Hey everyone and welcome back to your weekly Linux and open source news show I'm your host Nick and this is a podcast where we discuss everything that happened in the Linux open source privacy and Open web spaces so for this week We have some unknown trouble at the GNOME foundation that might very well put in danger all the projects Or at least some of the projects that they've been working on with the funding of the sovereign tech fund We've got the EU looking into GDPR Violations or potential
violations made by AI tools We've got f-droid micro G and the slash e Android ROM Bending together for a new initiative to try and make well mobile and the mobile space a little bit more ethical
We've got some news about Fedora. We've got some news about the Internet archive being targeted by DDoS attacks We've got some distro releases We've got some gaming news and as always if you want to dive deeper into any of the topics I'll talk about here all the links are in the show notes And if you want me to keep making this show and you want to support it They are links in the show notes just as well And if you become a patreon member you will get a daily version of this show
from Monday to Friday So if you don't want to wait for the end of the week to get all the news and get a little bit more Topics because there are some things I just cut out of this podcast So it's not too long if you want all that then you can just become a patreon It starts at $1 per month and you will help me make this show live on so thanks for Listening to this little self-promotion and now let's get into it
So first let's talk about GNOME. You probably know they received a like 1 million euro grand from an organization That is based in Germany. That's called the sovereign tech fund They have to use these funds specifically to work on specific projects They agreed upon when receiving the grant and they've been doing a lot of that. There's the global keyboard shortcuts portal There's home encryption. There's a new accessibility framework.
There's better wayland support There's a lot of stuff being included in here, but apparently they've hit a snag with this That's what they call a major issue on the GNOME Foundation side But they did not give any more details yet They said they wanted to resolve that problem before it impacts coordination of those sovereign tech fund projects But they also said that if they could not solve that major issue It might affect some parts of the project and make work on them basically hard
I wish they had been clearer about what is happening It would have been nice to know what the problem is exactly Did they use some of those funds to work on something else? Did the GNOME Foundation misattribute certain elements of that fund or maybe did they not sign the correct paperwork or forgot to do something?
I'm not sure maybe the foundation was not eligible for this grant because it's from a German thing and the GNOME Foundation Is not German I don't know but I wish they had explained because it would make it way easier to potentially offer some help or just to know if The risk is high or not for the various projects that are being worked on which are really really nice It would be a shame if those projects could not come to fruition or just were not funded anymore Because they are things that
will advance GNOME immensely now they are still making some progress while they're trying to resolve that thing and Notably one thing that I missed is that they've worked on adding GTK CSS variables Meaning that certain colors in GTK apps and in the Advaita theme could be changed through variables by developers Which is interesting if a developer wants to have a specific accent color in their app Which is not the accent color the user defined or if they want to have specific
Contrast and color tones in their application, but it's also useful for potentially supporting this pesky little accent color standard that has been implemented by KDE by I think Cinnamon I think Matei has it as well I think elementary OS has it as well basically the only major holdout is GNOME They don't support this accent color standard and so maybe this work could be helpful for that I don't know if that's what they're going to end up using it for because they just never call it anything
Along those terms they never mention accent colors in there But using variables to define certain colors in your theme is generally used to let people change the colors
And if app developers can do it. There's no reason why we couldn't also do it through GNOME settings They're also working on a new installer for GNOME OS Something that I feel might be the inkling that this GNOME OS could at some point become more than just a test distro for developers and something users might actually Want to run because why would you focus on developing a brand new installer?
If the distro you're offering is just meant for developers and for testing It would feel a bit weird to have all that extra work being invested in just the test platform where you could just Use column RS or anything else that has all the features Any developer will be able to accommodate that and they really won't need something super custom if you really need Certain custom options in your installer you can add them to existing ones So developing a brand new installer feels
like maybe maybe it's a move Towards making GNOME OS a more normal distribution that people could actually use Again, I do not know it's just pure speculation here now I hope the major issue that they identified with the GNOME foundation can be resolved Everything that has been started thanks to the sovereign tech fund grant is super important to push GNOME forward And it would really be disheartening if anything could jeopardize the delivery of this project
So hopefully they can resolve that issue
and tell us a bit more about it. So we know like what's happening Okay, and so I'm recording this exact segment the day after Recording the podcast and we had some more information about the potential issues that GNOME is facing They didn't tell us exactly what is happening But they did post an update right as I was recording the news video this morning to confirm that things are now solved They did not explain what the issue was but work will apparently be able to continue and GNOME will even
Expand its various initiatives to do more work along the lines of what they're doing with the sovereign tech fund They actually hired a brand new program manager to handle all of these projects and handle communication Which kind of makes me think that maybe the major issue was that everyone started working on their Projects for the STF, but no one really communicated any progress to the STF directly Maybe no one answered their questions or like checked in to tell them how the
money was being used and maybe the STF got worried That hey, you know what?
