Episode 36: OpenClaw Breaks, Fedora 44 Release, CopyFail Threat & More

Welcome, everybody, to episode 36 of the Dual Boot Diaries, the weekly podcast where two longtime Windows users learn to use Linux daily. I'm one of your co-hosts, Adam Patrick Marnie. I'm your other co-host, Will Smith, and we're not Linux experts. We're just people out here learning to use Linux, sharing the experiences. We're having the trials, the tribulations, the hopes, the dreams. and at the end of this whole thing we're going to either stick with Linux and delete Windows or delete Windows and stick with Linux or stick with Windows and delete Linux or maybe change to something completely different you never heard of before that's even cooler than either Linux or Windows but that's where we're at yeah I kind of went on, I'm trying new stuff here yeah, you know just the place to workshop all this stuff just like this is a good place for us to workshop us being experts in Linux news, because we actually have some news pieces at the top of the show that we should cover, right? Yeah, stuff has come up. One, the big one, I think, this week is probably the, I think, Dan Gooden over at Arstechnite described it. The headline is, the most severe Linux threat to surface in years. Yeah, we had some people even in Discord flagging us. I don't know if we had any specific questions about it in the questions channel, but I did see some chatter and people are like, oh, wow, did Adam and Will see this? We did. Yeah, so there is a link to like Will mentioned, the Ars Technica article in the description if you want to go read over there. I mean, there's plenty of coverage over there, but this is the one that felt very succinct to me. I want to read a couple things in there. Yeah. Will allow me. Yeah, this is the copy-fail flaw. It's a local privilege escalation, which I think we're going to get into right now. Yeah, yeah. So what does this say? They talked with – who is this person? Researcher Georgian – Yeah, you made a mistake. Okay, yeah. There's a researcher they talked with. It's Georgian Szydrichsvorshav. Georgian Szydrichsvorshav. Sorry, the Swedish, I think. So they wrote to ours and, quote, said it means an attacker who already has some way to run code on a machine, even as the most boring, unprivileged user, can promote themselves to root. From there, they can read every file, install backdoors, watch every process and pivot to other systems. End quote. Yeah. Well, so, OK, so what that means is they have to be able to run code on the local machine. It doesn't mean they have to be sitting in front of the computer, although that's the easiest way to get local access. it does mean that they have to be able to run shell commands or something like that. And the scary thing about this is it works even from inside other containers, which are usually pretty secure. So like you can – Isn't that the idea of a container, right? Is it it's containerized? Well, containers are partially a security thing to keep public users off of your internal stuff. But it's also partially a convenience thing because like often your applications that run in containers will have different dependencies than the other applications running on the system. Or you might have shared access. You have some containers that run some people's stuff and some containers that run other people's stuff. This lets you jump those boundaries, which is scary for server people. It's probably less worrisome for end users because this isn't like an old school Windows XP worm where if you leave your computer on the Internet without a router or a firewall between it and the real world, in 35 seconds it's going to be hacked 18 times. This isn't that. They have to get local access first with an unprivileged account, which is admittedly relatively easy to do. But they're not going to – this is more of a problem for people who host a bunch of servers than it is for people like us who are running locally on the desktop. Yeah, I mean that was my biggest question is like, okay, well, what does this mean for me? What do I need to do? Do I need to take my laptop, my Linux laptop, and immediately chuck it in the trash? Is it that bad? Which one, the old one or the new one? Both. Well, the old one probably, yeah, but the new one is I think probably okay still. Okay. Don't throw that one in the trash. And I would e-waste either of them. Throw them in the trash is uncool. Here at Dual Boot Diaries, we believe in e-wasting our old computers so that our children don't have to mine them out of the landfill. Adam. Okay. Well, actually, now that I look at it, their distros have already patched the vulnerability, including Arch and Red Hat Fedora. So hopefully I should be safe. Yeah, there was actually a good post on the CacheOS subreddit that somebody asked, hey, is copy fail safe? Is CacheOS unsafe due to this exploit? And the first response six days ago was from user Aristoka. And they say, hey, somebody here on this other Reddit post. Oops. Anyway, they dissected the actual CV record to see where the fixes are tracked and pushed into the Linux kernel and who's running them. So if your kernel is 7.0 or newer, 6.19, 0.12 or newer, 6.18, 0.22 or newer, 6.12, 0.85 or newer, 6.6, 0.137 or newer, and so on down the line, then you're fine. And you can find that out by typing, let's see, I think it's uname slash F maybe? A, dash A. Hold on. What is it? Oh, I did it on my desktop, not my, hold on. You name slash a dash a, and that will tell you which version of the kernel you're on. So if you're newer than one of those, you're cool. So, for example, my desktop is running 7.0.3-1 cache EOS variant because I run a rolling distro. This is one of the advantages of running a rolling distro is you get these changes a lot faster. So I'm good. No worries there. My server, I'm not going to say what kernel I'm running on my server because I need to update that thing. It's old. yeah no it's newer than two but it's a five it's a five kernel and it's a probably yeah it's not great i need to update it but well we'll get to that in a little bit i have some questions about updating that at this point because i feel like i've maybe gone i feel like i've maybe gone too long without an update over there well i mean i guess the bigger question i have is do you do you think do you think you would actually be uh a target for this or do you think this is more for like enterprise people. Not that you shouldn't patch things and take this stuff serious, but like, I feel like there's a difference between things that are targeting server based infrastructure and us on the desktop slash home lab side. That's more of a Mikey or Elena question. I think probably I, I, my feeling is if there's a big exploit in the wild, it's usually worth updating. Even if you don't think you're a deliberate target, just because there's a lot of botnets created, botnets are created out of targets of opportunities. So they find a router or a copying machine or a printer or something or, you know, whatever, whatever that's unprotected on the on the open Internet. They hack it with one thing and then they apply the other things. And if this is an easy way to get root access from having a low, relatively low level hack, that's that's bad, obviously. So, yeah. OK, well, it's just it's just really weird because I have never really experienced this on the Windows side, you know, like major vulnerabilities. Oh, it happens all the time. You know, security. No, what are you talking about? No. Adam? Why do they do patches every Tuesday on Windows? You just don't ever hear. No, no, no. It's a total joke. Oh, I can tell you. You're using your serious Adam voice there. No, no, no. I was trying to troll everyone. No, do I think Windows is more safe than Linux? No. Mac OS, though. Yeah. Totally safer. 100 percent max never get nobody's ever hacked a mac yeah so uh anyway tldr you're probably fine update do you know when you when you get your update notification do the security updates it will update the thing to avoid this and then everything's cool okay speaking of updates uh i i have a another update related thing that i think would be interesting news talk for us, I guess, specifically. I found this article that popped up on gamingonlinux.com. There's a link down in the description if you want to go check it out. But essentially, Discord has finally allowed updating or self-updating, I guess is maybe a better way to say it, on the Linux versions. Because usually you have to get the update through the repo, but now it's able to use the same self-updater that it does in Windows? Yeah. Am I calling that right? So you don't get the difference is that for a long time, people who use Discord on Linux got used to this where you'd start it and it would work fine for like three days and then you'd reboot your computer and you'd fire it up again. And it would be like, hey man, you need an update, but I can't update this. And then the only way to launch Discord was to wait until your repo updated it or to go into the discord.config slash discord folder and change the prefs to not auto update. uh they have uh now you don't have to do that anymore it's one less hoop to jump through which is which seems good uh i i'm kind of fine updating it through the package manager because i update the package manager every other day but like whatever it's fine this is good well it just means for me i don't know about you but i've always seen those pop-ups sometimes when i would launch discord where it's like hey updater is ready but then nothing happens in in this case i think it i think it was Yesterday when we were in the office for the full nerd, I saw it happen on the Lenovo laptop. Like I launched Discord and I got a new little notification window. It's very small, very tiny, but it was like a little updater bar updating Discord. And I was just like, oh, okay, there we go. I got it. That's pretty good. I mean, it's a good change. I'm stoked that people like Discord are paying attention to Linux users. That's the real win here, I think. Right? I mean, once again, I feel like it's a trend. You start to see enough of these little things, and it's a trend in the right direction. Well, you know, year of Linux, Microsoft imploding, it's all good for Linux users. Can we talk about – there's two things that came up this week. A, I want to say