4 ms·

One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful. These results will get reported back to the graphics software

• mikepurvis 2mo ago
  I think it depends who it is making noise. There are some famous Oculus-era stories about John Carmack tracing display latency issues and then writing lengthy screeds to Samsung engineers to get them to give him lower level access. I bet if someone like him made enough noise, people at MS would pay attention.
  • cwillu 2mo ago
    Sure, but isn't that the point? Needing to be a celebrity to fix something?
• torginus 2mo ago
  This kind of thing is certainly possible under Windows - you can basically patch any kernel API call, replace any COM object instantiation, install filter drivers that intercept any request to and from a device, replace userland DLLs with your own. It's really scary what you can do, to the point that I often asked myself 'why allow this?' - seeing as hits on certain APIs took me to blackhat forums and articles about writing exploits.
  • pbhjpbhj 2mo ago
    Oh sure, but if I just need to troubleshoot why Minecraft-launcher (a first party app) won't launch ... it didn't give any output; it didn't even exist apparently, but only because MS were hiding it, had to crack out Process Explorer just to get something to troubleshoot on ... then it turns out the "turnkey" app from their first-party app store, loading the first-party app, on the same company's OS just failed with no indications to the user at all, not even a "this app crashed". Solution was to cut out as much of MS as possible ... it's just infuriating when it doesn't work, which seems to be all-the-time. More power to Bazzite and Valve, the sooner games app run in other OS the better.
    • wongarsu 2mo ago
      The developers of Process Explorer have a lot more to do with the OS than the makers of Minecraft, even if the company name is the same on all three
      • pbhjpbhj 2mo ago
        SysInternals was an acquisition (2006) too. I'm pretty sure that Minecraft launcher was made since that (2014) acquisition?
• Hikikomori 2mo ago
  Not Microsoft but Battlenonsense investigations on latency did get Nvidia to create reflex.
  • torginus 2mo ago
    Afaik reflex is a bit different - it times the input to frame latency in your game, and tries to start the gameloop as late as possible in the frame so that your input gets sampled at the latest possible time and the frame still makes it to the vsync period, this isn't really a compositor tech.
    • Arch-TK 2mo ago
      Why would it need to measure input to frame latency? Surely it just needs to measure how long it takes the game to go from vsync period to frame ready and delay when the game thinks vsync happened to force it to poll later in the cycle?
• smokel 2mo ago
  Some things do indeed improve, but some other things require a massive effort that no hobbyist or small company can make happen. This is most obvious in places where a lot of coordination is required, for example in supporting proper color correction throughout all applications, or decent support for advanced printer functions. There are many incremental changes, but we often get stuck in local minima for years. Still, I personally like that one can (relatively) easily watch what happens under the hood. It's not entirely clear to me why Windows and MacOS must remain closed source.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Because if it's open source you can't make money from it or have multiple tiers.
    • alightsoul 2mo ago
      If it's open source you can make money by selling managed services to companies. They don't want to deal with it really.
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        How is Red Hat's revenue compared to Microsoft's?
        • esseph 2mo ago
          Are you sure you want to put Microsoft on any kind of pedestal?
          • achenet 2mo ago
            if your sole goal is making money, yes, because Microsoft have actually done a pretty good job of making money, even if that's generally at the cost of the well-being of people using their software.
• wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
  >give Bazzite a whirl I never really understood Bazzite's immutable fs thing. Can one install standard dev stuff (i.e. compilers, ides, etc) easily under bazzite? This use case is the main reason why I lean towards maybe using cachyos
  • haunter 2mo ago
    Yes, rpm-ostree solves that https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/rpm-ostree/ https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/rpm... https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/ https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/
  • abhinavk 2mo ago
    You can modify the fs using rpm-ostree. It will overlay your changes on top of the immutable image. The recommended way is to create toolbox/distrobox which uses containers to isolate stuff.
  • NelsonMinar 2mo ago
    Bazzite mostly suggests installing stuff via Flatpak or Homebrew. (No, really, brew on Linux lol). You can also layer in things with rpm-ostree but it's clunky. I think the immutable OS makes sense for a consumer but not for a developer. So I'm using Nobara instead. It's a different Fedora-for-gaming but has most of the same improvements. It is a traditional system, not immutable. CachyOS is also very popular and that gets you an Arch-for-gaming. Just yesterday I learned of PikaOS, a Debian-for-gaming. The main thing all these gaming-customized systems are doing is getting graphics drivers and proprietary codecs installed for you easily.