Maybe you're swindling us of our money because we don't know what you're doing right now This is just speculation on my part I have no idea if that's the case, but since they hired someone to handle this maybe that's the problem GNOME also seems to want to expand the work being done with a process to let the community give suggestions for work that is needed And another process for companies or organizations to offer grants to fund that work so basically some kind of bug
bounty but with features and Probably some kind of triage to make sure that the requested features are actually stuff that GNOME wants to offer in their whole Ecosystem I I don't see someone asking for the like the minimize button back or the system tray back Being allowed to have funding for this exact same thing the GNOME Foundation applied to the open tech fund as well That's an American nonprofit focused on supporting projects that go for a more open approach towards tech
So maybe this could give them a little bit more funding as well And the foundation will also apply for more contract funding with the sovereign tech fund in mid-june And finally, they also are launching a development fund to raise more funds from the community themselves To fund all of these ideas, which is nice and on top of that it looks like they cleaned up the books They are now operating under their budget and they probably shouldn't have a deficit this year
So it looks like everything is going pretty well in the end Problems are being handled and GNOME seems to have everything lined up to move forward to get bigger and to work on more things We will have to wait and see if this amounts to anything in a year or two But it's very encouraging and it should make all the people kind of mocking or doubting GNOME for hiring This new director called Holly Millian Maybe they're gonna eat their hats now because who could have guessed that
someone with experience Finding funding and running nonprofits would be a good choice to run a nonprofit instead of looking at her
External activities of shamanism. Maybe they should have looked at her resume Which apparently seems to give her some good notions of how to make the GNOME foundation run We'll see if it works in the long run, but for now, I don't see anything that I find distasteful at all Now the EU is well known for trying to regulate everything and anything including big tech companies Sometimes it's a hit sometimes it's a
miss right now. They're investigating some potential GDPR breaches in chat GPT especially in the data it's scraped off of the internet because if you don't know the GDPR says that before collecting any data about anyone you have to gather consent from that person and you need to be able to prove that you gathered that consent and By scraping a lot and a lot of data from various public websites Chatter GPT definitely has grabbed some personal data about certain people
whether they're prominent public Individuals or just some public Facebook profiles and they actually never got consent from those people Together all of this data the data protection board in the EU Analyzed the practices from open AI and they found some problematic things in how they scraped content But also in the accuracy of the data that chat GPT display They received a lot of complaints about chat GPTs hallucinations And this is another problem with the GDPR because the GDPR also
states that if you restitute any information to the public about a certain person or organization or anything else this information needs to be factual and correct and Well, we all know that open AI and general chat bots attend to hallucinate a lot of stuff That never actually happened or completely misinterpret certain articles and phrases attributing quotes citations desires and phrases or acts to people or companies that they indeed never Actually did they're just flat-out
inventing some stories now this investigation is just starting but it's an interesting angle It's not looking at hey, are they infringing on copyright by scraping this data? It's not oh, is it a misinformation if they publish this? It's not oh should they respect licenses on the things that they use?
It's well, they're gathering a lot of personal data by accident or not And yeah, it needs to be regulated as well, which I think is an interesting angle We never really saw about AI so this investigation already surfaced a few
things first. It's that consent thing Obviously sometimes Companies in the EU will not be able to prove that they gathered consent for a reason or not or another But there is another use case that lets companies gather that data without consent And that's when they can rely on a legitimate interest for the company to gather that data And that's what is being contested here a privacy expert saying seems to think that basically here open AI has no legitimate interest to gather this data
because well gathering data on public profiles on Facebook is not what is going to make your Chatbot better and the GDPR stipulates that companies who use that legitimate interest to justify the fact they're gathering Personal information without consent.
