Bancho, ladies and gentlemen, we've got a fantastic show lined up for you all today with one of the big headlines being, of course,
that Windows 11 might be bricking gaming performance by as much as 25% on average.
You can partially brick things now?
Well, I think bricking, I think taking an RTX 3080 that someone paid $8,000 for and hacking off 25% of the performance constitutes a partial brick.
Yes. Yes, I do. Yes, I do.
Now, there's a lot more details about this. We're going to get into that in other big news.
Oh, man, what else is big news? Let's have a look here. I'm going to steal all the good stuff.
The Noctua GPU is apparently real. Video cards leaked it. It's been discussed on Tom's hardware, on LTT forum.
We're going to be talking about that. What else we got this week?
Amazon is making a hilariously kind of...
We'll talk about it later, but they're making a house robot. I'll leave it at that.
Oh, I didn't put my birds to sleep. Sorry, I'll do that after the intro.
And the chip shortage. It's going to get worse. Hooray.
All right. Yay. That's really not good news, Luke.
All righty then. It's probably good news for someone.
I don't know who, but I'm sure there's someone out there that's happy about it. Someone who's a jerk.
Yeah, pretty much.
All right, let's jump right into our first topic here.
Windows 11 has a feature called VBS, which stands for virtualization based security.
So the original article here is from PC Gamer. They did a fantastic job of testing this.
And in a nutshell, VBS uses hardware and software virtualization to improve security
by creating an isolated subsystem to prevent malware from screwing over your PC.
That makes a ton of sense. And in fact, it's something that is already required by...
What is it? Some US governmental institution, the Department of Defense, already requires their systems to run VBS.
So it is already a feature in Windows 10. The main difference is that Microsoft is going to be rolling it out.
And it appears that it may not be optional on Windows 11 PCs as time goes on.
And we don't have, as far as I can tell, any kind of clear schedule for when that will happen
or what exactly the requirements will be for them to decide to enable it.
So the principle is pretty sound.
I mean, we've often said in the past that one of the only ways to prevent some kind of malware,
like if you're going to go on a sketchy site, I think Luke and I have talked about it on the WAN Show.
I definitely talked about it when Windows 11, when that ISO leaked ahead of the launch or ahead of the launch of the beta.
One of the best ways to go on a sketchy site or try a piece of sketchy software is on an isolated virtual machine.
So you don't give it any networking capabilities whatsoever.
You can actually copy files to and from it just using a virtual disk that you mount to the machine.
You can run whatever it is that you want to run and there's no meaningful way.
I mean, I shouldn't say there is no way where there's a will, there's a way,
but it's very difficult for any kind of malware to execute at the hypervisor level
or to infect another virtual machine or any other physical machine that's located on the same network
because there's just no point of ingress to those other machines.
It's effectively in this little walled off garden where you've sliced off part of the hardware and said,
no, no, you go play over there.
The problem is that even hardware virtualization, which has gotten really good, I mean, it like gotten crazy good.
We've shown off using hardware virtualization a number of times over the years.
I mean, even going back all the way to, man,
this was a long time ago because this was a video that you and I hosted together.
Two gamers, one CPU.
What we did there was we took a hypervisor, which is bloody, bloody hell.
What is Red Hat's hypervisor called?
It's just my mind has KVM.
So we took KVM, which is running on Unraid. Unraid,
the reason we use that was because especially back then it allowed for relatively painless pass-through of GPUs.
So we used KVM. We split up the CPU resources so that you could have two separate people plugged into this machine.
And then we had two GPUs each using what's called GPU pass-through to essentially completely assign the hardware rather than slicing it up and reallocating it.
Now for CPUs, this practice of virtualizing them has been around in,
from my understanding, longer than it has for GPUs and it's quite a bit more mature.
We also have so much memory bandwidth these days that from a consumer standpoint,
splitting up a CPU into and allowing two users to access it at the same time means you could still actually have plenty of memory,
plenty of memory bandwidth for consumer applications like games to run without issue.
And we've observed as little as a single digit performance difference taking the same computer than just virtualizing it and running a game on it.
We've seen as little as a single digit performance drop from running on the bare metal,
as it's called when you're not virtualizing versus running it in a virtual environment.
Now the problem is that GPUs I have far less experience with and that's for a good reason.
It is far less common and far less performant to virtualize a GPU.
So that's why we typically use GPU pass-through which completely assigns a physical GPU to your VM.
And you look at any of the projects we've done around this,
two gamers, one CPU, seven gamers, one CPU, the video editing one we did,
we were always constrained to the number of machines that we could slice the CPU up into.
We were always constrained not by how many CPU cores we had.
I mean, today we could easily do 32 gamers, one CPU,
take a 64 core epic and have a bunch of people running League of Legends.
I mean, you could probably even do run 64 instances of League of Legends on an epic CPU,
wouldn't surprise me.
But we were limited by how many PCI Express slots we had
and how many GPUs we could slot into it
because as soon as you start trying to cut those up,
unless you get into NVIDIA's much, much higher end data center products,
which don't even have display outputs,
they're just not made for consumer applications like gaming at all,
you run into a really bad time.
It's a really bad time.
So PC Gamer found that using VBS might improve security,
but it dropped Far Cry New Dawn.
