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

[Guest]

It might be true that there's 100% males (and/or lesbians) in The Gnome Project, but still, assuming it shows prejudice of the assumer.

I think he meant they're male 'virgins' who didn't have sex in their entire life. It would explain few things.

[Weasel]

show us your code, and then we keep talking.

Sorry, I contribute to other great projects because I follow what I preach, mostly to Wine, so it's not just "my code". And yeah, because of the personal attacks, I'd rather remain anonymous. (there is a difference between "bashing the code" and personally attacking a developer, I never advocate the latter, no matter who the developer is, even if it's an indirect attack as was mentioned long ago)

[onicsis]

Direct effects (not of radiation) of CoC, political correctness, outreachy programs, discrimination of majority in favor of (some) minorities and other "innovations" to "boost" code/software quality. And a new metrics of stupidity and a recipe for a guaranteed disaster. Scary!!

[leipero]

I think he meant they're male 'virgins' who didn't have sex in their entire life. It would explain few things.

Well, whole premise of assuming gender and sexuality is based on what he meant, if he assumes "people who never saw p.. in their life", he clearly means on heterosexual males or homosexual females, there's no other option there = therefore, he assumed gender and sexuality.

[mbello]

I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop since version 11.04 (a ThinkPad x220 purchased in june 2011).
i have always read many complaints about Unity but to me it worked fine. In 2014 I upgraded my laptop to 16GB ram and a 1TB 850 EVO and since than I have been unable to find a good reason to spend $1+k on a new machine.

Well, after moving from Unity back to Gnome on 18.04 I can finally say my main machine is no longer fast enough. What bothers me the most is the keyboard input delay. And Gnome on Wayland (I tried that hoping to improve things) crashes almost daily.

After reading the article and the thread I believe there is indeed something wrong with Gnome 3. Time to try a different DE and keep the laptop a while longer until laptops with quad cores and capable of at least 32GB RAM become an affordable reality.

[Guest]

I haven't personally owned a laptop before but I've used some owned by others for applications that required other operating systems (a windows 10 toshiba, an apple macbook, etc...).
In terms of CPU usage, gnome-shell has always been fast enough when I had an intel core2duo with 4GB ram desktop and became faster when I upgraded to a skylake corei5 with 16GB ram. The only bottleneck was always the GPU. The Fermi and kepler cards were too slow for gnome-shell and GTK+ CSD windows and that is one reason I never liked CSD windows. Upgrading to 1050Ti pascal card heavily improved performance.

The only issues I still see are memory usage issues. But I believe those will improve since gnome usage is increasing with Ubuntu/Endless using recent gnome versions. More testing coverage normally exposes bugs much faster and naturally pushes for improvements.
Gnome 3.26 and 3.28 are already much better than 3.16 and 3.18 but there is much room for improvement.

[cynical]

No, that's absolutely broken culture, and this is why people stop contributing to free software.

It's really amazing. We would be spoiled for choice in the free software world with two quality desktops, but we have even more than that. As someone just getting into coding, I seriously appreciate the hard work you guys do. I'm enjoying Gnome so much that I find using anything else unpleasant. I definitely did not imagine feeling this way when I first started using Gnome, but it has grown on me since then. (extensions help) I like the philosophy that I see of good defaults, less clutter in the UI, generous use of space, and overall simplicity. I may try to contribute one day when my skills are improved.

[cynical]

Yes JavaScript is fine as a scripting language, however writing a shell is not a place where I'd consider it to be a good place to use a scripting language for similar reasons to why it's not a good decision to write it in python or to write the core of a game engine with it.

Why? A game engine and a desktop shell are two completely different beasts. JavaScript itself is a highly expressive, compact, and fairly performant language (as far as interpreted languages go), and much safer to write in than something like C, while having a familiar syntax, and a large base of developers. I don't see a better language to use. On top of that, JS is actually quite elegant if you avoid using the poorly designed parts. It's very similar to scheme, except popular.

[cynical]

I'm personally sick of seeing projects that are similar, one written in proper language like C, one written in some obscure crap with "scripting features" in a bloated language like JS (instead of say, Lua), and then the latter using up 10 times more memory, taking up 10 times more disk space, etc etc.

I don't believe you code. By what standard are you saying C is a 'proper' language compared to JS? The language was brilliant for its time, but broken by modern standards in significant ways. Lua and JS are very similar, other than the fact that JS has a much more comprehensive ecosystem, so your rant doesn't make any sense.

[Candy]

The language was brilliant for its time, but broken by modern standards in significant ways.

Weasel is right by saying that a Desktop should be written in a proper language like C. With C you can get the most out of the hardware and even ensure that your code works more or less fluent on less powered machines. This can only be achieved with using C. For the Assembly part I agree! No one should be using Assembly anymore. I speak about own experience here - by having programmed 68000 Assembly for more than a decade.

C is also not broken by definition. Broken are the programmers that lack knowledge about proper programming skills. People that have never programmed to save clock cyclles, ram, space, performance and speed. Of course these things doesn't need to be driven religious here, but performance still matters.

Rather than speaking about optimizing code, these "so called developers" nowadays say "hardware is cheap", "harddisk space is cheap" as an excuse for their bad coding capabilities.

And clearly JS does not belong into a Desktop shell!. For what ? Eating up all resources ? To use JS to code a few extensions (which says that there is a problem with the overall functionality of the shell per se) ? Or to make the entire desktop crawl like hell ?

Compare Gnome3 with e.g. AROS or MorphOS. Both systems are entirely written in C., They boot up within seconds (a blink with the eye) on ancient rotten hardware. Clicking on an Icon to launch the program is another blink with the eye and the software is loaded up.

For the person saying "show me the code and we can talk".

The code is all there. It has been abandoned for underperformant technology. Gnome has always been like this. Replacing things before they even come to a mature level.

gnome-config replaced by gconf2. gconf2 wasn't even able to mature and got replaced by dconf (or was it called zerconf). The aim was to use it even for system configuration. Luckely no one bothered using it. Bonobo got nuked, BonoboUI got nuked, Bonobo-Config got nuked, Corba got nuked and so on. Of course some technology makes sense and others not. Replacing some of the code to unify things is good too. But Gnome had all of that.

And now ?

With Gnome3 we got 4 new paths for Gnome.

1) Gnome3
2) MATE Desktop as a fork or continuation of Gnome2
3) Cinnamon Desktop as a highly configured version of Gnome Shell + a fork of Nautilus and a few other tools
4) Not entirely a Fork or something but the "Gnome Fallback" option - that by definition - should have gone years ago but still kept because they hope to get moved off people back

A Desktop is a clean area with icons, a top or bottom bar, an application launcher thingy that eats around 0.1% of the overall CPU time, takes less than 10mb of Ram (make it 50mb for HiDPI stuff) and does nothing else. I don't want it to go in some sort of expose kind of feature, when I want to access the program launching bar and have all my connected monitors (3 in my case) go to that expose feature too, just because gnome shell wants it like that and make my critical software go off for a few seconds because of the expose stuff.

And again C may be old - but it's the proper language to achieve this. Learn to code, learn to allocate and free memory, learn how to use a debugger. Performance matters even on old hardware. Get off with the attitutde that "hardware is cheap". Firstly it may be cheap - but it's not YOU who buys me the new hardware and secondly get some sense for our environment and all the plastic and electronic junk we create.