GNOME Shell + Mutter Off To A Good Start For Summer 2020

[reba]

Gnome was never meant to be lightweight. It's not supposed to be heavyweight either (we have KDE for that :P)

Wait, what?

KDE Plasma is one of the leanest desktops available, even slimmer than XFCE

Off the top of my head:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-prediction-kde-will-steal-the-lightweight-linux-desktop-crown-in-2020/

[gedgon]

In fact, even with kwin_x11 (i.e. not lowlatency) on Deepin 20, I cannot get it above 5% and only if I dramatically shake a window while moving. With normal moving, it's about 2%.

2% of a single core, or a 32 thread CPU?

Edit. Just tried this on Plasma 5.19.2, both, on X11 and Wayland session and the CPU usage on my system is almost 3 times higher than on GNOME Wayland. 20-22% of a single core for kwin process and about 10% for plasma shell.

[aufkrawall]

It's 10% Xorg and 8% kwin here with lowlatency fork for 1440p 85Hz and 1000Hz mouse polling rate.
Totally unspectacular, total CPU load is just ~2% with the 6700k. Windows 10 is much worse with ~12%, which is suspiciously close to one full thread utilized.

[foxhound]

Brutal critique of Ubuntu 20.04 and Gnome today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sez8qPipGbc
50% cpu usage just to move a small window around.

I did same test on mine machine which is weak AMD E-350 APU (iGP Radeon HD6310) on Fedora 32 with GNOME 3.36.3 and got ~45% load of one core by gnome-shell process, ~20% in total CPU load. Well, for just moving the window its still much and they definitely should work on that even if it is much lower than the guy from yt shown ...

[foxhound]

I don't think you can get a usable desktop with less than 4GB of RAM anyway, at least not a graphical one with a Chromium-like browser or even Firefox. Disabling Javascript might work though, to some extent.

CPU power is kinda moot if you have a moderately fast GPU. Any Intel IGP is more than capable of driving a modern composited desktop, and even a Llano APU might be grossly overspecced for such task.

The rule of thumb which is known for ages says that you never should save money on RAM

[foxhound]

It's interesting how Gnome users don't even hide their disdain for anyone not running the absolute latest, fastest hardware.

I can't agree with you. I use Fedora 32 with GNOME 3.36.3 on ancient AMD E-350 system, which came from 2011 (and even on release time it wasn't the fastest one on the market). It works better than I thought. Moreover I use another same hardware with CentOS 7 with GNOME as well. Both systems allows me to work efficiently and slowdowns are rare.