It dropped performance kind of across the board.
The main thing that they're noticing,
which is pretty interesting, is that the average power drop is dropping really hard.
So if you look at these various charts,
they have one from, like he was saying, Metro Exodus.
Are these all Metro Exodus graphs?
There's a summary paragraph a little bit lower.
Far Cry New Dawn is what it's talking about.
Yeah, I think they might have labeled their charts incorrectly or something.
But either way, power draw is just dropping like a rock
and that seems to be actually the main result of this lacking performance
because it lines up very nicely.
Oh, interesting.
So yeah, Far Cry New Dawn lost 5% in FPS,
Horizon Zero Dawn about 25%,
Metro Exodus 24, Shadow of the Tomb Raider 28,
3DMark Time Spy only dropped by 10%,
but that's one of the reasons that we've been largely dismissive of 3DMark
as a meaningful system benchmark for many, many years.
It just, anytime you introduce an industry standard benchmark,
no matter how good your intentions were
and no matter how good of a job you did,
within a very short period of time,
everyone will be trying to cheat
and you'll be left back where you started
with no meaningful way of objectively measuring performance
without just running actual games.
And we made a video that got into this in a little bit more detail quite recently
called CPU gigahertz doesn't matter.
It's a pretty good watch.
I would recommend it.
AJ in the floatplane chat,
that sponsor had to be sweating when Linus didn't remember KVM.
Look, we can all have, we can all have brain farts.
Okay, AJ.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
The good news is that this is not something that it appears will be mandated on custom-built PCs.
So this is yet another one of those Windows 11 things,
you know, like the requirements around trusted platform module
that doesn't appear to apply to custom-built computers.
And it's kind of funny that there's this distinction between them
that seems to be widening all of a sudden like
and it, I mentioned I think two shows ago
that it kind of, we've been talking for a long time about how consoles are becoming PCs
and I mentioned like two shows ago
and that's the first time I'd really thought about it,
are how in some ways PCs are sort of consolifying slightly.
And this feels like potentially more of that.
Absolutely.
I mean, custom-built rigs that are very gaming focused
and not very focused on other things outside of that.
I could see stuff coming from this that would be positive.
I mean, it seems like the kind of thing that could absolutely help with anti-cheat.
Yeah.
Anti-cheat, malware, system security.
Yeah, sure. It sounds like a really good thing.
The problem is just that, oh man.
Performance drop, which if it is,
if it is specifically tied to the cards for some reason using less power draw,
it maybe sounds potentially addressable.
Maybe, yeah, maybe it could be fixed through a driver.
I would certainly hope so.
But otherwise, I mean, we are,
we are looking at potentially, you know,
hundreds of dollars of wasted GPU.
Like you could literally just not buy an RTX 3070,
get a lower-end card,
and get exactly the same performance by building a custom rig
instead of buying a pre-built one that enables this feature that trashes your performance.
You know, what's funny is this isn't the only way
that custom PCs are being differentiated from pre-builds.
You look at the California,
the California power consumption restriction stuff like that.
Only, the efficiency requirements only apply to pre-built systems.
A random physicist has an excellent question.
So will system integrators like iBuyPower be affected?
Ones that are not really, as we call them, tier one system integrators.
So these, these system integrators that are smaller,
scrappier ones that are just piecing together parts based on,
I think they could get by.
Yeah, just based on hardware that you,
they could just buy at Newegg and assemble for you.
I suspect that those kinds of machines will continue to not be,
to not be affected.
So your boutiques, like your main gears and Origin PCs,
and I'm sure there's some other really important ones I'm forgetting.
There's good old...
Especially like, like super special customization stuff like Puget.
Yeah, Puget.
I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem.
You can just tell them whether or not you want it on or off
and they'll make sure you have it correct.
Make sure you have a motherboard that like doesn't have it or whatever.
Yeah, something like that.
Like, like you'll, you'll be, you'll be fine through those types of systems.
I mean, that is the beauty of custom system building, of course.
So it's, right now it's a concern,
but I think that, I think that it might not be an issue for either me or Luke.
I don't know if you noticed Luke,
but I low-key asked Logistics to grab you a little M.2 drive.
I was going to ask you what's up with that.
Yeah, so the challenge is real.
The challenge is happening.
Luke and I are going to be switching to Linux on our daily driver machines.
This may in fact be the last WAN show that I broadcast on a Windows machine for quite some time
and we haven't figured out exactly what the punishment for blinking first is going to be,
but whoever goes back to Windows first is going to have to do something.
I saw one really good suggestion.
Dyeing your hair in four like quadrants, the Windows colors, might be a kind of fun one.
It's not permanent, you know, you're not maimed or anything,
but it's certainly, you'd have to like run it the whole way out.
Not the best.
Yeah, like shave your head like it would have to be reasonable haircuts and stuff like that.
Yeah. Yeah, you're not allowed to re-dye it.
That would be ridiculous.
Yeah.
So, and there's some more good news for anyone who's looking to game on Linux.
There's nothing in the dock.
Is that okay?
You said no more WAN shows.
So that's your home PC.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, that's my home PC, man.
Okay.
There's more good news for Linux gamers.
I did not get around to fleshing this out in the dock,
but hey, look, The Verge did an article, boom.
