32

I looked up specifically examples of this and didn't find answers, they're buried in general discussions about why compiling may be better than pre-built. The reasons I found were control of flags and features, and optimizations for specific chips (like Intel AVX or ARM Neon), but to what degree do those apply today?

The only software I can tell benefits greatly from building from source, is ffmpeg since there are many non-free encoders decoders and upscalers that can be bundled, and performance varies a lot between devices due to which of them is supported by the CPU or GPU. For instance, Nvidia hardware encoders typically produce higher quality video for similar file sizes than ones from Intel AMD or Apple. Software encoders like x265 has optimizations for AVX and NEON (SIMD extensions for CPUs).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 9 points 4 days ago

Anecdotally: the night Mozilla builds were a godsend when I couldn't afford decent hardware.

Also anecdotally and professionally: when you have a client that insists on using source like most software companies do nowadays; you can use that source along with something like a hash to keep them honest and prevent them from leaving you holding the bag when shtf. (ask me how I know this works. Lol)

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Anecdotally: the night Mozilla builds were a godsend when I couldn’t afford decent hardware.

I don't know much about them, do you happen to know why the nightly builds were better? Did the new features fix a problem?

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

i wasn't using the main build; i was using a minimalist build on my ancient laptop and i struggle to remember what it was called now.

this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
32 points (88.1% liked)

Linux

48823 readers
655 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS