[Stephen]: All right, welcome back to BitFlip podcast. Today is going to be a pretty fantastic time. We've got some nice topics. We're joined today by Alex, which is watching spacecrafts go up into the atmosphere and above. We've got Jeff as normal and Adam. Boys, what should we talk about first? I think Framework 13 Pro.
[Geoff]: Yeah, I saw this came out this week. It's pretty exciting.
[Stephen]: I may have may have ordered one. probably will go through with it just saying
[Alex]: So what's exciting about it? Is it the fact that it's in space black? Is that what's exciting? Or is this actually a Linux laptop for MacBook Pro refugees?
[Stephen]: for me i wanted to upgrade enough of my original 13 which was a 13th gen intel that i figured why not just get the whole kit and caboodle and resell the other unit i wanted to upgrade the screen i wanted the trackpad that's haptic and the upgraded keyboard which for me i had the original keyboard there's a second gen that apparently got better but why not just go to the newest one and then yeah it's black
[Geoff]: So for those who don't know what we're talking about, the framework announced a new MacBook or not MacBook. They introduced their framework 13, which they're calling a MacBook Pro for Linux users. And they're doing that because they've completely redesigned the chassis. So it is made out of a single piece of aluminum. So it's milled aluminum. What's really impressive, I think, with the chassis is that you can swap any existing Framework 13 motherboard into that, even though they've had to rejigger some things to accommodate the next thing they improved, which is the battery. They went from a 61 kilowatt hour battery to a 74 kilowatt hour battery. They're claiming you can watch 20 hours of Netflix at 4K on a single charge, which is... Impressive. Processor-wise, it's a new Panther Lake CPU. They also have the Ryzen 300 AI, which is just a wonderful thing to say. Or sorry, Ryzen AI 300. AMD, fix your naming conventions. They're terrible. And then they also, because they moved to Panther Lake, they switched out the RAM standard. So it is now LPCAMM2 instead of just your normal RAM stick. So that's a little bit of a difference. But this is how they're able to move forward with being able to replace your RAM. The display for a lot of people, they finally did what a lot of people were asking, and they put in a touch screen so you can actually touch your screen. It's a fully custom. They actually designed this one themselves. And pricing is $11.99 US for the DIY and $14.99 for the prebuilt with Ubuntu because this is shipping also with Ubuntu. So that's kind of the main stuff. I mean, Alex, are you interested in getting one?
[Alex]: No, not at all. I mean, I like Framework as a company, and I'm very glad that Framework as a company exists, but I've bought over the years two of their laptops and skipped off them both in pretty short order. I just think that Apple make the best laptop. It's as simple as that. It's not got the best operating system on it, and you can argue the task as to whether it's Windows on a laptop or Linux on a laptop that's the problem, because they both have rough edges. mac os just works first time every time when i open the lid it's got battery it connects to the wi-fi even almost before i've opened the lid it's already connected to the network there's never and i use i use these things dozens of times a day you know like walking around the house working from home going to the office and and it's just never a problem and so as much as i want framework to succeed with this laptop and i actually really genuinely do because Desktop Linux is a gift that we should all be incredibly grateful for. You know, I reinstalled Arch on my gaming rig the other week. I was going to go and switch to CachyOS. I don't know why. But I couldn't get the installer to load with the NVIDIA graphics card I have because it's a 5070 or something. So then I tried no mode set. Anyway, I digress. The Linux desktop really is the only thing that we have in our lives, in modern computing lives, that is not going to n-shittify at some point. The business model is what it needs to be for an operating system that isn't going to try and ram advertising down my throat at every juncture. Anyway, this was not supposed to be about the Linux desktop, but it's unavoidable to have this discussion when talking about the framework because it doesn't run macOS. And because you don't have that tight coupling between the hardware and the software like you do on a MacBook, you could argue that Framework actually, probably out of all the vendors, maybe have one of the easier jobs compared to many other Linux vendors. But you have the removable modules, so you don't quite know what's going to be in the laptop there. You have to try and support who knows how many different motherboards and what have you now. What I think is exciting about this framework in particular, though, is it's a pro model, and that moniker has to mean something. So it has to mean better cooling. It has to mean a better screen, better battery life, better keyboard, better... Everything about this thing has to be top-tier, primo stuff. Remains to be seen whether that's actually the case with this one. But my question to you all is, do I need a touchscreen laptop? Do I want to be... I hate it when I get fingerprints on my screen at the best of times.
[Adam]: But when the screen is meant to be touched, it's a little bit different.
[Stephen]: Is it?
[Adam]: I mean, do you have an iPad?
[Stephen]: I do
[Alex]: I do, and I hate getting fingerprints on that thing.
[Adam]: You don't like fingerprints? Okay. This is a you problem. That is, there's nothing. Okay. We can move on to the next thing about this product because
[Alex]: It's okay when the screen is bright enough that it shines through the fingerprints. I suppose what is often the case on touchscreen laptops is that they don't have the same brightness that an iPad has to punch through it.
[Geoff]: Fair.
[Alex]: And so if you have the nits to work with, if this framework has the nits, the brightness to burn my retinas with, maybe it'll be okay, but also maybe not.
[Adam]: I will say it's also easier to clean an iPad because just it's form factor. You can just put it on a countertop and clean it off really effectively. But one of the interesting things you mentioned, so skipping off of framework in previous iterations, I did so as well. And I think it was, again, there was a couple of things that I feel a lot more hopeful about this specific unit. So the power consumption of the Panther Lake, hugely better than the 11th gen when I first bought, bought the 13th. And also just the buyer's remorse that I think came from the feeling that it did not feel as premium as I expected for the price when I paid for that first one initially. And I have high hopes for this, this solid unibody build for this one. Plus it just looks so fricking cool with that keyboard specifically like the the multicolored one, not the, not the purple one, the other one. Um, but, uh, yeah, I think that it might live up to that pro moniker, which is, I think what I have always wanted. And it's not, I guess it really depends on your perspective. Cause Alex, like you're stating, you know, I want my laptop to work every time X, Y, and Z factors of Mac book, but you're not getting rid of your Mac book. Right. So I feel like this is going to be a fun system for me to use on occasion. It's also a 13 inch versus the 16, which I always go for for my MacBooks. So I can use it for that portability factor, testing different Linux desktops. And I also really think that they were, they're excellent with their marketing on this one. I got to say, like they got me in the fields of, you know, own your equipment, uh, be part of the change that you want to see in the world, et cetera. And, um, yeah, so I was, I just came to the point where I'm going to sell my little Asus gaming laptop with the Strix Halo CPU and 128 gigs of Ram and hold on to my shackles for shackles, shackles for a little bit. And, um, wait for, I guess, round 11 at this point for when they're actually going to have some in stock again, which is insane.
[Stephen]: I got on a number six, the six batch. And so there's a couple of things, but I think this one gets Ubuntu certified, right? That's a new thing.
[Adam]: Yes.
[Geoff]: whatever that means.
[Stephen]: Yeah, exactly, whatever that means. So I'm curious, does that mean I install Ubuntu and it works exactly like I want it to, just like I expect my MacBook when I first open it? I don't know, so that's to be seen. What I mainly want this thing for, and I was thinking about getting the cheap Mac that just came out, but I want this thing to take out of my office and go service clients with. The big bonus is I drop it or what have you, and I can replace the parts. I've been carrying around my very expensive MacBook Pro, and if I drop that thing, it's a pretty big financial hit, right? So, I don't know. I'm excited. And I guess we'll talk more when it finally shows up.
[Alex]: Couldn't you buy two MacBook Neos, three
[Stephen]: Yeah, but
[Alex]: MacBook Neos for the price of one Framework
[Stephen]: very small.
[Alex]: Pro though?
[Stephen]: Very small.
[Alex]: Size isn't everything, Steven.
[Stephen]: I've been told.
[Alex]: Jeff, I see you got your hand up.
[Geoff]: Yeah, I guess I'm the only one who hasn't skipped off my framework. So I've had a framework 13 for two years now. And maybe the difference for me is I use mine more as a desktop replacement. So it basically sits on my desk plugged into my monitor and it rarely leaves that. Um, So I've been kind of, I've been back and forth on this one a lot, trying to figure out what I want to do to upgrade. So, cause I have a Ryzen 7040, I think it is. So I think it was like the second, first or second gen or whatever AMD they came out with. And so, you know, it does fine. I really don't have any complaints with it, but you know, the battery life and the other improvements have me kind of tempted.
[Alex]: The fan noise in that model that you have
[Geoff]: It's
[Alex]: is
[Geoff]: pretty bad.
[Alex]: very shrill.
[Geoff]: I actually, Alex, I thought of you because I so brief tangent. I've been playing around with Universal Blue to install Fedora as an atomic, you know, immutable OS, which is a whole separate conversation. I'm not going to go down. But when I was doing that last night, I stumbled across a GitHub repo that has a fan control app that you can install that actually controls the fan speed on the framework. And I'll put that in the show notes. I think it's kind of useful. So I was playing around with that a little bit last and I really saw a difference because I was pulling down some Steam stuff and I could hear the fans burying and I went in and I was able to, you know, lower the max speed down so it did not sound quite so atrocious. And I thought that made, you know, that seemed to make a difference. So I'm kind of torn because on the one hand, I kind of want to upgrade the chassis because I think the chassis has got a lot of improvements. But on the flip side, I kind of want to upgrade the motherboard, but I really don't want to pay RAM prices these days. And I feel like... I do one or I do the other because if I'm gonna do both, I feel it gets more economical just to buy a new one at that point. I can probably turn around and sell my current one for, I don't know, checking eBay and it looks like they're either, people are pricing them because Rampocalypse is making things really expensive or they're actually holding the resale value somewhat decently. I'm not sure what it is, but it looks like I'd at least make a decent chunk of whatever I buy back. So I don't know, Adam, what do you think?
