Age verification Laws could break Linux? GrapheneOS's new partner, Plasma drops X11 in August

0:00Hey everyone and welcome back to the Linux and open source news show I'm your host Nick and this is a podcast where we discuss everything related to Linux open source privacy the open web and all of that stuff and once again the episode is a day early because I do have once again a war hammer tournament that I need to get to this weekend and so I won't have time to work on this episode on Saturday so it's coming out on Friday. So this week we've got some worrying stuff about age verification laws brewing in California in the US in general but that will likely pop up all around the world and Linux distributions are kind of grappling with the idea of implementing it and it's just a mess so we'll talk about that. We also have graphene OS signing on with a new partner to bring the D Google Android round to more smartphones. We have plasma making changes to the documentation that seem to indicate that they will drop X11 way earlier than expected and of

1:02course we have a bunch of other stuff as usual all the links that I used to write this show are down in the show notes do check them out if you want more details about any of these topics and as usual you'll also find links to our sponsor Tuxedo computers. Tuxedo is a hardware manufacturer based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and of course the important thing is that they ship their computers with Linux preinstalled. They have a big range of computers from more affordable laptops all the way up to giant workstations gaming laptops gaming PCs anything you want. They have plenty of customization options for the keyboard layout for the internals you can pick the distro you want preinstalled but of course since all the hardware supports Linux really well you can also just install any distro that you'd prefer and that's just going to run perfectly well. I only use their computers these days everything you see from me is done on a Tuxedo laptop the Infinity Book Pro 16 all my gaming is done on one of their desktop the Tuxedo cube. I really enjoy what they've been doing they've been sponsoring the channel for a really long time now

2:04they're great and as usual the link is down in the description. So it looks like there is some crap brewing in California with the Digital Age Assurance Act which is a law signed in October last year that will take effect early next year. This is being studied and this will have dire consequences for open source and for Linux. Basically this is the usual terrible law that aims at verifying the user's age for any digital product especially operating systems and app stores. So Linux distros are affected Linux desktops are affected flat hub the snap store distro repos even bsd is affected by this as usual the rationale is we need to protect the kids from the bad stuff on the internet which is the general umbrella under which all surveillance laws like to hide we have the same bullshit brewing in the EU no compliance with this law means paying fines and so of course you either have to invade user privacy and implement costly measures

3:04all you need to accept the fines all you need to just drop California has a market which is what midnight bsd did by excluding use for their users in California starting in 2027. The main issue is that OS providers as in distro manufacturers are expected to have an age verification interface when setting up the user account on a computer that wouldn't be an issue if it was just a user declaring their age but the real problem is that operating system and app store developers are expected to request what they call an age bracket signal when a user accesses apps or features and when that signal is received the developer is presumed as knowing the users real age range they basically can't say we didn't know this was a kids account because they gave us proof that this was a kids account this digital signal basically will have to be an ID or a picture that you would analyze because if the signal is the user told us they were 21 you're still presumed knowing the real age of the person it will be on the developer for not asking more

4:10information to confirm that so basically it would force Linux distros and desktops to check the user's age for real which is incredibly invasive and not something that should ever be implemented and of course this means that distributions are now looking at how this could be done a Ubuntu developer proposed a debus interface that applications could implement to check on the age of the user but that's just proposed by an Ubuntu developer it's not an official canonical thing canonical said that there are no concrete plans for now that is just an informal conversation and that nothing has been adopted yet Fedora and Mint are also talking about how they could comply but in the end I think this will have to be a concerted effort from all distros and all app stores whether it's repo based flat hub the snap store whatever else because it's just too much work to implement on a per distro basis I think and system 76 also talked about that issue call ritual their CEO said in a blog post that this law means that anyone under 18 would

5:10basically not be supposed to create an account on a computer on their own which means this is the end of curiosity they say that most of the people who work at system 76 got into computers and into software by tinkering way before they were 18 which is also the case for myself I started playing around with PCs when I was 9 and I discovered Linux when I was 16 if I hadn't been allowed to use a computer at those ages I would probably still be using windows right now because I would never really have fallen in love with computers in the first place Carl says that limiting the ability of a kid to play around with a PC just limits their future he says that this encourages kids to lie about their age by getting someone else to set things up and then to keep using the PC as if there were the ones who validated their age in the first place Carl says that the laws are also badly written because you could interpret those as the person downloading the OS being the manufacturer because they are the ones doing the install on the hardware does the burden of

