Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: RichardYao

Quoting: damarrinI'd be happier with snaps if at least they started faster. 10 secs for FF from an NVMe drive, 40 seconds from a spinning drive in a recent Ubunt is a joke.

The downside of duplicating shared libraries is that it does not take advantage of the system page cache (or ARC for ZFS), so load times are higher. :/

From what I heard, the main problem with load times is that a cold Snap package first needs to be decompressed (fully, I guess?) before it is launched. But I guess duplicated libraries would also affect page cache.

However, that doesn't need to be the case. If the runtime uses similar shared libraries with other packages, it would be possible to deduplicate that stuff either on the package technology level (like Flatpak runtimes) or on the filesystem level with online or offline dedupe and reflinks. I don't know enough about Snap to make strong claims about how effectively or ineffectively it uses these methods. Considering Flatpaks seemingly don't have the same cold start delays, I am guessing at least not very effectively.

By all likelihood it's the decompression. Shared libs and cache sounds very implausible, for one it does not take 10s+ to load some shared libs and secondly Firefox as a deb/rpm already bundled special versions of the libs anyway so it loaded only a limited number of shared libs.

The old deb contained these bundled libs for Firefox:
 
/usr/lib/firefox/gmp-clearkey/0.1/libclearkey.so
/usr/lib/firefox/gtk2/libmozgtk.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libfreeblpriv3.chk
/usr/lib/firefox/libfreeblpriv3.so
/usr/lib/firefox/liblgpllibs.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libmozavcodec.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libmozavutil.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libmozgtk.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libmozsandbox.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libmozsqlite3.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libmozwayland.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libnspr4.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libnss3.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libnssckbi.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libnssutil3.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libplc4.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libplds4.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libsmime3.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libsoftokn3.chk
/usr/lib/firefox/libsoftokn3.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libssl3.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so
/usr/lib/firefox/minidump-analyzer
/usr/lib/firefox/omni.ja
/usr/lib/firefox/plugin-container

Granted the snap Firefox contains those (which is about 256MB) and an additional 65M of libs that otherwise would be shared.

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Quoting: SchattenspiegelRemember the time basically every major application had a .deb package available and most the disk space was available for games and data and stuff, because applications where small and started nearly instantly and... actually...worked...?

I mean seriously, what is the goal of this? To accelerate climate change by being intentionally wasteful? To incite social unrest by creating an atmosphere comparable to a traffic jam whenever one opens an application?

The goal is most likely to create a shared common framework for game devs to write games for so they don't have to bother with which versions of a specific library exists in your or mine distribution of the week, and to sandbox the whole thing so that it doesn't matter that the bundled libs are old and insecure.

Now I'm by no means defending snaps here, I hate the "new" type of distribution regardless of if it's snap, flatpack, appimage, docker or whater. But if there are two applications in particular where it at least makes some sense then Firefox and Steam is it since both where already bundling custom compiled versions of various dependencies so the overhead and different vs a plain deb isn't that much.

Of course unbundling Firefox would have been the preferred way IMHO but I think solving world peace and world hunger would be the easier option (and also far more worthy a cause).

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Quoting: PikoloSteam as a snap package? That is very unwelcome - I hate applications updating behind my back. Mozilla provide an official Firefox PPA, but I hope Canonical don't mess with the Steam APT package.

The Mozilla Team PPA is not by Mozilla, it's by a voluntary group inside Canonical (or at least they where some years ago). Mozilla are the ones that build the snap for Ubuntu.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: whizse

Quoting: frykBut what I never want to go back to, is having to read all that conversation on screen. Voice-Over please :-)

Hah! I'm very much the opposite. Zero patience for voice. I finish reading. I click to skip. :tongue:

What I never get is why they voice the replies that my character does, I mean I read the entire reply when choosing to click it so why did I just have to spend time hearing it as well?

Especially since they always get someone to do the voice that doesn't sound like me at all. Terrible research on their part! :grin:

Hard to tell since I don't know how you sound ;)

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Quoting: whizse

Quoting: frykBut what I never want to go back to, is having to read all that conversation on screen. Voice-Over please :-)

Hah! I'm very much the opposite. Zero patience for voice. I finish reading. I click to skip. :tongue:

What I never get is why they voice the replies that my character does, I mean I read the entire reply when choosing to click it so why did I just have to spend time hearing it as well?