[Adam]: I think that this specific model, the pro model, and I was just thinking as you guys were talking about pricing, as Alex stated, you could get two NEOs for the cost of this unit. However, I think that the difference this time is that it might actually be worth what they're asking for, for a singular purchase. Not looking at it through the perspective of upgrade path as the value proposition, to say is this worth it for this price assuming i go nowhere with the system and i do not continue to advance it and swap out parts and i think that that makes a big difference also when you're looking at the pricing because effectively if you go through you know if you do the mental gymnastics to look at the pricing structure if you're to swap out these motherboards over and over they're charging enough that you could effectively buy a new system each time. Almost. Um, it's close. Uh, especially if you're having to do things like you, you mentioned like switch to the new, uh, DDR five standard. So, um, yeah, I think that's the thing that was also compelling to me is that it's the price is okay for this level of quality and for this type of componentry that they're including in it. Um, and so that, I think that that makes a difference to me personally. I think a big miss though, I feel like they did 99% of this pro level of system, but why didn't they put a mini led display or an OLED? Because if they had those plus a upgraded webcam, then literally there's like, I can't think of any other gripe to say that this is a pro level, you know, um, best of the best type of build.
[Alex]: A lot of it will come down to how good those Panther Lake CPUs are from Intel. The AMD ones, particularly the generations that Jeff and I had, because I had the same framework that you did, Jeff, those AMD chips ran pretty warm. And when I pick up my MacBook again, the entire chassis is almost always cool to the touch. With the framework, how I like to use it, this is hell for computers, is I have a cushion on my knee on the couch, and so it can't breathe the way that a framework breathes, which is through the vents on the bottom, whereas on a MacBook, they're on the side, so it's never a problem.
[Adam]: Before we move on, I just want to acknowledge that Alex hates the fans, but he suffocates his laptop and he doesn't like touch screens because they get fingerprints, which is the point of touching a screen. I just, I just, okay. I just wanted to put those two together. You can continue
[Alex]: It also
[Adam]: now.
[Alex]: sounds shrill when it's on a desk as well.
[Geoff]: It does.
[Alex]: It also gets hot when it's on a desk as well. It just happens a lot faster.
[Geoff]: Yeah, I can confirm. Like, again, mine sits on the desk. I have a little 3D printed stand for mine. And there are times where, you know, what's also weird is I sometimes have an issue where, like, I'll come back for a while and the fans are going full on burr. It's been in suspend mode and it's just, it is warm to the touch. So there is definitely some issues with the thermals on the one I have, which is why I am thinking of I might upgrade the motherboard and leave the chassis for another day. but then
[Stephen]: Okay.
[Geoff]: I have to find LPCAMM2.
[Alex]: Yeah.
[Stephen]: So we've got me pre-ordering one. Probably we'll go through with it. Adam seems pretty sold. Jeff. Okay. Okay.
[Adam]: Oh, I'm sold.
[Stephen]: Count Adam sold. Jeff is kind of on the fence, but that's fair. He has some pretty good reasons. Alex is probably not buying four or five of them. And that leaves us with the other awesome things that they released, right? They've got a keyboard that I absolutely will order as soon as it's available.
[Geoff]: What, you don't want your Logitech K400 anymore?
[Stephen]: I don't. I have three of them and I want to throw them across the room. They are terrible to use. The trackpad is the worst thing ever. But I mean, if you're interacting with a server or whatever, it's fine. But sweet Jesus, I hate them.
[Geoff]: Yeah, the track. I think I've got one back there somewhere. The trackpad is gone. The one saving grace for it is that mouse button on the or the click button on the left side. Or you can kind of hold it like, you know, in two hands and you can kind of click with the other finger. That is the only saving grace of that keyboard. Otherwise, it is complete garbage. I agree with you.
[Stephen]: Mashed potatoes feels nicer to type on. Honestly. Just saying.
[Alex]: It is interesting you mentioned the keyboard, because they also announced something pretty cool for the 16-inch laptops. They've basically got this Oculink dev kit, so you can attach external full-gas GPUs into your 16-inch framework i presume when it's on your desk you're not taking that to starbucks are you but uh how cool is that like a proper pcie interface for high-speed network like you want to put 100 gig network card in your framework laptop go right ahead i mean does it make a lot of sense in most cases almost certainly not
[Geoff]: Did you hear that they also put a 10 gig ethernet USB card out there? So you can also have that now.
[Alex]: And it's tiny.
[Geoff]: Yeah.
[Alex]: It fits in the same sort of footprint as the 2.5 gig Ethernet cards used to. We'll see. I mean, we all know 10 gig copper gets hot today, but this is a new breed of controller, so we'll see. Judgment is out on that one. I like a lot of this stuff. Like, does putting an Oculink port in a laptop actually make sense? I don't know. But they did it, and kudos to them for doing that.
[Adam]: The other cool thing about the Oculink implementation that they're using is that it's an X8. So you have actually a full eight lanes of PCIe. And that's the thing that's interesting to me more than
[Alex]: Gen
[Adam]: the
[Alex]: 5?
[Adam]: idea, because Oculink has been in That I'm not positive
[Geoff]: Yeah.
