Microsoft Has Promised to Fix Windows - WAN Show May 1, 2026

HELLO WORLD AND WELCOME TO THE WAN SHOW. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYBODY. We've got a great show lined up for you. It is the first day of the second month of Good News Wow. That's right. The ratio of good news to bad news has to be I forget what we settled on, but it's pretty much mostly good news this week. Starting with something that is like a blast from my childhood past. The one and only Zs Knight, original developer of Z SNES, is back. Zess is back. Completely rewritten from scratch. I actually haven't tried it yet, but I intend to this weekend. I'm super excited to talk about that. Also, we've got to be talking about Oh, no. I don't want to talk about that. Oh, this one's good. Microsoft has committed in something that they are codenaming K2 seemingly as an acknowledgement of the mountain they have to climb a concerted effort to fix windows. Very excited to talk about that. What else we got? Uh I took mine Toyota. You know I try baby. Toyota did what people have thought about for a really long time which is they took a chair from a car and they put it on a stand with some wheels on it and they called it a computer chair. Toyota's limited edition $3,500 Crown gaming chair has heating, cooling, and USBC seat seat belt buckle. I didn't even know that part. It's so expensive. Ah, but cheaper than a real Toyota. That's true. Maybe not much more than a used one. Um, and I don't know. We've got stuff. There's other stuff. We sponsored a drift car. Really? You went with that? I don't know. Sure. I saw a better one right under it. It is what it is. The show IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY VESSIE, ODO, SQUARESPACE, and Ninja 1, along with our rap partner, Dbrand, and our laptop partner, Razer, and our chair partner, also Razer. If you were a famous musician, what genre would you want to be in? What's the most annoying genre? No, I think it's called noise. Is it? Is that a thing, Dan? Tell me something. What What do you think? I would defin knows way infinitely more about this than either of us. I'm going with Sure. I would definitely be cringey cringey. You agree? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'd be cringey pop style music for like moms at this point. I think I think that would be that would be my best shot. I don't know. Taylor Swift. Um, if I could if I had half the talent that Taylor Swift has in one thigh, then I could hope to be, you know, more like Taylor Swift. But no, no, I'm afraid I might have thighs, but they're not talented. Uh, let's jump right in. Hold on one second. Noise music, or simply noise, is a subgenre of experimental music that is characterized by its use of unwanted noise as a primary musical element. So, that's that's I think that's probably the most annoying one. It's just terrible. Often featuring little or no melody, rhythm, or harmony. That just sounds like someone was taking the piss. It's just terrible. And then it just accidentally a whole genre. All right. You're No, no, we're not. We're not. It's important that everyone knows about noise. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Microsoft has created an internal initiative called K2 to fix Windows 11. Apparently, it's been going on for a while, though. They have finally admitted to themselves that Windows 11 is a giant boatload of suck. And according to sources inside Microsoft is using the K2 initiative to fix the operating system's biggest pain points and win, pun intended, back user trust. The company is also reportedly intentionally pivoting away from shipping new features as fast as possible and refocusing on quality. You know, it's kind of amazing how every time a company is like having big big problems, the idea is, hey, why don't we stop intentionally sucking? Actually, I wish that was often the solution. I I went on a rant about this recently, but not on camera. So, here you go. Ready for it? Here comes the Tim Horton's Wan Show rant. Oh, hell yeah. This made me so angry. I was talking to an American or something and they were basically like, "Well, yeah." Yeah, right. You know, you know, right? Like, bud, like Tim Hortons, right? Y'all Canadians, y'all like the Tim Hortons, right, Bud? Instantly triggered. And and I was basically like instantly triggered. Okay, let me clarify because yes, I do like Tim Hortons, but there's a bit of a temporal issue with that statement because while it was once true for me and every proud Canadian, it is no longer true. Tim Hortons is now owned by restaurant brands, which seriously, did they go to that to the LTT store of naming? We're going to have a company that owns restaurant. What should we call it? Let's call it [ __ ] restaurant brands. That aside, okay, restaurant brands is owned by like Black Rockck and some Brazilian conglomerate, like a bunch of private equity. There is nothing Canadian about Tim Hortons anymore. Oh yeah. And after all of that happened, Tim Hortons went, at least here on the West Coast, I've been told that on the east on the eastern side, some of them do still bake the donuts fresh in store. So really here on the West Coast, they went from baking the donuts fresh in store every day. Their slogan used to be always fresh. Always Tim Hortons. That was their slogan. Now they're still always Tim Hortons, but they're a gross, messed up, not fresh version of it. Like you you could get a brand new like the freshest doughnut in Tim Hortons. It'll taste like it's 3 days old these days. It It's so It's so bad. It's It's absolutely disgusting. Uh how did I get on the subject of Tim Hortons? I literally to be honest. Oh, right. When companies start sucking Right. Okay. So, this was a while back. This must have been like a year ago at this point, but it like it made its way into my news feed that Tim Hortons was experiencing less than stellar growth and customer engagement. And on a shareholder call, okay, on a shareholder call, they're literally acknowledging soft sales and they go, "Yeah, so here's our plan. We're gonna really like double down on the Canadana in our marketing and like you know little kids skating on outdoor hockey rinks and maple leaves and beavers and all those very Canadian things in order to connect more to our Canadian cere's an idea. Why don't you makeing edible food as a way to connect with your Canadian customers? I used to when I would travel abroad, uh, so when I'm at airports basically, um, I I had a routine where every single time I would go to Tim Hortons. So like the last thing I did in Canada was like one of the most Canadian things you could do, which is go to Tim Hortons. Go to Tim Hortons, get some chili. Haven't done it. Yep. Get a sandwich, get get a donut. They all suck now. Haven't done it in years. They even [ __ ] up the chili. How do you up chili? It's literally just like meat and tomato paste and beans and then you just put it over heat. Okay. The chili is fine. But the problem is the bun sucks. Oh, the chili has gotten worse as well. Has it really? Okay. I think so. I haven't had it in a while. It feels like it. I might just be like, "Dude, annoyed. The bun tastes I also use the bun as a spoon." Well, yeah. That's the whole point. So, the bun being way worse may have impacted my opinion of the chili. Okay. Because like I used to go and get Tim Horton's chili for my lunch. Like seriously, this is embarrassing, but like two to three times a week when I was working at NCX, I'd get my chili, I'd get my bun, I'd get usually when they had them, I'd get the blueberry fritter. Oh, the blueberry fritter. The only problem with the blueberry fritter was how often they ended up undercooking them, which looking back on it is maybe why they stopped baking them in store. The point is that doesn't matter. I would get my blueberry fritter, I'd get my lemon iced tea, and that was it. The lunch of champions. That lunch took OCZ as a product line from like $3,000 a month to $300,000 a month. Okay, that's what Tim Horton's Chili did in his prime. Now I wouldn't feed my dog that bun. I don't even have a dog anyway. So yeah, I wish that every company came up with the idea of how about making the product suck less, but restaurant brands couldn't do it. Anyway, I I genuinely think Tim Hortons was so important to Canada's national identity that that sale should have been blocked. I I actually strongly agree. It like actually was like our prime minister would talk about it globally. Like this was this was it was not a this was not just some random like restaurant. Yeah. Like like going to Tim Hortons in the morning for breakfast is like was might as well be the canteen of Canada. Like it's it's just Yeah. And it's ruined now. Like I'm trying to think of like what would be an like I don't know of a single example. It would be like Ford like not be it would be like Ford selling to like Volkswagen company. Yeah. Or to Gily or something like imagine as an American if you're watching this right now if like [ __ ] Ford did not was not American. I don't think Ford is as tied into the American ID as as Tim Bordon was in Canadian. Depends you know like like built Ford tough like dude is there a country on earth that loves the F-150 the way that America does? Like let's let's be real here. But still, let's be real here. I still think I still think it's more like what would be what would be like a what would be like a like a like a German equivalent? Like what would what would be so so offensive to like uh guys hit me hit me with it. You know what? No, we can move on. We can move on. Okay, so coming back to Windows on the performance side, the start menu is being completely rewritten in Microsoft's own WinUI3 framework, which is supposed to make it 60% faster and more responsive. That is such a See, that's such a baffling