4 ms·

Oh my God... That user interface is trash. It's so laggy!

justinjlynn 8y ago
Yes. They were quite clear that the software stack is pre-beta quality at best.
simias 8y ago
I'm sure the amount of work that went into it must be huge (creating something like that from scratch is indeed a daunting task) but I wonder if this video really does them any service, your average human being is just going to see a crappy and laggy interface that will remind them of bootleg smartphones from 10 years ago. On the technical side of things I wonder if the lag is due to the lack of hardware acceleration or if it's because of a very unoptimized early build. If it's the former it'll fix itself when they integrate the GPU, if it's the latter then it's slightly more worrying from a code quality perspective. Beyond that the interface looks like pre-alpha status (most of the widgets look like placeholders, glitches everywhere etc...) and they want to ship that in 6 months? I hope that early PureOS adopters are ready for a very rough launch, this is going to be quite a ride...
whalesalad 8y ago
This will be the downfall of this device. The kind of work required to provide a UI experience that even remotely resembles that of modern smartphones is a monumental task. It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind: the folks who have the time, interest and ability to do this work are not interested in using the platform.
- vgoh1 8y ago
  If they are smart, they will have their margins adjusted to support a niche device. There are a few people (including myself) that are willing to sacrifice a beautiful UI for all the good things that go along with a user-respecting OS. Also, they have a lot of time. I have made a few UI's myself back in the DOS days, before they were always readily available. First I would make it work, then I would make it look good.
- mruts 8y ago
  I agree that the device looks like trash. But what's wrong with desktop linux? We have compositors, hardware acceleration from nvidia and AMD, and WMs that are just as good, if not better, than windows. What more could you want?
  - na85 8y ago
    >What more could you want? Consistent UI, consistent configuration schemes, working suspend-resume, reliable WiFi, reliable auto mount of USB storage, and easy file sharing over LAN for starters. None of these things was I able to achieve on my ThinkPad even 3 years ago when I last gave Linux a try.
    - doublepg23 8y ago
      If we were talking about OpenBSD I would agree with you, but I can promise you all those are functional across many laptops and desktops I've used. > Consistent UI, consistent configuration schemes Have you used Windows? > easy file sharing over LAN Every install of Ubuntu for years has come with a "public" folder for easy LAN sharing (Samba). https://xkcd.com/949/ https://xkcd.com/949/
    - mruts 8y ago
      I mean, I’ve been using ThinkPads for years and have always ran Linux on them, and personally haven’t had any problems with them. ACPI, touchpad, screen, audio buttons, all worked out of the box or were just a few package installs away.I don’t like auto-mounting of drives, but I know it’s pretty easy to setup with hotplug. WiFi drivers are very good at this point, supporting pretty much any WiFi cards in any laptops. File sharing over LAN can easily done with Samba or SSHFS. Linux has pretty good drivers at this point, and in my experience, often better and more complete than Windows. Not saying you’re lying or incompetent or anything, but I do think you had a very atypical. Maybe you’re not familiar with Linux? Not trying to put you down, but maybe I find that Linux works Because I’ve been using it for over 15 years at this point.
      - na85 8y ago
- linuxftw 8y ago
  > It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind Behind what? I've been a daily linux user for the last decade or so, I've always felt the desktop experience was superior to to Windows and Mac. At least Gnome 2/3 has been.
- kabacha 8y ago
