This week in Linux, we saw some big releases from OpenSUSE, Mozilla, and more. We're also going to take a look at a new prototype laptop from TUXEDO Computers that I am very excited about. Then we'll jump into everyone's favorite segment, legal news, because Valve is being sued for apparently overcharging gamers, even though it's much, much cheaper than buying games on console. Hmm. All of this and more on this episode of This Week in Linux, Your Source for Linux GNews. This episode of TWIL is sponsored by Kolide. More on them later. This week in Linux, Raspberry Pi went public on the London Stock Exchange with their ticker symbol being RPI or RPI. And this IPO was a successful one. After selling more than 60 million Raspberry Pi single board computers, they are now selling shares of the company. Here's a quote from the announcement about the IPO. It says, The access to the public market will enable us to build more of the products you love faster, and the money raised in the IPO will support ambitions for global impact. The IPO started off opening at 360 pence a share with a high of 392 pence. The share price did go up and down a bit during the day, but it was all about above the set share price at the 280 for starting the IPO. I am also pleased to report that during recording of this episode, this share was selling at 420. Nice. So not only can you buy Raspberry Pis, you can now own a piece of the Pi. TUXEDO Computers revealed a new prototype laptop at Computex 2024. And it may be a game changer in the Linux hardware space. For any hardware addict out there, the Linux laptop space has been ramping up lately with a variety of new hardware options, but a powerful ARM-based laptop have been few and far between. Now, TUXEDO Computers is aiming to fix that void with a new laptop powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite 12-core ARM processor that they showed off as a prototype at Computex. This prototype is built with a premium all-aluminum body and a weight of just 1.36 kilograms or 2.9 pounds. It has a 14-inch display featuring a 2560x1600 resolution with 400 nits maximum brightness and 100% sRGB coverage. The SOC, or SOC, or system on a chip, is wired to 32 gigs of LPDDR5X memory, and it uses a M.2 2280 Gen 4 slot for storage. Given the platform's low TDP, or thermal design power, TUXEDO has given this a lightweight 50-watt-hour battery, and connectivity includes USB 4 and HDMI. The company is working on a Linux distribution and also software support package that ensures every hardware component on the platform is fully exposed and supported by the OS, which is why TUXEDO considers this still a prototype. Now, this is huge news because up to this point, Windows has been the only platform being discussed by major hardware vendors working on powerful ARM-based processors. Apple has raised the bar when it comes to laptop hardware for years now because Apple has, you know, it's always been the choice of convenience over performance. But with the introduction of the ARM-based M chips, Apple has become a solid option for performance as well. What does that mean for this? Well, to quote from TUXEDO's press release, benchmarks from Qualcomm suggest that the new Snapdragon can not only catch up with the competition, but also clearly outperforms Apple's M2 Socks whilst showing higher energy efficiency. Our preliminary measurements confirm these values. Now, that brings up the question, is Qualcomm doing anything for Linux support? And turns out they are. Qualcomm posted on their developer blog about upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon Elite or the Snapdragon X Elite, which is very exciting to see for me. When I first heard of this hardware, I was a bit cautious because of the limitations of ARM, but for them to upstream support to Linux, that is exciting. And TUXEDO is making themselves more and more of a standout Linux device supplier. And if they can get this to market, it will make a big splash. They are confident that this will become a product. They just aren't sure on the timeline. line. This is what they had to say regarding the availability. They said, we have been working with this first prototype for some time, which will soon be replaced by a second one. The development is still in the alpha stage, so some drivers are still missing, which will hopefully be available within the next two kernel versions. It is quite conceivable that an ARM notebook from TUXEDO will be under your Christmas tree in 2024. However, there are still too many pieces of hardware, hardware software and delivery capability puzzle missing that to even begin to set a release date. So TUXEDO for ARM will come, but we don't know exactly when. I know I'm very excited about the possibilities of this new laptop. I used to be one of those people who hated ARM because of the fact that you have to build specifically for that particular CPU. There wasn't really universal support for software. That just isn't a thing with them. Okay, I still hate that. But, you know, Now, having used an M1 MacBook for testing purposes and just to see the experience, I do have to say the performance battery life is pretty impressive. And I would