The end for BcacheFS, X11 compatibility layer, Flathub is massive

Hey everyone and welcome back to your 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 space. And this week we've got a bunch of stuff. First, the bcachefs file system drama has picked up again, but this time I think it's ended because this file system will just be dropped from the Linux kernel from now on. We also have a new x11 compatibility layer that might...

help with people who cannot really transition to Wayland fully. We also have big news about FlatHub becoming a massive, massive app store for Linux. and also a bunch of NVIDIA drivers related stuff, Meta winning an AI lawsuit, more organizations dropping Microsoft, and a lot more stuff. So as always, if you want to dive deeper into any of these topics...

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So, as it was bound to happen, BcacheFS is now officially kicked out of the Linux kernel after yet another clash between its developer and Linus Torvalds. As with previous issues, this seems to stem from problem... with how fixes and changes were submitted by the developer during the kernel development cycle. You're only supposed to submit fixes for existing features, you're not supposed to make sweeping changes to your codebase during a dev cycle.

these changes, you're supposed to propose them in between development releases. The developer behind BcacheFS overstepped, tried to add a new feature for BcacheFS repair functionality in the kernel 6.16 during the release candidate. phase, not even like the very beginning, but the very end of that cycle, which obviously is a big no-no. The code could also apparently cause regressions, according to other maintainers, and as usual, the BcacheFS developer pushed back, saying the rules should bend.

he resubmitted his patch as is Torvalds merged it as the very last patch that will land in the kernel for this file system because starting with 6.17 bcachefs will be dropped entirely Now maybe if that developer calms down and learns to play nice with others instead of trying to have rules adapt to him, well, maybe that file system can land back in the kernel at some point, but for the meantime, it's just...

better this way if you can't work with others within established processes and you keep pushing back against those then you don't really have any place in that project and you probably should go away and stop annoying people who actually want to follow the process and get things done. Now there's a new compatibility layer that might please a lot of people. It's called Wayback.

and the goal is to bridge the feature gap between X11 and Wayland. Now, of course, you know about X-Wayland, which lets you run applications using an X11 server as a Wayland client, but you're just running the application itself.

It doesn't permit certain apps to do things that they would expect to do so, generally insecure things that X11 allows, but also some features that Wayland just doesn't support. Now Wayback can apparently let you run an entire X11 desktop environment on top of Waylon and it's intended to replace the X11 server entirely on Alpine Linux at some point to keep complete compatibility when it's needed.

It is still super experimental and it might not be adopted widely, we'll have to see, but it's another option for people who might get onboarded onto Wayland by their distro, but still have some use cases that are not fully served by Wayland. Developers seem to think it would be ready next year, either around Alpine's May release, or at worst, at around November. So it's still a long way off, but it's interesting.

As far as I understand it, this lets applications run under an X11 desktop environment, meaning all the apps that you run on the way back we'll be able to talk to each other exchange data freely without the restrictions of Wayland support global keyboard shortcuts all the time etc etc and it also probably lets you just remote login to that and just have a remote desktop access as X11 allows you to do when on X Wayland the application itself is run as an X application

on Wayland, which means it does have limitations and it is not as integrated with other ex-Wayland apps unless you disable the Wayland security model through certain options like, for example, what KD offers you. So it seems to be more permissive, probably a lot... heavier but also interesting for some use cases where either Weyland or ex-Weyland don't really work.

Now, Flathub reached 3 billion downloads worldwide. Their open statistics, available at flathub.org slash statistics, give us a few interesting things. Notably that the US is the bigger downloader of stuff, although if we tally...

up all the downloads in the EU. It's actually more downloads than the US. Things have massively picked up starting in 2022. And they haven't stopped rising since. Flathub is just getting bigger and bigger with every passing month, with the most popular categories being utilities, games, audio and video, developer tools and networking. Normal, because that's the...

use case of linux for most people there seem to be more gnome apps downloaded than kde applications judging from the runtime downloads that's to be expected most applications are made for gnome these days and gnome app developers seem quicker to adopt FlatHub than others.