There's a stock image of a Girafix card.
Remember, if it's GIF, it's Girafix.
And in a nutshell, Linux gamers are getting a new, a new tool to tinker with.
Proton has added support for DLSS technology,
or rather, Nvidia has announced that it is working with Valve to bring DLSS technology from their RTX cards to Linux.
So if you're not aware, DLSS is not perfect.
It doesn't look the same as native rendering.
But what it does do is it does get really freaking close while delivering very,
very noticeable improvements in performance.
There is more input lag.
Yes, because there's processing being done using machine learning on this,
like enormous data set of sometimes imagery from the specific game,
but that's actually kind of the old way of doing it.
So now it's the more generalized data set and then taking your lower resolution gameplay
and upscaling it to native 4K or whatever happens to be the display that you're running on.
I'd say at 1080p, there's really not much point using it if they even do allow it.
I've never even tried.
It's never even occurred to me.
But particularly for gamers on larger, higher resolution displays like 4K TVs,
it can be an outstanding way of improving image quality without or improving performance without really losing much in the way of image quality.
We did a video where we figured out who on the LTT staff could tell the difference between native 4K and DLSS.
And predictably, Anthony and I were able to do it.
But the results were much spottier.
And Anthony and I both admitted, we actually talked about it off camera afterward,
but we both admitted that we could tell because we knew what to look for,
not we could tell because it looked like dog with DLSS enabled, like it wasn't like that.
So there's there's no time frame for when DLSS will be coming to Proton,
but support for Vulkan is coming this month and DirectX support would be coming in the fall.
So I guess we'll I guess we'll see. I suspect that the pressure is kind of on.
I mean, I think Valve making this move with the Steam Deck is really shining a light on Linux gaming in a way that has never happened before.
I mean, I'm sitting here going, I'm going to I'm going to go for it.
I have and this is this is a tough confession for me to make here.
I have never daily driven Linux. Not once.
I think in a lot of ways, it's going to be probably not as bad as you expect to be completely honest.
I'm not expecting it to be bad. I'm expecting it to have unnecessary bullshit that you shouldn't have to deal with.
One of the best ways Windows has lots of that. Yes.
Yeah. One of the best ways. Maybe it's better now.
I don't know. It's been a very long time for anyone watching the audience.
It's like it doesn't work that way anymore. Like, OK. Yeah, sure.
They probably changed it years ago because it's been a long time.
But the last time I daily drove Linux,
the thing one of the very minor straws that broke that camel's back was just everything that I needed to do.
That was just small, unimportant tasks that would essentially take no time on Windows took just a little bit more time.
And one of those was like, I need to update Discord on Windows.
There's a little green down arrow and you click it and then your Discord closes and reopens and you're done.
And I had to like do a more stuff. I don't even remember what it all was because it didn't matter,
but I had to do more stuff and it was just annoying. I didn't want to do that at that time.
I just want to start working at that time. Floatplane worked through Discord.
It's just little things that are just like, why do I have to do this additional amount of work?
In a lot of cases, it's not even really Linux's fault.
It's it's kind of like the the Android problem with things like Instagram back in the day.
I don't know if it's still a thing where, like, just because you have an Android phone, your picture is going to be like lower res.
Yeah. And it's just like you're like not going to work as well. Like all the apps back in the day worked better on on iPhones.
And it wasn't like the Android phone's problem. But it was still a problem if you used an Android phone.
You know what I mean? So, yeah, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how it goes.
I'm also wondering about like game compatibility. Like they say the Steam library is going to be there.
But ho ho ho, there's more libraries than just Steam. Yeah. Like, you know,
one of the games that I haven't played in a while, but that I do really enjoy, Anno 1800, is Ubisoft Connect even available on Linux?
I don't even know. I don't even know. I guess we're going to find out, right?
Is Origin available? Is Bnet available? Is the Riot Games Launcher available? Does Battle State Games Launcher work?
Yeah, I'm assuming no for like quite a bit. OK, now I am going to do something really bold here.
I'm going to do something really bold and I'm going to let the community pick which distro I use.
I'm still going to do some of my own research to determine which one I think are we using the same ones?
No, no, no. So that's going to be one of the elements of this video.
I think it's going to ultimately be a video series.
So part one, I think has to be like, like kind of like day one.
You know, like your challenges deciding which one to get, getting the initial setup done.
I think this is something we absolutely have to both kind of submit our experiences for and both talk about.
And then past that, I think there's got to be kind of like an update.
All right. It's been two weeks and I haven't I haven't played this game that I really love in two weeks.
And I'm getting the twitches, you know, like that kind of thing.
And then we have to have a conclusion where we kind of go, OK, I've settled in now.
I've I've figured out a lot of my work arounds. Here's where I'm at.
I talked about it with James. I think he thinks it should be just two pieces of content, but we'll see.
But the point is, one of the things that will be included in the first one is a lot of hemming
and hawing about which distro to use. So here's what I've got in my list so far.
And it's not comprehensive. You guys are going to help me flesh it out here.
I've got Pop, Mint, Arch, by the way, Ubuntu and Manjaro.
Is there one you're leaning towards? I have heard Pop is like super, super simple.
I know that System 76 does a lot of really great work.
