The user-facing v0.26.0 notes said, of the PyroWave GPU-priority lever:
"it is now, and the package grants the host the permission that switch needs"
That was true of 0.26.0-1 and is now the opposite of true. Granting CAP_SYS_NICE
made the host unidentifiable to KWin and killed desktop streaming on every KDE
box across all five Linux channels, so 0.26.0-2 revokes it everywhere and must
keep doing so. The lever is wired natively on Linux for the first time — that
part stands — but it is dormant on an ordinary install, and the notes have to
say so rather than advertise a speed-up nobody gets.
CHANGELOG.md was already corrected in #136 (the 0.26.0-2 note under PW1 and the
qualifier on the owed A/B). This is the user-facing half, which #136 did not
touch:
* the PyroWave bullet now leads with what DID land (two encoder handles, the
capture buffer headroom) and describes the priority switch as present but
dormant, with the reason.
* a new Fixed entry for the KDE breakage itself. Worth telling users even
though the release was never announced: 0.26.0-1 packages did reach the
registries, and anyone who pulled one has a desktop session that fails with
a missing-screencast error surviving a clean reinstall. It also explains the
dormancy the bullet above now refers to.
Deliberately NOT written as a "Before you update" action: upgrading strips the
capability by itself on every channel, so there is nothing for a reader to do.
Commit count 47 -> 52.
Voice check clean (0 internal-vocabulary hits above "## For developers"); notes
67 lines.
v0.26.0's notes and docs-site say the patched gamescope is now installable on
Fedora and on Debian/Ubuntu. Neither package exists on the release. Both builds
failed inside best-effort steps that emit `::warning::` and return 0, so every
job stayed green and the only evidence was a warning nobody reads. Arch built
fine, which is why it is the sole gamescope package attached.
Two distinct missing build deps, same root cause: `dnf builddep gamescope` /
`apt-get build-dep gamescope` resolve the DISTRO'S OLDER PACKAGED gamescope,
which does not need what the pinned master tree needs.
Fedora (f43 AND f44)
/usr/sbin/ld: cannot find -lstdc++
have you installed the static version of the stdc++ library ?
ERROR: Compiler sccache c++ cannot compile programs.
build-punktfunk-gamescope.sh appends `-static-libstdc++ -static-libgcc` to
LDFLAGS deliberately, so the binary still starts on SteamOS's older libstdc++.
Without libstdc++-static that trips meson's very FIRST sanity check, so
nothing builds at all.
Debian/Ubuntu noble
protocol/meson.build:7:17: ERROR: Neither a subproject directory nor a
wayland-protocols.wrap file was found.
The tree carries no wrap fallback for wayland-protocols.
Both proven deps are installed WITHOUT `|| true` so a rename is loud. The
remaining Arch makedepends the older packaged gamescope may not pull (glm,
cmake, libXcursor, wayland-protocols-devel on Fedora) stay best-effort, since
meson finds fallbacks and a name that moves between releases should not fail
the job.
And the part that actually matters: on `refs/tags/v*` a missing gamescope is
now an ERROR, not a warning. A release must not be able to make a claim its own
CI silently dropped. Gated in two places per platform — the build step, and the
packaging step that is authoritative and also covers the cache path (the build
step is skipped entirely on a cache hit, so a stale cache would otherwise reach
packaging and skip in silence). Canary keeps the old best-effort behaviour.
Deliberately NOT gated: the sysext leg. The notes make no claim about gamescope
inside the sysext, and with the build fixed gs-cache is populated so it gets the
binary anyway — gating it would add release-blocking risk with no matching
promise.
⚠ Verification is CI itself: both YAML files parse, and every gamescope-touching
`run:` block is `bash -n` clean with the matrix placeholders substituted. The
dep names cannot be proven from macOS; the rpm and deb legs on the next tag are
the proof, and they are now hard-gated, so a wrong name fails loudly instead of
shipping another empty promise.
# Best-effort on canary, HARD on a stable tag — same reasoning as rpm.yml. A warning
# here is what let v0.26.0 promise an apt-installable gamescope that was never built.
case "$GITHUB_REF" in
refs/tags/v*)
echo "::error::punktfunk-gamescope failed to build on noble — a stable tag must not ship without it (the release notes and docs-site say it is installable)"
exit 1
;;
esac
echo "::warning::punktfunk-gamescope failed to build on noble — no .deb this run (gamescope sessions stay SDR)"
echo "::warning::punktfunk-gamescope failed to build on noble — no .deb this run (gamescope sessions stay SDR)"
fi
fi
@@ -357,6 +378,13 @@ jobs:
if [ -x gs-cache/punktfunk-gamescope ] && gs-cache/punktfunk-gamescope --version >/dev/null 2>&1; then
if [ -x gs-cache/punktfunk-gamescope ] && gs-cache/punktfunk-gamescope --version >/dev/null 2>&1; then
