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

[mppix]

To be honest, that was pretty much exactly what I was hinting at. Especially if Gnome 3 wants to at least pretend it is a great experience on mobile platforms (as a justification for trashing and regressing the desktop experience).

Good luck finding any modern DE that does not leverage GL (and hopefully VK soon) in one way or another.
You can run such DEs even on systems without GPU using software implementations but why bother?

[discordian]

That's nothing new. IIRC, file-roller has had a bug where drag-and-drop could hang it with an exclusive pointer grab (requiring Ctrl+Alt+F2 and a killall file-roller) since at least Lubuntu 14.04 when I noticed it. I can't remember whether it was fixed by 16.04, but they don't seem to test their DnD very well.

Buggy Applications are nothing noteworthy, but that file-roller version hangs the entire desktop, nothing works, no single keypress (some gnome-shell javascript seems to run amok). something a buggy app should just never be able to do.

[Mez']

Unity ran like shit on devices where even a old gnome shell ran acceptable.

More like the other way around.
When coming back from 6 years on Unity, Gnome Shell performance was the 1st noticeable downgrade. After the Unity ditching, it was all a big compromise to try and make use of the primitive Gnome 3.
Gnome 3 is probably the worst DE I've ever used. Whether you used it with the mouse, the keyboard or a combination of both, it was the perfect antonym to user-friendliness, pragmatism or workflow efficiency. Fortunately, it died, and having no unique specificity, it won't be remembered much in history.
Gnome 40 is much better in my opinion, at least if you steer it with 3/4-fingers actions on a touchpad. It's still absolute crap with keyboard, mouse or both.

[Alexmitter]

More like the other way around.
When coming back from 6 years on Unity, Gnome Shell performance was the 1st noticeable downgrade. After the Unity ditching, it was all a big compromise to try and make use of the primitive Gnome 3.
Gnome 3 is probably the worst DE I've ever used. Whether you used it with the mouse, the keyboard or a combination of both, it was the perfect antonym to user-friendliness, pragmatism or workflow efficiency. Fortunately, it died, and having no unique specificity, it won't be remembered much in history.
Gnome 40 is much better in my opinion, at least if you steer it with 3/4-fingers actions on a touchpad. It's still absolute crap with keyboard, mouse or both.

I have a bay trail system here, Ubuntu 17.04 with Unity and the famous 17.10 with Gnome. The system is low end for 2015 standards so there is not much to expect.
Gnome runs bad, its noticeably slow but action still happen when requested, just slowly. Unity on the other hand is so slow that you have to wait well over 10 seconds for the search to start open, then watch it slowly phasing into existence. And the same is true for every system I ever had Unity run on, it was always slow.

I know about the effect, people always remember the good things, and its the same with Unity. People fail to remember how extremely bad it was.

[hsci]

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.

With some sarcasm:

It is not only developers which are jumping on the next hype train but also. It are companies which try to save money on developers. We had a pretty good decade regarding performance but especially memory requirements are rising now through JavaScript, new more efficient JavaScript-Engines (which encourage using even more JavaScript*) and especially Electron (Flash for the Desktop). Every Electron based application is consuming memory like it is freely available and it get worse through the computer industry - soldered RAM. And not, there is not fix or switch in Electron. The issue is - Electron.

Why companies prefer Electron? It is like Flash, just worse. And there is no Steve Jobs which punish this companies for wasting battery runtime. I don't like Apple but Jobs killed Flash because it wasn't efficient. Electron is cheap for them - you get portability and can pay less to developers, because web developers seem to somewhat cheaper than native developers. The UI sucks, it's fat and you get a lot of glitches - but the customer will pay the hardware. And then it is the customer who has to plug in the laptop earlier to the next socket.

* I encourage you to open some random online shop, something about cloths. Now either your system monitor or the included monitor of the webbrowser (Firefox abouterformance -> look at the energy column) and see what happens. You will get mad. They use our CPU, RAM and Battery for JavaScript, Videos and Ads. Especially when you have some tabs open. Now visit some plain HTML/CSS website without JavaScript - or turn JavaScript off and open "amazon.com". You notice something? It is the same website - just fast.

PS: GNOME-Shell is actually fine opportunity to switch usage over to C, C++ or Rust. The memory issues around garbage collection would have never existed (in that horrible way) and they wouldn't loss performance with marshaling. We have here and interpreted language, garbage collection a fast JS-Engine and suffer painfully from huge memory leaks - fascinating?

I'm not against JS. Why I should? It is a language and a usable tool - but probably even more misused than in 2001.

[Vistaus]

I don't disagree that running a full blown Chromium instance just for a simple chat program is overkill and wasteful. But you have to look at it from the other side as well. Developers aren't given much of a choice when it comes to multi-platform development. Deployment is hard, especially on Linux. Electron seem to eliminate a lot of the burden you get with something like C/C++. Maybe you had a library like Qt in mind as an alternative, cross-platform and fast. That's true, but it's also very tedious to deploy on Linux and even MacOS. No, you cannot rely on system versions of Qt because they may be older or newer than what you compiled your binaries with, and even if you program runs, the version that is in the user's machine may contain a bug that you didn't anticipate, causing unexpected regressions/crashes. You have to ship your own Qt-library with your app, and you have to ship all libraries that Qt itself is dependent on that you cannot reliably expect to be on your users' target systems. That may include trivial things like gstreamer1.0 and its plugins. This may of course cause you licensing issues if you're not careful. You also have to compile on an older or as new of a system as your users' target system, or else glibc is gonna scream! And don't get me started with MacOS.

