly

so obviously it is a

public letter it will probably

not accomplish anything open ai will not

change its work culture or

lack of ethics over a public

letter and companies that are focused on

building ai currently just

want to make it to market first

they want to have the biggest amount of

users possible first and

if that means ignoring any

roadblock whether it's copyright

licensing safety or societal problems

they will ignore those

roadblocks they don't care hopefully we

have the eu starting to look at

regulations we have the us

also starting to look at regulations on

that sector so we should

see things maybe slowing

down a little bit or at least being less

of a free-for-all with a

little bit more oversight

i personally want to use cool ai tools in

my day-to-day

applications to make my work faster

i already started in the vinci resolve by

using the automatic

text detection and subtitle

generation for this exact podcast if you

use a podcast client with

subtitles you will get them

through the vinci resolve and their use

of ai tools why not

those tools can be fantastic

but i don't want them to be done

irresponsibly with any

without any regard for anyone else's

work or just by encouraging the bad

practices that we're seeing

from most of these ai companies

nowadays so hopefully they will get some

oversight and the fact that some

employees working there

are also like trying to put their foot on

the brakes is probably a

good sign in general for

how society perceive these tools

hopefully this manages to

accomplish something but

open letters like this generally don't

but if you do like ai

chatbots and the like but you

would want to use them more privately

duckduck go has a solution

they unveiled their new ai chat

service which lets you choose a large

language model chatbot and

lets you use it anonymously

without installing anything on your

computer or signing up for an account

they support chat gpt

3.5 turbo clod 3 llama 3 and mix trawl

which is one i had never

heard about of course this thing

is free of charge from duckduck go so

there are daily limits in how many

requests you can make to

any of these bots so to access the

feature there's an item in the duckduck

go sidebar the little

hamburger menu or you can type

exclamation mark ai or exclamation mark

chat in the search field

just like you could type exclamation mark

g to automatically move

to google's results for

example from duckduck go that's what they

call banks all your chats

are anonymized with these

tools there's no metadata being

transmitted to them there's no ip

addresses being transmitted

either and these chats also won't be used

to train other ai tools

so duckduck go apparently

has agreements with the chatbot providers

to not provide them with

that info and the chatbot

providers also say that they will delete

any saved chat within 30

days after it was made of

course if you willingly give personal

information to the chatbot

then obviously the company behind

it will receive that information and will

have it for 30 days before

they have to delete it so

potentially they could access it or use

it or someone hacking

their database in the meantime

could also get it as well if you're only

concerned with these tools is

privacy i don't think it's a

bad way to access them but of course if

your concerns are more

related to the quality or

veracity of answers or to the potential

ethical and licensing issues

then that won't do anything

for you you're still using those ai tools

even though it's a

little bit more anonymous

okay and now let's conclude things on a

little bit of gaming news

there's just one item this week

a linux passed the 2 market share on

steam and by a pretty big

margin it's at 2.32 percent this

growth is fueled by your loss of market

share from windows even though it's still

more than 96 percent

of the steam gaming market share mac os

also progressed a bit but

it stays almost a full point

under linux's market share now of course

this might just be temporary for the

month steam market share

tends to fluctuate pretty wildly for

linux and mac os because

there might be more or less

device from china that are being counted

these generally earn

windows and so they can skew the

data really hard in windows's favor or in

this month's case really

hard in terms of the linux

data still it is interesting to see in

terms of distributions this

market share growth is fueled

by the steam deck obviously steam os is

grabbing 45 percent of

linux's market share on steam arch

is almost eight percent of that market

share the steam flat pack

interestingly is six percent

meaning that it's seeing a lot more use

than it used to and the rest

is pretty fragmented amongst

distros but steam os 45 percent of that

steam market share meaning

that yeah linux gaming is

only driven by the steam deck hopefully

this is not just a fluke with chinese

users reporting less

data this month and linux dropping back

down under two percent next month

hopefully that's not going

to work like that because it's great to

see linux making headway it is still an

insanely small market

share it's like the steam gaming market

share for linux is even

smaller than the general desktop

market share of linux which is at about

4.1 or 4.2 percent so even

when you say that linux is the

second biggest pc gaming platform it

doesn't mean much when the first one has

96 percent market share

but it does mean that we are getting more

and more games playable on

linux the more people have a

steam deck or run games on linux the more

developers will take notice

and make sure that their games

work with proton we still need to figure

out a solution for

antichit tools because there are

some going back and forth with that some

games let you play some

games did let you play but then

moved to another antichit solution that

doesn't support linux some

games flat out said they don't

want to hopefully valve has another

solution maybe discussions maybe trying

to develop a solution a

wrapper whatever that would reassure

these game developers that

even if you're using linux it

doesn't and proton it doesn't mean that

you're cheating maybe there

could be a detection way to

say hey this is proton this is official

proton so people gaming with that like

just give them a pass

for proton if you detect anything else

then sure block them but in

the meantime like it's proton

it's verified by us it's not like an

additional layer of weirdness

maybe that could reassure them

i don't know what they could do but

hopefully they have a

solution uh in the cards because

right now that's our biggest problem if

you play single player

titles linux gaming is fantastic

but if you try to play multiplayer once

it can vary uh widely from

game to game it can be very

hit or miss still 2.3 i would never have

expected that in my entire life ever

since i started using

linux in 2006 i never thought we would

ever be a suitable platform

for gaming and we definitely

are so that's great okay so this will

conclude this week's episode

i hope you enjoyed listening

to it as always if you want to learn more

about any of these topics

all the links i used are in

the show notes if you want me to keep

making these shows please

consider supporting them

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from monday to friday so don't hesitate

to check that out and also

just a little reminder there

won't be an episode next week because i

will be on vacation things

will resume normally the week

after that so thanks for listening and i

guess you will hear

me in the next one bye