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  • #21
    Originally posted by Ray54 View Post
    I have Cinnamon 3.6.7 running under Mint 18.3 64bit on six older computers that are typically 3GHz Intel Pentium dual cores with lower end NVidia cards. I never notice window opening time more than a second for normal applications like firefox on my old machines. For me Cinnamon is a great desktop, as it gives me what I liked about older versions of Windows (e.g. XP), without all the awfulness of Windows 10, and of course without the low quality Windows kernel. I can see how people like Gnome and Unity desktops, as they are both good desktops, but I like the being able to keep my relations happy by giving them something not too dissimilar from their previous Windows desktops. I have almost never experienced desktop freezes in several years, so I hope that Danny3 can isolate his problem.
    I'm left with the same disappointment as radeon. all the linux DE's suck to varying degrees because they each are missing basic/desired features.

    I can literally say that I tried them all (if they were in the ubuntu repo).
    all the non-compositing desktops were either unstable or woefully behind on features unless all you want is app-launching.

    i finally bit the bullet last year and switched to compositing desktop because windows don't update well without it.
    the GUI performance impact is visible even with all effects and animations disabled.

    KDE was broken and DOA, i don't care if it was KDE's or distro's fault.

    I used Cinnamon a few months because I want my bloody panels. but it's power mgmt. wasn't stable for my rig (they should just copy GNOME's).
    1/10 times my laptop went to sleep it wouldn't wake up and I was losing work. Their VPN icon update bug has been broken for YEARS.

    I use GNOME now cause it's the most stable of the compositing bunch (which isn't saying much),
    but i was cursing all the way. It took me a while to find all the extensions to just implement basic panel features (icons, weather, legacy-systray-icons).

    No compositing desktop works well in a virtual machine, so you still need non-compositing fallback.

    God forgive me, my windows 7 desktop at work is more stable than linux!

    It's all moot anyways, since either browser: Firefox or Chrome brings every desktop to their knees/crashes, windows and linux alike.

    Since I can count on nobody, clearly the only solution to this problem is for me to fork my own desktop!
    brb
    Last edited by project_phelius; 17 March 2018, 08:57 AM.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by radeon View Post

      I don't know why they didn't make Cinnamon an Extension to Gnome Shell. However, it's the same pattern we see in other fields, too. Take all those Window Managers or Environments like XFCE, Enlightenment, LXQt, LXDE and so on. They are not different enough to warrant completely separate development, yet they are all independent and much manpower is wasted by reinventing the wheel over and over again.

      Edit: Just to have that said: I know the benefits of competition, however, there is an ideal number of competitors which is usually two. If we have dozens of competitors but only a very small Linux GUI market share, it means that there are dozens of products which are not really useable due to a lack of manpower.

      In my personal view, an example of this is eMail clients under Linux. There is Thunderbird, which is really good with countless useful addons/extensions but also really slow, and it lacks Microsoft Exchange integration (some people need this for business purposes). There is Epiphany, but it doesn't do some things as good as Thunderbird.
      Then there is Claws and Sylpheed, both basically a bit outdated and each one having parts the other one is missing.

      Now, if I am a user and need a subset of those functions/parts, there is quite a big chance that there is not a single client which has all of those functions, because the developers and thus some of the functions are distributed over all the available alternatives. In the end, I have to settle with a mediocre solution, just for the sake of having "many alternatives".
      I'm not certain whether I agree or not. In some scenario's like political parties, yes, two options is the ideal. With three or more parties it's possible to have a tiny minority ruling your country. But with corporations that produce consumer products I don't think that same logic applies. I think the more minorities the better in that case. That way you --don't- end up with a giant majority in control of entire markets.

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      • #23
        Good. I hope this fix makes it in to Mint 19.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by unixfan2001 View Post

          Those who don't understand good engineering are doomed to bitch about JavaScript.

          There's nothing inherently wrong with using JavaScript and it can be plenty fast enough, as long as its aided by an efficient runtime written in C/C++/Rust/any other lower level language.
          Separation of concerns is a thing.
          Yes, it is nothing wrong when you write JavaScript which then compiles in native code. But this crap requires to run SpiderMonkey - and that means full blown Javascript interpreter\compiler with all of its memory and CPU requirements. There are a lot of examples of Electron based apps and I know only VSCode which works fast and consumes adequate resources. Yes, you can write fast and low memory code in Javascript, but it is almost as complicated as writing in C/C++/any other low level language.

