GNOME 40's Shell Theme Code Is Rather Expensive But Optimization Pursued

[andyprough]

In particular, Daniel noted that he noticed with GNOME 40 that up to half of the render time is being consumed by the GNOME Shell's theme code. He is now investigating possibly rewriting the slow parts of the theme code as a shader in order to cut down that render time.

Gnome Devs - "Please don't rewrite that Daniel - the slowness is a feature, not a bug"

[discordian]

Wouldn't be simpler just to switch to other distro or desktop environment?

both xorg and wayland are cumbersome in their own ways, I use the latter as I have 2 monitors with different resolution. Still missing some rather trivial things like additional mousebuttons / configurable mousewheel speed, Copy-paste has more moods than a dumped teenager, video acceleration is still messy (particularly browsers), easy screen casting unattainable. AFAIK KDE/Qt & Wayland still is meh (Gnome beeing best there), and DEs like enlightenment seem to need alot of work.

This is not a "distro-thingy"

[bple2137]

both xorg and wayland are cumbersome in their own ways, I use the latter as I have 2 monitors with different resolution. Still missing some rather trivial things like additional mousebuttons / configurable mousewheel speed, Copy-paste has more moods than a dumped teenager, video acceleration is still messy (particularly browsers), easy screen casting unattainable. AFAIK KDE/Qt & Wayland still is meh (Gnome beeing best there), and DEs like enlightenment seem to need alot of work.

This is not a "distro-thingy"

Using desktop Linux with high res screen equals dealing with a lot of compromises. I learned that by purchasing one. X11 didn't even allow me to set up 2160p@60Hz and manually setting modelines or forcing it using XRandr just caused it to glitch very badly. It works very well right away with any Wayland session, but then there are bugs in KDE or lack of SSD on Gnome or Xwayland scaling issue on KDE/Sway/everything besides Gnome I think, or other quirks here and there. No matter how much I'd criticize GNOME devs for their design choices or lack of features in the shell, for now it is the only option for me if I don't want to use Windows.

[mos87]

Apples to oranges comparison.

yes, mainly bc Linux (or Thunderbird for that matter) actually sane and usable software at least re core functionality.

subj is defective by design and even that is buggy )) so essentially they keep fixing (for like 13 years now) their insane toy so that this wretched implement can finally stand and not fall over. I say better use legs for standing rather than fix standing on your head...

[mppix]

Can someone explain what the famous gnome slowness is all about?

The only Gnome slowness that I noted was the app grid in 3.36 that was largely fixed in 3.38. Sure, Gnome X11 is starting to see regressions that may never be fixed (why bother?).

Fyi, I'm running Debian Bullseye (Gnome 3.38) and Fedora 34 (Gnome 40) in default settings (Wayland, 4K 60fps) on multiple machines.

[mirmirmir]

Can someone explain what the famous gnome slowness is all about?

nah, people just want to be angry about something. it doesn't matter really. it's just your everyday internet...

[kpedersen]

In particular, Daniel noted that he noticed with GNOME 40 that up to half of the render time is being consumed by the GNOME Shell's theme code. He is now investigating possibly rewriting the slow parts of the theme code as a shader in order to cut down that render time.

So that solves the issue (maybe) for those with accellerated GPUs. I am sure he will also overconsume shader features requiring the very latest GLSL revision (version 460) or Vulkan.

However mobile's, VM and tablets rarely have accellerated GPU access due to missing drivers. Is mobile platforms not one of the main reasons Gnome 3 is so... awkward in terms of usability? Surely due to the focus, they want to keep them fast and usable. This will be very difficult with LLVMpipe.

[drake23]

My personal experience: Ubuntu/gnome were only usable on both my x200s as well as my Dell E4310 once I disabled vsync in .drirc.

Now I must admit that I might like Gnome Still, plasma takes almost half of the memory shell takes, so they have some way to go. But great to see Daniel working on it!

[hax0r]

Compiz was always smoother and a better optimized compositor. Also Unity was a better DE than gnomeshell.

[Vistaus]

A new generation of (lazy?) developers that jumped on hip web technologies have infected lots of products and companies. A messenger that used 40 MB memory was considered bloated a few years ago, now we got messengers that use gigabytes of memory with basically the same or even less functionality thanks to hip new web technologies.

I mean JavaScript in the desktop? What an amazing idea... the benefits are outweighed by all the performance issues and image damage it caused to Gnome.

I agree with your points, but it's not exactly a new generation. Palm's webOS already used JS and CSS years ago on their smartphone/tablet OS and on desktop, SymphonyOS, a now-dead Linux distro, already did it way, way before webOS, let alone on GNOME.