(I promise you this statement is related. It’s a little bit of history on BTRFS/ReiserFS though. BTRFS actually has support for in-place conversion from EXT and… ReiserFS, as it was kind of a competitor and the same engineers worked in ReiserFS)
I think pretty much anyone buying one those laptops who wants Linux already knows how to install it and let’s be honest if it ships with any given distro I think most would install their preference over it anyway
I mean…you’re mostly right, but I don’t know how setting a few flags like -H,-W,-h,-w is that big of an issue. I agree lutris and maybe heroic (I don’t use) have frontends for these,but I would hardly that “way better”.
it’s incredible how out of touch this community is with the average end user. I’d wager that MOST people don’t know how, much less want to set custom flags for every one of their games. Believe it or not people actually like using nice GUIs and rely on simple intuitive frontends, and it’s a massive failure on Valve’s part considering they’re the largest, most mainstream PC gaming platform.
Nobody running a FOSS third party launcher is an average end user. Also, people routinely add flags to typical games even on Windows (e.g. -skiplauncher)… It’s really not that big a deal.
Yeah. I don’t know what those flags are… Yet.
The moment a game launch fails in that particular way, I will be diving all the way into that particular deep end.
I picked up a Black Friday Lenovo ChromeBook (Flex 3) for US $160 and use it essentially the same way you describe. You can load up a Debian-based Linux environment within ChromeOS. It’s basically my web-capable thin client.
X11 and Wayland are just protocols. These protocols are used to abstract the window drawing from the actual hardware and runtime environment as much as reasonably possible - because nobody wants to maintain 3215 versions of their app for different runtime environments. So in order to be shown on the screen an app needs to implement either the X11 or the Wayland protocol (or both!).
The piece of software that is on the other side depends on whether the app is using X11 or Wayland. For the sake of simplicity let's assume that the app does only support one of those. If the app supports Wayland then it will try to connect to a Wayland compositor. The compositor implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app. If the app supports X11 then it will try to connect to a X server and take the role of an X client. This is (on Linux, essentially) always X.org*. X.org also implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app.
Unless you're running a Wayland compositor, then it will connect to XWayland which passes through the window to your compositor.
Wayland compositors have full control over the apps while the abilities of apps are purposefully restricted.
A window manager is just another regular, boring, old X client connecting to the X server. It doesn't actually abstract anything. It can move windows because the X11 protocol allows it to, but any other X client could just as well move all other windows around, read all user input to all other windows and even move the mouse around as it pleases.
So, to be specific, there is no mouse pointer bug in Virtualbox while using Wayland. There is a mouse pointer bug affecting specific Wayland compositors, likely because they enforce GPU hardware acceleration that is lacking in either your VM or the Linux kernel because of missing drivers. Try using a different compositor, (re)installing Virtualbox Guest Additions with the correct version on the guest system and/or check whether hardware acceleration is enabled for the VM and has enough video memory.
The application needs to speak a protocol to be able to use it. If you use a X wm your apps need to be able to talk X’s protocol to work, if you use a Wayland compositor your apps need to be able to talk Wayland’s protocol (or run on Xwayland, which is basically an X server that runs inside Wayland).
The wm/compositor abstractions only work if your apps know how to use them via the correct protocol
They are themselves abstraction layers for the apps that are made for them. Software has many levels of abstraction from what you see on the screen all the way down to hardware.
Typically the abstraction to draw elemnts inside a app window is in the application framework, like GTK, Qt, Electron (chromium), etc.
This is also why apps built with the same framework typically have the same problem on wayland (looking at you, electron).
The abstractions you are thinking of is not in the window manager, which only controls things outside of the main app window, like tiling, border, window top bar, etc.
Yes, part of my confusion was simply mixing up the job of the app frameworks/gui toolkits for the wm. It was weird to me that some apps like firefox had to provide wayland support by themselves and couldn’t simply rely on abstraction layers from whathever they’re coded in. However, I looked for some info, and found out that firefox renders some widgets on its own, and now it makes sense that they need to provide wayland support.
If you’ve ever had your WM crash, then you may lose the decorations on your windows, the ability to minimize/maximize them or move them around, but the windows themselves still stick around. Restarting the WM brings that all back as well
For X there was only one protocol, so they all wrote for x.
This also allowed some hacky things to be done that are questionable from a security standpoint afaik.
I pretty new to Linux gaming but I love it. Currently playing games directly from Steam and Blizzard games via Bottles. Please help me out with a few questions. What is the use case for gamescope? What is the use case for Heroic? Is it instead of Bottles/Lutris?
Game scope is a micro-compositor, it’s how the Steamdeck handles games and probably steam. Basically the settings there, you can have the game in 1080p but upscaled by FSR/DLSS to 4k. The difference is that only the game is upscaled, not the whole system
Heroic is a launcher for Epic, Amazon, and GOG
Yes, it can be seen as an alternative to Bottles/Lutris but the stores and libraries are baked in
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