absolutely love to have a Linux-powered laptop like that. So I'm excited for this. And there's more to this story, and we dive a bit deeper into the specs and possibilities and why this could be so important in the latest episode of Destination Linux Podcast. So if you'd like to learn more, you'll find links in the show notes for sources and, of course, to the episode of Destination Linux 374. A new version of OpenSUSE Leap is now available, as the OpenSUSE project has announced this new version with Leap 15.6. If you are a user who prefers a well-tested operating system with long-term consistency and lower frequency of upgrades, then OpenSUSE Leap may be worth a look. Now, OpenSUSE Leap is built using sources from SUSE Linux Enterprise or SLE, and Leap 15.6 uses sources from SLE 15 Service Pack 6. For those who are curious about the difference between Leap and Tumbleweed, OpenSUSE makes these for the rolling release of Tumbleweed and a stable release of Leap. So with Leap, you get the more consistent system that is not going to update as much. And with Tumbleweed, you're going to get something that constantly, constantly updates, which is good. You know, there's good for both people, for different types of people. You get having both of those, it's really good. Now OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 comes one year after the 15.5 and it brings a lot of updates from the previous version. You'll notice that these updates are not going to include the latest versions of all of the projects and packages that we're mentioning as they focus on system consistency over having the latest versions. If you want that, then that would be Tumbleweed to check out. Now, OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 is powered by the Linux 6.4 kernel, which also includes various backports for some of the latest hardware drivers. OpenSUSE Leap offers a variety of desktop environments to choose from, and Leap 15.6 brings updates to these with KDE Plasma, upgraded to the latest long-term support version of 5.27.11 LTS, and GNOME has been updated to GNOME 45. Leap 15.6 comes with the same version of XFCE that 15.5 had with XFCE 4.18, but that's because XFCE 4.18 is still the current version of the DE. Though if you are aiming for a system that doesn't change much, then that pretty much fits perfectly. OpenSUSE is also doing something very interesting for those who are needing to manage servers, because they have recently added Cockpit with Leap 15.6. Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers, which simplifies and optimizes system maintenance. This adds a significant enhancement in system and container management capabilities for OpenSUSE Leap. Now, Leap 15.6 also sees major upgrades for audio technologies with the inclusion of Pipewire 1.04 and also Pulse Audio 17.0, which improves hardware compatibility and Bluetooth functionality for users. This release also received improvements for container and virtualization technologies. And on the container side of things, Podman has been upgraded to version 4.8, which includes tailored support for NextCloud through Quadlets. We also see upgrades to DistroBox, Docker, Scorpio, ContainerD, and more. On the virtualization side, Xen was upgraded to version 4.18, and we also see upgrades to projects like KVM, LibVert, and VertManager. For more details, you can check out the full list of features, or if you're ready to take the leap with this version of OpenSUSE, and you'll find a wide array of live ISOs to download with additions for KDE Plasma, Gnome, XFCE, all pre-installed, as well as many others, including a rescue edition and more. You'll find links to all of that in the show notes. This episode of This Week in Linux is brought to you by Kolide. In a perfect world, end users would only work on managed devices with the IT-approved apps. But the BYOD or the bring your own device trend is here and it's here to stay. It's been in full swing for a while. Employees use personal devices and unapproved apps that aren't protected by MDM, IAM, and other security tools. There's a giant gap between security tools that we have and the way we actually work. 1Password calls this the access trust gap. And now, Kolide has joined forces with 1Password. Kolide brings their user-first device trust solution, which notifies users as soon as it detects an issue on their device and teaches them how to solve it without needing help from IT. 1Password brings their extended access management to secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Kolide is designed for companies with Okta, so if you're using Okta and you're looking for a device trust solution, then look no further than Kolide. Plus, now that they've joined up with 1Password and their extended access management, It just it's just going to get better. Now, Kolide plus one password. They care about user experience and privacy, too, which means it can go places that other tools can't like personal or contractor devices. It ensures that every device is known and healthy and every login is protected. So stop trying to ban BYOD or shadow IT and start protecting them with Kolide and 1Password. Support the show and go to