Hi, this is Marc and I'm listening to Linux for Everyone from Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Welcome home!

[Music]

Hello everyone and welcome back to Linux for Everyone.

And might I also extend a very enthusiastic welcome home.

Yes, sorry for that RSS feed jump scare.

I did not mean to alarm you today, but Linux for everyone is back.

The podcast is back.

The website is almost back.

And the video channel is up and running with about three or four new videos in the feed over there.

Unlike last time, this is not a one off return from a hiatus.

This is let's kick the tires and give it all we've got this time.

I'm not going to front load this episode with a whole bunch of filler,

but I have to get a little bit of housekeeping out of the way.

Number one, the theme song that you just heard is it might sound a little bit different.

It might sound a little bit refreshed, a little bit more polished.

That is because Jerry Morrison's band, Baseball Bat,

took the song that he wrote originally called Brain Dead,

which was the original theme song for let's call it the Linux for Everyone Legacy show.

And they went into a studio and made a fantastic version of that song.

And the band very graciously allowed me to use the new version for the YouTube channel and for the podcast.

And so I'm going to have links to Baseball Bats Bandcamp.

Definitely go check out the song and their and their EP.

It's it's really fantastic.

As far as what to expect in your RSS feed over the next several weeks,

I have a conversation scheduled with Mike Kelly, the creator of Nick's book,

OS and the computer upcycle project, as well as a chat with Veronica explains.

And kind of a big surprise, which maybe I'll just give away

a big old round table discussion featuring Liam Dahl from gamingonlinux.com,

Gardner Bryant and Nick from the Linux experiment.

But my first guest on this little revival tour is Graham Morrison.

Now, if you listen to late night Linux, you know, very well who Graham is.

But for those not in the know, he is a technical writer at Canonical.

He is a cohost of late night Linux.

And he was the former editor of both Linux format magazine and Linux voice.

Since Graham is quite a VR geek, I thought it would be awesome to get

together and have a conversation with him about the gamble that Valve is taking on arm,

the state of Linux and VR, and a whole bunch of other stuff like Fex, and how Valve has

secretly been funding this project since 2016.

All kinds of it was just a great conversation.

And I'm going to stop babbling so that he and I can babble together.

Anyway, it's so wonderful to be back and I am so grateful that you're still here for

the podcast and without any more delays.

Let's get into it.

Graham, welcome to Linux for everyone for the first time.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you, Jason.

I got to remember to look at the camera.

It's been like I was telling you before we hit record.

It's been three years since I've done an on-camera interview for this show, this channel and this

brand.

That was the most fun I had doing Linux for everyone was the conversations.

So I'm really looking forward to this.

So thanks for being the guinea pig, the first one to kick it off.

Hey, it's no problem.

I have no idea what you're going to talk about or ask me about, but it'll be fun.

That's right.

No notes.

No notes except that I sent Graham about two hours before we hit record.

I sent him an email with the full text of the article that The Verge published about

an interview with Pierre Lou Graffet at Valve.

And it is wild.

Some of the questions I was going to ask you have been answered definitively, I think.

You loop me into this because I really care about VR.

You know, ever since I was a kid, any opportunity I get to talk about virtual reality.

Ever since you were a kid?

Well, yeah, I was a teenager in the 90s.

And at least in the UK in the 90s, you got these sprawling mega arcades.

And in those mega arcades in the mid 90s, you got these units called virtuality, which

actually were powered by an Amiga 2000 and then two cheap PCs that created these great

big VR headsets you could put on your head. So this is 1992, 1993, super, I don't know,

five frames a second, just simple polygons. And sometimes they put them side by side and

you put on this headset. And for me, it was just a whole different world. I've never been

able to forget about that. And I have to say, you know, Palmer Lucky really reignited that

dream for a lot of people and me included with the idea of VR coming back into mainstream.

When did the virtual boy camp come out? Because I think that is what killed any excitement for VR

for years. Yeah, you're right. And it was a hack. But even in the 80s, you got at least in the UK,

you got these tomey headsets which would have like these little displays that would

pretend to be 3D kind of driving or 3D something else.

Anything 3D on my head and to me it's just a whole different level of immersion and so

I'm into it.

Okay, let me back up.

There's a tradition that I have to follow.

And since you've never been on the show before, I would love to know and I'm sure our listeners

would love to know what was your kind of your Linux and open source origin story?

How did you discover it?

What made you jump into using Linux and being involved?

So I actually just mentioned the Commodore Amiga and the Commodore Amiga was my gateway

drug to computers.

It's an incredible machine.

I still have an Amiga behind the screen in front of me.

Oh, wow.

It's still connected and plugged in.

And seeing an Amiga touching a mouse for the first time, seeing 4,096 colours, that's what

got me into computers.

And I studied computers at university.

And honestly, I was bored by the prospects of working in the computing environment that

I found in the mid-90s.

I tried a few things with a friend, did some 3D graphics, ended up doing websites, which

And I've never had very much business sense, but I was bored by doing the websites in the

late 90s.

And then I discovered on the cover of a magazine, Mandrake Linux.

So I tried to install Red Hat 5.2 on my Amiga, but Mandrake in the late 90s was the thing

that really did it for me.

And I got so into it, I developed a piece of what became very popular open source software

called K-Album in the late 90s.

- Early. - K-Album.

Music library management?

- It was photo, photo management.

Before iPhoto, it looked remarkably like iPhoto.

Okay, so that's a stretch.

This was 2001, but this was before iPhoto

and it was included in lots of distros.