I want to see if there's any other major ones that I've missed.
No, we're not running Fedora. Like, come on, guys, put put real, real serious.
You should get extra points or something if you run Fedora and wear a Fedora for the whole duration.
Oh, good lord. No, no, you shouldn't get any of that.
I'm very interested in audience input, and I have not looked into this stuff in quite a while because it's been,
like I said earlier, years since I've daily driven Linux.
But I was sort of I was going to do some more research, get myself back up to date,
but I was sort of planning on just going Mint again because that's what I did in the past.
And I was decently happy with what it had to offer.
But yeah, it's been it's been a while. Guys, don't be don't be spamming some of the ones that I have already in the chat.
I'm trying to flesh out the list. You're going to vote in the straw poll.
Come on, guys. Are you new? Are you new here? This is such a minefield, dude.
All right. OK. Floatplane chat is being extremely unhelpful.
No GUI, only bash. Yeah, I'm going to run my gaming machine with no GUI.
Come on, you guys. No, it's brilliant.
Oh, what? Straw poll is not letting me create my poll.
We should have to we should have to toggle GUI off for like every action other than actively playing a game.
No, we shouldn't. Oh, I am extremely disappointed.
Anthony wants to know if we're going to allow distro hopping.
Honestly, I think that's going to cause more problems than it solves because one of the biggest issues with Linux from my experience,
which again is not daily driving,
but is from trying to use it to do kind of almost literally anything when we've tried to make videos.
One of the biggest issues is the lack of searchability for solutions.
So I might I might be able to find the solution to, oh, steam.
Oh, it was supposed to be easy to install, but it wasn't.
Here's the workaround. And you can find the solution for Ubuntu or whatever.
And then you run into some other problem and you find the solution that works great on Mint.
It's like, well, OK, now what? I'm going to go over to Mint.
I'm going to solve this problem. I completely reinstall my stupid OS.
And then I'm going to realize, oh, no, my I can't I can't even figure out how to get steam installed.
Now, to be clear, these are these are problems I'm not expecting to actually be problems.
I will be able to figure out how to install steam. It's fine.
But it is something that I've run up against where from between distros and even from version to version of the same distro,
because the community is so much smaller, the help resources are just so much narrower
and they have a tendency to be not directly applicable to what you're trying to do or to be outdated.
Now, a straw poll is just straight up not working for me.
What's that straw poll like clone? I mean, no, no.
Yeah. Are you going to about me? Yeah. The real one's not working for me.
It's working for me. Do you want me to just make it? Yeah. If you could just do it.
Pop Mint Arch, by the way, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Gentoo, Elementary and Debian are the ones that I want in there.
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All right. Oh, man, I'm so ready for this. Luke, do you like can you do our next topic?
What what is OK, so I've got we need the results from. Yeah, we need the results from the poll.
I didn't post it. I want to make sure I have all of them. Pot mint, Art, Deviant, Ubuntu, Manjaro.
Feel like I missed one. Gen two elementary. Did you have both of those?
Dev Arch, I have mint, I have arch gen two. OK. Elementary.
There were quite a few suggestions. Draugr. I never even heard of that one.
Leave it out. No, I'm putting it in. Correct.
What if it wins now? All right, we'll come back to that.
I think our next big topic is going to be. Oh, let's talk about Valve's Deckard standalone VR headset while people get their votes in.
So, guys, check out the chat, check out the chat, you're going to want to make sure you vote,
because this could be determining which Linux distro I daily drive for.
I mean, I don't want to lose. I think setting like a month for the challenge is pretty reasonable.
It sounds like like a month or a month. We're both going to make it.
Oh, man. Two months. I don't know. Three months till the end of the year.
I don't know until the end of the year. Do we get something?
That's my thing. I mean, there's the bad.
There's the bad. It's going to be Ethan. Ethan's going to come up with it.
And Ethan is an evil genius because, like, man, there's a channel Superfun coming that Luke knows about the rest of you.
It is going to blow your minds.
Ethan came up with, you know, what is close enough to release now that I can probably tell you guys what it's about.
Without me knowing without me having any awareness about this whatsoever.
Ethan and Dennis came up with the idea of hiding in my house for an entire day.
Like without me knowing my wife knew all of my kids knew, but I had no idea.
I could have easily been walking around butt naked.
And unless one of my family members managed to convince me to to clove myself,
I could have I could have easily been spotted by Ethan and Dennis literally living, hiding in my house.
They even did stuff like they were acting like house elves. They prepared a meal among other house chores.
Like they tidied things up. Just sadly, I didn't notice.
I guess I'm not a very observant person. But anyway, you guys are not going to want to miss that video.
So I'm sure Ethan will come up with something for us that is going to be absolutely freaking ridiculous.
So let's talk about let's talk about Valve's Deckard standalone headset.
And while I eat jerky and then we'll come back to the results from the straw pool or other pool.
Yeah, I had to make a different one. I had to remake the whole thing and everything.
But it's going out now. I'm working on it. Oh, all right.
Should I run through this then? Sure.
Yeah. I just want to eat jerky.
OK, Valve's index virtual reality headset was and remained the best VR headset for some time, but always had a fatal flaw.
