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Firefox seems to work fine nowadays on X11 with an AMD iGPU. I haven't had a reason to try Wayland recently, and last time I checked it wasn't fully supported b

Firefox seems to work fine nowadays on X11 with an AMD iGPU. I haven't had a reason to try Wayland recently, and last time I checked it wasn't fully supported by some of the stuff I use (IntelliJ, mainly, and IIRC electron apps). But I wonder if HW acceleration is actually that helpful in practice. Judging by CPU use hovering around a few percent, watching videos on Firefox or mpv is unloaded to the GPU. But my laptop still gets fairly hot. I haven't actually tried to compare battery life between CPU and GPU decoding, but I figure the heat has to come from somewhere, right? One fun fact I've noticed is that the laptop gets less warm while watching 4k YT videos than FHD. Even if I have it scaled to FHD resolution (my external screen is 4k, but not the laptop's panel).

qalmakka 3y ago
(Well written) Electron apps have fully supported Wayland for a while now, without any issue. I've been using VSCode on Wayland (native) without a hitch for more than a year. Discord is more problematic due to them being a bunch of donkeys, but there are workaround for the motivated tweaker (like using another version of Electron).
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  I didn't look too much into it since X11 worked fine for my needs, but my understanding was that some applications used too ancient versions of Chrome. One which I remember specifically was teams.
  - qalmakka 3y ago
    Teams on Linux is essentially abandonware. Just stick to the PWA with a Chromium-based browser and you'll notice it works a billion times better than however the "app" has ever done before
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      Sure, that's what I use nowadays. But, I actually find it works worse. The only improvement is that I can now authenticate with my YubiKey, which the older version didn't support. But otherwise? It's terrible. Notifications are hit-and-miss, especially since chromium by default seems to "suspend" the page. When the notifications do work, there's no "urgent" tag on the window, so if I've missed the notification popup, I don't know someone's waiting for me. They've "improved" the layout during calls, so that when someone shares their screen, there are always a bunch of useless icons around it instead of going full-screen. And the old version used to draw a red rectangle around what was being shared. Now I get a tooltip at the bottom of the screen, which sits half below my screen edge and the other half is partially obscured by the launcher. Plus, its "hide" button doesn't do anything.
Timber-6539 3y ago
HW acceleration on Linux is a mixed bag. You have to ensure that it is always working. If it's not broken in the browser (am looking at you Chromium, with a slight side eye to Firefox) then your GPU might not support the video codec requested by the video service. In my case, I have hardware that supports HW accel for avc and other "legacy" codecs but not av1. Which YouTube likes to use randomly and the only way to confirm if they are using it is by checking the video stats on YouTube. There are ways to disable the browser from requesting av1 from YouTube but I stopped using the official interface in favor of other privacy-respecting clients which to my knowledge don't request av1.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure it was using hardware acceleration since the cpu usage was so low. Using mpv and forcing it to use the CPU has it jump to something like 20-25%.
  - Timber-6539 3y ago
    In my case with Intel hardware, how I make 100% sure that it's activated is using a program called intel-gpu-tools, with it if you run intel_gpu_top as root you'll get the video acceleration stats shown to you. Pretty sure Nvidia has something similar but am not sure about AMD.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      There's radeontop, but it doesn't seem to say anything about video acceleration. mpv does say what it uses and complains when you ask it to do something unsupported, and since there's a clear difference in CPU usage between hardware and software decoding, I figure CPU use is a good enough indicator.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
I tend to watch yt vids at 2x speed or higher and hw acceleration is important on my little xps13. If I don't have it enabled, the laptop runs noticeably warmer and my cpu spikes up to like 80-90% usage instead of ~ 40%.
temp0826 3y ago
There's a huge difference on my laptop (Intel iGPU + nvidia dGPU, though the nvidia chip has no video decode capability) in battery life between software decoding and using the Intel quicksync hw codecs, at least with mpv. Using the dmabuf-wayland vo is especially efficient (though theoretically lower quality than gpu-next/gpu).

qalmakka 3y ago

(Well written) Electron apps have fully supported Wayland for a while now, without any issue. I've been using VSCode on Wayland (native) without a hitch for more than a year. Discord is more problematic due to them being a bunch of donkeys, but there are workaround for the motivated tweaker (like using another version of Electron).

vladvasiliu 3y ago
I didn't look too much into it since X11 worked fine for my needs, but my understanding was that some applications used too ancient versions of Chrome. One which I remember specifically was teams.
- qalmakka 3y ago
  Teams on Linux is essentially abandonware. Just stick to the PWA with a Chromium-based browser and you'll notice it works a billion times better than however the "app" has ever done before
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Sure, that's what I use nowadays. But, I actually find it works worse. The only improvement is that I can now authenticate with my YubiKey, which the older version didn't support. But otherwise? It's terrible. Notifications are hit-and-miss, especially since chromium by default seems to "suspend" the page. When the notifications do work, there's no "urgent" tag on the window, so if I've missed the notification popup, I don't know someone's waiting for me. They've "improved" the layout during calls, so that when someone shares their screen, there are always a bunch of useless icons around it instead of going full-screen. And the old version used to draw a red rectangle around what was being shared. Now I get a tooltip at the bottom of the screen, which sits half below my screen edge and the other half is partially obscured by the launcher. Plus, its "hide" button doesn't do anything.

Timber-6539 3y ago

HW acceleration on Linux is a mixed bag. You have to ensure that it is always working. If it's not broken in the browser (am looking at you Chromium, with a slight side eye to Firefox) then your GPU might not support the video codec requested by the video service. In my case, I have hardware that supports HW accel for avc and other "legacy" codecs but not av1. Which YouTube likes to use randomly and the only way to confirm if they are using it is by checking the video stats on YouTube. There are ways to disable the browser from requesting av1 from YouTube but I stopped using the official interface in favor of other privacy-respecting clients which to my knowledge don't request av1.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
I'm pretty sure it was using hardware acceleration since the cpu usage was so low. Using mpv and forcing it to use the CPU has it jump to something like 20-25%.
- Timber-6539 3y ago
  In my case with Intel hardware, how I make 100% sure that it's activated is using a program called intel-gpu-tools, with it if you run intel_gpu_top as root you'll get the video acceleration stats shown to you. Pretty sure Nvidia has something similar but am not sure about AMD.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    There's radeontop, but it doesn't seem to say anything about video acceleration. mpv does say what it uses and complains when you ask it to do something unsupported, and since there's a clear difference in CPU usage between hardware and software decoding, I figure CPU use is a good enough indicator.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

I tend to watch yt vids at 2x speed or higher and hw acceleration is important on my little xps13. If I don't have it enabled, the laptop runs noticeably warmer and my cpu spikes up to like 80-90% usage instead of ~ 40%.

temp0826 3y ago

There's a huge difference on my laptop (Intel iGPU + nvidia dGPU, though the nvidia chip has no video decode capability) in battery life between software decoding and using the Intel quicksync hw codecs, at least with mpv. Using the dmabuf-wayland vo is especially efficient (though theoretically lower quality than gpu-next/gpu).