Linux After Dark – Episode 117

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Hello and welcome to episode 117 of Linux After Dark.

I'm Joe.

I'm Chris.

I'm Gary.

And I'm May.

Welcome back all.

May, you've actually been using your computers for a change.

What?

No.

Not me.

It couldn't be.

So what have you actually been doing then?

Well, for one, I've been going back to legacy distributions on everything.

I've been a bluefin user for probably a year and a half now.

And you got sick of the dinosaurs, yeah?

I got sick of the dinosaurs.

I just couldn't stand them anymore.

No, it's ultimately what I did is I installed Fedora on the computer and did all my setup

stuff that I'd usually do, which is basically just installing the Intel media driver and

calling it a day.

And the first DNF upgrade took less time than my first or regular bluefin upgrades.

I thought, that's not good.

It's just, I don't know.

I've been getting a little sour on this whole, the new way we're going to do Linux thing.

So you're telling me that the way we've been doing it for 30 years is actually better

for you.

I don't know if I should give you that satisfaction, actually.

What do you think it is that's causing that?

It's still using OS tree under the hood, right?

And that's what makes it sort of slow and sluggish.

I think some of it does have to do with OS tree.

I think some of it has to do with layers being kind of large.

Maybe I just ultimately have a better mirror for like Fedora updates than I do for GitHub

packages.

Controlling for download, it was about the same wall clock time, but I don't know.

It's rough.

Well, spoiler, I knew you were going to talk about this.

We do have some plan occasionally.

And so last night, I thought, I'm going to check this out on my 20 pound challenge machines.

That is a fourth gen i3.

It's not very powerful, but it's what I decided to use.

I downloaded silver blue and then Fedora workstation and put them on my Vento USB stick.

And then I was going to boot silver blue and install that.

And I noticed, ah, I've got an old version of blue fin on there.

Hmm, let's install that and see how long that takes to update to the most modern version.

Well, I started booting it and then it kind of didn't boot.

And so I don't know what went wrong.

Maybe it would have booted eventually, but I just was looking at it and then playing

a bit of darts and waiting for it and no, it wouldn't boot.

So I thought, oh, well, silver blue is then.

And so I installed silver blue and that took ages to boot as well.

And I almost gave up on that, but then didn't.

It took quite a while to install, quite a while to update.

And so I kind of had a feeling.

I didn't time it.

I didn't do the scientifically, but I had a feeling of how long it took.

And then I did the same for Fedora workstation.

And it took about the same amount of time to install and update.

So I have no data for it felt the same.

I don't know what you mean.

I suppose it's a feeling of, like, at least if you've got a bunch of packages updating,

you can see the progress, maybe I don't know.

Maybe that's it.

And that's not even the biggest thing about it just because most of the time, blue fin

updates happen in the background.

You don't even notice, like, that's how it's supposed to work, right?

That's how computers are supposed to work.

But it was more a couple of bugs that I've hit along the way.

A couple of months ago, I got stranded on update a blue fin somehow, where it just forgot

the keys that were required for downloading new updates.

And then while I was resolving that about a month later after I had gotten stranded,

because you know, sometimes you just have to use the computer and not fix the computer.

I hit control R and it came up with a stack trace from television.

And I thought, nah, what's television for those of us not in the now, apart from the

thing you watch in the corner of your living room?

Honestly, I'm not sure I didn't research it.

I think it's a fuzzy finder because you mentioned it before.

So I think it's some kind of fuzzy finder in your terminal so that when you do control

R, rather than just passing a simple bash history, it does fuzzy find as well.

But obviously, it can't find anything if it doesn't work at all.

The poor thing.

It told me to update the config file.

Maybe if I had gotten the updates working again and gotten everything back into shape,

it would have been fine.

But I guess that's kind of the thing that you get when you're going with any distro that's

either rolling or trying to push the boundary is sometimes you go past the boundaries and

end up with breakage.

And every six months to a year, I just switch a bunch of distros.

So this might just be that too, that want to move on.

