Quoting: ShmerlImproving native Linux development tools could also go a long way. For example Valve can develop an advanced but actually easier to use than gdb debugger for Linux. Just an idea. It's one of the complaints I've heard from Windows developers who are trying to learn Linux tools.

Hah! I used to think GDB was just the worst, but it's my go-to debugger now. With a few dozen lines of scripting you can at least soften the annoying parts (can't just click in an IDE to set breakpoints, etc), while greatly amplifying the parts where it excels. There have been a few cases now where I've been able to automate replicating a nasty crash with scripting, and I'm not convinced I would have solved the bug without it. As a bonus I can use it with my dumb retro-dev projects for GBA or Genesis, and it runs basically everywhere.

Do not bring GDB up with MSVC devs though, ever... Basically every conversation I've had where people ask about debugging on Linux go something along the lines:
MSVC user: How do you debug in Linux?!
Me: You just gotta use GDB. You can script it to do X/Y/Z pretty easily.
MSVC user: The MSVC debugger can do that. GDB is the worst, why would I want to use that?
Me: Right, but weren't you asking about Lin...
MSVC user: Moses went up on the mount and received the perfect debugger from God himself...
Me: I mean I've used MSVC's debugger, and it's fine and all, but weren't you asking about Lin...
MSVC user: ... and they built a beautiful temple around the debugger and called it MSVC.
Me: Well... I tried. -_-

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Quoting: chimpyDoes anyone have experience with using Gamescope? I know I can install it on my Manjaro box through the AUR, but will it replace my current compositor or is it some thing I can install side by side and call on a per game basis within Steam? Thanks in advance for anyone with info.

Yeah, it's kinda neat! Basically it runs a private XWayland server, then launches a game inside that so it renders to a "virtual screen" of sorts. It kinda solves the problem of games that launch into a window when you want to force them to be fullscreen (or the other way around). It can force certain resolutions then scale them up to the desired screensize, etc. Basically it's kinda like the experience of running a game in an emulator, but it's for native games. Useful and neat, but not a killer feature unless you are building a handheld gaming PC perhaps. ;)

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Quoting: elmapulif we gonna abstract everything again, we might as well just go back to openGL instead.

the same goes for dx12 against 11 and the previous ones.

Yeah, I kinda agree. It's not like the old APIs are going away any time soon. They are still good for learning concepts, and being able to tackle them one at a time.

Quoting: DrMcCoyA few years ago, I did write a simple Vulkan renderer just to get a hang of Vulkan, starting with getting a triangle to work. I loosely followed https://vulkan-tutorial.com/Introduction [External Link] , IIRC.

And yes, it was nearly exactly 1000 lines to get a triangle to show up. Granted, extending it to do more didn't add thousands more, but it is definitely more verbose than OpenGL.

Well, to expand on some of my thoughts. I do think Vulkan probably will make for a terrible first introduction to graphics APIs. The joke that it takes 1000 lines of code to draw a triangle in Vulkan and 1001 for a whole engine is not far off. Joking aside, I think it was about 500 until I could clear the screen, 800 to draw a triangle, and 1200 for my whole renderer. So it's definitely front loaded with the complexity, and that's kinda what I mean that It's frustrating that Khronos doesn't just make a swapchain + init library. 99% of GL programs shared the same "default" init and nobody really complained about that. There was always EGL if you needed something more complicated, and Vulkan is even worse than that. :p

Also, I think Vulkan-tutorial had it's place and served it well, but I do find it sort of frustrating that it's still around, basically unmodified many years later. I also started with that when learning Vk, and it pretty quickly became obvious that it was teaching you to implement a tutorial in the "hello world" sense. It made you structure your renderer in an extremely rigid and awkward way that was basically unusable for a real project. I gave up about 1/3 of the way through, restructured what I already had and filled in the rest from other docs/sources. Bah! Unfortunately I'm not sure I have anything truly constructive to say here. It's not as though I'm spending my time writing a better tutorial, and don't want to spend too much effort tearing down someone who did. I do think it needs some updates though.

