Ask The Hosts – Episode 35

What we do when we get stressed, cinema vs theatre, our mentors, and if we’ve tried being vegetarian. With Gary from Linux After Dark, Andy from Linux Dev Time, and Shane from Hybrid Cloud Show. Patrons got this this in their feed two weeks ago.          

Steam stats suggest that gaming on Linux is more popular than ever, Wine improvements might entice even more gamers, Ubuntu might break things when it tightens up GRUB security and makes 6GB of RAM the minimum requirement for the desktop edition, and Ubuntu MATE is looking for new maintainers.   News LAS 2026 Call for proposals extended till the 10th April Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at the kernel level, and the speed gains are massive Ubuntu 26.10 could drop btrfs, ZFS and LUKS support from GRUB Ubuntu quietly raises its minimum system requirements Windows 11 has lower requirements Ubuntu MATE – seeking maintainers                   Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. RSS: Subscribe to the RSS feeds here

It’s another hot questions episode. Whether we think better on our own or with other people, our non-standard debugging habits, favourite interview questions, coding at night, character encoding, and abolishing time zones.             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed

The ugliest and jankiest hacks we’ve put into prod, and a few of the worst things we’ve seen other people get away with.           Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes           Subscribe to the RSS feed.

Microsoft says Windows 11 is getting less rubbish but we are skeptical, vehicles with alcohol interlocks won’t start because the manufacturer’s server is down, and whether you should virtualise a router or a NAS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Five‑Year Storage Design with OpenZFS: Media Refresh, Rebalancing, and Hardware Independence   News/discussion Our commitment to Windows quality Microsoft fixes broken Windows update days after vowing fewer broken updates Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded across the US   Free consulting We were asked about whether you should virtualise a router or a NAS.             See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

Making silly URLs, visualising complex weather data, a TUI network discovery tool, and an open source version of a classic synthesizer in discoveries, plus the sad reality that it’s more or less impossible to avoid code that’s been generated by “AI” these days.   Discoveries creepy link Supercell Wx whosthere Ultramaster KR-106   AI in FOSS systemd 260-rc3 Released With AI Agents Documentation Added New Xfce Wayland compositor is being developed with genAI                     Automox Turnkey Results Endpoint management tailored to your specific environment. Know the plan. Trust the result. Learn more at www.automox.com     Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. RSS: Subscribe to the RSS feeds here

We decided to give openSUSE a try. We had a great time. Honest.                 Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

The US government is drumming up fear about foreign routers, a pretty serious supply chain attack might be state-sponsored, and the safety of filesystems inside VMs.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes The Real Cost of Technology Dependence: Building Independence with Open-Source Storage   News/discussion US bans any new consumer-grade routers not made in America National Security Determination on the Threat Posed by Routers Produced by Foreign Countries (pdf) 1K+ cloud environments infected following Trivy supply chain attack Self-propagating malware poisons open source software and wipes Iran-based machines   Free consulting We were asked about the safety of filesystems inside VMs.                 Automox Turnkey Results Endpoint management tailored to your specific environment. Know the plan. Trust the result. Learn more at www.automox.com       See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

Age declaration and verification in Linux gathers pace, Google blesses us with some hoops to jump through to install the software we want on stock Android, the FSFE lost their payment provider, great new KDE Plasma and GNOME features, and more.   News Just over a month until OggCamp! Piss up at The Shipwrights Arms (just next to London Bridge station) on Saturday 27th June from 6pm until late Age verification isn’t sage verification when it’s inside operating systems The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux A small set of people are merging changes to various Linux components to make sure every application knows your birth date When you tell me to just not implement age declaration, do you understand you’re asking me to risk thousands of dollars in fines? I traced $2 billion in nonprofit grants and 45 states of lobbying records to figure out who’s behind the age verification bills. meta-lobbying-and-other-findings Android developer verification: Balancing openness and choice with safety 450 FSFE supporters affected: Payment provider Nexi cancelled us This Week in Plasma: Press-and-Hold for Alternative Characters Introducing GNOME 50, “Tokyo”                 Automox Turnkey Results Endpoint management tailored to your specific environment. Know the plan. Trust the result. Learn more at www.automox.com     Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. RSS: Subscribe to the RSS feeds here

In the wake of Discord’s recent announcement about age verification, Matrix recently came in for a lot of criticism by a lot of people who said it’s not a viable replacement. Andy works on Matrix for a living and Amolith is invested in the XMPP world so we get into secure messaging, trade-offs between security and user experience, federation, and more.   Piss up at The Shipwrights Arms (just next to London Bridge station) on Saturday 27th June from 6pm until late         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed