Steam Autumn Sale, NVIDIA, carbonOS, Stargate, Arch Linux, Amazon Linux | This Week in Linux 177

welcome to episode 177 of this week in linux recorded live on november 27th 2021 from the destination linux network i'm michael tanell and if you're new the show this is the podcast that will keep you up to date with what's going on in the linux world and i'll give you my take as a year plus linux user so let's get started with your weekly source for linux good news [Music] this episode of this week in linux is sponsored by digitalocean and by bit warden a first in the show this week we got some news from valve and that is the steam autumn cell is here there's a lot of games that are available for linux native as well as of course proton but first of all let's talk about stellaris civilization 6 valheim stardew valley all of these games are linux native also wasteland 3 terraria metro exodus dead cells hollow knight and so many more again all of these are linux native you might not be aware how many games are available for linux native but there are a ton of them and there are not all of them but a lot of them are on sale right now plus also in addition to the steam autumn sale there's valve is taking nominations for the steam awards now i like the steam awards because nominations for the steam awards are submitted by gamers for a variety of categories and the winners are also voted on by the gamers unlike other video game related awards now these other awards well they do allow the gamers to vote on them but the nominations are typically well they seem like they are just pandering to companies because it's always triple a titles it's very rarely indie games and you know that kind of thing so while some people are even saying that you know but they're only nominated because they're controlled by by companies that backed it as sponsors and that sort of stuff i don't know i'm just saying it seems kind of weird so anyway if you want to participate in a video game awards process where you are your vote you know has the ability to matter i'll have links to the steam awards nominations and a link to the steam autumn sale in the show notes up next in the show i want to tell you about something nvidia has done they've committed an act so rare it has to be addressed an action so uncommon you may not even be aware that they have done this before nvidia has released open source software that's right i know open source software nvidia doesn't make sense to go together but it does in some rare occasions like the nvidia image scaling sdk 1.0 has been released as open source this is a cross-platform gpu image upscaling implementation and it has support for dlss on nvidia basically what it takes it takes a resolutions that are a little bit lower and upscales them to make them look better on different monitors who have higher quality resolutions and that sort of stuff to make them look better for gaming and and all sorts of things but mostly for gaming and there's also something some work done on generic compute shaders for amd and intel inside of this sdk so while of course it's optimized to work best on nvidia hardware it does actually work on competitor hardware as well which is pretty cool now with that said amd and intel the solutions they already have of their own solutions and it's all theirs are both already out and also open source so intel's xess upscaling and amd's fsr or fidelity fx super resolution is available for developers so they wouldn't likely use nvidia's image scaling for those types of hardware but it is cool that they could if you'd like to learn more about the image scaling sdk from nvidia or checking out all their other open source projects which there are more not a ton but there are some more you can check those out links in the show notes below speaking of amd's fsr the godot engine is a game engine that is open source and free to use and they have just added support for amd's fsr or fidelity fx super resolution it's hard to say that when you know really quickly but i did it twice yes so the fsr from andy has been merged into godot's engine and it's going to be available for the next big release as well as a lot of other cool stuff that's going to be in the next release but first uh for those who are not familiar with the fsr i kind of explained it in the previous topic but it's a upscaler for taking resolutions that are a little bit small and uh increasing it on basically computers that have higher resolution like 4k and making something look much cleaner and much better by without having to re-code everything and to make it specifically for those resolutions which is one of the reasons why it's very cool to see this being added to godot in addition to that godot's also and gnome 4.0 specifically is also adding support for vulcan which is really awesome and they're also overhauling the rendering system of the engine as well so many cool things i can't wait for godot 4.0 there's gonna be a lot of cool stuff come from that because there's a a lot of games already that use godot and having the vulcan support and fsr just going to make it even better to play those games so if you learn more about ghetto and fsr in general i have links in the show notes up next on the show let's talk about the north german state of schlozvig holstein plans to switch to open source software including libreoffice in its administration and schools the state wants to reduce its dependence on proprietary software which is awesome and eventually end it all together by the end of 2026 microsoft office is to be replaced by libra office on all of their 25 000 computers used by civil servants and employees including teachers and the windows operating system is to be replaced by linux as well they give a date for that but it's very cool that they're doing we'll talk about