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I've been using swaywm on my laptop (XPS 13) with XWayland disabled for a few months now and have had very few problems with it. As far as I can tell Firefox wo
by cbdumas 7y ago
I've been using swaywm on my laptop (XPS 13) with XWayland disabled for a few months now and have had very few problems with it. As far as I can tell Firefox works perfectly, except for some very strange behavior if I try to enable hardware acceleration.
I love how easy it is to configure via config files, external monitors work great, scaling on HiDPI displays has been totally painless. My days off fiddling with xorg config and xrandr are behind me.
I know the creator of sway hangs out here, so if you're reading this, thank you!
- hollerith 7y agoThat is encouraging. What distro are your swaywm and Firefox running on?
- cbdumas 7y agoI'm running Arch, which I find to be the most frictionless when you're trying to do sort of "bleeding edge" stuff like this.
- hollerith 7y agoIt is time for me to give desktop Linux another try (which will be my first serious try in 10 years).
- cbdumas 7y agoYes definitely! Things have come a long way in 10 years, in my opinion. If you are looking for something more "set up and forget about it" though I would definitely recommend Ubuntu over Arch. I use Arch because I (usually) enjoy tinkering and customizing and setting things up exactly how I want. Edit for a little more detail: I used Ubuntu for a long time on my desktop and actually did quite a bit of gaming on it. Mostly stuck to games that have native Linux support but from what I hear the compatibility layer that Valve has released is actually really good. If gaming is your thing. All this is to say, things that were once supposed to be impossible on Linux are now very much possible.
- imtringued 7y agoDon't.... You will waste a big chunk of time on playing windows games on linux....
- michaelmrose 7y agoWithout hardware acceleration doesn't watching video in the browser pretty much destroy your battery life and use most of your cpu time?
- cbdumas 7y agoSo I'm no expert but I believe there are actually two different notions of hardware acceleration at play here: 1) HW accelerated rendering in Firefox, which despite being unfortunately disabled by default on linux can in my experience be enabled (on about:config) without issues. This makes the experience of scrolling much smoother, so I usually do that. I don't think this has any observable effect on battery life for me. However, enabling this in Sway results in some very odd behavior that breaks certain things so I've had to disable it. I can go into more detail on that if you like. 2) Hardware accelerated video decoding. In contrast to the fist one, this makes a HUGE difference in CPU usage and battery life. However this unfortunately cannot be used in any browser AT ALL in Linux, regardless of setup or configuration. The way I watch youtube videos on my laptop is usually with mpv, which does use hw decoding if it is configured to do so.
- Thaxll 7y agoIf I disable HW acceleration on the desktop it's horrible perf wise, like VSCode and all the electron app are slow, there is aliasing all over the place when moving windows, slowness ect ... ( Ubuntu 18.04 / Unity on a Dell XPS 13 from 2016 )
- aeroevan 7y agoI've used chromium-vaapi on Linux with some success. I don't think those patches have been accepted in upstream chromium though.
- cbdumas 7y agoI may give that a shot, although I think chromium still requires XWayland, right?
- 7y ago