• 0 Posts
  • 222 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 28th, 2023

help-circle






  • It isn’t significant. Wine already supports the vast majority of MediaFoundation codecs with GStreamer. This is just an alternative backend that uses FFmpeg instead of GStreamer. GStreamer already has an FFmpeg plugin, so this doesn’t add any new codecs to the table. It seems there’s just a long term plan to move away from GStreamer for whatever reason.

    Wine’s MF support used to be much worse, which is why Valve had to do their workaround shader hack. Not sure what exactly the current status on that is, but I do know things like mf-install or Proton-GE are rarely if ever necessary anymore, even with non-Steam games (which I have plenty of).


  • Well, Steam and Proton both already run on top of FEX or Box64 on ARM Linux, but it’s nice to see an official effort from Valve.

    Also, does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86? That adds a not insubstantial amount of CPU overhead, which does hurt battery life.

    And perhaps most importantly, is there any ARM chipset out there that can deliver performance on par with the Steam Deck’s CPU (even after factoring in the overhead of the x86 JIT) at a viable price for a Steam Deck successor?




  • Unless they changed it, mobile Firefox is locked to a limited set of extensions unless you:

    1. Use Nightly.
    2. Create a Mozilla account.
    3. Log in to that account on the Add-Ons site and create an add-on collection with all the extensions you want to install.
    4. Set that collection as your source of add-ons in the Firefox settings.

    You’re also unable to use about:config unless you’re using Nightly (or maybe Beta). So Nightly is really the only version worth using since it doesn’t have nearly as many artificial restrictions as the stable version does. This is also true to a lesser extent on desktop where you have to use Nightly to install unsigned extensions.

    You also can’t open any offline HTML files for whatever reason and on devices with very little RAM (like 2GB) Firefox isn’t viable, but Chrome-based browsers work mostly fine. Firefox is still the best mobile browser though, mostly because it supports extensions at all.



  • Qt1 came with two default themes. One of them mimicked Win95 and the other mimicked Motif. KDE1 defaulted to the former in order to look more familiar. To this day, the “Windows 9x” theme still ships with Qt and can be selected on any Plasma 6 install. Starting with KDE2 they started using their own custom themes for everything, tho.

    GNOME 1 actually looked very similar, which isn’t surprising because its main goal at that point was to offer a replacement for KDE that didn’t depend on then-proprietary Qt. GNOME 2 and KDE 2 is when they really started building a distinct identity.


  • Yeah, I mean Google caring about Linux isn’t exactly breaking news. We knew that already. Android and ChromeOS both exist and as web company they kinda have to care about the OS that by and large runs the web. But this is Phoronix and they’ll make articles about anything as long as they think as it’ll get engagement. “Chromium” and “Wayland” are pretty good buzzwords as far as that goes, thus this article. My point is more so that maybe it isn’t productive to have every acknowledgment of Chromium’s continued existence be overwhelmingly negative regardless of context.