GNOME Shell & Mutter Can Now Be Extensively Profiled For Missed Frames, Other Metrics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Shell & Mutter Can Now Be Extensively Profiled For Missed Frames, Other Metrics

While we've seen a lot of performance optimizations land in GNOME over the past year or two, we're likely to see more optimizations come now that Sysprof integration for GNOME Shell and Mutter has been merged that will allow profiling closely for missed frames and other performance metrics...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Mutter-Sysprof-Lands

[amehaye]

I wish that https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/73 will land in time for GNOME 3.34. As an avid user of a multi-monitor setup this could be a real boon.

[microcode]

Brilliant, I hope this is used extensively by GNOME developers!

[DeeZiD]

VanVugt just published !602 which fixed lots of NVIDIA related issues, especially when CPU is used a lot.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/602

Anyone using Arch or based can try out all the fixes here:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mutter-781835-workaround

[DeeZiD]

Colors are still missing. Instead, the gnome 3 desktop distracts users with bugs and bad design.

Tried 4.13 a few days ago and it is almost as laggy as KDE 5.16- not as bad as Deepin though and KDE 5.15 was even worse.

Just try out Gnome with VanVugt patches or even Windows/Mac computers, to see how a responsive machine actually feels like. Both Gnome (VanVugt latest + !602) and Windows/Mac basically have no input lag at all.

XFCE on the other hand suffers from severe input lag even in simple tasks like scrolling or moving windows around. The strong tearing and the frame drops I dealt with have been fixed in the latest version though. Me as a video editor and colorist working in Davinci Resolve Studio - which definitely would suffer quite a lot, can't recommend using another desktop than Gnome + patches on Linux for professional work - if low input lag is a requirement. Switched to Linux when Gnome 3.30 was around and was quite impressed by Daniel's performance improvements which made Linux finally usable to me. Rendering using multiple cores + GPUs has been faster on Linux quite a bit before.

Here's to hoping KDE, XFCE and even Deepin developers can fix these issues soon to make Linux on the desktop more attractive.

[hax0r]

Man these fixes coming out of Canonical developer are historical and he's not stopping, low latency, fluidity, and responsiveness is among the most important aspects of desktop compositor. Gnome has officially won desktop race, compare it it half assed vblank syncing implementation in kwin (hello kwin-lowlatency), not to mention it never ran properly with nvidia drivers without hacks, KDE is nothing more that a Qt unit testing framework at this point (it always been). Props to nvidia developer for EGLstream implementation in kwin and fixing some important bugs while he was there, finally somebody was able to get a point across KDE's thick skulls.

[stan]

I hope this will help improve gnome-shell's horrendous memory usage. Gnome-shell's use of JavaScript makes garbage collection a complete nightmare:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/64

Not only are there memory leaks that nobody will ever find, but the garbage collector burns up the CPU needlessly while chasing its tail. Worst of all, none of the core Gnome developers know what to do about it. Really amateurish, if you ask me. We need more tools like these to make debugging feasible, or a change in programming languages to one that is safer (Rust was mentioned as an option).

Anyway, congrats to Christian Hergert, Georges Stavracas, Daniel van Vugt, and everyone else involved. Speaking of which, just imagine where Linux and the Gnome desktop would be if we had David Reveman of Compiz fame working on mainstream Linux desktop rather than on Chrome OS, which will always be crippled by design.

[Aeder]

In your dreams it is so. Most of the people use something else than gnome3 or kde, see:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics

The stats you show actually show the opposite of what you're saying with most users using either KDE or Gnome, their combined share bigger than all the others put together and their individual shares being two times larger or more than each of the other desktops when compared individually.

[DeeZiD]

Stuff like this raises the question. How many wayland Desktop compositors do we need?

Mutter is by far the most tested, mature and performant compositor. Ideally we only need one.

Well at least on Intel and NVIDIA systems using Xorg it runs like a beast right now using the latest patches - basically Windows or MacOS alike.

Not true when using the open source amdgpu driver.

Honestly never tried using AMD graphics on Linux and won't change until AMD fixes their driver issues with Resolve on both Windows and Linux.
Would be wonderful if that was the case since the Vega VII with its 16GB vram even trashes the 2080 Ti in terms of video editing performance for like half the price. Also AMF encoding is finally available in latest Resolve 16 Studio.

But until then I'll keep using my trustworthy 1080Ti which never made any problems besides running out of memory on Windows which made me switch to Linux in the first place.

[DeeZiD]

A great action from gnome3 developers to prevent the success of the Linux desktop. No themes.

https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Moves_against_Themes

Bravo IBM-Microsoft.

I agree.
Official theme and desktop support are missing and using extensions is a must - which can break with each update...
On the other hand I love using Activities and like the minimalist and slick looking applications and of course the fluidity and lack of lag.