one to me is like when I open the start, what are you even doing? Like there's there's a there's there's things that I do on computers that just completely bewilder me how they can take as long as they do. Uh, perfect example of this. We were running a benchmark on set yesterday. We were uh performance testing. Oh, we ran SLI. We we grabbed some 3090 Ti, okay, and we we like ran like modern games that would still run. It's not really SLI. It's more of like the direct X12 multiGPU thing, but hey, we we ran them and in the best case scenario, it was actually pretty competitive with a 5090 in like 3D Mark. It was pretty pretty crazy. Anyway, the point is when we were running 3D Mark, I was just like I was losing my mind because it's just always bothered me. You know how it does that thing where it's like um detecting system configuration and it takes like a minute to do what? Yeah. Like how long does Steam hardware survey take? How how long does it take to get a string of characters for for the identifier of a piece of hard? Like we we run at billions of operations per second on modern computing devices. You've got to be kidding me. Or like when a Wi-Fi access point takes like forever to authenticate the password. It's like it's literally eight bits. I know it isn't. Okay. But but it's it seems so trivial. And in the same way the start menu is like what are you even actually doing? Like all of this has got to be pre-cached. What are you doing? You're You're not doing anything. Why Why is there like a delay? Well, hopefully there won't be anymore. I don't know enough of the the difference between like what is it? Win UI or whatever um and React Native. As far as my understanding goes, React Native was calling Win UI. So there the the the so the the start menu right now is a React Native app as far as my understanding goes. Um, and if they're just removing that layer and stepping down one and going to win UUI. I I don't know how this stack works. I read quickly that apparently at least sometimes it is calling Win UI. So, I'm assuming they're just stepping down a layer. Like maybe you gain a bunch of performance there. The fact that any part of Windows native UI is React Native is wild to me. Oh, this is great. Greak has another good one. I hate it when Windows takes forever to tell me my password's wrong. I accidentally pressed enter instead of, you know, enter anything like just immediately when you when you do it like six or seven times or whatever. That could be that can be a security feature where it's like delaying you being able to put it in again. But when it just like takes a while, it's dude, it's like a handful of characters. It either the hash matches or it doesn't for crying out loud. Anyway, Microsoft is also reportedly removing ads from its start menu. Again, like a a bold move. Bold move. This is like restaurant sales falling. They come up with the bold idea of making food fresh. Um, and then for gaming, Microsoft is treating. This is crazy. This is probably the best marketing for Steam OS that Valve could have never afforded with all their billions and billions of dollars of I'm Gabe Newell. Rather than buying a yacht, I will literally buy the company that makes the yachts. all of the money that they have could never have purchased. Microsoft is treating Valve's Steam OS as a performance benchmark. They want Windows gaming performance to be comparable to Steam OS on identical hardware, which they say is critical because the next Xbox is reportedly going to run Windows 11. Oh man, they were doing really good up until Is this is this Have they hard confirmed that there was going to be another Xbox? Yeah, Project Scorpio I think it's called like the new CEO Helix. Helio something. Helix. Helix. Thank you. Lightning X in chat. Um File Explorer is also getting major performance fixes with a third party app called File Pilot being used as the performance benchmark they're shooting for. This is like embarrassing. Who makes File Pilot? Like, no offense. No offense. You're probably No, it's it's I mean, it's the opposite. It's a huge [ __ ] brag if you're File Pilot. That's amazing. But I don't even know who you are. And the fact that Microsoft, a multi-trillion dollar company, is looking at this going, "Yeah, these guys are crushing us. We need to do we need to do better." Okay. Who are you? Manifesto fast, dude. Search for system commands. This is actually sick. Hold on. My god. Is file pilot dope? File pilot is one guy, dude. Catholic Croatian husband, father of five. One extremely busy guy. Just donking on Windows. Look at that. Look at this. That's awesome. Hey, what am I looking at here? Oh, this is File Pilot. Yeah, he's selected a bunch of things and select a system he can search. Yeah, I never even like thought about that. Finally, Windows Update is being reworked, too, with the goal of making Windows 11 reliable enough that you only need to restart once a month. Dude, File Pilot's cool. You might if we're doing that thing, you should maybe include Microsoft Microsoft setting the bar. Okay, we want to We want to beat the performance of an operating system that the games literally don't even run natively on. We want to beat this one dude in Explorer, like the most critical thing in Windows that literally is like Windows 3.1. Okay. And we want to only have to restart your computer once a month. They put the bar here. Come on, you guys. Also, the taskbar is getting back the ability to put the bar somewhere. Moved and resized. K2 is reportedly not going to be a single release, but an ongoing initiative that started in the second half of 2025 with Moe's changes rolling out through the end of 2026 and into 2027 discussion question. And for this, I need you to put away the chat, close your eyes, and search deep inside your feelings. Search your feelings, Luke. Okay? I'm channeling the force. Sorry. Do you think Windows can win back its users? And you're searching your feelings because, you know, you at least used to be a Windows user. Or is it too little too late? Search your feelings, Luke. Uh, I mean, I think I think so. And the reason why I think so is I think most of them haven't left yet. I think most of them are very vocally honestly they should be action of the rage that the community has had. I think some people have left. I've left. I'm not stopping using Linux when the Linux challenge is over. There's a spoiler. Um I'm going to continue using it. Um but it isn't it isn't completely too late. the the approach that I'm taking right now is what is the most appropriate tool for me to use to have the least frustration, the the most good time, whatever you want to call it. Y um and be able to operate and get stuff done without significant um like inability to do the thing that I want to do. And right now that is almost always pushing me to Linux either mint on my laptop, cache on my desktop. Um, I do plan on ending with a dual boot setup on my desktop, but it's honestly completely unnecessary on my laptop, and I will be continuing to run Mint. If this bar shifts and it makes more sense for me to use Windows, I'd probably just use Windows, but that is not currently true. And like I'm I'm trying to be honestly like pretty um what would I say about that? Objective. Yeah. And like I I I whipped I I went over to my Windows drive. Uh cuz I still have my Windows drive in my desktop. It's just been sitting there untouched for like 2 months. I jumped over to my Windows drive just to like Okay. Like is it going to function? I haven't even booted into it for two months. I don't know. Like did I corrupt it in that time? Maybe. I bet I know where this is going. I ran Windows update for a while. Got annoyed by a few things. booted back into Cashi and was like, "Nice." It took, dude, it took and I know I haven't updated in a while. Okay. Okay. All right. It took forever to update. It was so long. Super super long time. Um I It felt so stupid that like the control panel seems like it wants to fight me. Like there's just there's just like I'm trying to do multiple things at once and it's like no no I'm just going to like redirect. I guess you can just have one of me open. It's like what are you what are you even talking about? Um search was just annoying again. Just like everything it was just like it felt gross. So I I went back. All right let's jump into Windows Insiders. Actually sorry there's an interesting question from chat at at ZM said have you tried Mac OS recently? If not would you give it a try? I am more open to trying other operating systems now. I recently learned Mint and Cashy. Do you want to borrow my Neo? I'm not using it right now. It's on my desk. I don't necessarily think so. But what I was going to add is that I was using my mom's Neo for a bit. Mhm. And it was totally fine. I do find Mac OS a little weird. I don't know if I would fully get used to it. I still don't think it's for me really. There's some stuff that I find just completely unnecessary and irritating about Mac OS. The fact that you have to click on a window first to make it the focus window before you can interact with a thing. I see it both ways. Like on Windows sometimes you can like if a window like pops up and you're like about to click something, you can like accidentally interact with something that you didn't mean to. And I can see how the Mac OS way kind of prevents that, but also it just it just creates a second click like anytime I'm switching between things and I I do not find that to be um great. There's a couple Yeah, there's a couple little things like that. There's a couple things that feel a little clunky to me just cuz it I don't know. It's just not really my style. Um, I do think, however, at this point in time, if there was a killer app on Mac OS, I wouldn't flinch using it. Which I think is not true as of a year ago. So, like, if I was an editor and it was like, oh boy, I'm going to have to use Final Cut, it's like, okay, I mean, if I have a Mac, yeah, sounds good. More Windows news, though. Windows Insiders can now pause updates indefinitely in 35day increments. Uh, Windows Insiders can uh Oh, and there's no cap on renewals. This is a Windows in Oh, for crying out loud. Okay, we need to do a thing where the the title and the first line are not the same cuz just Yeah. No, I completely agree also indefinitely for 35 days. Yeah. So, so for as long as you want, you can keep saying 35 days later. 