And I couldn't believe that I could sit on my own somewhere

in my bedroom, literally not speak to anyone for six months,

throw this software out there.

It took me six months to build the RPMs,

throw that software out there

And then get all kinds of people emailing me.

- And just, I mean, that's how games

are like Doom were distributed back in the day, right?

It was just strictly word of mouth

and people talking on BBSs and that's fine.

By the way, side note, I think the early 2000s for me was,

you know, 2006 era, like that was peak UI designed for me.

- Yeah, I mean, I've always loved KD.

- I love how software looked back then.

- So, but the thing is I'm a poor programmer

And I actually realized I enjoyed, maybe like you,

I enjoyed writing and helping people

and trying to describe the things that they needed to do.

And I became a journalist.

So I worked for Linux Format Magazine,

which was the biggest selling Linux magazine.

I became the editor.

- I mean, you, that magazine was on newsstands, right?

- Yeah, it was--

- Yeah, global, there were Greek, Italian,

Russian translations.

In fact, it only closed last year.

Well, I joined the team and then stayed long enough

to become the editors, like the last person standing

in a situation like that.

- We have that slightly in common, not even,

my story is not even close to the extent of yours,

the scope of yours, but I ran a indie music magazine

called Kill Your FM, that's how I got my tagline everywhere,

my username everywhere.

It was, you know, Kill Your FM obviously meaning

ditch radio, embrace podcasting and indie music

and all that stuff.

And so we were one of the first people don't know this these days, but like the Sony PSP was a marvel of a machine.

And we had up to, I think at one point, we were writing this music magazine every month and distributing it exclusively on the PSP

through some homebrew software that was made through RSS back in like the first or second year that RSS existed.

And we could include, you know, MP3s with artist permission.

We can include little tiny, like low res videos.

And we had up to 10,000 people reading that at one point, just on the Sony PSP.

So, and I was the editor of that.

And it was an absolute blast.

The distribution, I mean, the PSP and the Vita, I mean, inadvertently became such

brilliant things for homebrew software.

Incredible. Yeah.

After Linux former, a few of us left Linux

format and crowdfunded a magazine called Linux Voice, which was our dream. We did that ourselves.

Really wonderful part of my life, but very difficult. We really struggled for money. We did

this for maybe two or three years. People who know the Linux Voice story know that in the end

we had to hand it over to Linux Magazine so that subscribers wouldn't lose out completely.

And we all kind of went our own separate ways. And so for almost the last nine or 10 years,

I've been working for Canonical as a technical author there.

Oh, okay.

- Helping with the documentation at Canonical.

- Oh right, I was able to pay off my debts.

- Is so important.

So you're not throwing all of your documentation

on Discord then?

Just.

- No.

(both laughing)

- Oh man, that's a sort, that's a,

okay, no, we won't go there.

But I had to get a little jab at that practice anyway,

because I keep seeing that and it's,

like I had to submit a help ticket for something

through Discord and all their documentation,

FAQs are on Discord.

All that data can just go away,

and you have no control over it at all.

- Oh, I agree, I agree.

I mean, I don't know, maybe it's my age,

but I'm very much, you know,

I use bulletin board systems and FIDENET.

I'm used to archiving things and wanting the web

to be my archive and things need to be open.

RSS is so fundamental.

And you know, there's a generation now

that don't understand this as a right.

I'm sounding old and complaining.

- You know what, go ahead, go ahead.

You know what, I turned 50.

- Whoa.

(laughs)

You know, you don't look at, I have to say, I'm not.

- Well, thank you.

Thank you.

I don't feel it either, which is nice.

I hope that continues.

Okay.

- Now, where was Simerage then?

- We're actually here to talk about VR.

We're not gonna cover, you know, the details

and the summary of Valve's hardware announcements

'cause that's been done.

I wanted to talk about the Steam Frame specifically

because just this morning, I read that interview

that the Verge did with Pierre-Luc Graffet at Valve.

It had some revelations in there.

And I just kind of wanted to have an organic conversation

about the steam frame, the state of Linux VR

and how what Valve's doing might affect,

I guess the adoption of ARM.

We kind of know your background in VR.

You've obviously got started in the 90s,

but what more recently, what have you been into?

- So I mean, with Palmer, Lucky and the Oculus Rift,

that's when I got back into it.

And I haven't bought into the Facebook side of VR, I have to say.

That's just too much of a stretch for me, but everything but that I've been into.

The HTC Vive that Valve co-produced at the same similar kind of times to the Oculus Rift,

that was that moment where that kind of bridge between the mid 90s and I don't know, 2016,

that was my dreams kind of realized that you could put this thing on your head.

And even then Valve was considering Linux.

You know, Steam VR eventually came to Linux,

and that's itself been a long story.

And that's what's so, I think, amazing about the Steam Frame

is that it seems for Valve are all in on Linux.

When I first heard about it,

I first assumed they'd got their own version of,

you know, a lineage-based Android or something,

and they were gonna run their own Steam APKs on top of that.

But no, it's not. - Yeah, it's Steam OS.

Just, they just casually, like, wasn't even,

It wasn't even mentioned in the big nicely produced trailer that they did.

They just glossed over the fact that, hey, by the way,

we put a ton of resources into porting SteamOS to ARM,

which has its own huge, huge implications.

But that was my gateway to VR was the HTC Vive.

I was at Forbes at the time,

I was at Forbes in and out for many years.

I reviewed it and it was magic.

It felt like magic to me.

The problem with it was that eventually I moved and I didn't have

space really to keep following.

- Because you needed the tracking units,

in fact, this one behind my head.

