I don’t think his statement is true though. If https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1ce7z19/gaming_on_linux_ep131_ntsync_vs_fsync_nobara_39/l1ho8od/ is not manipulated in any way, games with lots of these calls still get big improvements with ntsync over fsync (about 30% in this particular case, which is a massive boost). So while nobody can rule out that his statement may be true on average or in general, there are still cases where ntsync offers a tangible advantage – be it improved FPS or the fact that the game runs at all.

Edit: in the video that the thread is about, fsync didn’t beat ntsync in a single one (or I missed it when jumping through it). In the best one, they were exactly tied. Sure, the difference wasn’t really big, but again there are titles not working with fsync.

However, I want to stress that I’m not trying to talk about fsync. It’s a good solution that significantly improved performance. But ntsync is, from everything I’ve seen, almost always better; how much depends on the case, and it never seems to be worse.

Yes, sorry

Any linking against GPL software requires you to also release your source code under GPL. ALGPL allows you to link to it dynamically without relicensing, but as explained, there are platforms where dynamic linking isn’t an option, which means these libraries can’t be used if one doesn’t want to provide ALGPL licensed source code of their own product.

fsync isn’t faster than ntsync, it’s merely a workaround to match Linux to Windows synchronization primitives. From ntsync’s official description:

It exists because implementation in user-space, using existing tools, cannot match Windows performance while offering accurate semantics.

So without this, you either have a huge perfomance hit in case of an accurate implementation or you have good performance, but might run into edge cases where software doesn’t work well or at all because it’s not accurate (see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2922 for examples)

While the full number might be inflated, it still has one of the most complete official repositories.

Fish is a surprisingly good shell.

It’s not POSIX compatible, but I don’t really care, it only executes its own scripts / functions. It’s not as innovative as elvish or nu, but it kind of does everything very conveniently and shell-y for lack of a better word – and it always seems so simple. It seems conservative in design, but the old concepts have been evolved in a very usable way. Something I can’t say for all the other shells I’ve tried – at some point, it always gets awkward where fish is just elegant.