I'm really proud of us as a community, both you and I, the viewers, the listeners, everyone. we made it 35 episodes before people were yelling in the comments about open source software, how it should always be free, because we talked about open source software that we paid for last week. And we had, yeah, yeah. No, it's still FOSS. No, what are you talking about? It's, oh God. Okay. Open source software, free software means that the, the, the source code is available and free to use. It does not mean that the software is free. It means that if you want to download the software and compile it yourself and run it yourself, then you're totally allowed to. But people are totally allowed to charge for open source software. This is a thing that has been the case for a long time. You can't eat stars on GitHub, it turns out. You can't. Good vibes and thank yous and thumbs ups in the Discord chat. Don't pay the electric bill. I mean, if PG&E accepted those, I'd be really good. That'd be fantastic. Oh boy. Uh, I've run a lot more servers. Let me, let me just tell you. But, um, but yeah, the, the, the free and free and open source software means it is, it is available free as in, uh, free as in speech, not free as in beer is the, is the classic line from the person in the early open source community that we don't talk about anymore. Cause he turned out to be kind of bad. Um, free beer. That'd be nice. Free beer is nice, but, but free software is better. That's the TLDR. Because if you have free software and you want to change it and you want to fix it, you want to make it better, you want to make it serve your own purposes, you can. It does not mean that you don't have to pay for it. It just means that they have to distribute the source code if they are charging for it. And then you can fork it and recompile it and do all sorts of stuff. And that happens all the time. So anyway, 35 episodes. I did not think we would make it 35 episodes before having this very important open source conversation. But I'm proud of you all. I think we did great. I think let's keep it going. I definitely saw some confusion in the comments. Yeah, there was a thread. It was fine. But no, no, yeah. I mean, as far as YouTube comments go, let me tell you, it was completely fine. And actually, I learned something as well because I didn't even know that this was a debate. Oh, yeah. This is a 90s conversation, not a modern – anyway. The other thing I wanted to talk about is – and I'm curious if you've gotten this. but like if i'm playing games with my friends and my my game crashes or like obs is weird for a second or discord crackles out and comes back do you get the oh is this a linux problem oh you're giving linux problems again will oh this baby's little os having a bit a big big big big poopy mistake here dude who's who's come on who's bullying you for using linux we my nerd friends You're bullying me for using Linux, Adam. I'm sorry. That's rude. I don't talk about having computer problems in certain circles anymore. I just don't because then it's like, well, if you weren't using Linux, you wouldn't have these problems. Like these circles know that you're on Linux. Yeah. Yeah. Or actually. We have a podcast, Adam. I don't know if you know. I know. I know. But Will, or are you going in there being like, oh, look at me. I'm on Linux. No, I never, ever do that. You're like, actually, I'm on Linux. Every time I've. Okay. Arc Raider starts a lot faster on Linux because the anti-cheat loads differently, and it takes a really long time to load on Windows, and it's really fast on Linux. And I did mention it the other day, and then immediately the whole machine crashed. Like, the game crashed out, and they were like, how's your Linux going now? It's like, well, I can still launch the game faster than you chumps. See, that's kind of on you. That one's on you. I asked for that one. I asked for that one. I walked out. I was like, God, if you don't like this, strike me down. And then the Linux god struck me down. um but the point is i just don't say i'm having computer problems anymore i'm like oh i if like i'm in a meeting or something and like my webcam goes out i'm just like hey guys i'll be right back i gotta reboot i have really bad diarrhea i mean it's just like whatever i can say that's not hey i'm having a linux problem because i just don't want to hear it okay i know that sometimes i bring these things on myself i know i'm taking a harder path a more difficult path but i would rather be like, yeah, no, I'm having some serious gastric distress, then yeah, my I had to you know, my video VL2 loopback crashed or something. See, I think the real friends in those circles that would be in the know would be like, oh, Will, I'm sorry, are you having Neary problems again? No, no, those people aren't friends either, Adam. Although So I do have to say, I'm – well, should we get into it? Should we start some diaries? Glad you enjoyed this segment. I'm sorry. The – yeah. It's – yeah. I'm sorry. No, no. It's fine. Okay. Oh, man. I need a breather. Okay. Yeah. Before we move on, let's take a break so I can take a breather. all right i've taken a breather i think i've combined compiled myself maybe that's the best word for it and uh and we're gonna move on no more neri jokes right no you had no issues with neri there's no way for me to poke holes in your use of neri neri's great adam yeah it's fantastic what i was gonna say though yes is that i've kind of been thinking it might be time to put a second desktop manager on the machine, on my desktop machine, because I was watching Air Max, who's a competitive shooter streamer, plays games on Linux. He's one of the people that when we started talking about doing this, I was like, oh, this guy who plays competitive games all day on Twitch is living that Linux life and playing games and has a high-end gaming machine and it all works. I was like, we can do this. If this guy can do this, we can do this too. This is a doable thing. Oh, nice. But he was doing benchmarking. Sometimes he does benchmarking streams in the morning, and he was doing some benchmarking of the 7.0 Linux kernel, which had just come to whatever distro he uses. And we were – he was benchmarking in different desktop environments, and there were performance differences. And I thought, oh, am I leaving performance on the table by playing games inside Neary instead of by playing games inside KDE? Adam's making a face for audio listeners. So what if all of my productivity gains by using the Tiling Window Manager being offset by the gaming losses due to soft Niri gaming performance? Or even better, what if Niri's better than the KDE or the GNOME? Actually, it could be. It's real life. It could be the silver bullet. Compared to KDE and GNOME, Niri's like a little sliver of software. KDE and GNOME, giant monolithic software. Actually, okay. That is kind of interesting. We don't know. Well, that's what I was going to ask. What environments was he testing in? He was testing KDE and GNOME, I think, mostly. But it was mostly looking at the kernel performance. To be honest, I was kind of doing this while I was listening while I was doing other stuff. So he may have been talking about testing KDE and GNOME in the past. He may not have actually tested KDE and GNOME on the stream. But the TLDR was KDE seems faster, which makes that – Valve uses KDE on the Steam Deck. It makes sense that KDE is probably, they spent time optimizing. What was the performance difference? Are we talking like 10%, 2%, 20%? On the different versions of the kernel, it was fast enough that I was like, this is probably worth investigating running the newer kernels. But I'm on cache, so it was already happening, so I was already there. On the desktop environments, I kind of was in and out doing other things, so I think I missed the numbers on that part. I didn't go back and rewatch the stream. That would be some interesting testing, though. He was doing some pretty, I would consider it pretty casual testing because he was doing others, like, you know, it was the normal thing where he'd run the benchmark and, like, look at it and just run it one time. And, you know, some of those, like, Shadows of the Tomb Raider is pretty good about a consistent first to second result, but sometimes you get shader caching and stuff like that, and the first result is a throwout in my experience. So anyway. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know when I'm going to have time to do it, but I'm going to dig into that because I'm kind of interested in, A, if logging out and logging into KDE at my launcher is all I need to do to do that, then, yeah, it seems pretty light. I think it used to be that KDE and Neary both used SDDM for the kind of display manager, the thing that launches with your login screen. Now they don't anymore. So I think KDE uses its own thing now, and I got to figure out how that works because that seems scary. But anyway, so – and then that would presumably let me do a GameScope session that boots directly to the Steam UI for games, except – which I talked about before. except I tried Steam Big Picture Mode when I was testing the Steam Controller, which I forgot. We don't even have it on the list here. We should talk about that today a little bit too. Oh, yeah. But Big Picture Mode runs like absolute dog crap on NVIDIA cards. It is embarrassingly bad. Well, specifically GameScope. So booting into that different session. Because Big Picture Mode, you can still engage Big Picture Mode from the desktop, right? I'm talking about running big picture mode inside Neary on my desktop runs real bad. Yeah. Wow. That? Oh, okay. It was roughly analogous to, I can't remember which one I was testing, but last year I tested a bunch of Intel NUCs that were pre-XE graphics, pre-Alchemist graphics, that were not on the supported list for Steam for the big picture UI GameScope launcher. and it performed almost as badly as them. It is several frames per second, not dozens. And you think that's for sure an NVIDIA issue? I tried it on the Intel AMD streaming machine just to see how it worked. And that is a KDE, of course, but it worked fine. So I don't know. It was weird. It was weird. I finally got the fingerprint sensors working on both the desktop and the laptop finally. So I got a chip-sailing – Ernie Smith on Blue Sky recommended