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Comment by caro_douglos | Hacker News Reader

I don’t recommend Linux as a desktop anymore (free99 sold me for a while though).

Still beats windows on older hardware..when it comes to minimal browser boxes Linux is still the best.

I can't really agree here. I'm very much the definition of a power user and I love the easy accessible configuration (text files FTW) and the overall customizability of it. Working on Windows with hard-to-find GUIs, no tiling WM and overall lack of system control feels like a grind to me.

Sure, some of that is habit, but I've never felt like a Windows machine was truly "mine".

That's a bit throwing the baby with the bathwater. There is a significant amount of people who use their machines in extremely simple ways, ie. web browsing. Desktop Linux is perfectly fine for that.

Unfortunately I have to disagree with even that. Firefox (the default browser in most Linux distros) can't do hardware accelerated video, so you tend to get tearing/stuttering or at the very least a higher CPU load when watching YouTube for example, compared to say Windows, resulting in increased battery consumption if a laptop or at the very least increase fan speeds.

I know it's being worked on with Firefox having acceleration worked on in Wayland, but right now, if even the simplest and most common use-cases have major downsides compared to Windows/OS X, it's hard to justify moving to a worse experience. Windows rules with vendor support, that's just how it is. I've grown tired of having to compromise.

AFAIK OSX hides from userland the support for VP9 decode acceleration present in the Macbook's hardware, Youtube's primary codec these days, so now Firefox supports VAAPI under Wayland it is already ahead of OSX/Macbooks in this regard.

> Firefox (the default browser in most Linux distros) can't do hardware accelerated video

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Hardware_video_...

In short: Firefox supports it under Wayland since version 75 (and for more formats since 76).

Not that I've really noticed this being an issue under X11.

I need to test this (I didn't know about the hardware acceleration), however, first: tearing and stuttering are different things.

Tearing required, for a very long time, to be configured manually in the Xorg configuration. However, on 20.04 now it's not needed anymore (I don't know why; I've just verified it on Nvidia and Intel GPUs).

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