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          • #25
            Clearly Cinnamon should already have some integrated tools which voluntarily send anonymous data back to Cinnamon devs, as permanently feedback. Recently I tested Firefox 58 on Wayland and was very fast, like back in the days when Internet Explorer start rendering fonts natively, directly on hardware using DirectDraw( DirectWrite or successors). Actually not sure if Firefox Quantum (or servo) using any kind of font rendering using GPUs via OpenGL or Vulkan. Cinnamon has optimizations and memory problems.

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            • #26
              Clearly Cinnamon should already have some integrated tools which voluntarily send anonymous data back to Cinnamon devs, as permanently feedback. Recently I tested Firefox 58 on Wayland and was very fast, like back in the days when Internet Explorer start rendering fonts natively, directly on hardware using DirectDraw (DirectWrite or successors). Actually not sure if Firefox Quantum (or servo) using any kind of font rendering using GPUs via OpenGL or Vulkan. Cinnamon has optimizations and memory problems.

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              • #27
                Fantastic - people paying attention to performance. Well done Cinnamon guys. Keep paying attention, but you have a long way to go. I just tried the python "open/close 200 windows" script. results here:

                Code:
                make_windows took 2126.453 ms
                  (whole desktop/GUI actually hung/unresponsive/no updates for 21sec)
                close_windows took 15.582 ms
                  (whole desktop/GUI actually hung/unresponsive/no updates for 3 sec)
                The article says this should have improved by maybe a factor of 4x, so down to maybe about 500ms (though the whole desktop froze for much longer than the numbers from the tool). Enlightenment does even better:

                Code:
                make_windows took 99.824 ms
                  (whole desktop/GUI actually hung/unresponsive/no updates for under 1sec)
                close_windows took 11.928 ms
                  (whole desktop/GUI actually hung/unresponsive/no updates for under 1 sec)
                And I'd say Enlightenment is a bit fat and sluggish compared to where it could be. So keep working at it and get your numbers better. They can be drastically better. Memory footprint too. The "free" commandline tool reporting total system memory usage when booting right into X session with 1 terminal to run "free" from:

                Code:
                Cinnamon: 474496Kb
                Enlightenment: 236344Kb
                Full output:

                Code:
                              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
                Mem:       16309592      474496    15419660      114876      415436    15440972
                Swap:      16777212           0    16777212
                
                              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
                Mem:       16309600      236344    15709272       71160      363984    15726828
                Swap:      16777212           0    16777212
                Keep at it and get better. Competition is good.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by Royi View Post
                  I'm using Linux Mint 18.3.
                  My questions are:
                  1. If I move to XFCE, will I notice better performance? Significant reduction of resource usage?
                  2. Does XFCE compatible with all applications I'm running on Cinnamon?

                  Thank You.
                  Yes and yes. I would expect it to be faster at startup and to consume way less memory. Of course, if you don't care about the eye candy...

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by project_phelius View Post

                    I'm left with the same disappointment as radeon. all the linux DE's suck to varying degrees because they each are missing basic/desired features.
                    What's the basic/desired features you care about? There's a lot of users here, maybe we can give you a hand.


                    all the non-compositing desktops were either unstable or woefully behind on features unless all you want is app-launching.
                    For non-compositing WM, Fluxbox has an amazing amount of features. Mostly it lacks a dock/launcher, desktop file manager (ie device icons, file drag to/from desktop), and desktop widgets, but all of those can be added on or removed as you see fit. As far as actual window management goes Flux does everything I've ever wanted a window manager to do... multiple workspaces, maximise/minimise, remember location, remember layer, un/re-decorate, a variety of efficient themes... I can run xfdesktop if I want the desktop file manager, or I can just maximise Thunar with no borders, flag it for all desktops and bottom layer and let it perform the same role, and Flux will remember all of that... if you want composite to reduce CPU usage and redraws you can install compton or xcompmgr. If you want to group windows with tabs like you can with Compiz, that feature is supported. One of the few things you can't do with Flux is zoom the desktop the way you can with the big four composited desktops... and that takes it out of the running for my main desktop since I have keratoconus and I'm half-blind half the day and need to zoom often... but I still use Flux in a Xephyr window to segregate certain apps from my XFCE4 desktop, and that lets me take advantage of all of Flux's window management goodness, while getting to use xfwm4's lovely zoom which BTW works to zoom a multi-head desktop including one landscape and one portrait display side-by-side... no other WM works with that setup let alone zooms with that setup.

