Eh, guessing from a distance or playing favorites won’t be better though. Like I might get grumpy about a C-level guy or investor getting more than their “fair share”, but marketing for example is still an important job done by people that aren’t paid gobs of money. Without the ability to let the people that would buy it know about your product, it effectively doesn’t exist. We all love the story about a game that came out of nowhere, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
I had a 10th gen S76 Lemur. The hardware was a mixed bag. Chassis was nice and light (compared to Apple), but enameled so the edges eventually chipped. Keyboard/trackpad were average. Speakers were awful… Battery life was excellent like usually got around 20 hours on a charge (and often more with a little effort!). I also had a number of hardware failures and dealing with their support was pretty terrible… Broken control key out of the box, Wifi died twice, second time they replaced the motherboard (and that took like… 9 weeks), then it completely died a year later when it was finally out of warranty. A real mixed bag of Pop OS being nice, and having great software/firmware support, but also multiple hardware failures coupled with terrible warranty support.
A bit of a zombie thread, but I’m not making anything up here. The blocking issue gets discussed a lot in gamedev circles, and there are issue threads that have been locked by folks with the power to do so because they just said “no”. One of them (Maybe Sebastian Wick? I don’t remember… doesn’t really matter) gave verbatim that use case where a video service they use would stop playing videos when the browser was in the background, and that is why they won’t report . Maybe they weren’t a “core” developer, but they had the ability to say “no” and end the discussion thread.
As for it being not a problem anymore, it still occurs even on Fedora 39. The 1 second present timeout still only works for XWayland, and that’s… not a great solution. Also, realistically unless SDL2, GLFW or whatever engine a gamedev is using handles it for them they just don’t have the time to worry about what GTK, Qt, or XDG shell does. We are already supporting multiple rendering APIs, and combining that with multiple UI libraries just to get a window to draw a triangle into is a combinatorial explosion. Last I remember reading from the SDL folks, they were waiting for the functionality to appear in Wayland before they could implement it, and they weren’t expecting anything to change soon either. Speaking personally, my current game project is single player so I can just pave over the timing issues when they come up:
Long frame detected: 6463.731931 ms. Skipping ahead!
The most frustrating part to me is much more meta. You get discussions with other game devs that have heard about this stuff and they continue to think that supporting Linux is just way too much work. Sometimes they are right, but rarely for the right reasons it seems. I believe in the glorious Wayland future… I just wish it would get here a bit faster. ;) On the other hand, if we rushed it and botched it then it would never arrive at all I suppose. (sigh)
As for how window activation works, you got me there. I just heard other people discussing that one, but it did explain why on Wayland I would just get “Firefox is ready” notifications when opening links instead of just showing me the page like X did. Though I’m quite happy that it’s gone now in Fedora 39. Progress is good!
Yup, don’t. People already covered why. I will add that I tried learning dvorak for quite a while and it didn’t stick until I went cold turkey. It was very frustrating hunting and pecking for a couple days, but I made pretty quick progress. IIRC I was back up to 20-30 wpm after a week which was “usable” at least, and back to 60-70 wpm after a month. I had regular wrist pain before switching, and it was basically gone after. I don’t think it helped my typing speed. Like I can do 90 in bursts for a bit longer, but generally I “cruise” much slower than that. ;)
People keep saying this, but X forwarding seems to work just fine with XWayland. I just tried a handfull of X programs between my machines, and neither are running X11. I don’t use it everyday to know the gotchas, but there you go. Programs that use shared memory pixel buffers (everything that isn’t xeyes realistically) even run better than I remember now that I have gigabit. >_< It’s still a way worse experience than VNC or RDP though.
Wayland is great! Except for all list of not-a-bugs that I’d like to see fixed. Still, I’m not going back to X, so take that how you will.
What are the not-a-bugs? Things like covering up a Wayland window will block it’s rendering thread indefinitely with no way to detect it happens to handle it. This can lock up some games, or cause you to time out in a networked application. Some Wayland core folks don’t want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it’s mild information about a user’s attention that should be private. Every game dev on the other hand is asking “WTF!?” as it causes their games to break randomly.
Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can’t pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can’t open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you “Firefox is Ready” and make you do it manually.
A lot of this is slowly (painfully?) changing, and the adversarial nature is a bit frustrating. Wayland fixes so many little things that I find it well worth it though, and I say that as a game developer frustrated by many of the core design decisions.
I really like plain “boring” vanilla Gnome. It’s straightforward, I like it’s workflow, it does everything I need it too, and looks nice too. I’m not a fan of “power user” UIs as I feel like they have too many features I’ll never use filling them up. You can always get more programs to do more things anyway. Like I use compilers and disassemblers all the time, but I’m not upset that Gnome doesn’t ship with those features built in when I’m in some weird 1% of users that need them. On the other hand, I think KDE is important to the ecosystem too, and I donate $100 a year to both the Gnome and KDE projects.
Hrm. Skim ahead if you already know some of this… So say you have a running program XYZ that loads libUseful.so to do useful things. Now you run some updates and libUseful.so gets replaced with the new version. Because of how files on Unix work, the old version still exists on the disk until XYZ closes it, but any new program will load the new version. So things generally “just work” when the system is updated in place, but on the rare occasion causes weird problems. Fedora (from the GUI) chooses to run updates during reboot to prevent the rare, weird problems. If you update from the command line, it just does them in place. Kernel updates always require a reboot to apply though.
Interesting. My laptop died a little while ago, and I needed to demo a game I’m working on at a local convention. My wife had a hybrid GPU machine and let me swap in my SSD to run it. The drive had PopOS on it without the NV drivers. It did seem to run wayland fine on the internal display, but the external display was picky. (I wanted to demo on a bigger display) The only way to get the game to run smoothly was to disable the internal display using X11, and run the game using GL instead of Vulkan. >_<
So yeah, kinda mostly worked if I wanted it to be a laptop. I can see how it gets to be a pain if your needs are specific though.