Anthony is the one who prepared this topic for us, the cable. And it's true.
After you have tried wireless VR, whether it's on the Vive Pro or whether it's on the Quest 2,
going back to the cable really does feel like it's like it's like going from your first flat panel.
And I mean, like a good one, not the early days ones, which really sucked like awful TN panels.
I mean, going from like a flat panel monitor back to a CRT.
I know. OK, CRT enthusiasts. Yes, I do understand about input lag and all of that stuff and black levels and everything.
But I think we can all agree that a modern flat panel, unless you are specifically trying to experience vintage content,
the way it was when you were a kid, are a lot better than CRTs.
OK, so it's like it's like trying to go back to that. It's like going back to a phone that doesn't run Android or iOS,
you know, like like running an old BlackBerry with the full keyboard at the bottom with the wheel on the side to go through menus.
OK, like no touch screen like it's it's jarring.
So Valve may have a solution to Ubuntu. I made it Ubuntu.
Did you spell it wrong? I want Ubuntu. I want Ubuntu Linux.
Darn it, Luke. Can you link me, by the way, in Discord to the results?
I'm not remaking it, guys.
So Deckard appears to be Valve's upcoming standalone headset and was discovered by VR YouTuber Brad Lynch.
username sadly it's Bradley. Brad has been tracking Valve's patent applications and got a tip about a device code named Deckard.
After digging into recent SteamVR updates, the string Deckard has shown up.
So there's also a new, you know what, this is almost an entirely separate news topic because not because it's like particularly noteworthy,
but I really hope we can change it.
Steam game updates, no rollback.
Yeah, we'll talk. We'll talk about that a little bit later.
This is like quietly flying under the radar and I'm super, super off about it.
OK, there's also a new internal menu that mentions a standalone system layer.
So together, it seems to point to Deckard being a standalone device.
Brad live streamed other evidence he's found in Valve's repositories and patents and says he believes Valve will make an official announcement within six months.
It's worth noting that this is the same kind of detective work that accurately predicted the Steam Deck, although we didn't know what it was going to be called.
They've been rumored to be working on something like this for a couple of years now, and there is significant user demand for an index without a wire.
Personally, I'd love it if we just got like Y gig wireless display technology on the index,
but I can understand why Valve might not be happy with the performance compromises that they would have to make either to the display's resolution or refresh rate or to the like,
I guess the compression that they would need in order to fit within the bandwidth that you can achieve with a modern wireless interface.
Multiple standalone VR concepts have apparently been tried at Valve, but The Verge may have uncovered some additional detail while previewing the Steam Deck.
Greg Coomer mentioned that the Steam Deck's APU would run well in that environment and that it's very relevant to us and our future plans.
How interesting would that be? A Steam Deck bolted to your face.
Whoa, this is an Anthony Young observation.
Deckard could be read as deck art, which could mean deck augmented or artificial reality device.
And that's exactly the kind of pun slash play on words that I would expect from a bunch of giant nerds like all of the folks I met at Valve.
By the way, love you guys lots. You are my people, but you're giant nerds.
So right now, the standalone VR headset market is pretty much the quest to.
What would it take for Valve to penetrate that essentially monopoly on standalone VR devices?
What does it take? I don't think much.
I mean, the their previous VR device did extremely well.
Like, I don't I don't know if it's even fair to say that they would have to.
Penetrate that marketplace because they're already in like a highly it's like how do I describe this?
I feel like it's a gas car maker making an electric car. Like their foot's already extremely in the door.
They're just not fully through the doorframe. You know what I mean?
Like it's not the same as like some random company that has never made it before trying to make a device.
We already know that they've done a very good job making a VR headset.
If they made a VR headset with that same pedigree wireless, I'd be super stoked.
But what about pricing? I mean, Valve is sending very mixed messages on their hardware pricing.
Index is clearly priced to make money.
Yeah. Whereas Steam Deck, I'm not going to I'm not going to cover this territory again.
But Steam Deck is not. Steam Deck is aggressively priced.
Valve is flexing their don't give a **** muscles by pricing Steam Deck the way that they are.
Do they do they take that same approach with Deckard? I don't I kind of can't understand why.
Unless, you know, part of this is just a volume play to get pricing down on some of the components that are shared between the two devices,
like the custom APU that AMD is making for them.
And that getting AMD to fab you a custom chip is a non trivial endeavor.
The more devices you can ship with that thing, I almost wonder if the pricing would come down on their entire or even just to meet the volume requirements.
They might have started working on both of these devices to ensure that they could hoover up enough of these chips to even reach AMD's required quota for how many chips they're going to have to buy over some period of time.
Because you got to remember, the tricky thing is not necessarily committing to AMD.
Oh, we'll take 10 million units. The tricky thing is actually selling 10 units or 10 units, 10.
The tricky thing is selling 10 million units of whatever the **** device you're making while that chip is still even remotely relevant.
Yeah. Now, Microsoft and Sony get around this by deciding when a new chip will become relevant by releasing a new console that uses it.
So they effectively are able to dictate the terms in that relationship to a degree that Valve might be able to do.
I think the Steam Deck is going to be a huge runaway success, but Valve may not have had the confidence at that time before the Steam Deck was revealed to the public,
before our video showcasing it got, hold on, Steam Deck.
