3 ms·

Hmm, I'm less convinced about gnome3. I've given it a number of goes, it shows promise, but is not there yet. 1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs

Hmm, I'm less convinced about gnome3. I've given it a number of goes, it shows promise, but is not there yet. 1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram and a massive graphics card, yet draging windows about has lag, pressing the meta key has lag. Its just not fast like mate or lxde. 2) shortcuts are hard. I have a number of shortcuts for my most often used things, and they are always clickable, no matter what. Gnome 3's favorites are _almost_ the same, but its much harder to create custom entries (if its not in the applications list you're out of luck)

russdpale 8y ago
lxde for the win! Seriously, I run it on a 12 year old laptop, and newer laptops and htpc's. It just can't be beat, in my opinion. The simplicity and customization is its power. I enjoy it more than xfce or mate. Though to be fair I have no tried mate on a non-ubuntu flavor.
- k_ 8y ago
  I agree with that :) Though after a while I personnally traded simplicity* for more customization and performance and switched to openbox and now i3. Edit: * Well no, "simplicity" does not exactly mean what I first thought it did. I guess I mostly traded ease of configuration / usage. Openbox and i3 are more difficult to approach but they don't lack on simplicity at all.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  The one laptop I have running a Linux Desktop runs lxde, and it is pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's very customizable. Maybe I haven't spent enough time with it, but how do I add custom menu entries, for instance? How can I add additional menus to the panel? I miss Widowmaker/GNUStep, which still exists of course but no distro on earth uses it by default and Linux Desktops are enough of a pain to build from the ground up that people keep making distros with minor tweaks just so they don't have to do it again.
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    GNUStep could’ve been a contender. In an alternate universe, Gnome & KDE never fractured the desktop Linux space, and GNUStep became a first class alternative to macOS, eventually surpassing it.
jchw 8y ago
>1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram and a massive graphics card, yet draging windows about has lag, pressing the meta key has lag. Its just not fast like mate or lxde. I am going to say this is probably only partly GNOME 3's fault. I have only lukewarm feelings about GNOME 3 but was blown away when I ran a distro on a very old Intel NUC only to see GNOME 3 running buttery smooth. My guess for why is due to the high quality of the open source Intel graphics accelerator drivers on Linux. NVIDIA and AMD do not offer this at all, and at best performance can be tricky depending on what extensions and features your driver supports (and how well your card is supported if using open source drivers.) Basically, I don't think GNOME 3 is bloated or slow. I think it uses relatively reasonable CPU, but compositing in Linux is complicated due to second-class graphics driver support, and that causes a lot of the lagginess/glitchiness/general wonkiness that you get with the desktop experience. (edit: An example is that I've had issues with resizing Windows that I have found to be NVIDIA-specific.) (Of course, you can get around this by not using compositing at all, but I think the case for compositing is more than solid at this juncture.)
- bgorman 8y ago
  AMD and Nvidia both have better drivers than Intel, although admittedly Nvidia only offers proprietary drivers.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    There is a open source NV driver which is usually the default that gets installed and it really really sucks a lot.
    - KaiserPro 8y ago
      Its the first thing I banish on any image I create.
  - franga2000 8y ago
    In my experience, the Intel drivers are always the most stable and the closest to their Windows performance. Although I haven't tried the new AMDGPU yet.
kkaranth 8y ago
The slowness was very apparent for me too. I used to keep restarting the shell (Alt F2, then r) to get it back to normal speeds(this doesn't close the running applications). In Wayland, they removed this shortcut. I've since switched to KDE.
- devxpy 8y ago
  You can blame js for that. It's known as the famous gnome memory leak.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Modern KDE also uses JS. So I guess Qt's implementation is of better quality.
    - de_watcher 8y ago
      Qt projects tend to use js as the js was originally intended: small one-liners (in this case, to glue some QML together).
- majewsky 8y ago
  > In Wayland, they removed this shortcut. I'm usually not one to come to Gnome's defence, but it's very likely they did not really have any choice there. In Wayland, the compositor is the parent process of the entire session, so you cannot restart it willy-nilly. That's a design choice made by the Wayland protocol, not by the Gnome devs.
  - kkaranth 8y ago
    The real problem was that the shell got slower over time. If that was fixed, the choice of Wayland vs. X wouldn't bother me.
devxpy 8y ago
Gnome is slow because it uses js. I don't understand how anyone would agree that using js on a desktop is a good idea. Goddamn, designers...
Fnoord 8y ago
This website shows how input latency has become worse over the years [1]. On the bottom there are more references, such as a comparison between terminals and editors (not that you asked for that, but still). [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/

russdpale 8y ago

lxde for the win! Seriously, I run it on a 12 year old laptop, and newer laptops and htpc's. It just can't be beat, in my opinion. The simplicity and customization is its power. I enjoy it more than xfce or mate. Though to be fair I have no tried mate on a non-ubuntu flavor.

