You’ve already addressed the few ideas I had. I’ll try to get a better look at the logs once I’m home.
Edit: what happens if you use the arch testing repos instead? Maybe there’s some software that’s been updated in the test repos, that’s currently behaving badly with your system and it’s just unfortunate timing?
Hm, I’ve had this problem since my initial setup about 2-3 months ago, I think that if there’s something wrong with the software in the repos, it would’ve been fixed by now and I wouldn’t be the only one having this problem, right?
But of course, if you want I can give the testing repos a try :)
It was super cool to see the GFX hardware support increase the last few years. Now we just need that GFX software from intel / amd / nvidia that is available on windows, taking advantage of that newly supported hardware. We have some, but it would be nice to see parity. Linux already has to translate the games to play, would be nice to get a little boost on the software / feature side.
Edit. By software I’m talking about in game features.
Yeah, the sole reason I don’t have linux on my old laptop is that lenovo has completely proprietary video drivers for it. I’m talking “manufacturer’s installers don’t think there’s a video card there” proprietary.
Edit. By software I’m talking about in game features.
Like FSR and such? That’s available on Linux (FSR 1.x is integrated into SteamOS for compositor-level upscaling). AFAIK AMD does not officially support FSR on Linux but it’s written in a way that it should work with minor integration work. It’s written with cross-platform support in mind, given that it’s targeting PlayStation etc. als well.
Don’t misunderstand what a server means, however. Just because something is called a server doesn’t mean it’s not made for the desktop. It’s a technical term that doesn’t necessarily relate to networking, it might just relate to stuff like inter-process communication.
However, Wayland is designed for the desktop environment. It’s like the main reason why it replaces X11, which was designed for terminals.
My comment was mostly meant as a joke. I’m aware most of them use their networking capabilities for IPC and being able to use them remotely is just a cool feature resulting from that (except X11).
Linux is an everything OS with whatever features you want/need. Do you need a hardened enterprise server? Linux got you. Do you need a user friendly OS for even non-technical people? Linux got you. Do you need something that can do a little of everything? Believe it or not, Linux got you.
I know this is a joke comment but Linux is for sure an enterprise kernel first and foremost. It did not start that way but that is how it has been developed and managed for many years now. Maybe the most incorrect thing anybody has ever said on record in the computer industry is when Linus said Linux was “not going to be anything big and professional”.
Linux distributions, which are conceived and managed totally independently from the kernel are available for every niche. Many of them are desktop and “consumer” oriented. With many Linux distributions, I would say that it is more accurate that they are hobbiest oriented more than what Microsoft would mean be “consumer”.
embedded windows in the japanese arcade scene has been working fine so far. for example, most of bandais arcade machines in the past like 7 yaers or so basically run embedded windows.
it was a benefit to non arcade users because a majority of games that were on those machines eventually got pc versions, or a new game on pc for the first time (e.g Tekken 7, Taiko No Tatsujin), where historically, theyve basically never been on PC officially.
So let me get this straight – your defense of Microsoft, in this instance, is Japanese cabinet makers, making arcade machines, where the user doesn’t interact with the operating system in the slightest bit? A Japan that still faxes even in modernity? That’s your defense of MS? I bet they aren’t even using a special build of windows — just the desktop schlock with some shitty 3rd party app on top.
im not defending mocrosoft at a whole, im just saying windows embedded isnt as bad as you actually think it is, and consumers benefitted from it more than it not
A Japan that still faxes even in modernity?
what a country does has barely anything to do with rhis context. thats like saying the U.S is shit because they didnt have tap to pay until Covid happened, whoch other countries have been usong for a decade before, or having terrible public transportation and internet infrastructure, and in the latter case, basically invented it.
That’s your defense of MS? I bet they aren’t even using a special build of windows — just the desktop schlock with some shitty 3rd party app on top.
that shows how ignorant you are with it because all of the games arent directly ported. look into the efforts required to port Gundam Extreme Versus 2 on teknoparrot. if it was a native game, then they wouldnt have to jump through as many hoops as the game doesnt have a PC port (nor any of its predecessors have ever had one)
I don’t know that Microsoft has any business trying to make Windows support these devices better…
Windows is entirely built around two pillars:
Enterprise support for corporations, and team machine management
Entirely open compatibility so they can run almost any hardware you put into it, plug into it, and backwards compatibility for all that for as long as possible.
Portable game machines are not an enterprise product. Nor do you care about broad hardware support or upgradability. Nor do you care about plugging in your parallel port printer from 1985. Nor do you care about running your ancient vb6 code to run your production machines over some random firewire card.
Windows’ goal is entirely oppositional to portable gaming devices. It makes almost no sense for them to try to support it, as it’d go against their entire model. For things like these, you want a thin, optimized-over-flexible, purpose built OS that does one thing: play games. Linux is already built to solve this problem way better than Windows.
But, Microsoft will probably be stupid enough to try anyway.
Could be a defective library that’s used by many apps. Glibc, etc. That said, if something like this is that broken, others should be complaining about it too.
How many actual PC handhelds are there?
The link in the article that promises “plenty” of handheld examples talks about Steam deck, Asus, and… the switch. And that’s it. And obviously the switch is not a PC handheld, so… ?
There’s quite a few. Steam deck and Asus, as you mentioned, but there’s also AyaNeo, GPD, OneXPlayer, Aokzoe, Lenovo, etc. And many of these brands have several different models, if you’re counting individual products.