Qt also has an inferior styling system to HTML5/CSS3, the Qt developers even planned to deprecate their StyleSheet-system which is the only thing close to CSS, because they realized that it's not powerful enough and causes problems for some developers. Also, your code ends up being an unmaintainable mess. Yes, you can paint stuff yourself, and QPainter is insanely powerful and fast (albeit not GPU accelerated, so forget fancy animations), but that's way more difficult to deal with than HTML5/CSS3. Yes, you can use QPalette to choose from a limited set of identifiable and configurable colors/gradients/images, but their number is limited, and there is no way for you to do things like rounding corners of buttons, for that you'll need QPainter or StyleSheets.



So please, understand that GUI app developers don't have it easy, especially on Linux. Choices are limited, even in 2021. It's not about being lazy, it's about not having to deal with 10x the development effort for a problem that, let's be real, has "solved itself". It's a sad state of affairs, and the only way to solve it is to offer stable, sustainable and serious frameworks for cross-platform devs that are based on fast languages. If all we have is the aforementioned (and GTK which is not even close feature-wise), can you seriously blame devs for using Electron?

The issue I have with Qt apps that ship their own libraries is that they don't scale well. Font size is so small, I can hardly read it. And mind you, I'm on 1920x1080, i.e. not HiDPI. It's probably worse on HiDPI screens. That's the only reason I wish app developers stop doing that 'cause font sizing and rendering looks absolutely great on Qt apps that use the system libraries.

[Vistaus]

There are two different products named Compiz. It's the 0.8 version and the 0.9-based version. 0.9 is a reimplementation in C++. It took a while to get there, but in my opinion, it did.

True, but the most used version was 0.8 so I based my point on that version (though 0.9 was also rough on the edges, but better than 0.8).

Unity _is_ good. Why the past tense?

Because Unity isn't being developed anymore. Not that that makes it a bad thing or anything, I just don't use it anymore for that reason. But Lomiri looks promising I already love it on Ubuntu Touch, which is a blessing as a mobile OS IMHO and experience, so if they can make it work on the desktop, I'll switch from Deepin to Lomiri.

[board]

The issue I have with Qt apps that ship their own libraries is that they don't scale well. Font size is so small, I can hardly read it. And mind you, I'm on 1920x1080, i.e. not HiDPI. It's probably worse on HiDPI screens. That's the only reason I wish app developers stop doing that 'cause font sizing and rendering looks absolutely great on Qt apps that use the system libraries.

I'm not sure what has caused this issue, this sure sounds like a HiDPI problem, but on a FullHD screen? It could be bugs in these apps themselves. But yeah, it does happen that Qt is inconsistent with rendering as well.

HiDPI in Qt is actually pretty good these days, not pixel-perfect last time I checked, but very close.

[ermo]

(...)
Gnome 3 is probably the worst DE I've ever used. Whether you used it with the mouse, the keyboard or a combination of both, it was the perfect antonym to user-friendliness, pragmatism or workflow efficiency. Fortunately, it died, and having no unique specificity, it won't be remembered much in history.
Gnome 40 is much better in my opinion, at least if you steer it with 3/4-fingers actions on a touchpad. It's still absolute crap with keyboard, mouse or both.

(emphasis mine)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I was of the impression that GNOME 40 is really 3.40 (that is, GNOME 3.38 was followed by GNOME 3.40, but due to various development process tweaks, the GNOME developers decided to just drop the "3.") and should thus be viewed as the continuation of the GNOME 3.x series?

In that light, where did you get the idea that GNOME 3 "died"?

In support of my argument, consider this summary:

Enter the GNOME Foundation’s Emmanuele Bassi who, in a forum post to unveil the new versioning, explains the reasoning behind the leap. And the short answer is to simplify the ‘unwieldy’ numbering.
(...)
Whether the label reads GNOME 3.40 or GNOME 40, it doesn’t strictly matter. Underneath, it’s still the same hugely popular, user-focused desktop environment.

(source)

[Mez']

(emphasis mine)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I was of the impression that GNOME 40 is really 3.40 (that is, GNOME 3.38 was followed by GNOME 3.40, but due to various development process tweaks, the GNOME developers decided to just drop the "3.") and should thus be viewed as the continuation of the GNOME 3.x series?

In that light, where did you get the idea that GNOME 3 "died"?

In support of my argument, consider this summary:

I'm sorry but 40 is a totally different thing: vertical to horizontal, starting in the overview, all extensions needing a rewrite, wayland touchpad gestures, GTK4 coming in parallel, etc... The paradigm of Gnome 3 has partly died. Gnome 40 is as good as a v4. They didn't number it 4 due to a possible confusion with GTK. But it is in spirit. And I'll consider it that way.

Also, I really like omgubuntu, but your quote is just Joey's opinion, not an official way. And "user-focused" probably got everyone laughing.