So I installed Fedora on a whole bunch of things and continued doing more testing and continued

messing with computers.

We've got a whole list of things.

If anyone writes in, looking at the requirements for Bluefin, it does say Ventoy is unsupported

and suggests to use the Fedora media writer to create installation media.

I am convinced, convinced I am that I've booted that before off that Ventoy and installed

it.

But I may be wrong about that.

I'm probably wrong.

I think every install I've ever done of Bluefin has been from a Ventoy USB.

So maybe this is me.

So the way Ventoy works is that it puts files in.

If you look at the GitHub repository, you have to define some of the distros and it detects

that automatically based on the ISO naming scheme.

So if you change the ISO naming, which for example, Bluefin have, because they've changed DX

and given it different names and the different streams, the image files might have changed

names and also the config files that it pulls in automatically to create the bootloader

configuration will get broken.

I remember there being a forum post that George contributed to where they said we don't

support Ventoy because they don't work together.

Do you see what I mean?

If Bluefin changes something, the upstream for Ventoy that has written out configs needs

to adjust and it's neither party's responsibility almost.

If you see what I mean, you changed your distro, will you change your tool, Spider-Man

GIF?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, I think more of this is just me looking for a reason to move.

I was a little upset with getting stranded, I'm usually upset by bugs, but also it was

just kind of time to wipe things and restart in some ways.

One thing that you briefly mentioned to us is that you've been testing the speed of Firefox

with different packaging methods.

So I was actually trying to prove a different point with that.

I was trying to prove that old laptops aren't dead.

We just ended up killing them by setting the default power mode to balanced.

And instead, I ended up figuring out that for some reason, the Firefox flat pack performs

anywhere from about 15 to 30 percent better than every other package in Linux or every

other package that I tried, which was the deb in Linux Mint, the SNAP, and the RPM

in Fedora.

And I can't quite figure out why that is, but I mean, they have to build them all with

newer stuff with the flat pack.

So maybe it's more like the one that you can download directly from Mozilla, just the

.runner, whatever that you get.

So yeah, if you need a performance boost, maybe try out the Firefox flat pack, but what

I was actually trying to figure out was what the difference between balanced mode and performance

mode actually ended up being on computers, because I've got this old Surface Pro that

is a seventh gen i5, and I was using it just with Linux Mint, because I was just trying

that out.

I ended up going with Fedora eventually, but I was using Linux Mint at the time, and I

noticed that it just seemed really slow for what it was, and also I wasn't able to record

on it anymore after installing Linux on it.

Well Windows was fine, and that doesn't make any sense.

Why would the heavier operating system have a problem with this until I put it into performance

mode using the little battery drop down?

And interactive performance seemed fine, and audio seemed to work okay in everything,

and so I wanted to benchmark that.

And did you manage to benchmark that cross OS, because presumably Windows also has its

own balanced performance mode?

I did not reinstall Windows on it to test.

Yeah, and this is Linux after dark, so we don't really care.

But what did you find out then?

Are some distros stuck in this balanced mode, and not giving us the performance that we

could have?

I think that people should try out the toggle that they have on their laptop, whatever

they are running, whether it's Katie or Kenoma or Cinnamon or whatever.

I tried my Surface Pro 5 and the 50 pound challenge machine and my framework laptop,

and just between plugged in and unplugged, and different packages, what the performance

of speedometer was, so what number speedometer spat out.

I found that for some reason, the flat pack of Firefox performs as well the first time

you load speedometer as the RPM and the snap and the Deb roughly, and then every subsequent

run, it gets the better performance anywhere from 15 to 30%.

And I can't explain that well.

I mean, you can say that it's some type of caching, but then why isn't it working on Fedora's

package, why isn't it working on Linux Mint's package, why isn't it working in the snap?

Something's weird here, and I haven't dug deeper into that because I had other things

to mess with.

You made a Linux Mint as an easy-to-use Linux distribution.

I mean, yes, also water is wet.

