For immutable image type setups like SteamOS, it totally makes sense, but I'm loathe to have a bunch of different versions of libraries around because Flatpak A still depends on them and hasn't been updated yet - but I'm not the target audience if I'm actually reading the list of everything pacman (or apt, yum, etc.) wants to update and actively reviewing and deciding what I'm about to proceed with. (Looking at you, holding back Mesa for months because of that SteamVR regression.)

Containerisation is potentially nice, for sure, for all the same reasons Docker or Podman are. It's also potentially a pain in the butt for all the same reasons, if you have something that really needs a whole lot of permissions in the first place. 😅

I remember the days when Windows Vista(?)'s incessant UAC prompts just pushed people into turning it off entirely, and while my (mostly Steam Deck) experience with Flatpak has never been that bad, I've had to mess with Flatseal more than I want to, for things that 'just worked' on my desktop. I think giving emulators access to Bluetooth and USB gamepads was one of them - minor stuff, but the kind of stuff you'd expect an emulator to have the appropriate permissions for out of the box.

tl;dr, Flatpak is a great option, but I'm not moving from distro-native package management any time soon, and that's okay, because it doesn't have to be an either-or, and that's why Linux (and BSD, etc.) are awesome. 🩷

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Quoting: williamjcmOh, nice, it also has that fix for what broke SteamVR in earlier 25.3.x versions. I'll be able to unpin the mesa packages, then.

Was just going to post that, too - looks like I'll get to test that a bit later today! 👍❤️

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Quoting: williamjcm25.3.0/1 had a bug that forced me to downgrade to 25.2.7 if I wanted to use SteamVR, so let's hope that one's fixed too.

Also had to do the same thing here. Not in 25.3.2 but it looks like there's a Merge Request open with a fix!

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/836#issuecomment-3665458999 [External Link] -> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/38987 [External Link]

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Quoting: ChrisznixNow that i came to love it - can anyone forecast what this would mean for a fork like librewolf?
They surely would take that out, will they? Can they?

Yes: https://chaos.social/@librewolf/115716906957137196 [External Link]

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Quoting: tpauI wish we could replace this with element&matrix.

I used to think the same, but I kind of gave up on that fight. Technical issues with maintaining my own server coupled with how long this meta-issue has been open [External Link], plus their list of paying customers (who, of course, really drive their development)... honestly, good old Mumble is probably still my favourite, with just running my own Nextcloud instance with Talk/Spreed what I'm currently trialling.

I still deleted my Discord account entirely last month, though - my friends are fine just pinging me directly on Steam, which apparently has similar drop-in persistent voice channels in group chats, now?! It's still janky in the same way that the Steam client itself is janky, but still. :happy:

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Quoting: tohur

Quoting: torkel104Can you toggle vsync yet?

For gaming on KDE that LONG been fixed and as far as the desktop if you have VRR it uses that if you have it turned on and if not it uses Vsync.. I don't understand though why on Earth you would want to turn that off on the desktop itself... would be a screen tearing mess

Yeah, I have a... 'FreeSync Premium' monitor and I just set the 'Adaptive sync' setting to Automatic and honestly kind of just forgot about it. Games and such tend to just work with their Vsync settings 'on', and I can see in my monitor's overlay the refresh bouncing around as needed, no visible tearing I can see.

Even watching videos in Firefox (LibreWolf), VLC, or mpv, no tearing, even for stuff shot at 24/25fps, provided it's full screen. I haven't paid close enough attention to see how it handles smaller windows and which takes priority.

The big caveat here though, of course, is: AMD GPU. :wink:

I've heard nVidia has gotten better but it sounds like here that it's not quite caught up.

Personal nVidia-versus-AMD anecdote time:

Spoiler, click me

AMD sucked on Linux back in the bad old days of fglrx, but since the newer 'radeon' and 'amdgpu' drivers, it's worlds better.

I got burned owning a GTX 980 back in the day (still no firmware for reclocking under Nouveau!), swore I'd never buy anything nVidia ever again, and while laptop shopping was a royal pain (ended up with an Asus 'AMD Advantage Edition' G513QY that's now my wife's... and has the terrible ACPI implementation-slash-bug [External Link], that at least is much less noticeable under Linux than the Windows it came with), and there were some initial firmware/DisplayCore related bugs with my RX 9070 XT and launching SteamVR, for the most part, new-ish AMD GPUs and Plasma 6 on Wayland have been awesome, and actually feel a lot more responsive than the exact same system logged into an Xorg session (again - was my workaround for the now-fixed SteamVR bug :grin: )

I suspect that might have been the 60Hz vs. 165Hz + VRR thing, now, come to think of it.

Quoting: ShmerlFor lulz, people are suggesting CDE for those who want to be stuck with X11: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ [External Link]

You joke, but CDE's one heck of an aesthetic. :wub:

Quoting: syylk

Quoting: MayeulC

Quoting: syylkviewport/video memory sharing

Now I don't understand this. We already have dma-buf.

Screensharing / screencasting still don't work natively in Wayland, while it works on X11.

Examples:
- Discord streaming your game screen to the other people in your voice call;
- Teams sharing your screen or a window it doesn't "own" while in a videocall;
- OBS capturing stuff from other program's GUIs and casting in Twitch or other streaming service.

