GNOME Optimizations Continue In Striving For Faster 4K Experience

[Mez']

I've seen some activity yesterday from Daniel van Vugt around the double cursor issue (for fractional scaling intermediate values, e.g. 150%), which Gnome devs don't seem very keen to solve (won't fix).

What would be nice as well is wayland not screwing up videos on 4k60Hz. They run at twice the speed and with a high-pitched sound. I can't play anything from embedded videos to movies/shows in any media player. Works fine in 4k30.

wayland can't be deemed ready if it can't play videos on 4k60.

[royce]

Let's be fair here and not pin all of the performance work on Daniel's shoulders though, because it's not the case. That being said performance had never been a focus for the GNOME team until Canonical came back, with all the users Ubuntu brings, and Daniel started pointing out all the shoddy ways GNOME was slow. There's not a lot of love between some of GNOME devs and Daniel, and I wonder if that stems from losing face to an external contributor.

[zxy_thf]

Let's be fair here and not pin all of the performance work on Daniel's shoulders though, because it's not the case. That being said performance had never been a focus for the GNOME team until Canonical came back, with all the users Ubuntu brings, and Daniel started pointing out all the shoddy ways GNOME was slow. There's not a lot of love between some of GNOME devs and Daniel, and I wonder if that stems from losing face to an external contributor.

To be fair, during the early years of Gnome 3, the real performance bottleneck is the GPU driver, not the DE itself.

[royce]

Why? Unity is still better in the eyes of many.

I'm on that list. Unity is still wonderful, performant and well integrated.

People have massive double standards. Canonical was heavily criticised for creating Unity instead of improving GNOME 3, as if they had any sort of obligation to do so. Other distros have created their own DEs in time (Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon) and never got any of that flak.

[johanb]

People have massive double standards. Canonical was heavily criticised for creating Unity instead of improving GNOME 3, as if they had any sort of obligation to do so. Other distros have created their own DEs in time (Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon) and never got any of that flak.

Pantheon was the groundwork for all of elementary OS, not sure how you could complain when you choose the distro yourself.
Cinnamon started out as extensions for Gnome Shell to resemble Gnome 2 which eventually became its own shell because the extension system did not give them enough control. It's still heavily dependent on Gnome Shell and takes in changes from upstream.
Budgie I don't know much about.
Unity was created because they didn't consider GNOME 3 to be good enough, basing it on Qt instead of previous GTK yet doesn't share much code from KDE.

To me it's easy to see which one made the most drastic change for users...
On top of that Ubuntu was (and still is?) the most popular Linux distribution, of course people are going to complain more about a more popular distro.

And please don't interpret this as if I'm saying that Unity is bad, my point is that such drastic changes rarely comes without resistance and I'm not sure why people expect otherwise.

Also, it's not double standard for Pantheon because elementary OS has always run Pantheon and Cinnamon was controversial because it was even less of a difference between GNOME 2 and Cinnamon than it was between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3.

[ms178]

Pantheon was the groundwork for all of elementary OS, not sure how you could complain when you choose the distro yourself.
Cinnamon started out as extensions for Gnome Shell to resemble Gnome 2 which eventually became its own shell because the extension system did not give them enough control. It's still heavily dependent on Gnome Shell and takes in changes from upstream.
Budgie I don't know much about.
Unity was created because they didn't consider GNOME 3 to be good enough, basing it on Qt instead of previous GTK yet doesn't share much code from KDE.

To me it's easy to see which one made the most drastic change for users...
On top of that Ubuntu was (and still is?) the most popular Linux distribution, of course people are going to complain more about a more popular distro.

And please don't interpret this as if I'm saying that Unity is bad, my point is that such drastic changes rarely comes without resistance and I'm not sure why people expect otherwise.

Also, it's not double standard for Pantheon because elementary OS has always run Pantheon and Cinnamon was controversial because it was even less of a difference between GNOME 2 and Cinnamon than it was between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3.

Just wanted to add that Budgie heavily relies on upstream Gnome as well and improves several aspects of the UI (e.g. my beloved desktop icons are back there).

[lem79]

Still using Unity today (in 18.04). Keeping an eye on these developments though, maybe I can switch by 20.10.. just so hard to beat Unity though. It's so fast and accessible, even feels lightweight these days.

[Guest]

I'm on that list. Unity is still wonderful, performant and well integrated.

People have massive double standards. Canonical was heavily criticised for creating Unity instead of improving GNOME 3, as if they had any sort of obligation to do so. Other distros have created their own DEs in time (Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon) and never got any of that flak.

It's sad, that Canonical failed to make own desktop and profit from it heavily. Less funds less FOSS contributions. Linux users should rather support such companies, instead of the envy they express on these forums. As, it just makes Linux on desktop weaker, and people give money to Microsoft and development of windows.

[treba]

Thats not "premature optimization", its fixing a lack of design (what to do when and where). GTK4 will finally have a scenegraph, so there is hope that one day Gnome will not need a 3Ghz Quadcore to not be slower than my 50Mhz Amiga 1200 when drawing the UI.
...

1. the shell does not use GTK
2. the recent MRs from Daniel were quite small and simple in nature. IMO they show a rather good design (as it allows these optimizations) and at the same time a lack of systemic testing and measuring. So indeed nice to see him filling that gap to a certain degree.

[Volta]

wayland can't be deemed ready if it can't play videos on 4k60.

X can't be deemed ready if it can't handle different refresh rates.