that more in a bit they've also said that 90 of their video conferences that they're doing in the state administration runs on jitsi which is very cool which is an open source video conferencing tool for those who are not aware and they've been testing libreoffice for over two years now and are confident that it will work for the switch as for switching to linux they have tested various distros and have found that five are suitable for their purposes and they now plan to do a transparent competition of sorts for which distro will ultimately be chosen for the switch and for those unaware this is not the first german state to do it the city of or actually technically the city of munich has been in the news many times over something similar to this but not necessarily always good because there's like a roller coaster of this because there was actually and it wasn't even it wasn't like a roller coaster because there it wasn't working it was a roller coaster because of some of the decisions they made as well as some drama that was attached to it like for example there was reports that microsoft spent a lot of money to convince them to switch back to windows and also some drama involved with some politicians who had an affinity for microsoft stuff when they took office made some changes but overall there were some technical issues and the state of try it again uh schlozvig holstein is taking a different approach than what the city of munich did so the city of munich was did an approach where it was kind of criticized as well because they decided to make their own linux distribution called limex and that created a little bit of technical debt as well as making it harder to provide support for their users because they couldn't rely on an existing distribution to do that whereas the the state of schloswig halstein one of these times i might have said it right i don't know is taking the different approach of using existing distributions and i'm very happy to see that because using existing distribution instead of making your own makes it much more manageable and also eliminates a lot of technical debt so that's very cool if you want to learn more about this i'll have links in the show notes below this episode of this week in linux is brought to you by digitalocean now is the perfect time to dive into the digital ocean their new app platform service helps you build modern cloud native apps for way less money with the app platform you can build deploy and scale apps and static websites faster and easier than ever before using a simple intuitive interface you simply point the app platform to your github or gitlab repository and let it do all of the heavy lifting for you now whether you're using nodejs python go php ruby static sites docker or container images all of this works in the app platform so you just point it to your github or gitlab repository like i said and just let it do its thing and do everything for you basically by running the app platform on their own infrastructure also digital ocean keeps your costs significantly lower than with other products plus it's built on top of digital ocean's kubernetes providing a smoother migration path so you can take more control of your infrastructure setup as a this weekend linux listener and also a member of the dln community you can get started for free on the app platform actually better than free because if you go to do.co dln you can get started with a 100 free credit that's right go to do.co and get started with a 100 free credit on digitalocean's app platform we want to thank digital for sponsoring this episode of this week in linux up next in the show let's talk about a new distro that was i was recently made aware of and it is pretty interesting to say the least now before we go too far i need to inform you that it is very early stages of development so it's currently classified as an alpha release but we're going to talk about carbon os carbon os is an atomic immutable distribution powered by lib os tree now that means the system files of the os are all protected and read only and it also means that every copy of carbon os is meant to be identical now this makes the system much more stable less prone to bugs and more secure because everybody who has installed it has the same underlying core now we've talked about some kinds of discharge like this before on the show such as distros like fedora silver blue open sousa micro s and fedora kenoite carbon os can certainly be compared to these distributions in a lot of ways but there is one very interesting difference carbon os does not have a traditional package manager in fact it doesn't have a package manager at all and it acts more like a mobile os sort of thing where you have roms that you replace where everything is all in one now it's not locked down you it the immutability can be unlocked if you want to and the there's full read write access to user user local and there's also full administrative privileges available if you want to do it but by default it has this stuff in a more immutable system now but so in order to have applications you can install it has the primary solution for that being flat packs and for more advanced workflows they have nsbox which is provided and they are planning to add podman to integrate support for docker containers now for those who are not familiar ns box command environment is really interesting because it essentially provides a container where the user can install traditional distribution like fedora arch or debian and use advanced workloads or workloads like compiling software and that sort of stuff and also in this carbon os there's a lot of other cool things that i think are quite interesting such as the default file system is butter fs and it has compression for butter fs transparent compression set up by default