They should make all that information they gathered publicly available So everyone can check that they indeed gathered information that is legitimate and related to what they're trying to do Open AI does not publish any of their data set or anything they trained on meaning It's all a black box and you can only infer what they've used in terms of data by the results and the information it just spits back Which leads you to sort of guess where it could have gotten that information
And that second issue is obviously those hallucinations We talked about the GDPR stipulates that all information you can get about EU citizens should be accurate So when you ask a question to chat GPT about a specific individual It shouldn't tell you things that it imagined and as I said We all know that it tends to imagine a lot of things that never actually happen So these are preliminary conclusions and it ends in no fine or recommendations
It's just broad advice. It's just saying hey just by the start of this investigation We have noticed that open AI should implement appropriate measures and safeguards This could mean anything and everything at the same time It leaves open AI completely free to interpret that however they want and to fix anything But maybe later down the line they will find more concrete stuff that open AI needs to do I hope they can do that So these tools can start operating in a more ethical and
respectful manner in the future
We are being force fed these tools. Some people are very happy to have them Some people don't want them but basically they are happening whether we like them or not We are going to see those tools everywhere at some point So it would be nice if they were at least private and ethical from the get-go Instead of having to wait for them to become gigantic before acting just like what we did with the giant tech companies We have today We only started regulating them when they
were way too big to really regulate if we can avoid doing that same mistake with AI companies It would be great Now this week we also saw an interesting group or initiative forming for mobile devices It's called Moby free and it includes the e foundation They are the ones making the slash e Android ROM that I covered a bit on the channel It's a de-googled ROM with their own custom launchers forks of AOSP apps or entirely open source applications And they are not just shipping a package
of already available apps They're actually improving the design so it looks coherent They're offering a space in the next cloud instance for free so you can store your stuff and create a free account that you have control over
Not another company stuff like that. So they're trying to push the privacy and ethical side of Android basically I talked about them on the channel go check out those videos if you want But this initiative also regroups micro G Which is the open source implementation of the Google services which lets you use certain Google apps and applications That depend on Google services on
de-googled Android ROMs. You never make a real call to Google with those things It also includes fDroid which is the open source app store for open source apps And there are a bunch of other projects
here. It's sponsored by the European Commission So the EU and the end goal is to have a more open more private and more sustainable Ecosystem in the mobile software sector without all the current privacy violations without user lock-in that prevents You from moving from either Android to something else But even sometimes from a Android manufacturer to another one and without forcing hardware changes through software obsolescence Now they also advocate for open source code
Obviously because all of these projects are open source and their plan of action is to first start gathering Information about what people would like to see change in the mobile sector by conducting some workshops and some user focus groups And then to use that feedback to improve the slash e Android ROM improve the various app stores improve messaging tools Maps and more to actually have well something that can compete and can support all the applications people need
It is a very interesting project to me It probably will not amount to a lot of people moving away from big tech platforms and services Unless at some point it gets a strong push by the EU with a specific carrier or whatever
Not seeing that happening. That's not what the EU does generally But if they do manage to get a bit of EU funding if they can manage to make sure that slash e works Reliably with most apps without compatibility problems due to Google safety net or due to micro G not supporting everything That will be a net benefit for most people even for people not using slash e as their ROM This initiative will basically lift all Android ROM If it actually managed to build something
