gamescope VS xdg-desktop-portal

Compare gamescope vs xdg-desktop-portal and see what are their differences.

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gamescope xdg-desktop-portal
56 154
2,652 524
6.0% 3.8%
9.7 9.4
2 days ago 7 days ago
C++ C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

gamescope

Posts with mentions or reviews of gamescope. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-19.
  • The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 1
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Dec 2023
    I think your information is quite outdated. The HWC overlay planes are heavily used, you can see this trivially just doing a 'dumpsys SurfaceFlinger' or grabbing a systrace/perfetto trace. When it falls back to GPU composition it's very obvious as there's a significant hit to latency and more GPU contention.

    The overlay capabilities of the modern Snapdragons are also quite absurd. They support like upwards of a dozen overlays now and even have FP16 extended sRGB support. Some HWCs (like the one in the steam deck) even have per plane 3D LUTs for HDR tone mapping (ex https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/blob/master/src/d... )

    The composition is bandwidth heavy of course, but for static scenes there's a cache after the HWC in the form of panel self refresh.

  • Gamescope -- How do I get this to work on Endeavouros?
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 6 Dec 2023
  • Firefox Is Going to Try and Ship with Wayland Enabled by Default
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2023
    One of the unfortunate things about Wayland is every compositor will have its own quality of implementation affecting things like latency.

    With XOrg, especially in the pre-compositing days, you could choose whatever WM you want and it wouldn't have any impact on the rendering performance of X clients. Once the Composite extension was added and everyone started running composited X desktops, that started to change, and the increased latency already started appearing - in an arguably worse architecture than Wayland because there were often three processes involved with lots of IPC per draw: X-Client->X-Server->X-Compositor->X-Server->CRTC. At least in Wayland it's more like Wayland-Client->Wayland-Compositor->CRTC.

    If you're unhappy with the rendering latency of your Wayland sessions, it may be worth trying alternative compositors... they likely vary significantly. The Valve/Steam folks have made a minimal one specifically optimized for games/low-latency [0]. I doubt the SteamDeck would be seeing as much success as it is if Wayland were so problematic in this department.

    [0]: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

  • BG3 splitscreen on two monitors?
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 29 Oct 2023
    Use gamescope.
  • Help needed to confirm two 3.5 bugs
    2 projects | /r/SteamDeck | 24 Sep 2023
    While streaming from the Deck to another device (phone with Steam Link app or another PC running steam), taking a screenshot on the Deck (hold the steam or ... button, and press R1) crashes the session (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/961). This one also impacts Decky Recorder. If you're recording the screen or have replay mode on and take a screenshot, you'll have a crash.
  • I haven't seen much posted about it here, so I wanted to point out Valve's gamescope micro-compositor (Linux Gaming)
    1 project | /r/linux | 21 Sep 2023
  • Gamescope adds support for Reshade effects
    1 project | /r/ReShade | 17 Sep 2023
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 17 Sep 2023
  • Force V-Sync or limit fps in proton games
    4 projects | /r/linux_gaming | 5 Sep 2023
    Mangohud (GOverlay), libstrangle, gamescope. Pick your poison.
  • FYI on video corruption in cmd and terminal windows
    1 project | /r/EryingMotherboard | 20 Aug 2023
    Hey folks. I've got a 11900H motherboard and use the iGPU and stock Intel graphics drivers that I keep current. Even at baseline (so without overclocking of any kind, with good Corsair memory sticks configured without XMP and regardless of voltage), I would be able to use Windows 11 and the CMD or Terminal programs without issue but after some time they would be corrupt and unreadable. The fix was in Terminal, go into Settings, then Render, and turn on Software Rendering. I hope this helps someone else. FYI the corruption was very much like other Intel UHD graphics samples reported in this link: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/356

xdg-desktop-portal

Posts with mentions or reviews of xdg-desktop-portal. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-29.
  • Flathub: One million active users and growing
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2024
  • Changes to xdg.portals?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 28 Nov 2023
  • PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    >Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703

    >remapping keys

    >Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev)

    Up to the compositor.

    >Global shortcuts

    Also up to the compositor. Was added to xdp in https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data... so it's up to the compositor's xdp impl to provide it. It was created by a KDE dev so I assume KDE implements it at least.

    >tunnelling over ssh

    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

  • Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Oct 2023
    > - O proper screen recording support

    Works just fine. I use OBS.

    > - broken screen sharing

    Never had any trouble with it.

    > - No proper global keyboard shortcut

    > - No push to talk support

    On its way: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/711 / https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.free...

    > - Several problems with multiple screens

    Haven't had any more than on X11, but then again I do use Nvidia hardware on Linux.

  • The Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port at a Time
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2023
    It might help, but at this point Linux containers can't really stabilize the whole environment, especially for games. Particular pain points include accelerated graphics (which theoretically can have a stable kernel interface, but in practice is so complex and performance-sensitive that it's not stable enough to be a "reference platform", so to speak) and modern game controllers (which present a whole mess of concerns typically "addressed" in Flatpak by granting the device=all permission and hoping for the best [1]).

    I also know a guy who ran into issues with a kernel update breaking a custom allocator, although I don't know the fine details. That wasn't for a game, but games also use custom allocators for various reasons.

    [1] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/536

  • Unpacking Elixir: Syntax
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Sep 2023
    I don't use Wayland, but it seems xdg-desktop-portal since 1.16.0 has a 'Global Shortcuts portal'. Perhaps check it out.

    https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal

  • UX Hurdles in Open Source #1: Flatpak Permissions
    1 project | /r/linux | 27 Jun 2023
    It's being discussed: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/611
  • Advice: TW or Aeon
    2 projects | /r/openSUSE | 26 Jun 2023
    The first bug report was filed in early 2022 but unfortunately no progress yet on the matter, even after numerous similar reports ever since.
  • Native messaging for Firefox
    1 project | /r/flatpak | 23 Jun 2023
  • Xdg portal hyprland and launching gui apps
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 21 Jun 2023
    Yeah been having the same issue since I changed to using the unstable branch, supposedly noticed and fixed upstream for a few variants of the problem (different people with different configurations of DE and xdg-* deps installed report the same issue due to timeouts of the other portals)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing gamescope and xdg-desktop-portal you can also consider the following projects:

gamescope-session - ChimeraOS session on Gamescope - Own personal repository, issues and forks should be made on ChimeraOS/gamescope-session

gamescope - SteamOS session compositing window manager [Moved to: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope]

gamemode - Optimise Linux system performance on demand

wayfire - A modular and extensible wayland compositor

holoiso - SteamOS 3 (Holo) archiso configuration

gtk-layer-shell - A library to create panels and other desktop components for Wayland using the Layer Shell protocol

MangoHud - A Vulkan and OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, temperatures, CPU/GPU load and more. Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/Gj5YmBb

pipewire - Mirror of the PipeWire repository (see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/)

sway - i3-compatible Wayland compositor

flatpaks

LatencyFleX - Vendor agnostic latency reduction middleware. An alternative to NVIDIA Reflex.

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