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Topic: Palemoon AVX2 build request (Read 840 times) previous topic - next topic
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Palemoon AVX2 build request

Hello,

Introduction:
There's limited number of choices in the so called "Internet browser" space. Its either Chrome and never-ending numbers of clones trying to fix what should never be done in the first place or Firefox that became bloatware too (including, but not limited to, the so called "telemetry"). It doesn't look good even now, not to mention the future of Internet "trusted devices" (Google's Devices/Internet DRM, with Mozilla for sure answering: "we need to follow and enable users to browser "The Internet"..."). It's not looking good, when one company decides what is and what isn't the Internet and what device is or isn't allowed to browse "(their) Internet". Just because Google moved off public eye to shadow development for the so called Internet Trusted Devices DRM (they for sure will sell it to the public with a lot of buzzwords, including but not limited to words, like "security"), it doesn't mean its forgotten by "We The People".

My request is the following:
Provide Palemoon compiled with AVX2 (last 10-15 years?) optimizations. Its not a fork of Firefox, but a browser in its own rights with independantly developed Goanna engine. Independent of Mozilla or Google. Its open source. Source code is released freely under open source license for you to take and compile it. Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird are registered trademarks. So is Palemoon. Code is open source.

Please do not fall in for the FUD. Read what the chief developer wrote and if you want - talk to him prsonally. It's fast, lightweight (!) and secure. It has Adblock Latitude and nMatrix that are maintained. The browser receives proactive (!) and defensive security patches as well as many new improvements very regularly. Just take a look at the release notes for the last two years. You will be impressed.

Its not much to request. Inclusion of AVX2 compiled Palemoon wouldn't take too much time of your machines and it does not require 128GiB of RAM, either.

Hope to see Palemoon AVX2 soon in Artix repos.

Thank you.

Resources to read:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22399








Re: Request - Freedom of Choice

Reply #1 –
palemoon-bin and palemoongtk3-bin are in the AUR, which can be installed extremely easily. These provide the official binaries built by Pale Moon which is probably what the Pale Moon team would prefer you use, to ensure you get the best possible experience, they get annoyed if distro's don't build things correctly - (perhaps you missed the thread on here where librewolf wasn't in the repos for a while because the maintainer couldn't get it to build  ;D ) - and Pale Moon requires a whole list of non-standard versioned deps so there's massive scope for error, especially in a rolling release distro. The other point is if you are using a Pale Moon "genuine" build you can get direct support on the Pale Moon forum, otherwise you are going to have to determine whether any issue is upstream or distro-specific. The support there for Pale Moon problems will also be far better than you will find here, they are truly experts in their field.
But I haven't been using Pale Moon or following the forum there recently, due to newer more powerful hw, perhaps these things have changed, I doubt it though!  ;D

Re: Request - Freedom of Choice

Reply #3 –
1. I don't use risky repos to update my system
2. I don't use risky repos for just one application
3. Artix is not Windows. I will not hunt the "bin" for each application I want all over the internet
4. Its not AVX2 build at all
5. Palemoon is not Librewolf and can be built
6. Its just simply "no, beacause no".
7. You treat better google than independant devs empowering monopolies
8. You treat Palemoon as if it was a leprosy software
9. Even windows user have it :$ choco install palemoon
10. I was wrong to even expect this build from "the community".

Re: Request - Freedom of Choice

Reply #4 –
Quote
1. I don't use risky repos to update my system
2. I don't use risky repos for just one application

AUR aren't really risky, because the makepkg is available, just by reading it you should see if there is a malware inside or not. You can even change your build options if the ones proposed in the makepkg aren't the one you want.

That's actually the main purpose of arch and arch based distros, because packagers don't have time to maintain every software in the universe, they stick to the most used ones. People using other software have to build it from source, or rely on the AUR. You should see the AUR more like an help to build the package than an untrusty repository.

It is advised to use an AUR helper like yay or paru when using arch based distros, even if you can stuck the old way, with the makepkg command.

I remind you that there is no distro that I know where there is every software in the universe in the officials repository, and the most popular ones, debian based, for most of the software you want to install you have to add a non official and untrusty repo. Compared to that, I think arch and arch based distros are a far better choice.

Quote
10. I was wrong to even expect this build from "the community".

I think you can always try to became an official packager in order to add Palemoon yourself in the repo if you have time to care for it.

Re: Request - Freedom of Choice

Reply #5 –
Quote from: artrixie – on
1. I don't use risky repos to update my system
2. I don't use risky repos for just one application
3. Artix is not Windows. I will not hunt the "bin" for each application I want all over the internet
4. Its not AVX2 build at all
5. Palemoon is not Librewolf and can be built
6. Its just simply "no, beacause no".
7. You treat better google than independant devs empowering monopolies
8. You treat Palemoon as if it was a leprosy software
9. Even windows user have it :$ choco install palemoon
10. I was wrong to even expect this build from "the community".
Just build it yourself you complete nutcase. It's not hard.

Re: Request - Freedom of Choice

Reply #6 –
Well it's good to raise your concerns, but be assured you have misunderstood my explanation, see here in the words of Moonchild himself:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=23706&p=182770
It's not that there is any reason there absolutely couldn't be a repo build, if anyone wanted to provide one and was happy to work with the Pale Moon team closely, but it would be difficult to match the high standards of Moonchild's own builds don't you think?
And that is exactly what you get when you install the binary AUR packages I suggested earlier, look at the PKGBUILD, hopefully even someone unfamiliar with these can still see what is going on as it is quite simple:
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=palemoon-bin
All this AUR package does is provide a quick simple method to download and install the binary built by the Pale Moon team themselves from the Pale Moon repos using signed secure methods, the AUR package is only an installation wrapper so it is registered for automatic updates via an AUR helper and supplies a .desktop file so it appears in your desktop menu. But there is absolutely no question about security because it does nothing but securely bring you the real authentic Pale Moon recipe made by Moonchild himself, that's the beauty of the system.

Re: Palemoon AVX2 build request

Reply #7 –
At first I was tempted to initiate a build for it, but the Palemoon licensing is pretty problematic for Linux distributions to adhere to. Then I saw they already offer AVX/AVX2 builds themselves.

Re: Palemoon AVX2 build request

Reply #8 –
After further reading on the topic, I hadn't initially understood the significance of the AVX / AVX2 bit, I should first admit here  :-[
This is similar to the x86-64-v1 / 2 / 3 / 4 thing, a build optimized for newer 64 bit CPU's only. As an example of the hardware requirements, AVX is only supported from Intel i* 2nd generation and AVX2 from Intel i* 4th generation onwards, some low powered CPU's didn't get it until later, if ever.

As it turns out, although there is no specific AVX AUR package, it won't matter because Pale Moon will be switching all their 64 bit builds to AVX this summer after holding a vote:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30909
 

Re: Palemoon AVX2 build request

Reply #9 –
Quote from: artrixie – on

My request is the following:
Provide Palemoon compiled with AVX2 (last 10-15 years?) optimizations. ...


I just can't resist posting the following:

Code: [Select]
gcc -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -v -Q --help=target

Code: [Select]
gcc -march=native -v -Q --help=target

RTFM:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Makepkg#Building_optimized_binaries
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Safe_CFLAGS
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/x86-Options.html
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/
"Wer alles kann, macht nichts richtig"

Artix USE="runit openrc slim openbox lxde gtk2 qt4 qt5 qt6 conky
-gtk3 -gtk4 -adwaita{cursors,themes,icons} -gnome3 -kde -plasma -wayland "