because it's open source code and any other Android ROM will be able to benefit from those improvements so hopefully this works and I can finally go back to using a D Google Android ROM on solid hardware because for now I'm stuck Now the Fedora mirrors are apparently being heavily strained by millions of requests coming from AWS Fedora hosts the mirrors for the ep el systems They're called basically the extra packages for enterprise Linux They're sort of PPA's for red hat
enterprise Linux for red hat based distros for sent OS and stuff like that They contain software that lets you turn your system to a specific use case That is not necessarily the prime focus of red hat enterprise Linux or sent OS And they're very interesting things that that a lot of people use these mirrors that host the EP el Repos have seen a surge in traffic since March 2024 more than five million new systems pulling packages from those repos are just pulling the repos for available packages
and it basically doubled the amount of connections to those repos in a few months and The source is clearly identified as Amazon with traffic from AWS surging like crazy Now fortunately the problem has been reported to Amazon and some of their engineers are looking at the issue To try and see what happened and to fix it This is apparently not linked to people migrating from sent OS 7 or red hat enterprise Linux 7 Which maybe who would maybe like focus on a similar distribution that would use the
EP el system to upgrade itself That's not the case that surge would have lasted way less time than what we're seeing on the Fedora mirrors So what would actually be nice is if tech companies using those community projects the all those community mirrors hosted by community projects if they actually Hosted those mirrors themselves or made a copy of them or just offered to host them on their infrastructure When a giant company like Amazon is a big leader in the hosting space
It would make sense if instead of just piggybacking off of community servers They could actually pay for some servers for their own use because apparently Amazon Linux uses those things. So yeah I know Amazon contributes to the Linux kernel things like that But honestly hosting some mirrors for those projects would probably cost them nothing And if they could just use their own mirrors instead of the community ones for their own distros That would probably be best for everyone
And still on Fedora. It looks like the new installer is being delayed again They've been working on a replacement to the let's be honest pretty terrible Anaconda installer that Fedora currently uses they've been working on that for a while now It was initially planned for Fedora 39.
It wasn't ready was pushed to 40 then was pushed to 41 But it also won't be ready for October when Fedora 41 is planned meaning that it has to be pushed yet again to Fedora 42 Now that new installer is called Anaconda Web UI It does look a lot better and more user-friendly than the current Anaconda It's way easier to understand with a more normal design instead of putting like confirm and continue buttons in the top Left corner where no other program ever placed them
Especially if you have a big screen where you might not even see that there's anything up there Yeah, it's just going to be a big big improvement and it's kind of needed because Fedora currently like if you install it three times You know it works, but the first time you are going to be very confused Apparently installing Linux is not a big issue these days if at least if I can trust in my latest community survey that I did I think only 4% of people said that installing Linux was a
major problem for them So people seem to have solved that but having a good installer is still pretty nice and their new installer will support Wayland now It's it's a web application So easy to maintain and easy to replace or even to use on other distributions It will support a better remote desktop for installations But yeah The developers just do not feel like they have the time to get that installer to a state where it would offer All the features that people are
expecting from the installer so it will not land before 2025 for Fedora 42 probably in April It's not a big big problem and I call that the current version
works. It's just very unintuitive What feels really weird to me and the development time isn't really weird either because Ubuntu did the exact same thing when they revamped Their installer they announced it They said hey look at what we've done and then they took three years to release it because yes making a stable installer is not that easy Which is why I don't understand why every single distro feels like they have to redevelop their own installer Open SUSE is doing it right
now Fedora is doing it right now Ubuntu did it like I think a year and a half ago or a year ago. They started using their own installer We have Kalamares that works pretty well. We have a lot of others GNOME is working on their own installer just for GNOME OS. Why do we need so many installers?
