5 ms·

What are you guys doing with your desktop environment that you need it to be performant and multithreaded? Aren't all computers plenty fast enough now?

gigatexal 1y ago
We are called power users ;-) we can do more than one thing or ten things at a time and want things to be responsive and fast and not drop frames and not crash the whole session when some plugin fails etc etc. you know, a well designed thing
shmerl 1y ago
Not necessarily the environment, but compositor itself must be fast. It shouldn't introduce any delays that would affect for instance input latency in its processing loop. Gamers would for sure complain. Someone could totally make it do everything in a single thread and not think about that, which would be pretty bad.
- winrid 1y ago
  That doesn't require multi threading.
  - shmerl 1y ago
    If it does almost nothing - may be not. Otherwise you'll be doing something in the main thread which will take time, unless you also squeeze concurrency (i.e. multitasking) into one thread and then again, why not use multiple threads already.
  - nasretdinov 1y ago
    On a high enough resolution, especially with 5K-6K displays a single-threaded software-only compositor is absolutely going to have horrible performance. Even on Full HD it's actually quite noticeable
wiseowise 1y ago
“Don’t you guys have fast computers?”
- munchlax 1y ago
  My computers are old and slow. They run XFCE just fine.
Twirrim 1y ago
They should be, but with the speed and resources available on machines these days, people don't spend as much time optimising every little thing, and even make trade-offs, e.g. Gnome 3 desktop has the spidermonkey javascript engine in it, and an increasing numbers of components are using javascript.
pjmlp 1y ago
Depends on how much Electron crap is running alongside the desktop.
robinsonb5 1y ago
You'd think, wouldn't you? But in some regards they still feel less responsive than the desktop of a sub-10MHz machine from the 1980s. (I'm not kidding - the tight coupling of quadrature-based mouse counters and hardware sprite mouse cursor - bypassing all the wireless, serial / PS/2 / USB encoding and decoding we have today - and on-screen gadgets being drawn and redrawn in the input subsystem's context without messages having to trickle through a ten foot long pipeline of frameworks and UI toolkits, all gave a sense of immediacy, of "having the computer's full attention", that's rare to find in today's world of janky semi-functional web apps.)

gigatexal 1y ago

We are called power users ;-) we can do more than one thing or ten things at a time and want things to be responsive and fast and not drop frames and not crash the whole session when some plugin fails etc etc. you know, a well designed thing

shmerl 1y ago

Not necessarily the environment, but compositor itself must be fast. It shouldn't introduce any delays that would affect for instance input latency in its processing loop. Gamers would for sure complain. Someone could totally make it do everything in a single thread and not think about that, which would be pretty bad.

winrid 1y ago
That doesn't require multi threading.
- shmerl 1y ago
  If it does almost nothing - may be not. Otherwise you'll be doing something in the main thread which will take time, unless you also squeeze concurrency (i.e. multitasking) into one thread and then again, why not use multiple threads already.
- nasretdinov 1y ago
  On a high enough resolution, especially with 5K-6K displays a single-threaded software-only compositor is absolutely going to have horrible performance. Even on Full HD it's actually quite noticeable

wiseowise 1y ago

“Don’t you guys have fast computers?”

munchlax 1y ago
My computers are old and slow. They run XFCE just fine.

Twirrim 1y ago

They should be, but with the speed and resources available on machines these days, people don't spend as much time optimising every little thing, and even make trade-offs, e.g. Gnome 3 desktop has the spidermonkey javascript engine in it, and an increasing numbers of components are using javascript.

pjmlp 1y ago

Depends on how much Electron crap is running alongside the desktop.

robinsonb5 1y ago

You'd think, wouldn't you? But in some regards they still feel less responsive than the desktop of a sub-10MHz machine from the 1980s. (I'm not kidding - the tight coupling of quadrature-based mouse counters and hardware sprite mouse cursor - bypassing all the wireless, serial / PS/2 / USB encoding and decoding we have today - and on-screen gadgets being drawn and redrawn in the input subsystem's context without messages having to trickle through a ten foot long pipeline of frameworks and UI toolkits, all gave a sense of immediacy, of "having the computer's full attention", that's rare to find in today's world of janky semi-functional web apps.)