35 days later. Um Okay. You can also restart or shut down without being forced into an update and restart. previously got 5 weeks max before Windows would force these updates. This is only available in the experimental channel which replaced the old dev and canary channels. Microsoft's own description, uh, features here may change, get delayed, or not ship at all. So, the people testing this are the ones who opted into the most bleeding edge pre-release builds because they want updates as early as possible. uh regular Windows users who've been getting forced restarted mid meeting for a decade don't have this yet and there's no timeline or confirmation for a general rollout. Now, our discussion question is, how did it take Microsoft over a decade to let people decide when their own computer updates? And my crazy hottake response is, I actually don't like this crazy people should probably update their computers. I uh when I did my first Mac OS challenge, so the first time I switched to Mac OS, I think it was on the 5K iMac uh was the first time I like used nothing but I uh nothing but Mac OS for 30 days or 60 days or however long it was. The thing that was most life-changing about it for me in a positive way was the way that Mac OS handled updates at that time and it still does actually. And that is that it would say hey there's an update like a little you know little thing and then you'd be like okay and then you would come in the next day in the morning and everything would be exactly where you left it and your computer would have installed all the updates and then opened everything back up right where you left it. Pausing updates is not the solution. better handling of saving all of my work, saving my state, and then restoring my state and just doing the update when I'm not using my computer is, in my opinion, a way more elegant solution. Like I I get I get like I get agitated when, you know, someone hands me their phone or their computer to use and I see that they're running like a year old build of whatever operating system they're on. Something I've really started to enjoy is I I actually system update way more often on Linux than I did on Windows. But I really like that it just updates everything. Like that's awesome. Like I'll get Discord updates. I'll get any other software that I have. It'll just update my entire system all at once. I'm not individually updating programs. But are you asking for the I mean the Microsoft Store is a thing that exists and Windows can manage your updates for you. But I think most of us just make it not terrible though. Like I I that but honestly I think that's really the solution. Like games for Windows would have been fine if it wasn't dog crap. Microsoft Store would be totally fine. People like package managers on Linux. They just don't always uh suck complete butt. And a lot of time the Microsoft Yeah. The first one that I had on on Cashy sucked and then I I went with KDE and now I actually really like it. Um, and and the one that comes packaged with Mint is like fantastic to be honest, but it it's it's very up and down. But the Microsoft Store in my opinion is like the the the problem. Um, yeah. And the fact that Windows Update and the Microsoft Store are not integrated. Like crazy. Like if the best way to install stuff on Windows was Microsoft Store because Microsoft Store wasn't an annoying piece of crap and also because that way it would just auto update along with Windows update and just made everything really smooth. And like why do I have to go digging for a driver update? And I know that Microsoft has actually done a lot of really good work around like automatic driver management, but the fact that some of it is over here and some of it is like it'll never update unless I like go and get it and some of it is handled by like Armory Crate and some of it is in Windows Update and like the fact that it's everywhere is it's one of those things where the first thing that someone would would tell me from Microsoft or even you know a viewer would tell me is well that's not X's fault you know or that's because of you know this and that might be true of choice and and you know what those things are super super true but you know what as as a user from a user perspective I don't give a flying [ __ ] whose fault it is yeah it doesn't matter it doesn't matter what matters is that it's a terrible user experience experience and somebody needs to fix it. Like the way that um this is while you think of that this is what I'm talking about like all the time when I talk about how it's actually it's not even here right now so I keep gesturing at it but my my laptop when I talk about how it's actually easier and like less annoyance and more productivity to use it. This is what I'm talking about. I don't have to go around and update all these individual apps. I'm not like partway through working on something and then I need to open another app to do something and oh my god, now that needs an update, whatever. No, I just update once and it does everything and it's fine and it works. It's great. Every everyone freaks you out when you go to any Archbased DRO because they're like, "Oh, it's rolling. You're going to update. It's going to break everything." When I go to update on Cashachi, it checks Arch news. Oh, it and it it'll be like, "Oh, no. this one might require manual intervention. He might not want to install this right now. And it's like, okay. And I just close it and then I wait until it doesn't. I just do it that way. Like it's Harry G made a good point. The driver nightmare is because of third parties. They don't want to ship their drivers via Windows update because they can't bundle their bloatware with it. So then Microsoft should just straight up stop Wickle certifying anything that requires bloatware to be shipped with it. Like these are things that Microsoft flex your muscle, man. does like they're they flex their muscle to do the wrong things. Like they're flexing their muscle to put stupid Candy Crush in my stupid operating system. No, flex your muscle to do things that enhance the user experience and make Windows more secure and faster and more powerful and more usable. Uh, all right. Let's jump into Ooh. Okay. This is one of our bad newses for this week. Intel has reportedly cancelled discrete gaming GPUs in the upcoming XC3P Arc Celestial family. According to Intel leaker JKEN, Intel cancelled their discrete GPUs. So, these are the add-in cards for Celestial long ago. That means that the ARK B580, so this is their battle mage generation, will remain Intel's latest gaming GPU with no clear successor in sight. XC3P will show up in data center and workstation products, just not gaming cards. The nextG XC4 Druid architecture is expected late 2027, but whether it gets a gaming GPU, in JK's words, is up in the air. Intel has not confirmed or denied any of this. Our discussion question here is if Intel quietly walks away from gaming GPUs, what happens to GPU pricing? The answer is it goes up. However, however, the answer is nothing. However, unfortunately, I um I really want to keep the faith. This is something that former Intel CEO Pat Gellinger allowed to continue Intel's discrete GPU ambitions. And I really hope that Lipboutan uh does not kill. I know that there's a lot of like issues with the consumer cards that you know like being low margin and uh catering to a a super noisy, highmaintenance customer base. Let's face it, gamers are not the easiest customers to deal with. But I really do believe and if there the strongest argument that I can make for this is so does Jensen Hang who is the CEO of from time to time the world's most valuable company. I really do believe that the innovation on the gaming side makes the enterprise and professional sides better and stronger for all the work that they do and also gives you a volume market that you can dump silicon into to help fund all the development that you need to do. like you I don't think it makes sense to build a GPU business that doesn't have a consumer arm if you've all like you've already done so much of the work for Alchemist and Battle Mage to fix the backwards compatibility and to refine the architecture. Um, please, please just give us a bigger desktop version of, you know, what you're already shipping like amazing technology on on like laptop, like please don't let it die. And if you have to skip Celestial, fine. Don't skip Druid. We need more options. And gamers, it's like the Windows thing. Like gamers are they're mad at Microsoft, they're mad at Nvidia, but you've got to give them a better option or they're just going to begrudgingly stay there forever. And like, oh man, like Intel continues to put in the work on the software side. You got to give us hardware to run it on. Let's go. You know. Yep. thank you for coming to my TED talk. Uh Dan, what are we supposed to be You can keep doing topics or we can do uh the CW announcements. Oh, I feel like I should probably talk about the CW announcements. Uh do you want to do you want to fire up the site? Sure. This week, it's a huge week for Creator Warehouse. Is Shiptorm still running? Uh yes, looks like it. I believe so. So, the Shiptorm sale is still running. So, now is an amazing time