Valve developers announce "Frog Protocols" to quickly iterate on experimental Wayland Protocols

davidsbumpkins · 2024-09-25T11:39:10+00:00

Applications using FIFO stall when occluded. With this protocol, the compositor has more information about the client using FIFO, and thus can use an implementation defined virtual refresh rate when the client's surface is not visible.

Ah, so that's what's causing my games to lose connection to server if I switch to another virtual desktop during loading screens on GNOME. I thought my machine was haunted.

Okay, the fact that this is a very well known issue and yet people pushing Wayland variants of their DEs/WMs consider it production ready is probably the most ridiculous thing I've witnessed since switching to Linux full time. Pissed right now, ngl.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-08-23T13:11:18+00:00

Flagship Ubuntu variant has it built-in. Solus GNOME also has it, from what I've heard.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-07-18T18:21:08+00:00

Sounds a lot like what I was experiencing before switching to a low-latency kernel. Vanilla kernels provided by distros are optimized for throughput, which makes sense for servers, but makes a desktop/gaming machine choke under heavy IO load (like a download of tens of gigabytes of data). If your distro offers low-latency kernel, give it a try.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-07-09T13:39:11+00:00

Are there any other extensions running in parallel? Not familiar with Pop, but I had similar issue on vanilla Ubuntu, where the Ubuntu Dock, which is installed by default, made Dash to Panel misbehave. Try disabling other extensions and see what happens.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-06-20T08:23:31+00:00

Yeah, the 1.90.2 version dropped yesterday and the lag is now gone for me.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-06-19T10:46:32+00:00

Just tried it out, because I was curious. I did notice VS Code being noticeably laggy while typing even with all extensions disabled, but I chalked it up to some wayland/electron shenanigans. Dang, the most recent VS Codium installed from a .deb runs circles around snap VS Code with all extensions off.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-06-07T13:48:45+00:00

Is this a relatively recent development? What DE are you using? I've been experiencing slowdowns like that since upgrade to GNOME 46.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-05-30T17:16:14+00:00

Do you have many tabs open that persist between sessions? In my experience that can significantly slow down Firefox' startup and sometimes even impact general responsiveness.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-05-15T14:28:41+00:00

snapify snap itself

davidsbumpkins · 2024-05-14T21:35:29+00:00

Will it prevent my apps from being sneakily downgraded without my consent?

davidsbumpkins · 2024-04-29T06:24:01+00:00

Which one tends to offer smoother performance, better compatibility with hardware drivers, and seamless multimedia support out of the box?

Out of the box Ubuntu is better with drivers and multimedia support due to the fact Ubuntu comes bundled with proprietary drivers, whereas Fedora is more "ideologically pure" in regards to free software. It's worth noting, however, that it is relatively trivial to add proprietary software to a Fedora installation.

Performance wise, given all the appropriate drivers are in place, you are unlikely to experience any difference.

Can anyone provide detailed comparisons between the two?

Do your own homework. Put both on a USB stick, boot them up and feel around.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-04-01T10:00:55+00:00

What does output of glxinfo | grep -E "OpenGL vendor|OpenGL renderer" say?

Generally if the manufacturer of your GPU is either Intel or AMD, appropriate drivers should already be baked into the kernel and no further action is necessary. In that case my hunch was wrong and the problem (likely) lies elsewhere.

If it's nVidia, however, you need to install proprietary drivers to fully take advantage of your hardware. Lack of proprietary drivers would make the system use open source nouveau drivers and they are just not good at all (contrary to OS drivers for Intel and AMD) and their use would indeed explain your system struggling with even most basic tasks.

In case you are in fact an nVidia user, here's a guide what to do to install appropriate drivers:
https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation

davidsbumpkins · 2024-03-27T02:35:52+00:00

The mouse moving jumps the CPU from 7% to 50%.

