Regressing and Killing GPU Acceleration in Linux due to Distro Policies

[marek]

Canonical and others made GPU acceleration unavailable due to Snap and similar package deployment systems. You can't update drivers within Snap and if you have a new GPU, you can't get GPU acceleration until Snap and/or Canonical updates Snap 1 year later. Snap apps in Ubuntu 22.04 just got GPU acceleration for RDNA 3, 1 whole year after the GPUs launched. The situation is the same with new APUs. The unavailability of acceleration for new GPUs and APUs that Snap is plagued with, and shipping dated slower drivers with Snap that users can't update or change, has put Linux in the worst situation regarding GPU support since the dawn of time when Linux either lacked or had substandard GPU drivers.

When GPU acceleration is missing, everything is rendered on the CPU. That makes Ubuntu and distros using the same package deployment systems have the worst power consumption and the worst battery life OF ALL DESKTOP OPERATING SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD.

I speak from experience. Scrolling was super slow and laggy in LibreOffice because it was installed via Snap and drawn on the CPU. Google Maps in Firefox didn't have the Globe View and rotation because of no GPU acceleration due to Snap. And don't even try to watch a 4K video on that.

Because of those reasons, I can't recommend Linux distros using those deployment systems, and it's puzzling that some distro vendors are completely oblivious to this.

That's the end of my rant.
(with my AMD hat off)
Michael

[Kjell]

I've had a similar experience when I first tried playing games through Flatpaks this summer.. I experienced crashing as well as worse performance (and not to mention the higher disk usage). None of these issues were present with traditional packages from OpenSuSE and Arch Linux.

My experience wasn't great with NixOS either.. GPU acceleration tends to break silently due to how their packaging- and dependency system is designed:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/228586#issuecomment-1528680202

[oleid]

Interesting, I had the opposite experience when using flatpaks on debian stable. The mesa driver inside the flatpaks tended to be more recent than my system mesa driver. Thus, things ran actually more performant than debian-native apps.

BUT I think containerized applications should actually some kind of VirtGL / VirtVulkan to get the driver inside the container out of the equation.
Maybe Zink could get hooked up used as well to be able to run on the system's Vulkan driver.
Then flatpak would be perfect for conservation of elder games.

[EldoraJohnson]

Thanks for the info, I will keep it in my mind.

[user1]

Canonical and others made GPU acceleration unavailable due to Snap and similar package deployment systems. You can't update drivers within Snap and if you have a new GPU, you can't get GPU acceleration until Snap and/or Canonical updates Snap 1 year later. Snap apps in Ubuntu 22.04 just got GPU acceleration for RDNA 3, 1 whole year after the GPUs launched. The situation is the same with new APUs. The unavailability of acceleration for new GPUs and APUs that Snap is plagued with, and shipping dated slower drivers with Snap that users can't update or change, has put Linux in the worst situation regarding GPU support since the dawn of time when Linux either lacked or had substandard GPU drivers.

When GPU acceleration is missing, everything is rendered on the CPU. That makes Ubuntu and distros using the same package deployment systems have the worst power consumption and the worst battery life OF ALL DESKTOP OPERATING SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD.

I speak from experience. Scrolling was super slow and laggy in LibreOffice because it was installed via Snap and drawn on the CPU. Google Maps in Firefox didn't have the Globe View and rotation because of no GPU acceleration due to Snap. And don't even try to watch a 4K video on that.

Because of those reasons, I can't recommend Linux distros using those deployment systems, and it's puzzling that some distro vendors are completely oblivious to this.

That's the end of my rant.
(with my AMD hat off)
Michael

This is yet another reason to avoid Snap and it's also one of dozens of other reasons why it's the single worst app distribution system on Linux. From my experience, I can say that the situation with Flatpak (Flathub to be specific) is much better. Until about 2 years ago, Flathub has been updating its bundled Mesa drivers once every 6 months or so, but for the last 2 years it has been updating its Mesa drivers almost immediately after a new major version is released.

[Panix]

Canonical and others made GPU acceleration unavailable due to Snap and similar package deployment systems. You can't update drivers within Snap and if you have a new GPU, you can't get GPU acceleration until Snap and/or Canonical updates Snap 1 year later. Snap apps in Ubuntu 22.04 just got GPU acceleration for RDNA 3, 1 whole year after the GPUs launched. The situation is the same with new APUs. The unavailability of acceleration for new GPUs and APUs that Snap is plagued with, and shipping dated slower drivers with Snap that users can't update or change, has put Linux in the worst situation regarding GPU support since the dawn of time when Linux either lacked or had substandard GPU drivers.

When GPU acceleration is missing, everything is rendered on the CPU. That makes Ubuntu and distros using the same package deployment systems have the worst power consumption and the worst battery life OF ALL DESKTOP OPERATING SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD.

I speak from experience. Scrolling was super slow and laggy in LibreOffice because it was installed via Snap and drawn on the CPU. Google Maps in Firefox didn't have the Globe View and rotation because of no GPU acceleration due to Snap. And don't even try to watch a 4K video on that.