[Adam]: on, but Oculink has been in other offering offerings from like GPD, GPD? I think it's GPD WIN Max is what they're called. Those little small form factor PCs and such. But I believe those are always constricted to buy four for the lanes. Oculink just inherently has less overhead than Thunderbolt, which I'm excited about, but The idea of an uninhibited eGPU versus, you know, what we've seen with eGPUs up till now is the really exciting part about that for me. That could be a game changer.
[Geoff]: I mean, they're definitely targeting the 16-inch as more of a gaming-focused machine. I really do think that they're trying to get as much value as they can out of that expansion bay as they possibly can.
[Stephen]: I think it's also like a workstation sort of machine, right? Like people that want the thing on their desk, but they want a laptop for whatever reason. Like, well, Adam always buys the larger MacBook. So I think a lot of people want to use the larger one for gaming. Sure. But maybe if they're messing about with AI and whatnot, and they want a graphics card into their machine, it's a good option.
[Adam]: Also to be fair, the 16 inchers do not have the, um, 16 inchers do not have the issue with that fan spin up wine that you guys are complaining about. Um, we have, uh, one of my coworkers has the 16 and it's, it's quite nice and quiet. Um, and I think I'm also interested in how quickly they've started to do some of these iterations. So you see that they did the new solid, um, the solid touchpad and it's the haptic now as well. They have the new solid keyboard. Uh, they just, uh, it was probably within S was at six to eight months. They released the first graphics module upgrade and they had the Nvidia and it was the 5,700 with the eight gigs of Ram. They just announced that they're doing the 12 gigs of Ram. And that's a pretty quick, cycle, honestly, for these things. So they're putting some attention on the 16 that gives me a lot of hope on where that's going to go in the future.
[Alex]: so quick bit of real-time confirmation it's pcie gen 4 with eight lanes which is roughly equivalent to gen 3 at 16 lanes roughly roughly in terms of bandwidth so you should be able to run most desktop gpus at roughly 85 to 95 percent of their actual capability in an external enclosure That has never really been possible on a laptop specifically before. Very exciting.
[Geoff]: So I think just to wrap this up, I think all of us can unanimously agree that we really hope Framework succeeds in coming out with something. I mean, my personal hope is I hope worst case scenario is even if Framework doesn't make it, the ideas that they have put forward about modularity and repairability, you know, because I've heard Lenovo is coming out with other machines that are repairable. I really hope that what they've started keeps going. If not Framework, someone else keeps it going because I think it's the way forward.
[Alex]: Now I'm sure by this point in the show you've noticed that I'm not in my usual studio setup. Please bear with me whilst the audio is so poor this week. But I am in Cape Canaveral because yesterday my wife and I decided to fly down from Raleigh to Orlando to come and see the Falcon Heavy launch that was scrubbed from Monday until today. So as we record, it's Wednesday, April 29th. And... we did it we got to see the falcon heavy go up at 10 15 this morning or 10 13 to be precise uh and we got to see that the reason this one was so special to me at least was because it was a dual booster returning to pad launch they don't do they don't do falcon heavies very often first of all and second of all they don't do dual return to the cape very often they normally put them out on drone ships out in the middle of the ocean Something to do with the amount of propellant they need to turn the thing around and bring it back to land. But it was just awesome. I don't really have much else to say other than it's not an event that photographs very well. You feel it more than anything. You see the big firework going off in the distance. And then you see the boosters way up above your head. And then before you know it, they're on the ground. They're doing 4,000 kilometers a second. And then suddenly they're on the ground and they haven't blown up into smithereens. And then maybe 15 seconds after that, the double sonic boom hits you. And then the double sonic boom from the other booster hits you.
[Geoff]: Oh.
[Alex]: And it's just like, guys,
[Geoff]: I am so
[Alex]: I
[Geoff]: jealous.
[Alex]: was just...
[Geoff]: I am so jealous.
[Alex]: As an adult, you don't get often that moment of pure, pure excitement like that, where you are just in the moment. And for me, it was like, there was just this, we were at this place called Jetty Park in Cape Canaveral. which is across the water from, it turns out, a nuclear submarine base because we saw a nuclear submarine come sailing in front of us this morning. It says a lot about my day that that wasn't the coolest thing I saw. Yeah. Yeah. If you are ever in the Orlando, Florida, Cape Canaveral area, we're going to Kennedy Space Center tomorrow. I'm... Beside myself with excitement about that, too. I think they've got like Saturn V
[Geoff]: Mm-hmm.
[Alex]: on its side that you can go and see and stuff and a space shuttle. And who doesn't love spaceships? I mean, it was a really cool experience.
[Adam]: I'd just like to call out the fact that he's saying that it wasn't good to photograph. And as our resident pro video guy, he didn't bring a nice camera. I want, I want our audience to understand that, that it's probably amazing to photograph and he just didn't want to hook some homies up with some, you know, let us live vicariously through you. No, no, no. He just had to, just had to have it for himself.
[Geoff]: If you want, go watch the video of him he posted on Mastodon. You can just hear the giddiness in his voice. He's like, oh, oh, there
[Alex]: Look,
[Geoff]: it is. It's coming down. It's coming down.
