The WAN Show - Pre-Built PCs Are About to get MUCH Worse - WAN Show October 1, 2021

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Change the way you address patching concerns with rebootless QEMU/KVM patching at https://hubs.ly/H0X1rWt0  Get 30% off list price and 30% off onboarding at http://www.graphus.ai/linus  Save 10% off your Savage Jerky order today with code WANSHOW21 at http://savagejerky.com/ltt Check out our other Podcasts: Carpool Critics Movie Podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt-oJR5teQIjOAxCmIQvcgA Timestamps (Courtesy of NoKi1119) [0:00] Chapters. [1:21] Intro. [1:51] Topic #1: Windows 11 VBS harms gaming performance.     3:18 Virtual machine & hardware issues.     7:46 Affected games & change in performance.     9:52 VBS is not mandated on custom builds.     13:03 Switching to Linux challenge.     17:32 Issues with daily driving Linux.     20:15 Polling which distro to use. [25:23] Sponsors.     25:27 TuxCare QEMU & KVM patching.     27:01 Graphus anti-phishing cloud software.     28:22 Savage Jerky. [32:27] Topic #2: Valve's "Deckard" VR headset.     35:11 Going standalone in the VR market.     37:46 Pricing of Valve products.     42:37 Poll: Which Distro should Linus use?     45:22 Tim Cook meeting with EU competition chief. [46:48] Topic #3: Amazon's "Astro" house robot.     48:24 Criticism towards the robot.     48:52 Pricing & specs. [52:06] LTTstore new merch & site redesign. [52:56] Superchats. [57:20] Topic #4: Asus's RTX 3070 with Noctua fans. [58:20] Topic #5: Silicon Lottery closing. [59:14] Topic #6: Steam disables downloading older builds. [1:00:27] Topic #7: Dune Case has not shipped yet. [1:01:04] Outro. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Uber Reserve, you can book your Uber ride in advance. 90 days in advance. Perfect for all you forward thinkers and planning gurus. Reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. Uber Reserve. See Uber app for details. Fan show, 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? There are, well, I think brickings, 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 gonna steal all the good stuff the noctua gpu is apparently

real video cards leaked it's been discussed on tom's hardware on ltt forum we're gonna be talking about that what else we got this week amazon is making a hilariously kind of we'll talk about 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. Alrighty 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 has 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. 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'm okay. 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, 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 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 um what we did there was we took a hyper, we took a hypervisor, which is bloody, bloody hell. What is a Red Hat's hypervisor called? It's just, it's my mind. 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, 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 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. 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 good reason. It is far less common and far less performant to virtualize a GPU. So that's why we typically use GPU passthrough, which completely assigns a physical GPU to your VM. And you look at any of the projects we've done around this,

2Gamers1CPU, 7Gamers, 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 run 64 instances of League of Legends on an Epic CPU. It 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. found that using vbs might improve security but it dropped um far cry performance kind of across the board the the main thing that they're noticing which is pretty interesting is that the average power draw is dropping really hard um so like if you look at these various charts, they have one for like he was saying, Metro Exodus, these all Metro Exodus graphs. There's a summary paragraph a little bit lower.

Far Cry New Dawn is what it's. Yeah, I think I think they might have labeled their their charts incorrectly or something. But either way, Power Draw is just dropping like a rock um and that seems to be actually the main result of of of this lacking performance because it lines up very nicely oh interesting so yeah far cry new dawn um lost five percent in fps 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 float plane chat, that sponsor had to be sweating when Linus didn't remember KVN. Look, we can all have, we can all have brain farts. Okay, AJ, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 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, like the requirements around trusted platform module uh 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 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 i mentioned like two shows ago that it kind of... We've been talking for a long time about how consoles are becoming PCs.

