I’ve wanted to buy an upgrade to my RX580 for years now, but I’d really like AV1 encoding support. With OBS finally supporting AV1 on all platforms (?), this actually makes sense. But I’m once again reminded how bad the used market for GPUs is in my country atm, so I’ll wait for a while longer.
Got a 6700XT second hand about a year ago when the price finally came down from astronomical ridiculous crypto bubble crazy, to almost reasonable. Just looked and they’re still going for the same price. Thought this would have dropped a bit by now, but I guess not.
Yes, I’ve also had an eye on the 6700XT, but I made the bad decision to wait for the new gen and hopefully a price drop for older GPUs. The stable used prices are probably because of people who bought at exorbitant prices who don’t want to sell their GPU for nothing, combined with the new gen having the same price to performance ratio.
Now with the 7600XT having 16GB VRAM, I’ve thought about buying until I noticed it only supports PCIe 4.0 x8, which is half the bandwidth on my PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. It’s a B350 board I want to upgrade to a 5800X3D and use for years to come. This means I’m basically forced to either go with a 7700XT, or go with an older 6700XT.
Anyway, waiting years for a new gen isn’t an option either, so I’ll stay frustrated for a while longer.
Fun coincidence, 16 lanes was one of my concerns as well when I got mine. I’m also on an old AM4 motherboard. Currently have a 3900X CPU which is plenty for my needs for now, but it’s good knowing I still have an upgrade path to an X3D. AM4 has been an awesome platform in terms of upgradability :)
That’s because H.265 is patent encumbered. Firefox doesn’t support H.265 at all and Chrome only supports it if the hardware does. In order to support accepting H.265 input from streamers, Twitch would basically have to pony up the compute resources for full-res realtime transcoding for every H.265 stream to H.264 – either that or put up with a lot of bad press surrounding people not being able to stream at full res anymore.
AV1 would introduce a similar hardware requirement because not everyone even has AV1 Decode, and even fewer have AV1 encode. AV1 encode would only be available on people on gpus using the latest generation, blocking anyone buying previous generation stuff (so no AMD 6000 or older, or Nvidia 3000 or older, and non Intel Arc products).
All (recent) major browsers I’m aware of have software AV1 decode as standard, so the receiving end wouldn’t be a problem apart from higher CPU usage. As for encode, obviously this wouldn’t be universal – just streamers who had the computing power (hardware or software) for realtime AV1 encode would be able to take advantage of that on Twitch.
the browsers have the software, but not the hardware decode step.
software decode, especially for mobile, would be battery draining and no streaming service would realistically would use it without the userbase having hardware decode support.
for pcs, av1 hardware decode is amd 6000 or newer, amd phoenix apus, nvidia 3000 or newer gpus, 11th Gen intel cpus or newer.
for mobile, its only like a small portion of the phones released in the past year and a half or so.
for iphone, the list is the iphone 15 pro max. and for the other devices, things using the M3.
as long as the world is a mobile first mindset, theres no way theyre going to ask evwryone on mobile to take a significant battery loss just for a higher resolution stream.
What’s up with the ux design of nix? I get it’s made for advanced users but still. I’m reading through this guide and man it’s convoluted.
The different ways of installing packages. Either through editing the configuration.nix or running a command. The weird inconsistency of nix commands. nix-env -iA to install and nix-env --uninstall to uninstall. Then updating uses nix-channel --update but upgrade uses nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade. All this to use the package manager. Also haven’t even mentioned flakes or home manager.
It’s a cool OS, but the UX really needs work imo.
[Edit] I do wanna add something else too because I feel like my point isn’t getting across.
It’s okay to have a complicated ui. Especially if your target audience are tech-savvy. But even tech-savvy people have to start as new users. A tech-savvy new user isn’t going to know what the best practices are. Being able to anticipate the steps for installing a package is important for ux. If the commands for installing packages isn’t cohesive/intuitive, then the user has to spend more time looking for guides and learning how to use the software.
People also mentioned a new command in the works. This is great! However, these current commands are being recommended through blogs and nix. New users won’t know about this new command.
