0:03

I need to consolidate some services

0:06

and I might need your help. Are these

0:08

financial services or legal services?

0:11

Into one affordable monthly payment by any chance?

0:15

One affordable large monthly payment? No,

0:18

I have realized that I'm spending

0:20

a little bit too much on internet

0:22

services, as in VPSs

0:25

and stuff, and I haven't

0:28

been choosy enough with the pricing, so

0:30

I went and found somewhere that was a bit cheaper that

0:32

could provide me with internet services.

0:35

But that means I'm gonna have a new server somewhere

0:37

and I need to migrate some existing

0:39

stuff in there, and I can't

0:42

quite decide how to do this,

0:45

and I might need a bit of your help to help convince

0:47

me, okay? Okay, so you're

0:50

actually not talking about where, but

0:52

how you want to run these

0:54

services. Is that the gist of this? Yes,

0:57

I'll outline what those services are, right?

1:00

So my own personal website is

1:02

on a BitFolk VPS that I've had

1:03

for

1:04

like a decade or more. It's 1804,

1:07

32-bit, I can't really upgrade

1:09

it anymore, it's running out of space constantly,

1:12

I need to do something. Yes,

1:14

I could pay for a new VPS from BitFolk, and

1:17

I love BitFolk and I want to support him, but

1:20

I can't justify that,

1:22

because I also have

1:24

a server at Linode running

1:27

what I call popey spades, it's open spades,

1:29

an online game. It's running a couple of servers, but it's

1:31

the tiniest of tiny Linodes. Those

1:33

aren't the problem. The big problem

1:36

is Ubuntu.social, which

1:38

is a chunky box

1:40

at Linode, and Linode

1:43

is relatively expensive, and I've

1:45

shopped around and I found something

1:48

cheaper, and it's a dedicated

1:51

box at Hetzner, Germany.

1:54

Now, brief sidebar, signing

1:56

up for Hetzner was a challenge in and of itself.

2:00

You go to their website and there's loads and loads of options

2:02

for all different sizes of machines, right? And

2:05

the machines are either in Finland or Germany

2:07

or somewhere else. I don't really care

2:09

if the internet is all the same. And

2:11

I clicked a button and was like,

2:14

buy that please. And he said, okay, you need to sign

2:16

up. So I sign up. And he says, okay, you need

2:18

to put in a payment method. So I put in

2:20

my credit card details. And as soon

2:22

as I did that, it said we

2:25

have detected some kind of bizarre behavior

2:27

and we've deleted your account. Wow.

2:29

Oh, yes. So as soon as I put

2:31

in my credit card details, I was persona

2:34

non grata. And I

2:36

thought, well, that's not a good start. It

2:39

was all resolved by shouting

2:41

at them on Twitter and they

2:44

DMed me and I went through their

2:46

customer support and told them, I am

2:48

a genuine human being who wishes to purchase

2:50

services from you. Even after this,

2:53

I still want to purchase services from you.

2:55

Sidebar because you're quite cheap. And

2:58

so I have a server and it's

3:00

a chunky box. It's cheaper than everything and

3:03

and if I consolidate all these things together now,

3:06

that's the end of the sidebar. I've got a box. Okay.

3:09

So

3:09

you say you've got a box. I think

3:11

you said you would got you'd got like two

3:13

VPS is and a chunky box. So

3:15

were any of those bare metal and

3:18

is this new thing a big

3:20

VPS or is it actual

3:23

server? It's an actual server. Aha

3:26

the VPS is two of them.

3:28

The Bitfoc VPS is a Zen

3:31

domain. I think is the implementation,

3:33

but it doesn't really matter. It's just a small I've got

3:35

a small part of a small box and

3:38

the Linode Popi

3:40

spades is like the smallest shared

3:43

machine. You can get tiny is like a gig

3:45

of RAM or something. It's super tiny. Right. Those

3:48

aren't the real problems. The big one is I

3:50

need to move the whole masters on thing.