All these downloads cover more than 3,000 desktop applications, more than half of which are verified by their original developer, which is an extra guarantee for users that they're getting the application as intended, not with any dis... specific or maintainer enforced change. Now, of course, we don't really have any data from the Ubuntu Snap Store or from specific distro repos or the AUR, so it's harder to compare and to see Flathub is replacing other alternatives.

or if everything is just growing at the same pace alongside each other, which would also be nice. What is certain is that Flathub is now the App Store for Linux. Everything else can keep existing as is, but for developers who want an entry point to develop one Linux app that works on all Linux distros,

Flatpak is the choice. It might be harder to make your Flatpak package than any generic Linux distro package, but once you've done it, it works everywhere and FlatHub is the entry point to distribute your application. I think it's nice it doesn't prevent any other distro from using any other format but at least we have the one single option that mostly everyone agrees upon as being the right entry point and then you have other packages for

who still want to have specific distro support. Now, an NVIDIA engineer is now the co-maintainer of the Nova driver that's being developed by Red Hat. This open source driver is written in Rust, and it now has the support of Alexandre Courbeau, a developer that has worked at NVIDIA for about seven years in total. He's been an open source NVIDIA driver advocate at the company for a while, and he started posting...

hosting code for Nova and is now a co-maintainer of it, which is nice. This at least cements the fact that Nvidia seems interested in open source drivers. probably after seeing the success that AMD enjoys on that front and the benefits of having a community of talented developers helping your products work better on Linux. And Linux... is a crucial segment for GPU manufacturers. A lot of compute tasks, of rendering tasks, of AI work is done on Linux farms.

So let's hope this can boost the development of the Nova driver if it's officially endorsed at least by one of Nvidia's employees. It probably means that it's a good choice and a good option.

And while the NVIDIA drivers, the official ones, are currently open source, it would still be much better to have a mainlined driver, something that is part of the Linux kernel and something that is part of Mesa with NVK, rather than having to install... external module as with the current official drivers, because that introduces a bunch of problems, a bunch of install issues, where when it's in the kernel it generally tends to work better.

But also NVIDIA confirmed that older GPUs will be left behind in their drivers. Version 580 will be the last one that supports the Maxwell, Volta and Pascal architectures. These being the GTX 750, the GT-

the GTX-900 series, the GTX-1000 series, basically everything that doesn't rely on their GSP firmware will be left

on drivers 580 and thus end up unsupported, although Nvidia does provide support for their older driver versions for a long while generally. Now this still kind of sucks because... some of those GPUs really don't work well with the Nuvo drivers and they likely will not be supported by the newer Nova driver because it is only designed to handle newer GPUs from Nvidia, the RTX series and upwards.

Of course, users will be able to stick to the 580 drivers for a long while, Nvidia does provide security fixes for that, but you will not get, for example, better Wayland support on those, new features on those, which kinda sucks. This only reinforces the fact that open source drivers and firmware are absolutely

crucial. NVIDIA could absolutely open some of the specs or the architecture of these cards because these are old, they are not competing with anything brand new right now, and opening that up... to the community would probably let them make sure that Nuvo supports these cards properly and can help them move forward a little bit more, but it doesn't seem to be something Nvidia wants to do, which is, I think, unfortunate. Still, it doesn't mean those...

cars are entirely dead. Like I said, Nvidia does tend to keep having support for those older driver versions for quite a while. Now at some point, Fedora had a proposal to drop the 32-bit architecture entirely, starting with Fedora 44. This could have had a dire bunch of consequences for a host of Fedora-based distros, notably anything that is...

gaming focused because well for now Steam and Linux gaming in general relies on a bunch of 32-bit stuff and so ditching that would make Fedora and any derivative like Bazite and others sort of unsuitable for Linux gaming if you the steam flat pack it kind of solves the problem but some distros like bazite can't do that because they launch a specific steam session with a specific compositor and that doesn't play well with the flat pack package fortunately this proposal was phased out and

There was just too much opposition. It was just too soon to drop this architecture. Well, no current PC that I know of, or at least current PC that anyone would really want to buy, is sold with the 32-bit architecture. A lot of stuff just isn't ported to that yet, including some Steam libraries. There was also some apparently very vocal feedback, not necessarily phrased in the most productive way possible, which always sucks. You can discuss those issues without being...

especially since phasing out 32-bit will happen at some point. It is inevitable. A lot of programs and libraries already don't compile. on 32 bit so at some point it will have to be dropped it will ease the maintenance burden for a lot of distro maintainers for a lot of package maintainers it has to go away at some point but right now doing so would really destroy the foothold

linux is putting inside of the gaming space ubuntu even backed down themselves when they tried to do so because they realized like we're gonna get dropped like a hot potato by everyone so Fortunately, this has been abandoned but it will pop back up in the future, that's for sure. Now we also have some bad news for AI skeptics like me, as a court case against Meta's use of copyrighted books to train their AI tools was won by Meta.