this to me, and I'm eternally grateful because I had bought and returned like six different fingerprint sensors that didn't work in Linux. and I'm looking at the actual model number so I get it right but it is a chip sailing CS9711 fingerprint it's not even a fingerprint it's a fingerprint sensor that I bought from Timu I bought it from Timu not proud but it was shipped from the US it cost like $14 and it works in both Windows and Linux configuring it in Windows was easy I just used the Windows Hello thing You do the normal thing touch it a bunch of times then touch it again a bunch of times and then you can log in with your finger. In Linux, I had to install fprintd. We've talked about this before. That was relatively easy, and then I had to – oh, wait, hold on. It wasn't easy to set up in Windows because I had to go get a specific driver from a really skeezy Chinese website. and then I realized that that wasn't the driver I should get I should actually get one from the Microsoft the Microsoft driver store and I installed that one and it worked immediately out of the box as soon as I did that one I'll I'll see if I can take up the link and share that with you in the in the notes for both the the the fingerprint sensor and the driver okay in Linux I installed the chip sailing driver. I had to install a separate chip sailing driver that is specifically for this chip set that's on the AUR. And once I did that, it was fine and worked great. I was able to enroll the fingers. I did have to do the... You mean the fingies? The fings. The fings. Yeah. I had to enroll a couple of fings. Is the thumb a finger? It could be. For the purposes of a fingerprint sensor, a thumb will work. You could probably also use a toe, too, if you wanted to get real crazy. But I glued mine up underneath the desk, so I don't think I can get the toes up there in a meaningful way. I thought you meant you glued your toes. I mean, that's phase two. I guess it would be a real – That's the ultimate security though, right? Nobody can – Yeah. Nobody would suspect that actually you have your fingerprint sensor unlocked with your toes. On your toes, yeah. Yeah. I – yeah, I mean, you could – there's nothing to say you couldn't put it on the floor and just touch it with your feet when you want to log in or do a sudu or something. you'd have to keep your shoes and socks off which seems like not great for me or just make a hole that's true you could make a hole fair this is a weird podcast I'm loopy today in order to get that stuff to work you have to specify in the pam.d pam.d is the authentication module for Linux and it determines what requires a login and what doesn't, what requires a password and what doesn't, what requires authentication and what doesn't. And I had to go in and monkey around a little bit with some of the files. Oddly, on the laptop, it just worked. I loaded it up and everything was just there. And I can't remember if it's because I did this in the past at some point or if maybe in the time between I installed. I installed the laptop much like three or four months after I installed the desktop, So maybe they included some of the stuff by default in the newer releases. But I had to put – the thing I learned about PAM is that you can call other PAM modules from inside a PAM module. So let me explain what that means. In the PAM module, you'll have like a line that says – I'm going to open up the PAM. Sorry, real quick. Yeah. Is PAM an acronym? Probably, yeah. because i'm just wondering if you're saying like atm machine like pam module that last m might maybe uh let me i'm trying to head off any youtube comments right now oh i mean look if you live that life you're just gonna make yourself crazy what does pam and pam d stand for uh pluggable authentication module so i am saying atm machine i'm sorry i'm a bad person um so if you go to like EGC slash PAM dot D slash system auth, which is like the kind of topest level one. I'm going to, I'm in the pseudo, so I have to touch my fingerprint sensor. At the top, there's a line that says auth sufficient PAM underscore Unix dot SO, try first pass null OK or something like that. Or auth required PAM fail lock dot SO. And those determine that things like after it fails, after you fail a login three times, it locks it for a while and stuff like that. Right. With fprintd, you have to put an fprintd line at the top of these things. And so I was able to put auth sufficient pam underscore fprintd underscore gross hack dot so the gross hack we talked about before. It's so that you can do fingerprint without necessarily having a password logged in. And because most of the other pam modules now call this system auth one, that just made almost everything work out of the gate. which was fantastic. It was like a revelation, honestly. And that's it. So I read a really good article about PAM called Understanding PAM that's on Linux.com. It was published in 2004. And it explains the nesting nature of the config files in a way that was incredibly helpful to me. And it was like a three-minute read. So definitely worth reading. Shout-outs to J.T. Smith for writing this two decades ago. Please put that in the Notion, and I'll put it in the description. I will put it in the Notion right now because I want to read it. Yeah, it sounds like an easy read. I mean, it's funny because we've been using Linux for more than six months now. The only time I've ever had to engage with Pam is when I've tried to get a fingerprint sensor or when I tried to get the face camera on that Asus laptop working. And other than that, it's been fine. So anyway. Okay, a couple other things. I was looking at fixing the hack on my home server, and I realized that the SSD is nearly full, and I'm not sure why. There's no GUI on that. I need to find a command line or TUI text user interface disk management thingy. I tried using df-h, but it doesn't. Ubuntu, the version of Ubuntu I'm using, uses some sort of screwy image for the root file system, and I don't, I don't, I got to dig in and figure out how to get further into that. Is the SSD in there for caching or are there actual, like that's where you store your? So I have two servers. I have the NAS, which has a bunch of hard drives in it and a small little SSD for caching. The home server is like the small little B-Link box that does the heavy lifting. It has a much bigger, much heftier processor, although not hefty by today's standards. It's like an N100 or 105 or something. and so this is the home server machine not the NAS so the NAS updates from it's a Synaptics NAS so I just update the software on it occasionally it's not storing it's not a storage no it has like three game servers it has a couple of Minecraft servers a Plex server and like two other things that run I think I had a at one point I was running a Perforce server on there and a couple other things. But the data is all stored on the nest. So it should not have 120 gigs worth of space. It's 120 gigabyte SSD. It should not be 96% full. That's weird. It's probably like logs, honestly, because it's run for like three years at this point. It's a lot of logs. I mean... Or what if it's that security vulnerability? It could be that... What was it? Open fail. Open fail. No, copy fail. Copy fail. Yeah. Maybe somebody's copy failing into your server. How do you know? That would be bad. That's why I was looking at this because the version of the kernel that's on there is not appropriate. But also I'm afraid to try to update it as little disk space as there is on root right now. So I need to, you know, I need an easy way to see where my space is so I can just go. You know what? If I had to guess, I bet it's probably the satisfactory server because when I think about it, that's the beefiest thing on that machine probably. and I definitely did not put the satisfactory save on the network share because that would have been really, really slow. And those satisfactory saves can get kind of beefy, although 100 gigs seems high. Are you still playing those? No, I haven't. The server hasn't been up in two years probably, so I'm just going to delete it. So just wipe it, yeah. And then one day your daughter is going to walk in and be like, hey, satisfactory, I've heard about this. Do you want to play, Dad? Yeah, I'll set it up on a machine in here that has a real seat. cpu in it there you go yeah um so okay that uh the open call stuff is ongoing i had a real fun setback this week where i had everything working the way i wanted i had like skills set up so it could look at my it had read only access to my email and my calendar so it could tell me what i was doing each day which was nice kind of cool and i had it writing some python code for me and i had two agents running on that laptop at the same time which was really cool and good a real cool demo. And then Cashy was like, hey, you just took some updates. You should probably reboot after this one. I was like, okay, cool. Let me reboot. And I rebooted. And guess what didn't save? Any of the configuration options, any of the skills, any of the Discord login, any of the – all of that stuff, it didn't save. So I think you asked me how it was going yesterday at the office. And I said, have you ever seen those pictures of the spiders that they fed LSD in the 50s and how jacked up the webs were? And you were like, yeah, those are awesome. I was like, yeah, they are awesome. But imagine that this software was written by the exact same progress. You took a bunch of people that knew how to write normal human code and build applications for humans. And then they were like, you know what? What if we only care about programmers? And you cut off all the concessions for normal human beings. And then you also get a machine that's jacked up on acid to write the code. This is kind of where we're at with this thing. So not super impressed with the deal we are so far. Was this Cache's fault? No, this was OpenClaw's fault. So here's the – okay. When you're running apps like Docker apps or something like that, containerized applications on a server that are designed to be exposed to the internet, but not necessarily to local users. Often you do things like put credentials, like your API keys and all the things that you need to make an application work, and you put them in environment variables, which makes sense on a system where normal users don't