GNOME's Window Rendering Culling Was Broken Leading To Wasted Performance

[drees]

My question is:

Will these changes be backported into Ubuntu 20.04 LTS? Or will people who want stability have to wait until the next LTS before they can enjoy these performance benefits? At some point in time vast performance improvements like this have to be considered bug-fixes.

Digging into the ticket, it appears that it will be backported into 3.36, and thus Ubuntu 20.04.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1324#note_846799

This was superseded by !1326 (merged)

@abramm the commit at !1326 (merged) has been cherry-picked to the gnome-3-36 branch. I advise you use that one instead.

[drees]

As part of wanting to improve the GNOME performance at 4K with Intel graphics, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt has been profiling various desktop issues and looking to address them for GNOME 3.38 / Ubuntu 20.10.

My question is:

Will these changes be backported into Ubuntu 20.04 LTS? Or will people who want stability have to wait until the next LTS before they can enjoy these performance benefits? At some point in time vast performance improvements like this have to be considered bug-fixes.

[Zico]

Nice to see optimization
Important thing.
The sad thing is that high quality imaging has not been used by applications such as Live Wallpapers etc. Many people are interested in the content, but cover of the book too..

[microcode]

...

With windows displaying complex software (like a web browser) this data often needs to keep being sent (i.e as pixels) because it changes very often (the copy on the GPU is already out of date). This unfortunately results in blocking the pipeline. Especially now people have (wastefully IMO) extremely high resolution displays requiring massive amounts of pixels to be sent.

If people had simpler UI designs (i.e think boxy Motif) where they could be drawn mainly with instructions (i.e "draw 20x20 box") rather than a raster image, this could be much faster. But people in 2020 want their fancy "bling". This trend does seem to cycle. Perhaps in 2030 we will have less wasteful desktops? Who knows?

As it stands, many things can be retained on the GPU. But not enough unfortunately.
This ability to retain data also made it translate exceptionally well to remote UI systems. Unfortunately these are being neglected in these days of consumer electronics.

I think that it's a mixed blessing. Partial updates have actually come a long way since the Motif days. I think we now have the best and most efficient tools for this ever. Personally I prefer the Windows 95 look to the Motif look.

As display resolutions have increased dramatically, more of the screen is filled with images, and text rendering has become more complicated (shaping, hinting, subpixel rendering and positioning, etc), direct drawing of UIs has become less attractive.

I think there's some promise in making the scanout engines smarter, so we don't need to actually composite most of the screen.

[240Hz]

Many users don't like KDE, because it's over-customizable and over-detailed. Personally, that's also mine reason, why I prefer GNOME 3 over KDE.

However, why each DE develops its own compositor from scratch instead of having/sharing some common reusable base compositor (at least for rendering). Except from UI overlay, the rendering (buffers exchange, compositing) process is the same,...

I just don't get why Linux users promote too much diversity. It looks to produce more resources waste, and reinventing the wheel, than benefit.

KDEs issues would are due to receiving much less funding and manpower than Gnome, as Microsoft, IBM, etc all prefer to see the Linux desktop be crippled by Gnome.

KDE achieves far more with less resources than Gnome, and with the same resources it would be an unparalleled superior Desktop experience.

kravemir A single Wayland compositor for the desktop? Sure. The big distributors already went with Mutter.

Mutter is inferior to KDE plasma wayland session as has been shown numerous times on phoronix performance tests.

Wow, sour grapes... I have tried KDE a couple of time, but wasn't very impressed. After having getting used to Unity, I will never go back to a desktop with a Windows-style taskbar eating away my precious vertical screen space. Personally, I feel Gnome has really become very performant (yes, it took a long time!), unobtrusive and easy to use with nice keyboard shortcuts.

However, all to their own... but at least try to be a bit sociable.

Latte Dock can mimic unity exactly and is even superior to it. Latte Dock is part of KDE software.

[JackLilhammers]

Guest Adapting to Mutter is far easier than doing your own desktop wayland compositor.

That would be laughable, if you weren't saying wrong things on purpose.
Which in turn makes you ridiculous.

Guest You can read this old post: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blo...gl-compositor/
Even when Mutter was released it was vastly different from Kwin, which in turn is more similar to Compiz

PS: that post was shared also here https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...item&px=OTMwOA

[Veto]

Imagine if instead of spending so much time, energy and effort into getting gnome to become barely usable, the effort instead went into improving KDE.
The linux desktop experience today would be 100 times better than it is currently. G*ome is the worst thing to have ever happened to the Linux Desktop and the linux community.

Wow, sour grapes... I have tried KDE a couple of time, but wasn't very impressed. After having getting used to Unity, I will never go back to a desktop with a Windows-style taskbar eating away my precious vertical screen space. Personally, I feel Gnome has really become very performant (yes, it took a long time!), unobtrusive and easy to use with nice keyboard shortcuts.

However, all to their own... but at least try to be a bit sociable.

Guest Adapting to Mutter is far easier than doing your own desktop wayland compositor.

Well, not everybody is in favor of dependency bloating. However, that holds true only while system stays completely free of gtk based software, otherwise there's shared gobject dependency.

Guest A single Wayland compositor for the desktop? Sure. The big distributors already went with Mutter.

Isn't mutter too much coupled to gnome/gtk codebase? At least it's coupled to gobject system, but isn't there more? It might be usable for gtk-oriented DE(s) like XFCE, but bad for others like LXDE, KDE,..

Imagine if instead of spending so much time, energy and effort into getting gnome to become barely usable, the effort instead went into improving KDE.
The linux desktop experience today would be 100 times better than it is currently. G*ome is the worst thing to have ever happened to the Linux Desktop and the linux community.

Many users don't like KDE, because it's over-customizable and over-detailed. Personally, that's also mine reason, why I prefer GNOME 3 over KDE.

However, why each DE develops its own compositor from scratch instead of having/sharing some common reusable base compositor (at least for rendering). Except from UI overlay, the rendering (buffers exchange, compositing) process is the same,...

I just don't get why Linux users promote too much diversity. It looks to produce more resources waste, and reinventing the wheel, than benefit.