to pick up uh I mean basically anything at LT store. So, we've got buy more, save more on our blank t-shirts. Uh we've got deals running on our scribe driver bolt action um pen and pencil as well as our long sleeve t-shirts. And then uh hold on, hold on, let me see if I can find the details. And we have some super cool new items. So, Shiptorm free shipping across Canada on orders over 150 and worldwide on over orders over 225. And then on the US site, oh no, I wish I had these details ready. I'm so sorry you guys. And then on the US site, Shiptorm is uh yeah, free US-wide shipping on orders over 150. And then uh float plane supporter plus. So if you're on float plane at the supporter plus tier, it actually goes down to just $100. So it's a great time to join float plane. Also, we have some new arrivals. Uh so yeah, Luke's laptop. We have some new prints for our party shirts. These are flipping amazing. Want to give us uh want to give us a closeup of that? Are you serious right now? Laptop zoom. This touchpad is a little weird. It's not the site. It's the touchpad. Cursors. Some of them are are glasses. How cute is that? My hands. Some of them are pointers. Right. That's fun. Yeah. And then we've also got Okay, this one's this one's sick. Let's let me just There we go. That works. There we go. So, this is like a very kind of 90s and like ' 90s screen saver and computing and also I don't know work from home. It's got a whole bunch of different like vibes like work from the beach kind of. Yeah, like the palm trees and stuff. Just like don't mind me here chilling on my like CRT laptop or whatever. And then this one's meant to just be like a very wearable uh lollipop lollipop print. Totally not inspired by anything else that looks like that. It's lollipops. It's uh it's it's uh it's candies. It's umbrellas. It definitely is not a beach ball. 100% not a beach ball. Uh we've also got the spinning wheel of death pin set. Okay. Well, now we've really gotten rid of any plausible deniability that we could have had around where that design inspiration came from. So, here's our pin set that is Yeah, definitely not a beach ball, except for the one that definitely is a beach ball. So, we've got candy umbrella as well as a lollipop in there. Uh, what else do we got? Yo, yeah, so you can get yours at lmg.gg/partyshirt and lmg.gg/wheelof death. If you're looking for something that's a little bit more low-key, we've also got two new polo colors, plus a restock on black. So, soft cotton blend with a bit of stretch, so it's comfortable without feeling sloppy. Clean, simple look that works whether you dress it up or keep it casual. These are just easy to put on pieces that go with pretty much anything and that you can wear it pretty much anywhere. And you can shop at lmg.gg/polos. We also do this kind of fun thing where we have like a little kind of splash of accent color down there. There you go. Polo shirts, dress blues, brilliant white and black. Look how much happier Plof looks. Come on, Reese. Would it kill you to smile? Love that guy. We uh we did an upgrade for him yesterday. Uh we're bringing back setup doctor and his setup needed some doctoring. He he streams, he games, he does like unboxings of fancy shoes. He had so many shoes. Uh so we helped a little bit with the organization of that. We got him like a new desk setup. Um, and he tufts does like carpet tufting. And so we got like a like a much more ergonomic, space efficient setup in his little room where he does all of those things. So that was that was a fun shoot, guys. Don't miss that one. Lots of good vibes. Also, uh, okay. Yeah, that's pretty much it. So yeah, now's a great time to get an order in. Also, I think that a lot of people probably missed it, but um hold on. Where are they? Yeah, cables. So, we did have a small restock hit our US distribution hub today for Truepec cables. Uh okay. Yeah, many of the sizes are already out of stock again. The only way that you're going to have a shot of getting these guys is to make sure that you get the notify me because when they hit they're gone. So, uh there's nothing I can do about that. It's in priority sequence. You guys got to you got to get in there. Um so, yeah, we had an order hit today and then you can actually you can actually see in the dashboard where it hits here. Check this out. This is hilarious. Uh, gee, Luke, can you tell me where the cable restock was? Yeah. I mean, maybe where the maybe where the snake ate the deer. Um, yeah. So, wild. So, make sure you do that. All right. Two coms. All right. So, if you're placing an order now, it's a perfect time because we have what we call checkout messages. We when we stream, we don't want you guys to just throw money at us for nothing. We want to work for it. That's right, me, Luke, and Dan. We all want to work for it. So, instead of having people just send like Twitch bits or super chats or whatever, we created what are called checkout messages or coms. All you got to do to send one is head on over to ltstore.com, add something like our new flex pants to your cart, and go to the checkout. There it is. You can choose to have it displayed as a checkout message. You can make your name anonymous or you can show your name. You can send a little message and then you can choose your color and whether or not you want to opt into email communication about your message. This will help us follow things up with you if you want. All right. Then you go ahead and place your order and it will go to producer Dan. I already waved. I don't know what to do now. Uh you'll have to come up with something. Wave with the other hand. Nice. Solid. It looks weird. I'm not used to him doing that. It hurts. Anyway, it'll go to producer Dan who will reply to your checkout message or will pop it up down here or up there or who will curate it for me and Luke and often Dan to respond to. Dan, do you want to do a couple for us? Yeah, sure. Hey, DL. Currently visiting Vancouver with my wife and kids. I had no idea it was so beautiful. Kapalino Park is awesome. Yeah. Do any of you guys go hiking or anything like that? Not as much as I should. Literally, we were like flying over the the like outer Vancouver region and I was like, Luke, did you have any idea that there were this many hiking trails in this area? I knew there was a lot, but it looked like a wherever we particularly were at the time like Chilowak or whatever it was like very likely. It looked like a video game map. It like there was just so many trails. It was crazy. And they weren't they didn't seem to be like dried river beds. Like they seemed to be hiking trails. Yeah. Oh yeah. The entire area was just littered with them. And I was like, "How have I never been on any of these?" Some of them are pretty great. Absolutely ridiculous. Oh, team is pretty legendary. Um, so yeah, we should Have Have you ever done the grind? No, I've always gone the other way. Gone the other way? What's the other way? Isn't the grind north van? Uh yeah. Yeah. I've always gone like out. Oh. Oh, I thought you meant you've always like gone down it. Like you're I take the I take Yeah, I take the gondola up. You're literally not even allowed. Like it's That would be That would also be the one way that would be really bad for my knees. Is to go down. Okay. Well, if you ever want to do the grind, I'll do the grind. It's called the grouse grind. It's on grouse mountain. You can like hike up the mountain. It's Yeah, it's pretty savage. Wait till your knees are of like a workout than what you might expect from a traditional hike. This is fair. It's just like an incredible amount of stairs, which is awesome. There's people that do it like literally every day. Like it's it's great. It's just uh it's a quite a bit of a different experience from what I've heard. My brother shot up there recently. I wan. DLL. First off, San update when I'm a storage and backup engineer and that is my daily bread and butter. Second, did you consider any centralized backup solution? Also, why no why so few tall shirts? Now, I can see why you curated this one, Dan. Um, it's a really good question. We are we are expanding slowly our selection of tall merchandise. Um, we just we have to be we have to go slow and steady. Sure, this may be a surprise to you, all of you, but physical goods are an extremely cash flow sensitive business. Uh they every new product requires a brand new upfront investment that may or may not pay off. And we just have to be careful. We have to go slow. We have to be careful. We don't we're not taking private equity. We don't have outside investors. So every time we launch a new product, that's the product team working with me and working with our other leadership and going, "Okay, here's all the chips. These are our chips. Here we are betting them. Let's hope it pays off. It doesn't always We've got to be careful. It's It really is that simple and also complicated." I think I think the new the new war is going to have to be over pants. Tall pants. I know. when when not even necessarily tall pants, just when you guys launched the flex pants, I was really surprised the inseam length was 29. And then on on uh on an internet forum, uh somebody posted like, "Wow, LTT store really makes me feel really tall and it was in relation to those pants cuz they're like, "Wait, inseam 29 is is all they Yeah. Yeah, pants are tough, man. There's you have to have all the waist sizes. Ideally, you would have all the inseam sizes. We've done as much as two inseam sizes for a pair of pants. Um I believe the cargo pants, we have two inseams for and it it literally double like you got to you got to think about it in terms of skew count. You literally double your skew count. And if we still had everything consolidated at a single distribution center, that would be a little bit easier. But every