If anyone from Valve is reading this, my biggest wishlist from Steam OS is a proper general purpose browsing tab. Please make it happen ..
I currently use that web browser from Decky loader, but that keeps breaking so often. Plus it would be nice to have something that i can login my YouTube, Netflix etc.. accounts ..
Did you try loading the browser as a non-game application?
To be honest, I primarily do my browsing offline, and I installed https://localsend.org using Flatpak to move files to/from the Steam Deck. It works amazingly well.
With Google doing everything in its power to end ad blocking, I’ve made a real attempt to switch to Firefox and Firefox-based browsers. I unpinned Chrome from my taskbar and only popped into it when I needed to. Over the span of a couple months, eventually the Chrome window never got closed… Eventually it was pinned to my taskbar again… And at some point it was my default browser again and all I was using.
I don’t like how Firefox handles tab groups, I don’t want to rely on extensions to fix that, I don’t like their dev tools, I don’t like how their private window shortcut is different from what every other browser uses with no way to change it, I personally think it’s ugly, I could go on.
I tried alternatives like Zen but I end up not liking their weird ideas of how a browser should be used, and trusting small FOSS project maintainers to ship a stable, secure browser has not been great in my experience.
Chrome is boring and reliable which is really what I want. Edge is a slightly worse version of it due to Microsoft incompetence/lack of taste but I’d still rather use that than Firefox.
It's not exactly rocket science to add a "browser app" to the Steam system to use certain web sites in an appliance-ish mode, but it's not great for general purpose browsing.
A slightly more advanced browser frontend that offered an experience comparable to Edge on Xbox would be very nice.
From my reading, it will be replacing a user-space sync emulation handler with a kernel-space sync module. Generally, kernel space will be faster or more efficient than user space. Whether this matters in any appreciable way (more than 1% improvement) in reality will have to be seen.
It's more that FSync was close to but subtly different from the Windows synchronization primitives when used in certain specific ways and NTSync is a 100% accurate implementation of those same exact Windows synchronization primitives. It should resolve hitching and other minor issues in older games, especially.
Basically it will have no performance improvement, in some cases minor degradation, but it resolves some compatibility issues with older multi-threaded programs.
Just reading about it now, it implements some system calls from Windows NT normally emulated via Proton in user-space to the kernel which should reduce overhead. Very cool.
Games that have problems with the previous approach might have hitches or stalls, though it could manifest in many ways.
Edit: I am running a kernel with it on, as well as Proton-CachyOS which has it opt-in. I have yet to see it make an improvement of any kind. Maybe it might help on lower-spec hardware such as the Deck.
BTW, this driver is genuinely useful even for Linux code. WaitForMultipleObjects is super-helpful if you want to do sane thread cancellation without jumping through POSIX hoops.
I currently use that web browser from Decky loader, but that keeps breaking so often. Plus it would be nice to have something that i can login my YouTube, Netflix etc.. accounts ..
https://beebom.com/how-install-google-chrome-steam-deck/
To be honest, I primarily do my browsing offline, and I installed https://localsend.org using Flatpak to move files to/from the Steam Deck. It works amazingly well.
With Google doing everything in its power to end ad blocking, I’ve made a real attempt to switch to Firefox and Firefox-based browsers. I unpinned Chrome from my taskbar and only popped into it when I needed to. Over the span of a couple months, eventually the Chrome window never got closed… Eventually it was pinned to my taskbar again… And at some point it was my default browser again and all I was using.
I don’t like how Firefox handles tab groups, I don’t want to rely on extensions to fix that, I don’t like their dev tools, I don’t like how their private window shortcut is different from what every other browser uses with no way to change it, I personally think it’s ugly, I could go on.
I tried alternatives like Zen but I end up not liking their weird ideas of how a browser should be used, and trusting small FOSS project maintainers to ship a stable, secure browser has not been great in my experience.
Chrome is boring and reliable which is really what I want. Edge is a slightly worse version of it due to Microsoft incompetence/lack of taste but I’d still rather use that than Firefox.
It's not exactly rocket science to add a "browser app" to the Steam system to use certain web sites in an appliance-ish mode, but it's not great for general purpose browsing.
A slightly more advanced browser frontend that offered an experience comparable to Edge on Xbox would be very nice.
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f4cc1a38-1441-62f8-47e4-0c67f5a...
Basically it will have no performance improvement, in some cases minor degradation, but it resolves some compatibility issues with older multi-threaded programs.
Edit: I am running a kernel with it on, as well as Proton-CachyOS which has it opt-in. I have yet to see it make an improvement of any kind. Maybe it might help on lower-spec hardware such as the Deck.
It does link to this page, which has a bit more info and links to further info. Not at all 5-year-old level, but should help: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14-NTSYNC-Driver-Ready
For more info, see here, including a link to Youtube video with more details: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241213193511.457338-1-zfigura...
Unless you mean linux client, but that is presumably coming at some point now that the windows client is 64bit.