Late Night Linux – Episode 380

This late-night Linux family podcast is made possible by our patrons.

Go to latenightlinux.com slash support for details of how you can join them.

Support us on Patreon for access to ad-free episodes and early releases.

That's latenightlinux.com slash support.

Hello and welcome to episode 380 of late-nightlinux recorded on the 6th of April, 2026.

I'm Joe and with me, I'll fail him.

Chocolate overdose.

Grame.

Chocolate overdose.

And will.

Hello, moon.

Why do they sell many eggs and kilos?

Before we get going, a quick plug for the Linux app summit, 2026 call for proposals,

which has been extended till the 10th of April.

You put the sin failing.

Yeah, and it's in Berlin on the 16th and 17th of May, and yeah, the extended the deadline

for call for papers till April 10th.

And this is the Gnome and KDE kind of co-conference.

Yeah, pretty much.

So if you're in Berlin, go.

Right, well, I'll put a link in the show notes.

Great news.

Linux smashes past 5% on the steam survey for the first time.

Do we believe these are actual numbers?

I believe it's going up, and I think that's great.

Yeah.

And when you look at the graph, it's gone up massively.

We started talking about this a long time ago when it was down in the 1s and 2s, and it

has been on a steady increase on almost a quite clear diagonal line going up and to

the right.

But then in the last three or four months or something, it's taken a massive jump, like

2.5% more, or rather, an increase of an additional 2.5%.

In a very short amount of time, it's really, really encouraging.

That's what makes me doubt that these figures are properly accurate, but I do agree

with Graham that the line is going up and to the right.

I just don't quite believe this 5% plus really.

I think we need more data, don't we?

We need another few months of steam survey results to really kind of get a picture of

where we are.

The Linux distro with the biggest increase, 17.6% increase is 0, or perhaps 0, 64 bit.

The other one, which has had a large increase, is 64 bit, 8%.

What are these distros up presumably?

They are steam OS, are they?

I don't think they are.

I think I've seen something recently, which said someone might be Casio S.

Yeah, which is like arch, but tweaked specifically for gaming.

Yeah, and I actually got the steam survey recently, so I don't see any neon there, bar

of that 25%, so I mean, that's 25% people are using neon, which should, if they were

any sensitive, but you know, yeah, great, use a dying distro, excellent idea.

It's not dying distro, it's fine.

I think that there is some interest in the numbers to give it a little bit more legitimacy.

We say that Linux has increased, well, about 3.5%, Windows has decreased 4.3%, so I think

Talies, I think it is people not using Windows anymore, because they don't need to, because

Proton and Wine and all of those good technologies are working good enough now that they can

play what they like.

I think so too, and I think we're also in a period where upgrading hardware isn't so

important.

People are making their old hardware last longer, they've got hundreds of games in their

collection.

You've got a lifetime of playing, and you can play most of them on Linux, and it feels

a bit like that.

It seems like something has changed.

I think that's an interesting concept that people have just said, my PC is good enough,

and I felt that my PC is good enough for gaming for a little while, but perhaps everyone

is reaching the point where GPUs are massively price-inflated, RAM is massively price-inflated,

and so people are just going, you know what, I don't need Windows on there anymore, so

I don't need to upgrade it, and I'll live with it for years to come.

Can you switch into Linux on your gaming rig then?

Well, I think it's worth revisiting, right?

It's already your boot, so I do just need to boot back into it and see what works.

Last time it was fine, let me see if this time it's good.

I will give that a go.

Right, well, we'll have to see if you actually get around to that.

Well related, Wine 11 is coming soon, and there's some massive changes and new stuff

in there that I do not understand, but if you read through this XDA developer's piece

about it, the take home seems to be playing Windows games on Linux is going to be much

better going forward.

In some cases, like spectacularly, like the FPS from the likes of Dirt 3, which is like

a car rally game, went from, I think it was something like 90 FPS to 850, like bunker

stuff, because it's all down to the thread scheduling, and obviously the vast majority

of games are going to use loads of threads for various things.