3:52

Now I have moved masters on

3:54

in the past. You may remember it used

3:57

to run on a server in my office. And

4:01

I used nginx on the outside world to

4:03

proxy into and tunnel into

4:06

and it worked fine for a small number of users,

4:08

right? Where small number is one

4:10

me and now there are more users and

4:13

I want to put it on something But beefy now I

4:15

could migrate the same way that I did last time

4:17

and that is Handwavy our

4:20

sink all the files across Set

4:22

up the config install all the stuff

4:25

shut it down at the old place back up everything

4:27

make do one last our sink back up The database

4:29

restore the database make sure the config works. Yeah,

4:32

yeah, yeah, you know, that's not hard

4:34

to move services from one place to another

4:37

It's manual and I've got documentation

4:39

and I've done it before and it isn't like super

4:41

hard, but it's time-consuming but what

4:43

I would also like to put on that box is my personal

4:45

website and poopy spades

4:48

and All of that

4:50

is currently on the inverter commas

4:53

bare metal. There's no containerization

4:55

of any kind now I don't like

4:57

Docker we know this You

5:00

are aware dear listener. I'm not a fan

5:02

of the dockers And so

5:04

I I'm not quite sure what to do. Should

5:07

I do that? Should I? Create

5:09

these containers and

5:12

put everything in its own container It's

5:14

what I would do, but it depends

5:16

on why you don't like it and other

5:18

container runtimes are available

5:21

Yeah Is it that you don't like containers

5:23

or is it specifically something about a docker

5:25

that you don't like doing stuff

5:27

with it and you'd be Happy building

5:29

a container in a similar way, but running

5:31

on something else I don't know is that the

5:34

mental model of docker docker is a bit weird for

5:36

me because it's kind of inside a thing That's

5:38

a bit like a VM, but it's not a full

5:40

VM and I've

5:43

had problems with it in the past where I couldn't

5:45

I couldn't quite grok What was

5:47

inside and what was outside? Yeah, I

5:50

certainly had that problem at first. Yes, right

5:53

So there's a bit of a learning curve there and

5:55

you know part of me thinks Alan just man up. It's 2023

5:58

I just use docker. I mean it doesn't get around

6:00

a lot of the problem of having to migrate the data

6:02

because the data that you'd be are

6:04

thinking about is the stuff that doesn't live inside

6:07

the container. So you still need

6:09

somewhere sort of permanent

6:12

for the data to live as well,

6:14

which then gets mounted on the container. So

6:17

even if you have the software nicely packaged and easy

6:19

to deploy, you still have

6:21

to think about where is all of the

6:24

stuff going to live that it uses.

6:27

So that's interesting. I hadn't thought that.

6:29

I thought it would all be inside this box, inside

6:32

a box somewhere in Germany. But

6:35

if that's the case, then I don't really see the advantage

6:38

because I'm already pretty okay with administering

6:40

Mastodon and Postgres

6:43

and all the other bits and bobs and Ruby and

6:45

everything. The thing is that

6:47

they're not containerized. And so

6:50

I will have a web server running

6:52

my personal website, which is just a static website.

6:54

It's only Hugo, but then there's

6:56

this Mastodon thing on the same

6:59

box. But then there's also OpenSpace,

7:01

which actually is running as snaps. I

7:04

built a snap of OpenSpace. So those are containerized

7:08

games. Yeah. So the advantage that

7:10

you get there if you move them all to containers

7:12

is you don't risk them accidentally stomping

7:14

all over each other when you're upgrading

7:17

things or installing things.

7:19

Like if you've got the Mastodon

7:22

stuff all in its own container, you've got another

7:24

container, which is just a web server. And then

7:26

you've got something possibly snaps,

7:29

possibly another container of some sort with

7:31

the OpenSpace stuff in and you don't have to worry

7:33

about them conflicting with each

7:35

other. Yeah. While that's true, they

7:38

already aren't going too much

7:40

because my own website is all static

7:43

HTML and CSS images and stuff. And

7:46

that's not hard work. And there's nothing active

7:48

in there. There's no PHP or anything. And

7:51

OpenSpace, like I said, is inside a snap.

7:54

And so everything that is to do with it is inside

7:56

a confined

7:58

directory.

7:59

I'm finding it really hard to justify

8:02

the effort but I know everyone

8:04

is shouting at me you should do it and

8:07

I can hear it over the internet people telling me

8:09

I should use containers it's the right

8:11

practice to do but

8:13

yeah I'm finding it really hard to justify it.