thisweekinlinux.com/kolide That's thisweekinlinux.com/kolide Go there and get more details about these great security solutions. That's thisweekinlinux.com/kolide. Valve is not new to having lawsuits filed against them, and there is another on the horizon for them. This time, the lawsuit alleges Valve has been overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position in the UK. It was filed in the UK. That's why it's mentioning UK gamers. Now, the claim was filed by Vicky Shotbolt, the founder and CEO of ParentZone. Before I move on any further, I just want to say, Shotbolt, that's a cool name. The rest of this is far from cool. Now, Shotbolt is also on the executive board of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety and is a trustee for MILA, the Media Literacy and Information Alliance. Now, this feels like a cash grab to me or a marketing thing because they even made a dedicated website for this lawsuit at steamuos.co.uk. And a company was built for this purpose called Vicky Shotbolt Class Representative Limited to do this lawsuit. It just feels a bit cash-grabby. Now, from the claim website, it says. Valve Corporation faces a $656 million pound collective action claim for overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position in the UK. Valve owns and operates Steam, the largest digital distribution platform for PC games in the world. Companies who hold a dominant position in market are not allowed to charge excessive or anti-competitive prices. They also cannot impose other unfair trading conditions that prevent or hinder others from competing with them. We believe Valve Corporation has been unfairly shutting out competition for PC games and in-game content, which has meant that UK customers have paid too much for these products. Okay, so there's so much to unpack here and there's so much more to this quote, but I just want to really quick point out that Steam is one of the most competitive in terms of pricing. Like if you go buy a game for a console, you're going to pay $60 or more. And sometimes they have these massive packages. So I'm not sure how that's more expensive. And then also you're saying that it has the dominance and it's dominant because it was the only option for like a decade. People ignored PC gaming and they were the ones to do it, but they're not the only one. Saying that they have unfair trading conditions, like what exactly? Sure, they have a set that they have always had and they have rules that say you're not allowed to charge less than you charge here, but that's normal for any kind of market because if you're able to charge less, why would anyone buy it on Steam? It's basically like you're agreeing to have fair pricing. So how does that make it unfair? I'm not sure. We'll get into that more in a second. So let's get back to the quote, shall we? So it says, apparently it's a promotional thing for Vicky at this point. It says, Vicky Shotbolt, a leading campaigner for children's digital rights, filed the claim via Vicky Shotbolt Class Representative Limited on behalf of all All affected gamers at the Competition Appeal Tribunal on June 5th. Now, it's interesting because it says, on behalf of all affected gamers, I have a very strong feeling that this person is not a gamer and this has nothing to do with them. But that's the whole... That's why I feel like it's a cash grab because it just seems... Kind of odd because, okay. So Vicky accuses Valve Corporation of shutting out competition in the PC gaming market by forcing game publishers to sign up to pricing restrictions that dictate the lowest price games can be sold for on rival platforms. It doesn't dictate what the prices are. It dictates that if you are going to sell on Steam, you also need to sell wherever it is the same price. That's just normal actions. Like that's just kind of like normal business. Sure, you could do sales and stuff like that, but you can also do that on Steam. If you want to get a lower price at a temporary time, there are Steam sales. There's no difference here. It just seems very weird that this is the problem they're going after. Maybe there's more to it. So let's go back to the quote. This has led to UK customers or UK consumers paying too much for PC games and add-on content. And that has really nothing to do with Steam because really the pricing for PC games is lower than console games by a lot. Even with the non-actual physical media where you're just getting a download, it is still more expensive on consoles. And the price has always been the same. The structure goes on to say, and has enabled the gaming giant to continue charging an excessive commission of up to 30% to publishers. This 30% has always been there. It's not like it's a new thing that they're attacking the market and trying to get more money. It's always been 30%. And, you know, it's 30% on Apple too. And also it's 30% on YouTube revenue share. If you are making a video like I am and you have AdSense, you get 70%, they get 30%. That's how it works. It's actually kind of worse on Twitch. I think it's 50%. Like they take 50. So anyway, that's how revenue share works. If you build a platform, a market for people to sell their stuff