I mentioned like two shows ago, and that's the first time I'd really thought about it, how in some ways PCs are sort of console-ifying slightly. And this feels like potentially more of that. Absolutely. 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. That performance drop. Which 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 prebuilt 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 power consumption restriction stuff like that. 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 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 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 um i'm sure there's some other really

important ones i'm forgetting there's good old especially like uh like super special customization stuff like puget yeah puget i'm sure they wouldn't have a problem that 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 um so it's right now it's a concern but i think that But 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 um dyeing your hair in four like quadrants the windows colors um might be a kind of fun one it's not permanent you know you're not maimed or anything but it's certainly you 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 uh there's nothing in the dock. 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 Giraffix card. Remember, if it's GIF, it's Giraffix. And in a nutshell, Linux gamers are getting 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 a 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 we knew what to look for not we could tell because it looked like dog

with dlss enabled like it wasn't like that um so there's there's no time frame for when dlss will be coming to proton but support for vulcan is coming this month um and directX support would be coming in the fall. So 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 go for it. I have, and 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. 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 bull that you shouldn't have to deal with one of the best ways windows has lots of that just want to say yes yeah one of the best ways i 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 okay yeah sure they probably changed it years ago because it's been a long time but the last time i daily drove linux uh the thing

one of the one of the like very minor straws that broke that camel's back um 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 and 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 wanted to start working

because at that time floatplane worked through discord um 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 uh the android problem with things like instagram back in the day i don't know if this is still still a thing. Just because you have an Android phone, your picture is going to be lower res. Yeah. It's just not going to work as well. All the apps back in the day worked better

on iPhones. It wasn't the Android phone's problem, but it was still a problem if you used an Android phone. You know what I mean? 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 these days. 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 gonna find out right is is origin available is bnet available is the right games launcher available does uh battle state games launcher work yeah i'm assuming no for like quite a bit of that okay now i am going to do something really bold

here um 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 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 gotta be kind of like an update. All right. It's been two weeks and I'm, 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, okay, I've settled in now. I figured out a lot of my workarounds. 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 System76 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 real, real serious suggestions. Like extra points or something. If you run Fedora and wear a Fedora for the whole duration. Oh, good lord. No, you shouldn't get any of that. I am 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 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 it's a minefield dude all right okay floatplane chat is being extremely unhelpful no gooey only bash yeah i'm gonna run my gaming machine with no gooey come on you guys

no it's brilliant oh what, what? StrawPool is not letting me create my pool. We should have to toggle GUI off for like every action other than actively playing a game. No, we shouldn't. 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 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. And it's like, well, okay, 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, I can't even figure out how to get Steam installed. Now, to be clear, 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 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 um now straw poll is just straight up not working for me what's that straw poll like clone me no no yeah that's me yeah the real one's not working for me uh 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. Why don't I do the sponsor spots while you create that? So one of our sponsors today, hey, look at this. Look at this. Sponsored by TuxCare. Okay, sysadmins know the painful procedure to update the QEMU. We talked about this last week. You know what? If TuxCare is watching this, fire me over an email with how you want me to pronounce this. I'm going to go with QEMU. Okay. QEMU, whatever. It doesn't matter. The QEMU hypervisor. It involves complex live migrations of virtual machines to other nodes, which sucks. Okay. Copying a VM from one node to another live is like fraught with potential

minds. Or you have to restart virtual machines on the node that's being patched, which also sucks because any users who were relying on those resources are going to get real mad because all their stuff is gone temporarily. But I mean, I could see it from both sides, right? Like from the sysadmin's point of view,

it's like, look, it's only going to be down for two minutes. And then from the user's perspective, it's like, yeah, you always say that. It's never down for just two minutes. So both of these are time consuming, network bandwidth intensive and error prone. Well, TaxCare's QEMU care eliminates all of that. They allow live patching of QEMU without disrupting any virtual machines or performing lengthy live migrations. There's no maintenance window, no service restarts, just immediate transparent patch deployment for QEMU. So check out the demo on the QEMU care page and subscribe for a free trial

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buffalo style bacon jerky in a long freaking time. I'm so sorry you didn't get any, Luke. Mine started going. I don't even have it. I think the sorry you didn't get any, Luke. Mine started going. I don't even have it. I think the second you raised the bag in front of the camera, I could just feel like that's ridiculous. Oh man, I have missed this. They've got tons of flavors from mild to wild. Like their sweet sriracha barbecue, mojo habanero,

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and you can save 10% on your order by using offer code WANSHOW21 and learning more about Savage Jerky at the link in the video description. Alright, I'm so ready for this. Luke, can you do our next topic? What? Okay, so

I've got Pop, Mint, Arc... Yeah, we need the results from the poll. I didn't post it because I wanted to make sure I have all of them. Pop, Mint, Arc, Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro. I feel like all of them. Pop Mint, Arc, Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro. I feel like I missed one. Gen 2, Elementary. Did you have Mint?