After trying out Nix as a package manager I realized I have a pretty different world view than the makers of Nix. I agree with the end goal but how they are trying achieve it is just alien to me. The nix command line is just downright user hostile.
I am personally hoping that someone else takes a stab at the Nix concept but have accepted Nix isn’t for me.
Yeah because when you make an error it causes a snowball affect and it shows you too little information but when you look at the trace its a wall of errors.
i had a syntax error in my dotfiles that took me two hours to solve.
it was a missing semicolon that was wayyy above where the error said it was. it didn’t even say missing semicolon, instead saying unexpected ‘}’ on line …
Imho I wouldn’t bother with nix-env or nix profile. It just creates a secondary list of packages that needs to be maintained and it’s cumbersome to do so. There’s nix-shell or nix shell if you need a package temporarily and there’s your configuration.nix or flake for everything else.
Side note: nix profile at least has consistent commands: install/remove/upgrade
They have resolved this exact problem. There is an “experimental” cli tool that fixes a lot of your complaints about nix-env, nix-channel, etc. Itcs wrapped together with “flakes”. This newer feature is a little different, and working with or without flakes segments the community AND the types of articles about nix, like this one.
As far as I know though, nixos related thing still have a bizarre set of commands, and even with flakes “nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade” is still how you switch configs.
And as far as installation goes, using nix-env -iA really is a bad practice. Thats installing something ad hoc like you would in any other package manager. That defeats the point of nixos, where your configuration file explicitly defines all the packages you need installed, and nothing else. Nix will remove any packages you didnt specify.
Oh that’s good that they are addressing those issues with a new command. Hopefully it gets into stable soon.
Might be that nix-env -iA is bad practice! I’m strictly talking about ux design here and nix-env -iA is being recommend by blogs and nix themselves. (Nixpkgs tells you how to install using nix-env -iA)
A new user isn’t going to know what bad practice is.
It actually recommends using nix-env -i, which is even worse because with that command it searches the whole repository instead of just getting the correct attribute on nixpkgs. It takes half a minute to run the command, it’s insane.
I do think it’s important to emphasize the difference between installing software in user environments and system wide, which is why the tool is named nix-env. System packages must be installed via the nixos configuration file and a rebuild.
To me the biggest missing piece for new users is a tool to help manage your system configuration and reduce the frustration of having to constantly look up nix syntax or nixpkgs quirks. Maybe thinking of it as a nixos/nix IDE? Also a polished distribution built on nixos would be a good starting point (and easy to do, I didn’t realize I could just copy someone else’s configuration until well after I had my system working well enough)
The other thing that got me starting out is the need to garbage collect old packages. It’s not strictly necessary if you have a large enough disk, but it took me several iterations of filling my root partition before I figured out how to properly clean up old generations.
Is my go-to command. For a while I was looking at generations manually, but now I just wait a while (days, a few reboots, or until I need more space) to run this after changing things in case the new stuff is broken.
I think running this as my normal user cleans out old env generations… But I’m not 100% sure.
There is controversy in the nix world because nix flakes were (some say) merged without proper vetting first. OG nix diehards don’t want to taint nix documentation with ‘experimental’ flakes. But probably the majority of nix users are all in on flakes. So you have documentation from the OG camp that doesn’t include flakes, and you have innumerable unofficial guides for the flakes way. This on top of the quirkiness of nix the language and the multiple ways to do things. Unfortunate.
IMO nix-env was a mistake. It feels like an imperative package manager which may be comfortable to new users who are used to apt or similar. But really what you should be doing on nix is maintaining *.nix files which document/specify your system setup, and nixos-rebuild to update your system to that configuration. Similarly, nix channels are an imperative holdover, which can be done away with if you use flakes, which results in your current nixpkgs version being documented in a system level flake.lock file.
I think both nix-env and flakes are designed with making package management easier. Nix-env tries to make it intuitive and familiar for new users. Flakes improve package management by simplifying the configuration.
Personally I would love to see syntax highlighting, language server, code completion. Maybe all in a dedicated application which is configured to give the easiest experience for new users. If nix is intended to be managed through config files, then the experience of writing a config should be as easy as possible.
