Hi there! I’m the founder and maintainer of Portable and it’s PKGBUILD repository, portable-arch.

Your favourites apps, all coming to Portable

Since it’s first introduction, the app library it holds continued to grow. I’d like to showoff a picture of most supported apps:

App Library

Speaking of new apps, Steam is now available in package steam-portable. Various technical changes in Portable has taken place for this journey to happen.

  • The whole mount logic was rewritten from the ground up in #410!

  • We also added an option to disable mounting of flatpak-info.

Previously, running Steam is not possible due to the presence of /.flatpak-info inside the sandbox. It makes Steam believe Flatpak is present and starts to use the Flatpak spawn portal. Initially it was a dead-end. Because intercepting and re-writing D-Bus messages isn’t possible, at least in bash. And we don’t want to do nasty hacks.

Well, turns out after modernizing the calculation of mount arguments, we can do things like not mounting flatpak-info quite easily without introducing race conditions. And it made Steam function well. Testing of several games turned out successful and stable. Not surprising though, since I already use portable-sandboxed wine to run various games locally.

In other news, portable-arch now also supports multiple architectures, and updated linuxqq-portable along with obsidian-bwrap

The rest of Portable news

Among existing apps, new features and bug discovery also happened.

  • We discovered a bug causing XWaylandVideoBridge to send incorrectly-scaled images to Feishu in Discussions
  • Multiple refactors and inspections have been conducted, to make Portable start and terminate much faster. From cold and dark to shutdown now lasts for only 251 milliseconds, and starting up only takes about 107 milliseconds (both measured on a 14th Gen Core processor, running on E-cores, balanced profile with moeOS power saving features). Makes the start time hardly noticeable, and reduced stop time by ~800 milliseconds.
  • shellcheck has been introduced to catch potential issues before commit
  • Multiple literal matching statements have been ported to regex, improving robustness
  • The ability to start debug-shell when sandbox is running is dropped
  • Utilized delegation of control groups
  • The multi-GPU experience has been improved further
  • The status of sandbox can be viewed by passing argument --actions stats
  • Fixed a bug affecting hybrid graphics with the Nouveau driver
  • Most PCI devices are hidden, except GPUs in use. (Note that single output systems and gameMode uses the old behaviour, and is subject to change)

Also, huge thanks to the developer of Resources, for the collaboration of identifying Portable apps and set containerized status correctly.

moeOS

What powers the developing foundation and casual computing experience is moeOS. A customised Arch Linux system designed with elegance in mind.

A number of power saving features were added into it, and we migrated to the p2dq scx scheduler for better performance under load.

Fractional scaling has been enabled on Firefox, Zen Browser and Thunderbird. The constant stuttering has been traced and solved.

The search indexing service, localsearch has also been limited on resources, and will no longer operate on battery power.

On top of that, the issue involving rendering of Korean characters in Firefox with WQY fonts has been fixed, by specifying the correct font family based on languages.

That was the extent of this post. Have a great December!