Valve often has confidence. Five million views.
Did they expect five million views on an early access video showing the thing?
Not necessarily. I don't know. I don't know.
Because I mean, because it's your OK. OK, here. So for some context, it's not like competing devices don't exist like the Aya Neo, like devices from GPD.
None of them have ever gotten five million views.
I don't get that much. Yeah. On anything. They do really well within a niche.
So for Valve, it's not like they could have known for sure if they were going to be king of the niche or if they were going to penetrate the mainstream and really go after
the people who otherwise are going to be stuck with whatever Nintendo decides to bestow upon them or to keep pleading with Sony to eventually make a follow up to the Vita.
Like they have no idea what this device is going to be until they actually deliver it.
So I could see them conceivably saying, hey, look, we need to have as many possible things we can put these chips in.
So we're not sitting on an entire warehouse full of three million APUs that nobody wants anymore.
Because even Valve, a money printing machine, does not want to throw money.
You don't want to you don't want to use your money printing machine and, you know, siphon off the output and just you put it into a furnace.
You don't heat your house with money. You know, you you use the money to I don't know, move to New Zealand where it's beautiful all year round and you don't need to heat your house.
I mean, that's that's rather topical, just in case you didn't know. That's all. Oh, I do know.
I don't know. I meant for other people. Sorry. You clearly did know. But yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole the whole moving to New Zealand when you're a billionaire thing is apparently a big thing right now and like building bunkers and stuff,
because good guy New Zealand just doesn't have anything of military strategic value whatsoever.
So the idea is that in a nuclear holocaust, that's the safest place to be while still maintaining like a like a Western democracy standard of living that you are accustomed to in whatever country you are fleeing from.
Yeah. And apparently this is not conspiracy level, crazy tinfoil hat stuff. This is like actually a thing. Like it's not a coincidence. Gabe Newell is in New Zealand.
Little odd, but that's the thing. You want to look at the poll? It is a little corrupt because when I was I checked the original poll just to be like, am I crazy?
I did spell Ubuntu right the first time. But Ubuntu won the most votes.
So I would take that with a slight grain of salt because it's Ubuntu and people might have voted for it for the meme.
If I had to hazard a guess, I think the real winner here is pop. I could definitely see like, you know, 50 something votes coming in for the meme for Ubuntu.
So I would kind of see either pop as a winner or pop as a tie with Ubuntu and Arches clearly people wanting to make me suffer.
That's another meme. Like, yeah, 100 percent. I think in my opinion, the like real top three is Ubuntu, pop and mint.
And with with pop being kind of the most interesting one to me right now, Ubuntu, I think, gets a lot of votes because of the meme, gets a lot of votes because it's existed for a long time.
People know what it is. Mint probably a little bit on the exist for a long time and people know what it is realm as well.
And then pop because of the system 76 affiliation and it being gaming focused and it having specific ISOs for like your are you Nvidia?
Are you AMD? That kind of stuff, which is like actually pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, I'm currently leaning mint or pop.
Pop is winning me over already, though, so maybe maybe you'll end up being pop.
But I want to do more research on it first. Are you just going to go with the poll?
No, I'm going to do a little bit of research. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure Anthony is going to have going to want to have some say.
And unlike you nerds, Anthony is going to be looking out for me like Anthony wants to convert me to daily drive Linux forever.
Like he's yeah, he's going to be all about giving me whatever suggestion is the best chance that I never that I never go back to Windows.
He's probably watching. What is what does he think the best option is? He is probably watching.
I'm sure he's going to recommend pop. He's something of a system.
76 fanboy. I'm sure he'd admit it. I mean, he runs arch, by the way, of course, but I don't think he's going to recommend that I run arch.
I really don't think so. By the way, there's a there's a threat on the forum here.
I have no idea if this is the right spot to put this, but sometime soon,
the EU competition chief will be in New York City discussing with Tim Cook about how fair Apple is.
Who else is there? Louis Rossman. He has invited the chief to meet with him to discuss with them how Apple unfairly screws people over.
He's got a 62 page reference to document with him as well.
I'd like this to be talked about on WAN Show because the only way to make the meeting happen is to make as much noise as possible to get people to notice.
OK. Well, there you go. I believe this is the latest video on Rossman's channel.
I don't think so. Is it not? I don't think so.
All right. Well. He releases a lot of content sometimes.
Yeah, he releases a lot of content, sometimes. A random ride around New York City on a weeknight with low quality commentary.
Three hours after the other one. I love Louis, but dude, learn to YouTube.
He's released three videos in the last 24 hours. I'm telling you, sometimes he just cranks them.
All right. Well, at any rate, the second last video. Go check it out.
Yes, I think that would be a very good thing. I don't think that they're going to necessarily.
You know, I would I want to see the outcome so that noise is good.
That meeting should happen because it will tell us a lot about how serious the EU is about this conversation they're having with Mr. Cook.
Yeah. Amazon has some new devices. Oh, boy.
Yep. There's Anthony. Anthony's hitting me up. He says Pop or Endeavor is probably my pick.
Endeavor is Arch based, but user friendly like Manjaro.
Arch based tends to have more bleeding edge packages and kernel, which is good for gaming.