in, you take a percentage. Now, what exactly made 30% terrible? I don't know. I know Epic Games with the Epic Store or the Epic Game Store, they decided to undercut that and make it lower. But that's more of a marketing decision, not necessarily saying that Steam is now doing something bad. What they should do is sell it for the exact same price on the epic game store and epic games take a smaller percentage and they get more money from it that makes more sense what what is the problem with if they're selling on steam they which is probably most likely because a lot of people just use steam but at the same time there's more incentive to get people to buy it on the other their platforms, then vice versa. It's kind of weird because if it's the same price, the publisher gets more money that way. So I don't really see the problem really. But anyway, it also feels like a cash grab because since they're going after another company, that being Sony, for $5 billion and have a website for that too that says playstationuos.co.uk. And to me, it feels like Like the us part is a bit of a stretch. But it says the partner leading the case for this up against Valve says, Valve has had a stranglehold on the PC market for a long time. And with this claim, we're challenging the status quo. Competition law is there to protect consumers and ensure that markets work properly. When they don't work properly and consumers are harmed, how are they being harmed? Actually, it's more incentive to people to buy on other things. Actually, it doesn't really matter. Technically, it doesn't matter. Back to quote. Sorry, I got tangent. When they don't work properly and consumers are harmed, collective actions of this kind provide consumers with a voice and a way of holding big companies like Valve to account. We're delighted to be working with Vicky to seek compensation for UK consumers. Okay, so let's break it down. That's the big claims that everything is horrible for consumers, which I don't know of many gamers that are that bothered by it, considering most of the time the pricing is better on Steam anyway. So it boils down to these three main issues for the claim. Number one, price parity obligation clauses. We say that Valve Corporation imposes price parity clauses. Okay, so this is not a good argument, like I said, because why would they want to offer better prices, as in cheaper, when they would, if they offered the exact same price on the other platforms, which is all that Steam is requiring, you would make more money. Because they take a smaller percentage on the other platforms. Why would they do that? That doesn't make any logical sense in a business way. Like, what are you talking about? Anyway, I'm missing something. Obviously, I'm missing something. So, let's go to the next main issue. Number two, tying. We say that the restrictions Valve Corporations imposes that mean on the add-on content for games must also be purchased from Steam, restricts competition in the market. That's just because it wants to inter-work with the game. Like if you bought add-ons, you'd have to modify the game on Steam or modify it in some way to make it work. And that just adds extra effort when you could literally put the DLC in Steam and then you just download it and it does it automatically and you're done. It's a convenience factor for the consumer not for the oh it's trying to hurt consumers maybe it's annoying that they couldn't charge more for the add-ons but they could charge whatever they want i mean there are games that are charging for these like dlc add-on packs hundreds of dollars steam does not stop you like valve is not stopping you from doing that it's just they're They're taking a percentage of whatever you sell. Like that's how it works in like marketplaces. So I'm so confused. Anyway, moving on to the number three, excessive pricing. Here we go. We argue that Valve Corporation has imposed an excessive commission of up to 30%, which is not that it's actually kind of standard, but also it doesn't matter because they could just not, they could convince people to not buy on Steam. I don't think that, I don't think there's actually restrictions of them mark how they market the game. I don't know if there is, but maybe there is. I could be wrong about that since I haven't researched that particular topic. Anyway, the quote says, charge to publishers up to 30% charge to publishers that resulted in inflated prices on its Steam platform. What? Okay. Inflation is something that means this particular product will cost this. And then everything around it makes it more and more expensive. But these are digital things. This is a game. It is a digital concept. There is no standard pricing system for inflation. It's whatever the developer wants to price it. Now, yes, based on the marketplace, they're going to have their game price comparative to other games that are similar or in the same genre or whatever. Ever sure that will happen but that's not steam causing the pricing that's the market itself establishing the pricing and again why would any game developer sell the product on any other platform for less than on steam because if they sell it for exactly the same