what do linuxers think of crostini??
Quack Doc @ Quackdoc @lemmy.world Posts 1Comments 212Joined 2 yr. ago

crostini is pretty damn great but it's important to know what it IS and it's actually really simple. Crostini is two things combined into one
Firstly A VMM
Crostini uses the crosvm VMM which is can be thought of kinda like an inhouse version of qemu but designed to explicitly run natively integrated and high performance VMs safely instead of being a swiss army knife (KVM acceleration, virtio peripherals etc) (PS. it's written in rust too) They use it for chromeOS to integrate android support (on select newer devices) and linux. It runs a supervisor distro which can run containers inside of it.
ChromeOS calls the VM termina. Im not sure what distro is running in the VM, or if its a specialized one. I forget
Next is the containerization
It is a lot like distrobox, It can run a myriad of distros but the key part of it is sommelier. A wayland compositor designed to render windows through virtio-wayland, an extension of virtio-gpu. In practice very similar waypipe which rendering wayland windows to a remote wayland client using network/sockets (Yes, it does support AV_VSOCK so it can work with qemu.)
Sommelier is run in the containerized Distro, running on the TerminaVM. Using termina provides excelent security and performance, and then using LXD inside of termina provides excellent flexibility
The guts of "crostini" crosvm, virtio-wayland, sommelieris all open source, you can actually (with some degree of hassle) set this up entirely yourself, or do what I do, and run qemu + waypipe for a similar experience. Waypipe is much easier to setup however it comes at a preformance detriment since qemu virtio-gpu perf is worse then crosvm (no vulkan support in qemu yet still)
EDIT: s/Architecturally/in practice/ I have no idea why I said Architecturally. they are quite different things. I must have had a brain fart
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I just get any windows tablet that has good linux support and throw bliss on it, Linux tablet situation is bad right now
I am aware of that, but even with it there's still a decent amount of waste.
I fell for the lie of flatpak not being bloated, I just nuked flatpak from my PC since I just run arch anyways. Im not sure if repo is safe to remove. You might be able to run rmlint -g
and see how much data can be deduplicated on an FS level, I never checked myself since I run f2fs, but if you run an FS with dedupe capabilities it may work for you.
For sure try out olive You can't do automatic stabilization but manual works fine, However I will always use gyroflow whenever possible anyways. If needed you can easily script motion tracking data from 3rd party sources.
but it is properly color managed throughout the entire editor so doing color correction works properly and accurately. the node system is really powerful despite it's early nature, and as far as I know olive is the only FOSS editor with proper OCIO integration, which means you get industry standard color management tooling including things like ACES support. You also have OTIO support for importing and exporting editorial cutting information.
Exactly that. While most apps do offer X86 versions, there are some that don't. Every now and then you will come across an app or two that doesn't.
I wont say there is no jank, there is certainly a degree of it, particularly around arm apps due to needing libhoudini or libndk for arm translation (some games, not all with pick these up as "emulators" and block you or simply not work on a couple games) but generally most arm apps work fine. if you are living with a fully x86 ecosystem like myself, I have zero complaints, everything works fine and dandy. that I myself have tested. but ofc, bugs do exist and we try to help out as much as we can on the bliss telegram or matrix as it is an actively developed project.
It only really works well with 2 in 1 machines that have decentish linux support. there are specific builds for some surface devices. however if your device like mine has decent linux support, it's pretty much a plug and play solution. Bliss uses a the android common kernel which has very little modifications to upstream kernel so typically support for hardware is simply dependant on how new the kernel is.
Bliss also relies on mesa for graphics, so intel and AMD have great support, and Nvidia is quite lack luster, but this may change with the new foss nvidia driver stuff.
Honestly might be a bit of a "shill" moment, Grabbing windows 2 in 1 and flashing bliss to it. Currently have a chuwi hi10x which can boot into Bliss and it's nice.
Nice! thanks a bunch, this will be quite nice :D
the cosmic edit is really nice, But I would like it if it would bundle and compile the icons and stuff it needs. One of the great parts about rust is being able to statically compile all the programs I need and slap them onto a thumbdrive, did that with cosmic edit and this is what I saw. overall, I think cosmic edit has a lot of potential, love the aesthetic of it a lot
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/615105639567589376/1176360701309243515/image.png
It's not really hacky as far as I know, it's just the old status quo. On X applications could scale themselves if they have high DPI support, and that's what KDE is allowing. And it works great. The vast majority of apps I use support high DPI on X, and they work perfectly fine on xwayland.
It is legitimately a great experience using xwayland like this. A lot of apps I use, they look perfectly fine, they perform perfectly fine, and they're not broken, which is a massive plus.
Of course, this probably does break one or two apps out there. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution. It's far from it. But honestly, I think it's a really good solution. It allows developers the ease and flexibility of developing for X11 if you don't need Wayland's features.
Of course, you are still losing out. Having proper touch support is such an amazing feature with Wheland. Don't get me wrong. I love a lot about Wheland. It's just a pain in the ass to develop for. It is nowhere near as flexible as X11.
I haven't had any stuttering issues myself, so I cant comment on that outside of "works for me"
This is understandable, and honestly xwayland is great, even with fractional scaling now, at the very least on KDE. I think simply relying on xwayland is a very viable solution now for a lot of apps. and it helps work around a lot of issues so that's always a major plus
Ill say promising. Mesa recently landed sparse support so that should make a lot more games playable now, perf is decent but there are for sure still bugs, for instance for me and a couple others, gamescope doesn't work right
i've been using sonobus lately and it's been pretty good, I had latency issues when I tested the android app a long time ago, ill have to test it again
You could probably look into something like paperwm or Niri, I think scrollable window managers have a lot of potential to be a novel but good touch experience
EDIT: Im not sure if niri support touch, I havent tested it, but I think i might actually try it myself when I get the chance now
I am, very hesitantly, optimistic for the new smithay based compositors. Cosmic doesn't have touch support yet, but it's super light weight, I get better perf then I do even with KDE. I plan on swapping to it full time on my tablet when it gets touch support. (and when some touch friendly gui stuff is available). you also have catacomb which is an actual mobile compositor. Very promising stuff, but still very far out
I find that even if you get a touch primary device, make sure to get one with a keyboard, Ubuntu, Fedora, doesn't matter, KDE, Gnome doesn't matter, the touch only experience on linux is simply not great. Make extra sure to get the keyboard with it if its optional.
it's not accurate to say android is centred on touch input. Android has some of, if not the most diverse input options, mouse and keyboard works fine, also there is a large library of apps compatible with remotes/gamepads. While that might be how a lot of people normally interact with it, android is very well developed to be diverse
"Google" isn't. ChromeOS is actually providing more and more flexibility then ever. Android however is the exact opposite. One must keep in mind that google isn't some monolithic company, it's very fractured and has many independent teams, the best showcase of this is JXL. 3/4 top contributors to libjxl are google employees, and yet chromium decided to remove JXL support citing bogus reasons generated by obviously flawed testing and analysis.