so this releases the size of the logs and the caches and the os files in general they're also using pipe wire instead of pulse audio by default and they've got some stuff with the systemd omd and swap on zram technology for handling the out of memory situations instead of using traditional swap partitions or swap files on the disk and they have their own desktop environment called graphite desktop environment which i'm very interested in checking out this distribution again this is a alpha very early stages distribution but it's just interesting to have all these different things combined into one distro so if you want to check it out i'll have links in the show notes below but again remember alpha stage so just keep that in mind when you check it out up next in the show let's talk about virtualization because collabora has announced a new project which is called venus an experimental vulcan driver for vert i o gpu this driver is for having 3d acceleration of vulcan applications in qemu or kwemu i'm not sure if that's supposed to be pronounced or there's i don't know but now i realize that sounds like a mouthful of jargon but this is very cool i'm not an expert in this stuff but i'm going to do my best to explain why this is cool a virtual machine is essentially running an operating system inside of another os and this has been possible for ages but running graphical applications inside of a vm can be fairly resource hungry it can slow down your computer giving you a bad experience in terms of graphical performance and that sort of stuff so being able to accelerate all of this by offloading the workload to a gpu can be a great performance boost this is already possible via opengl but not vulkan until now and you may still be wondering okay sure michael but why does this matter have you ever heard of io mmu passthrough so for enough for those who haven't generally speaking the act of having two gpus installed in a system in order to send one of the gpus to a virtual machine to give it direct hardware access this is often done to give a windows vm hardware access to directly increase the performance and even play games inside of the vm now this is very cool that you can do this but also does require a sizable investment like having two gpus in the same system now with this news collabora is providing something very cool because it pretty much works like pass-through but in reverse instead of sending hardware to the vm with this vulcan driver you can now send calls from the vm directly to the hardware of the host machine now this may still seem a lit a bit like jargon so what makes this exciting is that a lot of stuff is converging on vulkan this work on vulcan driver for virtualization combined with windows support for direct3d on top of vulkan makes it so that you can have a windows vm with close to native performance using hardware acceleration without the need of an additional gpu yes this will make it possible to have basically anything with vulkan compatibility to have hardware acceleration inside of a vm even windows itself now this is very exciting news and i wanted to cover it on the show because of this but it also is very very early stages of this project so i mean it's classified as experimental so it might take a little while longer before we see this fully rolled out but in the meantime if you learn want to learn more about virtualization calabra qemu this kind of thing i have links in the show notes below up next in the show let's talk about stargate stargate is an all-in-one daw or digital audio workstation and plug-in suite stargate is designed to be a comprehensive solution for music production with a focus on providing unique and innovative features especially for edm production stargate is a digital audio workstation with a pattern-based workflow it has lots of features for example it has a comprehensive suite of built-in instrument and effect plugins basic wave editor powerful track routing matrix with easy side chaining modular mixer architecture and so much more now some of this might sound like a mouthful of jargon and while i'm not an expert in this it's a jargon for me too so yeah but what i do know is that it has an all-in-one approach which i think is pretty cool because you can install stargate and get started immediately unlike other daws where it requires you to install the software and then also find other pieces like plugins before you can get started so that's pretty cool now this might not be the best solution for everyone i mean i don't know but if you're interested in making edm this might be something worth checking out though with that said stargate is also for everyone and of course now i'm talking about the tv show stargate sg1 and stargate atlantis because both of those are great sci-fi shows that everyone should check out so if you're an edm producer and you don't want to let the go old win then check out the link in the show notes for stargate digital audio workstation up next in the show let's talk about wireshark because they've released version 3.6 wireshark is a very useful and powerful packet analyzer and it's open source by the way but it's a packet analyzer for networking other communication protocols and it has the new release of 3.6 which adds a lot of new features and new protocols and not so much so it has support for a new support for importing captures from text files based on regular expressions adds usb link layer reassembly support for decoding the vector informatic binary log file or blf file format improvements to the user guides and documentation which is always great to see for any release notes of any project and they also added a lot of new protocols supported for wireshark so for example they added support for tp-link smart home protocol also microsoft's task scheduler service and