additional layer of complexity you add, it's a multiplier. It's not additive, it's multiplicative. So, was that like I'm just genuinely curious. We've sold pants before. So, was that like did we have was most of our orders 29 or like how did we land on 29? Um, we landed on that as sort of a like a best middle ground for most people really. H. Yep. And what we would have probably done if we had another skew is we would have gone longer. Yeah. But that was one of those ones where it's like the tech pants are 30 and 32. People also got a kick out of you guys calling tall 32. There's degrees of tall. I'm a 32. So yeah, Dan's tall. Dan's pretty tall. What What do we call got stumpy legs? Jonathan and Conrad and Lucas and those guys. I mean Lucas. I mean towers. uh Okay. SN update. Um I am still not convinced that SAN is the right solution for us. I've every time I've asked someone who's very pro storage area network uh why we should have one, they have not given me a satisfactory answer. Um NAS seems like the way to go for us. I we don't have the same kind of like resiliency and like like crossorg access complications that um that you might have if you're like uh I I don't know flipping like multinational or if you're or if you're like you know you're running a data center that has you know CPU compute over here and GPU compute over here so you need to have like a storage network that they all access like we don't have any of those use cases we just have individual users accessing saying file level resources that are centrally stored. Can someone explain to me why we need sand? I think float plane has sand. Yeah, float plane does. But do we have no seph, right? Yeah. Do we have no seph locally? I don't think so. I don't think there was a reason to. It was a pitch at one point. Yeah. And then we didn't go that route. Uh it's all redundancy. Yeah, but we don't need that much redundancy. We have the one share that is like the current projects actually redundant and replicated places share and then everything else we made a conscious decision and it's been it you know it it's it's funny for me seeing people sort of go oh remember that time they lost data? Yes. Yes. Yes. We we've other than okay when we lost Wanic that was bad but the time that our vault had some data loss we had made a conscious decision that this was non-essential archived data and that if we lost it we had decided that it was not worth the additional expense of replicating that storage and that's especially true today man storage has gotten so expensive and so we've made the decision that we only really need the projects we're working on and every other like random snippet of footage. If we lost it, we lost it. It doesn't really matter. And so going for something more complicated, more expensive that requires more administration, I I just I don't um I don't see the point. Oh, are you are you literally talking to AJ in chat right now? And Jonathan, they're both in here. We do have Seth on prem. Um it's just in the lab and it's just an MVP right now. Sure, there's only a few things kind of running into it. But the thing is when you take AJ and Jonathan and you throw them in the pool of IT people that do stuff for LMG, they come from Seph and Kubernetes land. So like it why not? It becomes I think a lot more reasonable. It's it's a right tool for the right job for the right person type of situation. We have AJ and Jonathan. We might as well do this thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a recommendation for everybody. Um, like TCL 987 says, I would think you'd want SAN for running VMs so that a storage node going down doesn't take down the VMs too. in terms of like like critical on the media group side and the creator warehouse side which make up the majority of our revenue. I can think of like a couple of VMs we run like sure on the flow plane side. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You're 100% right. Like you want that redundancy built into that storage network that everything else is using. But for video editing, we don't we don't have nodes of storage. We just have a storage server that every periodically backs up to another one. If flowplane was on prem, you need it. Flow plane has it anyways. I just I just said that. Yeah. Um Oh, faint locket asks, can you explain what sand is? So basically the idea is that instead of having your storage in each machine right like this and this and then like allocating uh you know like instead of putting like a drive into your computer and going okay here virtual machine this is like your drive. uh SAN is an entire an entire separate network of machines whose entire job is to provide storage for all the other machines on the network. A big pool. Yeah. So whether whether their job is to run VMs or whether their job is to uh serve media or whether their job is for the editors to access it, all of these compute resources will just instead of having local storage over the network, they will access this this storage network which is entirely separate boxes that maybe don't need a ton of compute but do need like a butt ton of storage. And then this this storage network is going to be built with redundancies and and safeties that make it so that if one of these machines goes down, all the other machines that are doing all of your web serving and all of your uh your compute or all of your research or whatever it is they're doing are still able to access their storage as if nothing happened. So, it's a way of of distributing your storage to make it so that a failure will not impact your operation at all rather than taking down one of your nodes. But we have so few nodes outside of the float plane side and so little critical critical infrastructure that I just uh I'm just not convinced that it is relevant for us. Um, yeah, Torpedo Bench describes it as kind of like RAID but at a much bigger scale. And and that's kind of a way of thinking about it. Instead of your one machine having multiple drives, one of which could fail, all of your machines have like a bunch of machines that have a bunch of drives in them and an entire machine could fail and then they'd be able to still access it. It's that's it's kind of a it's kind of a neat way of thinking about it. And then NAS is more like like a it's like a storage area network that only that it's not really a network. It's just it's just a a standalone resource that all of those things can access over the network that might have some redundancy in the form of uh in the form of RAID for instance but it doesn't have like multi-achine level redundancy. That's about the kind of simplest way that I can summarize it. Okay. Yeah. Time to do more topics. Uh, no. Legendary ZNAS Nintendo emulator has been rewritten from scratch with GPU acceleration. The original developers of ZNES or ZSNES or ZSNES, whatever you want to call it, ZS Knight and Demo are back together for the first time in nearly two decades with Super ZNES, a complete groundup rewrite of the legendary SNES emulator that dates back to the DOS era and the first N Super Nintendo emulator that I ever used. I have personally played through Final Fantasy 6 on this emulator, Chrono Trigger on this emulator. Like, man, I have very fond memories of using this often times uncooperative but quite quite treasured piece of software. It was what Yeah, it was what everybody used for a long time. The last major release was almost 20 years ago, though. So big change here is a GPU powered pu core that enables high-res mode 7, widescreen support in supported games, overclocking for games that were notorious for slowdown, uncompressed audio, and perame visual enhancements that the devs are calling super enhancement engine. It also keeps the classic falling snow UI. It's available now on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android with iOS coming soon. And the devs made a point of listing no vibe coding as an official feature. Everything was handwritten the classic way. Now with that said, I have heard that it's a little buggy. It is an early build. Special chips like chips like the Super FX are not supported yet, but in a world where vibe coding is everywhere. Is no vibe coding a selling point for this for you? Would you want to try it? I I want to try it. I'm spoiler. I want to try it. I don't know if like no vibe coding is particularly a selling point, but I'm going to try anyways. I wanna I wanna I want to hear you talk about that if stuff is properly like I I know people that use vibe coding stuff in a way that I would consider properly and I know people that use vibe coding in a way that I would hyperaggressively not consider properly. Um, if these two guys said that they used AI assisted tools, I don't think I'd be too concerned about it. Interesting. So, to you, it's more about having who's wielding the tools, having the skills and having the street cred to take shortcuts and know to like review it and make sure that bad stuff doesn't get through still. Um because it also it also depends like did they say no? Okay, so no vibe coding specifically. So okay maybe yeah maybe that is particularly a good thing but like AI assisted. So here's the quote the quote no vibe coding classic development style but that's pretty ambiguous. Yeah that's classic. Well to them 20 years ago might be just no assistance. No no I don't think it's that they haven't been doing work. They just haven't been working on zness. No. Yeah that's fair. Um, but yeah, I mean, a AI assisted coding has been a thing for a super long time. Yeah, Peter said this and I I mean, I've said this on W show like a billion times and I just still agree with it. The buck stops with the one who commits the code 100%. It goes back to that IBM thing that I've also shown on W show before. Um, quote, "A computer cannot be held responsible." Um, let's