GNOME Dynamic Triple Buffering Can 2x The Desktop Performance For Intel Graphics, Raspberry Pi

[brent]

The GNOME bashing is a bit dumb. The performance issues are mostly apparent on older iGPUs combined with high-res (4K etc.) displays. The compositor actually hits the fillrate limits of the iGPU and if the GPU then fails to adjust its power state properly according to the load, that's when you see slowdowns. It's not really a GNOME specific issue.

Edit: by the way... these older Gen9 iGPUs also have performance issues with 4K displays on Windows 10 compositor. The hardware just isn't really up to the task, there are limits on what you can do with software optimizations, after all.

[fulalas]

Vermilion, thanks for your reply. I see what you mean, but GNOME hasn't improved performance since the quotes/tests I mentioned -- you can check Dedoimedo recent article on this matter: he keeps the same main critics.

I tested it myself but I didn't want to use my results because it would be weak for the article. One power test that I conducted (using a power meter) proved that one of the factors that make GNOME more power hungry is the fact that it requires more time to finish a given job, so because the machine is up for more time it consumes more power. This is vanilla GNOME 41 running 100% in RAM, no extensions and after I removed all the garbage that comes as default in most major distros. The results are a bit worse using Ubuntu/Manjaro/PopOS default settings.

I would argue that GNOME is getting slower over the years, just like most software, including DEs that I have sympathy. The whole concept behind GNOME is exactly the same since version 3. Reading the changelog and the conversations on their Git page can confirm what I'm saying.

GNOME's runner app is the only one I know among all DEs that is modal and has no autocomplete. Why? How is this better? On their website it says nothing about being a debug tool. Check yourself: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/CheatSheet and here https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-h...rtcuts.html.en

This 'Other Locations' thing is so non-intuitive (why it look like a folder list if it's not? why it look like a folder list even when nautilus is set to icon view? why is it hiding something in the first place?). It also introduces more clicks to accomplish the same job. How is this better?

[You-]

Vermilion, thanks for your reply. I see what you mean, but GNOME hasn't improved performance since the quotes/tests I mentioned -- you can check Dedoimedo recent article on this matter: he keeps the same main critics.

i am not going to read the article, but both 3.38 and 41 (AFAIK backported to some 40.x minor too) had fixes of race conditions that were massively noticeable.

I don't like this triple buffering solution either, but it seems that Plasma developers also reached the same conclusion. Still feels like working around buggy drivers to me.

fulalas - you are the first person who I have seen argue that gnome has been getting slower. It might be true, but I have not seen anyone else suggest that for the past few years. On my systems, I havent benchmarked it, but it feels fluid and fast and occasional stutters I would experience say 5 years ago are no longer present.

btw, wiki.gnome.org is ancient. those screenshots seem to be from gnome-shell 3.0. For me Alt+F2 was a gnome 2 thing. I cant remember having used it in the last half decade. With gnome 3 it has always been windows key and start typing.

I wouldn't suggest that gnome's version of Alt+F2 is better than alternatives. I would say it is mostly forgotten and expected to work in the minority of scenarios that someone would want that as opposed to gnome-shell search. Why doesnt it have autocomplete? probably because no one was bothered enough to add it or they had other solutions.

[Mario Junior]

Linux will never be a relevant thing on desktops because we can't have a fucking decent desktop environment. This is the BASIC of computer usability.

[Vermilion]

I tested it myself but I didn't want to use my results because it would be weak for the article.

I believe the article got weaker the moment you mixed facts and opinions.

I would argue that GNOME is getting slower over the years, just like most software, including DEs that I have sympathy.

You need to back this up with recent and accurate benchmarks, otherwise all the work being done for Toolkit, Shell and Compositor optimizations would beg to differ.

GNOME's runner app is the only one I know among all DEs that is modal and has no autocomplete. Why?

Because that's not GNOME's app runner? GNOME's runner is accessible with the Super key, and integrated in the Overview. It provides autocomplete, search suggestions and more.