engage with it. Normal users aren't installing software that has write access or read access to large chunks of the file system and things like environment variables. OpenClaw is designed like one of those containerized applications that has, So like you're supposed to put your Discord API key in an environment variable and all these other places. And as I was doing this and it asked me to do that, I was like, this sounds really stupid on a machine that I use like a laptop sometimes. So I didn't do it, which is, I guess, my own fault. But also like you, the whole everything I know about security on user facing machines is that you don't ever put credentials in plain text. And environment variables are like the most plain text thing in the world. You put them in secrets files or you use a password manager, one of the other 50 million ways to have this kind of access. So anyway, maybe I need to just put this in a VM and not think about it too much and treat it like a server rather than like a client application. So setbacks is the TLDR. It was working great, and then it's an enormous setback. So I got to go do all that configuration stuff again. Okay, so I guess that's my next question is, it was beneficial enough to you that it's worth going back and reconfiguring? Just, I will say, I'm going to the window, the chat that I have with it, is that I was able to, for three days, say, hey, what do I have going on today? And do I have any emails that I need to respond to immediately, first thing in the morning? and it was able to look across all of the email accounts that come in to like five different mailboxes across multiple providers and be like, yeah, you have here are three emails that look important to me. And it was usually right on those. And then it would give me like some some kind of like, I think these might be important, but I'm not sure. And I'm pretty sure these are bad, but you should look at them anyway. and so it took basically like 800 emails, including the spam that gets through like Gmail spam filters and all that stuff, and condensed it down to something I could read in about 45 seconds. That alone is worth the hassle. Okay, right. The rest of it, like I don't, I didn't, it erased the, like I have the Python code, but I don't, I needed to make some more changes to it before, so I got to go back and redo all that stuff. I don't know if the Python works, But the, hey, here's a thing that will help me manage – like I have three email addresses that I use on the reg that have been posted publicly or are really easy to guess if you know somebody – a really famous guy's first name and last name. And they get an enormous amount of spam that passes filters. And this is like – A godsend. Incredibly helpful. Yeah. Okay. Well, and you're chatting with it through Discord, right? I'm using Discord. Now, I did have – did we talk about the mess up I did with Discord? No. Oh, so a few weeks ago, I just – yeah, usually when I'm getting ready to do a stream on my Twitch Discord, I do an at everyone and it – that, hey, I'm live. If you want to watch me play games, I'm available. So I did that and then the bot responded. and then the bot, despite not being supposed to be able to talk to anybody, was talking to everybody in the server and doing stuff. And my wife texted me while I was playing games and was like, hey, that laptop that's sitting on the hearth in the living room next to your chair is just, the fan is going really loud all of a sudden. And I was like, oh, that's bad. Just close the lid. So she closed the lid and it went offline. But anyway. Yeah. Wait, so what was it saying? I mean, I can scroll up. People were asking it to sing songs and stuff like that. Make up poems and stuff like that. Mostly they were doing it. That is a very friendly Discord. It's people who have hung out with me now for almost 10 years in many cases. The first response was, why is there an open claw bot on the server? and then somebody was like, based on podcast comments, Will's been experimenting with local LLMs, but this is the first time I've seen it on Discord. It probably doesn't realize that it's not supposed to be talking to us. So then people asked it for a recipe for cupcakes, which looks pretty good. Like, this looks like a reasonable cupcake recipe. Well, hold on. Yeah. So you have a DM with it. Yeah. I have a chat channel that only it and I are in. Okay. Oh, okay. How did it have access to this group? I added it to that chat channel that only I, it and I have, I put in the main Discord that I use for the Twitch stream because it's the, it's like relatively low traffic and seemed like a safe place to do this. In retrospect, probably would have been better off having its own server. But then they asked it about Gary Witta and then they asked it about like, anyway, then Gina closed the lid on the laptop. So, anyway. So, that's hilarious. So, if you're going to do this. Yeah, learn from Will's mistakes. Learn from my mistake. Don't put it in a public Discord server. This is probably more of a me problem than most people will have. But, yeah, make your own server with just it and you. And that's it. So, what happens with your chat with it when the lid closed or when that cache-y update killed it? It just doesn't respond anymore. Oh, you type something in there and it just – Yeah. Okay. I just thought it would be funny if it responded like, I can't do that, Hal. No, no. It's just dead, right? When the lid is closed, it's not alive. But the nice thing is when the lid is closed, when the lid is open, when I turn it back on, I can hit an app message in that channel and it will go up and read anything I've written to it while it was asleep. and it'll start doing that stuff if I have asked you to do stuff which is like it's kind of impressive how that stuff works generally like I spent a lot of time in the configuration the way the LLMs the way you set them up is you do natural language memory and rules documents So you say, like, I don't want you to be obsequious or toadying, right? I don't want you to apologize all the time. I don't want you to act like I'm the smartest person you've ever met. I want you to give me critical advice. And that kind of stuff gets loaded at the front of every prompt when you feed it into the LLM. The power consumption on this is, like, less than my desktop computer but more than, say, my home server. So the home server seems to be around, like, five watts. This is at idle. This is idle most of the time. When it's running, it spikes up to like 110 watts or something like that, 150 watts, I think, and then it drops back down. But, yeah, this feels like a not terrible way to use this stuff. It doesn't solve the problems and the concerns I have about like the kind of inherently copyright infringing nature of LLMs in general and how they were trained or any of that stuff. But I did feel like it was important that I take some time as somebody who talks about technology a lot in a kind of public commentariat way to learn more about how this stuff works and see if it's – like find the boundaries of what's useful and what isn't. And that's kind of like, you know, with new technology, there's always tradeoffs. And I have been incredibly skeptical publicly for years that the tradeoffs of these technologies are worth anything. And this is the first one that multiple really smart people that I know and have known for a long time have been like, yeah, you should actually look at this one. This is pretty good. and in some ways yes it absolutely is in others it is an absolute holy living nightmare the way they configure things so anyway my hope is that we'll see some follow-ons out of this that are maybe a little bit more usable and for what it's worth i still think like using these technologies for like image generation and stuff like that is super skeezy so anyway that's what that's where i am that's that's pretty much what i've been that's that's my i guess it's been two or three weeks since we've done a regular one of these. Yeah. Well, Will, hold on real quick. I need a Zune update. Oh. I need a Zune update. So the Zune update is I took apart the Zune to replace the battery. I got a new battery. I did not have the right size wires for it. So the Zune, the wire from the battery to the Zune board was soldered on on both ends. Oh, really? Like from the factory? From the factory. Oh, wow. Okay. And the factory wires were too short to reach the end on the new wire that I bought. I mean, on the new wires that I had here. And also those wires were like, I think, 24, 26 gauge. So they were pretty big. I got some 30 gauge wires that are coated in silicone so I can solder them. I don't know if you can see those, but they are itsy bitsy. So I'm going to do that later this week when I have a moment. It's a little bit of soldering. Yeah, so I got to do some soldering before. But I was exploring the opportunities for syncing music to a Zune on Linux. Surprisingly well-developed. So the solution on Windows is basically run the old Zune software in like super backwards compatibility mode in Windows 11 and hope it works. No way. Yeah. The solution on Linux is, yo, we have a Linux client for Zune that you just copy your files over to and it's real easy. That is so cool. Do you mount it with USB? You have to use the dock because it has like a – that was the era of the 40-pin dock connector in Apple. Microsoft wasn't going to make a connector that didn't mimic – they don't want to give up that sweet, sweet USB cable cheddar. You've got to get that accessory cache out of them. Yeah, okay. All right. Well, yeah, I'm chomping at the bit for your Zoom check-ins. You've got just enough Gen Z in you that you're excited about a traditional music player. Too true. Too true. The problem is I don't think I have a – I don't know that I – I'm going to have to get like a Bluetooth DAC that plugs into the bottom of that because I don't think I have any wired headphones anymore. Oh, come on. I have some earbuds, I guess. That's the actual solution for this. All the kids these days are using the wired Apple earbuds now. Come on. Those never stayed in my ear, man. Like my ear holes are ginormous. Yeah, I don't know what it is. They don't get in right. So I have to have something with a foam tip or something. I do have some in-ear monitors that I use here sometimes when I don't