Their goal is to grab either a system image and unzip it or to grab a bunch of packages and install them We don't need 20,000 installers to do this thing and the UI is exactly the same for all of them They are the same steps you choose an internet connection you choose a user you choose a keyboard layout You choose a language and you choose a partition scheme, and then you install it's really not that difficult I'm pretty sure people could unify all of this because as much as I think
Fragmentation is a good thing for a lot of projects for installers. I really do not see the point It's something you will do once on your computer And you will only do it again when you change systems which technically should not happen all that often
So why do we need that many installers? I will never understand that Now the Internet Archive is apparently being heavily targeted by DDoS attacks And they have been trying to fend these off for a few days now They haven't been able to identify the source of that attack and the entire database of the Internet Archive is apparently safe But the website is made Unaccessible intermittently and it also knocks off the Wayback Machine website Which you probably know about it lets you
find old versions of specific websites stuff that vanished off of the internet And it's a really really useful information conservation tool and it is apparently a trend these days for plenty of public knowledge Repositories to be attacked by these types of attacks including the British Library or the Berlin Natural History Museum Apparently some people think it's fun to try and have less knowledge for humans pretty pretty strange behavior and The Internet Archive took this
opportunity and the like the word of mouth going around saying that they were attacked They took that opportunity to remind their users that those DDoS attacks are not really that alarming Compared to other problems that they're facing which is that they're being sued by many US publishers Because they claim that the Internet Archive is infringing on their copyright by Preserving all the material and basically functioning like a regular library they host a bunch of content that has
been donated by users and Just like a normal library and they offer rentals of this content whether it's a movie a book or whatever
Just like a normal library. You cannot run the same thing 20,000 times at the same time just like a normal library But apparently US publishers thinks that digital libraries are different than physical libraries and they are attacking the Internet Archive for this If they lost that lawsuit, it would be an absolute disgrace for human knowledge They already lost one relatively recently, which I think scrapped 500,000 books from their collection which really sucks because some of those are
things that are not being published or sold at all Anymore meaning that there's one less way to grab these it's the same problem with video game conservation when something is no longer sold or accessible In any way, I think copyright should just go away on those things because there's basically no reason to keep it Let people distribute what they need when you're not making money off of it I think that's fine, but apparently not so yeah DDoS attacks and a giant lawsuit is not good
The Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive are really useful project for scientific research and just for personal knowledge and having them Go off the map would really really suck Now we're going to talk about WSL the Windows subsystem for Linux some of you might think it's not related to Linux But let me assure you it is because it is running Linux So Microsoft has announced a few things for WSL that should improve the experience first They will automatically release some of
the memory used by WSL when it's no longer under use for the underlying Windows system Which is interesting because I would have thought that already was the case by default because if not It means that basically you were running your WSL system. You were launching apps It was grabbing more and more RAM and then when you close those apps the RAM stayed in WSL instead of being given back to Windows, so you probably had to close your WSL System from time to time and reopen it.
It's weird. I don't know They doesn't feel like it's been developed that well, but yes short But more importantly apart from that Microsoft is bringing a graphical settings app to configure WSL Meaning that you will no longer have to use a text file Meaning that probably some Unix die-hard fans will be even more mad about the existence of WSL Because now they're even moving away from text-based configurations Now I'm just joking you can still use those text files to configure things
But you will get a graphical app to do the exact same thing and Windows users will also get a new Environments feature that will let you create manage and launch various development environments Probably sort of like a virtual machine manager for WSL So you could create an Arch Linux dev environment a Ubuntu or Debian environment and launch these Indiscriminately from the same interface probably a graphical thing way easier to handle for a lot of people And I know a lot of people do not like WSL
They're afraid it will be detrimental to Linux's growth in the long run For now the data seems to point to the fact it had zero impact Linux is growing and growing faster than it ever has So WSL probably never had an impact on that I personally think WSL has the potential to cement Linux's place as the leading platform for developers Right now if you want to develop something in most domains, you're better suited with Linux It's going to be easier to install and run your dev environment
But for some people running Linux on bare metal is not an option So having Linux available on Windows means that people keep using Linux for development or learn how to use Linux for development Instead of just using Windows because that's what is installed on their PC and trying to develop stuff on Windows I think it's a net positive for Linux in general, but we'll have to see in the long run Now Ubuntu finally released their long announced version using a real-time kernel They're calling it
real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS But it is not a separate distribution despite its very long name It's just Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with a patched kernel that implements the preempt_rt patch set This is what lets the kernel handle various operations in a very predictable way Which is what you need for a few specific use cases if you want to learn more about specific kernel versions Including the real-time one I made a video very recently on that topic early this month or at the end of last month