# Best-effort on canary, HARD on a stable tag. A `::warning::` here is what let
# v0.26.0 publish release notes promising a Fedora gamescope package that did not
# exist: the step "succeeded", the job was green, and the only evidence was a warning
# nobody reads. A release must not be able to make a claim its own CI silently
# dropped, so on `refs/tags/v*` this is an error.
case "$GITHUB_REF" in
refs/tags/v*)
echo "::error::punktfunk-gamescope failed to build for f${{ matrix.fedver }} — a stable tag must not ship without it (the release notes and docs-site say it is installable)"
exit 1
;;
esac
echo "::warning::punktfunk-gamescope failed to build for f${{ matrix.fedver }} — the sysext ships without it (gamescope sessions stay SDR)"
echo "::warning::punktfunk-gamescope failed to build for f${{ matrix.fedver }} — the sysext ships without it (gamescope sessions stay SDR)"
fi
fi
@@ -227,6 +250,15 @@ jobs:
--binary gs-cache/punktfunk-gamescope \
--binary gs-cache/punktfunk-gamescope \
--release "$PF_RELEASE"
--release "$PF_RELEASE"
else
else
# The authoritative "does this package exist" decision, and the one that also covers
# the cache path — the build step above is skipped entirely on a cache hit, so a stale
# or empty cache would otherwise reach here and skip in silence on a release.
case "$GITHUB_REF" in
refs/tags/v*)
echo "::error::no usable punktfunk-gamescope for f${{ matrix.fedver }} — a stable tag must not ship without its RPM"
exit 1
;;
esac
echo "::warning::no usable punktfunk-gamescope for f${{ matrix.fedver }} — skipping its RPM"
echo "::warning::no usable punktfunk-gamescope for f${{ matrix.fedver }} — skipping its RPM"
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Most people need to do nothing. Check this list if any of it applies to you.
- **Audio catches jitter before you can hear it.** The rule that decides how much sound to keep buffered only ever learned from failures you could already hear: it waited for three audible dropouts before deepening the buffer, and it re-tested a shallower one every few quiet seconds, paying for a wrong guess with a click, forever. It now reads the near-misses nobody hears, backs off after a probe that fails, and refills in one go rather than limping. Simulating ten minutes of a Wi-Fi power-saving pattern went from roughly two thousand audible events to nine. Update the client.
- **Audio catches jitter before you can hear it.** The rule that decides how much sound to keep buffered only ever learned from failures you could already hear: it waited for three audible dropouts before deepening the buffer, and it re-tested a shallower one every few quiet seconds, paying for a wrong guess with a click, forever. It now reads the near-misses nobody hears, backs off after a probe that fails, and refills in one go rather than limping. Simulating ten minutes of a Wi-Fi power-saving pattern went from roughly two thousand audible events to nine. Update the client.
- **A gamescope session says so when its refresh rate has been lost.** If something in the session's own configuration drops the setting that carries it, the stream still runs and still looks right while the game underneath is capped to 60 — which is exactly the kind of fault that costs a week to find. It is now one line in the log.
- **A gamescope session says so when its refresh rate has been lost.** If something in the session's own configuration drops the setting that carries it, the stream still runs and still looks right while the game underneath is capped to 60 — which is exactly the kind of fault that costs a week to find. It is now one line in the log.
- **The low-latency wavelet codec got a serious round of work on Linux hosts.** It encodes on the same graphics cores your game is using, so under heavy load it was being crowded out — the encode step measured around 2 ms idle and 15–18 ms at 95% game load, with the stream's frame rate collapsing along with it. The switch that asks the graphics driver for priority had never actually been applied on Linux; it is now, and the package grants the host the permission that switch needs. Alongside it, the encoder can now work on two frames at once and the capture path asks your desktop for enough buffers to keep up, where before it took whatever it was given and never even expressed a preference.
- **The low-latency wavelet codec got a serious round of work on Linux hosts.** It encodes on the same graphics cores your game is using, so under heavy load it was being crowded out — the encode step measured around 2 ms idle and 15–18 ms at 95% game load, with the stream's frame rate collapsing along with it. The encoder can now work on two frames at once, and the capture path asks your desktop for enough buffers to keep up instead of taking whatever it was handed without ever expressing a preference. The switch that asks your graphics card to put that work ahead of the game's had also never been applied on Linux, and now is — though it stays dormant on an ordinary install, because switching it on requires a system privilege that turns out to stop KDE recognising the host at all. There is more on that below.
- **Jumbo frames can now be proven rather than hoped for.** The whole path was dead code: the discovery that was supposed to find a larger packet size could never settle above the ordinary limit, so the setting that grows mid-stream was unreachable on every path that has ever existed. A network that genuinely carries big packets is now detected, and a wavelet session starts at the large size instead of never getting there — around six times fewer packets per frame. Still opt-in, on both ends.
- **Jumbo frames can now be proven rather than hoped for.** The whole path was dead code: the discovery that was supposed to find a larger packet size could never settle above the ordinary limit, so the setting that grows mid-stream was unreachable on every path that has ever existed. A network that genuinely carries big packets is now detected, and a wavelet session starts at the large size instead of never getting there — around six times fewer packets per frame. Still opt-in, on both ends.
- **The configuration documentation caught up with 0.25**, including the jumbo-frame option and several other settings that had shipped with nothing written about them.
