Even if Valve pushed their own Steam machine back then, it would have failed miserably. It simply had terrible game support because Proton didn’t exist (or integration with wine). Only the few native linux games out there would work.
But now Valve has Proton. I doubt the Steam Deck would have taken off if it wasn’t for that.
fixes introduced regressions
Software development in a nut shell
I’ve seen the thing about ‘mixed refresh rate monitors’ couple of times and I also don’t get it. What issues are people having?
If you use multiple monitors, X treats them as one big monitor. And it will refresh that one big monitor at only one refresh rate, usually the slower one.
Say you have a 144hz monitor and a 60hz monitor. X will choose to refresh that one big monitor at only 60hz. So if you drag windows around on your 144hz, it will visually look like 60hz.
There are some exceptions to this. The cursor will move at the highest refresh rate if it’s operating in hardware cursor mode. In software cursor mode, it will look laggy. Games will usually operate at the higher refresh rate.
fractional scales are an issue for them?
This is a whole other issue. Not everything implements fractional scaling nicely. For example, currently GTK handles fractional scaling by rendering at 200% scaling, then resizing the output. This uses more more processing power and uses more battery. And things are fuzzy. As for why, imagine you have a 15 pixel wide element at 100%. With fractional scaling at 125%, that element is then supposed to be 18.75 pixels wide, which is impossible. So what do you do? Round up? Round down? Same question for a 17 pixel wide element, at 125%, it would be 21.25 pixels wide. Round down? Round up?
Some toolkits don’t do the render at 200% then resizes method, but still suffer from other issues.
As for focus and positioning both Gnome and Awesome have settings for this and I never had issues with any of it.
Most stuff follows the rules, but not everything. Discord, Steam, and Bitwarden ignore my settings under X. But I can force Discord and Bitwarden to run using Wayland, which fixes the issue.
Wayland is more secure, better at handling mixed refresh rate monitors, and much more modern. Another thing that I like is that apps don’t have as much control over the positioning and focus of their apps, so apps open in more consistent locations and are less likely to steal focus.
Why not? Mozilla already fixed the biggest issue plaguing MV3 by continuing to allow MV2 ad blockers.
The reason snap reinstalls is just due to basic dependency management, nothing sinister. Apt has a feature to stop a package, such as snap, from reinstalling if you don’t want it.
Although I don’t see the point in removing snap. Just uninstall the snap version of Firefox and use flatpak for whatever you want. Or if you don’t like that, have fun dealing with third party packages and apt funkiness.
They do understand, they’re just saying that OpenSUSE doesn’t have this problem since you can choose your DE in the installer.
The issue is worked around in newer kernel versions. But it’s better to just update your BIOS to fix the issue.
Agreed, Silverblue is great. I would love a declarative system, but Nix just doesn’t make it easy with its sprawling documentation and mix of new and old parts. I was trying to follow a guide for Home Manager, but couldn’t use it because they were using flakes, I was still on the “old” configuration.nix style.
You can’t make all things declarative either. If I can only have things 50% declarative, it kinda defeats the point.
I also still tried to use flatpaks since nix doesn’t have sandboxing and is slower on updates, but its font configuration was broken.
Nix overall feels like it’s requires a lot of workarounds, moreso than Silverblue.
But hey, at least if I ever want to try it out again, I just need to copy in my configuration.nix and make things work from there.
This is the right answer. I can’t even count the number of times people have shrugged off Wayland because Arch doesn’t include this kernel parameter by default and they didn’t read the Arch wiki.
Fedora Silverblue Represent!
They did sponsor/donate to someone who got the Epic Games Launcher working through wine. Don’t remember the exact details and can’t find a link though.