- You needed the two, right?

I mean, probably a good like eight by eight, six by six space.

And I just, you know, I just, I never, I never had that

and didn't have a room to devote to VR, essentially.

And so I kind of fell away.

And so now I feel like I'm sort of an audience surrogate.

I feel like a lot of people right now might be also kind of seeing their curiosity for

VR reignited or maybe for the first time they're interested because of the steam machine and

the steam frame.

I guess let's talk about where does Linux sit in the VR ecosystem right now?

It's been a pretty flaky experience up to now.

I mean Valve has officially supported it for some time.

For quite a long time, you needed almost specific NVIDIA devices,

a specific versions of NVIDIA drivers.

>> NVIDIA devices, that's surprising.

>> Wow. >> For quite a few years,

and the experience was suboptimal, and this is pre-proton being a real thing.

>> Right. >> You had to run native Linux binaries,

and there were very few.

Performance really took a hit on Linux with SteamVR.

We've got all this problem with X11 and Wayland.

And the kind of pipelines through to a VR system running

is basically this dual screen off an HDMI link

made it very difficult.

Windows was the default choice

if you wanted to really experience VR.

And that's what I think has really changed.

You could see, I think it was what Valve intended,

intends to do.

You could see that it was infesting time and money

into Steam VR and supporting all the various technologies

that go into making that work.

But there was no end goal.

And I think now we can see that the steam frame

or the ecosystem that the steam frame perhaps signifies

is the beginning of that.

It's so exciting.

I mean, I'm also,

I'm excited about so many aspects of this.

A little bit underwhelmed by the screen technology,

but I'm not gonna let that affect me.

- Or were you hoping for OLED is that why?

- It really was.

I mean, you talked about the PSP earlier on and the Vita.

I have to say, especially in,

And this is something that the HTC Vive had

that the Valve Index didn't have was OLED displays.

And so the Vive was OLED.

And there's some downsides to it,

but I think for me anyway, the black levels,

the black being off really helps for immersion in VR.

- Oh, sure.

- But there are so many other things to be positive about.

I'm going back to SteamOS running on ARM,

running on Linux and SteamVR natively running on Linux.

There's the potential for a VR environment running off the arm part of the SteamVR headset

while allowing you to pass through the AAA VR experience from your PC.

Before I've always unloaded everything I can to get optimal performance, but now I can

see, you know, SteamVR has this environment where you can create it yourself, you can put

screens anywhere you want. You can be sat on top of a mountain in a house. All of that

has to be kind of side loaded alongside the games you may be playing or whatever experience

loading. Now, for me, it's pretty exciting that maybe you could just have that environment

living on your arm headset device with absolutely no degradation in quality. This is your virtual

environment where you can load games into it. And 2D games are a really big part of

it all kind of locks into this.

I mean, obviously KDE desktop and VR,

that's exciting to think about, right?

I just wanna have like the wobbly windows

where I can just like,

just kind of, or the cube, the cube is what I meant.

Not wobbly windows, the 3D cube, yeah, just wow.

But okay, so what I don't hear a lot of people talking about,

and I haven't consumed all of the media that's out there,

But it's not just a VR device, it's a computer.

And Valve was very forward about, they were very explicit about that it's a computer.

But it's a computer that can theoretically play the vast majority of

Windows games that are running on Linux right now.

All of those, the VR Windows titles.

Everything on Linux and everything on Android, 3D and 2D,

on the Steam Frame, all of that happening because of

an emulation layer called Fex.

It was revealed today that Valve started hiring for Fex,

started, well not hiring necessarily, but started recruiting and

funding developers to work on this x86 Windows 2 ARM solution called Fex

in 2016, so for almost 10 years,

they've been quietly funding this,

and they've had this,

they've had a very long-term vision for this thing.

By the time the steam frame comes out,

this has been in the oven for 10 years.

- Valve seemed very, this is my personal opinion,

they seem very good at hedging their future.

And so starting or contributing to something like

Fex 10 years ago is just another kind of bet on there.

Well, we knew we'll need something

to translate to ARM at some point.

And he also said later in the interview that one of their biggest hopes for

developers is that they can spend more time on their games and

on their next games than porting games to Linux.

And that was actually one of the questions I was gonna ask you is,

do you think with the advent of proton and

fex that people making native Linux games is even necessary?

And I think that with this, it's not a reality anymore.

- Oh no, I think you mentioned like Windows titles

and everything running on the ARM based Steam frame.

I think probably the results are gonna be very modest,

but I mean, for the average Steam library,

that's gonna mean a lot.

I mean, I have hundreds of games,

many of which are probably older than 10 or 15 years.

That article you talk about, I think mentioned Hollow Knight.

You know, I can see, so yeah.

- Hollow Knight's silk song,

he's playing it on his Samsung Galaxy phone

using the open source technologies that Valve is helping fund and develop.

And there is no Android version of that.

So it's amazing. It's incredible.

But I think it'll be pretty, in terms of the Windows titles,

will be able to play natively on the Steam Frame.

I think it'll be pretty modest, but still wonderful.

There's still a wonderful library.

Probably, you know, games that are eight or nine years old.

In terms of VR, I'm really not sure what it means.

There are loads of games.

I mean theory, Beat Saber or some table tennis games.

But I'm not trying not to set my expectations too high.

>> I think that I'm most excited about being able to play my 2D games on there.

And I'm also, okay, so the other aspect of this is the streaming technology, right?

