Matt Godbolt: So Ben, you've moved over to Linux, right? So what kind of problems did you have?
Ben Rady: It just works.
Matt Godbolt: Good afternoon, Ben.
Ben Rady: Good afternoon, Matt.
Matt Godbolt: This is doing two things. First of all, it's exposing everyone to what time of day we record this, you know as we continue to leak personal information.
Ben Rady: Mm-hmm.
Matt Godbolt: But also, it's confused anybody who thinks that we say only, hi, Ben.
Ben Rady: Literally every time we meet in the physical world, those are the only two words we're allowed to say to each other.
Matt Godbolt: That is how it works. It's kind of the SYN-ACK TCP protocol thing.
Ben Rady: Yeah. Otherwise I don't even know who you are. I just sort of stand around and it's like, who's this? I don't know. Who are you?
Matt Godbolt: I don't recognize me. You've got face blindness unless you hear the magic shibboleth from me.
Ben Rady: Yeah. Exactly. Mm-hmm.
Matt Godbolt: Well, my levels look really low. So I apologize to myself in the future for recording, having to edit this and probably do something hideous with the sounds. But we have a topic today because last time we spoke, you had a bold assertion and I believe that you followed through.
Ben Rady: We do.
Matt Godbolt: on that bold assertion and you have a trip report of sorts to share with us.
Ben Rady: I have.
Matt Godbolt: So do you want to remind us where you were and what you, what you said you were going to do?
Ben Rady: Yes, so I'm gonna go back to the full history here. So in the beginning there was Windows 3.1. And then after that
Matt Godbolt: Was that literally the first thing?
Ben Rady: That was the first thing that was ever created.
Matt Godbolt: Okay. Right.
Ben Rady: Yeah, this is a weird form of creationism where the entire, this is Last Thursdayism, you know, Last Thursdayism, right?
Matt Godbolt: No, I don't know Last Thursdayism.
Ben Rady: Last Thursdayism is the belief that everything was created last Thursday in its state, in its existing state, and that there was no prior state.
Matt Godbolt: Uh-huh. Right.
Ben Rady: And I think that it's like, and every Thursday it like recycles again.
Matt Godbolt: Oh.
Ben Rady: So the universe just recycles every Thursday.
Matt Godbolt: And all those dinosaur bones in the ground are just a joke that some omnipotent being has put there for us to have chocolate.
Ben Rady: Yeah, it's not necessarily a joke. They just, when the universe was created, they were in the ground as they were.
Matt Godbolt: Okay.
Ben Rady: And, you know, all the carbon isotopes were in the state that they were.
Matt Godbolt: Right, and all of the things in the entire observable universe were set with their velocities already pointing away from some... yeah. Okay, fair, it's hard to refute. I think one of those difficult to falsify...
Ben Rady: Exactly. All the light has already been stretched out, pre-stretched, you know, and that's just how it was when it was created last Thursday. Right. Yes, very difficult to falsify that hypothesis. Very, very difficult.
Matt Godbolt: Anyway, in a similar vein to that, you subscribed, your personal creationism is that all existence began with Windows 3.1. We're not even
Ben Rady: With Windows 3.1. And then, you know, had the Protestant Reformation in the form of Windows for Workgroups. No. No,
Matt Godbolt: Not even going to talk about 95, are we?
Ben Rady: No, no, no, no.
Matt Godbolt: What about ME?
Ben Rady: Well, yeah, so Windows...
Matt Godbolt: Windows ME, oh God.
Ben Rady: Yeah, right.
Ben Rady: Windows 2000. Yeah.
Matt Godbolt: No, it's fine. All right, all right. We'll take a little off-base here. Okay, so Windows 3.1.
Ben Rady: So Windows 3.1. Fast forward, that was like maybe the beginning of like a reasonable Windows that people would want to buy, right?
Matt Godbolt: Right, and that was last Thursday.
Ben Rady: And then all of that was created last Thursday.
Matt Godbolt: Okay, yep.
Ben Rady: Fast forward to now, Windows 10. All of the
Matt Godbolt: So seven Windowses have come and gone, or six. I've got one.
Ben Rady: Is that how many it is?
Matt Godbolt: I don't know. Well I don't know how many there are because of the counting problem, but you know, there was no Windows 9, right?
Ben Rady: Oh yeah, it's not.
Matt Godbolt: Because of too many things that maybe apocryphally searched for the string Windows 9 and then did some workarounds for Windows 95 on the basis of that would cover 95 and 97 or whatever, something like that.
Ben Rady: Yeah.
Matt Godbolt: Anyway, Windows 10 is now here.
Ben Rady: Yes, there have been. Windows 10, well, now Windows 10 is gone. Windows 10 end of life, right?
Matt Godbolt: Oh, that's right. It's not gone in my house.
Ben Rady: So, wow, right. But Windows 10 has reached the end of its supported life.
Matt Godbolt: Yep.
Ben Rady: And, you know, I certainly grew up in a world trying to play games before Windows. I had a PC. I had DOS on that PC.
Ben Rady: And that required, you know, I would,
Matt Godbolt: All the fiddling of himem.sys and autoexec.bat to try and get your Sound Blaster drivers to load, you know, yeah, happy times.
Ben Rady: Yes. And this was, oh absolutely. Yes. Getting a sound card to work on a PC was an exercise in understanding how computers work.
Ben Rady: And this was exacerbated by the fact that my dad, at the time, was running a company that did like...
Matt Godbolt: Your dad at the time.
Ben Rady: Yeah. Not my dad.
Matt Godbolt: You've changed that. You've got to change.
Ben Rady: Yeah. Just like Windows, you got to change that out every few years. The license expires.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah, that's right.
Ben Rady: They go end of life. And you have to get a new one.
Matt Godbolt: This is a terrible start to an episode.
Ben Rady: I don't even know what's happening right now.
Matt Godbolt: Okay, so are your dad, comma, at the time.
Ben Rady: So at the time, comma, my dad...
Matt Godbolt: Yeah.
Ben Rady: was running a company that did like video and audio editing software. And he would get all of these like experimental sound boards and video cards and other things from various vendors.
Ben Rady: And then they would do tests on them. And then when they didn't quite work out the way that they wanted, he would bring one home for me and like give it to me. Like, hey, you want this super high-end, you know, $10,000 sound card? And I'm like, yes.
Matt Godbolt: That we couldn't get to work. Yeah.
Ben Rady: Yeah, right. Exactly. That's a prototype or whatever, right? And so that just made the problem 10 times worse. And so like, you know, a large part of my childhood was just trying to figure out how to play games on this computer that had this weird combination of unreliable and unstable, but also super powerful and expensive hardware in it.
Ben Rady: Right.
Matt Godbolt: Right. And this is all before plug and play. So it's like moving jumpers around on the board and changing slots in there and trying to like...
Ben Rady: Oh, yeah. Yes. Which IRQ is this thing on? Oh, no, multiple ones.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah.
Ben Rady: And they got to be set like this. And it's, oh, my God. So that experience, like, viscerally created this, you know, thing in my mind of, like, it can be hard to play video games on a computer.
Matt Godbolt: Right.
Ben Rady: That is a thing that can be difficult to do, right?
Matt Godbolt: And, you know, from my own background, it was always the less than legal acquired versions of games on cassette tapes that but then wouldn't load because their audio quality was so terrible.
Ben Rady: Right. Mm-hmm.
Matt Godbolt: And then you'd sit there adjusting the azimuth alignment screw of your tape recorder to try and move the head up and down to some point where you could get it to actually load in and work correctly.
Ben Rady: Yeah, yeah.
Matt Godbolt: So, yeah, again, or you were typing them in from a magazine so that you spent hours.
Ben Rady: Yes, uh-huh.
Matt Godbolt: Essentially, what you're saying is that we... us old folk, we suffered to play games and that's how it should be.
Ben Rady: Yeah. Yes, we had to earn it. Yeah, right.
Matt Godbolt: Can't see how this is going to segue into the topic.
Ben Rady: Oh, it's going to be perfect. It's going to be perfect. So fast forward to the end of Windows 10 and the introduction of Windows 11. And my son originally was like, hey, I...
Matt Godbolt: No longer your son.
Ben Rady: At the time, he was my son.
Matt Godbolt: I'm feeling silly.
Ben Rady: This is too much.