the wow protocol or the world of warcraft world protocol which is used by blizzard for communications between the game client and their world server the quote-unquote world server for gameplay so that name may seem redundant and it is but apparently it also has a reason because of the world the quote-unquote world server that it connects to so you can learn more about wireshark 3.6 i'll have links in the show notes below this episode of this week in linux is brought to you by bitwarden get started right now with your free account at bitwarden.com dln bitwarden is a password manager that allows you to have peace of mind knowing your online accounts are secure how does it do it well it provides you with various different types of tools like a secured vault to store all of your passwords also an automatic generator so you can generate passwords and an automatically fill in passwords on login forms so you don't have to do any of this stuff and you can access your data across many different types of devices like web browser mobile applications desktop application or even on the command line yes it works on the command line if you want to do it as well bit warden seals and encrypts your private data with into in encryption before it ever leaves your devices which is very important because it's doing it locally which means that you're the only person that has access to your data unless you share it which you can share it on an organizational vaults like if you have friends and family you want to set up with bit warden or if you have a business you want to set up you can share it safely and securely through these organizational faults which is another fantastic feature of bit warden so go to bitworton.com dln to get started did i mention you can start it for free well you can but i also think you want to check out their premium accounts because for less than a dollar per month that's right less than a dollar per month not even a dollar per month less than a dollar per month gets you one gigabyte of encrypted file storage two-step login with yubikey u2f duo vault health reports bit word and authenticator for temporary one-time passwords prior to customer service and so much more so make the smart move like many community have and go to bitwarden.com dln to get started and thanks again to bit warden for sponsoring this week in linux so up next in the show let's talk about arch install 2.3 is being released back in april arch install was added to arch linux to make installations of the distro easier now to be clear it doesn't make the installs easy it just makes them easier than they were we talked about this in the previous episode i'll have that link in the show notes if you want to learn more about that when it was first announced but arch linux has a lot of great qualities but being easy to use or easy to install or beginner friendly none of those are one of those qualities with that said arch install 2.6 adds a lot of improvements for example full disk encryption is now properly works disk operations in general should be more reliable around partitioning and mounting and encryption manual partitioning also has been reworked as well so it is in better shape than it was before but it still needs some improvement but it's you know there's there's a lot of early stage stuff in this particular install because it is you know it's only been around for about six seven months right uh but it has uh early stages of support for uh multiple encrypted uh volumes butterfest sub volume support is in early beta initial support for arch install plug-ins which is really interesting because this is a basically allowing users and developers to create and extend arch install by making their own plugins for extra functionality and that sort of thing which is very cool and also uh swap support has now been introduced using the z-ram and z-ram generator so that's interesting if you want to check out this uh links in the show notes for more about this particular project for arch install but again real quick if you want to get started with arch totally fine doing so i'm not saying don't but if you're a beginner to art or beginner to linux arch is not really something you should mess with even with something like this that makes the installer easier than it was because it's not really it's intended for people who are experienced users but if you do want to learn and you want to learn more about linux and how to do it arch linux is a fantastic way to learn about linux so keep that in mind if you are just wanting to have a distribution that is easy to use to easy to get started and that sort of stuff it's not really arch but if you want to learn a lot about linux arch is a fantastic solution for that so links in the show notes up next on the show let's talk about amazon linux we don't talk about this kind of thing that often but amazon linux is a distribution made for amazon web services or aws which is a cloud provider which will let you run many linux distros and also their own amazon linux so aws has tried to incorporate rail compatibility or red hat enterprise linux compatibility for their amazon linux for a while but this latest one takes it to another level because they are re re-basing on fedora as the upstream for amazon linux and they're also doing it in an interesting approach because they're going to use fedora as the baseline for a lts approach kind of way so for example they're doing a two-year release cycle similar to ubuntu and supported for five years and they're also gonna be doing a quarterly batch style of updates and uh al2022 or the new version of amazon linux comes with se linux enabled by default and enforced by default for those who are not familiar se linux is a security tool and its approach is kind of interesting and different from other styles of security