I guess if you're not using the frame as a standalone PC and

you're streaming content from say the Steam Machine or

a beefy gaming PC that you have, then there's really no

No performance barriers at all, right?

Yeah.

They say the latency is milliseconds, you know, which is what we're talking about with

the screen anyway, which is remarkable.

And 6 gig wireless.

That's super exciting that it does all of these things because if you really want to

get into it, you're going to need a really good PC.

But at the same time, if you want to kick back and watch a film with your partner who

happens to be the other side of the world in the same virtual cinema, you're going to

be able to do that without anything else.

That's so awesome.

I feel like the Steam Frame is sort of the VR equivalent of the Steam Deck.

I mean, the Steam Deck is a potato when you really get down to it.

It's optimized, everything about that machine and Steam OS is optimized.

But it's still a very modest, as far as hardware and performance power.

It's very, very modest.

And yet it can play up until this year, with games like maybe Space Marine 2

and really, really intensive games like that, it could play anything.

>> Yeah.

>> Maybe you had to use FSR, maybe you had to lower the resolution,

maybe you had to bump everything down the low.

And I feel like that's kind of where maybe the Steam Frame is coming in to

the VR space too, at least the standalone side of it.

I mean, what would you do with it?

You got a Steam Frame in your house on day one.

And what is the first thing you're doing with it?

There are so many things now that I'm putting off, putting my index on, because I want to

experience in the frame.

So I love watching games, watching films, watching videos.

I actually love the, so the 2D game experience has been in there for a while, but it's pretty

clunky.

I'm looking forward to not having this heavy thing hanging off my nose and something that

I don't have, I'm not tethered because I'm still using the index.

I'm looking forward to the kind of the direct user experience.

But there's so much, I love Elite Dangerous and VR.

That is just one of the most incredible games.

And there are some great ways to visit different parts of the world.

You know, Google Earth is one of my favorite experiences.

You know, go to Kathmandu, go to Paris, you get a real sense.

Okay, so it's not the same, but you do get a sense of being elsewhere.

And I think that's really important.

It's really important for people who don't have the space

or the ability to kind of move necessarily,

but also if you're sat on an airplane

and just need to escape.

I've played the longest in the oldest games, Skyrim.

You know, you can mod it in all the ways that people--

- Can you mod it in Linux?

Is that just as easy modding it in Linux as in Windows?

I've been trying it.

- Well, I think, I haven't tried that.

I think you were talking about

whether Linux native games are still going to be as important.

I think the answer has to be no.

I think Win32 has become the default API for Linux gaming,

and it works best at the moment.

And the other thing, you mentioned the Steam Deck

and the fact that it's very modest also in its spec.

And that's really worked well in its favor.

Games developers target consoles specifically,

and the amazing things they squeeze out

of even the PlayStation 4.

Yeah, you know, that's what's really happened with the Steam Deck, as I'm sure you've seen it, you know,

people started testing their game for the Steam Deck, and it doesn't matter that it's a 720p screen,

you know, what they've been able to do is make it look much better.

And in fact, the bottleneck for VR in my experience is the GPU. It's not the screen resolution.

So the resolution and the frame is a five-year-old technology.

But what that does mean is that you'll be able to use oversampling if you care about this stuff.

And that is much more, that produces a much higher quality image.

You know, it's like whether you prefer to see anti-aliasing or the raw lines on something.

So you'd be able to really over dial everything if you really care about it.

For emulation, that's going to be one heck of a fun machine.

Yeah, there's eight or nine years ago, whenever this game called The Climb came out,

it was the same studio that does Crisis.

They developed a game called The Climb.

I remember it.

And that game gave me vertigo.

I have a fear of heights and that game legitimately gave me vertigo standing still.

Not even, you know, just doing the climbing motions and looking down and it was real enough for me.

Maybe that is something we should mention. I don't think it's good for everyone.

People genuinely get motion sickness from this stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you can't do a racing game at all.

There's no racing game I can do that doesn't make me sick in VR.

I mean, I have found that having a cockpit, that's why Elite Dangerous works so well for me,

make it bigger, you know, having something that stays static as big as you can in the foreground

really helps for some reason trick the brain.

The reason I asked you what are you going to do with it first, and you kind of struggled

initially to think about it.

Yeah, that's true.

I think Valve is going to have a difficult time marketing the Steam Frame.

There's no question that it's going to be a quality device, right?

But who is it for and what does it do is going to be, I think, a challenge for Valve to communicate,

you know, because it does so many things. Does it do all those things well? I don't know. What

does it do the best? I don't know. It's just there's so many unknowns, but I think it's a good

point. And I think I've tried to avoid jumping wholly on the VR hype train whenever it surfaced.

I think, you know, we have this real problem with motion sickness and the fact that it's an

an unnatural way for a lot of people to experience things.

But I think what me and I feel a lot of people

must also feel that this really does feel like

the future of human computer interaction

to put on that thing you are in a different world.

And I still think it'll take some further steps

in hardware innovation to get there.

But what I think is that is the destination.

So that is where I think we're going.

And I think it's an incredible privilege

to just be able to stick that on your head and experience it.

But yes, that's a really good point.

It's a difficult sell outside of those of us who are really engaged with it.

>> Yeah, what's interesting, well, this is all fascinating,

but the Verge is calling the Steamframe a Trojan horse.

If you wrote off the Steamframe as yet another VR headset, few will want to wear.

I guarantee you're not alone.

But the Steamframe isn't just a headset, it's a Trojan horse that contains the tech,

Gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy,

the next Google Pixel, and perhaps arm gaming notebooks to come.

And then that's when he starts talking about it.