                    i finally bit the bullet last year and switched to compositing desktop because windows don't update well without it.
                    the GUI performance impact is visible even with all effects and animations disabled.
                    Even on my Acer AspireOne with a cheesy D25 Atom, enabling xcompmgr sped up my desktop. It absolutely did not slow it down. So if you're experiencing performance problems then you must have a serious driver mis-configuration problem or you're using something far weaker than an 10-year-old Atom CPU... I'm happy to help if you share more information.

                    KDE was broken and DOA, i don't care if it was KDE's or distro's fault.
                    Yeah ever sine KDE4 it has been pretty flakey. I keep giving it a try every 6 months or so because 3.10 was really an amazingly productive work environment and I was smashed to have to leave it. :-( I wish they focused as much on consistency and stability as they do on eye-candy.

                    I used Cinnamon a few months because I want my bloody panels. but it's power mgmt. wasn't stable for my rig (they should just copy GNOME's).
                    1/10 times my laptop went to sleep it wouldn't wake up and I was losing work. Their VPN icon update bug has been broken for YEARS.
                    Which panels are you referring to?

                    I use GNOME now cause it's the most stable of the compositing bunch (which isn't saying much),
                    but i was cursing all the way. It took me a while to find all the extensions to just implement basic panel features (icons, weather, legacy-systray-icons).
                    GNOME is probably the sorriest desktop ever conceived... just like Linus said that SVN is horrible and brain-damaged because it tries to be "CVS done right", GNOME is horrible and brain-damaged because it tries to be a FOSS version of MacOS's dumbed-down-beyond-the-lowest-common-denominator so-simple-the-missing-link-would-find-it-intuitive desktop...

                    No compositing desktop works well in a virtual machine, so you still need non-compositing fallback.
                    Not true. No 3D-composited desktop works well in a virtual machine. Fluxbox with xcompmgr works absolutely fine in a VM, or on a VPS with no physical display hardware, and streams efficiently over VNC because the compositing reduces redraws and the desktop itself has minimal widgets and less colors than the other composited desktops.

                    God forgive me, my windows 7 desktop at work is more stable than linux!
                    Actually Windows 7 isn't the horse-pucky that all the previous versions were. It's reasonably stable and usable. I use my girlfriend's Win7 machine and I run Ubuntu in VirtualBox when I want to get real work done on it, but for basic document processing, surfing, content consumption, gaming... it's fine.

                    It's all moot anyways, since either browser: Firefox or Chrome brings every desktop to their knees/crashes, windows and linux alike.
                    Okay that tells me that either your machine has really terrible display driver configuration problems or you lack a decent amount of RAM.

                    Since I can count on nobody, clearly the only solution to this problem is for me to fork my own desktop!
                    brb
                    I hope you have St. George's heart, because you've chosen quite the dragon to slay! :-) I wish you the best of luck if you honestly go that route and don't get scared off by the fact that you can't even open a window in X in less than 100 lines of code, let along manage it, let alone decorate it, let alone manage multiple workspaces and add desktop widgets for every occasion, let alone interface well with input drivers and the constant churn of QT/GTK libraries.

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by Dukenukemx View Post

                      You using AMDGPU driver? I have a Radeon HD 7850 and when I tried the AMDGPU driver, Cinnamon would freeze often. But I have a GCN 1.0 graphics card, so I attributed it to AMDGPU not being ready for these older graphic cards.

                      **EDIT**

                      Nevermind, I saw you're using an Nvidia GPU.
                      I have an RX 550 and no issues whatsoever, so it must be your specific card...

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