The intent of nix-env was to make it easier, but the effect was to push some of your system state into a shadowy ‘env’ realm that is not managed by your *nix files. Same with channels - its state that isn’t in your configuration.nix.
To me the whole point is to have all your state in some files you can check in to version control, and use to reproduce your system.
Agree it would be cool to have a way to edit nix files that would give you all the args to functions, code completion etc. You do get some of that with the nix repl. Would be nice to even have a GUI for selecting packages for those that don’t “do” text editing.
I’m using nixd for a nix language server, but haven’t seen a lot of benefit so far to be honest. I think part of the reason is nixpkgs isn’t pulled in until runtime, so most things are undefined as far as the lsp is concerned. Haven’t put a lot of time into it, there may be ways to make it more useful.
How is the state of tilig WMs? Last time I ried Wayland, mixing and matching WMs and status bars was really flakey, with font scaling and rendering issues. There are certain things I will no longer compromise on in a WM, and if I wanted to be forced to use a specific desktop to get a working graphical environment (functioning scaling, for instance), I’d use a Mac.
Herbstluftwm hasn’t been ported - is there a similar configuration file-less tiling WM? On X, I could also settle for bspwm; both WMs are completely configurable on the command line. How about bars? I’m using polybar right now, but there are a dozen to choose from under X, any of which I can use with whichever WM (and have it function properly).
Again, mere months ago, trying to get font scaling to work properly with the same scaling in all applications was messed up. Under X, if I set a font and size in any program (that supports font selection), I get the same apparent font size - because programs get fonts from X and the same code does all font rendering which makes everything consistent. How is that on Wayland, now, because that was a major deal-breaker last a couple of months ago.
I used sway for a long time(months to a year?) and it was very stable. I’m currently messing with plasmas tiling option ATM and it works okay… Not as fluid but well enough that I haven’t switched back.
Hyprland is one of the ones I tried, and it may be closest to what I’m looking for. I’ve heard the community is extremely toxic, though. Software projects having “conmunities” is a relatively recent thing, for me, so it’s not a big deal, but what’s been your experience?
Me too, mostly, but popping into a forum to ask questions is a thing. I stopped using bspwm largely because the one responsive person in the Matrix channel was a first-class self-righteous turd; that alone wouldn’t have been so bae, but none of the admins called them on it, and, well, herbstluftwm turned out to be better software anyway. The hlwm community has avoided being toxic mainly by not existing, AFAICT.
Using wayfire (disabling the fancy resources eating plugins) + waybar + plus a bunch wlr utilities (some from sway).
I’m using integrated intel gpus. There’s a laptop with both the integrated intel gpu and a nvidia discrete one, but I had to configure the bios to only use the inegrated one, both the binary nvidia drivers, and the open source nvidia drivers fail to set fbdev=1 (the external hdmi monitor is the one associated to the nvidia gpu, and it gets a blank screen), which is required for enabling KMS, which is required for wayland, so no luck. Nouveau actually works, but it’s not stable enough, after some time of use the monitor turn off and there’s no way to turn it back on, and it feels slow or lagging compared to the intel gpu, although it should be the opposite. So I gave up on nvidia on that laptop, and any other box only has the integrated intel gpu anyways. I’ve read of successful stories with nvidia, both with the binary and the open drivers, but I think it’s not a generic thing that all nvidia gpus will work well on wayland with nvidia drivers. The noveau drivers are the only ones working for some gpus, but not stable enough. So I stick with the recommendation to stay away from nvidia if using wayland…
I guess although WM still applies, on the wayland jargon they’re called compositors, and the wayland compositors are not as light as the Xorg WMs, since there’s no Xorg server, and part of the responsibility of the server goes to the compositors on wayland…
There’s labwc, which is the compositor I would have chosen, but the developer decided to stick with xml configuration equivalent to the the openbox one, and also with the openbox themes/styles, which I never liked. On Xorg I used fluxbox + tint2 + …, and I tried openbox, but totally disliked it compared to fluxbox… But other than config and theming, I like its idea of being a light compositor.