find the slide here. A computer cannot be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision. And a management decision is to commit code. So like uh from the vibe that I get from this team, these two people, um yeah, I mean I wouldn't particularly be too concerned about it. Um, but there there will be people that will vibe code something and they'll tell me that excitedly and I know who it is and I know how much work in development they've done and I'll be like, "Oh boy, I'm excited to see how many different ways this breaks." Um, I wonder how many security keys are like hardcoded and publicly readable. Like things like that. Now you have to call me out like that. No, that that never happened. Oh, no. No. um security key for your Google sheet. Yeah. Um speaking of the Lionus Vibe coding challenge, the project is officially dead, unfortunately. Yeah. In the form of a video, but I'm still trying to uh I'm still trying to turn it into at least if it can be if it can be cobbled together relatively easily a float plane video or something. So, the problem is not that I was not able to vibe code a solution. I was and it's actually been in production since I vibe coded it which is like six months ago now or something which is the problem. By the time we would be releasing this video everything that I did is so far removed from the current state of AI and vibe coding that it just doesn't make any sense to talk about the entire thing like yeah which I could probably do. In fact, I could probably do way faster with better tools and now that I've done it. But the entire premise of the video for me was as someone who's never done this, what does that look like? And we would no longer be answering that question. The other thing that it wasn't killed because of is our real developer. Our real developer was able to create a solution, but because of scheduling and stuff and people being busy, I still haven't seen it. So, what I was hoping that we could still do is have um like have me sit down and like have it shown to me and then like Yeah, Dan could just kind of walk me through it and then we just do that on camera. Sure. And then we can do that as And then I could do like a short little summary. He already walked me through it on camera. Okay, perfect. And then we and then we can just throw that up on flow plane or something like that. Um another another Sorry, are you done? No, I just And then I probably I probably need a little bit more of his time though cuz I need it to work for mixed doubles and singles as well. Ult ultimately I mean you you you pay his check. So Well, I know. But but then why did we have to do this whole vibe coding? So the vibe coding challenge started because I needed some development resources for something that didn't really matter. Um, but then then it mattered because it was a video, but then now it's not a video. I feel like it would have been better for us to just say, "Hey, can I have some of Dan Seagull's time?" It's it's easier now and more appropriate now, I think. So, if you want service time, it makes sense. Um, I wanted to say one more thing on the super zed schnes thing. Um, I think there's also a like is what can I classify this as a crywolf problem? I don't know. I watched a a short clip last night before completely tearing down my entire computer setup um of Shroud going back to Counterstrike because I was interested because what I've heard is that Counter-Strike is covered in cheaters and the title didn't say anything about cheaters. It just said Trout goes back to Counter-Strike in the first time or whatever. So, I watched it in the first two games he was in, there was two blatant cheaters. Um and it's it's it's this thing where like modern, especially FPS games, but modern every game. Uh, basically, don't kid yourself. There's people that cheat in like Rocket League and MMOs and and everything you can imagine. Um, with with cheaters freaking everywhere. Something that has ruined something that has ruined. That's a weird sentence. Whatever. Um, is defeat because it it often feels like there's a built-in excuse for everything. Yes. So, if you don't think that people are cheating or if it's they're probably not, then it's like, oh man, that guy's really good. I want to watch this replay and try to learn from them, right? But if it's like, I don't know, there's usually at least one cheater per lobby. Then it's like, nah, that guy's just cheating. Screw that guy. And it like it it loses a lot of the like the interesting nature of losing, if that makes sense. Yeah. Do you how do you how do you get motivation from loss if the how do you get if the competition was never fair? How do you get like a rival? Like you know back back when there was dedicated servers and you jump on a server and there was always that freaking guy who just Yeah. who'd get you like every time. Yeah. And then and then you you train and you get better and you beat that guy and then it feels good. Like that that type of stuff is just kind of gone from cheating. And I think something that they're dodging here to bring it back to superness, super zness, um, is they're saying no vibe coding. So if it comes out and it has a bug, you don't get to go, "Nah, it's probably just modern AI junk spaghetti code, right?" Cuz they're saying no. No. If there's a bug, it's because we think we haven't fixed that yet. That part I think is kind of cool. I think that's super cool. Yeah. Yeah. Want to pick a topic? Sure. Uh, what do we got here? Sony finally responds to PlayStation DRM. Panic says, "Only a one-time license check is needed. No 30-day requirement. This was confusing if you weren't on top of this news cuz you're a PC person. There was a mysterious 30-day license timer showing up on PlayStation digital games purchased after March 2026's firmware update." So, people were freaking out. What is this 30-day thing? modders on Twitter spotted it first, but things spiraled when PlayStation's own AI support chat bots told users that they'd lose access every 30 days unless they were online, which is just not true, to be clear. That's just what the chatbot said. With nobody sure what was real, players started just testing stuff, trying to see what was going on. YouTuber Spawnwave pulled his PS5 CMOS battery to simulate a timer expiring and watched his brand new digital purchases just refuse to load with a license error. What actually happens if you miss the window is that the game stops working until you connect back to the internet. It doesn't delete it or get revoked permanently or anything like that. Once you're back online, access is restored and I believe once it does that actual check-in, you do get a permanent token. Sony says that if you launch the game once while connected, a one-time check kicks in and the 30-day timer won't apply at all ever again. It's fine. But, oh, testing from Reset Era user and Shrew found it's not quite that simple. There appears to be around a 15-day delay before the console actually converts your temporary license into a permanent one, a permanent offline one. Until that conversion happens, going offline for 30 days will lock you out. That 15-day window lines up suspiciously close to PlayStation's 14-day refund period, suggesting that this might have been an anti-fraud measure because apparently some people were buying games, going offline, having their offline version, refunding the game, Yeah. Uh Sony hasn't confirmed that part, but apparently that has been happening. So, yeah, makes sense. Uh, Sony has now officially responded to GameSpot saying a one-time check is required to confirm the game's license, after which no further check-ins are required. The DRM is real, but it's not the always online nightmare that people feared. That said, Sony rolled this out silently and let the panic build for a freaking week before saying a single thing. as a company. God, it's kind of annoying. That sometimes is has things fester in the community. I understand it both ways. I can understand why it seems crazy that Sony didn't say anything for a week. And then I can equally understand all the like mechanisms and checks that external comms need to go through especially in the midst of a crisis and why it can take a while. I I'm I'm going to firmly stand on both sides. Going wide. Yes. Strong firm stance. H I don't love this. I understand their whole trying to dodge the fraud thing. Honestly, it seems better than Steam. And we we hold Steam up on this like this pillar, this this pedestal. It's better. How is it better than Steam? Steam checks like all the time. Yeah, but if you go offline Yeah. then it works, which is fine. Playing single player games. Yeah. Not always. They'll they'll make you check once in a while. Oh, yeah. I guess I've never been offline long enough to notice. As someone who uh actually it seems like it's been a little better lately, but there was definitely a period where they had cracked down on it quite a bit and uh we would really run into it like on set. Can you just run the executables out of the folder? No, no, cuz it'll still launch Steam and it'll still do a DRM check. So, so we'd run into this on set when we only had like one copy of a game and we'd try to like pull the Ethernet cord and then launch it on the next computer and then pull the Ethernet cord and then launch it on the next one and pull the Ethernet cord. So, obviously this is like not a, you know, classic use case, but I have definitely run up against this. Um, I I haven't steam I haven't done this often, but I have not ran into it opening Steam when you try to just run the executable for the game. I've had it just launch the game. Okay, people in chat are saying they definitely do. Does it depend on the game? Cuz from my understanding, I definitely see it depending on the game. Not like GG where part