And it's it just tells you everything you need to know about this This release also apparently improves compatibility for Ubuntu with the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 and it makes them perform better For real-time uses, but there is one caveat to use this version You need an Ubuntu Pro subscription and it is free for individuals and for small-scale companies up to five computers But you do need to create an account and to register with Canonical to access and create that subscription
Which is something that is a bit annoying because if you just wanted to use real-time Ubuntu and not give Canonical an info Well, you cannot it's not a deal-breaker But it probably would have been better to just offer that version as a regular download or through a specific repo that you could enable on any system Still it's there it exists if you need a real-time OS and you know Ubuntu Well, at least you don't have to learn an entirely new OS just to use it and it's also not a bad option
Registering for that free subscription will also give you longer LCS support from five to ten years if I remember correctly So it is not that bad and it's just a few details who create an account I'm pretty sure you could use fake information in a temporary email if you really wanted to And now we'll talk about operating systems with two different systems. The first one is an interesting one It is not a Linux based
system. It's a free BSD based one It's called Raven OS not Raven It's a Y instead of the E and it's something that I gave a shot to a while back Before realizing it was extremely far from ready at that time and their new release is still not ready for most people But it is still interesting because the aim of Raven OS is to replicate Mac OS's experience as closely as possible But it's not by using a tweaked KDE version or a GNOME version Which sort of looks like Mac OS but
doesn't really work like it and the theme is just bad in a lot of areas And the global menu doesn't work for everything. No, they don't want to do that They are developing an entirely new desktop and they also want to be able to download and install Mac OS apps on The system on Raven OS. So for now, it is just a developer preview. I think it's version 0.5 It's not even an alpha. It is described as unstable and full of bugs But you still get the very basics of a
Mac OS desktop. You get a global menu You get a dog that works they support the Kokoa APIs Which are what is being used mostly to build certain Mac OS apps and they will apparently run most if not all free BSD ports they will run a lot of Linux apps through the usual free BSD to Linux or Linux to free BSD compatibility layer and Mac OS apps are said to be able to work in the future They say it won't be perfect compatibility But they seem very confident that they
will be able to just let you download the DMG and install the app and run it So it's a very interesting project I generally feel like these sort of let's replicate Mac OS systems tend to never succeed because what people want from Mac OS is the polish and the smoothness and the aesthetics and Generally, none of the systems trying to
replicate that really manage it. There's a lot of really weird stuff Maybe the default experience looks okay But as soon as you start installing something you immediately notice that yeah, it's not made to look like that It's not meant to resemble that it's not working with the global menu or it's not working with the dark or it's just not Mac OS It's a system tweaked to look like Mac OS and so this will never satisfy any person looking for Mac OS But in the Linux world
maybe something that completely replicates from scratch the desktop environment of Mac OS might be able to satisfy those users and If they can manage to actually run Mac OS apps on free BSD then this would be a very very solid thing and this could probably convert a few people and Honestly, this could also probably be adapted as a layer to any other BSD or maybe even Linux based systems Which would be really really cool now?
the only real big issue here is that most good Mac OS apps are paid for and And so I don't know what they're gonna do about this Because well you would have to have a solid compatibility list to make sure that the app you just pay ten bucks for Actually runs instead of buying it and noticing that it doesn't or just not being able to buy it at all because it comes From the Mac App Store and this you probably will never be able to run on Raven OS So interesting project kind of kind of
skeptical about their chances, but still I will follow it because it's fun And the second operating system I wanted to talk about here is Rhino Linux You probably heard about it in the past It's a rolling release version of Ubuntu, but it's not really Ubuntu They changed the entire desktop for something called unicorn Which is based on XFCE and they want you to be able to install basically any app from any source And this this through had been put on po on pause and on hold because well there
was a bit of developer burnout Tensions ran high apparently people were not agreeing on the rhythm of development And so basically they stopped working on it for a while and they've just now Reorganized around a few community guidelines and more healthy development practices and they released Rhino Linux 2024.1 this is still a rolling release it still comes with its own packaging tool You can still install like packages from Ubuntu Packstall flat hub or snap this update is
minimal it only updates pack stall to its latest version It's kind of like the AUR for Ubuntu based distros if you don't know it also comes with the kernel 6.9 But apparently it's sort of a buggy version in certain areas Because the rebasing on the latest version of XFCE broke a few things that they built Notably their global menu and so it's been hard coded in terms of length So it might actually spill out of your monitor and you will have to fix that manually in a CSS file
Which isn't really all that great. I'm really only mentioning Rhino Linux here just because it really outlines the fact that open source projects and operating systems are not companies mostly their groups of people who invest themselves to the maximum on their project for a while and then they can decide it's too much and then they can Reorganize they can leave they can stop they can resume they can change and it's always nice to keep that in mind when judging or
Using an open source tool or a Linux distribution just because it feels polished and it's a finished product that lets you do your work Every day doesn't mean that it's made by a giant company with tons of money Does it has it doesn't mean that it has financial support that other capable systems might enjoy?