You want both of those? Do you have Arch? I have Mint. I have Arch. Gen 2. Okay. Elementary? There were quite a few suggestions.

Draugr? I've never even heard of that one. Leave it out. Nope, I'm putting it in. Get rekt. 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 sound like like a month it's a month we're both gonna make it oh man two months i don't know three months till the end of the year i don't know to the end of the year do we get something that's my thing i mean because there's the bad there's the bad it's gonna be ethan et's going to come up with it. And Ethan is an evil genius because like, man, there's a channel super fun coming that Luke knows about the rest of you. It is going to blow your minds. Um, 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, you know, 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, um, among other house chores, like they, 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. Um, so let's talk about, let's talk about Valve's Deckard standalone headset and, well, I eat jerky. And then we'll come back to the results from the straw poll or other poll. Yeah, I had to make a different one. I had to remake the whole thing and everything, but it's, 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 okay valve's index virtual reality headset was and remained the best vr headset for some time um 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 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. And okay, okay, 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. Okay. 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 okay like no touch screen like it's it's jarring so valve may have a solution type out ubuntu i made it ubuntu oh did you spell it wrong i want i want ubuntu i want ubuntu linux darn it luke uh can you link me by the way in discord to the results i'm not remaking it guys um 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 noteworth 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. Okay, 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, YGIG 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, 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. um this is an anthony young observation deckard could be read as deck ard 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 the folks 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 2. 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, their previous VR device did extremely well. 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 door frame you know what I mean like it's 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 gonna 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 f*** muscles by pricing Steam Deck the way that they are. Do they, do they take that same approach with Deckard? I, I, 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 excuse me, 10 units, 10. The tricky thing is selling 10 million units of whatever the f***ing device you're making

The tricky thing is selling 10 million units of whatever the f***ing 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 5 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, you're, okay, okay, 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 5 million views. 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 3 million APUs that nobody

wants anymore. Because even Valve, a money printing machine, does not want to throw money. 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 oh, oh, I do know. I do know. I know I meant for other people. Sorry. You clearly did know. But yeah. Oh, 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, um, 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 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 a little odd but that's the thing you want to look

at the 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 uh won the most votes uh 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 um if i had to hazard a guess i think the real winner here is pop i i could definitely see like you know 50 something votes coming in for the meme for ubuntu um so i would kind of see either pop as a winner or pop as a tie with ubuntu and arch is clearly people wanting to make me suffer that's another meme like yeah 100 i think there i 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 exists 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 we'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 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 going to be all about giving me whatever suggestion is the best chance that I never go back to Windows. Anthony is probably watching. What does he think the best option is. He's probably watching. 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 System76 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 thread on the forum here um i have no idea if this is the right spot to put this but uh 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 lewis 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 referenced 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. Okay. Well, there you go. I believe this is the latest video on Rossman's channel. No, I don't think so. Is it not? I don't think so. Is it not? I don't think so. Oh, all right.