6:11age verification would lie on the person installing the distro instead of the distro maker he concluded by saying that these bills create a loss of effectiveness a loss of liberty and that the challengers are neither technical or legal but that they're educational he says that we need to educate kids about the digital world and digital life we need to do this early on and we need to teach those kids what to do when they encounter the darker corners of the internet and how to avoid those and that echoes my sentiment on this absolutely 100% this is not a legal issue this is not something that governments should ever metal with this is education it is a parents job to make sure that their kids can access the hobbies or the things they like without accessing the things that they're not supposed to look at this is why we have parental control software this is a parents job when you give your kid a smartphone a computer you are supposed to be at least a little bit intelligent about this you have to be educated about the digital world about the internet about

7:16how things work and you're supposed to pass on that knowledge to your kid that's education it's the basis of it and this is what should happen and if people aren't educated enough to pass that to their kids then we need to educate these people instead of just implementing laws that basically will open the door for mass surveillance and might even really harm open source and Linux because at some point they might decide that you know what this is too dangerous to let kids install operating systems and then maybe it's people who shouldn't install operating systems because it's too dangerous it's outside of the controlled circuit this just opens a door that we do not want to see opened parents educate your kids governments give tools to parents to educate their kids that's what we ask of you that's it now in better news graphino s has a new partner it seems it's Motorola they announced that they will work with the graphino s foundation to have support for that specific ROM on future Motorola smartphones now as a reminder graphino s is a de-google ROM that does not

8:17include Google services or apps they are focused on privacy and security you can still install those services if you need them in a sandbox but by default they are not there the announcement says that Motorola will bring graphino s to their next generation smartphone not smartphones so this might be a one-off to see if there's any interest but it's still pretty cool to see more phone makers start paying attention to de-google the Android ROMs and that's especially interesting for me because graphino s looks like a fantastic ROM but it runs on devices i am absolutely not interested in i do not want to buy a google pixel those phones just don't look the way i want them to look they're too big they are known for breaking all the time every single iteration of them has had a terrible reputation for solidity and and viability of the hardware and the long run i don't want those phones i don't like them but if graphino s is on more phones than did this gives me the opportunity to try it out and use it on other things and Motorola is not a gigantic smartphone manufacturer right now they lost a lot of their prestige but it's still a big name

9:23in phone manufacturer so i think that's really interesting it looks like plasma's abandonment of x11 is much closer than we thought they will drop x11 support entirely with plasma 6.8 and most people myself included expected that to release in early 2027 so you had a solid year of support for x11 left but a change to the plasma documentation seems to have removed the previous line saying that they didn't know exactly when plasma 6.8 would release and they replaced that line with information that 6.8 is due in august 2026 so in fact they are just a few months before x11 is gone from plasma this is much earlier than i thought and it seems that most significant issues that are listed on their wayland support page are not fixed yet so unless these are fixed in 6.7 and 6.8 the wayland session when it becomes the only thing you can run might not have things like session restore window position restore headless remote desktop

10:25and other things now personally it won't change anything for me i already run katie plasma on wayland and i don't really need session restore window position restore i've been using my pc without that for years it hasn't really made a difference at all in my use case but i know for a lot of people this is a big roadblock so i hope katie knows something that we don't and they know that these protocols are working they're being implemented and they will be there for 6.8 because if not it means that people will just not really be able to run plasma anymore in a few months because they really want those specific features and that's just not great and msa developers are apparently trying to reach a consensus on their ai policy as in what do we do with ai generated code for the msa drivers much like what most big free and open source projects are doing these days they're hoping to reach an agreement in march with plenty of different options for that policy there could be a complete ban on ai agents in the project there could be a total ai ban including all ai generated code there could be a smaller ban that would only prevent code being

11:31submitted if it is mostly generated by ai or they could just accept ai code but ask for full disclosure around the use of said ai tools msa is also looking at maybe having different policies on different drivers and components of the project it's a usual conversation around whether ai is just another tool or if it's drawbacks and ethical issues are enough to warrant not accepting ai code at all and there's the added bonus of asking the question about transparency and disclosure which is really hard to enforce because people could just not disclose things and hope no one would notice and so you still have to waste a lot of time analyzing the code to detect that it was indeed written by ai if no agreement can be reached it seems that the default would have to be a policy on a per directory basis so basically each driver maintainer deciding what they accept or not but that would probably become messy pretty quickly now no matter what those open source projects decide on their ai policies this is sure to create frustration on one side or another if you say