Actually by disabling the plugins I am on wayfire, it’s pretty much labwc but with new decent config (I really like its config BTW), and using the gui toolkit theming, so no specific wayfire theming at all, which is nice, as opposed to the labwc own theming… Still, labwc is also an option for some.
Wayfire and labwc are not tiling compositors as most of all others, :)
Gnome has been pretty great on Wayland for a while.
Personally I’ve been using it since 2017, and besides a stint with a 1080 Ti that was constantly causing issues, it’s been pretty good besides screen sharing in some programs. Speaking of…
I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app or people would abandon that shitty app. Unfortunately neither looks likely.
Right, actually you can use Discord natively on Wayland just passing the flags mentioned in the post. The only issue I have found with the official Discord client is that it doesn’t support streaming audio alongside to streaming your screen, but vesktop does the trick for that.
From my experience, it seems like the video quality really sucks the moment you try to stream anything more complex, like a 3D game - no indication on my side, but a friend complained and I got the same result checking the stream on a second device. Frame rate drops to 2fps or worse, with bad quality on each frame.
I remember reading an issue on vesktop about it, but sounds like it might just come down to missing HW acceleration in electron for the relevant APIs? Though if you have any suggestions and/or better results, I’d love to hear about it.
If you avoid Nvidia, it have been ready for many years. And to be honset, not sure X11 was really stable with Nvidia either. My main issue with Wayland, is that X doesn’t have multi dpi support… and for that I really cannot blame Wayland. Also, Skype doesn’t have screensharing, well, they actually had for a while, but then removed it… still, hard to blame on Wayland.
But as a general rule, if you have Nvidia, then you are not allowed to complain about anything… that was your choice, and with Nvidia under Linux, all bets are off. I thought that was clear a long time a go, especially after Linus not so subtle outburst.
My personal experience could never agree with that. I could never use Wayland on KDE on either one of my laptops with Intel graphics due to numerous glitches and incompatibilities, so nvidia is not even the scapegoat I wish it was.
I’m looking forward to plasma 6 next month, but at least on KDE, Wayland has not really been usable so far.
Machine learning pays my bills, and I never had a choice on my graphics card brand. To be sure, I wanted an AMD for the open source drivers, but CUDA remains essential to me. RocM support from AMD is a joke, and isn’t anywhere close to an alternative. Reseachers release code that only runs on CUDA for a good reason. To say that I don’t get to complain is going too far
Thanks to nouveau, I can still use GNOME even after dropping X11 🥳 I have a GeForce 6800M GT, I think, which would need a proprietary nvidia driver that is not supported (but patched by community) since kernel 5 I believe. Only thing that needed to be considered is, that one has to boot via legacy BIOS and not EFI, even on a mac laptop which normally uses EFI to boot into macOS and the grafic card still works. Would be nice if the nouveau team would get the card running on EFI as well.
But as a general rule, if you have Nvidia, then you are not allowed to complain about anything… that was your choice, and with Nvidia under Linux, all bets are off. I thought that was clear a long time a go, especially after Linus not so subtle outburst.
See, this attitude is exactly why Linux will never become mainstream. On Windows you don’t need to research if your machine will be able to run your operating system of choice, it just works.
If you’re a user, and you can install Linux without seeing a single warning that your hardware is going to cause issues, your distro is at fault. The moment you boot the installer, it knows damn well that your using Nvidia hardware and what the implications are. Distros either ignore the predictable instability, or they believe there is no problem, and either way the end user isn’t to blame for taking that at face value.
The truth is, Linux on Nvidia works fine, except for some very specific laptops with stupid mux chips, and even that is something Linux should fix, not the end user. Luckily, Linux installers don’t even boot on those machines, so the end user can just ignore Linux and continue using Windows.
You just can’t use Wayland if you want your Linux system to be stable, but X11 works fine and it will continue to do so for many years. Part of the Wayland issues still come from intermediate code refusing to work around Nvidia’s bullshit, ignoring known bugs and technically-spec-compliant-but-different stuff because it’s easier to blame Nvidia for everything. Wayland also makes some weird assumptions that I disagree with (“if the Wayland socket dies, your application must crash, there is no recovery”) which make minor stability problems a lot worse in practice.