I know this because I'm playing, you know, I'm playing

Hollow Knight silk song on my Samsung Galaxy right now.

It's crazy to see how far Linux gaming and proton has come in just three years,

just the three years since the Steam Deck launched.

I think at a much faster pace than before the Steam Deck launched, right?

It's one through three about three or four years between when Valve launched Proton to the release of the Steam Deck

That time period there was some great improvement, but since the Steam Deck launched it's just been

Yeah, you know by games without even looking right steam deck support if it's a it's a single-player game

It's going to run period. That's that's I think where we're at

Yeah, if it's a multiplayer game with certain types of anti-cheat, it's going to run also like arc Raiders

like Halo Infinite. So yeah, it's, I feel, I was telling someone, I feel kind of bad

for ProtonDB.com because they were such a critical resource for years and years and

now it's just like...

They've basically ascended. I think Valve really has a thing for VR. I think it can

see it as the end, the same as the notion.

And the two things are kind of...

Company-wide personal passion, I think is what it feels like, right?

I think it's a passion.

I don't think they think that, you know, the frame is going to, I don't know, I hope

it does, but I don't think it's going to be a huge seller, but it's their bookmark for,

you know, it's been six years since the index.

It's their bookmark in time for how things are going.

And the fact that they can combine that with the parts of the organization, a very small

organization that are helping get arm compatibility for games is a bit of a synergy that they

they're used for this.

>> Do you think that retroactively the Steam Frame and

Fex and all of this progress on our architecture,

does that retroactively improve a product like the Index?

>> Well, I think actually it makes it more accessible because I mean,

for the Index you needed a thousand dollar GPU at the least.

If that's gonna make, if ARM gaming brings the price down for

running those kind of titles that you may otherwise have needed a decent GPU, then yeah,

absolutely. Or it means you can do it on your laptop.

I mean, because you sort of had to have, you had to have an overpowered system to compensate

for all of the overhead, right? The performance overhead that you were losing to the translation

layer. Did I, I think that's right.

Yeah. So I think it's a, they're always very willy and ambiguous from, I mean, it's very

much like proton. I mean, the way that I seem to understand it is that they identify certain

patterns in VIX instructions that they know they've got an efficient routine for an arm.

And so they signal that as the official, as something they recognize as having an efficient

arm routine. And then the last step will just run the arm code for that. So it becomes like

a meta set of instructions.

When everything is translated into this meta state, then the performance is going to be

If there are still missing gaps,

then you're gonna hit bottlenecks at certain parts.

>> So I have another quote from about this actually.

Let me try to dig it up here.

So this is from an engineer.

I don't know which engineer, but an engineer at Valve who was speaking to Digital Foundry.

And he said the translation layer, and we're talking about facts,

the translation layer implements the x86 instructions, a top arm,

and does it actually at a very modest performance cost.

I think we've been quoting numbers of 10 to 20% nominal, but

that's not 10 to 20% of the game's performance.

So you can't just multiply the FPS numbers, for example.

It would be 10 to 20% of the CPU code that is running inside of the game

process because we try, as you were saying, we try to run native code as much as we can.

So all of the APIs that a game in a PC space would traditionally rely upon,

Those are all implemented natively.

>> You said like a compatibility layer,

I think that's identifying certain patterns and then knowing how those patterns can get

exact equivalent output on ARM is that translation.

>> So-

>> ARM is super efficient in lots of ways that x86 isn't.

So there are-

>> Can you talk a little bit about that because I'm not,

I don't have much experience with ARM aside from using Macbook really.

Well, you see, I mean, if you've used Rosetta,

Rosetta 2 specifically, Apple's doing

almost exactly the same thing.

And it's basically is the physical architecture

of ARM CPUs versus X86 CPUs.

It's the way that the actual processing units

are organized, the way that the different parts

are parallelized, and the way that there are

different instructions for doing different things

that make them very optimized,

especially for power efficiency, which is why they become--

- Oh yeah.

- Yeah, so, but that, now we're seeing a kind of,

I think, a carryover where they've become so powerful

at certain aspects that you can translate,

what, legacy, it's kind of, I don't know,

it's not really brute force,

but the established way of doing something into

what have become like the cutting edge CPU architecture.

- How did Valve do this faster

and I would say better than Microsoft?

How did that happen?

Because if you look at the gaming story on, you know,

Microsoft had this big push to arm laptops,

what, two years ago, maybe?

And gaming on that is a dumpster fire still.

I'm pretty sure that a lot less Windows games run

on Windows ARM than Windows games run on Linux, right?

So here you have Valve coming to the table saying,

Okay, we made this translation layer,

or let's call it a emulation layer.

By the way, I love what Val said in this interview

about wine, they give a lot of credit to Code Weavers

and a lot of credit to wine and they say that,

you know, what you see in proton is just a sneak peek

of what's coming to wine and it benefits everybody

and that's awesome.

- All of this is, this is, I mean,

there are many ways to answer your question,

but all of this is open source.

I mean, I think they're paying for like a single developer

But all of this code is available for Microsoft to use.

That's what's so wonderful about it.

Right, so I guess I can't wrap my head around how a multi-billion

or trillion dollar company has not managed to solve the gaming on ARM

on their own OS, where Valve has come along and they're like,

"You know what? Play anything from any OS, from any architecture on this.

It's fine."

I could make some guesses.

I mean, you've got to say Apple did a similar thing.

Mac OS, you know, is obviously BSD based.

BSD, UNIX systems, they were built with the intention

of being portable to work on lots of different architectures

of computer they did in the '70s.