want to have big giant gamer headphones on. Yeah, you got it. Yeah. Should we take another quick break and then talk about what you've been up to? Yes, this is a great idea, Will. and we are back to talk about what I've been working on and to tell you the truth definitely not as much as you have you've been up to some stuff though yeah I mean the biggest one was that I fired up my laptop earlier this week and got a screen the real one and then I did it on the Garbo one as well And it said hey guess what Fedora 44 is here Like wow Happy birthday, Adam. I don't know. It, it, it got me excited. This is, I remember when 43 got released and I think that was like. It was right when we started, wasn't it? It was, I mean, not right when we started, but a little bit after, I think it was November, maybe. Okay. It was early enough where I had started Fedora on 42, and I remember within a number of weeks, Fedora 43 came out. And then, yeah, now this is another numbered release. To tell you the truth, I guess I haven't really been following the numbering or anything like that. I remember back on the Ubuntu side, it was like, okay, well, there's LTS, and that has a different update cadence than the other one. So I don't know. For the most part, I've just been using it, right? And I don't know. I got that little excitement in me being like, oh, sweet, there's a whole new numbered version. And then I updated it, logged in, and was like, oh, okay. Wait, what's different? it's all the same, huh? Well, I, it's not, I went over to the Fedora website just to, to look it up. And one of the, one of the new major improvements is, or not improvements, upgrades is, uh, it, it has GNOME 50 integrated into it. So then I had to go look at the improvements or the updates for GNOME 50, uh, that were in there. And I started poking around the system and being like, okay, well, what's, what's actually there. Um, but it's, it's all really minor stuff. Like I saw some new wallpapers. All right, cool. There's new accessibility options, which are awesome. Uh, and then, yeah, just a couple of small knickknacks here and there. Like the text editor now has a better markup feature or something, but I don't really use the text or it's not the text editor, the PDF editor, whatever you're using Gnome, right? I use Gnome. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so I don't know this. I don't mean to sound, And like, I'm not not not trying to say, you know, the the fine folks that were for door are not doing good work. But also, I think I realized that maybe coming from Windows land that like anytime there's a new numbered version of Windows, like that's a big deal. Right. That's like, oh, you jump in there and you're like, oh, sweet. And even before that, when I was on Mac land, I remember when Snow Leopard came out, you know, and that was just a point release. and I was just like, oh wow, look at all these crazy improvements over Leopard you know, like things like that so I guess maybe I was hoping to get that magic again off of a numbered release but I didn't get it I mean, the thing is the well, yeah, it's weird because the updates are distributed kind of unevenly over here, right? I could have been running gnome 50 on cashy ages ago and you would have just gotten it now and like is is it less exciting for you because other people have had it first is that why you're feeling like this you think no i i mean that that is a good point like i think there's especially with the windows and mac side it's released as a big thing to everybody for the most part and like it's a almost like a collective oh sweet we're all we all got this together we're all exploring this together and you know there's just a ton of buzz around it where yeah i i mean it and i'm sure in fedora circles or fedora meeting groups or something everybody's sitting around being like woohoo fedora 44 is here i don't know but yeah i think i think i think you're right there's a little bit of that like I'm missing the community aspect of it of like oh sweet but like like I don't think it's more like I don't remember if I even knew that GNOME had 50 out so you know like like I don't I don't think personally that I feel like oh man somebody else already had it so it's not as special I think really what it is and I would say this is actually a good thing because the more I thought about it and I know I'm kind of portraying it as down, the more I thought about it, I was like, actually, that's kind of nice that I like Fedora. I like using it. I like everything about it. And they didn't rock the boat. It's like, okay, cool. We have an update. We've integrated these features, you know, some backend stuff, yada, yada. But for the most part, it just works how I like it. And then these are just refinements. It doesn't really need to be a new groundbreaking kind of thing every time there's a numbered version so like for me then i was like oh okay you know what that yeah that's right it's like it's stability it's it it is what it is so yeah i don't know so it's it's funny i was looking because being on a rolling distro i don't i don't feel the new up like they do cashy does releases but that's basically like when they update the installer disk the installer image oh um and they I mean, I think they said – so I'm looking at their Discord now, and it literally says, hey, we just did our third release of the year on April 26th, which gives like new GUI package manager support for DNS over HTTPS. Oh, they updated fingerprint pseudo in this update, so that's why I have that on that laptop and not here. There you go. And, like, it's all kind of relatively small things. But for me, the big difference here is that on Windows and Mac, it seems like you get those big annual or semi-annual updates. And then it's kind of stagnant in between those, right? Nothing changes in between those big updates. And that's probably the same experience you have on an LTS or even a regular distro, right, like Fedora. on cashy it's new new things drop all the time and like they replaced octopi which is the old pac-man gui for this new thing called shelly that i'm not even i don't think i have that because i'm probably i probably was grandfathered into octopi i don't have to look um but yeah it's it's uh do i have shelly no i don't have shelly that's weird um yeah i don't know i'm i'm I think for me, big new versions of Windows shifted sometime in the last few years from something I was excited about to something I kind of dreaded in a lot of cases because it usually meant bad news. Yeah, depending on the version of Windows. Yeah, depending on the version of Windows. But when each OS makes your experience worse, you stop looking forward. Like in those early Mac OS 10 days, it was really exciting every time they had a new annual release because something good changed. Like you got something good and new. And I feel like that hasn't been the case on Windows for a while. Maybe they're going to start turning it around. It seems like – like I think yesterday they announced that they're not going to put AI crap into the next Xbox now, which is interesting. The co-pilot Xbox integration is off the table. Oh, I missed that. I'll have to go back and move it. Yeah. so like so like maybe they're maybe they're going to focus on making stuff better over on that side but yeah I'm I'm glad you're excited is the TLDR but I'm also sad that you're a little underwhelmed yeah I don't know I don't know I have conflicting feelings and once again it's not like I don't love what I'm getting out of Fedora right now but I guess I'm just maybe that's the pace of innovation too or maybe sometimes like like windows 11 i felt like in a lot of ways took windows 10 and just rocked the boat for no reason in a lot of ways like hey you know what we moved it to the center i like that the start icon right yeah whatever but you know like for the most part i remember i i didn't switch over to windows 11 for a long time because i was just like i i don't really have a reason to like what it's what's it in what it was introducing was not enough for me to switch over. I didn't switch over fully until I got a CPU that pretty much required Windows 11 because the thread scheduler in Windows 10 couldn't deal with asymmetric CPU cores. Yeah. So, yeah. I don't know. It was weird. It was interesting. And I guess I didn't run into that same thing back when Fedora 43 came out because I was so new to Fedora 42 already. But also, at that point, you probably weren't in it deep enough to notice changes, too. In those early days, I remember I was switching from KD to GNOME to something else to something else and trying just all the different stuff. Yeah. Anyway, the other thing that I want to talk about, because this is Dual Boot Diary, is actually a Windows thing. Oh. We did talk about this on The Full Nerd, if you want to go subscribe over there, where we talk about PC desktop news. Yeah, the PC belt, as they say in Germany. Yeah. And so I was testing out Xbox mode. So Xbox mode is what they used to call Xbox full screen experience, whatever launched with the Xbox ROG Ally devices. and it was essentially feels like Microsoft's answer to Steam big picture, GameScope mode, whatever. The idea is that you load into a dedicated, or if you have it to launch by default, when the computer signs in, it launches just into this mode kind of thing and theoretically doesn't load up a bunch of background tests it doesn't need. And it's more controller friendly and you can kind of move it around. And anyway, the rollout for devices other than handhelds has kind of arrived, quote unquote. And so I was like, oh, this is something I really want to try on my home theater PC. Yeah. Because that's one of the reasons why I switched over to Bezite is because I can do everything with a controller. I mean, not everything. I have had to shell out to do some things. But for the most part, the idea is that that's like a utility. utility. Aside from like system maintenance stuff, it just works. Yeah. Yeah. So like if I just want to play a game, okay, I can launch into it. Boom, done. On the Windows side, when I have to launch the Windows side, nope. Oh, I got to get out my mouse and keyboard and futz around. So the more I could do on the Windows side with just the controller, I think is better. So I loaded it up on all these machines