4 ms·

Drop the fallback mode if it means better quality of the rest. Seriously, Gnome Shell runs fine on my Intel integrated graphics, i suppose it runs fine on nvidi

by buster 14y ago

Drop the fallback mode if it means better quality of the rest. Seriously, Gnome Shell runs fine on my Intel integrated graphics, i suppose it runs fine on nvidia and amd as well, so why fallback mode anyway. How about communicating to distributions to fallback to gnome2 or xfce or something similar as a recommendation?

Rovanion 14y ago
It may run fine on many, but it runs horrible on so many others. Running both Nvidia and ATI binary drivers often result in absolutely horrid performance with changes to the UI often not being rendered until after the animations are over.
- truncate 14y ago
  Apart from that, GDM itself performs horribly. I can almost always see a lag. Shouldn't happen on core i 2nd Gen atleast!
- bkor 14y ago
  Obviously that the performance is sometimes absolutely terrible is known. I'd wish it was not like that. Llvmpipe is not a good solution, nor are bad drivers. But IMO bad drivers are unacceptable. Why do we accept such sorry state? We had fallback mode for various years, as well as the need of GNOME 3 and Unity. Yet various drivers still are terrible. IMO I'd rather take the "my way or highway" approach: a driver is just plain not good enough. The hardware can do way more. Time to get your driver into the year 2005+.
Nursie 14y ago
"How about communicating to distributions to fallback to gnome2" Because Gnome 2 is officially deprecated and abandoned. The G3 team pretty much deliberately set out to destroy it and make the new stuff as incompatible as possible AFAICT. MATE is becoming a possibility but debian don't seem to want to take it on. Xfce, yes, that works fine.
- bkor 14y ago
  We did no such thing. Speaking on behalf of GNOME (and yes, I can! :P)
bkor 14y ago
We actually asked for feedback to distributions various times. We would've made a decision earlier but e.g. OpenBSD would have problems. Also this time there has NOT been any official announcement yet. What we do is mostly in the open, so things are announced beforehand. Now, with fallback I thought it should be announced in the 3.6 release notes that we were thinking about it. Unfortunately it was taken out, you can still see what I wrote in the git module though. For distributions, the suggestion is llvmpipe, though that is terrible. What we are more after is better drivers, with llvmpipe as a workaround. One thing that is overlooked is that not only gnome-shell relies on good drivers. Various applications have started relying on this as well. So the value of fallback mode was already decreasing.
- aortega 14y ago
  > What we are more after is better drivers Gnome 2 didn't need any driver to work, it was perfectly fine with a frame-buffer. You know what else do not need any driver to work? Windows. Llvmpipe DO NOT WORK except in latest-generation, very expensive hardware. You are alienating a huge portion of your users, it's specially painful because they are the poor-ones.
  - bkor 14y ago
    Please provide reference to that huge portion. The background of this is that fallback mode did not work very well. Various applications have been requiring the same hardware support. Obviously at the moment this will cause pain. But I don't understand why there is not more anger towards the sorry state of graphics drivers on Linux. My GPU of 6-7+ years old support GNOME 3 fine. At that time I bought a silent GPU, it was NOT the quickest GPU. Why are we accepting that we have such poor drivers? The anger should be focussed towards the drivers, not something which tries to use 7+ old technology.
    - aortega 14y ago
      I'm sure you know Gnome ran on a lot of things that are not Linux. BSDs for example. The implementation of gnome-fallback in OpenBSD works beautifully. I have a small ARM board that consumes about 1 watt, and you could install gnome on it and you couldn't tell it from my ubuntu desktop, it was that good. I expect games to need driver support, not a simple DE. If you take in account that not even OS-X need a graphic card to work, you know you are doing it wrong by requiring one. (Don't start with llvm-pipe, I dont need the DE consuming 100% of the CPU)

by buster 14y ago

Rovanion 14y ago

It may run fine on many, but it runs horrible on so many others. Running both Nvidia and ATI binary drivers often result in absolutely horrid performance with changes to the UI often not being rendered until after the animations are over.

truncate 14y ago
Apart from that, GDM itself performs horribly. I can almost always see a lag. Shouldn't happen on core i 2nd Gen atleast!
bkor 14y ago
Obviously that the performance is sometimes absolutely terrible is known. I'd wish it was not like that. Llvmpipe is not a good solution, nor are bad drivers. But IMO bad drivers are unacceptable. Why do we accept such sorry state? We had fallback mode for various years, as well as the need of GNOME 3 and Unity. Yet various drivers still are terrible. IMO I'd rather take the "my way or highway" approach: a driver is just plain not good enough. The hardware can do way more. Time to get your driver into the year 2005+.

Nursie 14y ago

"How about communicating to distributions to fallback to gnome2" Because Gnome 2 is officially deprecated and abandoned. The G3 team pretty much deliberately set out to destroy it and make the new stuff as incompatible as possible AFAICT. MATE is becoming a possibility but debian don't seem to want to take it on. Xfce, yes, that works fine.

bkor 14y ago
We did no such thing. Speaking on behalf of GNOME (and yes, I can! :P)

bkor 14y ago

We actually asked for feedback to distributions various times. We would've made a decision earlier but e.g. OpenBSD would have problems. Also this time there has NOT been any official announcement yet. What we do is mostly in the open, so things are announced beforehand. Now, with fallback I thought it should be announced in the 3.6 release notes that we were thinking about it. Unfortunately it was taken out, you can still see what I wrote in the git module though. For distributions, the suggestion is llvmpipe, though that is terrible. What we are more after is better drivers, with llvmpipe as a workaround. One thing that is overlooked is that not only gnome-shell relies on good drivers. Various applications have started relying on this as well. So the value of fallback mode was already decreasing.

aortega 14y ago
> What we are more after is better drivers Gnome 2 didn't need any driver to work, it was perfectly fine with a frame-buffer. You know what else do not need any driver to work? Windows. Llvmpipe DO NOT WORK except in latest-generation, very expensive hardware. You are alienating a huge portion of your users, it's specially painful because they are the poor-ones.
- bkor 14y ago
  Please provide reference to that huge portion. The background of this is that fallback mode did not work very well. Various applications have been requiring the same hardware support. Obviously at the moment this will cause pain. But I don't understand why there is not more anger towards the sorry state of graphics drivers on Linux. My GPU of 6-7+ years old support GNOME 3 fine. At that time I bought a silent GPU, it was NOT the quickest GPU. Why are we accepting that we have such poor drivers? The anger should be focussed towards the drivers, not something which tries to use 7+ old technology.
  - aortega 14y ago
    I'm sure you know Gnome ran on a lot of things that are not Linux. BSDs for example. The implementation of gnome-fallback in OpenBSD works beautifully. I have a small ARM board that consumes about 1 watt, and you could install gnome on it and you couldn't tell it from my ubuntu desktop, it was that good. I expect games to need driver support, not a simple DE. If you take in account that not even OS-X need a graphic card to work, you know you are doing it wrong by requiring one. (Don't start with llvm-pipe, I dont need the DE consuming 100% of the CPU)