So maybe there's something intrinsically different

in these BSD or UNIX based operating systems

that makes them easy to more portable,

that maybe this is purely my own opinion,

maybe Microsoft struggles with something

been so welded to x86 architecture for so long, especially when it comes to performance

pipelines.

Interesting.

I want to say that it feels like another nail in Windows coffin, at least for gamers.

I think you can forecast that five years from now, Linux gaming market share will probably

have doubled at least.

Maybe not daily driver Linux use, but gaming just from devices like the Steam Deck,

like the frame, like the Steam Machine.

And then at that point, do you feel like when, I don't know, there's 7 to 10% of people

gaming on Linux, whether that's Steam OS or Ubuntu or whatever, you know.

Do you think that developers then will actually start paying more attention as far as anti-cheat

and, I don't know.

>> I hope so.

>> Because that's like the last, that's like all right.

>> I mean, I know we're in a bit of a bubble or

I'm in a bit of a bubble, but I have seen people don't care

that the steam machines are running the next.

They actually see the steam OS experience on the steam deck and they want it.

They want the native cloud saving, the suspend resume,

the kind of console like experience with the vast library and

the far cheaper prices and no subscription service that comes with sounds like an advert.

that comes with Steam.

- We're reaching to the choir, but yeah, yeah.

- I mean, I have spoken to people

who are looking for gaming PCs

and depending on the price of the Steam machine,

they're indifferent about whether it's Linux.

- Really? - With the exception being,

yeah, with the exception being Fortnite.

But, you know, that's something I do hope will change.

But there are lots of people-- - Can you play the Android

version of Fortnite on the Steam frame?

- Now, that's a good question.

That's a really good question.

>> That doesn't have the same level of Vantici integration, does it?

I don't know about these things.

It's just- >> Well, it's a kernel thing, so I don't know.

>> I'm gonna have to dig into that.

That could be a game changer, at least for some people.

I love the fact that Linux is now a feature, an expected feature,

and not something that detracts from the experience.

>> Yeah, it's getting right.

>> When I was covering handheld gaming at Forbes,

you would constantly see big outlets like IGN or the Verge or those guys.

When the Asus Rog came out or when the Lenovo Legion go, not the S,

not the S with SteamOS, but the regular Lenovo Legion Go came out,

they were complaining about the fact that it shipped with Windows.

And that's such an unusual, very, very recent type of attitude to have where it's like, man,

it's a bummer this doesn't ship with SteamOS and Linux.

>> Yeah.

I get that, that's wild to hear mainstream out.

Let's sing that, right?

- Yeah, and the other thing that I don't think,

we've mentioned it briefly, but it's your computer.

It's your thing.

You can run, I mean, KD, you can install

whatever you want on it.

You can store the Epic Games store if you want to.

You can do anything you want to.

And, you know, when you, like we all do,

switch between various walled gardens

and then Steam OS and Linux,

It's just like your eyes wide open at the possibility and potential of a different kind of world,

but a world that really does exist in Linux and on SteamOS.

That's beautiful.

That's a quote.

That's going to be like a short.

That's going to be a Linux for everyone short right there.

That's the other reason why so many of us use Linux,

because that passion that you have for computers is really driven by being able to do what you want

and scratch your own itch and go down your own paths.

It's really important.

>> Well, hey, it's why the Linux kernel was created.

>> Yeah.

>> Right? By Linus.

I mean, he wanted his own,

he wanted an operating system that suited his needs and so he built it.

>> Yeah.

>> And that's what we see,

that's like the spirit of open source software ever since then.

>> Yeah.

>> For better or for worse,

I mean, there's fragmentation and there's

different package managers and different window,

>> Humans. >> Positors and all this stuff.

But it's also the beauty of it is having all that choice.

But now, the journalist inside of me has to wonder,

is there any danger to having Valve becoming such

a giant in the Linux gaming space?

It's just an open-ended question.

There's a lot of theoretical scenarios that could unfold in the next five

the 10 years with Valve having such a foot hold right now.

- The first thing I thought of is when you said

being the journalist and then asking a question

in the headline is Betridge's law of headlines

and so the answer is always no.

- Yes, that's exactly right.

That's exactly right.

You know, I mean, I'll pose that to the audience too.

You know, just, I know that there are people,

there are people, you know, they say things like,

well, Valve's getting kids addicted to gambling,

or, you know, Valve just has too much control over

the gaming ecosystem.

- My personal kind of private philosophy

is really not to read the comments.

I try to judge organizations and people by their actions

and not by what other people say.

And it's very easy for people to criticize.

I know I'm just as guilty of criticizing people

and criticizing processes and things.

I, you know, so I fail at this as well,

but it's easy to criticize and not offer an alternative.

And I don't think there's an alternative that's close.

And if you can think, if any of those people

can think of an alternative,

this is the space where you can do it.

You can't do it on a PlayStation, you know,

it's much harder to do it on an Xbox

and will be coming much harder to do it on Xbox.

It's getting harder to do it on Android.

It's getting harder to do it on Apple.

All of these things require development accounts.

They're trying to, you know,

so this is the place to do it.

And I'd like to see people try.

>> Yeah, I think that's a healthy outlook.

I mean, if you're not comfortable with the level of control or

whatever you want to call it that Valve has in the Linux gaming space,

just fork it all and start your own thing.

>> Yeah. >> I mean,

we've seen relatively new Linux projects like Bazite.

It's kind of a pretty amazing success story what Universal Blue has managed to

accomplish with Bazite in just a few short years.