Nvidia may be to blame for their shitty drivers when it comes to the core problem of the bad experiences Nvidia owners will have, not the end users buying the wrong hardware. You can’t seriously expect people who try it out for the first time to read up on the drama and controversy Linus Torvalds has caused over the years.
And even with all that, many serious Linux users who know full well the pain they’re about to subject themselves to still need Nvidia. ROCm is great but it’s nowhere near to as efficient and well-supported as CUDA. Whatever Intel has doesn’t come close and whatever macOS offers doesn’t work because even Nvidia has perfect Linux support compared to Apple.
I got my Nvidia GPU before I even considered moving to Linux. I am honestly getting pretty tired of reading these gatekeeping comments telling me “I’m not allowed to complain about anything” or how I’m a trash person for buying an Nvidia card in the first place. Nvidia is the largest GPU manufacter, people are going to own Nvidia cards, you need to live with it. Be constructive and nice to other people.
X11 is rock solid with Nvidia, never had a single problem.
I had a lot of issues with Wayland on KDE, lots of flickering issues all the time. I moved to Hyprland and things are mostly fine. IntelliJ has ocasional problems but they are working on a Wayland version anyways.
Ha, your first sentence is just plain wrong. It was quite broken under “normal” usecases with per-DE bugs.
For example, on KDE, about 1.5 years ago the bug finally got fixed where your Wayland session would completely crash if your monitor lost any signal whatsoever (monitor sleep or shutting off the monitor). If you ask me, that is an very standard usecase without which there is no world where said action crashing the entire session would be considered ready for general use.
I think we are there now, just some visual glitches nowadays, also some recent glitches with monitor sleep, but Wayland very rarely crashes anymore.
I’ve just had to switch back to X11 from Wayland on Nobara, because I couldn’t get Sunshine to work no matter what I tried, my windows were occasionally flickering black, and my taskbar kept freezing. So I guess I’ll wait a little bit more.
Unfortunately, NVIDIA. I was buying a new PC half a year ago, and only started even considering to make the switch to Linux few months after that, so I am at a pretty unlucky point where I just had recently spent a lot of money for new-gen PC, but without knowing that I should really go for AMD.
I will make the switch to AMD as soon as it’s justifiable, but I’m too lazy to deal with second-hand resale and it’s hard to justify a new GPU when I still have the current gen, but from wrong manufacturer.
I had numerous problems with Wayland when I had an NVIDIA video card. Since I switched to an AMD video card, it has been a blissful experience. Wayland now works perfectly.
Ooh, you are right, I can actually file bug reports or try to fix it myself now that I switched to FOSS from Windows. Tbh that didn’t really occur to me, since I was switching only like a month ago. I’ll look into it, so far I suspect that it’s actually covered by one of those troubleshooting cases mentioned in their FAQ, and I’m not really confident enough to start recompiling libraries with additional flags. Especially since I’m on Nobara and don’t want to break anything, AFAIK that OS is pretty customised from the start and figuring out what I can safely touch isn’t something I have the guts for yet.
A few years ago I was having obscure audio problems on Ubuntu so I tried replacing pulseaudio with pipewire. I was feeling pretty cocky with using the package manager so I tried
sudo apt install pipewire
Installed successfully, realized nothing changed, figured maybe I had to get rid of pulseaudio to make it stick.
sudo apt remove pulseaudio
Just two commands. Instant black screen, PC reboots into the terminal interface. No GUI. Rebooting again just brings me back to the terminal.
I fixed it eventually, but I’m really not very computer literate despite using Linux, so I was sweating bullets for a minute that I might have bricked it irreversibly or something.
Can’t say I have any interesting stories. Most of mine are just the head-scratching “I don’t know why that didn’t work; guess I need to reinstall” kind of story. Like enabling encrypted LVM on install and suddenly nothing is visible to UEFI. Or trying to switch desktop environments using tasksel and now I have a blank screen on next reboot. That lame kind of stuff.
My coworker though… he was mindlessly copy/pasting commands and did the classic rm -rf $UNSETVARIABLE while in / and nuked months of migrated data on his newly built system. He hadn’t even set up backups yet. Management was upset but lenient.
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