Sorry if I sound dumb, but which kind of program would be the one to display the output of text based interfaces, also called terminal applications, if not a terminal?

Okay, that sucks. Yeah, I bought a refurbished business device

Then the “avoid at all costs” like Dell

Must have gotten lucky then. Bought a used Dell about one and a half years ago. Everything worked out of the box

I don’t think his statement is true though. If https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1ce7z19/gaming_on_linux_ep131_ntsync_vs_fsync_nobara_39/l1ho8od/ is not manipulated in any way, games with lots of these calls still get big improvements with ntsync over fsync (about 30% in this particular case, which is a massive boost). So while nobody can rule out that his statement may be true on average or in general, there are still cases where ntsync offers a tangible advantage – be it improved FPS or the fact that the game runs at all.

Edit: in the video that the thread is about, fsync didn’t beat ntsync in a single one (or I missed it when jumping through it). In the best one, they were exactly tied. Sure, the difference wasn’t really big, but again there are titles not working with fsync.

However, I want to stress that I’m not trying to talk about fsync. It’s a good solution that significantly improved performance. But ntsync is, from everything I’ve seen, almost always better; how much depends on the case, and it never seems to be worse.

Yes, sorry

Any linking against GPL software requires you to also release your source code under GPL. ALGPL allows you to link to it dynamically without relicensing, but as explained, there are platforms where dynamic linking isn’t an option, which means these libraries can’t be used if one doesn’t want to provide ALGPL licensed source code of their own product.

fsync isn’t faster than ntsync, it’s merely a workaround to match Linux to Windows synchronization primitives. From ntsync’s official description:

It exists because implementation in user-space, using existing tools, cannot match Windows performance while offering accurate semantics.

So without this, you either have a huge perfomance hit in case of an accurate implementation or you have good performance, but might run into edge cases where software doesn’t work well or at all because it’s not accurate (see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2922 for examples)

the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros.

Care to elaborate? I don’t remember packages not working, but if anything, they’re not building; which is basically the reverse of what happens at other distributions where sometimes, breakage during building isn’t noticed because the packages aren’t getting rebuilt when a dependency or the compiler toolchain changes.

While the full number might be inflated, it still has one of the most complete official repositories.

You can game “now” ? 🤨

Well, you can… in fact you you could also before… but it’s technically correct

True! My original point though is that just providing a hash for a downloaded file is generally not required. It doesn’t provide anything that other layers haven’t already (a hash only guarantees integrity, while downloading over HTTPS provides authenticity). Personally, I see them as a relic of the past that made more sense when transmission was less robust (though even back then, a lot of layers provided some sort of error detection and correction), and modern filesystems can detect errors as well.

Those must have been really helpful in 1999.

Or any long-running process that’s attached to a terminal for which you can’t or don’t want to guarantee that you keep it open all the time, yet still want to look at the output.

As someone said. they’re different things, though they overlap in some areas.

Ah cool, that’s interesting.

SDL is kind of the equivalent to DirectX. It provides a standard interface for multimedia applications regardless of underlying mechanisms. Except the 3D acceleration part I think which is handled by OpenGL / Vulkan.

Realtime is not about being fast, it’s about time guarantees. It helps with or is required for workloads that require realtime, which I think includes audio production, but might also be helpful for things like controllers etc. where you need to make sure incoming data is processed in a guaranteed time or else fail. Browsing the web isn’t part of these, so an RT kernel will most likely be a hindrance.

My opinion : far too many distros are « pet distros »

I think those are actually great. Personally wouldn’t use them for a prolonged time or anything critical. But I love the spirit, even if the distribution is of no use to me.

Thanks, so yes.

Is this relevant when using a login manager?

You can also track the progress at https://nixpk.gs/pr-tracker.html?pr=367042, is already part of nixos-unstable-small at the time of writing, though this is probably not what a lot of people use. I’ll see when it hits nixos-unstable and let you know, but don’t know when I used my machine the coming days