8:15

I have a sort of kind of middle ground

8:18

for you so first of all I'm

8:20

going to say anyone that's listening to

8:22

this and they're about to send us

8:24

feedback and the words kubernetes

8:27

are in that feedback don't bother Alan

8:29

isn't going there right this is this is not

8:31

the direction of travel we are

8:33

headed in so I'm not I'm not spinning

8:35

up 20 boxes for kubernetes no hyperscale

8:38

open space but what

8:41

you might like is if you

8:43

use Proxmox which

8:46

is the operating system

8:48

that runs on the metal and

8:51

it has got a web front end

8:53

which enables you to create

8:56

visualize and you can deploy

8:58

in the usual way containers

9:00

I'm going to say docker containers

9:02

but you know OCI containers using

9:05

docker or podman or whatever and

9:07

also virtual machines so

9:09

you could use something like that

9:11

because I think that would help overcome

9:14

this sort of inception

9:16

visualization sort of block

9:19

that you have with what is this thing and where

9:21

is it if you can actually see through

9:23

like you know a management interface here

9:26

are all of my containers that are running

9:28

and this is what they are and here are

9:30

also the virtual machines and I would also say

9:33

that whilst yes containers are

9:36

definitely the sort of de facto

9:38

it's okay to use virtual machines if

9:40

you find that easier and in some respects

9:42

for something like mastodon that

9:45

may be advantageous because you could

9:48

define the size and scope

9:51

of the virtual machine instance more

9:53

easily in order to constrain

9:55

it so it doesn't overwhelm other things

9:57

that you're running on your box

9:59

That is a very fair point. I could

10:02

rein it in a little bit with this space

10:04

and see give it only a small number of CPUs for

10:07

example, yeah, because it is quite a beefy

10:09

box. It's got like more

10:11

CPUs than I need and That's

10:14

actually something I should consider. I think

10:16

what I need to do is make

10:19

some notes and maybe

10:21

put it in a blog post and let

10:24

people know what I'm thinking and then Solicitly

10:27

opinions of our listeners and anyone

10:29

else who passes by and tells me

10:32

I'm doing it wrong and I'm I should do it differently

10:35

I'm sure people will have opinions. This

10:37

is the internet after all

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11:10

All the details are at Linux Matters dot sh

11:13

slash contact There's

11:17

a major Moodle release coming up

11:19

next month and at work I've

11:22

been making some of

11:24

my weightiest contributions so far

11:26

to the upstream Moodle project And

11:28

when I mentioned this in our telegram channel Someone

11:31

suggested that I talk a bit about what the process

11:33

of contributing to Moodle looks like

11:35

So I thought I might have a bit of a chat

11:38

about that and and give people some perspective

11:41

on contributing to a

11:43

large and Established open source

11:45

project is the first question what on

11:47

earth is Moodle now that is a

11:49

very good question So Moodle

11:52

you will probably have encountered it if you've

11:54

been to University

11:57

or possibly a

11:58

college in the past

12:00

decade or so. It's

12:03

a virtual learning environment is the generic

12:05

term VLE. It is a thing

12:07

that provides web pages for teachers

12:10

to put learning content on

12:12

and run online activities

12:14

with their students. The idea

12:16

of it in its conception was it was built

12:19

around this idea of social constructivism

12:21

which is where people learn

12:24

together and teach each other. So

12:26

it's very focused to collaborative

12:28

online activities but it also

12:31

works for dumping a load of PDFs

12:33

on a web page and things like that. That's been

12:35

my experience of VLEs. My son would

12:38

get told your work for the week

12:40

is on the VLE. This was during

12:43

the event when VLEs

12:45

were coming into their own quite a bit and

12:48

it was just a dumping ground for PowerPoints

12:50

and links and stuff like that. It's got to be

12:52

more than that right? Yeah my Moodle is

12:54

a very powerful and varied and

12:57

extensible platform. These

12:59

days it's referred to more as an online

13:01

learning platform rather than specifically as a

13:03

VLE. It's designed to hook into

13:05

other things and there's a lot

13:07

you can do with it but that's a whole other

13:09

segment I think on what you can do

13:11

with Moodle. But it's been around

13:14

a long time. It's over 20 years old.

13:16

It was written in PHP 4

13:19

originally I think which was before

13:22

PHP had things like object-oriented

13:24

programming and the concepts

13:26

we're familiar with today. It's still

13:29

mostly written in PHP with quite a lot of JavaScript

13:32

somewhere in the region of a million lines of code

13:34

across those two languages. It's

13:37

quite big and it can be quite daunting

13:40

to start hacking away on. But

13:42

the interesting thing is because it's written in PHP

13:44

if you're running it you've also got all

13:46

the source code and if you want to make a change

13:49

you can just hack on a file and reload

13:51

the page and there it is. So what you find in the Moodle

13:53

community quite a lot is that quite

13:56

a few people who are developers used to be teachers

13:58

who use Moodle and then wanted to make a change. it better

14:00

and we're able to do that quite easily.