I’ve been using it for a few years now, and it fixes a lot of little issues I have with X11, and at this point brings very few of its own. ALTHOUGH, I don’t have any Nvidia GPUs, and people seem to think it works for crap on them. I keep hearing “Ah, this will finally fix it!”, but I don’t know what the actual status is. You have the hardware you have, so unless you are going to buy something different to try Wayland… eh… I guess it never hurts to try. It’s pretty trivial to toggle on and off.
There are a few directory structures I have memorized, like my programming projects for instance. For everything else, I use the GUI. That’s what it’s there for. Mixing and match to get the best of both worlds. Some handy tips:
xdg-open will act like clicking on a file in the GUI, and is an easy way to open folders from the terminal when you want to browse them.I’m pretty happy with “Console” myself. It works exactly like I expect it to, and it’s new look is pretty clean. I thought “Terminal” was fine too. I use dozens of terminals a day when working, but I suppose I’m not enough of a power user to care to configure them. :)
I went through the 68k -> PPC -> OS X -> x86 transitions, but eh… That was right about when they lost me too. I rather liked OS X, but they were trying to turn it into iOS, at the same time they were making their machines non-repairable/upgradable, and losing 32 bit was just one bit more than I could stand. It was also right around the time when Proton made Linux gaming explosively viable. I could have all the Unixy tools I wanted combined with all the improvements the DEs have made while still being able to play games. I haven’t looked back yet.
So I’ve used the Pop Shell extension. It’s really neat when you have a bunch of little windows like terminals and file browsers open. 95% of the time it’s actively annoying though. I appreciate that it’s on a toggle so I can use it when I want it. The proposed mosaic mode doesn’t seem terribly different, and has the same problem where it just randomly moves things around breaking my association of “where I put that”. Most of the time I really need the spatial aspect, and am willing to manage a few windows by hand to get it.
Also: Joining half screen windows into a single unit?! Please don’t do it! D: Augh! Apple did that on OS X about the time I left and I absolutely hated it. It was so actively bad. :(
I have, but it doesn’t show the MS extensions like the C or CMake tools which is kind of a dealbreaker. None of the alternatives really work well enough in my experience. I’m fine with opting out of the telemetry.
I do game dev, and I’ve been loving VSCode. I used to use a mishmash of stuff, but VSCode can do kinda everything. Working on retro-dev C/asm for NES or Genesis? Lua projects? Shaders? Debugging a native Linux/SDL game? Doing some math in a Julia notebook? Unity3D development? Working on Windows/Mac? The answer is VSCode to all! I still use vim for some light stuff or working on remote machines, but meh… VSCode has nice defaults for me without having to fiddle.
For my native Linux gamedev, I’ve just been using the MS Cmake and Cpp-tools extensions. They work great, and you can script up the rest with actions. The debugger isn’t great, but it’s convenient and good enough for simple crashes. I switch to GDB when things get interesting though. I suppose I have an extension for shaders too, but it’s just syntax highlighting.
I pre-ordered the 13" AMD, and here’s my 2 cents: In 2013 I bought a MacBook Air. The i7 version was pretty decent for dev, and it had all the other ultrabook niceties (small, light, all day battery, etc). I was still happily using it in 2020, though it was starting to show it’s age. In 2023, Apple still makes MacBook Airs in the same form factor. They look almost identical. Several thousand days of active use mine is practically still in mint condition too. If I could pay 2/3rds the price of a new one to upgrade the internals+screen I would totally have done that! I don’t expect to change out the modular IO much, but it is nice that I have the option to get an SD card reader or to choose the port layout to match my desk. I’ve also got what I need to make a magnetic charging adapter for it, so that’s awfully nice. So is it worth the extra cost? Maybe not, but I’m an idealist sometimes, and I like their ideals.
Yeah… I’m really conflicted about it. I think my Lemur was a lemon, and I’d be perfectly happy with it if I never had to deal with support. It’s not secret that the hardware is rebranded, and what they do is to make the firmware/software work well. That part was honestly great! Their also pretty RTR friendly and publish a lot of information about taking things apart and whatnot. On the other hand… I’m not equipped to fix a motherboard, and why would I want to when it’s still in warranty? Spending weeks to convince them that the hardware did in fact fail was… Augh! Having it returned without the power supply and missing screws, then being told I was mistaken was straight up insulting. :(
For as grumpy about RTR as Apple is today, in the past at least I found their service to be pretty excellent. On multiple occasions I got free repairs or battery replacements on machines that were out of warranty and frankly just… worn out. The one time I actually had to send one off for repair it was back on my desk in a matter of days. I haven’t been their customer in 10 years, and it sounds like it’s probably changed though. (shrug)
I’ve been running Pop since 2018 (I think?) and have had few issues. It currently pinned to the LTS of Ubuntu while they focus on their home grown Cosmic DE. They still update Kernel/Mesa versions though. Having never really “distro hopped” I put Fedora on a couple of machines when upgrading a couple months ago. I 90% can’t tell the difference. The new Gnome stuff is nice, and Wayland by default is nice. I’d say it’s hard to go wrong with either. Though Arch is more of an “enthusiast” Linux in my mind. Like something you’d have strong opinions about. Any particular reason to move away from it?
I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a “real time” kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn’t trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn’t and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.
Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N
Me: Oh jeez… I don’t want to do that.
Motor Memory: Y <return>
Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N
Me: Oh, crap! That’s not what I meant to do. Definitely not!
Motor Memory: Y <return>
Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?
Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<