I have for the past half year. I don’t have numbers, but rolling with the NVK vulkan driver (context for the unaware [1]) on mesa’s main branch gets me somewhere around half the proprietary driver’s performance on average, and can be accompanied with stutters if it is a heavy bottleneck (turning down the resolution is an easy way out). Most games I’ve tried are runnable now.

It sounds like you’re looking for more performance with this post though, so you’re likely not going to see improvements taking this route. I would still suggest giving it a try for people that are able and can tolerate the sacrifice. It’s good enough for me (and better in the wayland case) that I rarely swap to the proprietary driver anymore.

Mesa has a tracker issue for games on NVK [2] [3] with reports about game statuses and issues from the past 5 months. It includes playable and unplayable games for those interested in gauging its usability.

Also, for the record, NVK is no longer considered experimental as of mesa 24.1 (May of this year) [4].

[1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-has-landed.html

[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RuHD3Z_nBKCp618HHC5I9hOu0lqCoFYwQ4FM69M-Ajg/edit?gid=469568508#gid=469568508

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11066

[4] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-is-now-ready-for-prime-time.html

You might be interested in git-annex (see the Bob use case).

It has file tracking so you can - for example - “ask” a repository at drive A where some file is, and git-annex can tell you it’s on drives C and D.

git-annex can also enforce rules like: “always have at least 3 copies of file X, and any drive will do”; “have one copy of every file at the drives in my house, and have another at the drives in my parents’ house”; or “if a file is really big, don’t store it on certain drives”.

Slight correction, it’s available in Linux 6.7, and has to be enabled with the kernel parameter nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1. It may be enabled by default soon though (latest news I could find about that here).

NVK itself is not dependent on anything proprietary, but it’s practically required to enable NVIDIA’s GSP firmware blob if you want to see actual performance since it’s what enables re-clocking (older post by Collabora here which touches on it).

Cheers, glad to hear you got it working. I don’t think there’s any problem on your end; all my flatpaks are user-installed as a Guix System user, so it didn’t cross my mind that a habitually-placed --user flag would not work if something was installed system-wide!

Thanks for posting about this! I never thought to try this as an Akregator user, but it’s a great idea… I spent the past day getting this to work since I also use the Flatpaks; hope it helps.

As suggested by @progandy@feddit.de, one solution is to define a custom protocol where the URL gets passed to a script that opens Firefox Reader with the URL; here’s what I’ve done:

1. Decide on a protocol name, which the URL will be prefixed with and passed to xdg-open since that should be available to the Flatpak. I used firefox-reader as the protocol, so I put xdg-open firefox-reader://%u as the custom command (so a command Akregator would run might look like xdg-open firefox-reader://https://example.com).
2. Define a desktop entry to support the custom protocol (you can see mine below). ~/.local/share/applications is the standard place to put these, as far as I’m aware. Since the custom protocol needs to be removed from the URL, I wrote a script (also below) to do this and then call Firefox with about:reader?url= prefixed. The script can be anywhere in $PATH.
3. Add the desktop entry as a “default application” for opening URLs using this custom protocol. In my case, I ran xdg-mime default org.mozilla.firefox.reader.desktop x-scheme-handler/firefox-reader (org.mozilla.firefox.reader.desktop is the name of my desktop entry file).
4. You also might have to update some mime/xdg database stuff. I had to run update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications so xdg-open would find the “Firefox Reader” desktop entry.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Firefox Reader
Exec=open-firefox-reader.sh %u
StartupNotify=false
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/firefox-reader;

#!/usr/bin/env bash

flatpak run --user org.mozilla.firefox about:reader?url="${1#firefox-reader://}"

If you have any other trouble or want to find more information about this since the desktop entry could probably be tweaked, here are the sources of note I used to figure this out (If I forgot a step or two writing this, they should also be present somewhere in there):

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/497146/create-a-custom-url-protocol-handler
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_MIME_Applications
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_entries#Update_database_of_desktop_entries

I’ve been having my own fun trying out NVK on Guix System so I can’t give you specific instructions (assuming you’re not using Guix), but I can tell you what you need and maybe someone else can chip in on how/if you need to do anything else on your distro:

• Linux kernel >= 6.7
• GSP firmware enabled via the kernel parameter nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1
• Mesa built with the -Dvulkan-drivers=nouveau-experimental flag.

A few notes:

• Performance and stability of games has been fairly hit-or-miss for me. Of the 10 Vulkan games I’ve tried so far: 3 run perfectly, 3 are playable with noticeable issues, and 4 are borked.
• NVK is Vulkan-only, but performance largely comes from the GSP firmware so you will still see a difference (huge for me) in games not using Vulkan.
• You can override flatpaks to use the host’s Mesa version (set FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS=host); however, there’s a bug that causes the Steam Flatpak to not work when doing this. The mesa-git-extension Flatpak exists which can also be used to replace Mesa runtimes, but it had issues building with NVK so it’s currently disabled.

The only package I’m aware of at the moment (other than my hacked-together Guix package) is available in the AUR.