12:34no to any ai generated code you're still going to have to parse submissions that have been written with ai and decide to drop them after you notice they were written with ai so you don't really save any time and also this might discourage some people from getting started and trying to contribute but if you accept all ai then you're basically opening the floodgates to a lot of slop a lot of terrible code and the people like me who really despise this technology and the ethical implications of it well definitely not be happy to have code running on their device that was written mostly by ai so it's impossible to please both camps here i don't know what the right solution is but yeah most open source projects are going to have to contend with that at some point well you might remember the orange pie neo which was a handheld developed by menjaro and orange pie it was sort of a steam deck alternative unfortunately that project will stay on the shelves for a little bit longer after about two years of development because of you guessed it a ram and SSD

13:35shortages they had published updates about various hardware revisions about software improvements to menjaro gaming edition to better support this device and other handhelds but unfortunately due to the current prices of DDR5 and SSDs this already niche product is basically not viable financially for now they did not give a new date for the launch because no one knows when things will settle down but it is easy to understand why they wouldn't take that risk if Valve can't announce a release date or a price for their steam machine a much smaller company like menjaro or orange pie definitely can't do that either in the meantime though they've still secured certifications for using the EU and the us so at least when they're ready to launch everything should be fine work on menjaro gaming edition also advances to have the best support possible when they start selling the thing all in all it will be a fairly standard offering with a seven inch display at 1200 p and 120 hertz it has a Ryzen 7 7840U it has whole effect sticks it has some RGB lighting dual torch pads like the steam deck

14:40so it's sort of a steam deck plus in terms of hardware but running menjaro now this product will just live or die by the quality of the builds the hardware and the performance the distro on it doesn't matter if people like menjaro gaming edition they will keep it if not they will replace it with something like basite or maybe at some point the official steam OS if we ever get the ISO maybe this will happen I don't think it has to but the hardware will be the deciding factor but obviously you can't really build or sell hardware even if you're a giant company right now because prices are just insane and you don't even know if they're not going to keep going up for now a Firefox gave a first look at Nova which is the code name for their UI redesign that they're apparently working on I had no idea that this was one of their projects but it seems like it is so these are internal mockups they are not set in stone but the appearance all around looks more rounded with floating elements on a semi-translucent background you've got refreshed icons that are more rounded

15:43as well you've got touches of color here and there to tab groups you have color gradients across certain UI elements and these colors are expected to be customizable by the user hopefully they will access the users accent color preference on Linux so by default things look at least a little bit like you would expect them to now this mockup is for the macOS version of the browser so we'll see what changes for Linux we'll see if they manage to make that same semi-translucent appearance or not or the same colors that's not certain there's no date for the redesign either it is a working progress but if you like that sort of rounded look it looks pretty decent I personally gave up on my web browser looking anything like the rest of my applications on Linux they just don't follow UI guidelines whatsoever unless you really want to theme Firefox using some user chrome dot CSS elements to make it look like a native application it never looks native and most chromium based browsers also really look super out of place I've made my piece with that so if that's the redesign they want to go with

16:48I have no strong feelings on that as with all UI redesigns though a lot of people will like it and a lot of people will hate it now library office wrote a strange block post defending their UI they've stated that their UI is simply better than the one that Microsoft office offers simply because it is super customizable you can pick the menu bar and toolbar combo you can pick the tab interface you can pick other simplified grouped elements as well and they say that compared to the office ribbon it is much better much more thought out and it's just not a copy of Microsoft's ribbon which they accuse other office suites of doing including other open source suites like only office in a blog post they outlined all the advantages of library office saying that the office ribbon is just seen as modern because that's what Microsoft pushes and that office is so prominent but that library offices options are just indeed better for users they also mentioned a few other advantages like privacy compatibility with multiple platforms more options for macros and scripting

17:50with support for more languages and of course the fact that it is open source and that there's no monetization of users they also took some part shots at only office for some reason saying that they decided to default to odf as the solid format and saying that only office basically masquerade as being four open source but since they default to the Microsoft office formats then they are being fake open source it's basically how this reads which is kind of weird why do you feel the need to attack other options that exist that are also open source i would assume that the fact only office uses the default Microsoft office formats is because if not then people would just save their documents send them to their friends and their friends would say this doesn't open or this opens but it is all borax and doesn't look right because Microsoft office sucks at opening odf documents that's probably why the defaults to Microsoft office for compatibility reasons accusing them of being fake open source on nefarious for that seems really strange i don't think this behavior has its

18:54place in the open source community honestly now google officially announced that they are letting developers basically do what they please on android with some caveats so first change is the billing system finally developers can now use whatever billing system they want for the users not just google's meaning developers can sidestep the built in google commission they also letting users side load app stores on android which is good although this still depends on a registered app store list that google will control they will only add to it stores that meet certain quality and safety benchmarks so it is not fully open registered app stores will get a simplified side loading install process i would assume other stores will get the usual side loading process which will be a bit more convoluted finally google changed their commission structure they will now charge 5% for developers using the google billing system they will charge in app purchases fees of 20% and they'll offer lower rates than the usual 30% for developers who meet certain quality