Matt Godbolt: I think it's worth mentioning that you and I went out for drinks last night, and so I'm a bit hungover and feeling a bit worse for wear.
Ben Rady: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah, so maybe that explains a bit.
Ben Rady: Right.
Matt Godbolt: Anyway, yes.
Ben Rady: Yes. At the time,
Matt Godbolt: At the time, come on.
Ben Rady: He was like, I don't want to use Windows 10.
Matt Godbolt: Right.
Ben Rady: I just don't like it. I don't like what Microsoft is doing with it. I don't like, or wait, I'm sorry.
Matt Godbolt: Oh, 11, you mean? He didn't want to go to 11. This Windows does not go up to 11.
Ben Rady: Like I don't want to move off of 10 to go to 11. I don't want to use 11. Yeah. I don't want the speaker to go up to 11. So I'm not going to do it. I am instead...
Ben Rady: going to use Linux as my primary operating system for gaming. And immediately all of this sort of post-traumatic stress disorder from when I was a child and had all these like, you know, crazy pieces of hardware and all the things that I'm like, well, that's going to be an adventure, but I'm here for it.
Ben Rady: Like if that's what you want to do, that sounds fun in a weird way.
Matt Godbolt: You are going to learn a lot about how computers work, my son.
Ben Rady: And let's do that. Yes. Yes.
Matt Godbolt: You said. And then... did he?
Ben Rady: Yes. Well, so he set this all up and he installed a bunch of games. And for a while, he was dual booting Windows and Linux, and I think he maybe technically still is.
Ben Rady: But he started playing all these games in Linux and they were like, yeah, you know, it's like Valve,
Matt Godbolt: Right.
Ben Rady: Has, you know, like the Steam Deck and a bunch of these things that are based on Linux and they have like this sort of like verification system and they give games different tiers. You know, it's like the Platinum tier games work pretty well and then all these things. And he's like, yeah, you know, maybe there's some games, but it's like, this has all kind of worked well for me.
Ben Rady: And so I was like, okay, maybe this is not the most insane thing in the world. I too do not want to install Windows 11 on my computer and I'd had Windows 10 on it for a very long time. And I'm like, all right, well, over Thanksgiving, I am going to wipe my PC completely and install Ubuntu 24 on it.
Ben Rady: And then I'm gonna install Steam. And then I'm gonna allocate the next four days of my life to trying to get a video game to work on it. That was the mentality that I had going into this.
Matt Godbolt: So for our non-American listeners, I was going to say readers, but I mean, possibly some are reading along with the transcripts, but for our non-Americans, Thanksgiving is the last Thursday of November, so effectively you had a run-up of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday before you had to go back to normal job, I see.
Ben Rady: Right, right, right.
Matt Godbolt: Right.
Ben Rady: I'm going to just like, because the way we we do Thanksgiving is we we make a huge meal for Thanksgiving and then we just eat the leftovers for the next four days. And so I have no cooking to do or very little cooking to do.
Matt Godbolt: Fantastic.
Ben Rady: It's all just like hang out and do stuff.
Ben Rady: And what I was going to do is I was going to get games working on Linux on my computer.
Matt Godbolt: So you've broadly thought day one, install Linux.
Ben Rady: Mm-hmm.
Matt Godbolt: Day two, reinstall Linux. Day three, re-reinstall Linux.
Ben Rady: Yes.
Matt Godbolt: Day four...
Ben Rady: Download the NVIDIA drivers, yeah, the open source version of the NVIDIA drivers and recompile them on my computer with different flags set because that's what it's going to take to get these to work.
Matt Godbolt: Yep.
Ben Rady: So I started out, I was like, all right, let's wipe the computer, install Linux, that's easy. Fire up Steam, install a game, run the game, and it worked.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah.
Ben Rady: And that was it. That was the end of the story is it just worked. And then I installed another game and that just worked.
Matt Godbolt: Hmm. No, I think probably you must have... no, that's not how it is.
Ben Rady: I know, it's very disorienting.
Matt Godbolt: How, but so you're telling me that Linux installed okay on, what did you install it on?
Matt Godbolt: A gaming PC, is this?
Ben Rady: Yeah, this was just the gaming PC that I had Windows 10 on.
Matt Godbolt: Okay, with an NVIDIA card in it, right?