of the deal is that there's no online DRM. Like with Steam there there's online DRM. It's like a feature, not a button. I bet you it depends on the game. It depends on whether the game uses Steam Works, which is Steam's DRM. That also makes sense. Uh Couscous Captain says, "Can you keep your Steam Deck in offline mode for just a limited amount of time?" Yeah, from my understanding, it'll eventually need to phone home, but I correct me if I'm wrong. Like I said, this is something that I ran into more before and lately when we've been doing the Ethernet unplug thing, now that I'm thinking about it, it's been a little more successful. Um, TCL 987 says Steamworks and Steam DRM are independent. Um, blah blah blah. A lot of games use Steam library stuff for networking, voice chat, etc. Yeah, so it's probably going to be dependent on the game somewhat. Um, man, one thing that I find really annoying as somebody who has to set up a system for travel probably more often than most people because when I'm traveling is often when I'll have time to like, oh yeah, I'm going to try out the Steam controller, so I need like to load a bunch of games onto a system before I go. I really really wish there was a way to with one button like do the pre-launch crap for every game on my system because if I'm like if I have no internet or I'm or I'm somewhere remote with very slow internet or whatever like okay like installing stuff not shaders you mean no like get thenet whatever get the redistributable whatever install all dependencies do your DRM check like did install all dependencies cuz like it's it's become more and more of an annoyance over time how many Steam games have other launchers or have random dependencies especially on Linux uh which I've been using more lately uh where they'll have to grab like Proton crap ahead of time. Uh, so if I So if installing the game installed the game so that I just click go and it goes, I would actually I would love that. So if Valve is taking suggestions right now, uh, that's something that I'd love to see Steam level up on ever so slightly. When I install a game, do all of it. Assume that my intention when I install a game is to play the game. Um, not just not just enjoy it being in my readytoplay filter. Um, okay. Uh, Igny says, "As a game dev, requiring Steam is a toggle in the SDK API." Yeah. Okay. Game either confirms Steam is open and connected on Steamworks initialization or it doesn't. So, that explains why we just tried to open different games. We both would have had completely different experiences because both are both are true. That makes sense. it's not like a thing I do all the time, so I wasn't super confident in it. Okay, you want to we Oh, we should probably uh do some show sponsors. The show is brought to you today by Vessie. Earlier this week, we did a fun breakdown of Valve's Steam Controller, but today we need to stop talk about something that's even more important. A rain and moisture controller. That's right. Grown at the joke all you want, Luke. Oh, but Vessie makes shoes that they claim are 100% waterproof, meaning you can take back control of your dry socks. This is thanks to Vessie's Diamondex material, which also makes the shoes lightweight and easy to pack on trips. Their weekend Neo shoes are a great choice for the spring, and their simple design means they pair great with most wardrobes. So regardless of whether it's just a commute to work or if you find yourself caught in some spring rain out in the city, Vessie has your back and your feet. Every pair comes with free shipping, hassle-free returns, as well as a full year warranty. So don't be like meat boy Stay dry, comfortable, and stylish. Get 15% off your weekend Neo or Stormbburst at bessie.com/show. This is just me playing Super Meat Boy in the Steam Controller video. I don't know what that has to do with Bessie's, but sure. I mean, he like splooshes when he lands, I guess. The show is also brought to you by ODO. How many different applications and platforms do you and your team have to switch between in order to get a project over the line? Yeah. With our sponsor ODU, you can manage multiple aspects of your business all in one platform without needing to pay for a dozen different subscriptions. If you need to run a help desk to assist with solving tickets submitted by customers, ODU's platform can sync with things like WhatsApp, email, and live chats. Or if your business team needs help tracking leads and keeping organized on potential sales opportunities, ODO's CRM tool is there for them. They can even provide essential tools to an accounting team like budgeting and payment tracking. And something that's really cool about ODO is that if you need to use a single app within their suite, it's free. So, use our link below to get a 15-day free trial or to book a demo with a member of their team to learn how ODU can help your business. Lionus, we have a guest. We have a guest for the float plane announcements. For the float plane, you just don't trust us to do it right. Okay. Well, come on. Announcement first. The announcement first. Do the announcements first. What What's happening right now? You want us to do the read, Dan? Point at him. Show how he's being weird. Wait, what? Wait, what? He's like holding a monitor. Look at that guy. What's up with that? I don't understand what's happening right now. If you read the document, you'll know he's up to something. All right, I'm going to read the document. I'm reading the document. You know what the L in line stands for? Oh, there's a lot of flow plane exclusives about me this week. In the first video, Sammy gave me such a wonderful welcome back gift to welcome me back to the office. He will be fired for this injunction. Okay. So, first of all, Sammy, that's not really what injunction means. Is it not? No. Oh. it's about And second of all, you're not fired allegedly. Um, okay. Anyway, this is the video. Uh, people really loved this video on float plane. I came back to work and my entire office had been gift wrapped. Um, to this day, this is still how I feel about Anywh who, um, and if PC building is more your style, I went head-to-head against Elijah, Jordan, and Pancratz to see who can build a PC the fastest at Lionus Media Group. Wow. Did any of you wear a horse head? Dude, you filmed that ages ago. That video is just coming out. It took forever to edit. We should do Yeah, we should do a video on who's the fastest to edit a video at Linus Media Group cuz I think I think you would not be in good shape. 4 hours and eight POVs I had to edit and then I got I have to do other stuff. What kind of videos you editing with the POVs? Sick, huh? You disgust me. Get your mind out of the gutter. Uh anyway, so that exclusive went up very recently. Oh yeah, you guys are you guys are loving this one, too. Just upload that today. Okay, I'm not going to scroll down to the comments because I feel like it's going to be somewhat debatable who won. So, it's probably going to come down to commenters to decide who uh who did it best. Uh what else is going on on Float Plane? Uh to wrap it up, we've uploaded the full interview with the creator of Pop OS, Carl Michelle. That's pretty cool. Techquicki has been doing a ton of interviews with interesting people lately. So, if you want to hear more from our special guests, we'll be uploading them to Flowplane. Very cool. Check out the sea of exclusives at lmg.gg/fp1. GG/FPWAN. And don't forget guys that now is a better time than ever to subscribe to Floatplane because at the supporter plus tier, you'll be getting a lower threshold for shiptorm free shipping. Now Sammy has a special show and tell for us. What do you want, Sammy? You can't get mad at me, Linus. Hold on. You're telling me I can't I can't get mad at you. Uh can I stand here? You can stand anywhere you want. Don't touch the foils. So, you know, you know, you don't have a mic here, though. Did we Is it Is this No, this this was last minute. I forgot you're not here next to me. That's why. So, you know, you know the uh the the chair you bought with uh David? Um Oh, you mean the gun chair? Uh yeah, hold on. Yes, I'll bring I'll bring this up so people commissioned machine gun chair. Yes, that one. So, I So, here this was uh this was yesterday's video. Uh, it has actually one of my favorite intros that we've done in quite a while. Uh, okay. That that wasn't it. What are you watching? What are you There we go. No, no, we're good. We're good. But this is a gaming chair. Um, so you can Yeah. So, we had I love David Crawling. So, but uh anyway, sorry. Solid effort, David. I'm not trying to take too much time today, but um so I promised I would daily drive that thing for 30 days. I did not approve that. Uh the ergonomics are like not safe in my opinion. Is this a good monitor, do you think? Do you like it? Yes. Do you like that monitor? Um so, uh the the lumbar I agree is bad. So I was trying to adjust it. Did you know that thing has no limiters? It blew. Sammy, you can see my hand here. When I visit tried to physically try to stop it, it did not stop. There's no limiter on that chair. Yes, I know. I didn't know that. So then it broke. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I felt so bad. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Uh yeah, but I recorded for Flow Plane. Uh, so you'll see my reaction on there where you see my my the horror in my face as I try to save this monitor. Oh my god, it's mangled. That's deep. You don't like the uh the the keyboard like plate? It went through it. Did it occur to you to stop it not with your hand like by pressing the button? So the button wasn't responsive. It wasn't responsive. No, the one remote doesn't like work. Yeah, I didn't know. You have to use the other. Did you think to watch the video before? I watched like I watched mostly through. was like, "I know enough." And then I didn't know the I didn't know this. You are the problem. I know I'm the problem. I I Okay, Lance would have just read the comments. I'm sorry. Yeah. And through reading the comments, I would have known all the critical information that he didn't have. You're I will die on this hill. You are better off reading all the comments on a video than like watching the first 30% of it. I watched 50%. I, you know, I still maintain you're better off reading the comments on a video than watching only half of it. But I I am sorry. Um, but I have my reaction on it on Full Play next week, so we're getting some content. Okay. All right. You know that crazy expensive computer you built for him? I feel like you have to take the value of this monitor out of that computer somehow. They took away my GPU already. really? I I stood up for you. I know you did. I appreciate it. You saw me stand up for you. I said they shouldn't take it away. You know why they took it? Your department. Oh, get owned. Yeah, now beak with you. Yeah, let's get one. Get owned. Yeah, I don't think the two of us could take it with this broken monitor. I just might. It's very durable. All right. Thank you, Sammy. I'm very sorry. I'm very sorry. I feel so bad. I'm sorry. Oh, man. That's a really nice monitor. I know. I'm sorry. I'm What's the What's the model? That's not the 4K one, is it? It's like 800 Canadian. I'm sorry. I did It wasn't intentional. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I feel so bad. What monitor is it? Uh, it's a it's an Alienware something. You know that you're the one holding it who can see the model number, right? That's going to have to. Yeah, it's always on there. He's going to drop it. See, I mean, that's fine at this point. Sammy's one of those guys that we make a video with him and then half the comments are like, "Why does this guy even work there?" I promise. He's really good at other things. Wait, where's the model? He He is. Oh, Alienware 2725Q October 2025. I think that's the 1440p. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Wait, how much does it cost? It's It's 500 US, right? OH MY GOD. NO. WAIT. NO. WAIT. OH MY GOD. That's the first one I saw. This is a 240 Hz 4K. Yeah. This is like top of the line. Holy crap. Studled. like one of the best monitors on the market. Wow. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I honestly had no idea when you showed me. I thought it was just like some random junk monitor. I had no idea. I had no idea. No, we got like really nice monitors and we had that like sick Alienware that like sick Alienware gaming PC on it. It that was like peak gaming other than the lumbar support and the headrest. But aren't you glad I'm okay? I didn't get hurt. Actually, yes. That would have been worse. Did you get blood on the monitor? I got my hand on it. See, see this this this this hand sign shows war. I went war shows that you were like banging in the depths of a steam ship. Yeah. I was like, that's another possibility. That's not the kind of banging I meant, What do you mean? He's never seen Titanic. This is the problem with the kids today. I watched Never mind. Sorry. Anyways, I don't take too much time, but All right. Thanks, Sammy. Sorry. hasn't seen Titanic. Hasn't seen POV. Who is this guy? That's That's more expensive than any monitor I've ever owned. Just a random random fun fact. That might be worth more than every multimonitor setup you've ever owned. 1300 CAD probably. And I run three pretty good monitors. Yeah. No, I think it is actually. I think so. That's uh Wow. I would I like I I honestly had no idea. He showed me in the lab and I was like, "Okay." I mean, losing a monitor like sucks because we just always need monitors, but I'm sure it's just like some random generic monitor. I had no idea it was an Alienware. I had no idea it was high-end at all. No, it's the highest of end. It's It's like full Downward Dog Highend. Is Downward Dog the one where your butts in the air? I It sounds like it. Yes. Yeah. No, I was thinking of child. It doesn't It doesn't get much more high-end than that. All right. Well, subscribe to Float Plane so Sammy can continue to do the things he does. No, he does really good stuff, too. I promise. Dude, that's that's a lot. All right, let's pick Let's move on. Let's pick another topic. Hey, really cool LTT Labs article this week. Yeah, let's talk about that instead. We know it can be daunting to take your first steps into the world of Linux. We know this because we've been doing it recently, but LTT Labs is here for you. This article uh from Nick tested by Sean and Steven is we tried popular Linux gaming distros. It's I have not read this one yet cuz it just went up, but I'm very excited to. This went up like two days ago. can maybe summarize for us. We we had some well yeah it's I mean we're kind of benchmarking a bunch of gaming dros and there's there's tests if you go down um there's there's standard you know labs charts with different games and how the different dros did and as you might expect they're pretty similar cuz it kind of goes that way every time but we still looked at stuff. Cashy did pretty good. Let's go Cashy. Uh hey look at that. Look at that. I managed to pick the one the one that's bad specifically for Doom the Dark Ages. The other games it was uh if we if we do another Linux I switch challenge in the future, you should just have to use whatever I pick. No, that's less interesting. No, I I like I I think it's really important to have the conversation around what information a normie is likely to be exposed. No, that's true. That's true. That to me is a whether I end up making the right choice or the wrong choice is is actually a fundamentally important part of the Linux challenge. And I intentionally will not just ask people. I could have we even said this in the first episode. I could literally call Linus Torvoltz. Yeah. Literally have his digits and ask him what district he used. But I'm not doing that. The one the only thing that really surprised me and this would have led you to a dro that I didn't even recommend, but I had a gut feeling that you were going to go with what he said he used. Oh, yeah. Yeah. In the video you guys did together. That's what I thought you were going to do. Nope. No. So, my my part of my method is that I am I'm I'm looking at the entire switching experience and part of the switching experience is going out there and fact finding. And so, you know, when the community kind of comes and goes like he did the factf finding wrong because he found the wrong conclusion. What we need to do is we need to look at okay, what are all these resources and why are they recommending this thing if quote unquote everyone knows that it's like not good? And honestly, we've already seen some positive change every time. Yeah. Already. Yeah. And so it's one of those things where maybe I just accept my role as the bearer of bad news and the reality check for people who are so knowledgeable that they don't realize what they don't what they know I guess is probably the best way that I could describe it. It's like a curse of knowledge thing to a lot of Linux community members. They don't realize how easy it is to make the wrong choice because to them it's so obvious. They have they know the right people to ask. They know the right resources to look at. But to someone who to whom it's not obvious, who's coming into it for the first time, it's very easy to end up on a different path. And and honestly, I do find this pretty interesting because I I didn't initially use chat. I've used chat GPD to try to figure out things that are going on with my system, but I didn't use it to pick my dro at all. But you did and it spat out pop OS and then I did to see if mine would as well. And I don't it was one of the options. I don't remember if it was number one, but it was one of the options. I don't think it was number one, but it was there. I thought number one was Cashy for you. I don't remember. I thought it was like open susi or I'm sorry. I don't remember. It was a while ago. Um but this time I just did this sitting here right now, not logged in. So it's not tailored on me. And best overall experience, Pop OS. So like we can say we can say whatever we want, but a ton of people will use this. And people can be like upset about that, right? You can be upset about that. You can think they shouldn't use it. But and I said this I said this in episode one. If I am trying to be representative of Joe Gamer, who's doing my own research today and I didn't ask a chatbot, I'd be doing a complete disservice. That would be a completely unrealistic assumption that they would not use a chatbot because so many people are using them. And we know this. This is just a fact that we don't have to like, but we do have to deal with. We've got to deal with the fact that when Luke typed in what Linux dro should I use and then closed his tab right as I was about to switch back to his screen it out pop OS. And you know what's funny is um I know bar and a couple other things but it said best overall was Pop OS. I never actually switched off of Pop Os on my desktop. I don't know if I ever actually acknowledged that on Wancho. I don't I don't feel like I realized that. I I kept it because I I did the vast majority of my Linuxing on my other machines which were not running pop OS. I was running Steam OS on uh on the media PC and then I was running Kubuntu on my laptop which I actually ended up mostly really happy with. There were some issues, you know, we'll talk about those. But uh yeah, I didn't actually end up using my desktop that much. And for the limited amount that I did use it, Pop West not only was usable, but it actually got better over the…

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