The judge was careful to say that this isn't necessarily meta-winning as much as the plaintiff's failure to litigate that case efficiently. But right now...

The use that Meta makes of copyrighted works was judged as fair use. The judge said this didn't mean this use case is lawful in any way, it just means that the authors suing Meta had bad arguments and didn't develop proof to support the right arguments. The judge even said that it's hard to imagine that developing a tool to make billions of dollars by creating endless competing works could ever be fair use.

And that the argument that paying for access to these books would harm AI growth doesn't, and I quote, pass the straight face test, which I entirely... agree with. This isn't an argument. It is a statement saying, if we need to pay, then AI will cost us money, which, yeah, that's how things work. It's not a defense. It's just a statement that should be normal.

So basically, it doesn't mean that all court cases against AI companies or Meta will be automatically dismissed. It just means that the plaintiffs in this specific case had either terrible lawyers or chose a really bad argument to focus on. But the judge... was very clear in saying you should probably still sue them because there are a lot of open doors that you could go through to win a case against them. That's basically how this reads.

Now we also have yet another place moving away from Microsoft, this time the city of Lyon in France. They are not going to Linux, but they are moving away from Microsoft Office and they are embracing... Only office, not LibreOffice, interestingly. They're also adopting another video conferencing service, presumably to replace Teams. This is only for employees of the Lyon municipality, but that's about 10,000 people, so it is still a sizable change.

They call the replacement Suite Territoire Numérique Ouvert, or Open Digital Territory Suite, and it's hosted in regional data centers with 100% of that public market being attributed to French companies. So it is as much a move to try and save some money as a move to try and have better sovereignty over the software that they use. The database servers are also moving away from Microsoft products to become Linux servers.

And it's always nice to see this transition moving forward. We're really seeing the ball rolling in the EU. A lot of organizations and places individually ditching Microsoft products and adopting open source.

Hopefully this starts to snowball and there are a lot broader initiatives adopted because if we can start educating kids... with open source software and open source operating systems, then they'll want to use those in their professional life as well, companies will start providing them, and it starts to just...

pick up and at the end, in maybe a decade or two, everyone just uses open source software at home and this means more users, more potential contributors, more funding and it's just a better ecosystem for everyone. Now, interestingly, GNOME is apparently working on a prototype app for collaborative note-taking, nicknamed Aardvark but renamed Reflection.

It is a simple app that seems to use Markdown to take notes, but allows multiple people to collaborate on the same document. It's built as local first, so it's likely collaboration over the same local network, but the goal doesn't seem to make just an app

application to take collaborative meeting notes. This is absolutely a cool thing to make, but it's not something people have really been pining for as far as I can tell. The goal is more to show app developers how you can build a GDK app that has this collaborative features with a code example in the form of this specific application. So they plan to use Reflection as the tool that they use during meetings in the future and they aim to release a first version on Flathub in August.

Other features are planned like end-to-end encryption, permissions, and a nicer UI for comments and edits. This is all funded through the prototype fund through a grant to work on these specific features, but they also plan to apply for the second stage of this grant.

to keep things going. I think it's really interesting stuff, not as much for the collaborative note-taking app, although that's cool and I'm sure some people will enjoy using that, but for the prototype, showing that yes, on Linux we do have app development platforms that work really well. We're seeing a ton of applications being developed with GDK4 and LibidVita. My previous app on this very, my previous video on this very channel showcases a lot of really cool GDK.

and GNOME apps. But the more advanced features we can demo, the more we are likely to onboard new developers building more complex applications. And I think that's really, really nice. Now, it was announced and all but certain, but GNOME is making Papers, their default PDF viewer, to replace events. Ubuntu had already moved to Papers in their latest release, and the direction was pretty clear for GNOME as well. So starting with...

With GNOME 49, papers will be made the default. They apparently bridged the feature gap with events, as in building annotations, spell checking, fractional scaling support, screen reader support, so users shouldn't really lose anything, although...

There is apparently some issues with printing support, which is absolutely a big problem for a PDF viewer, because that's a feature that you might use quite often. This seemingly is an issue with GDK4 as a whole, not necessarily with paper specifically, some settings don't seem to be loaded properly for certain printers, meaning certain printers simply don't work well when they would normally be able to on other toolkits.

It is a small change on the surface, but I do hope that the printing problems get fixed if they're that major because, well, that's a big use case for a PDF viewer for a lot of people. Gnome is also replacing Totem with Showtime as the default player.

