Games: GTA, SDL, Gaming in Nitrux, and Portal 2

• How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

  Profilers are a great way of finding CPU bottlenecks. There’s only one problem - most of them rely on instrumenting the source code to get a perfect picture of what’s happening in the process. And I don’t have the source code. Nor do I need microsecond-perfect readings - I have 4 minutes’ worth of a bottleneck.

  Enter stack sampling: for closed source applications there’s only one option. Dump the running process’ stack and current instruction pointer’s location to build a calling tree in set intervals. Then add them up to get statistics on what’s going on. There’s only one profiler that I know of (might be ignorant here) that can do this on Windows. And it hasn’t been updated in over 10 years. It’s Luke Stackwalker! Someone, please give this project some love :)

• SDL2 Lands Native PipeWire Support

  While SDL2-enabled games/applications can already work on PipeWire-based systems like the forthcoming Fedora Workstation 34 thanks to the PulseAudio compatibility layer, the SDL2 library has merged initial support for interfacing with PipeWire. Merged on Sunday were various pieces of PipeWire audio support code for the SDL library including the playback/capture sink abilities. SDL2 now has a build time option for enabling PipeWire support as well as for whether to dynamically load it.

• Gaming in Nitrux pt. 1: Get Started — Nitrux — #YourNextOS

  In general, gaming on Linux used to be limited to the few FOSS games available for the operating system, which is no longer the case, and it has seen steady growth over the past few years. With major companies like Valve providing Steam for Linux, Proton; the development of DXVK, the continuous work put into Wine by its developers, and Indie game developers creating games with Linux support out-of-the-box, the amount of fun for Linux continues to expand. This post will be pt. 1, and it will only deal with obtaining games. For pt. 2, there will be performance benchmarks on Nitrux and perhaps a comparison with other distributions, including those purposely built for gaming.

• Portal 2 gets more DXVK Vulkan improvements with another update | GamingOnLinux

  Valve's fantastic first-person puzzle game Portal 2 recently had a huge upgrade that pulled in DXVK giving it Vulkan support, with another update out now to further improve it. As a reminder: this has nothing to do with Source 2. Portal 2 by default uses Direct3D 9 on Windows and OpenGL on Linux. For the Linux version, original Source engine games like this used a translation layer called ToGL to translate D3D9 to OpenGL. DXVK being added in gives the option to launch Portal 2 with "-vulkan" as a launch option which may improve overall performance.

Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 3 1.04 Released with Debian GNU/Linux 10.8 “Buster” Updates

About four month in development, Emmabuntüs Linux Debian Edition 3 1.04 comes packed with all the updates from the Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series, more specifically it’s based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10.8 update released last month with 45 security updates and 56 other updated packages with bug fixes. This means the educational distro is now up to date and safe to use by anyone on their personal computers. Offering up-to-date systems, especially for educational use, is very important and Emmabuntüs Debian Edition does a good job at keeping its users updated at all times.

Android Leftovers

• Google Maps dark theme for Android officially announced - 9to5Google

• Google Maps is getting a new trick (plus 5 other Android features coming) - CNET

• Google Chrome may soon default to desktop mode on Android tablets

• Chrome might automatically use desktop mode on Android tablets soon

• Your Android tablet’s Chrome browser may soon default to desktop mode automatically

• Your Android Tablet May Soon Default to Desktop Mode When Using Chrome

• How To Turn off notifications from websites in Chrome on Android? - TechStory

• Can iPhone-only Clubhouse succeed in Android-dominated Asia Pacific? | The Drum

• PUBG Mobile 1.3 beta update for Global version: APK download link for global Android users

• OnePlus Nord finally gets OxygenOS 11 with Android 11 - SlashGear

• [Updated] Realme UI 2.0 (Android 11) Early Access for Realme 6, C12, C15, X2, X3...