GNOME 3 Might Be Too Resource Hungry To Ever Run Nicely On The Raspberry Pi

[starshipeleven]

I know! But at the end, the entire experience matters.

If his answer was only about Clutter's history, no the whole experience does not matter.

[ebassi]

I know you are a gnome dev but please try to keep it civil and don't insult people. thnx

If I get insulted I don't see why I shouldn't insult back. Or are you going to pretend that there ins't a whole host of immensely clueless people here that go around all day insulting the authors of software they use just because of their shitty entitlement issues? I mean: how far do you think we, upstream developers, ought to take this constant barrage of crap without pushing back?

[Cerberus]

Gnome 3 is an abomination, resource hungry, crap functionality without extensions, ugly default theme and they keep removing more and more from it in each new version. Long time ago KDE was a resource hog and slow compared to Gnome, now it is the other way around, KDE 5 uses much less RAM, is far more configurable and default theme Breeze and its darker version Breeze Dark look good. Also battery use can be fine tuned in KDE which is not possible in Gnome. Lastly Gnome 3 search of local files is atrocious, you need to install tracker to index your disks and it is extremely slow, resource hungry and has no option to turn off content indexing. On KDE Baloo can be configured to index file names only, which is the only thing I need indexed, and it indexes hundreds of thousands of files very very quickly. After Canonical abandoned Unity 7 and introduced Gnome 3 I jumped ship and I am now alternating between KDE and MATE, but I am closer to going for KDE as my new desktop environment. KDE can even work well on pretty weak computers, just turn off desktop effects and get on with your life, you lose a bit of eye candy but it still looks pretty good.

[ebassi]

While i never understood the stupidity of Javascript being used in a key aspect of a GUI

If you think the language matters, in this case, you're clearly even less knowledgeable than you think you are.

The things that makes the Shell slow is not JavaScript; the Shell is not implemented wholly in JS, and blocking the main thread while running the garbage collector is not caused by JavaScript; even if you rewrote it in C, you'd have to free resources asynchronously because there's IPC involved, and you'd have to free them in the main thread because that's where GL objects live.

GNOME Shell is not running computationally heavy stuff in JS; the JS code is literally event handling and updating the frame. Inefficiencies are caused by an accumulation of small things, and in general it's just a bunch of stuff that delays the frame processing. The language has nothing to do with it, because those things happen in any language.

[JPFSanders]

Gnome... oh boy. (facepalm)

I'm only going to say that one of the big factors of Linux being a failure in the desktop is Gnome. Gnome 3 managed to regress Linux's desktop back in time 5-7 years. All for nothing.

Awful experience, awful design, a pile of tired and rejected usage paradigms, and the worst performance on any GUI in the planet.

The irony here is that the only positive of Gnome 3 is that MATE came out to be because of it.

[wberrier]

Hello, I've been lurking for some time, but wanted to add my 2 cents of gratitude for Gnome.

The nice thing about software is that it can get better

So, while it may not be perfect, thanks to all the devs and resources for making a great desktop environment!

Some background for my comments: I used WindowMaker for a long time: I liked the workflow and it was lightning fast. Once Wayland was conceived I realized WindowMaker was never going to run on it and GnomeShell was making rapid progress (thank you RedHat!).

I've been mostly running Gnome 3 since, largely on 2955U chromebooks, without any major complaint. It also runs fine when rendered using software in a VM.

Some sidenotes:

* I'm thrilled that Ubuntu is defaulting to Gnome lately as I think it will get even more testing and polish.

* I really do think Qt/C++ is a nicer development environment than Gtk+, but I still prefer Gnome over KDE

* IMO, even if Gnome were optimized for the Pi, there would be another piece of code next on the list, "XYZ runs too slow on the Pi"

Thanks again for the great desktop environment!

[onicsis]

From 2012 to 2018 a general question still remains, why so much peoples hate Gnome 3 and indirectly: why Desktop Linux has not yet taken off, after so many years.

Even the core of (one of the most promoted) Linux Desktop it's so bloated and slow in many situations, even on newest and powerful hardware. Bad design, bad architecture.

[torsionbar28]

It doesn't matter whether it is in the compositor thread or not. A javascript runtime will always be a resource hog in whatever thread is running. That is one of the technical reasons I won't touch Gnome 3 or Cinammon or any other javascript based desktop environment. Ofcource, the #1 reason is the horrible workflows that have been imposed to our throats by the developers as "innovations".

^ Very well said. When responsiveness is the goal, Javascript is the wrong tool for the job, period. Plus yeah, the clunky obtuse gnome3 UI that gets in the way of literally everything you use a PC for.

The MATE desktop is a great example of what a desktop environment should be. Light, fast, written in C, uses traditional desktop metaphors that everyone is familiar with. Works on everything from your big honkin AMD EPYC monster machine, to the lowliest raspberry pi.

[ebassi]

I know very well from personal experience that if someone calling your product bullshit et al is of course not something you wish to happen but it's something that happens everywhere anyway. You simply can't keep everyone happy.

I can keep myself happy and avoid burning out. If all it costs is insulting pissants who spout idiocies because of Dunning-Kruger then it's a bargain.

And by insulting them do you think that would make the situation any better?

It does, for me.

Cursing the product itself is totally different than giving personal insults tho.
What we have to do is to prove them that our products is worthy by improving them coz that's the only way to eliminate them

No, that's absolutely broken culture, and this is why people stop contributing to free software. The "product", as it is, it's the result of ton of time and effort; it's indistinguishable from me because I'm not a fucking machine that drinks coffee and pisses out code. If you think you can insult what I do and not insult me, you're clearly not contributing at all. Ignoring these little idiots running their mouths around can be done for a little while, but then it becomes unbearable; people burn out for this crap, and we lose contributors. Then we have to go around asking companies to fill the void by giving us money, and resources.

[ThanosApostolou]

If you think the language matters, in this case, you're clearly even less knowledgeable than you think you are.

The things that makes the Shell slow is not JavaScript; the Shell is not implemented wholly in JS, and blocking the main thread while running the garbage collector is not caused by JavaScript; even if you rewrote it in C, you'd have to free resources asynchronously because there's IPC involved, and you'd have to free them in the main thread because that's where GL objects live.

GNOME Shell is not running computationally heavy stuff in JS; the JS code is literally event handling and updating the frame. Inefficiencies are caused by an accumulation of small things, and in general it's just a bunch of stuff that delays the frame processing. The language has nothing to do with it, because those things happen in any language.

If I understood correctly from the discussion you are a Gnome developer. So, I would love to hear your own self criticism about what's wrong. If it's not javascript to blame, then what is it? How, can it be that the Desktop with the most developers and most support (Red Hat and now Cannonical too) has the worst performance without enough features justifying that. How can a Desktop, which was designed to be compatible with touch screens and small devices even if it means breaking the traditional desktop experience, is so resource hungry which it makes it impossible to run on those devices (even in low end laptops). Is it bad decisions? Is it bad implementations? Because if your answer is that it is impossible to avoid some problems because of the garbage collector or whatever.. then I would say that it was a bad decision to design a desktop based on these technologies in the first place... So, what will it change in the future? Would you be open to re-implement everything in a different way which doesn't have those problems?