Intel's Clear Linux Has Code In Place To Begin Handling Proprietary Packages Like Chrome & Steam

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's Clear Linux Has Code In Place To Begin Handling Proprietary Packages Like Chrome & Steam

One of the most frequent critiques of Intel's Clear Linux distribution has been its lackluster support in dealing with proprietary/third-party packages like the Google Chrome web browser and Valve's Steam gaming client. Since last summer, Clear Linux has been working on their third-party packaging support with their unique "bundles" system, but not much has been heard on the matter since...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Clear-Prop-Pkg-Code-Bits

[SkyWarrior]

Intel should stop messing with linux ditch all existing cpu designs and gather all resources around the table for a total new design. There are plenty of useful distros to play games and surf the web.

[oleid]

Since the most important stuff is already available via flatpak, I didn't miss anything so far. Maybe the proprietary nordvpn tool, but you can work around that.

[milkylainen]

Intel should stop messing with linux ditch all existing cpu designs and gather all resources around the table for a total new design. There are plenty of useful distros to play games and surf the web.

Yes. Because everyone at Intel is either a CPU Architect or an Hardware Description Language engineer....
There are absolutely no other roles needed to keep that megacorp floating...

[ms178]

Since the most important stuff is already available via flatpak, I didn't miss anything so far. Maybe the proprietary nordvpn tool, but you can work around that.

The few Flatpak apps that I've tried (Chromium, Steam) didn't impress me at all - the UI didn't blend in with the destkop environment and I've seen a couple of weird bugs with SSL and broken cursor with Steam which were not present in the native client. And the performance was slower, the programs felt more sluggish etc.

I prefer native apps any time until these problems are fixed.

[Guest]

Intel should stop messing with linux ditch all existing cpu designs and gather all resources around the table for a total new design. There are plenty of useful distros to play games and surf the web.

It's easy to say so,... However, it's not possible to get more performance for single core, while maintaining same performance per watt (except going to lower nm,...). Basic "trick" to achieve higher performance is superscalar processing, which doesn't increase power consumption. But, superscalar processing gives no/little gains, when there are dependencies on results of previous instructions,... Therefore, speculative / eager execution (source of security issues) is used, which is technique, which tries to guess what to compute, and goes for it,... however, it can lead to wrong "guesses" and therefore wasted computations (wasted power),...

ARM used that fact to build low-power CPU, and keeps raising performance via multiple cores, or with companion performance cores (ARM big.LITTLE),... So, we have various RISC and CISC architectures,... So, we already have x86/x86-64/AMD64, and ARM, and POWER architectures / instruction sets,...

So, only way to gain more performance (maintaining same performance-per-watt) is via more parallelization. However, this requires heavy adjustment of software development principles,... There's already movement for that, but it's slow,... It requires different way to think about software/code/logic,.. especially moving from synchronous way of thinking about logic, to asynchronous logic,... Though,.. engines/framework could abstract many things away, and provide declarative way to define application-specific components/elements/transformations/...

Actually,... my personal opinion is, that ARM's big.LITTLE approach could utilized also for AMD64 CPU(s).

[uid313]

Actually,... my personal opinion is, that ARM's big.LITTLE approach could utilized also for AMD64 CPU(s).

Intel is rumoured to be working for this with their upcoming Alder Lake-S.

Sources:

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/intel_alder_lake-s_leak_hints_at_a_big_little_future_for_desktop_cpus/1

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/307330-intel-desktop-cpu-rumors-point-to-a-big-little-configuration-16-cores

https://www.techpowerup.com/264615/rumor-intel-to-introduce-big-little-architecture-for-desktop-with-alder-lake-s-new-lga-1700-socket

[Guest]

Intel is rumoured to be working for this with their upcoming Alder Lake-S.

Sources:

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/intel_alder_lake-s_leak_hints_at_a_big_little_future_for_desktop_cpus/1

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/307330-intel-desktop-cpu-rumors-point-to-a-big-little-configuration-16-cores

https://www.techpowerup.com/264615/r...ga-1700-socket

Good to hear. It looks like great direction, especially in laptops area. Though, I'm AMD fanboy, I hope AMD would make also some big.LITTLE CPU/APU.

It would also need some scheduler/kernel support. For example, to force all latency-not-important daemons/services to run only on cores optimized for better performance per watt. Though, there would be still huge gray area in policies, which decide assignment of best-performance/lowest-consumption cores.

[skeevy420]

The few Flatpak apps that I've tried (Chromium, Steam) didn't impress me at all - the UI didn't blend in with the destktop environment and I've seen a couple of weird bugs with SSL and broken cursor with Steam which were not present in the native client. And the performance was slower, the programs felt more sluggish etc.

I prefer native apps any time until these problems are fixed.

I have a bit more of a mixed experience, but, yeah, when performance or all features working are super critical the native/distribution version is the way to go.

Firefox, for example, isn't all that bad from Flat..but as long as forums, videos, email, and other crap like that work in a not-suck manner, I'm happy. Steam, OTHO, native all the way. The client itself was very laggy, but isn't with native. Then there's issues where terminals and whatnot need overrides set to exit the sandbox which starts to defeat the purpose of a sandbox.

I suppose I prefer Flats when they work and are full-featured (enough for my uses) and native otherwise. I also think Flats need a UI wrapped around some of its options to make it more user friendly and more readily accessible...I've read so many man pages in the past two weeks that I feel like I'm going crazy...

[oleid]

The few Flatpak apps that I've tried (Chromium, Steam) didn't impress me at all - the UI didn't blend in with the destkop environment and I've seen a couple of weird bugs with SSL and broken cursor with Steam which were not present in the native client. And the performance was slower, the programs felt more sluggish etc.

I prefer native apps any time until these problems are fixed.

chromium doesnt really work well on flatpak. there are, however, now official firefox releases for flatpak.

as for steam - that doesnt even blend in as native app.

not sure about performance in general. at work we have a debian desktop. flatpacked apps are faster here as they come with a newer mesa driver.

do you use proprietary nvidia drivers?