on steam with a lower market share from the the other platform they benefit from the other sales so So, like... Why would they lower it? Except for sales, like, and except for like temporary sales and that sort of thing. Anyway, so I'm not a lawyer. I'm not involved in these sorts of things at all. So I could be, you know, I could be wrong. It just feels like to me that this is a cash grab because of the sketchiness of the fact that they're making a website called Steam You Owe Us. And then they're talking about how it affects gamers. Gamers and at no point do they suggest they are gamers which doesn't seem like they are because of the arguments they're making and the fact that they're going after PlayStation and Valve, for lots of money but then it gets even more sketch when I look at the website and it says if the claim is successful people who are a part of this class action you could be eligible for up up to 44 pounds in compensation, if you paid for a PC game or add-on content from June 5th, 2018 to now. Or if you're in Scotland, you might get some more, like five more pounds or something. So it's like, yes, we're going to sue them for 656 million pounds. And out of that 656 million pounds, you get 44 if you bother to participate. The fact that they're doing both of these lawsuits, they made websites for both of them, they made a company to start doing lawsuits for these things, it just feels super sketch. So, it's my opinion. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. This week in Linux, Linus Torvalds announced the plans to merge the extensible scheduler sketch underscore ext patches for Linux 6.11. even though there have been some people who are giving objections to this. For those unfamiliar, the kernel scheduler decides which processes run on which CPU core, when that happens, and for how long. It also deals with interrupts when a CPU needs to stop doing what it's doing and tend to hardware. Its priorities vary with workload. For example, desktop and mobile users want responsiveness and low latency while servers want throughput. This is pretty big deal as this is basically central to everything the kernel does. So for a long time, many core developers insisted that the kernel should have only one scheduler with no plugins and limited customizations. But the skedged underscore ext patch, that patch set added customizations using the kernel's BPF virtual machine, and this proved to be pretty effective. There are documented performance gains, including Linux gaming performance. It also makes it quicker for prototyping new scheduler changes. And some distributions are shipping patched kernels to have these benefits. In fact, Canonical have been evaluating it for pursuing a more microkernel-like design. Linus said he feels the SchedX code is ready enough and provides real value to the mainline Linux kernel. Linus threw down the gauntlet this week on the Linux kernel mailing list around the Skedged X v6 patches to announce his intent to merge the code with Linux 6.11. He says, and I quote, I honestly see no reason to delay this anymore. This patch set was the major private discussion at last year's Kernel Maintainer Summit, and I don't find any value in having the same discussion, whether off-list or as an actual event, at the upcoming Maintainer Summit one year later. So to make any kind of sane progress, my current plan is to merge this for 6-11. At least that way we're making progress and the discussion at KS 2024 can be about my mental acuity or lack thereof, rather than about rehashing the same thing that clearly made no progress last year. It's pretty often that sometimes development in the open can result in things taking a while, which apparently this is an example of that. But as the BDFL or the benevolent dictator for life, these kinds of things can be quickly solved as well. Just like this. He goes on to say, and using the in order to accept this, some other thing has to be fixed first argument doesn't really work well either. And that has been discussed for over a decade at various maintainer summits. Now, this is true that in some situations that argument can certainly be valid, but it can also be used to hold back trying stuff. So I feel like that is a double-edged sword kind of thing. So it makes sense that if that's the case, then shouldn't those things that have already been done, if it's been years, so... Makes sense. Linus goes on to say, I'm also not a believer in the argument that has been used multiple times that the BPF scheduler would keep people from participating in scheduler development. I personally think the main thing that keeps people from participating is too high barriers to participation. Now, this right here is something I wanted to address because this is much bigger than just about the Linux kernel development. Obviously, there is going to be an automatic massive barrier on participating with the kernel development, even this specific type of kernel development because it requires some pretty high development credentials to be put into it. But too high of a barrier to entry applies to literally every project. If you are part of an open source project, please try your best to