  > It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind Umm, what? Linux desktop is considered by far to be the most efficient and responsive desktop user interfaces there are. We have DEs that run on 10 year old hardware with no delay and even tilling window managers that are as efficient as you could ever get with todays hardware. Sure they are not average Joe friendly but to attack it's efficiency and responsiveness is preposterous.
- chmln 8y ago
  > It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind You really can' fault desktop linux at least performance-wise. I have ~3ms input latency in vim on xterm. Good luck beating that on windows, or even a mac. The reason linux on desktop lags behind is simple - 99% of desktops and laptops come pre-installed with either windows or macos.
com2kid 8y ago
As someone who designed a UI graphics stack almost from scratch, making a non-laggy UI has to be done from day 1, working with the EE's all the way up to the top most software stack. It is hard, and any misteps along the way can doom everything. A single bus without enough bandwidth, not reserving enough CPU time for UI code, to not ensuring end to end performance of the touch system, any mistake and the UI will be sub-par. The UX also needs to be informed by the hardware capabilities. Even simple things like whitespace around elements being scrolled can reduce HW load. Honestly the animations don't look too bad, their touch layer however, it looks rather questionable. Doing touch right is a difficult task, it has taken modern smartphone platforms years to get latency down to where it is just barely visible. Now days early gesture recognition involves some amount of ML training that will a touch gesture recognizer that runs on the device, the recognizer is customized per model of touch panel/sensors. (Alternatively, one piece chips that do all of this for you exist, popping out already recognized gestures, they may or may not give better results, I haven't poked around in this space for a few years.) On top of that, the touch panel needs to be running at a high enough refresh rate, and the entire UI needs to prioritize touch events over almost everything else! Audio Output > Video Playback > Touch Events == UI Updates > Rest of the world Last system I worked on, touch events could be delivered to the UI up until the moment painting started, painting was capped at ~20ms (IIRC), running at 30fps. The worst edge case saw 2 frames of latency before the UI responded. Average was around 1 frame of latency. The other thing I'd have recommended they do for a v1 product is v-sync at 30FPS, and base everything off of that. A smooth 30fps is better than dropping frames at 60fps. Treat it like a video game, you have a CPU budget in which everything must get done. The rest of the system must be running at a low enough CPU load that the render target can be hit every single frame. But again, this all has to be started at day 1.
- jancsika 8y ago
  They didn't start at day 1 so here they are. Wrt scrolling-- could they queue the repaints until the scroll reaches its final destination? I could live with a phone that reacts "instantly" and scrolls with the animation I expect while showing me transient "placeholder" content.
  - 8y ago
ams6110 8y ago
Personally, I couldn't care less about animation. Remember when Windows used to only show a frame when you were dragging a window around or resizing it? That was fine. The lag in that video is about the same as my cheap Moto G phone. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I just want a phone that I can trust isn't spying on me 24x7.
- Digital-Citizen 8y ago
  I agree; I think this thread and a couple similar threads (basically repeating the same objection) are vastly overrated. Not spying + hardware and software under user control is far more important than whatever someone considers lagging video or anything that animates, particularly for a device people insist on calling "phones". I might prefer no animated GUI.