Ben Rady: Yeah, it's got a 2080 RTX in it, which is not a new card, but it's, you know, it's pretty good.
Matt Godbolt: Okay. Okay. No, but it's, yeah. And it has just worked. And then Steam worked. I mean, Linux has been relatively reliable for me, but then there's forever quirks. So like, you know, my current desktop machine has, and I'm going to look down, one of the RTXs, I don't know which one it is, but Ubuntu 20, whatever I'm on, 25.10.
Ben Rady: Mm-hmm.
Matt Godbolt: If I lock the screen, it never unlocks ever again. That's it. It's done. You have to reboot it from the outside.
Ben Rady: Right.
Matt Godbolt: So like, you know, and I kind of put up with this for most of my life. You know that I've always been the guy suffering on with the Linux laptop going, ah, it's fine.
Ben Rady: Yeah, yeah.
Matt Godbolt: I just have to unplug it and plug it back in again like eight times until eventually it notices that there's a second monitor or whatever.
Ben Rady: Yeah, right.
Matt Godbolt: And that's, but it sounds like you had a very good experience, both of Linux, the base platform, installing it on your computer and it just working, finding your peripherals, finding your monitors, finding your mouse, keyboard, everything.
Matt Godbolt: I mean, that's never really been a problem, but you know...
Ben Rady: Yeah, right. That's always been fine.
Matt Godbolt: But certainly the graphics has been an issue with Nouveau being like, oh, the default driver is the open source one that is, you know, OK.
Matt Godbolt: And I'm sure folks are working really hard to make it work against all odds of NVIDIA wanting to be closed source.
Ben Rady: Right. Yeah.
Matt Godbolt: But then, you know, you want to run a game and it's like, well, I'd like to draw triangles quite quickly, please. And, you know, NVIDIA are good at that. Yeah.
Ben Rady: Yeah.
Matt Godbolt: And it just worked. And then Steam worked and the game just worked.
Ben Rady: It just worked.
Matt Godbolt: And so are all the games running under a variety of Wine?
Ben Rady: Yep. Yeah, I think Steam's thing for this, which is integrated into Steam, again, as best I can tell, because I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have to go figure out, like install some packages and configure a bunch of things.
Matt Godbolt: That's remarkable.
Ben Rady: It's like, oh, there's going to be an emulator delay and you're going to... No, it just clicked the install button and it just worked.
Matt Godbolt: So you literally...
Ben Rady: Yes.
Matt Godbolt: It sounds like an advert for Steam now, but like you just downloaded the thing and then you logged in with your Steam account that you were using in your Windows machine and then you just went, okay, get the games, and then you clicked it and I can't believe it.
Ben Rady: Yes. It's mind-blowing.
Matt Godbolt: That's miraculous.
Ben Rady: So I have...
Ben Rady: Well, I was going to say, so I've done this with like three games so far.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah, which which games? Which games have you done?
Ben Rady: So Factorio, obviously.
Matt Godbolt: Factorio, obviously. I mean...
Ben Rady: ARC Raiders was another one that we were playing. And then I have installed, but I haven't actually run Battletech yet. Is that what it was? Oh, there was another... Was it...
Ben Rady: You know, Faster Than Light, you know that game?
Matt Godbolt: Uh-huh, yeah, yeah.
Ben Rady: Yeah, there was, what's the successor? Into the Breach? Is that the one I'm thinking of?
Matt Godbolt: Oh, no, I don't.
Ben Rady: There's some other game I installed I haven't run yet. But so far, like, and so I've been playing a lot of ARC Raiders lately, and I've been waiting for it to crash.
Matt Godbolt: Okay.
Ben Rady: I've been waiting for it to glitch out. I've been waiting for, like, the inevitable, you know, crazy error that no one knows what it is.
Matt Godbolt: But I suppose, you know, the funny thing is... you know, Wine Is Not an Emulator, as famously is what it stands for, right?
Ben Rady: Mm-hmm.
Matt Godbolt: It is not trying to emulate or simulate.
