The Latest Firefox

General Discussion
#1

… is decent.

I’d moved away from FF for a few months due to absurd resource use that slowed even this rather well-endowed computer (Intel i9 9900K, 64GB RAM, NVMe SSD, ridiculously over-cooled, no superfluous software, and eye candy disabled). But I decided to try it again last night, and it’s like night and day. It’s scary fast now, with much more reasonable resource use across the board.

It looks like they did a lot of work on the rendering engine, too. It’s much brighter and clearer, and the colors are more accurate than I remember.

They also got Firefox Sync working right – finally.

I’m impressed.

Richard

#2

Droolworthy!

1 Like
#3

I forgot to mention the GeForce GTX 1660 GPU w/ 6GB video RAM. :yum: That’s in addition to the Intel integrated graphics.

I built the machine for video editing earlier this year, but I moved everything work-related over to it last weekend. It’s just easier.

I also have a laptop with my essential applications on it that has a network drive mapped to a B2 bucket containing everything I need to work remotely, if need be. Every document I touch on this machine is synchronized to B2 using GoodSync a few seconds later, and can be mapped as a drive on the laptop anywhere in the Interwebs-connected world using Mountain Duck.

Any changes I make on the laptop are then synced back to this machine from B2 using GoodSync; so when I get home, all I need to do is sit down and work.

Richard

#4

Hahah, yep … the i9 9900K is really in need for a proper cooling solution if you use it heavily. Which you seem to do with editing. But that GPU somewhat made me laugh. :sweat_smile: :smiley:

Mozilla did indeed fix a lot of issues regarding ressources, performance and sync issues. Hopefully they don’t make it worse with the planed UI changes.

#5

I dumped Firefox for the simple reason it seemed to have to update every single time I launched it.

I went back to Chrome.

#6

The video-editing software I use most often (Magix Video Pro X) actually uses the Intel GPU for hardware encoding for almost all codecs. I have an HDMI dummy plug in there to make the GPU accessible to the software. Most of my other graphics-related software, however, prefers the NVIDIA GPU.

I actually debated whether or not to install a discrete GPU at all. But I’m glad I did. It makes a huge difference for tasks like transcoding. But the Intel GPU does the heavy lifting for the bulk of my video editing.

Richard

#7

Do you ever get into fights with Nvidia Linux drivers? I’m wondering if larger desktop screens are friendlier than laptops with Nvidia cards. With laptops I can never get the proprietary drivers to scale with any sanity. Dual monitors won’t work either. Nouveau drivers solve both problems.

#8

This machine was built for and is running Win10. But in general, I haven’t had especially good luck with NVIDIA’s drivers on Linux, either.

They make a particular mess in Arch and Manjaro (and presumably other Arch progeny, if there are any). Nouveau drivers work much better as long as the NVIDIA drivers are never installed. Once they are, it becomes unstable, even if they’re not selected.

The other problem with NVIDIA on Linux is the move from X to Wayland. With NVIDIA still refusing to release the source code (at least the last time I checked), I’d have to have a really good reason to choose NVIDIA over Radeon for a dedicated Linux desktop machine.

Richard

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#9

The desktop situation sounds the same as laptops. I’ve never used a dedicated Nvidia card for a build or upgrade. My favorite graphics card is an ancient Matrox card in an i3 system on a motherboard that turns 12 years old in February. I’ll cry the day capacitors start popping in that computer.

I don’t know about Arch but Manjaro must have gotten the message and they made Nvidia drivers as easy as Ubuntu. Manjaro correctly detects just about any GeForce card and offers the single Nvidia or hybrid drivers. With Nvidia only, scaling is obnoxious as usual but hybrid looks normal even when the Nivida takes over, which is weird.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: Over 10 percent of Linux kernel source code is devoted to Radeon graphics. Only 2 percent ends up as the hardware binary but that’s still a mind blowing number considering how many lines make up the kernel.

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#10

Maybe I’ll have to give Manjaro another try. It’s been a few years.

Have they squished the bugs in Pamac yet? The last time I tried Manjaro, I’d have to clean the cache, remove and reinstall the keys, and then run pacman in the shell, almost every time there was an update. That was on both my laptop and a desktop. I was pretty puzzled by it because I never had that problem in Arch.

I really haven’t been doing much with desktop Linux lately because Win10 is stable and usable, and all the work software I adopted since swearing off Adobe runs on Windows. I should make a post about my Adobe replacements one of these days.

I’m also using Mountain Duck and Backblaze rather than RDC to work remotely nowadays. I used to like Arch / Manjaro partly because the RDC app (Vinagre?) on that platform seemed to work better than any other one I’d tried, including Microsoft’s.

But I’d rather not use RDC at all for security reasons; so I switched to using Mountain Duck to map the laptop to the synced files on B2. Running the apps on the (Win10) laptop and mapping to the files remotely also eliminates the GUI lag.

I may still have Manjaro (or Arch) installed on the second drive in my “guest” machine. I have a physical selector switch in that machine to choose between the OS’s, but I haven’t used it in so long that I forget what’s installed on the second drive. I’ll have to check it out later. I know it’s some Linux distro. I just forget which one offhand.

Richard

#11

I’m not familiar with pamac’s bug history but I remember Octopi problems when I was using Manjaro a few years ago. I don’t use it anymore but had another look recently along with other distros while testing a new laptop with Nvidia inside. Manjaro lives up to its reputation for supporting newer hardware. It was Manjaro devs who came up with a kernel patch for touchpads and screen brightness issues for mine and other models. The fixes showed up in a Fedora kernel update shortly after.

I can’t say I have a favorite distro but if I was stuck on a desert island (with wi-fi) and could choose only one, Fedora would be my pick.