19:59thresholds with a pure city it was just 30% flat for everyone but because nothing can't ever not be shady this also comes with the publication of an agreement between google and epic because if you don't know most of those changes were brought about after epic sued google for abusing their dominant position on android and so now that google made those changes they also signed a deal with epic and that deal is weird because it means that Tim Swini the CEO of epic signed an agreement saying he will be unable to criticize google to sue them or disparage them until 2032 he just won't be able to do it at least when talking about the android app store the fees applied to the app store the policies around what is being accepted or not Tim Swini also agreed to no longer advocate to have google change anything else on those fronts either and the organization that epic funded called the coalition for app fairness they can now only take aim at apple google is now protected

21:02against all scrutiny on that front until 2032 now let's not pretend that the changes google made are out of the goodness of their heart or out of the interest of the consumer they only did it because they were forced to by legislative pressure specifically because epic sued them and this opened the floodgates for this legislation but this was already in the works in the EU it was just a matter of time so it is still good for users they're applying this as maliciously as they can they're really trying to keep control over as much as they can but at least the doors are a little bit more open on android now what's bad is that epic basically just revealed they dropped the mask we know now that what they wanted was not for consumers to have a better experience it was not to keep pushing for more open ecosystems it was just to have the epic game store on android and now that they can do that they just agreed to basically shut up and not annoy google anymore at all it was never about the consumer just like I said when those laws who started this was always about

22:03epic's benefit epic is not a good friend a good company they're still a business they wanted something they got it and now they just don't care about the consumer ever again at least not on android that's sad but that's the reality of things all in all though benefits for the user it's just sours the thing seeing all those crooked background deals it is it just sours the entire thing I think now we do have some good news for linux gaming because the EA javelin anti cheat or at least EA is looking at hiring developers to work on their javelin anti cheat specifically for proton and linux there's a new job offer for a senior anti cheat engineer and that primarily focuses on supporting windows on arm 64 but the job description also mentions that the person who gets the job will have to define how to support additional operating systems and additional hardware in the future including linux and proton this means EA games will likely have a much better shot at running on our linux pc's on our steam decks on steam machines and whatever else

23:08we get in the future which is pretty good now this won't fix all the anti cheat that runs at the kernel level because you simply cannot really do that properly on linux and I don't think we really want a kernel level anti cheat running on our linux distros in the first place but it would at least bring the EA anti cheat tool at the level of things like battle i or easy anti cheat which means some games would run on linux with proton and some others would decide not to support it but at least it opens the door a little bit to get more people on linux which is good but also we have bad news for linux gaming because we're probably just not going to get PlayStation games on pc anymore there are plenty of reasons that could justify that move from Sony away from pc among those were the sort of middling reception of their games on pc they apparently did not sell all that well there's also the fact that Microsoft announced their new Xbox which will be a pc presumably with access to steam meaning PlayStation games would run on

24:10an Xbox with PlayStation just doesn't want there's also the fact that game sales are not going up that much that the PlayStation 5 is just keeping pace with the PlayStation 4 in terms of sales at its age point meaning it's not really growing either the growth in the gaming market doesn't really come from PlayStation or consoles anymore it seems to come from pc so it feels like PlayStation realized that putting their games on steam or on pc just would hurt in the long run it would hurt their PlayStation brand and so they announced that they would no longer bring most of their games to pc not all of them some might still come but a lot of them will just not come and i would expect the big name exclusives like god of war horizon the marvels firemen wolverine games all of that stuff will just not arrive on pc anymore which means we won't be able to play them on linux either which kind of sucks because i kind of like those games i like horizon i like god of war i like the marvel spider-man games i like ghost of sushi ma i want to play those but i want to play those

25:13on a good solid pc with good graphics and good settings and i don't intend to keep buying PlayStation after my PlayStation 5 is completely obsolete so this kind of sucks and i hope they reconsider but i don't think they will because the gaming market is changing quite a bit and PlayStation is not in the strongest position in it they have a very strong position in the console market but the entire gaming market with pc gaining ground with handhelds gaming ground they're not that strong in there anyway this will conclude today's episode i hope you enjoyed listening to it as always if you want to dive deeper into any of these stories all of the links are down in the description you'll also find links to support the show please do check them out it really really helps with making this episode every single week and you also have links to our sponsor tuxedo computers thank you all for listening and i guess you'll hear me in the next one next week bye