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Comment by zekica | Hacker News Reader

Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config

Thanks for the tip. I didn't have it enabled, but to be honest I've never noticed any lag when playing back videos or in any other situation.

With all the cores in modern PC's I'd doubt if you would unless you're on a computer that is 8 or 10 years old

I tried enabling that. I was able to verify vaapi was enabled. But even using a "forceh264" plugin, Youtube defaulted to unaccelerated playback

Y'all need to remember this in those threads when you say Linux just works and MS's registry is stupid and needs tweaking to work right.

Eh the thing for me is that the config is distributed and fairly easy to correct. If you're fiddling with Windows registry, you better make sure to do a snapshot/backup beforehand. I don't have to do any of that with linux, I just do a simple cp to file.backup and if I hose the system do an emergency boot or linux on usb and fix it.

This guy was using Gentoo on what I'm guessing is an older laptop. That kind of comes with the territory. You don't use LFS or Gentoo as a daily driver and expect not to do some footwork... but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." Of course, you have to do stuff on pretty much any PC, Windows, Mac or Linux. I own them all and know this to be the case... it's just that some people are blind to the things that they have to do everyday on their OS of choice.

Not an older laptop. Some 9th gen Intel i7 machine with a Radeon RX6400 GPU attached

Always an excuse... Why can't you just agree that this isn't how it should be but maybe you like Linux anyway?

Using Gentoo as an example of how Linux is hard to use is a bad argument. I have Mac, Linux and windows PCs and they all have fairly ridiculous thing that users of those OS's excuse because they are used to it. I'm not sure how that is an excuse. I'm just reiterating what my og comment said here.

"but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." "

I just started to make the transfer to Linux from windows. I have limited experience after running Ubuntu on a dual boot laptop back in school a long time ago. It wasnt my daily driver at the time but class required it.

I recently downloaded fedora onto a desktop and it has been a horrid experience. It's sooo slow compared to when windows was on the same hardware. It's so bad the kids won't use the computer unless it's the last one available. I regret the switch, but want the results. I cannot seem figure out what's causing it.

If you want "just works" your more likely to get it with Ubuntu than Fedora. As for being unbearably slow .... there aren't a lot of ways for that to happen unless you're using absolutely the wrong graphics driver.

A typical way would be using xfce's "enable display compositing" setting with a graphics driver that doesn't support proper acceleration.

I'm surprised people are saying this because Firefox works perfectly fine on X11 for me without config tweaks

If your hardware is supported (e.g. WiFi chips and GPUs are definitely a valid concern), I know of no post-install config that Debian with Cinnamon needs that you'd not also need to do on Windows, and Microsoft will put ads in your start menu for the trouble of buying their license at that

Firefox works fine on X11 without that setting, but perf ricers will always find something to tweak and complain about on any platform. You can bet some Windows users of Firefox have settings that Firefox is ""unusable"" without too. A certain segment of the population will apply this sort of audiophile mentality to anything you can think of. There are people who think cars are "undrivable" without some fancy hacked ECU, people who think the rental skis at resorts are unusable, and of course people who think the earbuds that came with their phone are completely unlistenable.

Reality is most people aren't sensitive to whatever it is these people believe they are perceiving and will get on fine with whatever the defaults are.

It never worked on my (now dead) Asus netbook, although Chrome could do it.

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