I personally tend to forget that from time to time because our stuff is generally very very good But some from time to time it's nice to remember that behind all of these projects that we use every day They are just human sometimes just one human sometimes two or three sometimes tens But they are doing this in their free time for the most part And so yeah problems can happen and I think the Rhino Linux example is a is a solid one People got super enthusiastic working on this thing
They really tried to rewrite things three times in a row because they had a new idea and at some point They just burnt out and this meant that if you use Rhino Linux as your main system You were left in the dust for like six to eight months, which is a feel bad But instead of judging the people making the OS we can all remember that hey, you know what?
They're just humans and it's sort of normal for humans to burn out and stop making those projects It I just wanted to outline this because that's something I tend to forget myself all the time Okay, and let's conclude this episode by talking about the steam deck the steam deck passed 15,000 games that are officially marked as being playable on the steam deck 10,100 have the official playable label meaning that they work on the steam deck But some elements might be a little bit
too tiny or you need to change the default settings or maybe controller input is not perfect, but it definitely works and is playable and 4900 games are officially verified meaning that they are perfect on the steam deck There are also 4,000 games being marked as unsupported and if you don't use a steam deck and you just use a Linux computer If it's a verified game for the deck You will install and play it with no issue on any Linux computer if it's marked as playable on the deck
Generally, you will have nothing to do to play it on a normal Linux computer And if it's marked as unsupported some of them will work Because they can be marked as unsupported because they don't support controller input or they don't support the resolution of the deck But some of them are marked as unsupported because they just flat out don't run on Linux at all because of anti-cheat or other things So your experience may vary but basically that's 15,000 games playable on the steam deck
That's probably closer to like 17 18,000 steam games playable on a Linux computer Recently verified titles for the deck include rogue trader something that I absolutely want to play and maybe that's the opportunity To get my steam deck out from its cupboard because I love this type of game, but I was really Uninvested and underwhelmed with Baldur's Gate 3 setting the game was Insanely good all the mechanics the options everything was fantastic But that generic fantasy setting just
doesn't do it for me. It is boring to me I much prefer science fiction and I much prefer the 40k universe to anything that is Tolkien based or Dungeons and Dragons based So while I will probably never finish Baldur's Gate 3 because I just Cannot bring myself to do it because I'm entirely uninvested in the story or the characters Warhammer 40k rogue trader seems a lot more like my gem and around the steam deck The data still seems to show that it's selling like hotcakes
It is consistently in the top three or top five sellers on Steam
Along with games. It's in the top five best-selling games on Steam, which is insane And that's been going on since the beginning of the year meaning that it probably sells multiple tens of thousands of units every week if you compare it to how many units the games in the top three or top five Of Steam actually sell that's a really really good thing for Linux gaming The more people use and own a steam deck the more developers will focus on supporting it and the more games will run on Linux
In general, so I will admit I personally have not used my own steam deck in a long time But that's mostly because I haven't really traveled a lot or at all recently I haven't been gaming much at all My time has been consumed by building painting and playing with my Warhammer 40k miniatures and armies Gaming has taken a big backseat recently, but honestly with rogue trader being supported it just sparked my interest again I will probably swing back to gaming at some point
I guess and honestly seeing the steam deck perform so well is really nice It's just a great little device great console and it's helping Linux immensely So props to valve with that. They're a
company. They're not doing this to be our friends They're doing this because that's where the thing they will make the make the most money and keep their sort of monopoly on the gaming market On PC for longer, but it still helps us in the short run at least so I'm not going to complain Okay, so this will conclude today's episode or this week's episode I hope you enjoyed listening to it even you though you might not agree with a lot of the opinions
I expressed in there. I hope you enjoyed So if you want to dive deeper into any of those topics You know where to go the show notes you have all the links that I use if you want me to keep making this show You also have links in the show notes right at the top that will let you support it and get access to a daily Version of this show if you become a patreon at any tier So thanks for listening, and I guess you will hear me in the next one next week. Bye