I'm sure there are not the only edge cases. And I'm equally sure there are workarounds. But this is the behavior out of the box for me (Nobara 43, Plasma 6.5.2 on Wayland, ofc).

I understand program isolation and sandboxing. But if the walls of the sandbox are too tall, then one program cannot grab what another is showing, and redirect the stream appropriately.

And this is what I mean for lack of feature parity with X11. X11 can do all of the above by letting one software somehow peek at the private graphic structures of another.

Now, I understand this isn't the raw dmabuf sharing you get from X11, but functionally this... hasn't really been an issue for me for at least a couple years I feel, now - the catch is that you need the corresponding XDG Desktop Portal (the little pop-up that lets you pick what monitor or window to share) installed as well - e.g., on Arch with Plasma 6 (and in fact, comes with both the full-fat 'plasma' group and 'plasma-meta'), it's:
extra/xdg-desktop-portal-kde 6.5.3-1 (566.9 KiB 2.2 MiB) [plasma] (Installed)
    A backend implementation for xdg-desktop-portal using Qt/KF5

• Discord was a bit of an issue for a while - Vesktop (Vencord) [External Link] worked around that for a bit until they updated the official app.


• Teams, mostly the official Linux build was abandoned - Teams-for-Linux [External Link] wraps the webapp in Electron, I believe, and was my go-to for the last ~2-3 years I needed it for work, though loading the web version in a WebKit / Chromium-based browser also worked in a pinch.


• OBS works great now, but there's one more layer in between: Pipewire, which I can also wholeheartedly recommend now as a Pulseaudio replacement (and honestly, it replaces JACK pretty well, too!). You can add whole-screen or specific window captures to your scene - the ones that have '(Pipewire)' in the name - and Pipewire then calls the xdg-desktop-portal picker. It even remembers what you picked for next time, usually, and at least for my setup, doesn't prompt again on subsequent launches for at least the full screen capture I have set up.

You used to need obs-vkcapture [External Link] before they got the Pipewire + xdg-desktop-portal combo supported, and that did work for me as well, but it's definitely a little clunkier in having to prefix your game/app with it.

Not being too familiar with Nobara personally, it looks like something downstream from Fedora, but their install wiki [External Link] here says this for OBS (including vkcpature!):

OBS Studio specifically from Nobara also comes with several plugins pre-installed that standard OBS from flatpak does not:

obs-studio-plugin-browser (Browser Source)
obs-studio-plugin-backgroundremoval (Camera Background Removal)
obs-studio-plugin-media-playlist-source (video/audio playlist aka VLC Playlist)
obs-studio-plugin-distroav (NDI)
obs-studio-plugin-vkcapture (Vulkan Capture for both 64 and 32 bit)

Additionally, Nobara comes with the OBS Gamecapture vulkan environment variable enabled globally, meaning you dont have to set any environment variables when capturing Vulkan game footage.
To install the Nobara native version of OBS and its plugins you can do so via the 'Recommended Additions' section of the Nobara Welcome app, or search for obs-studio in the Nobara Package Manager under the 'Packages' tab.

...and their plasma-workspace spec [External Link] includes xdg-desktop-portal-kde, so it sounds like it was supposed to all work for you out-of-the-box?

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Quoting: mr-victoryWhat is "ID", an internal UUID or the name I pick on the UI?

Looks like a UUID that gets used for their auto-generated and managed X.509 certificates that encrypt the connection: https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde/-/blob/4e53bcdd5d4c28bd9fefd114b807ce35d7b3373e/core/kdeconnectconfig.cpp#L375 [External Link]

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Looks like the Google Play version's already updated for me, and there is an option for allowlisting specific Wifi networks rather than the default 'any'.

However, it looks like Arch hasn't caught up just yet ( https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/kdeconnect/ [External Link] )

EDIT: While grabbing the PKGBUILD to see about manually building the update for now, it looks like they're backporting the patch in the already-available 25.08.3-2.

From the article-linked advisory:
https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde/-/commit/4e53bcdd5d4c28bd9fefd114b807ce35d7b3373e [External Link]
->
https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde/-/commit/1d757349.patch [External Link]

And then in Arch specifically:
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/kdeconnect/-/commit/08ea078c37bccf36079b7b76e876104618c5e586 [External Link]

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So - looking into it a little deeper, that particular bug fix looks to be this ticket: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/14087 [External Link] and that sounds like a GTK / Gnome + Vulkan issue that they're working around.

The bug I'm looking for, however, is here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1856 [External Link] and, good news, but it sounds like that did get a fix recently: https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/[email protected]/ [External Link] ... in the kernel. :tongue: That patch shows up in the changelog for kernel 6.17.8 [External Link] (search "drm/amd/display: Fix incorrect return of vblank enable on unconfigured crtc"), so either way I have something to test, even if it turned out to be unrelated to the Mesa update here.

Carry on! :heart:

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amdgpu: ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout, in vr when opening apps

Oh my gosh, is this the bug where the first time launching SteamVR with a newer AMD GPU causes a freeze and GPU reset? I thought that was a firmware / DisplayCore thing, and at least after that first crash & reset, it would work fine for subsequent launches that session.

Looks like I have something to test, later. :heart:

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