14:02

And for an established project of

14:04

this size, have we got any idea sort

14:07

of what the active number

14:09

of developers contributing to Moodle

14:12

currently is?

14:13

Oh, that's a good question.

14:15

I know that in terms

14:17

of the sort of rate of change, there's

14:20

somewhere around 40 issues are

14:22

integrated each week. In terms

14:24

of the actual number of developers actively

14:27

involved, it's not that easy

14:29

to put a number on that, I don't think. Because

14:31

as well as the core project, you've also got a

14:33

community of plugins around them, and

14:36

people who are active on those, and

14:38

people working in house on it. But

14:40

there's quite a few people working on it. Let's put it that

14:43

way. The conferences are always

14:45

well attended by developers. And you've contributed

14:47

to this before. But this what you're talking about today

14:49

is a more significant contribution.

14:52

Yeah, so my first job with

14:54

Moodle was about 15 years

14:57

ago. And I did my first contribution,

14:59

which was a one line change to

15:01

fix a CSS bug. Although the

15:04

bug was actually in PHP code. That's another

15:06

story. I made my first one line

15:08

change then. But yes, these are much

15:10

more significant. So

15:12

there's an area of Moodle called the question

15:15

bank, which is how it manages questions

15:17

used for quizzes. It has some quite

15:20

advanced features for that. But the

15:22

UI was looking a bit dated. So

15:24

my work recently has been

15:26

around refreshing that and making it a bit more modern,

15:29

and a bit more usable and accessible

15:32

and things like that, you know, to have some

15:34

of the features you expect when you see a table

15:36

on a page in an interface, you expect

15:38

to be able to do things like resize the columns and

15:40

move things around and filter the

15:42

results and stuff like that. So I've made

15:45

two fairly significant contributions

15:48

in that regard.

15:49

And so was this stuff that you

15:51

decided needed to be done or someone

15:54

else decided to be done and you went, I'll

15:56

grab that. So actually, interestingly,

15:58

this is a bit of a A bit of a unique

16:01

source for this contribution is actually

16:03

come from a group of universities

16:06

who got together and said, we'd

16:08

like to make this area better. And

16:10

so they clubbed together some money and

16:12

did some design work, and then basically

16:15

hired my company to do the development

16:17

work because we're a Moodle partner company and

16:19

we've got a lot of experience working with Moodle

16:22

with our clients. And

16:24

if people need Moodle development done, we can do it. And

16:26

in this case, they wanted us to do the development for

16:28

them, but contribute it upstream

16:31

rather than giving it to them in-house,

16:34

as it were. Were you initially giving

16:36

it to them so they could iterate on the

16:38

design or work on it with

16:41

you and then go upstream? Yes.

16:43

So, yeah, so it's been a sort of, I've been working

16:46

with them throughout the process and getting

16:48

early feedback. It's been

16:52

an agile development process. For

16:54

your buzzword, bingo cards. Which

16:58

stuff like this is generally best done that

17:00

way anyway, just because the

17:02

way that you think something's going to work never ends up being the

17:04

way it actually works and what you specify

17:07

can always end up being wildly different from what

17:09

you decide is going to work in the end. So

17:11

it's always good to work that way if you can. So

17:14

yeah, I wanted to talk a bit about once you've got

17:16

your thing made, how do you actually

17:19

get that into a project like Moodle? So

17:21

Moodle has a bug tracker, which is Jira

17:24

or Jaira, however you'd like to say

17:26

it, which has been quite heavily configured,

17:30

let's say, for Moodle's purposes.