lower this barrier as much as possible. I recently tried to communicate with an open source project that I will not name about some ideas that I had for them. This was very, very difficult. And it took one and a half to two hours just to start the a conversation. In this case, it was due because they mixed messaging on their website talking about how you can get in touch with them through their mailing list, which does not exist anymore. So when you go there, you find out that it's not a thing. Then you see that they have so many other ways to get in touch, but not all members of the project were actually using all of those platforms. It got pretty frustrating. Anyway, this is a tangent, so I'll just end it there. But it's very important that you lower the barrier as much as possible. And that's really cool. So I think this is a really interesting topic. What are your thoughts on this topic about Linus throwing down the gauntlet related to this scheduler? Let me know in the comments. Mozilla has announced the latest version of their web browser, Firefox, which just so happens to be my favorite web browser. So naturally, I wanted to dig into this news a little bit. So Firefox 127 is now available and this version brings a lot of great improvements, both with features and security. A few weeks ago on the This Week in Linux podcast, I went through the roadmap that Mozilla shared for the future of Firefox. And well, none of that is included in this version. That's not surprising though, because it's only been a few weeks and that roadmap was over the next year or so. So however, there are still quite a lot of changes in this release that you should be excited for. One, I am super excited for, so let's talk about that. The most notable and probably the most exciting, at least for me anyway, this release is all the improvements towards the screenshot tool. Now the screenshots feature in Firefox has gotten a big update. date. It now supports taking screenshots of file types like SVG, XML, and more, as well as various about pages within Firefox. And for those who don't know what that is, an about colon page is a section of the browser itself, not actual pages. So it was a little bit more difficult to do that. So this could be nice for anyone who needs to troubleshoot something and they can take a screenshot of that particular section and that sort of thing. Now, I utilize the screenshot feature of Firefox all the time. The visuals you see in the video editions of our podcast are often made with the Firefox screenshot tool. Sure, my beloved KDE Plasma has a screenshot tool built into the DE, but Firefox's screenshot has the ability to capture the entire page in one image and very quickly. Now, this alone is a reason to use this feature, but it also has the ability to quickly take screenshots of specific sections of a web page as well, which is very nice. Now, one of the things I felt was missing from their screenshot tool was the keyboard shortcuts to make it more efficient. and, well, Mozilla thought that too and added exactly that for this release. Also, they've added theme compatibility and high contrast mode support for the screenshot tool. And probably the most important thing for me is the performance improvements for capturing large screenshots because previously there have been times where I wanted a full-size screenshot of a webpage, but the page is so, so large, so absurdly tall that the screenshot tool wouldn't be able to do it. It would take forever and then eventually just give up. and then stop working until I refresh the page. And then I would have to do like smaller pieces in order to do it. Now I tested this and I'm happy to report that even with a very large website, I was able to take a full size screenshot within just a few seconds. That's right, just a few seconds. My test case was the release notes of the NextCloud Hub 8, which we covered on a previous episode of This Week in Linux. And this is funny because in that episode, I talked about how long their release notes were, and it was to the point where I scrolled the release notes the entire time I talked about it, and it never got to the end. It's ridiculous. Anyway, so for those who are curious, that resulted in an image with the dimensions of 2,994 by 32,766 pixels. Just under 18 megs for the file size. This is a pretty big deal for my use case. So I would like to say thank you, Mozilla. Thank you for doing that. Also, Mozilla has been working on performance and security improvements in this version of Firefox. They now offer the ability for developers to specify domain names for important assets that they can resolve them preemptively with the new support for DNS prefetching for HTTPS assets, which should help page loads faster. And also on the security side of things, Mozilla has been doing some changes related to loading assets from HTTP versus HTTPS. So Firefox will now automatically try to upgrade image, audio and video elements from HTTP to HTTPS if they are embedded within an HTTPS page, that is. Now, if these assets don't load properly using HTTPS, then Firefox will simply not load those assets. This is good news in my opinion, because even the not