Exact same feature set, as far as I can tell. And they're also replacing dev tools, dev help tools by manuals, which is the graphical documentation viewer. Now it is... generally not giving you any more features or fewer features, it's more replacing applications that were either not really maintained or not ported to GDK4 and Libidueta by apps that are and adopt the recent GNOME guidelines to have.

an app default selection that really reinforces how the desktop works. So shouldn't be a major change, but that printing stuff does worry me a bit. Now you might have heard about the Stop Killing Games petition that was started by a YouTuber to try and get studios to, well, to stop killing their games and to make them impossible to play for people who either bought them or invested significant time and money in them. It's...

an all too common practice where a game is tied to a server that only runs on the company's servers and then they're shutting down that server when they realize that their game is not indeed going to be the next fortnight leaving all their players with a non-working title that sometimes they paid for or sometimes they invested a lot of time and money into.

This petition reached 145,000 signatures in the UK at the time I'm recording this, which is enough to get this considered for debate in the UK's parliament, but in the EU it reached more than a million signatures, although there are apparently some concerns about non-EU citizens spoofing their location and address to sign it. It's still probably, even if it's like 500,000 signatures, it is a lot.

All in all, it is a major success and it should at least place the topic on a more public front instead of leaving it confined to gamer-specific circles.

I think it's fair to say that the gaming industry, or at least the AAA gaming sphere, is destroying itself. They're chasing live service games, they're all trying to build the next Call of Duty, the next World of Warcraft, the next Fortnite, and they're all... failing at that, meaning the game quality is pretty low, the game lifespan is pretty low, and they're just

buying studios, ditching their games, closing studios after mismanaging them. There are terrible reports of horrible mismanagement, horrible working practices. It's just a really bad time for gaming. It's probably the worst place gaming has been in as a whole since they started burying those E.T. cartridges way back in the 80s, I think.

It's a terrible place to be in. So hopefully this petition manages to draw some attention and we can maybe find some solutions. It's not that hard, companies. When you decide to shut down your server, you can just offer the binary with a few code tweaks so that...

people can run their own servers on their own computers. You make it clear that it's all abandoned, but you just give out a binary so people can run the game still and still have fun. Doesn't cost you a dime. You can have a license that just... makes you entirely not liable for anything that happens. Just do that. It's easy. Now, there's a potential new license emerging for open source of free software project. It's called the Copyleft Next license. It was initiated as a project 13 years ago.

as an experiment by Richard Fontana. He's one of the co-authors of the GPL v3. And the project is being revived now with Bradley Kuhn, who's the founder of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Copyleft Next is funded by this latter organization, complete with a new website and community tools. They're also very clear in reinforcing the fact that none of their previous employers or current employers has any control over that license, probably to avoid the kind of red hat tempers with everything kind of reaction, because yes, every major...

developer or visible figure worked at Red Hat at some point, and that doesn't mean Red Hat controls everything they do from the moment they leave the company. Listen, Red Hat sucks, but they're not Microsoft, they don't have their hands in every pie. The Copyleft Next license is a free software license that makes sure that people who redistribute the code must do so

under the copyleft-next license, even if it's a derivative project. And any part of that derivative project must be copyleft-next or GPL if it also includes some GPL code. one can't apply additional restrictions to the rights of the user

even if these restrictions would be added by external contracts or agreements. So I think that deals with the red hat thing, where they don't restrict your rights in the license itself, but they do apply a customer agreement on top of that, which does restrict your...

rights to the license because you're going to get kicked out as a Red Hat customer if you do exercise any of the rights of the license. So I think this provision was written to avoid that kind of stuff. I'm no lawyer though so I might be wrong. Patches submitted to copyleftnext code and that don't have any specific license themselves are automatically licensed under the copyleftnext license and there's also a provision for a 15 years

sunset basically. Once the code has been first distributed 15 years ago, restrictions start easing up and the license becomes more permissive along the lines of maybe the MIT license although it's not exactly the same permissions. There's also a patent protection clause, like with all free and open source licenses, and there's the usual no warranty, no liability clause that we find in most free and open source licenses as well.

So basically it seems to be a sort of typical free and open source license with the major differences being that there's that sunset provision 15 years after the initial release the rights and permissions are opened up a little bit more and also that anti-breadhat customer agreement clause, which maybe I misinterpreted, but it really read like that to me.

And that's going to conclude today's episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. As always, you'll find all the links that I use to write this show in the show notes and links to support the show. are down there just as well, including one to our sponsor, Tuxedo Computers. Thank you all for listening, and I guess you'll hear me in the next one next week. Bye!