Matt Godbolt: It is literally just an implementation. It's a reimplementation of the Win32 API and whatever things and DirectX and whatnot. And as convergent evolution has gone on and hardware and software have kind of gotten closer, presumably there's a thinner and thinner wrapper over like essentially what you need to do to send to the graphics cards. All the graphics cards do the same thing. Here's a big draw list of stuff to do. You go do it, whatever, that kind of thing. And like you're phrasing things. The complexity now is in like, here's a pixel shader. Here's a vertex shader. Here's a whatever shader, you know, like that aspect. And that is...
Matt Godbolt: pretty much the same across any system. And then the rest of the game is doing its level best not to interact with the operating system as much as possible, because that's the slow bit that you don't want to do.
Ben Rady: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Matt Godbolt: It's not like you're, you know, calling getchar to get the keyboard or whatever. You know, so I suppose it makes a lot of sense that, yeah, the... here's an API that's well understood for drawing things to the screen. Here's an API for reading the input on the keyboard. And then the middle bit is the same and always has been.
Matt Godbolt: But still, it's remarkable that it works as well as it does. You say you played through a bunch of time with...
Ben Rady: Yeah, I have, I think I have like 150 hours or something in this game right now. And I don't think it's ever crashed once. Right?
Matt Godbolt: That's really great. And edge case stuff, I would imagine, are things like, you know, interacting with storage, interacting with network play, doing stuff like unplugging or plugging in an extra mouse or full screening and not full screen. Those are kind of the edges, the weirdy edgy things that I would imagine.
Ben Rady: Well, and I'm like tabbing out of this game all the time, you know, I've got two monitors going and I've got like Firefox on one and like the full screen game on the other.
Matt Godbolt: Right, right. So full screen on one because you're cheating on the other monitor, yeah?
Ben Rady: And I, yeah, you got to look at the maps. I mean, you know, I'm not going to go find this stuff myself. I don't have time for that.
Matt Godbolt: Not crazy.
Ben Rady: Right. So yeah, I'm like moving my mouse back and forth between these things. And it's like, it all works great. It all works amazingly great.
Matt Godbolt: Wonderful.
Ben Rady: So obviously when I want to try this with a lot more games and, you know,
Matt Godbolt: I was gonna say, I haven't really kept up with the games world recently, but I'm pretty sure there's more than three available at the moment.
Ben Rady: There's probably, I mean, there's many more than three games in my Steam library that I have purchased and never played.
Matt Godbolt: At least five?
Ben Rady: So that...
Matt Godbolt: You just collect them. Okay.
Ben Rady: I kind of... you say that, but it's just sort of, ooh, I have this game. One day I'll maybe start it.
Matt Godbolt: Brilliant. Yeah.
Ben Rady: But yeah, I mean, I've gone sort of depth-first on this, right? It's like I've proven that like, you know, 150 hours in, there are no major issues, right?
Matt Godbolt: That is brilliant, yeah.
Ben Rady: And so now it's like, okay, let's try...
Matt Godbolt: But you mentioned before, I think in the last episode, there's a sort of rating for each game. So presumably the game that you just talked about is the one that has like an A, or S, or have a...
Ben Rady: Oh, is it Platinum? It's, you know, actually, I don't know. Let's find out. It might only be Gold.
Matt Godbolt: Go have a look and we get to hear you and your mechanical keyboard clicking away.
Ben Rady: Yes, there's going to be some of that.
Matt Godbolt: Or not, actually.
Ben Rady: What does it say?
Matt Godbolt: There we go. There it is.
Ben Rady: Game details. Yes, it is Platinum, so it is the highest rating.
Matt Godbolt: OK, so that's like the highest level of compatibility that they've got.
Ben Rady: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Godbolt: So what about, what other games might you want to play on Steam now?
Ben Rady: You know, I mean, Baldur's Gate, that's probably another one.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah. Oh, yeah, was that on Steam? I never know which things are.
Ben Rady: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Godbolt: I've, I know that I installed a bunch of, yeah, Baldur's Gate would, what does it say?
Ben Rady: Yeah, that is Gold.
Matt Godbolt: What does our survey say? OK.
Ben Rady: So maybe I would have more problems with that.
Matt Godbolt: It would be interesting to see how you'd get on with that on Linux.
Ben Rady: Yeah.
Matt Godbolt: Oh, that's fascinating. I didn't realise Baldur's Gate would work.