k_ 8y ago
I agree with that :) Though after a while I personnally traded simplicity* for more customization and performance and switched to openbox and now i3. Edit: * Well no, "simplicity" does not exactly mean what I first thought it did. I guess I mostly traded ease of configuration / usage. Openbox and i3 are more difficult to approach but they don't lack on simplicity at all.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
The one laptop I have running a Linux Desktop runs lxde, and it is pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's very customizable. Maybe I haven't spent enough time with it, but how do I add custom menu entries, for instance? How can I add additional menus to the panel? I miss Widowmaker/GNUStep, which still exists of course but no distro on earth uses it by default and Linux Desktops are enough of a pain to build from the ground up that people keep making distros with minor tweaks just so they don't have to do it again.
- peatmoss 8y ago
  GNUStep could’ve been a contender. In an alternate universe, Gnome & KDE never fractured the desktop Linux space, and GNUStep became a first class alternative to macOS, eventually surpassing it.

jchw 8y ago

>1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram and a massive graphics card, yet draging windows about has lag, pressing the meta key has lag. Its just not fast like mate or lxde. I am going to say this is probably only partly GNOME 3's fault. I have only lukewarm feelings about GNOME 3 but was blown away when I ran a distro on a very old Intel NUC only to see GNOME 3 running buttery smooth. My guess for why is due to the high quality of the open source Intel graphics accelerator drivers on Linux. NVIDIA and AMD do not offer this at all, and at best performance can be tricky depending on what extensions and features your driver supports (and how well your card is supported if using open source drivers.) Basically, I don't think GNOME 3 is bloated or slow. I think it uses relatively reasonable CPU, but compositing in Linux is complicated due to second-class graphics driver support, and that causes a lot of the lagginess/glitchiness/general wonkiness that you get with the desktop experience. (edit: An example is that I've had issues with resizing Windows that I have found to be NVIDIA-specific.) (Of course, you can get around this by not using compositing at all, but I think the case for compositing is more than solid at this juncture.)

bgorman 8y ago
AMD and Nvidia both have better drivers than Intel, although admittedly Nvidia only offers proprietary drivers.
- zaarn 8y ago
  There is a open source NV driver which is usually the default that gets installed and it really really sucks a lot.
  - KaiserPro 8y ago
    Its the first thing I banish on any image I create.
- franga2000 8y ago
  In my experience, the Intel drivers are always the most stable and the closest to their Windows performance. Although I haven't tried the new AMDGPU yet.

kkaranth 8y ago

The slowness was very apparent for me too. I used to keep restarting the shell (Alt F2, then r) to get it back to normal speeds(this doesn't close the running applications). In Wayland, they removed this shortcut. I've since switched to KDE.

devxpy 8y ago
You can blame js for that. It's known as the famous gnome memory leak.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Modern KDE also uses JS. So I guess Qt's implementation is of better quality.
  - de_watcher 8y ago
    Qt projects tend to use js as the js was originally intended: small one-liners (in this case, to glue some QML together).
majewsky 8y ago
> In Wayland, they removed this shortcut. I'm usually not one to come to Gnome's defence, but it's very likely they did not really have any choice there. In Wayland, the compositor is the parent process of the entire session, so you cannot restart it willy-nilly. That's a design choice made by the Wayland protocol, not by the Gnome devs.
- kkaranth 8y ago
  The real problem was that the shell got slower over time. If that was fixed, the choice of Wayland vs. X wouldn't bother me.

devxpy 8y ago

Gnome is slow because it uses js. I don't understand how anyone would agree that using js on a desktop is a good idea. Goddamn, designers...

Fnoord 8y ago

This website shows how input latency has become worse over the years [1]. On the bottom there are more references, such as a comparison between terminals and editors (not that you asked for that, but still). [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/