I feel like there's a bell curve where you have brand new Linux users on the left and

really, really experienced Linux users on the right, and just the normal amount of experience

Linux users in the middle, and the brand new ones are like, ah, man, Linux Mint is such

an easy-to-use Linux sister, it's great.

And the really advanced people also say the same thing.

And then everyone else says, no, Linux Mint, there's so many problems with it.

You shouldn't use it.

Linux Mint, it's fine.

Yeah, I quite liked it when I put it on my X1 carbon for a while.

It's just fine.

It's just a kind of boring destroyer.

That's what I want, at least.

Well, yeah.

I mean, I installed it on the 50-pound challenge laptop, the L380, and it's everything

I wanted on that laptop.

It's a relatively sanely set up XFCE.

It gets updates and runs at browser, and that's basically all I need from a cheap machine

like that.

Yeah.

I also installed the XFCE version, obviously, and I had a good time with it.

The only thing was printing didn't work.

With Zabuntu, I plug it into my printer, and it just works instantly, whereas it just

didn't want to work with Linux Mint, so I just gave up and got another laptop, obviously,

from the stack.

Otherwise, yeah, it was a very pleasant and uneventful experience, which is what I want

from a Linux distro.

I guess I wasn't surprised that it was an easy-to-use Linux distribution, but just

that it seemed fine.

I don't know what people go on about it being so bad.

Two people really do that.

They had a rocky period, didn't they?

With the bad ISO download, and the thing that's tricky for me is that they are a validly

anti-snap, so they put a file into a stop-snap from accidentally being installed.

That's fair enough.

You could do that yourself, but I wonder what would happen if that became more difficult

over time, but I've quite liked it.

I obviously have installed the Debian edition, and that gives you rolling cinnamon on Debian

stable, and it's a solid desktop that is well put together.

It's a fine distro, and I would definitely consider offering it to people, as we discussed

on a previous episode, that we're interested in Linux, it would be right up there as the

one which I would give them an option to use.

Yeah, I would still go with Ubuntu for new people, but if they couldn't get on with the

weird interface, and they were really used to windows and stuff, then I'd just give them

mint cinnamon, I think.

I don't know, I think I would probably give them mint like Eucharist, because it is just

so boring.

I know they're not going to mess with packaging formats, and they're going to give me

an extra piece of bunch of new tools that might break stuff.

They're just going to update to every Ubuntu LTS, or so, and put some slightly more

bloodite changes in there to stop things like snaps being installed, and that's kind

of what I want for a computer I'm giving to my mum or whatever.

They do add their own stuff, like there's very software that they've written and added

to it.

The theming as well, they put a lot of work into the aesthetic, like it's got nice polish

on all the desktop environments when you install it immediately, and they have X themes,

I think they call it X mint and things like that, and the wallpapers.

The ass-threat is definitely applied, I think.

Yeah, it's just a nice, easy-to-use Linux distribution, I can recommend it.

I only switched away because Cinnamon's Wayland experience is a little rocky at the moment,

and the X experience, if you're running it on something like a Surface Pro 5, Wayland

just kind of does touch and pen inputs a little bit better by default in some software.

Like in Firefox, you can go into about config and get it to work, but I wanted to try

for Dora too.

Yeah, it feels like on touch devices, especially the touch screen is treated more like a sort

of tablet, and I mean that as a tablet with a pen, except you're using your finger as

the pen, and Wayland is putting a lot more sort of auto rotation, touch detection, quality

of life improvements.

On your list, you said, holy shit, calculators, I'm really curious about this one.

If you use Windows for long enough, I know we just said this isn't Windows after dark,

but you type in a math equation to like the search bar, you open the start menu, you type

in a math equation, you wait five to ten seconds, and it gives you the answer to the math

equation.

In GNOME, KDE, whatever, you just type in a math equation, and you get the answer, and

it's remarkable.

I can do 20 divided by five, because apparently I can't do that in my head sometimes.

It's the same reason why you just type LS over and over again on the console, you just

need something to do.

But not only that, the calculator in GNOME is probably one of the best desktop computer

calculators that I can have access to.