that I have around here, installed the update, made sure the checkmark was to say, hey, get the latest updates, all the stuff that Microsoft recommended to be able to see this update, and I didn't get it. Of course. Yeah. Well, so you got Microsofted, dog. Yeah, I guess, I mean, whatever, a phased launch or phased release, you know this kind of ties into the whole fedora 44 thing too you know just like hey you know some some things come out some things don't i guess but i don't know i was i was really excited to test it over there and and i i can't yet so uh yeah it's it's weird but it definitely at least got me thinking i was like okay in a world where it did work well would would i stick with windows on that home theater PC, or would I go back to, or, you know, still enjoying Bizzite or whatever. But I tell you what, like, I've definitely had the frustrations with the audio stuff, with the controller mapping and the, you know, like, there's a couple pain points. But I do wish the Windows could get there, the Windows side of it, right? Because, like, there's plenty of stuff that's already set up, and, like, it should work like that. It would be nice if Windows was able to run games, Windows games for Windows, as well as Linux is able to run games for Windows. Right. And if what I think is the ultimate goal of the Xbox mode is to, that's what's going to be in the next version of the Xbox console, then they better get there. They got a long road. Yeah. But yeah, as of right now, yeah, it's definitely a long road. I mean, for the Windows handheld side that I do have, I do appreciate using it. Is it great? No. Is it even close to the sleekness of GameScope and what Valve has been able to make on that side? No. But it still does beat just using a normal Windows 11 interface. Well, good God. Yeah. I mean, well, listen, I've been pretty open about it. It never bugged me as much as some other people it did. But even then, this is still a better situation. You're also used to like – you have internalized all of the things that playing games on Windows make you do, like updating your Windows and updating your drivers and updating your chipset drivers and all the stuff you have to keep updated manually as well as updating the games and all the other stuff. And when you have somebody who comes from the console life and they're like, wait, you mean like hitting Windows update doesn't also update the drivers? That's weird. To compare and contrast, I finally got a Cashi update on that ROGLIX I've been testing. It popped up in the Steam control panel. I didn't have to shell out to the desktop mode. So there was an update there that said Steam update and another one that said Cashi update. And I hit Cashi update, and it went dark for a few minutes and rebooted. And then I had a new version of Cashi on that. And then I updated Steam, and the same thing happened. It was way, way easier than it was the last time I tried Bezite on – I mean, in fairness, that was more than a year ago. But yeah, whoever is doing this work has made some real progress. It was cool. Yeah, so I don't know. I guess I don't know where I'm going with this, but for me, I still want Windows to get better. I still want them to do better. I do appreciate using it. And especially whatever this big picture or Xbox mode that they have could solve a lot of headaches on me for not only for the handheld side, but also for the home theater PC. And like, I would love I would love a feature where I could control everything, both the Linux and the Windows side with just a controller. I mean I think the only part where that would probably fall down is I don't think actually I don't know do you think any of the grub or front end boot managers have like I would be able to use a controller yeah I don't know I actually haven't tried that because like that that would be the last thing right is like okay if we can get Windows to a good spot if we can get Steam to a good spot and then I'm able to thumb through to pick which one in a boot manager. For me, though, I kind of don't want – like, I want those machines to run – like, that kind of machine, I want to be a single OS machine. Like, I don't want to have dual booting on my living room. That's more than I'm going to ask my wife and child to deal with. But come on. Like, we're way too far away on that, though. I don't think so. Well, because even if I were to dedicate it to Bezite 100%, then it locks me out of those anti-cheat games that I can't play. So that's one of the reasons why I still have Windows on it. Yeah. But that works for me because I don't play competitive stuff in the living room ever. I want mouse and keyboard for anything competitive because I'm a real gamer. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, I hope that issue would go away. I feel like that's the last major issue for me on that. I mean, unless Windows gets to such a good spot, then it's like, okay, you know what? I'm willing to take a little bit more of the Windows jank, but I do have access to literally everything. We should – maybe next week's opening section is what does Microsoft need to actually make the games in the Xbox app? Like, what do they need in that Xbox app experience to give you the SteamOS experience? And it's like, we can talk about this. It's going to be a long episode. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. First, they need a package manager, and then, no, no. But, yeah, I think there's something. I get what you're saying. For me, the living room is a place where I play single-player stuff, so I don't have, or couch games, which don't have any cheat generally. like couch multiplayer. So I don't, I'm less worried about, like I'm never going to sit down and play marathon in the, or call of duty in the living room. Right. But I might play, I will play outer worlds or horizon forbidden West or, you know, whatever single player thing there. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. There's not a perfect solution, right? No. As of right now, there's not a perfect solution. That's why I dual boot. That's why I keep messing around with both. I mean, obviously, I'm in this space, and I kind of feel like I need to cover it anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, look, the whole benefit of having competition in the space is that it pushes everyone forward, right? This is why competition is good. This is why when Microsoft had no competition in the late 90s and early 2000s, everything got bad. And then Apple made a really good OS with OS X and that pushed them to do better with Windows 7 and, I mean, I guess Windows 8. I don't know. I don't think anybody made – Windows 8 didn't make anything better. 8.1. It was okay. Anyway. But yeah, I think more – Gordon was always a big fan of more competition being good for everyone. I think that applies here. I think the interesting thing to me is that Linux on the desktop has gotten good enough that Microsoft seems actually concerned about it now for gaming at least. Which like A, getting them to be concerned about the gaming audience has been a challenge for the last 30 years. B, getting them to say, hey – I mean not publicly but at least internally – hey, we think that the experience on the Steam Deck thing is better than we're giving our Windows users to play Windows games. is like they're paying attention to the right things for once. So maybe it'll get better. I'm hopeful. I don't know. Hopefully. I realize we didn't talk about the Steam Controller at all. This is a long episode already. But do you have more stuff? What else you got? The last one's a real quick short one. I don't even think we've talked about this offline. but through the course of recording expedition handheld at the office and our podcast room i have been using mac os at least just a little bit every week yeah so we have a podcast room that we share with uh roman the producer of the mac world podcast and so it's already set up nice and pretty so i was like okay cool i'll do expedition handheld in there and and that so that that's where i do that in the office and yeah like it's equipped with whatever new iMac it's a sick iMac m5 it's actually a really nice iMac i was blown away by it yeah so i've been using that uh and it is funny it's not like i'm doing that much in there i'm doing just enough to to do the recordings but like i i don't know i i don't i thought i was going to mess around with it and be like, oh, wow, okay. I see the analogy to the way that I've been setting up Linux. And man, I really miss Mac OS. I don't. From where Mac OS was when I used to daily it, to using it now. Is that right? 2010, I guess. Because 2011 is when I built my first desktops so like yeah that probably regular use ended in like 2011 were you a final cut seven guy yeah it was a final cut seven yep uh final cut seven so we had mac pros at the the office the the old cheese grade towers or whatever so yeah that was like pretty much the last time that i mainlined it but yeah where it is today i'm just like wow this like does not feel like what it used to be like it feels like over bloated with a lot of things like by default the dock is just loaded up with just all these app icons and i was just like this is weird this doesn't feel like the minimal aesthetic that that mac is known for and there's like widgets on the desktop and i don't know how like i definitely there was a little worry in the back of my head especially after being like hey wow i'm a gnome guy not a kde guy oh no man maybe i just really miss macOS and messing around with it, especially permissions. Oh my goodness. Well, you can just chmod plus whatever the files just like you can in Linux. The thing that strikes me so I was a regular Mac user from like 2008 or 2009 until 2016 2015 and the thing that strikes me today is that once Apple started making billions of dollars from services like iCloud and sorry, Apple one and all the all the stuff that they sell people, all their phone users, the number of icons on the on the taskbar when you set up a new Mac exploded. And like, it's mostly stuff that I don't want anything to do with, right, especially on a Mac. Like I like Apple TV. I actually – I love – there's a lot of the services that I pay for. A, Apple TV I guess I get for free because it just comes with the cloud storage that my wife pays for every month. Like I love – there's a lot of shows I love on Apple TV. It's fantastic. I don't need that on a Mac. I'm never ever going – like I'm not a Gen Z. I'm not a young millennial. I'm not watching TV shows on my laptop like some sort of Philistine. I have a giant-ass TV in the other room. They do that on their iPad. They don't have – no, no. When I talk to these kids – kids these days. When I talk to the kids these days. I went out on the street and I talked to the kids. I was like, what are you watching your Mad Men's on? And they're like, well, I have a Lenovo Thinkbook, and it has the foldy screen so I can set it up like a tent and lay in my bed. The only room I can afford because I'm a Gen Z kid. and your people destroyed the world, boomer. And I'm like, God, I'm not a boomer. Quiet, you. Why does the Gen Z voice sound like a boomer, though? The Gen Z voice, I got into prospector voice there. I don't know what happened. But the point is I don't need Apple TV on my Mac taskbar, right? I don't need that in the dock by default. It's nice that it's there, I guess, but, like, I don't need – you don't need to sell me on any – it's the same problem Microsoft has. I'm already paying for the service that has all of the things. you don't need to sell me on more crap. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I was just surprised because you have a fresh Windows 11 install has some junk in the dock for sure that I'm never going to use. But Mac OS was even worse. I was just like, why do they have all these icons down here? Windows puts it all in the start menu these days. So the start menu is loaded up with Candy Crush and a bunch of crap you don't want. OneDrive and all that. True, yeah. And also, the other thing about macOS is they have the common decency to have one fairly reasonably priced service that includes everything, whereas Microsoft is like, hey, you want Xbox Game Pass Ultimate? That's $30. You want OneDrive? That's $100. You know, if you want to back up your MacBook with a computer, a hard drive on the network, they still allow you to do that easily using the same software that's been there for 15 years, 20 years. Whereas Microsoft is like, yeah, man, we're going to bury this like 35 menus deep where you have to get some weird – you have to go to Windows Backup Central on .online to find out how to do this. And it's like, are these people trying to sell me something and I just install malware? But it's just the Windows Backup software that's been installed on the computer since Windows 7. Anyway, I'm – hashtag not bitter. Well, don't worry. This is not going to get turned into triple boot diaries. Okay, good. Good, good, good. season two. Linux. Adam goes back to Windows. I stick with Linux. We both install Mac OS. It's great. Boom. Our shared love of Mac OS. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So you want to talk about the Steam controller? Yeah. It works on Linux just like it does on Windows. It's really good. That's it. That's the bottom line. We talked about it on the Full Nerd a lot this week, and there's a full TechPod episode about it. But I didn't see anybody else talking about Linux in reviews. So on the on the Yumtubs. Right. I mean, like Russ, my my co-host over on Expedition Handheld, go subscribe over there. He did do a nice little chart kind of figuring out, OK, where does it work? Where does it doesn't? He did he did a little bit of testing in Bizzite. It seems to have full compatibility over there. I mean, that makes sense. Right. So it's not anything earth shattering. but yeah the the amount of people who didn't test like all the reviews and day one were pretty much like about the controller itself yeah which is important for sure but why also nobody was like digging deeper into okay well here's how it works and what what it doesn't work with the software whether you want to play it on windows whether you want to play it on linux whether you want to play it on mac os your iphone i you know whatever people didn't even plug it into the steam deck dock, right? Like I plugged it into the Steam Deck dock. I was like, oh, this works perfectly out of the box. No changes. The only thing it doesn't do is wake up the Steam Deck if it's asleep, which is kind of like, I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but a little bit of a bummer. The one thing we touched on a little bit in yesterday's episode or yesterday of the day we're filming this of the Full Nerd was that there is no headphone jack. And I do think that's probably on purpose that Valve was like, you know what? We don't We don't even want to mess around with piping audio through a controller. Like if it's anything like the issues that I've had with getting audio over controller, they were just like, nah, dog, you figure out audio yourself. I mean, the last one didn't have one either. I feel like that's a – when did that – was that a – I guess Xbox 360 had a plug on the controller, right? That's when that started. Well, I think the first iteration you had to have this weird little – Oh, yeah. Like connector kind of thing. Yeah. I think later ones, they introduced like just a straight headphone jack that you could use with any headphones. Yeah. But yeah, no. So I don't know. I would say that's a big negative for me. Like as somebody who likes to use headphones plugged into the controller because of the ease of ease of it. Like that. I don't know. I ordered one, whatever, anyway. So I guess I'm going to see how it impacts my life. But I do also wish that maybe Valve could have figured it out, could have fixed it. They've done so much to fix other things about Linux gaming that I kind of wish they would have tackled that one. But maybe there's nobody there who cares. Well, and I was going to say they have the – I don't want to say technology. technology, but when you stream a game using the Steam Link software, like when you're streaming from a Linux or Windows desktop PC to a Steam Deck or another PC, it turns off the speakers or headphones that your PC is connected to, pipes it into a virtual device, and then pipes it back up. And you could even do the pipe through audio from the controller on those stream sessions if you have it set up right. But like, yeah, I don't know. It's weird. I thought that was a weird choice. I don't use that feature all that much anymore. It used to be really, really important to me. And these days, if I'm in the living room gaming, I usually have just the speakers on and I'm annoying everyone. Well, and here's the other part. And, you know, like obviously we don't know when the Steam machine is going to come out. But that is kind of a weird thing to say, hey, look, we have something that acts and works just like a console. Except for, you know, the whole idea of you put it under your TV and it just works like a console. That's great. Except for every other console under the sun has a way to plug in audio into a controller. The other point is it is an open platform. You can just plug in your PlayStation controller and that'll just theoretically work, right? Ha ha ha ha ha. Have you tried that with a non-scuff controller? Have you tried it with a PlayStation controller? I tried it with PlayStation. I tried it with the Xbox Elite. Switch Pro 2? No, I wasn't going to use that on Linux anyway. So, uh, no, I like, yeah, I, so I don't know. I, I'd be curious if that's their official line. Maybe I should ask for comment. Hey, when the steam machine comes out, how do you expect people to plug a headphone headphones? Use wireless, use Bluetooth headphones. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, like, I don't know, but that, yeah, it's just not, it's not a perfect solution. And I wish, I wish they would have tried to tackle it. So I, I, yeah, it would be nice. but actually it made me realize real quick sorry what one more thing on this it made me realize that i've i've encountered issues on bezite right with the the audio routing through controller stuff maybe steam os because that's what's going to be shipping on the steam machine maybe that actually does work better i i mean but i'm not going to load that on my custom built machine so like maybe Maybe the Steam machine comes out, you plug in a PlayStation 5 controller in it, and there's just no issues with audio routing. We'll see. We'll know at some point in the future, presumably. Hopefully. If they actually start selling that thing. Yeah. Yeah, so that's it. It seems fine. $100 is expensive. I don't think it's, you know, whatever. We talked about that. I mean, the thing is, like, the other way to look at it, because everybody's looking at it from a lens of, oh, hey, here's all the controllers that are out there. And, you know, like, let's compare features and ergonomics and all that kind of stuff. The other way to look at it is if you are somebody who just games on Linux, which is the best controller for Linux? and like apart from the audio thing i i would hazard yeah i would hazard a guess that this is the one if you are a linux user uh this is the one to get but i mean who knows maybe maybe not maybe i'm exaggerating it but i i mean i think it's hard to argue against the standard xbox controller just because it's the the minimum viable product for controllers these days you don't get gyro controls with that which you do get with the dual sense but you and you don't have any weird trackpads or anything like that, but it has the face buttons, D-pad, two sticks, bumpers, triggers, start and select, and special button that every controller, every game kind of expects you to have. I think that this is, in terms of, if you want to play wirelessly, I think this is a much better solution with the dongle than Bluetooth for most other controllers, just because the Bluetooth chipsets that are installed and that are built into your motherboard vary kind of wildly and can impact your performance and latency at a high level with even controllers that have pretty good Bluetooth latency. So, you know, if the choice is fiddle with a bunch of different Bluetooth dongles until you find one that works good with your DualSense or your Xbox controller or buy a controller that has a 2.4 gigahertz dongle like the Steam Deck Steam controller or the 8-BitDo Ultimate 2.4 Bluetooth whatever controller. I can't remember the name of them, but most of those controllers come with a dock that has a 2.4 gigahertz dongle in them. Just USB-C dongle? Yeah. I'm sorry, USB-A. I think I would choose the dongle life just because those devices show up as wired controllers and you don't have to fool with Bluetooth in Windows or Linux, which sucks in both of them for controllers in my experience. This is the first time I've used a wireless controller with my PC since I stopped using that Xbox One dongle. dongle, you know, since realistically, my daughter was walking by and the USB dongle caught on her clothes as she walked by and she ripped it into a million pieces. And I was like, oh, you can't get those anymore. Whoops. I'm sad. Yeah. Sometimes kids, sometimes kids are great. Sometimes, you know, they destroy your Xbox dongle. But yeah, so that's kind of where, like, if wireless is important to you, this is a much better experience than anything I've used in a long time. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well, let's wrap it up by going over a little bit of homework. I, I found something that, or I didn't find something. I shouldn't say that. Q, Q, Q, Q's, K E W S Q's. I don't know how to say that name. They left muse. Yeah. Yeah. They left a comment over on our Spotify. Oh, wow. Account. know our spotify show page whatever what last week's episode they left a comment because you can leave comments over there and i'm and i am checking them so i don't know if will has seen selene ui i think that's how you pronounce it s-e-e-l-e-n-u-i for windows but it kind of turns your desktop into gnome and has a tiling window manager might be worth a look and i looked it up and oh man this does look pretty nice like i know this was directed at you will but oh suddenly you're saying about tiling huh yeah well i think i mean because i have a ton of windows devices here that like i i could easily just throw it on real quick and whatever just to try it out because like it does it does look pretty cool uh i don't know anything about it other than just going to the home page real quick but that that was definitely like oh this is interesting have you heard about this? I have not heard about this. This was one of the ones that came up. I didn't look at it. I will say I'm always a little skeptical of stuff that replaces the main shell in Windows but man this looks like this is some hot biz. Yeah right. I want to do some more research for sure but I want to try it. Does it do scrolling tiles or just yeah it just does traditional Hyperland-style tiles. But still, that sounds pretty good. I might try that on... Well, I don't have a Windows machine that I really use very much anymore, but should that ever happen again? The other one is that I did pre-order a Steam controller. It said shipping expected in three to five days, so I'm going to assume that I will have it by the time that the next episode goes up. So I do want to do some real quick tests on my home theater PC just to see some things. But if there is any other questions people want to have about specifically Linux use with the Steam controller, let us know. We both will have one on hand. But yeah, I want to do just a little bit of testing just to see how that is. And then the last one for me is Computex. It is rapidly approaching. I leave on the 27th, So we're talking about 21 days away and I'm still I'm still panicking and I'm still just kind of defaulting to thinking I'm just going to use Windows at this point. Because like I yeah, I'm like as much as I want to quickly switch over to DaVinci, like I still have everything set up in Premiere and there's other stuff on the back end going on that I'm just like, OK, you know, I'm just going to inertia and scene drama right now, both going at the same time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's – who knows? Who knows? Maybe something will change, but for the most part, that's where I'm at right now. Linux will probably not be part of my Computex journey this year. Okay. So let's see. I have more – I'm going to reconfigure the open cloth thing again, and I'm annoyed that I have to do that. If I have time to do the Zune battery swap this week, it's Mother's Day weekend this weekend, so I have a Mother's Day project that I'm working on still. Oh, yeah, yeah. and I don't know if I'm going to have time to do the Zune battery software, but if I do, I want to get into the Zune software and see how that goes. The home server SSD is nearly full. We talked about this briefly. I've got to figure that out so I can update that machine. I kind of almost at the point that I'm like, maybe I should just buy a cheap machine, but also cheap machines don't exist right now, and I really want to wait for Wildcat Lake to replace that machine. That feels like in terms of I think I bought that B-Link machine, like five five-ish years ago now than 100 maybe maybe a little bit more than that it was right around the time uh it was after i started tech pod but before it was probably 2021 so it's been about five years um so i'd like to get something that's going to last another five or six years and and that machine's starting to show its age in terms of like plex transcoding 4k videos down to the handful of 1080p the 110 ap tv in the house still and like all that stuff is kind of it's getting a little heavy for it. So I'd like to make that last a little bit longer. Maybe I should – I might just try an APU-based machine and see how that goes. Then let's see. Notion, while we've been recording this podcast, just blanks out occasionally, and I've never had that happen before. So I've got to figure that out, put that on the list of tasks. But if you're going to put the task on Notion and you can't see the Notion anymore, how are you going to remember? that I well when I resize the the window that notions in it draws again so it's like it's like the window manager is putting it to sleep or something and turning it off even though when it's not active but still being I don't know I'll figure it out. Niri got you again. So I don't talk about this stuff with people. My Motu occasionally crackles. that is a thing that i've never had a problem with in the past on windows or linux it's a relatively new development i don't think i've changed anything about how sound is working on this machine i wonder if it's like a buffer size on the on the interface for the motu or if it's something else i'm going to do some investigation and see if anybody else is having similar problems with i think this is a motu m4 um but we'll see and then maybe change the or check the cachey logs to see if they updated anything audio related? Yeah, I might actually just look at the system logs and see if there's like a USB buffer underrun or something happening too, because that'll show up in the big logs. The other thing is a Discord user sent a message last week that I wanted to talk about, and we had too much stuff to get into it this week. But L. Ritzdorf in the full nerd Discord sent me a message. Friend of the show, yeah. that had a bunch of info about where shortcuts for your window managers and wine programs and where your desktop environment displays their list of applications and how you can interact with that stuff in Wayland and X11 and all this kind of stuff. It's super-duper useful, and I want to share that because it was a super good post, and I had forgotten about it. So thanks to Elritzdorf for that. We'll do that. That started next week, I guess. That's awesome. Yeah. That's it for me. Okay. Nice. Sweet. Then, yeah, check back next week for your fix of Linux talk here on Dual Boot Diaries. If you want to watch the video version of this podcast, then go over to at the Full Nerd Network on YouTube. Subscribe over there. You get access to this. But if you don't want to use YouTube, we also have the video version over on Spotify. Search for Dual Boot Diaries over there, and the video version is an option. if you want to listen to us in audio form that's fine we are on anywhere that rss feeds point to and if we're not let us know and we will get on there uh if you're interested in another podcast to check out then we have the full nerd which like i said we talk about uh desktop pc news over there expedition handheld where russ and russ from retro game core and i talk about handheld gaming devices, both old and new. Will, you have Brad and Will made a tech pod with Brad Shoemaker of Nexlander fame. It's a cornucopia of tech topics. Techpod.content.town. Last week we did a hardware kind of potpourri in the Jeopardy sense where we took a bunch of different topics that were maybe not worth a full episode and jammed them together into one homunculus of hardware-based topics. We talked about the steam controller we talked about 3d printing i've been doing a bunch of 3d printing hey check this thing out oh no you're making me jealous man look oh it's a gnome it's a gnome he's look i wanted to see something i so i wanted to get my wife for mother's day a basketball a garden gnome because i often get lawn ornaments for mother's day we often get lawn ornaments for Mother's Day. And she loves the San Francisco, the Golden State Valkyries. So I wanted to make her I wanted to get her a garden gnome that had the Valkyries logo and Valkyries colors and stuff on it. Nobody makes that! They don't exist. So, I found a 3D model of a gnome with a basketball. She's just outside, so I gotta be quiet. And then I took the logo and I embedded it in the model and then I just sent that to the printer and it worked. And so we're going to try to cast it so we can make a couple of copies in concrete and do some other stuff. If it's interesting, I might make a video about this because I think it's a fun topic. That is pretty cool. The power of Blender, 3D printing, Orca Slicer and Blender made this magic possible. So shout out to Open Source Software. Love it. Love it. Well, let's wrap it up here, Will. Oh, yeah. If you have questions that you want answered, you can either email – oh, what is it? The Full Nerd at PCWorld.com. Or there's a link down in the description for the Full Nerd Network Discord. And we have a channel in there called dbd-questions. You can get a question in there and hopefully we'll read it on an upcoming episode. And, yeah, thanks, everybody, for hanging out. Yeah. Always a pleasure, sir. Have a good week. Good times. And we will see you later. Always be compiling. Bye. Bye.