Anecdotally, I have an Aya Neo. I know a few people with a few of the others brands. There’s a decently sized Aya Neo Discord that I’m part of, and I would assume the other brands have something similar. There’s definitely use of non-Steam handhelds, or there wouldn’t be a growing market for them.
I personally love it, and yes it can with a dock similar to the Switch’s. It’s ran every game I’ve thrown at it, and I’ve an original 2021 version. There’s a few quirks, like the joysticks will sometimes just decide to not do a random direction, but recalibrating is easy. Obviously the resolution quality isn’t as stellar as if you were running a pc meant output to a monitor, but on the built in screen everything is crispy. It’s decently heavy though, so my baby wrists get tired after a while. But yeah it’s great, playing whatever wherever is pretty ace.
Not sure what you mean – they all run Linux. The images just have the video hardware configs baked in with a preconfigured user and start script. You would be amazed at how easy that is to do, all things considered. I have a few kiosk configurations I created for the two Home Assistant panels I have in my house.
And, most importantly, money bags to subsidise the hell out of it. Let’s not kid ourselves here, the damn low price is one of the main reasons why people buy the SD rather than the ~2x more expensive alternatives.
No, we have been making our own platform toolkit (libcosmic), which is built upon iced-rs. We are using this both for our wayland compositor applets, and our desktop applications.
iced? Interesting. I though it’s still pretty experimental. There’s no official documentation yet, right? When I was looking at Rust UI libraries Yew and Leptos looked more mature. I guess you’re confident iced have enough backing and isn’t going anywhere.
How do you find working in Rust on a bigger UI project? Any issues?
Iced is a lower level GUI library, similar to what GDK is to GTK. We built our own COSMIC-themed GUI toolkit around iced, which is called libcosmic. As we’ve gotten more and more widgets and application logic developed, actual application development with libcosmic is a breeze. Even if you do have to create a custom widget, it’s much easier to creating custom widgets in GTK. We’re able to develop much faster than we ever could with GTK now.
Yew and Leptos aren’t comparable since they’re not native GUI toolkits. These are for web developers rather than application development. It wouldn’t be possible to use this for developing layer shell applets for COSMIC, either.
Why develop libcosmic around iced instead of going with something else modern that’s easy to develop in such as Flutter? Iced/libcosmic is probably a bit more efficient resource-wise but that probably wasn’t a huge point.
That would compromise our vision of a GUI platform built from the ground up in Rust. It would also not be feasible to use Flutter for applet development. We can easily make modifications directly to iced for all the Wayland integrations that we need in COSMIC, as the iced code base is very lean, and written in Rust.
Got it. So being written in Rust is one of the requirements. Makes sense. Flutter is great for self-contained applications but we can definitely use another sane native toolkit besides Qt that has wider applicability.
The GTK4 project was cancelled for multiple reasons. We originally began working on Relm4 to use GTK4 for COSMIC applets. While others on the team were also experimenting with alternative Rust GUI libraries.
It required a lot of effort to patch GTK4 to support the Wayland layer shell protocol. Getting those patches merged into GTK4 was also taking a much longer time. There were long delays between code reviews; and they also wanted a series of much larger refactoring changes to be made to GTK4 before exposing the layer shell feature. It was much easier to get layer-shell working with iced, as it is a much leaner and concise code base.
GTK does not support fractional scaling, which is something we want our applets to support on day one. This was one of our major concerns. A concern that didn’t apply to iced.
It was also exceedingly difficult to create custom widgets with GTK in Rust. Even those of us with years of experience considered it to be unreasonably difficult. So it was not feasible to expect new hires on the team to be able to comfortably develop COSMIC components with it. In comparison, our team was able to develop custom widgets with iced with much less effort and with greater flexibility, so the demand for iced grew stronger.
At the end of the day, GTK is not a Rust toolkit, and its API is cumbersome to adapt to Rust. Use of GTK would always be a compromise that lessens the developer experience for COSMIC app and applet development. A compromise that would eventually require us to rewrite everything in a native Rust GUI library the moment it would become possible to do so.
Since we are developing a desktop environment from the ground up anyway, we decided that there would be much more value for our time if we contribute to the Rust ecosystem and utilize iced to make a fully featured GUI library for application development.
Makes sense, thank you for the detailed answer! By the way, I saw that gtk apps will be automatically themed, is that only gtk3 or also gtk4? Edit: typo
This sounds really cool. I don’t see any documentation for libcosmic. Are you planning to promote it as an alternative toolkit for building desktop apps or do you see it more as an internal tool strictly for COSMIC DE development?
What’s the accessibility story for blind users for example?
Is it going to be suitable to use with proper bindings with other languages or it’s not an interest at this time or are there plans to support things like that and stability of apis, etc?
You can generate documentation by running cargo doc and browsing the generated web pages in target/doc. There are also examples in the examples directory of libcosmic, as well as a design demo example which is a WIP.
libcosmic is an alternative toolkit for building desktop applications and layer shell applets. It wouldn’t make much sense to build a toolkit only for ourselves. It’s the best way to develop layer shell applets for COSMIC, and other Wayland compositors that support the layer shell protocol.
I had a 3700x that was doing that sort of thing. It seemed mostly random, but moving big files would crash it pretty often. It ran memtest86 for 3 days no problem. I replaced part by part, and it ended up being the CPU. I’d bought it second hand so it may have been abused.
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