Because of those reasons, I can't recommend Linux distros using those deployment systems, and it's puzzling that some distro vendors are completely oblivious to this.

That's the end of my rant.
(with my AMD hat off)
Michael

What distro or which distros do you recommend ppl use, then? Is Pop OS (Ubuntu 'clone' - right?) - acceptable? I think they stuck with flatpak - not sure how they do - they promote a 'diversion' from Ubuntu + snaps - are any distros who use flatpak a better situation - do you mind on elaborating on what 'using the same package deployment' means? Is it - any that follow the *buntus - including any that utilize snap (give preference or better support) compared to flatpak?

How is GPU acceleration in Fedora and OpenSUSE? I apologize if any of my questions are annoying - I bow down to your expertise.

[Panix]

This is yet another reason to avoid Snap and it's also one of dozens of other reasons why it's the single worst app distribution system on Linux. From my experience, I can say that the situation with Flatpak (Flathub to be specific) is much better. Until about 2 years ago, Flathub has been updating its bundled Mesa drivers once every 6 months or so, but for the last 2 years it has been updating its Mesa drivers almost immediately after a new major version is released.

My impression based on any reading of snap and avg. Linux users' opinion of snap - is that they a) hate it and/or b) avoid it. There might be some hard-core Ubuntu users who either a) don't mind it or b) tolerate it - but, the vast majority share the contempt - which is kind of wild that Ubuntu keeps pushing it, isn't it?

[marek]

What distro or which distros do you recommend ppl use, then? Is Pop OS (Ubuntu 'clone' - right?) - acceptable? I think they stuck with flatpak - not sure how they do - they promote a 'diversion' from Ubuntu + snaps - are any distros who use flatpak a better situation - do you mind on elaborating on what 'using the same package deployment' means? Is it - any that follow the *buntus - including any that utilize snap (give preference or better support) compared to flatpak?

How is GPU acceleration in Fedora and OpenSUSE? I apologize if any of my questions are annoying - I bow down to your expertise.

From the GPU acceleration perspective, all that people need is a recent kernel and recent Mesa (or any closed source alternative if that's what they want), and having the option to update them at will. That's disallowed by Snap and Flatpak. Bisecting userspace driver bugs is also not possible if they are only reproducible with Snap and Flatpak apps.

Any distro that doesn't use those would be a good alternative. I'm not very familiar with other distros, only Ubuntu.

[Panix]

From the GPU acceleration perspective, all that people need is a recent kernel and recent Mesa (or any closed source alternative if that's what they want), and having the option to update them at will. That's disallowed by Snap and Flatpak. Bisecting userspace driver bugs is also not possible if they are only reproducible with Snap and Flatpak apps.

Any distro that doesn't use those would be a good alternative. I'm not very familiar with other distros, only Ubuntu.

Thanks for the info and insight. After some subsequent research, I discovered you can just decide to avoid using flatpaks - except for the odd distro that pushes flatpak like Ubuntu pushes snap.

That's peculiar that developers don't like Snap or Flatpak....hmmmmmm.....

[user1]

From the GPU acceleration perspective, all that people need is a recent kernel and recent Mesa (or any closed source alternative if that's what they want), and having the option to update them at will. That's disallowed by Snap and Flatpak. Bisecting userspace driver bugs is also not possible if they are only reproducible with Snap and Flatpak apps.

Any distro that doesn't use those would be a good alternative. I'm not very familiar with other distros, only Ubuntu.

Thanks for the info and insight. After some subsequent research, I discovered you can just decide to avoid using flatpaks - except for the odd distro that pushes flatpak like Ubuntu pushes snap.

Well, even if Canonical pushes Snaps, you can still avoid them. For example, I currently use Kubuntu 23.10, so first thing I did after installation is remove all the preinstalled Snaps, so that they don't use system resources in the background (auto-updating and stuff..).

Currently, only Firefox and Chromium are available exclusively as Snaps on Ubuntu. The reason for that is because when these 2 browsers were shipped as regular packages in Ubuntu, the packages were created by Canonical itself. All the other packages in Ubuntu repos are taken from Debian, so that's why I think there won't be any other app that will become Snap exclusive in Ubuntu.

One thing I really like about Ubuntu is that it's probably the only distro where you have a choice of the stable Mesa version you want to stick with:

1. You can stick with the distro supplied Mesa if it works fine for you. (In this case there would most likely not be updates to newer major Mesa versions)

2. you can use kisak-mesa fresh ppa if you want the absolute latest stable Mesa version.

3. If you want to stay on a recent Mesa version but also want to have some more stability (fewer potential bugs) and less frequent updates, there's also kisak-mesa stable ppa, which only updates Mesa when a certain major version has reached its last point release.

These are very well maintained ppa's and I've never experienced issues with them. (I've also read that kisak is a Valve employee)