17:32

So works quite well for their workflow and

17:35

it's been that way since

17:37

I've been involved. I don't know if they ever

17:39

had something different before. And

17:42

as with most projects, it's using Git for

17:44

version control. I think I

17:46

started just as they were transitioning to

17:48

Git. They previously used CVS, which

17:51

was fun. But fortunately,

17:53

I never really had to learn that. So

17:55

once you've got your bug, you

17:57

set up your local development environment and

17:59

fit the issue. So it's a it's

18:02

PHP so you set up a lamp stack locally

18:04

and whichever text editor

18:07

or ID you prefer,

18:08

write your code

18:10

and there's a coding style which

18:12

you follow. There's tools for making sure you

18:14

follow the coding style. As part

18:16

of a development that you're contributing upstream

18:18

you're also expected to write and run automated

18:21

tests. So there's unit tests

18:24

which test the PHP code in

18:26

isolation but there's also a tool

18:29

more widely known as Qcumber but the PHP

18:32

implementation is called Bhat which actually

18:34

runs a web browser and executes

18:37

functions within the web interface and

18:40

tests that it does what you're expecting it to do. So

18:42

you need to write tests like that to

18:45

prove that what you're doing is doing what you're saying it's

18:47

doing. So once you've got your code ready

18:49

and you've got all of this done you then push it up to

18:51

GitHub and you link it to

18:53

the issue on the tracker. So they don't do

18:56

pull requests via GitHub's

18:58

pull request method they do it separately

19:00

and when you push it up to GitHub

19:03

it will run using GitHub actions it runs

19:05

a bunch of these automated checks,

19:08

runs all of the unit tests across all

19:10

of Moodle which makes sure that you don't break other

19:12

things which is really important part of writing

19:15

these automated tests because you're basically saying

19:17

once you've contributed it the community

19:19

is maintaining this now and part of your responsibility

19:21

there is making sure that people know if something

19:24

they're going to do is going to break it. There's

19:26

also

19:27

some checks on the tracker side to make

19:30

sure that you've done everything there that you're meant to

19:32

do like writing a test script

19:34

that explains how this is going to be tested

19:37

and once that's all good and you've got the green

19:39

light you then submit it for peer

19:41

review.

19:42

So you said you don't create pull

19:44

requests so I imagine you've forked

19:47

the Moodle repository

19:50

from GitHub to your own GitHub

19:53

org and that brings over

19:55

all of the CI CD

19:59

workflows and test

20:01

infrastructure. So when you push

20:03

your code to your fork, all

20:06

of that test infrastructure runs. Yes.

20:09

And you link from your

20:11

project that you have forked to

20:14

the issue tracker. And that

20:16

triggers the link,

20:18

the awareness, the notification

20:20

that you are working on something

20:23

over here and you intend for it at some

20:25

point to be brought into the

20:27

main project. Exactly. Okay.

20:29

And they also have some

20:32

separate CI stuff and they're

20:34

the hat test runner, which is

20:36

all separate from GitHub because that's

20:38

a massive thing running on Jenkins somewhere, which

20:41

uses the tracker to say, these

20:43

are the branches I need to test against. Okay.

20:46

So peer review in the Moodle community can basically

20:48

be done by anyone.

20:51

And of course, when something can be done by anyone, that

20:53

means it's often done by no one. Okay.

20:56

This is where it helps to work for a company

20:59

which employs other Moodle developers. But

21:01

generally you have to go out,

21:04

unless someone is actively looking

21:06

for this to be fixed, you need to go out and find

21:08

someone who's going to peer review this for you. But

21:11

it doesn't have to be someone specific with specific

21:13

credentials. It just has to be someone who

21:15

knows the process and is willing to follow

21:17

it for you. They do publish guidelines

21:20

and a checklist of the sort of things that you're checking.

21:22

And it's things like,

21:25

how's the coding style we followed, which should be automatically

21:27

checked, looking out for any security issues,

21:30

looking out for any efficiency issues,

21:33

making sure that the test script that you've written is

21:35

sufficient and covers everything. And the automated

21:38

tests cover everything because it's fine. So I've written

21:40

the test script, but there's a difference

21:42

between writing a test script and writing a test script that

21:44

tests things well, and all

21:46

of these sorts of things. And once they've done

21:48

that, they can stick the ticked

21:51

off checklist on the issue and

21:53

say, this is now ready for integration.

21:55

And integration in Moodle is a second

21:58

round of review, which...

21:59

is done by a member of Moodle

22:02

HQ, which is the

22:05

affectionate name for Moodle's main

22:07

sponsor company. They

22:10

are the ones who run all of this infrastructure. They

22:12

own the Moodle trademark and they employ

22:14

the Moodle core developers, who

22:17

are the people who provide the integration review.

