The failure to wait for network-online was the last thing preventing me from going rootless. I am going to have to try this again.

Performance parity? Heck no, not until this bug with the GSP firmware is solved: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/538

Yeah, it’s amazing how upvoted the previous comment is. Just a bunch of idiots jumping on the web-hate bandwagon when even basic media players like Kodi have a tough time playing back video on the Pi.

It just isn’t a very optimized device for video playback. The Pi 5 is actually a step backwards as well, providing only H265 hardware video decode which the web doesn’t even use.

Yeah, in a Reddit comment, Hector Martin himself said that the memory bandwidth on the Apple SIlicon GPU is so big that any potential performance problems due to TBDR vs IMR are basically insignificant.

…which is a funny fact because I had another Reddit user swear up and down that TBDR was a big problem and that’s why Apple decided not to support Vulkan and instead is forcing everyone to go Metal.

Nowadays, I mostly don’t even care about compatibility issues anymore and just expect a game to work in Linux, which is just freaking cool. Obviously, some competitive MP games are off the table due to anti-cheat, but that isn’t my main gaming category nowadays so it works out.

I’ve heard something about Apple Silicon GPUs being tile-based and not immediate mode, which means the Vulkan API is different compared to regular PCs. How has this been addressed in the Vulkan driver?

Huge fucking deal, especially for Nvidia users, but it is great for the entire ecosystem. Other OSes have had explicit sync for ages, so it is great for Linux to finally catch up in this regard.

You’re correct. While the stable version of KDE Wayland is usable right now with the new driver with no flickering issues, etc., it technically does not have the necessary patches needed for explicit sync. Nvidia has put some workarounds in the 555 driver code to prevent flickering without explicit sync, but they’re slower code paths.

The AUR has a package called kwin-explicit-sync, which is just the latest stable kwin with the explicit sync patches applied. This combined with the 555 drivers makes explicit sync work, finally solving the flickering issues in a fast performant way.

I’ve tested with both kwin and kwin-explicit-sync and the latter has dramatically improved input latency. I am basically daily driving Wayland now and it is awesome.