Canonical Continues Snap'ing Up Linux Gaming For Ubuntu

[cl333r]

That's a bug in FF 104 that's fixed in 104.1.

104.0.1 or 104.1? Because I have the former, or 104.1 is not available/released yet.

[Jumbotron]

Ive been running Linux since the early 90s. Slackware was the new kid on the block.

Then things moved forward, but the "cool kids" thought Slackware was best cuz it didn't have this pesky, fascist "package management." That's for wimps! Tarballs 4 lyfe!

Then once everything had levelled out, all the "cool kids" moved to distros like Gentoo, cuz "We're experts, we build every single package ourselves with -O999999 for speed."

Then some very smart engineer designed systemd in response to the increasing complexity and required integration of systems doing ACTUAL important stuff. And a bunch of "cool kids" decided that was crap. Because they had never done anything serious with Linux, had never had to manage a large datacenter with many moving parts, and mostly spent their time tweaking God-knows-what for no reason.

Also, all along, there has been this undercurrent of "cool kids" who refuse to run the two most stable and sane Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora) because tHeY uSe gRaPhIcAl tOoLs aNd i'M aN eXpErT." Around this time, tiling window managers became hip with the "cool kids", because mouse bad.

Then the cool kids adopted Arch Linux, because it gave you the VERY LATEST VERY LIGHTLY TESTED version of EVERY PACKAGE ON YOUR SYSTEM! OOOOhhh this is so up to date all the time, and I even get to write my own /etc/hosts at install time! Now I'm computing with LINUX POWER! (Some halfway sane people came along and made it slightly less retarded to run Arch later on... I guess that's awesome?)

Then the "cool kids" started branching out into these other distros for God knows what reasons, Pop_oS!, this that and the other thing. At this point I stopped even trying to keep up with why idiotic stuff was being done. As a 45 year old man who has worked in IT for over 25 years, and held many positions doing admin/development support for UNIX systems and Linux servers, this is all clearly over my head, and I'm a stupid newbie for using Ubuntu.

LOL BRO DO YOU EVEN BUILD YOUR OWN KERNEL?? Yeah "bro", I was building my own 1.1.x development branches every night on a 486DX/33mhz with 4M ram every few days, it was great. You got to set off your `cd /usr/src/linux && make zlilo` every night as you went to bed, and prayed to God the build finished when you woke up in the morning. It took 8 hours to build a kernel. 8 hours.

So yeah, I use pre-built kernels. I like binary packages. I like GUIs! I don't use rolling release distros, because they're idiotic. I get it, you're a hobbyist, you pride yourself on doing things "the hard way." The problem with that is, some people just want their computer to work and do other stuff than diddling with operating systems day in and day out. You're not smarter than everyone else: you've just got more free time, and you don't have anything better to do.

AND NOW! Here's today's story.... EHHHHRRRR MER GEEEERRRD, a snap for gamemode. LULZ'ing ensues.

We're all very impressed, really. I would caution you, however, to try to keep in mind, in these Linux corners of the Internet, where you think you're one of the "coolest kids" in school...

There is likely someone reading who can see through your bullshit. Maybe it's one of those Dunning-Kruger effect things, where you don't know what you don't know. Just letting YOU guys know... it's embarrassing.

You guys have fun.

THIS !!

[jorgepl]

That still doesn't give you the automatic per-file deduplication Flatpak gets from OSTree's "git for the OS" repo structure, where you never re-download portions of a package that you already have and everything on-disk gets hard-linked based on the hash of its contents (sha256sum, I think) at install time.

That's why Flatpak's download size listings are all "up to" values.

oh, sure. I was just talking about startup speed.

Although I'm not sure how much of a difference does this make appart from atomic updates (which are nice, but also supported on snap)

[Alexmitter]

People hate Snaps mainly because they are uninformed and their knowledge on Snaps is outdated.

Doubt

The main reason is that Canonical's marketing was bad. They should provide Firefox only as snap when it is on par with the deb. Now it is on par with the deb, but most people don't know that.

Wrong, Firefox on Snap still loads about 15 times slower then on any competing package format. But okay, it is a improvement from the 30 times slower we had before. But how did they "fix" that? Not by fixing the most plainly obvious issue aka loop filesystems that need to be mounted and decompressed but by making firefox load less data on start which btw does not improve startup times on any other package format.

It is still, by any regards, much worse then literally anything else.

Snap is broken by design, it is broken on the plain technical level and you can not fixing it without creating a whole new format.

[ssokolow]

oh, sure. I was just talking about startup speed.

Although I'm not sure how much of a difference does this make appart from atomic updates (which are nice, but also supported on snap)

According to this script, I'm using 76.58% of the space I would be without deduplication.

Granted, some of that will have been countered. While Flatpak has BaseApps (basically templates for things like Electron or Godot or QWebEngine that provide pre-built files to bundle into your package to ensure that multiple packages will use hash-identical files so OSTree is guaranteed to deduplicate them every step from server to download to installed), Snap has an analogous system that allows a separate layer of shared overlay filesystems you can depend on between the runtime and the application. However, that still requires the upstream developer to actually use them, does nothing for "identical by sheer luck" files, and I didn't see mention of a mechanism for deduplicating across things like "multiple releases of the same dependency installed in parallel, which may share identical assets" or "developer X used the library snap while developer Y vendored the same version of the library into their application snap".

[Vistaus]

104.0.1 or 104.1? Because I have the former, or 104.1 is not available/released yet.

Sorry, I meant 104.0.1. I don't have the issue anymore after upgrading to 104.0.1. If you still have the issue, please re-open the bug report as Mozilla really has committed a fix, so if the fix is not working for everybody, they need to know about it.

[cl333r]

Sorry, I meant 104.0.1. I don't have the issue anymore after upgrading to 104.0.1. If you still have the issue, please re-open the bug report as Mozilla really has committed a fix, so if the fix is not working for everybody, they need to know about it.

Thanks, in my case the page is still triggering a reload when I switch Appearance from "Dark Theme" to "Light Theme" or vice versa, I'm on AMD RX 570, sorry I don't have enough motivation to find the bug you're talking about, registering, commenting on it and whatnot.

[hamishmb]

Thanks, in my case the page is still triggering a reload when I switch Appearance from "Dark Theme" to "Light Theme" or vice versa, I'm on AMD RX 570, sorry I don't have enough motivation to find the bug you're talking about, registering, commenting on it and whatnot.

Maybe post the link? I think I sometimes have this issue too. If you don't have the motivation to jump in and report, discussing it here won't help much, because it's not very easy for someone else to report on your behalf.

[cl333r]

Maybe post the link? I think I sometimes have this issue too. If you don't have the motivation to jump in and report, discussing it here won't help much, because it's not very easy for someone else to report on your behalf.

That's the point, I don't even know the link, the guy (Vistaus) who told me that this is a known bug and was "solved" didn't post the link to it to begin with.

[leech]

I recently did a fresh install of 22.04. Firefox wouldn't even launch because snap was broken... after an update it did, but on the nvme drives I have in that laptop, it's always been pretty instant to start. With Snaps, it lags seriously on start up. I compared it to the flatpak version and that's perfectly fine speed wise.