22:19

So aside from this high level peer review,

22:22

they're there to really look into

22:24

your code and say, is this

22:27

of sufficient quality to go into Moodle and

22:29

is it a good fit? Is

22:31

this following the architectural direction

22:33

that we're going in? Is this following the

22:35

latest best practices that we're adhering

22:38

to? And is this something that

22:40

we definitely want in Moodle core as opposed

22:43

to as a Moodle plugin? So those

22:45

conversations don't necessarily happen upfront

22:47

then. This is sort of

22:49

a, after you've done the work, is

22:51

there somewhere you can discuss like

22:54

ideas for changes you want to make so you

22:56

don't work on something and go

22:58

through the first two steps of contribution

23:01

and then

23:01

get told, actually, no, we're not

23:03

interested? Yes.

23:05

And it has been a bit of a bumpy road with some

23:07

of the stuff I've been working on recently in that regard. But

23:09

yes, there's the Moodle forums. There is the issue tracker

23:12

where you can discuss things upfront before you

23:14

start working on them. And there's the

23:16

Moodle Matrix channel where you can discuss things

23:18

with other developers. Did anything get

23:20

rejected or you have to rework anything?

23:23

Yes, I've been doing quite a lot of rework on one

23:25

of them because basically it wasn't

23:27

following the, there's

23:30

been a lot of work into the

23:32

user experience consistency and

23:34

modernisation of Moodle. And

23:37

some of the work I'd done was not

23:39

well aligned with the direction that was going in.

23:42

So after some conversations, we agreed that I'd sort of, you

23:45

know, the Moodle HQ

23:47

UX team gave me some designs

23:50

to adjust my work to follow better

23:53

what they're going to be doing in the future so

23:55

that we don't end up with two completely different things

23:58

in different parts of the system. So your work... has

24:00

landed now? It is in the process of landing.

24:02

One of the big changes has landed. It's in the process

24:05

of landing and the

24:07

release is I think just at the start of October.

24:10

So we're in code freeze now which means everything's

24:12

been submitted to integration and

24:15

yeah my second big change is going through the integration

24:17

process as we record which is

24:19

on the 5th of September. I should just put

24:21

that note in there. So depending

24:24

on when you listen to this it may already be out. It will

24:26

hopefully be out in Moodle 4.3.

24:29

Nice. I guess the more important question

24:31

is are your customers happy? I think

24:33

so. They

24:35

can email in and let us know if they're not.

24:40

I purchased one of those refurbished

24:43

steam decks from Valve and

24:46

after two weeks of ownership I'm

24:48

here to tell you if you're retro gaming

24:50

on the steam deck you're doing

24:52

it wrong and we're here to tell

24:54

you how to do it right. We

24:57

are here to tell you are we? Yeah

25:00

I'm totally throwing you under the bus with this one Alan.

25:02

So I finally capitulated.

25:06

I'm a fully signed up host

25:08

to the Linux Matters podcast for iNow

25:11

to own a steam deck. That seems

25:13

to be about 60% of

25:15

our content so I felt I should get one so I

25:17

can join in the fun. So here we are with my

25:20

first steam deck segment

25:22

for the for the podcast. Welcome

25:25

to the cult. Yes. So

25:27

I will say if anyone's wondering about

25:29

refurbished steam decks it's just

25:32

like a proper not

25:34

refurbished one. Everything appears

25:37

absolutely brand new. The one difference is

25:39

that all of the little boxes that it comes in

25:42

all have the words refurbished actually

25:44

imprint properly made not stuck on

25:46

with stickers. It's all very professional.

25:49

It did look just like a brand new device like

25:51

I saw when you unpacked it. It was like no

25:54

different than mine. Yeah identical other

25:56

than the addition of the word refurbished on

25:58

all of the some paper pullouts

26:01

and all the rest of it. And when people

26:03

cottoned onto the fact that I'd got a Steam Deck,

26:06

the first recommendation I got from

26:08

several people was, you should install

26:11

MU Deck because that's how you do

26:13

retro gaming on the Steam

26:15

Deck. And I was going to resist

26:17

getting into retro gaming on the Steam Deck

26:19

because I was going to keep it for PC gaming. But

26:22

then, Alan, you went and found

26:24

something and you totally ruined that

26:27

for me. I apologize. I

26:29

have

26:29

not been a fan of MU Deck ever.

26:32

All due respect to the developers,

26:34

it's a bag of spanners and

26:36

I don't like it and I don't like the way

26:38

it installs. And I recently nuked

26:41

my Steam Deck. I wiped the OS

26:44

completely and started again.