- **The configuration documentation caught up with 0.25**, including the jumbo-frame option and several other settings that had shipped with nothing written about them.
@@ -42,6 +42,7 @@ Most people need to do nothing. Check this list if any of it applies to you.
- **Bluetooth headphones got no game audio on iPhone and iPad.** With the microphone on — which is the default — the app was forcing output to the phone's own speaker, and that override outranks a Bluetooth headset. Wired headphones beat it, which is why plugging in a cable made it look correct. Turning the microphone off was the accidental workaround people found. Audio now goes to whatever you have connected, and dropping a headset mid-stream no longer lands on the earpiece. Update the client.
- **Bluetooth headphones got no game audio on iPhone and iPad.** With the microphone on — which is the default — the app was forcing output to the phone's own speaker, and that override outranks a Bluetooth headset. Wired headphones beat it, which is why plugging in a cable made it look correct. Turning the microphone off was the accidental workaround people found. Audio now goes to whatever you have connected, and dropping a headset mid-stream no longer lands on the earpiece. Update the client.
- **On a Steam Deck, the Steam menu and the Quick Access Menu also moved the game.** Both are driven by the same physical controller the client is forwarding, so opening either one played the game behind it at the same time — a second, invisible player picking things up and walking into walls while you browsed. Steam masks a normal game here and cannot mask this one, because the client deliberately forwards your real controller rather than Steam's stand-in, which has no gyro, trackpads or paddles. The stream now stops forwarding while an overlay has the controller, and hands it back without the button that dismissed the menu firing in the game. Update the client.
- **On a Steam Deck, the Steam menu and the Quick Access Menu also moved the game.** Both are driven by the same physical controller the client is forwarding, so opening either one played the game behind it at the same time — a second, invisible player picking things up and walking into walls while you browsed. Steam masks a normal game here and cannot mask this one, because the client deliberately forwards your real controller rather than Steam's stand-in, which has no gyro, trackpads or paddles. The stream now stops forwarding while an overlay has the controller, and hands it back without the button that dismissed the menu firing in the game. Update the client.
- **Streaming a KDE desktop keeps working.** An interim build of this release gave the host an extra system privilege, so that the wavelet encoder could ask your graphics card for priority. On KDE the side effect was total: KDE decides whether it trusts a program by looking up which file it is running from, the system refuses that lookup for any program holding a privilege, and so KDE stopped recognising the host at all — desktop streaming failed outright, complaining about a missing screen-capture interface, and it survived a clean reinstall of both host and client. Reported from CachyOS on both NVIDIA and AMD. No Linux package grants that privilege any more, on any of the five ways we ship, and upgrading strips it from a machine that already has it. If a host somehow holds one anyway, the error now names it and gives you the command that undoes it, instead of blaming a missing desktop file.
- **One capture timeout could slow a Linux host down for good.** Two very different problems shared a single switch: a graphics driver that genuinely cannot handle what your desktop produces, and a desktop that simply happened to be restarting. The second was being treated as permanently as the first, so a single moment of bad timing put that host on the slow capture path for every session until the process was restarted — including sessions against a completely different desktop that had never failed at anything, and with nothing at all in the log. The two now have the lifetimes they should, and a capture that works credits the budget back.
- **One capture timeout could slow a Linux host down for good.** Two very different problems shared a single switch: a graphics driver that genuinely cannot handle what your desktop produces, and a desktop that simply happened to be restarting. The second was being treated as permanently as the first, so a single moment of bad timing put that host on the slow capture path for every session until the process was restarted — including sessions against a completely different desktop that had never failed at anything, and with nothing at all in the log. The two now have the lifetimes they should, and a capture that works credits the budget back.
- **A wavelet-codec session could quietly fall back to slow capture and log nothing whatsoever.** The warning was asking a host-wide question about a per-session decision, so a degraded host and a healthy one produced identical logs while one of them touched every pixel on the processor.
- **A wavelet-codec session could quietly fall back to slow capture and log nothing whatsoever.** The warning was asking a host-wide question about a per-session decision, so a degraded host and a healthy one produced identical logs while one of them touched every pixel on the processor.
- **"Full chroma" could cost a Steam Deck its codec.** The client advertised the feature on the strength of the setting alone, with nothing checking whether the device could decode it — and no AMD hardware can. The host grants it on HEVC only, so a Deck with the switch on lost HEVC entirely and reconnected on H.264. It looked intermittent because it is a per-profile setting: a "Work" profile lost HEVC where "Game" kept it, on the same machine and the same host. The client now asks the graphics driver the same question the decoder will, so the advertisement and what actually works cannot disagree.
- **"Full chroma" could cost a Steam Deck its codec.** The client advertised the feature on the strength of the setting alone, with nothing checking whether the device could decode it — and no AMD hardware can. The host grants it on HEVC only, so a Deck with the switch on lost HEVC entirely and reconnected on H.264. It looked intermittent because it is a per-profile setting: a "Work" profile lost HEVC where "Game" kept it, on the same machine and the same host. The client now asks the graphics driver the same question the decoder will, so the advertisement and what actually works cannot disagree.
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