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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2023

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  • It isn’t significant. Wine already supports the vast majority of MediaFoundation codecs with GStreamer. This is just an alternative backend that uses FFmpeg instead of GStreamer. GStreamer already has an FFmpeg plugin, so this doesn’t add any new codecs to the table. It seems there’s just a long term plan to move away from GStreamer for whatever reason.

    Wine’s MF support used to be much worse, which is why Valve had to do their workaround shader hack. Not sure what exactly the current status on that is, but I do know things like mf-install or Proton-GE are rarely if ever necessary anymore, even with non-Steam games (which I have plenty of).


  • Well, Steam and Proton both already run on top of FEX or Box64 on ARM Linux, but it’s nice to see an official effort from Valve.

    Also, does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86? That adds a not insubstantial amount of CPU overhead, which does hurt battery life.

    And perhaps most importantly, is there any ARM chipset out there that can deliver performance on par with the Steam Deck’s CPU (even after factoring in the overhead of the x86 JIT) at a viable price for a Steam Deck successor?




  • Qt1 came with two default themes. One of them mimicked Win95 and the other mimicked Motif. KDE1 defaulted to the former in order to look more familiar. To this day, the “Windows 9x” theme still ships with Qt and can be selected on any Plasma 6 install. Starting with KDE2 they started using their own custom themes for everything, tho.

    GNOME 1 actually looked very similar, which isn’t surprising because its main goal at that point was to offer a replacement for KDE that didn’t depend on then-proprietary Qt. GNOME 2 and KDE 2 is when they really started building a distinct identity.



  • Yeah, I mean Google caring about Linux isn’t exactly breaking news. We knew that already. Android and ChromeOS both exist and as web company they kinda have to care about the OS that by and large runs the web. But this is Phoronix and they’ll make articles about anything as long as they think as it’ll get engagement. “Chromium” and “Wayland” are pretty good buzzwords as far as that goes, thus this article. My point is more so that maybe it isn’t productive to have every acknowledgment of Chromium’s continued existence be overwhelmingly negative regardless of context.







  • MV3 doesn’t make adblockers impossible, only less effective. It’s important to note that MV3 has changed a fair bit since the initial controversy and isn’t quite as limiting as it used to be. The fact that adblockers will lose some functionality at all is still a dealbreaker for me and many others which I thankfully won’t have to deal with as a Firefox user, but it isn’t going to kill adblockers on Chrome and most users will probably just install an MV3-compatible adblocker and move on with their day.

    uBlock Origin’s developers don’t seem to want to make a proper MV3 port, which is fair because they’d probably have to rewrite most of the extension, but they did create the far more minimal uBlock Orgin Lite, which a lot of people have taken to be an attempt at porting uBlock Origin to MV3. It isn’t that. On top of MV3’s limitations, it also makes the decision to work within these self-imposed restrictions:

    • No broad host permissions at install time – extended permissions are granted explicitly by the user on a per-site basis.

    • Entirely declarative for reliability and CPU/memory efficiency.

    These aren’t MV3 limitations, just a thing Gorhill decided to do. See the FAQ. You can get much closer to uBlock Origin within MV3’s constraints than uBlock Origin Lite does. Right now, the best option appears to be AdGuard, which has been making a true best-effort attempt at porting their adblocker to MV3 pretty much since the announcement.