That sounds really silly, but things like being able to type in equations with parentheses,

just by default, you can't exactly do that elsewhere.

Like the macOS calculator might be the worst thing that I've ever used in all of its

modes, even scientific.

When I install XFCE on Debian, the selection of packages it pulls in does not include a

calculator.

Usually, I install them from flat pack, and I think it's the GNOME when I usually install.

You install a flat pack calculator?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I need those bleeding edge fresh features, you know?

This is where I admit to just using Google as a calculator.

I'm in the browser anyway, just I've hit the address bar.

Yeah.

I have been known to do that, but I also use Marta calculator, which I assume is not

much different from the GNOME one, because I've just tested brackets as we would call it,

and that worked fine.

Things like in the GNOME calculator, it has a history of calculations that just tell

you's up as you go.

You have to like hit a history button in the Windows calculator, or you just don't get

it in the Mac OS one, because it's trying to be a regular, like, solar calculator.

Control shift H in the Marta calculator brings up the history.

Yeah, there's just so many thoughtful features in the GNOME calculator.

I didn't ever think that I would be excited to go back to Linux because a calculator was

better.

I just can't believe that you install a flat pack of a calculator, Chris, that I'll never

get over that.

Actually, I install a calculator on my phone because the built-in Google one is just so

bad.

They just made it into just this Comic Sans looking round button clown show.

So I think at some point, Chris, you extracted the lineage calculator APK and sent it to

me.

I did.

Yeah.

And so I just use that.

Calculate is important to me.

I use it way more than I probably should because my maths is rubbish.

I mean, the only time I use it is when I have to work out tip, basically, and a tip

isn't 10%.

I think that's my only use case at this point.

Working out 15% in your head is really difficult, apparently.

Well, I don't go to America, so I don't worry about that sort of thing.

I don't think you will ever beat the feature of the Ubuntu Touch calculator that every

calculator should have, though.

The Ubuntu Touch calculator has favorite maths equations.

What are the you favorite or the it proposes?

You favorite them.

So you can do an equation and then you can hit the hard button to add it to your favorites.

All right.

You mentioned something about non-intro just scaling.

Yes.

So I have always installed.

I have the framework laptop and the service pro, which means that I have these high

DPI screens that are absolutely useless in Linux.

So I always need to go in and figure out, you know, search for whatever G setting it is

to enable non-intro scaling.

And so I was going to do that this time and then I realized that everything wasn't tiny.

It was all scaled already by default.

So I went into the display settings and sure enough, 133% is just available for you now.

And it didn't look shit and blurry.

No, generally not.

You can do 100% 133% 200 and 266.

So that's just available by default now.

The future is now we have high DPI non-intro scaling.

Yeah.

I've always found going on to be very good at scaling generally much, much, much better

than XFCA.

Yeah.

I was just going to say I have a computer attached to my 40 inch 1080p television and I mainly

just play games on it.

So they sort of render their own graphics.

So it's not fonts as such.

It's kind of graphical elements and buttons.

But the actual desktop looks absolutely terrible.

Like it's just complete mess.

I've set the font size to a slight, but there's no like uniform scaling like you'd have on

these new fangled modern desktop environments that people like to run.

But I deal with it.

But if it was my actual daily driver that I was set in front of, I'd struggle I think.

Well under bluefinn and I assume this was both because of flat packs and because of

how long ago I installed it and how long I went without reinstalling, which I guess

is a testament to its stability.

I was always switched between like large text and not large text using the accessibility

menu depending on what monitors I had plugged in.

And I just don't need to do that anymore.

Well time gets the better of us, so we should get out of here.

But at least people can't accuse us of not using our computers because you clearly have

been using yours a lot.

It's made so well done.

I've been modding more game consoles if we want to be there for that monologue.

We have made do and mended though.

So you know, there you go.

I was right.

Yeah.

Right.

Well, we'll be back in a couple of weeks.

Until then, I've been Joe.

I've been Chris.

I've been Gary.

Yeah, Dave and me.

See you later.