I mean, everybody knows about SteamOS, yes, but a lot of people that I'm seeing

when they're having the conversation about switching away from Windows,

they're talking about using Bazite, not SteamOS.

And that just, I guess, that's all to say that I think that illustrates

your point really beautifully is that they saw an opportunity,

they saw an opening, and they built this thing.

And in a few short years, it became a pretty moderately successful project.

And that is the beauty of open source.

build what you want to use.

And if it's good, then I feel like it'll find some level

of success through word of mouth or whatever.

- I mean, I think there is always risk.

And there's the risk that just Valve is very dominant

at the moment.

The leadership at least seems to be doing it in a way

that's mostly, we all agree is a good approach.

You know, then they're not locking anybody particularly

in, there's no subscription, but things will change.

I'm sure, and then I guess we'll have to deal with that

when as of when it happens.

- You know, I really shouldn't say Valve,

I really should say Steam.

Steam specifically being such a monopoly

in the PC gaming space, you know, Epic games as a footnote,

all the other, you know, things that everyone else has tried,

like EA's tried Origin and, you know, Ubisoft has tried

to Uplay or whatever it's called, and they're just footnotes.

And I just worry about a day when Valve,

maybe under new leadership, they want more of a cut or

they tighten the reins with develop, I don't know, I don't know.

But like you said, let's judge them on their actions

instead of where unfounded fears are.

And their actions are like,

actions are basically like you guys are saviors right now.

They have had this vision since 2012

with the original Steam Machines in 2012.

I mean, yes, there were failure, but Valve has seen this highway

into the future for, I don't know, I'm just babbling now.

Who knows whether they really expected Steam Machines or SteamOS at the time to succeed.

But they needed to have the expertise in developing their own, well,

it was initially Ubuntu then, Debian-based OS.

>> That's right. >> What worked and what didn't work.

Developing the hardware, working with partners.

You know, you know this, you have to try something to be able to get that real world experience

of solving the problems and then you move on to try again.

You keep trying.

So you have to start somewhere.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you know why Valve at one point switched from an Ubuntu base or a Debian base to Arch?

I don't know.

I guess.

I mean, I don't want to say it as an arch user, but it's a lot easier to build it in the way

that you want.

You can see that it's a lot easier to build it up from scratch and rebuild it again.

It's a lot easier to make it without it being a declarative Linux OS.

It's a lot easier to get some of the benefits of both if that's how you want to do it.

And of course, it's super cutting edge in lots of ways if you need that as well.

Yeah.

Because I'm sure it wasn't about just having access to a newer kernel, right?

Because they could have just used the devian base and threw a new kernel in there.

So it's more about probably the immutable aspect of it all.

Maybe they could make it immutable without breaking so much from upstream arch, whereas

they'd be breaking some kind of Debian philosophy maybe in trying to do this with Debian, but

this means that they still keep within the main line of arch progress really without

breaking anybody's philosophy, maybe.

So you've not used VR for some time.

What's the first thing?

Why are you so interested in the frame?

I'm interested in the frame because I haven't been satisfied with the MetaQuest the last

time I used a MetaQuest 2.

I still have it in the drawer.

I maybe used it for two or three hours.

I just, you know, I wasn't satisfied with the library, with the experience, with the

mandatory meta account linking, all that stuff.

I started out being interested in the frame just because of its potential impact on Linux

gaming and then I started thinking about all of the potential that it has beyond just VR.

You know, okay, so this is a weird realization that I had.

It's sort of, the frame sort of reminds me of the Wii U, the Nintendo Wii U.

At least, at least there's like a marketing opportunity for that, right?

Where I think one of Nintendo's commercials, you know, was talking about how, well, if

If your parents or your roommates are using the big TV in the living room, you can just

transfer it to your gamepad and play on there.

And I feel like something like the frame provides that same kind of experience where

you can just kind of bring the gaming from the big screen in your living room to your

face.

I don't know.

I'm not articulating that very well.

You might not have a big screen or the room to have a big screen or you may live in a

house.

You just want to sit down on a sofa somewhere and escape and play.

Yeah.

I guess, I guess if I had to distill that answer into one sentence, it would be, I started

realizing that it's a Linux PC and not just a VR headset.

It's a Linux PC that I can do so much with, you know, it's like a discovery device.

I love discovering new stuff and playing with new things.

And I think that there's the opportunity for that on the steam frame is just going to be

off the charts, just so much you can do with it.

It wouldn't surprise me.

And when you look at how modular the steam frame is, the fact that you can remove that

whole front part that contains the processor and the screens and the lenses, that looks

very like you could snap on an OLED equivalent or a much more powerful arm equivalent.

A modular upgrade, right?

Oh, man.

So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a much more expensive micro OLED version.

Huh.

Okay, last question.

When are we getting a Steam phone?

Do you think we'll ever get a good Linux-based phone?

I haven't been following that space for four or five years.

I think we're quite far away from that happening.

Android is becoming under Google's control

a bit more locked down, a bit harder to keep open.

The AOSP gets getting more and more delayed.

We still have the same problem with the firmware's

that on the Modems of phones that we can't get to that part.

There are people that are trying,

there are people who have made a brave effort,

but nothing that is gonna, I think,

help them get past this kind of small group of people

really care about this stuff.

I think the best, when people don't accept it, but I think lineage is probably our best

chance of something like this.

But I think it's a pretty desperate situation.

Maybe all of this stuff that Valve is doing will trickle down to that space too.

Who knows?

It's all about that.

On mobile phones for me though, well not just for me.

