Ubuntu's Unity/Compiz Gets Even Slower

[Hamish Wilson]

But Michael puts fire into this discussion, because he says something about how unity is slower and that the alternative is xfce or something... whats wrong about gnome-shell as THE alternative. I mean performace-fetishists will maybe use that or better openbox or something like that. But the normal ubuntu-user will most likely use gnome-shell if unity is not good, but most likely he just uses unity because its default... so the first alternative would be gnome-shell not xfce, xfce is not that featurecomplete than a gnome-shell, if it where most people would used xfce in the time where gnome2 was out... that was not the case...

Its not bad, but its not the nr1 alternative.

I would rather use cinemon before I consider xfce.

Look, I am not part of the Gnome Shell bashing crowd, but your analysis here seems to be clouded by your own judgements rather than any objective reality. Considering that at the moment there is no separate Gnome Shell flavour of Ubuntu (that will change, but still...) I find it highly unlikely that most Ubuntu's user first choice after ditching Unity would be Gnome Shell. Both Xubuntu and Lubuntu are probably used far more frequently than people manually grabbing Gnome Shell packages.

And I debate the line that Xfce is less feature complete than Gnome Shell. Both have features targeting different areas - Thunar and xfdesktop are probably the largest sore spots for Xfce when it comes to feature completeness, but it does have an excellent power manager, a more stable and easily configurable panel than Gnome 2 did, a very configurable display compositor, and a superior settings layout. Gnome wins when it comes to the variety of default applications, superior user settings, and in some ways when it comes to out of the box appeal. But to sideline Xfce as you did there is unfair.

[ultimA]

how is it irrelevant (?) when the article is about just that, a regression in performance... it's essentially the most relevant part of the article. I would say you trying to get into some debate of it's design, features, usability, unpopularity, etc is actually what is pretty much irrelevant to the topic. And as far as Sam's comment - it is VERY relevant being how this article IS about a regression in performance, and it makes sense that he would point out, why the regression is there (apparently not in your mind, though). The reality is - this code hasn't been released yet because it's not ready at this point. Regressions are common in software that is in the middle of development, alpha, beta, etc ...so i think the developer's input is a good thing and very relevant to the discussion at hand. Far more relevant than your comment about this stuff.

You're talking about a different thing. The article was about the regression, of course, and it is good that the developer responded to that, for which we are thankful. Regressions are of course part of software development. My reply was meant for people who started bashing other people for voicing their dislike of Unity and argued that one of the dislikers didn't consider the analysis. I was just saying that for those who dislike Unity (which has way more causes than just performance reasons), the performance analysis doesn't make a difference.

[blackiwid]

Look, I am not part of the Gnome Shell bashing crowd, but your analysis here seems to be clouded by your own judgements rather than any objective reality. Considering that at the moment there is no separate Gnome Shell flavour of Ubuntu (that will change, but still...) I find it highly unlikely that most Ubuntu's user first choice after ditching Unity would be Gnome Shell. Both Xubuntu and Lubuntu are probably used far more frequently than people manually grabbing Gnome Shell packages.

And I debate the line that Xfce is less feature complete than Gnome Shell. Both have features targeting different areas - Thunar and xfdesktop are probably the largest sore spots for Xfce when it comes to feature completeness, but it does have an excellent power manager, a more stable and easily configurable panel than Gnome 2 did, a very configurable display compositor, and a superior settings layout. Gnome wins when it comes to the variety of default applications, superior user settings, and in some ways when it comes to out of the box appeal. But to sideline Xfce as you did there is unfair.

I did not want to insult people for using xfce, I just say that ->I<- would not want to use it, I tried it but it was way way from what I am used to in gnome. So if you think its maybe nearly as good as gnome2 was, I think that gnome-shell is significant improvement over gnome2, so I understand people who think that gnome-shell is worse than gnome2, which are many I guess for them that would be a hard critic when they would here that gnome-shell is way better than xfce. If you hate gnome-shell and loved gnome2 you maybe like xfce, but if you love gnome-shell way more than gnome2 you cannot like xfce.

Hope that clearified it a bit. I have nothing against xfce, if people like it be happy with it. But I know why Micheal talks about xfce, because he dont like gnome-shell, too. So I sniff a sideslap against gnome-shell not to mention it.

yes for ubuntu users its maybe a more likely thing to do to checkout xfce, but gnome is not some projekt with 5 guys or so... its THE Linux-desktop-system, its one of the 2 big, and from them its the bigger one (in userbase). Even xfce is partly gnome-powered, I mean gtk is mostly also a gnome-dev-project or am I wrong here? I know you can use gtk wihtout gnome-libs or something like that, but its a part of the gnome-projekt.

[ninez]

You're talking about a different thing. The article was about the regression, of course, and it is good that the developer responded to that, for which we are thankful. Regressions are of course part of software development. My reply was meant for people who started bashing other people for voicing their dislike of Unity and argued that one of the dislikers didn't consider the analysis. I was just saying that for those who dislike Unity (which has way more causes than just performance reasons), the performance analysis doesn't make a difference.