[Alex]: the rocket launched 12, maybe some miles away from where I was stood. It was maybe five pixels high on my video. I just I took my phone and the tripod and I just put it up just to record something. It's one of those things, like if I had a 1200mm lens on a monopod and blah, blah, blah, if I had 20 grand's worth of camera, I might get a shot. I didn't. And honestly, sometimes I spend so much of my life recording stuff for other people. Sometimes I just want to be in the moment, and that was one of those moments for me. So, sorry, but...
[Adam]: I hear you on that, actually.
[Geoff]: We acknowledge and accept your sacrifice because it's totally worth it.
[Alex]: Yeah, so that's why I have Crap Audio this week, and I'm sorry about that. But coming on to more BitFlip-related topics, I shared this with you earlier in the week, Jeff, that Proxmox and Kasm have announced an official partnership. And Kasm is a way to have basically web-native workspaces in your browser, like a desktop operating system experience within your browser.
[Geoff]: yeah no i after you posted that i decided i wanted to spin it up and give it a try uh partly because we're trying to figure out some stuff on our end for hosting thing for the host stuff and it's really interesting so i actually did it in It's funny, you would think it would be easy mode because Linux server is a big user of Kasm and they have Kasm in a lot of their containers. And so they have a Kasm Docker image, but it's Docker in Docker. So it just adds that extra layer of complexity on top of everything. And then also because we're hosting this stuff is on tail scale and you have to access one port in order to get things set up and then a different port to actually use it. I had to like flip configurations around. It was a whole. It was not the easiest thing for me to spin up and give it a try. But once I got it up, it's actually really cool because you can set up Chrome. You can set up full operating systems. I think I saw you can run a Fedora image in there, Ubuntu. You can run like Signal and Discord. You can do a whole bunch of stuff in there, which I actually find kind of cool because obviously work doesn't always let me access certain things. So maybe if I can create a way to be able to get into some of my stuff remotely, this might prove useful. I don't know, Steven, you're the resident, you know, hoster of things. Do you have a use for this?
[Stephen]: So the news, I think specifically, is that they have the partnership with Proxmox. So it's, from my reading and my understanding, it's supposed to work natively with the hypervisor so that you can on the fly spin up these resources for your clients, right? um i've been looking at uh and actually i i do host out uh virtual machines that are just basic desktops uh for for my clients because they don't want to uh to be you know governed by this thing on their desk back at their office they want to be able to get to it from wherever they are and the added benefits it's in a data center so it's better power and whatnot etc etc but From a Proxmox perspective, it'd be pretty sweet if I could just have a pool of resources and it spins these things up. And so I've been looking at how to do that, but it's pretty complex. But I think it's worth exploring. Adam, what do you got?
[Adam]: I am just wondering how, how is this different than a typical Kasm deployment? Is it just going to be an interface type of change? Cause functionally that's, this is what Kasm has always been correct. It's a, it's a VDI play like that. Are they also, are they limited? Do you guys know, are they only Linux desktops?
[Geoff]: Yes.
[Stephen]: No, no, they can do Windows. Whoa,
[Adam]: But
[Stephen]: whoa.
[Adam]: I
[Geoff]: Can
[Adam]: can't.
[Geoff]: they do Windows?
[Stephen]: No, right on their website, you can click on Windows and it gives you a demo of Windows.
[Geoff]: Hang on, now I want to pull up a Kasm instance
[Adam]: Okay.
[Geoff]: and see what I can pull up.
[Stephen]: I would not have been interested in this whatsoever had that been the case. I'd love to have Linux desktop be to my customers, but they're just not using it, right? So yeah, I was interested in this because I specifically went and saw the demo.
[Geoff]: interesting i find it's just it's very cool technology i just don't know the value in proxmox like so i set it up in the box that we have i then try to spin it up in an lxc to get around the docker and docker issue and just run it inside a container and it just i ran just so many errors trying to do it so i don't know alex you you did you try did you have any better sex best
[Alex]: yeah
[Geoff]: luck than i did
[Alex]: well i think the big announce the big part of the announcement here to pay attention to is the fact that the the integration between Kasm and proxmox there's now something called a Kasm auto scaler
[Stephen]: Yes.
[Alex]: so you don't need to leave these vdi systems spun up a hundred percent of the time just in case their owner shows up so it's kind of like what citrix do with their um what do they call their vdi solution i used to use it every day in the bank in london i've forgotten the name
[Geoff]: God, they use it in
[Alex]: But
[Geoff]: the office.
[Alex]: Citrix, you could always tell, they would boot the machine when I logged in in the morning because it took 10 minutes to load up.
[Geoff]: Yeah.
[Alex]: And I think this is doing a similar thing with Kasm natively integrating with Proxmox. It's not the same as the old pattern, like I say, where you just leave it spun up the whole time for the five minutes that you use it. This announcement is all about that kind of auto-scaling capability.
[Stephen]: Yeah, honestly, think about it from a hosting perspective. If you have a finite amount of infrastructure, you can over provision somewhat the amount of VDI that you can push out to your clients, right? Like assuming you could run a maximum of 50 machines all the way out, you could, you know, sell out 60. with the understanding that most of the time you're never going to be running 60 at any given moment. Of course, that's the exact same as when you start messing about with over provisioning storage, you have to be careful of these things. But from a hosting perspective, being able to do this natively on the hypervisor is a very big difference.