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write these three lines of code to make a window, and then 2000 more to clear it

Hrm, I'm kind of annoyed with the persistence of this mindset.:unsure: My entire Vk renderer is ~1200 sloc compared to my GL3 renderer at ~900 sloc. Yes, it's more complicated, and I would have been pretty lost if it was my first rodeo. It doesn't take thousands of lines of code to draw a triangle with Vulkan though, and I'm kind of annoyed that people keep saying so and discouraging others to even try it. :(

That said, there's a good 200-300 sloc of any Vk renderer that's just sort of "free" with GL. You don't have to carefully initialize a device to get sane defaults, and you need very little effort to get a framebuffer + sync. Khronos could make a reasonable library to simplify those parts of the API for 99% of the use cases I feel.

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I welcome the competition, especially with how open source friendly they have been recently.

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So I used to be a big Mac nerd until a few years ago, and even with several times the market share, the Mac never got a critical mass of games either. Ports of AAA games were rare and often delayed by years. Indie games were more likely to have day 1 support, but coverage was still really patchy. I jumped ship to Linux right before Proton, and I considered it to be about the same "fine, but not great" platform for games as the Mac. Even in the early days, Proton instantly made it a better gaming platform than the Mac I thought.

On the other hand, Proton is really running a fine line as Microsoft could really screw them over if they wanted to. They will also be playing catch up indefinitely. I just can't imagine the Steam Deck's initial price point being able to cover their ongoing costs to keep compatibility with new titles high. On the other hand, I'm baffled why they would want to discourage native ports as it would almost certainly improve battery life if not a small performance bump.

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Quoting: EagleDeltaIt's not a derivative or fork. Unlike most other alternatives DE's, this is just a pair of GNOME extensions that sit on top of GNOME Shell and can be disabled if you don't like them.

Yup. I really appreciate that too. I put Pop on my work machine at some point to give it a try when swapping hard drives. I liked it enough to bring it home when I upgraded my personal machine, and then bought one of their laptops for work too. :) That said... I don't like Cosmic as it stands right now. Feels much less than the sum of its parts compared to their mostly vanilla Gnome desktop before. I like that I can just trivially turn it off and then maybe try it again at some point in the future.

Why don't I like it? It feels very v1.0. In Gnome all you need to do is hit the super key, and you have access to just about everything through the activity view. Interact with all your windows, launch stuff, search for stuff, etc. Cosmic splits all that up into different views and their sum seems less than the Gnome activities view. :-\ It seemed like a major impetus for Cosmic was Gnome 40 changing from a vertical to horizontal orientation. I did some Gnome 40 beta testing on bug day and liked it well enough, but I couldn't care less which direction things go. It was the "same" to me. :p

According to their blog post, I'm not their target audience, and that's fine. I generally prefer leaving things on defaults over endless customization (less friction is good), I don't see the problem with launching apps from the activities view (not sure why the zoom transition would bother me since it's the same way I normally switch tasks anyway), and I use universal search sometimes (it's useful, and apparently highly customizable if you care about that). Instead, I might be the prototypical Gnome user. Sure, I've been developing for Linux and other Unix machines for several decades, but I really just want something straightforward that makes easy stuff easy. Gnome feels like home now after leaving OS X due to Apple's increasingly developer hostile attitudes.

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Uff. My cousin-in-law is an engineering prof there and seems pretty mad that the IRB allowed this. His words had more swearing though... Not clear if he knows more details than the article above though.

Just in case people aren't familiar, an IRB, or Institutional Review Board, is the group that review research proposals and get to say "no that's silly and/or unethical".

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I've spent so many hours playing various versions of picross... I thought I had rid myself of that particular vice. Noooooooo!

After playing a few puzzles, I have to say this is a really nicely made Picross game. The UX is smooth and clean (a lot of Picross games are frustrating to actually interact with), and everything about the game is really nice and juicy. This is all very unfortunate... for my time.

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"If you own a Raspberry Pi 4, will you be testing out the Vulkan support?"

I already have. :D https://twitter.com/slembcke/status/1326922881385836545/photo/1 [External Link] I had a mild notion I would modify my GL 3 renderer someday to work with GLES 3 on the Pi4 just for funsies. It is super, super cool to be writing Vulkan code for my desktop machines and having it "just work" on the Pi. It also provides some pointless, but nice validation for my excercise to add a Vulkan renderer to my game instead of finishing "important" stuff like gameplay. :p

The memory bandwidth performance is not great as expected, so don't expect HD gaming on the Pi to be a thing. Like even vkGears which is just a screen clear + some simple flat shaded meshes can't do it. On the other hand, the ALU performance is surprisingly good. 720p @60 fps seems entirely plausible for a lot of games. Apparently the vkQuake 1/2/3 versions all run just fine.

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