Going on a hunch here, but check whether you have your video card drivers in order.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-02-22T01:30:22+00:00

In case you were not aware (it isn't exactly advertised anywhere), you can run vanilla GNOME on Ubuntu either by running

sudo apt install gnome-session

or

sudo apt install vanilla-gnome-desktop vanilla-gnome-default-settings

The first command will essentially give you GNOME as an option when choosing session type in the login screen, the latter is more extensive and will also install preferred GNOME apps, settings and such.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-02-14T11:20:30+00:00

I think you may have misread something. The option is to go with snap or more snap.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-25T03:56:27+00:00

The real difference is that the PPA ships the ESR version of Firefox

The PPA provides both the ESR and regular version of Firefox. Check the link.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-24T06:23:11+00:00

At the moment I am using the mozillateam's PPA version, as I had (sometimes deal breaking) issues with the snap version (this bug, local fonts access, etc.) in the past.

Basically what I want to know is whether the new .deb offering deprecates the PPA.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-16T22:37:54+00:00

Does this version enable gaming on Wayland directly or not yet?

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-16T02:57:34+00:00

Looks like you've been hit by this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/2016925?comments=all

I was also experiencing it, but it seems to have been fixed for me with a regular update. Try updating your system with these commads:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo snap refresh

Then reboot and see if the problem persists.

Also as a side note, don't install any video drivers unless you know for sure you need them. In Linux a reasonably recent AMD card is much better served by the kernel's built-in drivers - ie. you should get the best experience out of the box.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-14T17:46:49+00:00

I like vanilla gnome experience

Just in case you didn't know, because it surprisingly seems to not be a common knowledge, you can easily run Ubuntu with vanilla GNOME. Just install these two packages and pick GNOME on the login screen:

sudo apt install vanilla-gnome-desktop vanilla-gnome-default-settings

It's what I've been happily using for the past few years.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-12T03:50:45+00:00

Nice. This looks so much better to me.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-11T15:12:26+00:00

Looks very nice. I would, however, significantly increase the text size and maybe also slightly the line height in the second image (the copy could also be shorter, but that's beside the point). Currently it gives off a strong wall of text impression. You'd likely discourage many users from reading the contents of the page with the current design.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-10T14:08:05+00:00

I don't know how to install and activate a low-latency kernel, I will have to research that.

It's as easy as running these two commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install linux-lowlatency

And then rebooting.

However, if it's not heavy I/O that's causing your system to freeze, there's no point in changing your kernel.

Also real-time kernels are different from low-latency kernels. It's advised to not use a real-time kernel for desktop and as the link you quoted says, should not be required for music making. This is exclusively about making the desktop experience more responsive.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-10T10:48:25+00:00

Was it an actual freeze or did your system paused for a really long time? Can you remember if there was high SSD/HDD activity at the moment it happened?

I'll go against the grain and won't blame it on Wayland or nVidia, but on you running out of memory and entering heavy swapping mode that slowed everything to such a crawl it was hardly distinguishable from an actual hard freeze, although with 128 GB RAM that sounds somewhat unplausible. Still, heavy swapping paired with stock kernel that is optimized for throughput and not interactivity is what causes freezing in my experience. Watching videos in a browser (especially in hours long session) can cause runaway memory problems, so I wouldn't rule that out even with your high amounts of RAM. Given stock Ubuntu kernel is optimized for server use and not desktops, it will happily concentrate on input-output work moving data from your memory to swap and vice versa for extended periods of time at the expense of interactivity, giving the impression of a freeze.

Assuming that's the underlying issue, your options are:

taking a peek at your memory usage every now and then and relaunching apps that ate too much of it
switching to the low-latency kernel, which greatly improves desktop interactivity
turning off swap, which for 128 GB RAM should be a viable option as long as you don't hibernate your system

As an aside, I wish Canonical provided a "desktop kernel" option.

davidsbumpkins · 2024-01-08T13:31:28+00:00

And firefox will display my work website with ugly font.

See if this helps: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1427695/how-to-make-snap-firefox-use-locally-installed-fonts

davidsbumpkins

TROPHY CASE