[Adam]: I'm wondering, Steven, since this is specific to your, in your realm, how much call for this are you seeing from your customers these days? Is this something that is popular that people are looking to get into more and maybe what's your opinion on like the size of business and where it fits, where, where it doesn't fit?
[Stephen]: I think that it's popular with people that are trying to do more remote work, right? When you don't have to deploy out hardware like a laptop to every single employee, and there's an understanding that perhaps they can just remote desktop in with their machine that they own, you can maintain having all your data sovereignty and everything else all inside your own infrastructure. There's also certain situations where you can't have certain data off on other people's hard drives whatsoever, right? So imagine doctor's offices, what have you. The other large part of this is licensing of specialized software. So imagine you work in a hospital and there's some software that, I don't know, is very specific to an x-ray machine that you use. Instead of every single person's desktop having a license for this thing, maybe their techs, they just log into a certain VDI and those machines are up and running for that.
[Alex]: Imagine if you ran a podcast with some buddies and you all wanted access to a shared email inbox. Hypothetically.
[Stephen]: Hypothetically.
[Geoff]: That's the exact for those listening. That's the exact issue we've been running into. And I will also add. I would I would the dream for me was I want to we all have a tail scale account and we all want to be able to, you know, we have an I, you know, OIDC thing set up. And so I was like, oh, we could all log in and access, you know, a single shared thing. Can't do that. Everyone has to have their own shared persistent data. So we're going to have to create a single, you know, bit flip account and we'll all have to use that. I mean, that would honestly be really cool. If you could share a session, like, you know, obviously only one person could access at a time, but if you could share a session so that way, you know, I could log into the account and then when I'm done, Alex could log into it. I think that would be really cool.
[Alex]: Now, time for a little bit of housekeeping. If you want to send us an email, contact at bitflip.show. Thank you to those of you that have written in. We're going to start incorporating some of those emails into future episodes. Also, I would like to let you all know that we are a big boy grown up proper podcast now because we have a Patreon. You can go to patreon.com slash bitflip. Help us basically pay for our editor at this point. We're working with a guy in Europe. I don't know if he's comfortable with me revealing his secret identity, so I won't right now, but he's worked in a lot of open source podcasts in the past. Very excited to be working with him. And so, yeah, if you want to support the show, help us not pay out of pocket to bring these episodes to you quite so much, we would very much appreciate that. Patreon.com slash BitFlip.
[Adam]: All right. Here's one that I wanted to ask you guys a little bit about. So who is interested and who noticed that the steam controller is now for sale? Have you guys seen anything about this? Okay. Jeff has seen this. I think it's interesting that it launched separately from the steam machine. Um, and they, I believe it's, it's selling at around a hundred dollars or it's going to sell at a hundred dollars for the cost of this thing. I find it feels very similar actually to kind of like the framework type of proposition where you're kind of paying for the change you want to see in the world. They're pushing Linux gaming forward. It looks to be, and from all the reviews that I've read, to be a very high quality product as well. It's still expensive. $100 is a lot for a controller. But I personally am probably going to pick up two just because... I'm that guy and I want to support that thing. And occasionally I'll play games with my brother or with somebody over the internet. So what do you guys think? Jeff saw this. Were you going to get one, Jeff?
[Geoff]: I saw this when they announced the Steam frame, the Steam machine, and the Steam controller back in, was it November, October, before the Rampocalypse really hit and everything kind of went to hell. Um... I was really tempted. I got to say the price. I understand the price because I would not want to be trying to price things right now in the current economic climate. It is... chaos. But I was totally hoping for more like $70 or $80, $100. I mean, it's $20. I know it's not the big deal, but I've got here in my hand for those listening, I've got a 8-Bito 2C. And this is a fantastic controller. I really, really like it. But it's only about $30. And it can do... pretty much everything that the Steam Deck or the Steam Controller can do. The one thing that's missing that I kind of would like about the Steam Controller is those touchpads to be able to play certain games. Like I was watching, I think it was Linus, he was playing Anno, I don't think it was 1800, but it was one of the Annos, and he was able to play it with the touch controller, the touchpads, pretty decently. And so like, I would really enjoy being able to do that. So I will probably pick up one, but I was really hoping to pick up two because I think the other great thing I think that they have is that really cool puck that will wireless, you know, first of all, it's the wireless communication between the, you know, your computer and the controller. So it's a good 2.4 gigahertz. You're gonna have good connection, but then two, it magnetically snaps into it for charging. I hope all the controller companies take that on because I think that is one of the coolest features.
[Adam]: I think it has some reportedly has some excellent gyro controls as well, which that's an additional cost there. I don't know if the controller you have has that, that sort of functionality built into it, but again, yes, it's expensive, but if you read the spec list, it's everything is premium. It's, it's the newest technology for the analog controls. They're actually apparently beyond
[Geoff]: Yes.
