GIMP

Anything in particular you think should be on this roadmap that isn't?

Oh does it not add new entries for every new DXVK release anymore?

Looks like the last time a verb for a new DXVK version was added was dxvk2010 or DXVK 2.1, in February this year. We're up to DXVK 2.3 now. Because the Winetricks codebase is around 20,000 lines of shellscript and I'm not the best at reading shellscript...I don't think the dxvk verb updates the Wineprefix's DXVK version based on what the newest version is. I think that's just an alternate way of installing DXVK; you can pull the latest stable release, or you can install a particular version.

I think executing a particular verb for a DXVK version would override whatever DXVK dlls you currently have installed in that prefix, too. I have no idea how to check what DXVK version is installed a particular Wineprefix, though.

even though it says DXVK (Latest) and that it’s from year 2023

That's based on the verb metadata; not what version of DXVK you currently have installed. A contributor bumped the year for the dxvk verb from 2017 to 2023 in a commit in February this year.

Oh I had no idea about this, and I normally just use winetrick’s GUI while using it so I would’ve had to look up how to update dxvk if not for you explaining it.

Happy if it helps. I've never used the GUI, but it's awesome that they managed to create a functioning GUI frontend with shellscript. Insane, really. God I hate shellscript...

So far I haven’t had an issue with DXVK being too old, but I mostly play older games

You probably won't get an issue with DXVK being "too old", but newer versions of DXVK implement more features (particularly for D3D12) and include bug fixes to improve compatibility or performance. From the 2.3 release notes:

Fixed a minor issue with D3D9 feedback loop tracking.

Test Drive Unlimited 2: Fixed shadows on grass.

Tomb Raider Anniversary: Improved performance.

So you want to be running the latest version for better compatibility. That said, I mostly play visual novels. My biggest problems are still DRM and media playback, which DXVK has very little to do with.

Unrelated but I’ll check that guide out, I’ve had trouble playing VNs that are in Japanese, as without LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8" wine /path/to/game.exe they won’t even run but even with it the fonts don’t work and are shown as empty boxes.

You're the exact person this guide was written for! This sounds like an issue that's easily fixed by installing fakejapanese with winetricks. More info here: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:problems#japanese_characters_aren_t_displaying_properly

And if you have .txt files in the game directory (like documentation or whatever) with garbled text, that's probably because they're encoded in Shift JIS. There's an easy fix to make them readable: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:problems#text_files_with_garbled_text

(That last one had me scratching my head for a very long time)

I'm on GNU/Linux myself, and personally, I don't use HEVC at all. I don't even decode video in my browser most of the time. I'm usually using mpv with yt-dlp. Streaming services like YouTube, Facebook and Netflix don't use HEVC to my knowledge (being AOM members and all), but I don't use services that require me to enable DRM in my browser. I don't know of a service that requires HEVC decoding support.

It's possible Mozilla will support HEVC decoding on other operating systems in the future. Windows is just the easiest one to start with. It's worth noting that Chrome's HEVC hardware decoding support does not support Widevine, the DRM Netflix and other streaming services use. So you won't see them adopting HEVC in browsers, at least.

The fact that this bug for macOS is a part of the hevc meta-bug indicates that Mozilla also wants to support HEVC decoding on macOS: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1839107

Chrome supports HEVC decoding on GNU/Linux, so I don't see any reason why Firefox wouldn't too, eventually.

Oh, mobile. That's not a platform I use often. I'll defer to you on that!

All my media is in HEVC and I dont want to have to buy a video card for the server just so I can transcode it to Firefox when everything else can play HEVC out of the box.

As far as I know, Google Chrome did not support HEVC until last year. Safari is still the only browser with a software decoder for HEVC, but I'm pretty sure it was the only one with any form of decoding support for HEVC until 2022. Let me check caniuse!

https://caniuse.com/hevc

So, it seems Samsung Internet (a browser I've never heard of, but presumably is the default on Samsung devices) also supported HEVC decoding for a long time, but aside from that, even hardware decoding support in Chrome is super recent: https://bitmovin.com/google-adds-hevc-support-chrome/

I was going to make a snarky comment about VP9 being good enough for Sisvel since they're trying to chase down Google for patent infringement royalties on HEVC, but yeah, transcoding all that media does not sound fun.

