Hector Martin loves Rust. Some kernel maintainers don’t. Hector made some social media posts criticizing a kernel maintainer, telling him he should resign or be removed for trying to sabotage R4L. Rust folks seemingly thought that Linus would side with them but instead Linus was annoyed that he took the problem to social media and that maybe the problem is himself (Hector).
I’m not going to deny that he can act aggressively, but his point is still valid. The anti-Rust sentiments of some maintainers has slowed down the upstreaming of Rust into the kernel. It doesn’t make sense to waste people’s time by letting R4L limp along in its current state.
R4L either needs to be given the go-ahead to get things upstreamed, to the dismay of some Linux maintainers who don’t like Rust, or R4L should be killed and removed from the kernel so we can stop wasting people’s time.
Personally, I think killing R4L would be a major mistake. Android’s Linux fork with Rust support has been a major success for Google and significantly cut down on vulnerabilities. And the drivers for Apple’s M chips has been surprisingly robust given how new they are and for being reverse engineered.
Not AI.
My bad on the Apple part.
The Nvidia driver didn’t support some protocol that AMD/Intel did that was used by desktops for the night light.
Yes, they could have made the night light work. But why would they when Nvidia said the feature was coming soon? Well it turned out that soon was taking a very long time and eventually KDE actually did create a special night light implementation just for Nvidia. The problem was that it was a hack that had extra overhead. And in the end the hack didn’t get shipped because Nvidia finally starting supporting the protocol.
The Steam Deck is great. At launch, it was cheaper than other PC handhelds and had better performance. And while SteamOS was buggy, the UI was much better to navigate than Windows.
As for a console that game play PC games, there’s just more competition and and less unsolved problems to solve.
Unfortunately not. There’s been a number of things on Nvdia’s side that slowed down Wayland adoption.
They didn’t always support Xwayland hardware acceleration.
Nvidia pushed for a technology called EGLStreams while everyone else agreed on GBM. So the desktop stack had to support both. Nvidia eventually relented and started supporting GBM.
Nvidia didn’t support VRR or night light for a while.
Nvidia didn’t support necessary stuff for Gamescope to function properly.
And overall Nvidia on Wayland was just buggy. I remember that many games failed to launch or had weird performance issues. But those issues just went away when I got an AMD card.
But things are in a much better state today. Though I did recently test a 20 series card on Fedora 41 and it was a terrible experience on the proprietary drivers. But when speaking with orhers, they didn’t share my issues.
One opinion that Wayland has is that the client is responsible for decorating its window. It draws its own title bar, shadow around the window, and the cursor.
Though not everybody was happy with this. A few protocols were created that lets clients tell the compositor to draw decorations around the window and the cursor.
But still, every app needs to support those client side decorations and cursors because not all compositors support those protocols. Gnome notably doesn’t, they like client side decorations.
The biggest reason the Steam Machines failed is that they were Linux based and could not run Windows games. Valve addressed this problem by creating Proton and making it easy to use.
Honestly, I don’t see a revived attempt at Steam Machines working unless they’re really cheap. Unlike the handheld market, the console and PC market is much more saturated and you have a lot more options.
Before Wayland, there was X Window System, created in 1984. X Window System was designed in a time where you had one good computer connected to multiple displays used by different people. X went through many versions but version 11 (X11) stayed around for a long time.
But the architecture just isn’t good. It wasn’t designed for modern needs. MacOS used to use X, but replaced it to fit modern needs. Windows didn’t use X, but they too updated Windows to fit modern needs. But Linux and other OSs stuck with X for a lot longer, hacking it to make it work. Honestly, it’s amazing how well it does work.
But isn’t not great. It wasn’t designed with security in mind, it doesn’t do multi-monitor well. Behind the scenes, it considers everything to be one giant display; issues arise when it comes to mixed-dpi displays and when monitor refresh rates don’t match. It’s also just a bloated, old code base that people don’t want to work on. Fixing X would not only be difficult, but would break compatibility.
So people got working on a modern replacement for X aiming to avoid its issues. Wayland is leaner, more opinionated, and designed for how modern hardware operates. Wayland itself is just a protocol (like X11), and there’s many different implementations of that protocol: Mutter, Kwin, wlroots, smithay, Mir, Weston, etc. Meanwhile X11 pretty much only had one relevant implementation, Xorg. Wayland’s diversity has its pros and cons. Pros include (1) you can create your implementation in any programming language you want rather than being stuck to just one, (2) an implementation can fill just the needs on the person making it rather than trying to generalize it for everyone. But cons include the fact that this fragmentation leads to scenarios where one implementation supports something that others don’t and implementation-specific bugs.
Wayland’s opinionated design is also draws criticisms. It gives a lot of control to the compositors rather than windows, which is how Xorg, MacOS, and Windows work. Nvidia’s wayland adoption was also slow and terrible. It took many years to get it into the only decent shape it’s in now.
Fedora Atomic, and by extension Universal Blue, does put the home in /var. It’s to denote that the directory is mutable.
This seems to be a systemd feature, system services can’t touch home directories by default.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/684074
I think a user script would still work. Or you could set the flag that would let system services access your home.
Is this a systemd user service?
Mint never preinstalled the snap. They package their own version of Firefox. I believe they have an agreement with Mozilla.
1.21.5 is the Spring Drop, so it will come out during the Spring.
I use a resource monitor called Resources. It has a GPU tab that shows the GPU decoder usage go up when playing a video.
Weird, it’s been working for me for a while. I just need to manually set “media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled” to true in about:config.
Nate Graham is hesitant increase the frequency. When the feature was announced, he repeatedly emphasized it a was a single year popup. He doesn’t want to go back on his word.
Ubuntu is your best bet. They have a special ISO for it on their discourse.
Fedora Discussion Post and Fedora Mailing List Thread noting bugs with sdl2-compat. Some cases of things breaking, being fixed with patches.
What the heck, I thought Microsoft promised Wine 10 was the last version of wine ever.
/s