[Adam]: hall effects where they're, I don't
[Geoff]: So
[Adam]: remember
[Geoff]: they're
[Adam]: what it,
[Geoff]: called TMR. I mean, look at it. It's a very long name. It is tunnel magneto resistance sticks. So the issue with Hall Effect sticks, they're great because there's no stick drift. The problem is they are more power hungry. So the TMR sticks are kind of the best of both worlds because they are exactly like a Hall joystick, but they don't consume as much power.
[Alex]: So let's put the pricing into context for a moment. And I think this controller starts to make more sense when you do. A basic Xbox controller from Best Buy or something like that, brand new, the sort of basic one, $65. The top tier Xbox Elite controller, if you can believe this, is $200. Now, maybe if you're a pro eSports person where that finesse matters, you should buy a PC. But putting the Steam Deck, the Steam Controller, right slap-bang in the middle of that price spread, I mean, $100, yeah. Do I wish it was cheaper? Yeah. But also, to get the list of features they have, like if we just needed another Xbox 360 controller or another DualSense controller in the world, well, those already exist. They're already massive volume products. So to bring something new to the table, like the, what do you call it? They're almost like touchpads on the Steam Deck.
[Geoff]: Yeah, they're
[Alex]: And
[Geoff]: touchpads.
[Alex]: they
[Adam]: They
[Alex]: have this
[Adam]: are.
[Alex]: lovely kind of like... When you move your thumbs over the trackpads, they have this lovely haptic feedback to them. I've tried a few times to play Factorio that way, just a similar keyboard and mouse-based game to Anno, like Linus tried. In the end, I always go back to a keyboard and mouse. It is the superior input method. But there are times where you think, I've just spent 8, 9, 10 plus hours behind a desk at work.
[Geoff]: Um...
[Alex]: I ain't going to sit there and play Factorio at my desk. I just want to kick back and do something silly on the couch. And for that use case, maybe this is the play.
[Adam]: You guys also think that maybe part of it releasing it now, I think that it was partially strategy to cut back on some of the sticker shock. That's going to take place when they release the steam machine with the understanding that it's going to be, I think everybody agrees at this point, then it's going to be more than we would want. So to be able to front load some, some of that spend, I think is a pretty smart shrewd little strategy there. So,
[Geoff]: I think it was Linus who suggested this one and he's maybe not wrong. you know, so it's a hundred dollars for the controller. What if they throw a controller in with the steam machine and kind of like, oh, you're looking, you're getting a hundred dollars in value for, you know, kind of jacking up the price of this controller to make it seem like you're getting a better deal. I think probably from a parts and manufacturing perspective, they probably could have sold in normal times. I think they might've sold it for more like 75, 80 bucks. I think you're absolutely right with the Steam Machine and everything going on with the RAM and everything. I think there may be a little bit of 4D chess going on with that one. So we're going to bring back something we tried previously and we're going to try it again this time. Maybe we don't do it every episode, but we're going to do some quick bites. We're going to do a couple of things that we think it's good for you to know and talk about it really quickly and then move on to something else. So, Alex, I think there's a new Ubuntu release you want to talk about.
[Alex]: Every two years, sure as death and taxes as a new Ubuntu LTS comes along. 2604 was released this week and they've called it Resolute Raccoon. I kind of want to be a fly on the wall in some of these naming. conventions. But this is the culmination of a huge amount of work done by the Ubuntu engineering team, I think led by John Seeger, who's the VP of engineering at Canonical these days, to kind of rustify a lot of the internal tooling, like Sudo is now based on Rust. It's a huge amount of rust added to the new Ubuntu. It's just... NLTS is a beautiful moment in time because it's the culmination of two years hard work and effort to get to a point where you know things are going to be stable and you can build on top of this thing and it's going to last.
[Geoff]: Yeah, no, I'm, I'm excited to upgrade, but I'm obviously like, I'm going to wait to the point one release. Cause you wait for the point one release.
[Stephen]: So I guess that leads us on. We have a new Fedora as well. There was a bit of a wait time though. I think it was delayed by what, like a week, right?
[Geoff]: Two, two weeks.
[Stephen]: Two, two weeks. So obviously that ships with the latest Gnome 50, Gnome War X11, and you have awesome KDE as well. I do like that they release these things all in one release as opposed to where Ubuntu has the different teams and whatnot doing the desktops. I think Fedor is starting to kind of pull ahead of Ubuntu for the main desktop, but regardless, release 44 is now live.
[Geoff]: I don't know about you guys, but I run Fedora, so I'm excited to upgrade and see what the new goodness has to offer.
[Adam]: I was going to say, I'm quite a bit more interested in the Fedora release this time for sure. I'm always, they always have some fun. I feel like Fedora still has the fun in the releases and it, and yeah, like in a lot of ways, the Ubuntu release should be where people are looking just from a pragmatic perspective, but it's great to be able to see these new things coming out and they seem to push things forward pretty aggressively. It's that nice middle ground though, too. It's like stable, but just enough.
[Alex]: I don't mean to turn this into a massive discussion about Ubuntu versus Fedora. Maybe we should save that for a future episode, actually. But I always feel like the Fedora release cycle being only nine months and the LTS cycle being, is it 12 or 14 months or something?
[Geoff]: There is no there is no LTS for Fedora. It's.