Bartek, clearly was saying that people just take any occasion that they can to bitch about Canonical and/or Unity, yet the article is about a regression, which Sam addressed - yet most commentors/dislikers just skipped over that, and continued to bitch - nowhere did i get the impression that bartek thought people should consider the regression/performance analysis as being a deal-maker (or breaker) as you are suggesting above. (in fact, i find that line of thinking to be a bit silly, at best). The closest he ever came to making any comment of that sort was to judge unity 6 when it is released - which is fair enough, but importantly - still not analogous to your interpretation of what he said. ~ likewise, i think the same is true of dh04000 statement.

I do not believe either of those 2 were trying to say people should be considering 'the performance analysis' over their opinions of UI design, features, etc... What i got out of both comments is that people just tend to bitch any chance they get and skim right past relevant information (to the article). ~ which is obviously very common place around here.

anyway, it really doesn't matter.

[ninez]

yes for ubuntu users its maybe a more likely thing to do to checkout xfce, but gnome is not some projekt with 5 guys or so... its THE Linux-desktop-system, its one of the 2 big, and from them its the bigger one (in userbase). Even xfce is partly gnome-powered, I mean gtk is mostly also a gnome-dev-project or am I wrong here? I know you can use gtk wihtout gnome-libs or something like that, but its a part of the gnome-projekt.

GTK stands for 'Gimp Toolkit' - it was not originally developed by Gnome nor was it a Gnome Project - it was developed to replace Motif as Gimp's toolkit.

lots of DEs/WMs use it and that doesn't make them gnome-powered, it makes them GTK+ powered. an example of a 'partly gnome-powered' DE - would be Unity or Elementary OS's DE or Cinnamon ~ those are examples of DEs that are powered by gnome, since they are all essentially gnome, just with different shells, modified/forked software and other slight (mostly superficial) modifications/alterations.

[Awesomeness]

you do also realize that the compiz that ships (or is updated into Ubuntu/Unity) doesn't always correspond to upstream compiz development, right?

No, I don't because it's not true! According to Compiz’ own development page Compiz’ release cycle was aligned to Ubuntu’s. It makes absolutely no sense that Ubuntu ships with additional patches on top.

Said said, I didn't even ask you, so STFU.

[Timo Jyrinki]

FYI if you want to follow progress on the regression bugs, see the following (at least):

https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+bug/1037411 "
[regression][GLES] Benchmark results are 15-40% lower with the gles2 code (compiz 0.9.8.0)"

and regarding full screen games performance as hinted in the above report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...iz/+bug/980663 "Compiz won't start if "unredirect fullscreen windows" is enabled"

The latter problem with unredirect fullscreen windows settings is apparently already fixed in the staging PPA (https://launchpad.net/~unity-team/+archive/staging).

Not sure if there are some unity specific fixes brewing as well, but at least for 12.04 the next Unity stable update should bring regional damage fixes among other things.

[narciso]

The problem with compiz is that some games like Trine 2 or Bastion use a peculiar way of going to fullscreen, and unredirect fullscreen windows won't suspend compiz effects, and performance is the same as running the game in a window. The only way to get proper performance is to remove compiz completely which is not possible because Unity is a compiz plugin.

[Timo Jyrinki]

The problem with compiz is that some games like Trine 2 or Bastion use a peculiar way of going to fullscreen, and unredirect fullscreen windows won't suspend compiz effects, and performance is the same as running the game in a window. The only way to get proper performance is to remove compiz completely which is not possible because Unity is a compiz plugin.

Hopefully also a bug like that could be analyzed far enough to fix it. Various other redirection related bugs were also very recently fixed (also in staging):

LP #1041047 - "Unredirect Fullscreen Windows" stay on top (unredirected) even when they're not on top any more (or the output is transformed)"

LP #1041066 - "Unredirect Fullscreen Windows sometimes fails to unredirect fullscreen windows at all"

I didn't find a bug describing the Trine 2 / Bastion full screen problem, though, unless it was fixed by the gtk-window-decorator related fixes of the latter bug's branch.

[ninez]

No, I don't because it's not true! According to Compiz’ own development page Compiz’ release cycle was aligned to Ubuntu’s. It makes absolutely no sense that Ubuntu ships with additional patches on top.

except that it is true. compiz-bzr is always slightly ahead of 'official' releases / updates. Generally, new code will go through testing / staging before it is officially released / pushed through as an update. (i guess your not familiar with this concept either). I never said they add additional patches to compiz, i don't know where you got that idea.

Said said, I didn't even ask you, so STFU.

It must be your time of the month - here are some tips on how to lesson your agitation; http://www.wikihow.com/Reduce-Menstrual-Cramps .... maybe some of these will help you out

I'd also like to point out, since apparently you're not familiar with how forums work - in pretty much any forum; people post and sometimes other people will post a comment/reply to a post - even if the original comment wasn't directed at them. That is generally common place in any forum. ~ apparently you think otherwise...