with linux because it restricts the stuff being ran unless it's explicitly permitted whereas other people have set it up where you know linux has a default policy on some distributions where it permits everything unless it is explicitly forbidden but that's not great for security most of the time but you'll see some like articles talking about disabling se linux and stuff and if you do see that it's not recommended i wouldn't say do that just just want to put that out there if you want to check out amazon linux i have links in the show notes below up next in the show let's talk about alpine linux 3.15 has been released and alpine linux is known for being a lightweight distribution that is often used for embedded and container focused purposes alpine is also known for its muscle busy box usage along with openrc as the init system so it is meant to be as light as possible for that purpose of doing complain container or embedded style implementations now alpine linux latest release of 3.15 has the linux kernel 5.15 included as well as gnome 41 and kde plasma 5.23 they've also decided to remove the support for the mips 64 architecture because well the architecture is now considered end of life so they're getting rid of it but they are adding in addition to many other things but one thing i think is really interesting is the initial support for uefi secure boot for x86 64. if you want to check it out alpine linux 3.15 is available now and i'll have links in the show notes below up next in the show let's talk about endless os so the endless os foundation has announced the release of endless os 4.0 it's based on debian 11 aka bullseye and endless os 4.0 is a major release that introduces many new features and improvements it includes an improved app grid navigation with clickable arrows that allows users to more easily navigate between app pages also this release introduces a fast user switching to allow you to easily switch to a different user while another user is still logged in and the new feature has been implemented for both the user menu and the lock screen endless os 4.0 also has driverless printing with the internet internet printing protocol to automatically discover printers in your local network and this says actually because it's based on debian stable endless os 4.0 uses gnome 3.38 which is an older version of gnome we're currently on gnome 41 and this is because it's based on debian stable and debian stable doesn't have a lot of movement when it comes to des and other things like that so that's why it's gnome 3.38 so if you're interested in checking out endless os 4.0 i'll have links in the show notes below up next in the show is deep in linux 20.3 has been released and this is based on the linux kernel 5.15 there's a lot of new stuff because of the new kernel that they're using so you get new stuff like in kernel smb server real-time preemption launching and other stuff i have there's more information about that in episode 174 of twill if you want to check it out i have that linked in the show notes also this latest release of deep linux 20.3 has updates and improvements to the album app the screen capture app file manager and the movie app as well as improvements to the deepen desktop environment or dde if you'd like to learn more about this latest release i'll have links in the show notes below thanks for watching this episode of this week in linux if you like what i do here on the show then please like that smash button and be sure to subscribe if you'd like to support the show and the channel we have multiple ways to contribute via patreon sponsors and many others you can learn more by going to tuxdigital.com contribute and if you become a patron you can join me during the live stream in the recording stadium to discuss stuff between topics hang out every week after the show and also in the pre-show because we have a we now have a post a patreon post show and a patreon pre-show now for this week in linux so you can hang out with me during those times if you'd like to by becoming a patron of the channel you can also support the show by ordering the linux's everywhere t-shirt or the linux's everywhere or the this week in linux shirt that i'm currently wearing right now by going dealingstore.com plus while you're there check out all the other great stuff that's there like hats mugs hoodies stickers backpacks aprons so much cool stuff dealingstore.com and if you'd like some more podcasting goodness from me then check out the latest episodes of destination linux and hardware addicts as i'm a co-host of both of those shows on the destination linux network and while you're on the destination linux network be sure to check out all the other great stuff like gamesphere pseudo show dlna stand and so much more and just a reminder this show is live every saturday at 1 pm eastern or 1800 utc so join us in the live chat room to discuss all the latest linux canoes each and every week by going to dmlive.com thanks again for watching i'm michael tanel with the destination links network and i'll see you next week for another episode of your weekly source for linux good news [Music] you

Channel: Michael Tunnell - TuxDigital

Views: 5,673

Keywords: Linux, open source, DLN, linux podcast, podcast, tech podcast, technology, linux news, tech news, linux distro, Destination Linux, Valve, Steam, Steam Autumn Sale, Steam Awards, NVIDIA, Godot Engine, AMD, FSR, FidelityFX Super Resolution, LibreOffice, carbonOS, Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE, Vulkan Driver, QEMU, Stargate, Digital Audio Workstation, Wireshark, Arch Linux, Amazon Linux, Fedora Linux, Alpine Linux, Endless OS, Deepin Linux, steam deck, steam os, linux gaming, arch install

Id: hMF19hCADEM

Length: 27min 15sec (1635 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021