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

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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"

[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"

[ernstp]

Considering that Shell40 is noticeable faster/more fluent on all of my systems compared to 3.38, I wonder how this is possible.

Are you sure it's better than 3.38.4+ ? It got a lot of fixes after the .0 release.

[skeevy420]

Linux kernel this, MozCo Thunderbird that, neither of them had long-lasting performance regressions between major releases.

I hope you're aware enough that you posted that comment on the website of the person who has done numerous benchmarks and uncovered enough Linux kernel performance regressions that the Linux Foundation should contract out performance regression testing to him. Basically, that's only true on Linux because of Michael.

[M@GOid]

I had to uninstall file-roller and deal with archives the commandline way for several weeks. Reason being that opening any archive with file-roller will (almost always) send the gnome 3.38 desktop in a deathspin, flooding the log with javascript errors. The systems so bogged down I cant even switch to a VT.
Drag and dropping files sometimes kills all nautilus instances, sometimes the target (gnome-terminal for me).

I sometimes miss the slow versions (not that the new ones are fast, just less horrible slow) that only had nautilus crash when you searched in a directory that is in heavy use.

Maybe this year I'll buy some Apple PC/Laptop (hate the company, never bought anything from them), and be done with that crap.

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