We sure came a long way from the early days where Linux didn’t have USB support to sometimes running Window apps better than Windows
To be fair the “no USB support” window was quite short. USB started becoming available to consumers around 1998-1999 and there was some level of USB support in the Linux kernel within a few months. I remember using an early USB stack written by someone else that Linus didn’t like so he rewrote it from scratch. Even the new Linus stack was in place by 1999. We got USB-2 and 3 support pretty quickly too.
It felt like a long long time. Maybe USB sticks were straightforward, but USB webcams, scanners, printers, modems took a while.
Helps all of wine:
ntsync driver to handle Windows locking types enabling Wine to work much better on many workloads (i.e. games). The driver framework was in 6.13, but now it’s enabled and fully working properly. Should make many SteamOS users happy. Even comes with tests!
I wonder how much improvements is it going to bring to Proton, though. I don’t remember the last time I ran a game on pure WINE.
If I understand correctly, very little. Since proton already implemeted esync, which was a workaround for this.
Proton is mostly just wine and esync has been replaced by fsync a while back. Ntsync is another even faster/better sync mechanism.
Ntsync is much more capable than fsync, which was the replacement for esync. Many games that benefitted from esync will benefit much more from ntsync. Esync also breaks many games, which ntsync seemingly does not.
Also, the majority of people running games on Wine are doing so with a version of wine that includes fsync. Lutris, Bottles, and Heroic all support versions of wine with these patches.
Proton is still largely wine. Proton is just wine with some custom patches (which usually make their way to wine) and other software like DXVK and vkd3d bundled in. This change will bring the same benefits to Proton as it does to wine, once proton is updated to support it.
Had to run the bazaar on wine. Apparently wine has a bug though where the game freezes when you tab out at any point. I have a windows VM now…
k
awww. I somehow thought it was coming in 6.13 (which is in testing -repos for arch atm), oh well.
Either way, seems like good stuff for gaming and - hopefully - productivity apps.
You can install the Zen kernel as it has the ntsync patch merged already and which I personally prefer for a gaming (desktop) system.
But as I understand it we have to still wait for the corresponding wine patch to be merged as well for it to be usable for Windows applications and more so in case of Proton.