But on the other hand, a bug triager for Mozilla opened a new ticket for HEVC support 3 months ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1842838

It's a strange ticket. No description at all, and why would they care about bugs for a video codec they don't support? It suggests Mozilla is going to do...something with HEVC sometime in the future. Shrug.

Edit: Did some more digging. See this ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1853448

HEVC playback will be supported via the Media Foundation Transform (MFT) and WMF decoder module will check if there is any avaliable MFT which can be used for HEVC then reports the support information.

HEVC playback can only be support on (1) users have purchased paid HEVC extension on their computer (SW decoding) (2) HEVC hardware decoding is available on users' computer

HEVC playback needs hardware decoding, and it currently only support on Windows. HEVC playback check would be run when the task is in the mda-gpu, which has the ability for hardware decoding. On other platforms, HEVC should not be supported.

Hooray for Windows users, I guess.

Reasonably sure, but willing to be corrected. See this section of the Winetricks code (it's just shellscript):

        # Don't install if already installed
        if test "${WINETRICKS_FORCE}" != 1 && winetricks_is_installed "$1"; then
            echo "$1 already installed, skipping"
            return "${TRUE}"
        fi

Followed by:

winetricks_is_installed()
{
    unset _W_file _W_file_unix
    if test "${installed_exe1}"; then
        _W_file="${installed_exe1}"
    elif test "${installed_file1}"; then
        _W_file="${installed_file1}"
    else
        return "${FALSE}"  # not installed
    fi

    # Test if the verb has been executed before
    if ! grep -qw "$1" "${WINEPREFIX}/winetricks.log" 2>/dev/null; then
        unset _W_file
        return "${FALSE}"  # not installed
    fi

Winetricks determines whether a verb has been installed by writing and reading to a winetricks.log file found in the root directory of the Wineprefix you're working with. It also tests if the file actually exists too, but let's just focus on winetricks.log for simplicity.

The first time Winetricks installs the dxvk verb, which takes the latest DXVK release at the time you run it, it writes dxvk to the winetricks.log file. When a new version of DXVK is released, and you run WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever winetricks dxvk, it will hit winetricks_is_installed and read ~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever/winetricks.log to see if DXVK is already is installed. It will see that dxvk is in the log file and give up.

When I was writing the Visual Novels on GNU/Linux guide, I did a lot of experimentation with Winetricks. I installed dxvk in a Wineprefix a few months ago and haven't touched it since then. A new version of DXVK was released three weeks ago. When executing the dxvk verb in that Wineprefix again, I get:

Executing w_do_call dxvk
dxvk already installed, skipping

Years ago, Winetricks would write a new verb definition for every new DXVK release. Presumably when it was much less stable. You can see remnants of that with the 100+ verbs for installing particular DXVK versions. Now it just takes the latest stable release. Yay for the maintainers, because that's a lot less work. As a side effect, Winetricks doesn't have a way of updating it normally.

Why doesn't Winetricks have the ability to update verbs? Well, you're often installing very specific versions of a native DLL to override the builtin Wine component. You don't want that changing on you randomly. The w_get_github_latest_release function, which extracts the latest release, was created purely for and only used for DXVK. DXVK is the only component that really works like this in Winetricks.

There is an easy way of updating DXVK anyway. Just run Winetricks with --force:

WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever winetricks --force dxvk

Now, admittedly, I misspoke about Winetricks "not supporting updating DXVK". I learned this option exists just now. So you can force-update it with --force, which bypasses winetricks_is_installed and installs the latest version of DXVK. Guide has been updated accordingly; thank you for making me look into this again!

It's a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.

I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It's by the same writers.

The NET is...fun...

That's a nice piece of hardware you've got there.

There are also Windows users who rely on niche business applications. Wine isn't great for that sort of software yet. Another big one is the creative industry. While the VFX industry is very Linux-focused, and 3D is very viable, other parts of video production are not. And GIMP needs non-destructive editing before it can even think of competing with Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Inkscape is a viable vector image tool. The many other Adobe programs don't have great alternatives, and if you need to collaborate, that means you all need to switch to a new program. Then there are the retraining costs to consider.

Gamers have the easiest time in switching to Linux. The amount of compromises and sacrifices you need to make in other industries are much greater right now.