loading part is good, because at this point, there's no excuse to not have support for HTTPS since having a security certificate is either very cheap or completely free now with Let's Encrypt. Another feature Firefox 127 comes with is the ability to close duplicate tabs. This might not be a problem for some people, but those of us who have dozens and dozens of tabs at one time, most of the time, well, this could be pretty helpful. For example, during my research for making content, there are times where I'm accidentally opening duplicate tabs and being able to close them automatically may not be a game-changing feature, but it's a very welcome feature from this podcaster. Finally, for those of you who are unlucky to have to use Windows for whatever reason, you can now set Firefox automatically to launch when you start or restart your Windows system. Now, are you a Firefox user? Do you prefer another browser? If so, let me know. Let me know in the comments, and also let me know what you think about this latest version of Firefox. NetXMS is an open-source cross-platform network monitoring tool, which just released a new version this week with NetXMS 5.0.4. Compared to other monitoring tools, NetXMS is more focused on the network part of monitoring. So NetXMS is capable of automatic topology detection, network maps creation, and automation through scripting. Net XMS can be used for monitoring entire IT infrastructure, starting with SNMP, the Simple Network Management Protocol, which is capable like this kind of hardware, which is like basically the standard for communication networks with hardware like switches and routers and that sort of stuff. But also Net XMS can use other IoT and industrial protocols such as Ethernet/IP. Is it Ethernet or Ethernet? Right. Anyway, and Modbus TCP, as well as MQTT. This means that NetXMS can monitor network communication equipment, but also sensors and controllers. That is usually missed by tools exclusively based on SNMP. Let's talk about the highlights of the latest release of this monitoring tool. In NetXMS 5.0, they added a new line styling options for network map. They also added styling scripts to provide the user the option to automatically change the styling or data on the line depending on objects it connects. 5.0 also features new automatic bandwidth calculation that can be used to color network map links and between nodes. And NetXMS 5.0 also makes it possible to now create a wireless domain, which is like adding a wireless access point controller under it and look at how access points are populated from the a controller. This is a big deal for larger networks running enterprise-grade wireless access points, for example, because they would be able to handle the massive network with tons of nodes. In fact, one of their clients inspired this functionality when they were running it across over 18,000 nodes. And this same client also inspired the next highlight of the release that we're going to talk about, which is the collector object creation. This new collector object class makes it possible for it to act as both a container for the nodes and perform data collection. This change makes it possible for larger installations to optimize their structure through this new class. So now it is possible to have both organization and aggregation in one object. Now, as with all software these days, machine learning is making its way into NetXMS as well. This release gets anomaly detection features. NetXMS always had thresholds for collected data, but it was the user's responsibility to define those frames for the data. Anomaly detection takes data samples from the same time for the last 30 days, as well as the same day of the week and time of the day for the last 10 weeks, and calculates an outlier score for the data. If the score is higher than the internal threshold, then boom, it gets flagged. So are you in the market for a network management and monitoring tool? Have you tried NetXMS? Are you interested in trying it? Let me know all of that in the comments below. Thanks for watching this episode of This Week in Linux. If you like what I do here on this show and want to be kept up to date with what's going on in the Linux and open source world, then be sure to subscribe. And of course, remember to like that smash button. If you'd like to support the show and the channel, you can check out the membership system we have where you can go to tuxdigital.com/membership and get a bunch of cool stuff. We have perks like patron-only access to our Discord server. We have a Discord server for everyone, but inside of that server, there's also patron-only sections and much more. You can also support the show by ordering the Linux is Everywhere t-shirt, the one I'm wearing right now, or the This Week in Linux shirt at tuxdigital.com/store Plus, while you're there, check out all the other cool stuff we have, like hats, mugs, hoodies, stickers, and so much more at tuxdigital.com/store I'll see you next time for another episode of Your Source for Linux GNews. Thanks again for watching. I'm Michael Tunnell. I hope you're doing swell. Be sure to ring that notification bell. And until next time, I bid you farewell.