We had an old Uncult E-Sync, a slightly better one called F-Sync, and then finally we've

got Uncult NT-Sync, which is effectively a proper kernel rewrite of it, and if you've

got the, I think it's the 6.14 kernel or higher, it's in the kernel itself, so you don't

have to have any chunky hardware tweaked kernels, like some of the likes of the Proton G1

that people run, so this is going to be excellent.

And I think it's tying in with the new Proton 64-bit stuff as well, because that's going

to have the higher version of wine in it as far as I know.

So yeah, that's in beta right now, so I think we're starting to see this pretty quickly.

Now, in the interest of complete clarity here, the numbers quoted on the FPS are compared

to the version of wine where neither E-Sync or F-Sync were enabled, so this is like vanilla

rather than at all tweaked.

Nevertheless, the numbers are amazing.

Out of that list of games that are on the article, the one that makes me most happy is

that Call of Duty Black Ops 1 can now be played on Linux.

I think that that is really, really critical game.

I think it's one of those ones that people come back to, perhaps more than the new

versions of those games, the remastered and all that kind of thing, because they're just

the gameplay is that much better.

And to have something like Call of Duty Black Ops on Linux, I think is really amazing.

I thought a lot of those games wouldn't work because of the anti-cheat stuff, but I was

corrected by my son, who is 11, and told me that no, he has managed to get that to work,

because he had to try out, I don't know, one of the games he likes, Reck Room, and there

was a way to install it on Steam, and it worked.

I was like, nice.

Yeah, cool.

Here's some code.

Wow.

Get that done by tomorrow.

The Windows on Windows 64 being complete.

I think that that is directly feeding in to something we talked about a few weeks back

where the 32-bit Steam libraries were now gone, and they were going to be 64-bit as

well.

I assume, although I don't know, that the Windows on Windows 64 completion is directly

related to Steam no longer shipping the 32-bit libraries only.

I had to rebuild my machine over the weekend, which was great crack, and I'd recommend

it to everybody.

I did, obviously, copy every single dot file across, so it's like, looking has changed.

By the odd, I haven't installed that application yet, like we had for our destiny today.

Did it die and you brought it back to life again for you then?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good.

No.

Well, as I was installing Steam, it went, you know, one way by install, I just went, okay,

yeah, apt install, steam installer, but yeah, pulled a whole lot of 386 libraries in as

well, still.

So I don't know.

I don't quite understand whether I've just done the wrong installer to see that fully,

but I always find that confusing because you install it as a package, but then it goes

and update itself anyway, so it's like, well, you know, I'm not quite sure where that

should happen.

Yeah.

And then it just pulls down just endless amounts of shit, doesn't it?

It's quick enough, like, to be honest, I don't mind that, but I just, I wish the kick

it off bit was maybe all 64-bit, and then we'll have to have the 386 libraries all over

the place now.

Just don't like that.

It's almost as bad as GTK libraries, almost.

Well, either way, this all seems like excellent news for Linux gaming, which is excellent

news for Linux.

So that is your dose of good news for the episode.

A Ubuntu 2610 could drop, butrofs, setrofs, and lock support from Grub.

So this is only a proposal at this stage, and it is for the interim release after this

LTS, which is coming out imminently.

So it is the time to be doing experiments like this, but it is controversial nonetheless,

but it is worth noting that this only affects people using secure boot, so not me.

And also non-standard configurations, because this is only the boot partition, right?

For you and him, you know about this.

Yeah.

So the way they're saying is that they will get rid of any of the external stuff.

So at the moment, Grub can understand file systems.

So you don't have to have the separate boot partition on a LVM partition, say, or an encrypted

disk.

Your Grub can recognize that and boot it correctly.

What they're thinking to do is taking out all bush EXT4 and maybe FAT, and then everything

else is not being done by it.