Well, it went up today. 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 Lewis, but dude, learn to YouTube. Dude, 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. you know, I would, I want to see the outcome. So 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. Okay. Yep. That's a, That's fair. So maybe I'll just let Anthony pick for me and I'll just not have to worry about it. We've got some big news from Amazon. They've got some new devices. Thank you, LTT forum user Abidos1. 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 in development. This is the kind of product that I would expect a Seuss to roll out on stage, make a bunch of noise about, be like, we're a 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 um there's been some amazing internal quotes have quote-unquote leaked i don't 100% 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 in 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. Knowing if someone's not supposed to be there. Yeah. Man. 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 a camera perspective that's someone laying on the floor for some reason and this thing just comes around the corner and then the eyes just slowly roll around the corner

like, oh, jeez. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. And it's $1,500 for a mobile Alexa. That's the punchline. That's the punchline of the joke. You could just buy Alexa's

devices for every room in your home for significantly cheaper if that's what you actually wanted. Oh, wow. Okay. They also have the HomeCam, a $250 drone that flies around for security purposes. I just... Oh, wow. Okay. Oh, no, man. They also have the HomeCam, a $250 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 $250 video conferencing device aimed at children, has a built-in 8-inch screen for video calls, and a projector that projects virtual activities onto a tabletop, and the Echo Show 15, a 15.6-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 AZ-2 Neural Edge processor for processing speech and computer vision on device. And it's 250 bucks and kind of looks like a picture frame. The discussion question from Jonathan Horst, totally not biased, is 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 it needs a don't don't be evil policy because like 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, yeah, I, hmm. Good luck with that, Amazon. I mean, people will buy them, no doubt. There's Amazon. I mean, people will buy them. No doubt. There's no doubt in my mind people will 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 and I agree about,

even though, like, he's a Mac and I'm a PC. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there's big news for LTD 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 could see all the different painstakingly captured images that these are not just color swap. Hoffman actually like 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 lttstore.com. 21 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 Chats,

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, Linus? 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 ltd 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.

That'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 really good. We're on a good trajectory. Dye Forest 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? I think it'll happen kind of over time.

Looking for a laptop. Oh, looking for a laptop oh looking for a laptop that would be great for video editing it work maybe some 3d animation you got to check out some value gaming machines if you're if you're trying to do you know real work uh but you don't want to pay a fortune for like a mobile workstation uh cyrus says updating discord on linux is a breeze now you just click the update button. So there 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 is because I was using it on a work computer. And well, every computer that I use is a work computer effectively. So I was using it on a computer that I didn't work on, which is every computer I have. And little things like that would just slow me down all the time.

And 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?EMU. All right. QEMU. I'm going to go with QEMU. It's QEMU. Is it?

Yeah. You didn't tell me last time. I did. You just let me flounder. No, last time I corrected you. This time I didn't. Did you? Oh, well,

you let me flounder this time. Is Hannah Montana Linux seriously a distro? Probably. I don't know. Oh, lordy. There's so many stupid ones like aren't really a thing you know because yeah i mean you could just recompile something and be like it's you know

whatever uh tech kev says i bought 24 months of pia um 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 uh 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 solution anytime. Anytime 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 okay 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 into the band show uh what's up luke i was just gonna say learning the new desktop environment, honestly, I do a huge amount of my stuff 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, wow. Huge. I love it. It's huge. I love it. I love it. I think 3070 was the right move. 3070 is the only remotely affordable enthusiast like top tier

card right now so there's that what do you think about the color oh i i think it was the right thing to do 100 you don't think it's like potentially almost too subdued no no i think it's it's very knocked to a 100 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. Okay, sorry, we should roll through a couple more of these quick things. Silicon Lottery is closing their doors for seven years. They offered higher bin CPUs and delidding services, but they are closing. This is due to CPUs not being as overclockable as they used to be, the silicon shortage, and delidding 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 delidding orders outstanding will be processed as long as they receive the CPUs by November 30th, Which, yeah, okay. That's a bummer. Yeah, Rip Silicon Lottery.

They helped us out. They hooked us up a couple times when we needed 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 want to rage 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? And the game's 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. 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 unbrick your save file or whatever, apply the new mods and then update from there. 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, um, 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, uh, 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 it's not showing any evidence of actually shipping

a finished product. Oh no, it's Kickstarter. That's very unfortunate. Alright, that's it. See you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye guys! Bye! Oh Sorry, I'm chewing into the mic Okay, I can't even hear it through whatever mic you're giving to me It's more for the stream they're still oh, I thought you're offline not yet almost