[Alex]: Sorry, just the support cycle for
[Geoff]: Yes,
[Alex]: a
[Geoff]: it's 12.
[Alex]: Fedora
[Geoff]: It's
[Alex]: release
[Geoff]: yes,
[Alex]: is so
[Geoff]: it's.
[Alex]: short that you have to upgrade.
[Geoff]: Yes.
[Alex]: Yeah,
[Geoff]: Yeah.
[Alex]: never a fan. But speaking of upgrades, it's not always a good thing to upgrade, is it, Jeff?
[Geoff]: No, so Bitwarden had a it wasn't a vulnerable thing was in GitHub actions where it was, but they had a
[Alex]: They had an oopsie.
[Geoff]: They had an oopsie release. So 26.04.0 had some vulnerabilities in it. And I actually got almost bitten by this one because I've been playing around with Universal Blue, as I said at the beginning of the show. And I've been building my images with Bitward and CLI in it and testing it out and doing different things. And if I had built during the vulnerability period, I would have been compromised. Now, granted, it's my own self-hosted instance, and it's not publicly accessible, so I don't think I would have run into there. But if for some reason you run Bitwarden CLI, double check to make sure you're not running this version. They did release a patch within about, I think, 90 minutes, I think is how quick the vulnerability was caught and fixed. But just check your stuff. Make sure you don't get bitten by this one.
[Adam]: can confirm that Jeff was sweating bullets when this happened. I believe we were on discord when you found
[Geoff]: Yep.
[Adam]: that, uh, chatting about it. So,
[Geoff]: Yep. There
[Adam]: yeah.
[Geoff]: was there. There were some swear words thrown on that one.
[Adam]: So my item for tonight is that cal.com, which is a self-hosted Calendly option that was out in the world, open source previously, no longer open source. And they are citing that the concern is around AI scooping up open source projects. And there's still some versions of this still available, apparently. but all of the more business focused enterprise types of, uh, versions are, have been pulled down or no closed source, which is, um, one of the, how many have we seen? Has there been many other examples of this, of the open source closing up because of AI?
[Alex]: There's been examples, I suppose if we look at book law and there's been a few examples of people rage quitting when being accused of being written by AI,
[Geoff]: Yeah.
[Alex]: but there is no examples to my knowledge really like this where people are blaming AI for going closed source. You hate to see it. It's a real shame. True or not, I just don't think burying your head in the sand and locking people out of the open source model is the way to go. We've, as a society, benefited hugely. Arguably, the AI models have benefited more than anybody from it. But open source as a movement, as I talked about at the beginning, the Linux desktop and the fact that that exists is only down to the free software movement. And without that, without the open source, we wouldn't have open hardware, we wouldn't have Prusia, we wouldn't. Just think of all the things in your life that open source touches on a daily basis. It's a shame.
[Adam]: We probably wouldn't, we wouldn't have these four friends getting together every week either. Think of all the relationship,
[Alex]: Guaranteed.
[Adam]: everything that you've built, especially in our communities, you know, that's been built on top of this, this, this magical concept of sharing information, sharing things that you build.
[Geoff]: Well, on that happy note, I think we're going to get out of here. Gents, what do you say?
[Stephen]: Well, I personally think I'd remind everyone that if they want to take a look at us on the interwebs, they can go to bitflip.show. You could also find us on Mastodon if that's your shtick at bitflipshow. We've already told you the email, contact at bitflipshow. And of course, we do have that fancy Patreon that doesn't give you anything at this current time. But other than the fact that we will love you for giving us money to support us. But yes,
[Adam]: you
[Stephen]: Alex, do you have anything else to say on this one?
[Alex]: I do. In one month's time, so was it May the 28th, I think, me and Stephen and Adam are going to all be in Toronto. And we're trying to get Geoff to join us, but I think,
[Geoff]: Family?
[Alex]: unfortunately,
[Geoff]: Yeah,
[Alex]: dad duties
[Geoff]: unfortunately.
[Alex]: might outweigh hanging with podcast buddies. We'll see. But if you want to come and hang with us, there's actually, the reason I'm in Toronto is a Tailscale meetup that I'm speaking at. So if you want to come to the Tailscale meetup, it's free. I'll put a link in the show notes to that. come hang out with us and meet Stephen and Adam. Be a good time.
[Adam]: One more thing. So I have one last item in that we talked a little bit about our tail scale setup and some of the tooling that we've used here on the show. I am interested. Again, we shared our email address. I want to know if our community and our audience is interested in how this show was put together, how it was built. Um, we want to kind of, you know, we want to look at adding additional content for some of the patrons. And, um, that was one of the ideas that we threw around was we can show you behind the scenes. I think it's pretty amazing, honestly. Um, so yeah, let us know. Is that interesting? Is it not? Should we talk about it more or not?
[Stephen]: Well, that's it for this episode, gentlemen. I've been Stephen.
[Adam]: I've been Adam.
[Geoff]: I've been Jeff.
[Alex]: And I've been the Rocketman, Alex. See you later.
[Geoff]: Thank you, everyone.
[Adam]: Bye-bye guys.