So you would, in that case, need to have an unencrypted or non-LVM boot partition, because

you wouldn't be able to have butrofs or anything like that for the boot partition, because

you wouldn't be able to load the kernel.

I can kind of see where to go with this.

It does an awful lot, and it is quite low level, and they have claimed that it is less

secure, though ironically checking into it looks like neither the XFS or a butrofs file

system parts of Grub have a CV against them, whereas SquashFS does, which is a little bit

awkward for snaps and the like.

Yeah, because they are proposing to keep spot for that because of snaps, as you said.

Yeah.

I don't know, like I think the entirety of the whole boot system of any PC is horrific.

It's far too complicated.

They were on like speed when they came up the whole idea of UFE, it's just, it's a shambles

how big it is.

It's larger than the Linux kernel.

It all started to go wrong when you could use your mouse in the BIOS.

Oh, fuck off.

Honestly, like, who fucking cares, it should, you know what, it should even be less advanced

than what the BIOS was.

It should be the simplest, smallest, most secure piece of code, literally an A4 page to just

get the actual proper OS up and running because otherwise you end up with the unpatched

terrificness that sits under your OS, like, hmm, I must admit, I miss Lilo.

Or lie, dot, dot, as it would often be when our pollocks.

So the primary motivation here is that Grub components that are unused might have security

problems in them.

And so rather than have them hanging around not doing anything for 90% of the people, they

should just get rid of them.

Is that right?

Kind of.

Yeah, the only problem with this is the fact that the Linux server install defaults to

a LVM setup and will be broken by this.

So I don't know what their plan is for that.

And if you use looks and encryption on your disk, it's also by the default install.

It's not going to be captured by this now.

When I rebuilt my machine, I have, luckily, seen this story and I just made it on a cryptid

boot, but I use secure boot in there.

So I'm not worried that something's going to put a dodgy kernel in there or something

like that.

So that's fine.

But what do you do?

Old systems like is 28.04 could be like the mass manual migration of all boot

partitions like fucking hell, no, thanks.

That's interesting.

You have full disk encryption enabled using whatever it is that Ubuntu told me to do.

So you are stuffed.

Oh, yeah.

Well, that just means reinstalling everything, doesn't it?

Yeah, just on all of the machines, all of the machines everywhere.

My understanding was that if you had done everything by default, then you were not going

to be affected by this.

It was only people who had done custom partitioning.

Well, if you do the default install, you'll have LVM on your root partition.

And looks will be on like the lower layer of that.

So grub would need to know how to do that to talk to that.

So I think it is.

I am prepared to be wrong.

I cannot believe that they would break existing installs that had been done with default settings.

The article points out that one of the Ubuntu technical board members, Thomas Ward, says

that the server installer sets up LVM by default and that looks encryption on Ubuntu

currently requires LVM.

So that is definitely going to be covered by it.

So I think this is going to get caught by it and he seems to claim it is too.

So right.

I think it's a future mess.

Yes, but it is 26, 10, they're talking about, as I said, the first of the interims

after an LTS.

So there is time to experiment with this and work out exactly what they're going to

do.

I mean, the LTS isn't even out yet.

Yeah.

It's 28.04, potentially.

I mean, everybody else, yeah, it's fine.

Yeah.

I think that they've got time to work out these issues and make it so that you will be

able to upgrade from 26.04 to 28.04.

I would like to see that.

Well, they're fucking better.

Quite frankly, because it would just be unacceptable to do otherwise.

And I do not believe that they're going to do that.

Yes, they might break the interims and stuff like that, but that's what the interims

are for as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, yeah.

Nobody sensible is using the interims in production.

Don't at me.

And this is on your personal laptop or whatever you needed, a new account or whatever.

But I don't think there's any service realistically running on interims or there shouldn't

be.

No.

Well, related, Ubuntu quietly raises its minimum system requirements.

And so there's only ever been a few of these spec bumps, essentially, over the years.