Also, Arch Wiki Pop is Ubuntu based, so a lot just translates.
Yep. OK. Yeah, that's that's fair.
So maybe I'll just let Anthony pick for me and I'll just not not have to worry about it.
We've got some big news from Amazon. They've got some new devices. Yeah. Thank you.
LTT Forum user Abydos1. This thing looks cringe AF.
And I'm aware of the irony of using the term cringe AF in 2021.
I'm doing it intentionally because it is the most appropriate possible way to describe the Amazon Astro,
a home robot that is being introduced after four years of years of development.
This is the kind of product that I would expect Asus to roll out on stage,
make a bunch of noise about, be like robot company and then promptly completely forget robot stage.
Hold on. Because they basically did that. Where is this stupid thing?
Here we go. The Zenbo. I mean, I would not expect this to come from a serious company like Amazon.
No offense, Asus. I love you all very dearly. There's been some amazing internal quotes have quote unquote leaked.
I don't 100 percent know if these are real because they seem way too sound bitey and I haven't really seen.
I don't know. They say apparently the internal quotes are saying it's a disaster that was not ready for release.
It's terrible. It's absurdist nonsense. It would throw itself down a flight of stairs if it presented itself an opportunity.
Give me one second. There's another one. Vice found from a leaked meeting that it says that the Astro is designed to track behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties.
It's like security surveillance. Yeah. Like knowing if someone's not supposed to be there.
Yeah. Man, just honestly, just the picture of it with the eyes and nothing else on the screen, just these eyes with little eyebrows is so creepy.
Like I could straight up imagine a horror movie where there's like a camera perspective that's like someone like laying on the floor for some reason.
And this thing just comes around the corner and then the eyes just like slowly roll around the corner like, oh, geez.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. And it's fifteen hundred dollars for a mobile Alexa.
That's the punch line. That's the punch line of the joke.
You could just buy Alexa devices for every room in your home for significantly cheaper if that's what you actually want it.
Oh, wow. OK. They also have the home cam, a two hundred and fifty dollar drone that flies around for security purposes.
The Ring Virtual Security Guard, which is a subscription service that provides third party professional monitoring of all your ring cameras.
The Amazon Glow, a two hundred and fifty dollar video conferencing device aimed at children, has a built in eight inch screen for video calls and a projector that projects virtual activities onto a tabletop.
And the Echo Show 15, a fifteen point six inch 1080p display with a built in camera that can display Alexa widgets, stream video and you can personalize it with a visual ID.
It uses the new AZ2 neural edge processor for processing speech and computer vision on device. And it's two hundred and fifty bucks and kind of looks like a picture frame.
The discussion question from Jonathan Horst, totally not biased, is our our Mac correspondent.
The discussion question is, who's going to buy this stuff? Question mark, exclamation mark. Am I the only one creeped out about everything here?
Question mark. It's seriously like Amazon needs a needs a don't don't be evil policy because it seriously seems like so many of the recent things that they've been working on are just all of the things that you would try to make if you just wanted to.
Just abuse your power in every way you possibly could, like it's just horrible.
I don't know. I'm a little biased when it comes to Amazon, I'm not going to lie.
But yeah, geez, guys, come on. I am.
Yeah, I. Good luck with that, Amazon.
I mean, people will buy them, no doubt. There's no doubt in my mind people buy them.
I don't know who these people are, but they'll buy them. And Jonathan, you're not wrong.
It's actually it's kind of amazing how many things Jonathan I agree about, even though, like he's a Mac and I'm a PC.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there's big news for the store other than the new site design, which is amazing, by the way.
You can preview like colors without even clicking through to a product so you can see all the different painstakingly captured images that these are not just so many.
Hoffman actually takes all these pictures exactly the same.
I don't know how he does it. We have new water bottles.
The V2 water bottles have landed and you can get them now on LTT store dot com.
Twenty one ounce, 40 ounce, whatever you're into. We've got all different colors.
Everything is in stock from the classic to pink.
And that's yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say about that.
I should do a couple of super chaps, but I kind of have to go because I'm doing a job interview.
Not for me, for someone else. Where are you going to work?
Yeah, exactly. Right. Oh, wow.
Half of the super chats for the earlier part of the show are about Rossman.
So I think we talked about that. B. Miller says any news on the LTT backpack?
Oh, I work as a level two tech for several schools could use a comfy replacement.
It will be a comfy replacement that distributes weight.
I can tell you right now that everything from the global logistics nightmare that's occurring in the world right now to the rolling power outages in China is going to affect our ability to deliver that backpack in a reasonable amount of time.
It will be months. So if you absolutely need something now, buy something else.
If you want a really great backpack and you're willing to wait and you're willing to pay because it is not going to be cheap, then wait.
It's going to be freaking awesome. I'm really happy with it.
I tried to kill the backpack project multiple times based on the samples that we got from every factory that we dealt with.
And then Bridget came in, basically said, look, I know I want to tackle this.
And I was like, good luck. It's going to be a big waste of time.
And it's not going to look good on your KPIs because you're supposed to, like, deliver products we can actually ship.
But, you know, I don't I don't like to stand in people's way if people think that they've got the solution or if they think that I was wrong.
I'm all about letting them try it. And I was totally wrong.