26:46

And when I started again, I thought,

26:48

huh, I could probably play some retro stuff

26:51

on here. Hey, what's this? This is not MU Deck.

26:53

This is something else completely different. So

26:55

I found a thing called

26:58

Retro Deck and I installed

27:00

that and then mentioned it to Martin

27:02

and he won't shut up about it now. Yes.

27:07

So Retro Deck is what I'm here to

27:09

tell you about and it is

27:12

fabulous. So there's a

27:14

few things I really like about

27:16

Retro Deck. The first

27:19

is it's not a bag of spanners.

27:22

It's distributed as a flat pack, which

27:24

you can find in Flat Hub. So

27:26

everything is integrated in

27:29

this one bundle. It

27:31

is all of the things you need

27:33

to run emulators

27:36

and one install and you're done. And

27:39

it's all isolated together there. So

27:41

that's really tasty. I like

27:43

that a lot. But then the actual

27:46

architecture for how this works currently

27:49

and also where they're going, I really like. The

27:51

first thing I like is it's really easy

27:53

to use. Unlike some of the

27:55

sort of emulation framework

27:57

platforms, which expose the retro.

28:00

Arch user interface, which

28:03

I am not a fan of. It overwhelms

28:05

me. I don't understand what all the options

28:08

are and also I don't really want to know

28:10

what all the options are. I just want to play

28:12

some games. And Retro Deck

28:15

does that. It just shows

28:17

you the games you can play

28:19

and hides all of that complicated

28:23

stuff away underneath. So

28:26

in terms of how it presents, it's

28:29

kind of like a Netflix-like

28:32

user interface, which

28:34

gets better when you download

28:37

metadata. And I'll talk about that in a little

28:39

bit. But it's very easy to use.

28:42

I haven't needed to dive into

28:44

the underpinnings of Retro Arch

28:46

and all the rest of it. All of the stuff

28:49

that I've needed to change has

28:51

been exposed through its

28:53

own interface.

28:54

I have played with Emu Deck. And

28:57

I agree with your sentiments. But one of the things

28:59

that I do like about it is that

29:01

it includes a tool which finds

29:03

all of the stuff you've got set up with Emu

29:05

Deck and adds it into your Steam launcher

29:08

interface. And at that point, you

29:10

just go into Steam and you say, launch this. And

29:12

it's just like you're playing a game through Steam.

29:15

You don't feel like you're going into Emu Deck

29:17

to play it. Does Retro Deck do

29:19

the same sort of thing or is it all through

29:21

its own interface? I don't think it

29:24

does, but I don't know for sure

29:26

because I haven't looked for that feature. I

29:28

don't think it does. And I don't want it to do

29:31

that. And I agree with that. I don't want my Steam

29:33

cluttered up with a whole bunch of spanners.

29:36

I want the one thing to

29:38

launch it. And then I've got a view on all

29:40

of the emulators and all the games that I want to play.

29:43

And it was the whole integrating

29:46

all of these little spanners in

29:49

Steam UI that really

29:52

put me off Emu Deck. And

29:54

that's the thing I love about Retro Deck. You launch one

29:57

thing and you're now in all the emulators and you can just

29:59

go into each one. Is that launcher launched

30:01

through the Steam interface? Yeah, it's

30:04

add one item and you only have

30:06

one thing to add the Steam and you're done.

30:08

Yeah, so there is one game

30:11

in Steam called Retro

30:13

Deck and then it's a

30:15

beautiful launcher and it really

30:17

is very beautiful. So some other things

30:19

that I like about it is, this

30:22

was an interesting one, when you push the two

30:24

buttons to quit a game, for whatever

30:26

reason, when you start that game at some

30:28

point in the future, it automatically

30:30

creates an autosave point so when

30:32

you start that game next time, you're immediately

30:35

back in the game exactly where you left

30:37

it, which took me by surprise a couple of

30:39

times till I realised it was doing it. I

30:42

like that because when I just do pick up and play,

30:44

this is great for, right, I'm going to put this down, I may

30:47

have come back to it in a couple of days time but I can

30:49

pick up and carry on from where

30:51

we were and then it also

30:53

has retro achievements, which I've

30:55

never dabbled with before but

30:58

I can totally see that I could

31:00

become a retro achievement

31:02

hunter as a result of

31:04

how nicely integrated that is into

31:07

Retro Deck, including like

31:10

notification toasts appearing over

31:13

the game as you hit certain

31:15

achievements. So that hooks

31:17

into various retro games and

31:19

tracks when you do certain things in them.