And now for 26.04, the desktop edition, they've raised it from four gig of RAM to six

gig of RAM.

And people have been very quick to point out that Windows 11 only requires four gig of

RAM.

Well, good fucking luck running Windows 11 with four gigs of RAM.

Yeah, not alone that, but it's also the hard disk requirement that Windows 11 has.

I don't think even Windows almost fits in that requirement that they have just your gigs

or whatever it is.

I think that's the entire install already.

So enjoy playing with NotePad.

You need 64 gigs or larger storage device, it says for Windows 11 versus the 25 gigs.

That's Ubuntu 26.04 requires.

Now I've got an old laptop, now this is a very dear laptop to me because it's the one

that I started doing these podcasts on all those years ago.

It's a second gen i5 and it's had various amounts of RAM in it over the years, but the

moment it's got six in it.

So I took two out, I actually took the four out first and put two in and you can boot

the installer, but it is just painful.

So I put four in and I went through the installation process and it was fine and it all worked.

But then I opened the browser and started opening some tabs and it just started to get

a bit slow.

So then I put the other two back in and it was fine.

It was a pleasant experience.

I managed to read a bunch of news and organize the show dock and everything.

So I think six is a sensible low bar really, a minimum bar because yeah, you can get by

with less than that, but you can't really run anything on top of the OS without six.

So I think it's a sensible default.

Did that laptop have wax under as the storage, and it's actually got a SATA SSD in it.

And at one point it had two SATA SSDs, one in a caddy that went in the disk, you know,

the CD or DVD tray.

But I've since removed that and put the DVD drive back in because it's now my only machine

that has an optical drive in it and occasionally when I might need one, that's my go to.

And actually, I lent this machine to my mum at some point and it came back.

I'm not going to say she broke the power socket.

Oh, it's in secure.

I am.

Yes.

And it just sat broken for many years.

And then I think it was two, three months ago, I ordered the part, I ordered a heat gun,

I did a aesthetics fix on it and it only fucking worked.

And so now it actually works.

I think I did somewhat break the ethernet port while I was at it.

But let's not, you know, let's gloss over that.

The power port actually works and I can actually use that as a reference shitty old laptop.

So there you go.

Love it.

Well, another Ubuntu-related one, a Ubuntu Marta seeking maintainers.

Marta and Winpress has had enough, finally, and he's stepping down.

We kind of saw this coming, I think, because the 26.04 version of Ubuntu Marta

didn't apply for LTS status, which you can do as a flavor.

And in the thread on the discourse, a couple of people have expressed interest.

And he said he's going to DM them.

So hopefully it'll be fine.

But it's kind of an inventory, really, isn't it?

Yeah.

But I mean, it's been coming.

Martin is no longer interested in Ubuntu Marta.

I mean, he's been into nicks for however long and various other window managers and whatnot.

So, you know, these things are always a passion project,

and it seems that he has lost the passion for it.

But from speaking to him before, it seems like the governance model for the destroyer

and the flavor was all kind of set up nicely.

So hopefully, if someone steps up and takes on the role that he had, it'll be fine.

But just goes to show smaller distros don't always last forever, potentially.

Well, thanks, Martin, for keeping going for so long, for driving it for so long.

I mean, I remember the time.

It was a very significant addition to the Ubuntu flavor family

and made its mark in the alternatives to KD and GNOME

and showing that there was demand for keeping things the same as they used to be.

Yeah, continue to, right?

Because when Unity came along, it was pretty different.

And people who were used to the old GNOME 2 way had this Ubuntu Marta suddenly,

and it was essentially just a kind of green version of the older Ubuntu.

Yeah.

And I think maybe times have changed a little bit since then,

what was new and shiny then is now old.

And it's a different demographic.

Right, well, we better get out of here then.

We'll be back next week when who knows what it'll be.

But until then, I've been John.

I've been Salem.

I've been Crane.

And I've been Will.

See you later.