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

[bug77]

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?

You could push back by addressing people's complaints. But you're right, a little "fuck off" is more in line with my expectations from the Gnome camp.

[microcode]

I really do like a lot of the design direction of GNOME apps, but this is just sad. Maybe GNOME should give up on this CSS monstrosity and switch to EFL or something, they obviously don't have enough people who care about performance for the software to remain adequately fast. As I switch more of my devices to displays with refresh rates greater than 60Hz, the performance issues become more and more glaring when I try out GNOME from time to time.

[timofonic]

A GNOME User

Who of both is the GNOME user?

[RahulSundaram]

You could push back by addressing people's complaints. But you're right, a little "fuck off" is more in line with my expectations from the Gnome camp.

Some of these comments are not really constructive complaints. They go far beyond that and assume a lot of bad faith and goes as far as insulting even users. The above image is a good example of bad actors. It is not like people don't have a whole host of choices if they want something fundamentally different from GNOME's approach.

[Vistaus]

First of all, and from the bottom of my heart: fuck off. You have zero clue about anything you just said. You should just delete your account.

[danmcgrew]

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


What we have here is the technical-article equivalent of a double-negative
(or, maybe, as the from the famous movie film line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate.")--

1. GNOME 3 is too resource-hungry to be used for anything; why it's even considered by OS-designers, users, or even allowed space in a technical article--as there's absolutely nothing 'technical' about it--will become a moot point in the not-too-distant future. Simply read ALL the bad reviews. GNOME's devs don't...

2. Nothing runs nicely on a Raspberry Pi except what it was intended to support: a non-real-time application to teach beginners how to program. No matter the Raspberry Pi Group claims there's no overheating problem (...never has been; the Pi simply shuts down,; errr, "throttles back"); that IT HAS (directly from, and 'statement of fact' promoted by, the PiGroup) GIGABIT ETHERNET (which RUNS ONLY AT 300 Mbps!); that it has no true mass storage (an SD card is considered "adequate") ; that it has never--since first introduced--been able to be shut down properly...'moot' is also in the RPi's future.

[ermo]

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.

(Emphasis mine)

So, ignoring the usual pointless mud-slinging from the peanut gallery and getting back to more reasonable, constructive comments and questions, what do you personally feel would need to happen for GNOME Shell to be able to address the "accumulation of small things" and "if you start cramming features in, and you don't maintain the underlying toolkit, things don't get better" concerns you outline?

Where should people attempt to contribute if they want things to change for the better? Does GNOME need more funding? More manpower?

Personally, I had to switch away from GNOME because simply idling at my 3x1080p desktop would put a non-trivial amount of load on my system and make it feel jerky. I don't have those kind of issues on Budgie, which to me suggests that it should be entirely possible to get rid of some of the undesirable overhead in GNOME, provided that resources are correctly spent on whatever part of the stack needs a good look?

[Candy]

Where should people attempt to contribute if they want things to change for the better? Does GNOME need more funding? More manpower?

It's not possible to contribute to GNOME because it's a closed community. It has been that way around 1999 and it's still the case today.

For the funding: Gnome received 1 mio USD from an anonymous donor a couple of days ago:

https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1m-donation-over-two-years/

[Weasel]

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.

I don't think anyone writes crap code on purpose, so let's assume that to be the case. Considering how it's bloated and slow as piss, ever thought maybe you're just not as competent at analyzing the "inefficiencies", as you think you are?

But nevermind, that first assumption is wrong, so pardon the conclusion since it's also wrong. Using garbage collector and javascript in the first place is proof enough of the competence level of whoever is responsible, even if they don't ultimately end up used at all. Just *considering* javascript is enough proof.

[dungeon]

It's not possible to contribute to GNOME because it's a closed community. It has been that way around 1999 and it's still the case today.

For the funding: Gnome received 1 mio USD from an anonymous donor a couple of days ago:

https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/a...ver-two-years/

Such a big anonymous donation, could be just a false flags.... one more proof and no doubt that GNOME is closed community

What stops some evil and anonymous donor company to donate big chunk of money, just so that you lead people into wrong direction