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Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle"Only the smartest will be able to figure it out."

🤣🤣🤣

So not some one with a "very, very large brain" I assume :)

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Quoting: drlamb

Assassin's Creed 3 4, Black Flag

I don't know why this bothers me so much but it does, unless the issue is trying to say Assassin's Creed 3 and Black Flag.

It's referring to both 3 and 4:

 
    /* Assassin's Creed 3 and 4                   */
    { R"(\\ac(3|4bf)[sm]p\.exe$)", {{
      { "d3d11.cachedDynamicResources",     "a"    },
    }} },

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Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: henriquecariocaStadia is linux + Vulkan , Stadia helps Steam deck and vice versa ( and steam for linux )
that simple ,

Give a single example where Stadia have helped the Steam Deck. Stadia is not Linux + Vulkan, it's some in-house proprietary Google API + DXVK that just happens to run atop Debian.

Stadia does not currently use DXVK. I think you have it confused with the new "windows emulator" project they are working on.

Others have already replied here, but just one quick note for the curios: very few game devs (if any) will spend the time and resources to completely rewrite their shader code from DX9-11 to Vulkan so they use the stand alone version of DXVK to do the translation for Stadia, it's part of the Stadia Porting Toolkit.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slaapliedjeI have a theory; Xbox as a hardware platform is going to be dead.

There is no need for it, really. It's already basically a stripped down Windows, from my understanding.

I believe Xbox Game Pass first came to be available on Linux via the Atari VCS. If MS is branching out and allowing that to be a thing... But it isn't like you can easily find a new Xbox (or PS5 for that matter) these days. They took away the dev mode from the Xbox users, so you can't use them as retro boxes anymore, which is a shame.

But why not ditch the hardware altogether next time a refresh is needed, when they can just sell games through Windows Store / Xbox Game Pass / Edge Browser, etc.

Streaming games isn't going to be anything I'll sign up for anytime soon. As it is, even using some games (especially mostly or all Online games) on Steam is bad enough. Too many constant updates that are huge. If my ISP decides to take a vacation, like it randomly does, that means I can't play anything. Not to mention the 'oh, I'll just play this for 30 minutes while I'm waiting for something...' is no longer available, as I'll boot up the computer, start Steam, and there is an update that takes 20min...

Ha, sorry, turned into a rant about modern gaming... I should just play on my MiSTer more...

Because you can buy a Xbox X for a lot less that you have to pay for a gaming PC, so you buy a relative cheap console for your kids and you keep a non-game compatible PC as your home Internet-browser / work-from-home computer. Have zero figures to draw from here but I wouldn't be surprised if the average Xbox owner is not like the people who roam around this site with a powerful gaming capable pc.

Yes with the Xbox Cloud you no longer need a powerful pc to play those games so you have a point there, but then you have to give up your pc for the kids AND pay for decent Internet that also competes on bandwidth for your Netflix and YouTube viewing. Not to mention how much easier it is to just throw a console at the kids and not have to worry about viruses, kids viewing whatever on the net and so on.

Not saying that the above is you or me but there are a lot of normies out there. But I do think that you are correct in that MS is going to try to move in that direction, I just don't think that they will do that until they are sure that Sony and Nintendo won't take over the market once they have left it.

The problem is all your bandwidth is still taken by downloading games. Even if you're buying physical copies, the patches these days are larger than the games of yesteryear. I live alone, and still am irritated when Steam is downloading something and taking all of the bandwidth, so Netflix/Amazon Prime that I'm usually watching while the game/patch installs is either degraded, or constantly stopping to buffer (this doesn't happen in Linux, but only when I'm using Windows for some unknown reason... I'll blame it on the network stack).

Modern gaming is both awesome, and a curse at times! Which is why I just received a boxed copy of Rogue64 for the C64/C128. :P

As you say you live alone, I have to children (18yo+20yo) and one wife. All of them are basically on Netflix and YouTube (some of them simultaneously) 24x7, one of the phones had a download of over 200GiB today according to the traffic monitor on my wireless router.

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Quoting: henriquecariocaStadia is linux + Vulkan , Stadia helps Steam deck and vice versa ( and steam for linux )
that simple ,

Give a single example where Stadia have helped the Steam Deck. Stadia is not Linux + Vulkan, it's some in-house proprietary Google API + DXVK that just happens to run atop Debian.

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