Ben Rady: Yeah. And so the other great thing that this has done is, for a while, for a long while, I had this machine set up in a dual boot configuration because I have a Linux laptop.
Ben Rady: I have a Lenovo Linux laptop, but it is a little long in the tooth. It is not the most powerful thing in the world. And having, you know, my desktop PC be available for when I want to try to develop things on Linux is nice.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah.
Ben Rady: But, you know, you're like booting back and forth and, you know, I've always had sort of weird problems with like USB keyboards not being recognised during the boot process.
Ben Rady: And so you like can't change the GRUB menu because the whatever is going on in the PC right now, it just doesn't quite pick it up.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah. Especially if you're plugged in through like a hub of some description like that.
Ben Rady: Yeah, yeah.
Matt Godbolt: I've definitely had that before now.
Ben Rady: Yes.
Matt Godbolt: It's usually when I'm trying to unlock, I only notice it when I go to unlock the drive password or whatever, and I'm typing away and I'm like, oh, wait, and then I have to open the laptop lid and actually tap it on the laptop's physical keyboard, for example, and that kind of stuff.
Ben Rady: Yeah, yeah, and it's made worse, but I like, I have this kind of complicated setup where I use my monitors as USB-C hubs. So then if I have a laptop plugged into them, the mouse, keyboard, everything just all works. But then if I don't and the PC is on, then it like takes over the inputs and then everything switches over and it just, and it like all works like 99% of the time perfectly. But the one place where it doesn't really work great is in that boot menu. And so it was always kind of a pain, is my point, is to go back and forth.
Matt Godbolt: Yeah.
Ben Rady: And now I can just have one computer with one operating system that does everything that I need to do. And if, you know, the price of that is that occasionally I have some games that I have to futz with.
Ben Rady: But again, I've done zero futzing so far. So like.
Matt Godbolt: Zero futzing required. I mean, so I think like, you know, you and I have definitely, I mean, obviously you told us your origin story and the amount of pain and suffering that you were prepared as an adolescent to go through to play games, right?
Ben Rady: Right.
Matt Godbolt: There's a lot. And then as an adult, your patience runs thin to some extent. You just want to enjoy the game. And so the map screen's up on the spare thing and you really don't want to have to do any futzing.
Ben Rady: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Godbolt: But hidden in there is a little bit of internalised, well, occasionally my keyboard doesn't work the right way, but that was only for the boot thing. So yeah, I guess that goes away, but yeah, no, that's great. I mean, I, of course, I think we alluded to this last time, I've sort of taken a quarter step backwards, like I've been Linux only since the late 90s. My kids have got, when I set them up with Linux machines, and then eventually of their own free will, I...
Matt Godbolt: Came down and I'm like, where did you get Windows from? Oh, I found some key. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. This is not how you do this. Then we bought proper, you know, keys for it and installed it because they wanted to play games. Now, for them, those games are like Overwatch and other things, which I don't know. They're not Steam-based.
Ben Rady: Well, you can get, can't you get Overwatch on Steam?
Matt Godbolt: I don't know if you can. I know that like there's a very anti-cheat, kernel level anti-cheat thing that pops up that requires them to be like super, you know, user every time.
Ben Rady: No, maybe not. No, you can't. I bet you can't. Yeah.
Matt Godbolt: And that's a bit of a, you know, especially if playing competitively, like they are, but you know, so anyway, they've got a Windows machine.
Matt Godbolt: And then I had to install Windows in order to get a video editing package that didn't absolutely suck.
Matt Godbolt: Even though, I think we talked about this before, it in theory works on a version of Linux, just not my version of Linux.
Ben Rady: Right, right.
Matt Godbolt: And it was just like, ah, you know what? I don't want to have this. I just want to have an appliance that runs video editing and does it somewhat well.
Matt Godbolt: But I really wish I didn't have to do that. I prefer not to. I mean, I've already got Windows 11 and it is a... I can understand why. I was going to ask you earlier, so why didn't you want to upgrade to Windows 11? Maybe I should still ask that because, you know...
Ben Rady: I mean, you know, we all sort of know the answer to this, but it is... Providing a lot of things that I don't need or want, I think is just going to be the summary of that.
Matt Godbolt: Right, right, right. It is providing...