It's outstanding. There's still some changes we've got to make, but.
Yeah, it's it's really good. We're on a good trajectory.
DiForas says, are you and Luke going to return to in-person WAN shows? Yes, that's our intention, but not yet. What else we got here?
Looking for a laptop. Oh, looking for a laptop. That would be great for video editing, IT work, maybe some 3D animation.
You've got to check out some value gaming machines if you're if you're trying to do, you know, real work.
But you don't want to pay a fortune for like a mobile workstation.
Cyrus says, updating Discord on Linux is a breeze now. You just click the update button.
So you go, Luke. Like I said, it's been years, right?
So like, I'm happy there has been developments in that realm.
I'm just saying those types of things are what kind of pushed me away from it last time around.
It's because I was using it on a work computer and well, every computer that I use work computer effectively.
So I was using it on a computer that I did work on, which is every computer I have and little things like that would just slow me down all the time.
It's incredibly frustrating when I'm trying to get stuff done.
So, yeah, hopefully it's better this time. It's been a long time. So it very likely will be.
James Ryan says, listening to you say QEMU hurts. Try QEMU.
All right. I'm going to go with QEMU. It's QEMU. Is it? Yeah.
You didn't tell me last time. You just let me flounder. No, last time I corrected you, this time I didn't.
Did you? Well, you let me flounder this time.
Is Hannah Montana Linux seriously a distro? Probably.
I don't know. Lordy. There's so many like stupid ones that like aren't really a thing.
You know, I mean, you could just recompile something and be like, it's, you know, whatever.
Tech Kev says, I bought 24 months of PIA off a link in one of your videos for two years with three months free.
But I was charged for the first three free months. Need to check your links and deals.
All right. I will forward that to the business team.
We'll have to figure that out and make sure that that kind of stuff is not happening.
Yeah. Need a need a solution any time. Any time a sponsor is not honoring the deals that they're supposed to have.
That's not a good time. I'm just going to send that screen cap to Colton real quick here.
OK. Thank you for that. And you'll get frustrated at first.
But most of my issues came from learning the new desktop environment rather than fixing things. That's fair enough.
And I think we're going to call it there. Thank you guys very much for tuning in to the WAN Show.
What's up, Luke? I was just going to say learning the new desktop environment.
Honestly, I do a huge amount of my stuff in in browser these days.
Yeah, it's true. Yeah. There was a headline topic we didn't talk about.
ASUS Noctua collab GPU OMG looks crazy. Just show it.
ASUS Vietnam, their Facebook page briefly published the first images of the highly anticipated RTX 3070 with Noctua fans.
Oh, huge. I love it. I love it. I love it.
I think 3070 was the right move. 3070 is like only the only remotely affordable enthusiasts,
like top tier card right now. So there's that.
What do you think about the color?
I think it was the right thing to do. You don't think it's like potentially almost too subdued?
No, no, I think it's it's very Noctua. I thought they kind of shrouded it because they have that like silver thing going around it.
They're covering a lot of the fan frame. Oh, bad news.
OK, sorry, we should roll through a couple more of these quick things. Silicon Lottery is closing their doors for seven years.
They offered higher binge CPUs and deleting services, but they are closing.
This is due to CPUs not being as overclockable as they used to be.
The silicon shortage and deleting not being as big of a performance boost on Intel CPUs anymore since they are soldering their IHSs now.
The online store will be open until October 31st, 2021.
And currently, any deleting orders outstanding will be processed as long as they receive the CPUs by November 30th, which.
Yeah, OK. That's a bummer. Yeah, RIP Silicon Lottery.
They helped us out. They hooked us up a couple of times when we needed like guaranteed great overclockable chips for projects.
So really appreciate you guys. All right, that's it.
Thanks for watching, guys. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.
Oh, wait, no, I'm worried about the Steam game updates. So Steam is pushing an update.
It looks like I think this is in like the beta, like very advanced tier right now, but they're pushing an update that will not allow you to roll back games to a previous version.
So one of the only ways that because Beat Saber updates all the time and it breaks all the mods right in the games unplayable without mods.
So at times in the past, I've had to roll back to a previous version of the game.
And so first Steam removed the ability to disable auto updating.
Now you have to have auto updating at some point when you try to launch the game, it will update.
And now they're making it so you can't even manually roll it back, even temporarily.
And this can be a huge problem for modders, for example. I remember old games running into situations where you would have to get the older version of the game installed,
like unbreak your save file or whatever, apply the new mods or apply that and then update from there.
Like there are situations where it can be a very useful troubleshooting step to roll back to a previous version of your game or software.
And I'm extremely frustrated that this is going to be a thing.
Also, there is one last thing I really need to talk about. The Dune case is still accepting orders based on our video previewing it like two years ago.
But they, as far as we can tell, have never shipped anything.
I have updated this video to say do not buy.
And I have added a pinned comment under the video. The title has been appended to reflect the do not buy status of the Dune case.
It's seen many delays and so far is not showing any evidence of actually shipping a finished product.
Oh, no, it's Kickstarter. That's very unfortunate. All right.
That's it. See you again next week. Same bad times, same bad channel. Bye, guys. Bye!
Oh, I thought you were offline.
Not yet. Almost.