However, Adobe is trying to bring some of their programs, like Photoshop, to the web. It's unlikely we'll see stuff like After Effects on the web, but Photoshop, Illustrator, maybe even inDesign could possibly, maybe be there in a few years. Photoshop web is already in beta (though it's garbage). The web continues to be the great equalizer.

I don’t know if they’re still 720p locked on the free version.

Yes, it's still locked to 720p on the free version, but the Create plan is very competitive at $9.99 a month. It has all of the features of Pro except encoding is limited to H.264/AAC and AV1 on Vimeo/YouTube, and you have no control over the encode aside from resolution. That was enough for me, though. I'm not doing anything super professional but I'm doing more than you can do easily with most of the NLEs on the list above.

I’ve tried LW before but I never really liked the workflow.

The workflow kind of broke my brain when I first looked at it a few years back but after acclimating to it I quite like it. The cutting is keyboard-based in a way most other NLEs aren't, but yeah, it can definitely be annoying without some tweaks. Were you using Lightworks when they didn't have a Fixed Layout option? The Flexible Layout pretty much leaves you to it, but the Fixed Layout is very reminiscent of Resolve. What I love most about Lightworks is definitely the speed. It's the fastest and most responsive NLE I've ever used (Cinelerra probably comes a close second). And it gives you good Color tools and many other powerful features! Not a common combination. The community is also full of knowledgeable people, but that's true of Resolve too.

Anyway, if you're happy with Resolve, there's no reason to consider switching. Pricing wise Resolve beats out Lightworks after two years of Pro license ownership and the licenses are less annoying. Main reason I went for Lightworks is I didn't want to be forced to keep a NVIDIA GPU forever. It seems less disruptive to my workflow in the long run. How is Resolve stability-wise for you? I'm still trialing Lightworks but the ownership cost is leading me to re-consider Resolve...

Having a look at the Resolve 18 Codec manual, I see they've moved from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8.6. I'm glad they didn't kill the GNU/Linux version or something along with CentOS, lol...

I also prefer chromium dev tools, though it isn’t that bad to switch to Firefox’s dev tools.

I actually vastly prefer Firefox's dev tools to Chromium's. There are keyboard shortcuts to open every tab, it has a color picker, it has a multi-line Javascript console, and in general I find it more intuitive. Chromium developer tools seem to be less complete than Firefox and harder to use.

I just learned Chromium technically has a color picker tool, but you need to scroll through CSS propetries to find a color selector, click the color, then click the color picker. With Firefox, I tap CTRL+SHIFT+I to open dev tools, click the color picker which is front-and-center, and it copies the hex code to my clipboard. This is a microcosm of my overall experience with Chromium's developer tools. Everything is slower or further out of reach.

I don't know how it ended up this way.

I tried Lutris and Bottles, but I didn't give Heroic much of a shot. Personally, I think Bottles is the nicest one, though I'm still using Lutris. Although, for my use case (Japanese language visual novels), Lutris makes it easier to select Japanese Locale for specific games, and hopefully with the next release, it will let you choose Locale when installing games: https://github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/493

I think the Lutris Installer is generally less finicky than Heroic and Bottles as it automatically detects the game executable after installation. It isn't always successful, but it usually is.

Does the Heroic Flatpak bundle a runtime similar to the Lutris Runtime? It seems to imply that it bundles Wine versions, but what about all the other usual dependencies, like DXVK, Faudio, etc.? There doesn't seem to be much information on that.

I'll share the one thing that made my life much easier: Gamescope. So many visual novels don't fullscreen properly, and Gamescope is a great workaround for that. The upscaling stuff is nice too.

all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14

That was what I originally wanted! They were sold-out by the time I needed to buy one, so I went with an ASUS Scar something-something.

Most of the laptops I own are Dell laptops which originally came with Windows, on account of the 5-year repair deal where they repair it wherever you are (making use of IBM's network to do so). I didn't get a chance to see how the latest one worked with Windows 11 because I wiped it immediately...

I've heard good and bad things about Framework with Linux. I don't know if I would end up buying it either way, as it seems like it would demand more experience than I have.

Some good pointers, thanks! I imagine it's mostly the 120Hz display that's killing my battery life...which is a shame, but alas, sacrifices need to be made sometimes. I'll have to give these things a try!

Was it hard to find an AMD dGPU laptop? There are almost none where I'm based.