Ben Rady: Like a Microsoft account, for example.
Matt Godbolt: Right. And, you know, to the extent that we are both broadly in favour of the appropriate use of artificial intelligence, LLM-based technology, it's a choice thing, an opt-in thing, rather than a, you must forcibly opt out or maybe later on everything.
Ben Rady: Right.
Matt Godbolt: Which is, that's got to be the most grim anti-pattern of recent times, isn't it?
Ben Rady: Yeah. Oh, it's so bad.
Matt Godbolt: I mean, not just that, but like, yeah, the "would you like to leave a review for our software?" You've got yes or maybe later. And you're like, never darken my door again with this question.
Ben Rady: Right. How do I put a no solicitor sign in the software to just tell them to leave me alone?
Matt Godbolt: Right. Right.
Matt Godbolt: So anyway, I mean, we somehow have managed to make a 25 minute conversation out of "it just worked".
Ben Rady: Right. It just works.
Matt Godbolt: We could have just done that. And then I cut straight to the closing music and then we could be done with this. But...
Ben Rady: Maybe, you know, actually, I feel like we should, that's almost like the cold open of this is you play the, you do the "it just works".
Matt Godbolt: You want us to. All right.
Ben Rady: And then you play the outro.
Matt Godbolt: I'll see what I can do. I'll see what editor Matt can do. Now we'll leave all this in so that people can hear that we planned this. It gets incredibly meta then.
Matt Godbolt: So let's do the recording now. Then people can laugh at this. So Ben, you moved over to Linux, right? So what kind of problems did you have?
Ben Rady: It just works.
Matt Godbolt: There we go. All right, that's what we'll do. And then we'll cut to the closing music. And then, all right, we'll do something. Fab.
Ben Rady: Beautiful.
Matt Godbolt: Well, I think we're kind of getting towards the, not an actual stopping point then, really bizarrely.
Ben Rady: Well, I mean, one other data point here is that, like, as I said before, this is all inspired by, you know, my son, Will, and he plays lots more games than me because, you know, he is a more interesting person than I am.
Matt Godbolt: Oh, of course, yeah. So your sample size of three is bolstered by the fact that he has dozens or so, yeah.
Ben Rady: Yes.
Ben Rady: Right, right. And I think that he has maybe run into like one or two problems, but nothing that he couldn't solve by himself. And he is definitely not, you know, he's not one of the computer nerds in the family. Right. Like he's a smart kid, but he's not like, you know, into programming and stuff like that.
Matt Godbolt: That's, yeah.
Ben Rady: Right. Like for him, the Linux environment is more of a means to an end. And for me, it's a little bit more of an end unto itself in some ways, right, because we're nerds and we like these things.
Matt Godbolt: Yes. We like that kind of, yeah, we enjoy the complexity that it affords us and, you know, secretly we're like, oh, I wonder if I move the jumper, will it work this time on the PCI board?
Ben Rady: So I think basically at this point, he hasn't had a problem yet that wasn't just solved by updating some apt packages and like you're done.
Matt Godbolt: That's really quite excellent. So 2025 then was the year of the Linux desktop.
Ben Rady: Perhaps it was, or at least the year of the Linux gaming PC.
Matt Godbolt: There you go.
Matt Godbolt: But apparently not the video editing one, which...
Ben Rady: That's going to be 2095. The Advent?
Matt Godbolt: That's, yeah, you're probably right. Well, on that note, I better go and edit some videos as a, you know, by the time this goes out, I will be halfway, if not all the way. No, yeah, about halfway through all of my, the Advent, which has been going very well.
Ben Rady: I have been enjoying those, by the way.
Matt Godbolt: Oh, thank you.
Ben Rady: I think they're very good. Yeah. I like them.
Matt Godbolt: Thank you. Yeah. We are, this again reveals how close to the wire we are recording this one before it goes out to people. But, yeah, it turns out it's a lot of work to do something like that. Who'd have thought, right? I have the utmost respect for people who churn out content regularly because it's killing me.
Ben Rady: It's tough.
Matt Godbolt: But it's fun. It's fun to see it. And it's been well received.
Matt Godbolt: But that is a separate thing from this wonderful podcast of ours. So I think we should leave this here and I will see you soon.
Ben Rady: Sounds good.