31:22

Yeah. Huh, that's quite neat. Yeah,

31:24

it is, it's pretty cool. Not every game is supported

31:26

because obviously there's tens of thousands of retro

31:28

games that you can

31:29

lob on these things but all the

31:32

big ones tend to have some kind of achievements

31:34

and it's quite a lot of fun actually doing

31:36

that. Yeah, the user interface that you've mentioned

31:38

is very beautiful, it's based on emulation station

31:41

or a fork of emulation station because I think that died

31:43

off at some point, which is the same UI

31:45

that I've got on my PyCade, my

31:48

tabletop Py Arcade thing. Emulation

31:51

station has been around a while but

31:54

with themes and stuff it's taking it to the next

31:56

level, it's so nice to use. Yeah,

31:58

so it uses emulation.

31:59

Station Desktop Edition

32:02

and the Retro Deck Team are

32:04

actually contributing Retro

32:07

Deck specific Features

32:09

and changes to that project

32:12

that is only exposed when it's running

32:14

on the Retro Deck So they're

32:17

sort of working in tandem So it's all very

32:19

seamlessly integrated and this is one of the things I

32:21

like about like the way the project is

32:23

being led And the direction is headed in because

32:26

it has got some rough edges They signpost

32:29

those rough edges and make it very clear.

32:31

This is the way it is right now For example, there's

32:33

some zenity pop-ups and things like

32:36

this at the moment. They fully intend

32:38

to Integrate into

32:40

either their own UI or into

32:43

the emulation station desktop but

32:45

it's all been very thoughtfully put together

32:47

and The project itself

32:50

is still beta. So whilst

32:52

I've had no issues running this I'm

32:55

by no means a Hardcore

32:57

retro gamer. I don't know what shouldn't

33:00

be working or what platforms aren't enabled.

33:02

For example I know that their intention

33:04

is to enable everything that retro arch

33:06

supports I don't think everything is right now

33:09

But I like the way they're sort of signposting

33:11

where they're headed with this in the future And

33:14

here's one of the things I absolutely love about

33:17

this is because it's a flat pack

33:19

You can run it on desktop Linux, too

33:22

So actually I've been mostly

33:24

running it on my desktops

33:28

Because I can and

33:31

I've got sync things sat in the background Automatically

33:34

syncing my game library between

33:37

all of my machines that have Retro-dec

33:41

installed and all of my

33:43

configuration and save states

33:46

and metadata and all of that stuff is consistent

33:48

across all of these devices Including

33:52

the steam deck because I did a little hack

33:54

and I got zero tier working

33:57

on the steam deck So all of

33:59

this synchronize works between

34:01

the Steam Deck and my library

34:06

in one place, one virtual

34:08

place, and all of these machines pick it

34:10

up. You mentioned briefly the artwork.

34:13

There's a whole bunch of stuff to do with scraping

34:15

as well. There is. You showed

34:17

me, yeah. Yeah, so there's two providers

34:20

that provide artwork and metadata.

34:22

One I think is called Screenscraper.

34:24

It's a French website and there's the other one which is the TV

34:27

database. I'd never used

34:29

this French one. I've signed up and I'm using

34:31

that. It's quite slow but it

34:34

gives you a really great result because

34:36

it gives you videos and all

34:38

of the cover art and all of the history behind

34:40

all of the games. So it very much is like

34:42

Netflix. When you go to a game,

34:45

it has a rolling video. The theme

34:48

that I'm using has arcade

34:50

cabinets that match the originals or

34:52

TV sets that are era-accurate

34:54

for the games consoles. It's just a

34:57

very beautiful experience and

34:59

it invites you to want to play these

35:01

games because each time you switch to the next

35:04

one, it's colorful and

35:06

sounds great, looks amazing, and

35:08

you just want to play. So there

35:11

it is. It's RetroDeck. It's RetroDeck.net.

35:14

We'll have links to all of this in

35:16

the show notes including my

35:18

instructions on how to install

35:21

Zero Tier on the Steam Deck which is

35:23

also a nice generic way to

35:26

have persistent software installations

35:28

from the Arch repos on a Steam Deck

35:31

that survive SteamOS updates.