    • marcinostefano 2mo ago
      Why not for developers? You can install tools from flatpak or in home directory. My workflow includes toolbox containers. Distrobox is also good option.
      • admax88qqq 2mo ago
• ivanjermakov 2mo ago
  > results will get reported back Even better, most of the tech stack is open source and contributions are welcome!
• Someone 2mo ago
  > These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible. It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft could turn a knob and get telemetry data from millions of devices, and feed that back to the software graphics authors. Certainly both Intel (https://www.techpowerup.com/312122/psa-intel-graphics-drivers-now-collect-telemetry-after-opt-in https://www.techpowerup.com/312122/psa-intel-graphics-driver...) and Nvidia (https://nateshoffner.com/blog/2017/05/disable-nvidia-telemetry https://nateshoffner.com/blog/2017/05/disable-nvidia-telemet...) collect such data themselves (opt-in in both cases, so they may not get much data from the most hard-core gamers)
• Aardwolf 2mo ago
  > One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful. If only they'd actually DO something with this meaningfulness. I love and use Linux as my daily driver, but desktop environments and everything around it have become so complicated yet worse than before. In the past a simple config file with intuitive setting names inside of them could make you do anything you wanted. Today they have all these layers of abstraction for themes, icon sets and light and dark mode and what not, but almost NO combination works! If you set light mode, you'll get some light gray text on lighter gray background somewhere, but if you use dark mode, then you'll get some black text rendered on a black background elsewhere. And even if not involving light or dark mode, same misery with whatever themes like "Adwaita" and others, some things will work in one, other things in another, I've seen a PDF viewer that made everything black text on black background in some desktop themes... A PDF viewer can't even independently choose its own text and background color without the desktop environment messing with it? No theme I found anywhere has _well visible_ scrollbars, they all seem to love making them as subtle as possible so you can hardly see where your scroll position actually is. No theme I found anywhere has a _clear visual distinction_ (different color, not just a subtle shade difference) for the selected window vs the non selected ones. This would be _extremely_ handy for knowing in what window you're typing now, even windows 3.11 got this (and the scrollbars, and the ability to customize your colors) better While not latency, it's still a thing they just can't get right, and when things were less overdesigned it actually worked better, so what was all this for?
  • doodlesdev 2mo ago
    > If you set light mode, you'll get some light gray text on lighter gray background somewhere, but if you use dark mode, then you'll get some black text rendered on a black background elsewhere. I've been using Linux (Linux Mint Cinammon, then Fedora Linux GNOME) for over five years and I've never had that. What kind of desktop environment, themes and applications are you using?
  • aljgz 2mo ago
    My experience has been reasonably consistent. My main DE is KDE, it switches between light and dark based on my location and time. It switches to warmer colors at night. I have never had a problem in the applications I use. I occasionally switch on the fancy effects like windows fall apart when I'm in the fun mode, or I'm showing something to friends, as a bit of fun makes everything more interesting, and all work perfectly well.
• alanwreath 2mo ago
  Bazzite or CacheyOS (if you wish to do gaming and have more rope to hang yourself mainly because you can more easily affect the system if it isn’t trying to enforce immutability). TBH with the onslaught of LLM CLI’s like Claude I am a lot more promiscuous in my Linux OS choices as of late. I used to stick to Ubuntu because that was the Linux I knew, but the “interface” has become the same to me because I just ask Claude to help me achieve a semantic goal without having to score the web for the appropriate keys. Who knows, maybe I’ll eventually swing the other way and give NixOS a try finally.
  • alanwreath 2mo ago
    I stand by my comments. Bazzite has benefits being immutable but immutability can cause certain tasks to be more involved or constrained. Case in point it’s nice that Bazzite comes with a lot of sane defaults: - brew - podman But it would be disingenuous to understate the additional hurdles either you or software you are accustomed to using being amenable to operating within the immutability restriction. That’s not to discount the great benefits and entire categories of problems that immutability protects you from. It’s just a priority and weighing your options question. Here’s an example that bit me: I wanted to run k3s/k0s but both have issue with Bazzite. Those were hard stops for me.
• preisschild 2mo ago
  > Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it And thats exactly where free software shines. Enough people fixing issues they deem worthy of spending time on means the overall software will only improve with time.