Yes. They were quite clear that the software stack is pre-beta quality at best.

I'm sure the amount of work that went into it must be huge (creating something like that from scratch is indeed a daunting task) but I wonder if this video really does them any service, your average human being is just going to see a crappy and laggy interface that will remind them of bootleg smartphones from 10 years ago. On the technical side of things I wonder if the lag is due to the lack of hardware acceleration or if it's because of a very unoptimized early build. If it's the former it'll fix itself when they integrate the GPU, if it's the latter then it's slightly more worrying from a code quality perspective. Beyond that the interface looks like pre-alpha status (most of the widgets look like placeholders, glitches everywhere etc...) and they want to ship that in 6 months? I hope that early PureOS adopters are ready for a very rough launch, this is going to be quite a ride...

whalesalad 8y ago

This will be the downfall of this device. The kind of work required to provide a UI experience that even remotely resembles that of modern smartphones is a monumental task. It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind: the folks who have the time, interest and ability to do this work are not interested in using the platform.

vgoh1 8y ago
If they are smart, they will have their margins adjusted to support a niche device. There are a few people (including myself) that are willing to sacrifice a beautiful UI for all the good things that go along with a user-respecting OS. Also, they have a lot of time. I have made a few UI's myself back in the DOS days, before they were always readily available. First I would make it work, then I would make it look good.
mruts 8y ago
I agree that the device looks like trash. But what's wrong with desktop linux? We have compositors, hardware acceleration from nvidia and AMD, and WMs that are just as good, if not better, than windows. What more could you want?
- na85 8y ago
  >What more could you want? Consistent UI, consistent configuration schemes, working suspend-resume, reliable WiFi, reliable auto mount of USB storage, and easy file sharing over LAN for starters. None of these things was I able to achieve on my ThinkPad even 3 years ago when I last gave Linux a try.
  - doublepg23 8y ago
    If we were talking about OpenBSD I would agree with you, but I can promise you all those are functional across many laptops and desktops I've used. > Consistent UI, consistent configuration schemes Have you used Windows? > easy file sharing over LAN Every install of Ubuntu for years has come with a "public" folder for easy LAN sharing (Samba). https://xkcd.com/949/ https://xkcd.com/949/
  - mruts 8y ago
    I mean, I’ve been using ThinkPads for years and have always ran Linux on them, and personally haven’t had any problems with them. ACPI, touchpad, screen, audio buttons, all worked out of the box or were just a few package installs away.I don’t like auto-mounting of drives, but I know it’s pretty easy to setup with hotplug. WiFi drivers are very good at this point, supporting pretty much any WiFi cards in any laptops. File sharing over LAN can easily done with Samba or SSHFS. Linux has pretty good drivers at this point, and in my experience, often better and more complete than Windows. Not saying you’re lying or incompetent or anything, but I do think you had a very atypical. Maybe you’re not familiar with Linux? Not trying to put you down, but maybe I find that Linux works Because I’ve been using it for over 15 years at this point.
    - na85 8y ago
linuxftw 8y ago
> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind Behind what? I've been a daily linux user for the last decade or so, I've always felt the desktop experience was superior to to Windows and Mac. At least Gnome 2/3 has been.
kabacha 8y ago
> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind Umm, what? Linux desktop is considered by far to be the most efficient and responsive desktop user interfaces there are. We have DEs that run on 10 year old hardware with no delay and even tilling window managers that are as efficient as you could ever get with todays hardware. Sure they are not average Joe friendly but to attack it's efficiency and responsiveness is preposterous.
chmln 8y ago
> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind You really can' fault desktop linux at least performance-wise. I have ~3ms input latency in vim on xterm. Good luck beating that on windows, or even a mac. The reason linux on desktop lags behind is simple - 99% of desktops and laptops come pre-installed with either windows or macos.

com2kid 8y ago

As someone who designed a UI graphics stack almost from scratch, making a non-laggy UI has to be done from day 1, working with the EE's all the way up to the top most software stack. It is hard, and any misteps along the way can doom everything. A single bus without enough bandwidth, not reserving enough CPU time for UI code, to not ensuring end to end performance of the touch system, any mistake and the UI will be sub-par. The UX also needs to be informed by the hardware capabilities. Even simple things like whitespace around elements being scrolled can reduce HW load. Honestly the animations don't look too bad, their touch layer however, it looks rather questionable. Doing touch right is a difficult task, it has taken modern smartphone platforms years to get latency down to where it is just barely visible. Now days early gesture recognition involves some amount of ML training that will a touch gesture recognizer that runs on the device, the recognizer is customized per model of touch panel/sensors. (Alternatively, one piece chips that do all of this for you exist, popping out already recognized gestures, they may or may not give better results, I haven't poked around in this space for a few years.) On top of that, the touch panel needs to be running at a high enough refresh rate, and the entire UI needs to prioritize touch events over almost everything else! Audio Output > Video Playback > Touch Events == UI Updates > Rest of the world Last system I worked on, touch events could be delivered to the UI up until the moment painting started, painting was capped at ~20ms (IIRC), running at 30fps. The worst edge case saw 2 frames of latency before the UI responded. Average was around 1 frame of latency. The other thing I'd have recommended they do for a v1 product is v-sync at 30FPS, and base everything off of that. A smooth 30fps is better than dropping frames at 60fps. Treat it like a video game, you have a CPU budget in which everything must get done. The rest of the system must be running at a low enough CPU load that the render target can be hit every single frame. But again, this all has to be started at day 1.

jancsika 8y ago
They didn't start at day 1 so here they are. Wrt scrolling-- could they queue the repaints until the scroll reaches its final destination? I could live with a phone that reacts "instantly" and scrolls with the animation I expect while showing me transient "placeholder" content.
- 8y ago

ams6110 8y ago

Personally, I couldn't care less about animation. Remember when Windows used to only show a frame when you were dragging a window around or resizing it? That was fine. The lag in that video is about the same as my cheap Moto G phone. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I just want a phone that I can trust isn't spying on me 24x7.

Digital-Citizen 8y ago
I agree; I think this thread and a couple similar threads (basically repeating the same objection) are vastly overrated. Not spying + hardware and software under user control is far more important than whatever someone considers lagging video or anything that animates, particularly for a device people insist on calling "phones". I might prefer no animated GUI.