I don't like really using my phone, but when it comes down to it, are the apps there that

I need to use?

And I've become reliant on my banking app working

and I have to say, contactless payment.

So it's hard enough in my world without Facebook

and without WhatsApp and without Instagram

because of the decisions I've made.

I've made a few choices, but I can't take it any further

unless I'm prepared to live in a hot,

- Hey, you can only do so much.

It's not a bad idea.

You can only do so much.

- Yeah.

- Before you go, I wanted to give you a chance

to just kind of promote your stuff, you know?

What you're into, any links, any podcasts?

- My regular podcast is Late Night Linux.

- Good podcast.

Very good long running podcast, right?

How long you guys been going now?

- Well, Joe must have been,

I think I've been doing it for about nine years,

but it existed before then, so maybe 10 or 11 years.

- What is latenightsynf.com?

- I went to that URL and it was just nothing.

It was dead or it was something, I don't know.

- I'm surrounded here by synthesizers,

which is kind of the hobby that I never get a chance to explore

because I don't have enough time.

And I keep doing on the other podcast,

these kind of aside,

where open source music generating software or synthesizers,

I'll show up here.

- Yeah, please do.

Whoa!

Hello.

So that looks complex and fun.

- When it, yeah, it's a lot of fun.

And so whenever I do these kind of synth sections

on Night Night Linux and I haven't done one for a while,

I always get a lot of people saying they'd love to hear more,

which is a bit of a joke 'cause lots of people say

we don't want to hear anymore.

And what I've promised to do for a couple of years

is do a late night synth, at least as a one-off,

which I haven't got around to doing,

but that's what the domain name is about.

- Interesting.

I don't know if you're interested in doing a collaboration

or anything, but I'm gonna be talking,

do you know who Veronica explains is?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Okay.

I'm talking to her next week and we're talking

mostly about open source music production.

- Wow, so yeah.

- And so, and that's something that I have been really

wanting to get into as a musician and I'm scared.

And so that's gonna be, you know, a good step

towards doing that is getting her knowledge

and just talking to her about how she does it,

what her pipeline is, what her tool set is.

But I think it'd be fun to do like a, I don't know,

a bunch of Linux podcasters get together

and write a song or something.

- Yeah.

- That'd be cool, you know?

- Well, the thing gets a bit--

- I don't play keyboards, so.

- I know, 25 years ago, I really took it seriously

and tried to do something.

But since then, you know, I'm a geek.

It's just become a big research project.

I've written my own sequencer that runs on this thing,

which is just a load of lights and buttons.

- I would love to hear some of that.

We've got a good sound point.

- I'm really interested in sound and repetition

and what makes good music good music.

So if I turn this stuff on,

I'm just a mad scientist rather than a composer.

- That sounds like a blast, honestly.

- It's a lot of fun.

- It sounds like a blast.

- You have nothing to show for it.

- Well, it doesn't have to be for us.

It can just be for you and you alone, but you know.

- And I've accepted that.

I think I've accepted that in my fifties,

I'm never gonna be the next pop star.

- Well, but you can still have fun trying.

>> Yeah, and also maybe I should release this weirdly self-indulgent repetitive electronic music.

>> Well, thank you so much for being here and talking to us about all this stuff.

I could talk about Linux gaming in general for days on end.

What, okay, last question, and then we'll say goodbye.

What are you rocking as your daily driver distro?

>> So I work for Canonical, so I do spend a lot of time with Ubuntu.

But for a long time, I've just been my daily driver for over a decade.

Vanilla arch, Pure Arch?

- Well, I wrote a KDE application.

I've been a KDE user for--

- Which one?

- So the K-Album application I talked about.

- Oh, it's okay, okay.

- It was KDE.

So it doesn't exist since 2003.

- Oh, that's about to look it up.

Shoot, okay.

- You can probably so--

- At least get an archive somewhere.

- Yeah, you can get an archive.

I've got the code on GitHub.

But there was a mode in it where you could export

your photo collection as a web page, as an HTML page.

And so if you put in quotes on the internet,

generated by K-Album,

you can still find a lot of websites

that were generated by the application

usually in the early mid 2000s.

- That's really cool.

You're kind of a trailblazer, man.

- Oh wait, there's so many.

I mean, if I'd have thought about it,

there's so many things I could have done to mess with SEO

and capitalize on people building websites with my product,

but I never did any of it.

(laughs)

- Well, dude, thank you so much for spending the time

at the end of a long day for you

'cause you're about eight hours ahead, right?

- I've really enjoyed it.

It's been a day full of meetings

and this has been my favorite one.

- Yay, awesome.

I love having conversations like this

with people in the community and geeking out over stuff

and like that's something that I can't get anywhere else.

So.

- That's a rare skill as well, I think.

You know, it's easy to take it for granted

'cause maybe you don't see it,

but it is not so many people have it or are able to do it.

So you do that.

- Oh, but I'll tell you what,

I was nervous as hell before we got on camera.

- Really?

- Yeah.

I was nervous as hell, man.

'Cause I haven't done this in so long.

Just anxiety over, I don't know, the technical side.

Will the recording be okay?

Like, will I sound like a dummy?

You know, just stupid things, imposter syndrome things.

But yeah, this is what I feel.

the same way. I think everybody does well apart unless you're a complete dick.

That's right. Only complete dicks. Don't have imposter syndrome. You heard it here first.

Man. All right, dude. Thank you so much for this.

Thanks, Jason. It's been a lot of fun.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, you bet. You bet. See ya.

Cheers, Jason.

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