We take a trip to visit Level1Tech's Wendell Wilson and come back with some of his performance tips for a smoother Linux desktop.

Plus the story behind exFAT coming to Linux, and the big desktop performance improvements landing next week.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Drew DeVore, and Ell Marquez.

Links:

• XKCD Forum Hacked — The security breach occurred two months ago, according to security researcher Troy Hunt who alerted the company of the incident, with unknown hackers stealing around 562,000 usernames, email and IP addresses, as well as hashed passwords.
• Examining exFAT — Linux kernel developers like to get support for new features — such as filesystem types — merged quickly. In the case of the exFAT filesystem, that didn't happen; exFAT was created by Microsoft in 2006 for use in larger flash-storage cards, but there has never been support in the kernel for this filesystem. Microsoft's recent announcement that it wanted to get exFAT support into the mainline kernel would appear to have removed the largest obstacle to Linux exFAT support. But, as is so often the case, it seems that some challenges remain.
• Waypipe Is Successfully Working For This Network-Transparent Wayland Apps/Games Proxy — Waypipe development was successful this summer by student developer Manuel Stoeckl who was working on the effort as part of this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Waypipe is successfully working now for running Wayland games/applications over the network using this proxy mechanism and supports features like compression, multi-threading optimizations, and hardware-accelerated VA-API for video encode/decode across the network.
• GSOC 2019 - M. Stoeckl's website — Waypipe supports many quality of life features, including a user-friendly command line wrapper for ssh, hardware accelerated video encoding, transfer compression with either LZ4 or Zstd, and a method to reconnect applications when the ssh connection breaks. With more recent kernels and versions of Mesa that support DMABUFs (GPU-side buffers), it can proxy programs that render images using OpenGL.