On their website it says nothing about being a debug tool. Check yourself: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/CheatSheet

The answer is right in that page. The modal is used to run commands like lg, r, rt, debugexit, check_cloexec_fds which are meant for debugging and can't be run from a terminal. You could also run bash commands there but can't run apps by names (like "Files" or "Disks") hence it's not the app runner. The app runner is in the Overview.

[fulalas]

I believe the article got weaker the moment you mixed facts and opinions.

Do you mind pointing some examples? I tried to backup everything I could with facts, either trustworthy external references, screenshots or reproducible actions.

You need to back this up with recent and accurate benchmarks, otherwise all the work being done for Toolkit, Shell and Compositor optimizations would beg to differ.

I can't backup it (that's why I didn't say that in the article). It's just my feeling based on the normal path of modern software. I know here and there some performance issues can be addressed, you're right. But at the same time developers keep introducing more and more things and the overall performance gets worse -- Xfce 4.12 vs 4.16 is a good example, and in this case I conducted some tests so it's not just a feeling.

Writing that article took me an unimaginable amount of time and tests, so unfortunately I can't do everything again using old GNOME versions simply because I don't have enough free time for that.

Because that's not GNOME's app runner? GNOME's runner is accessible with the Super key, and integrated in the Overview. It provides autocomplete, search suggestions and more.

I don't agree. Xfce, for instance, can have whisker menu, which has a search that works just like GNOME's Overview search, but it also has a simple app runner which has autocomplete and it's not modal. The same applies to LXQt and even KDE. I personally don't see the point in running this bloated Overview application just to run a program if I can do it using a simple runner. But, hey, this is just a small detail in a sea of bad things related to GNOME.

It's fine if you like GNOME and use it. I don't judge you, really. My main concern to be honest is that GNOME doesn't follow its own rules, and that's why I think it's a disaster -- I'm also trying to help them, including not just the article, but some bug reports. In the end I wish it could be good because I see many nice ideas there (e.g. it's elegant and consistent most of the time).

[Myownfriend]

Vermilion, I will be glad to fix any error you find in the article.

Thanks

Here's some corrections and comments.

Applications List deserves a special category of flaws and annoyances:

• How items are sorted is a mystery and there is no simple way to set it to be alphabetic
• It is not possible to open a new instance of a program from the Applications List if it is already running
• When adding an application to the Dash bookmark it is actually moving it out of the Applications List, and the remaining items do not shift left
• If you remove an application from the Dash bookmark it does not necessarily go back to its original position in the Applications List grid
• The only way to ungroup applications is moving out one by one
• When moving out an application from a group, the popup closes and, if there is not enough space on the current application page, the focus goes to the next page
• There is no way to select multiple applications

The applications list isn't sorted in any order. It's user-defined just like the groups. That's one of the things I like about it. Because it's grouped by page and by actual groups, I'm not even sure how useful sorting things in alphabetical order would be. If I'm looking for a specific application and I can't remember where I put it, I just type it in and launch from that.

You CAN open a new instance of a program from the Applications List by just right clicking it and selecting New Window. You can do the same from the Dash. If it's the active application then you just click the Application Menu on the top right in Panel and select New Window from there too.

When you pin something from the Applications List to the Dash, the other icons DO shift over and when you unpin it is DOES go back to it's original place.

You're correct that it might be nice to ungroup things easier but depending on the amount of things in the group it would potentially shift things over for pages. That's complicated.

You're correct that focus shifts to the next page for some reason when the first page doesn't have room. That seems like a bug though.

Yes, there's no way to select multiple applications and that would be nice for grouping things. I feel like a lot of the current behaviors for sorting things in the application list aren't really big issues because sorting your applications isn't a common task.

[fulalas]

The applications list isn't sorted in any order. It's user-defined just like the groups. That's one of the things I like about it. Because it's grouped by page and by actual groups, I'm not even sure how useful sorting things in alphabetical order would be. If I'm looking for a specific application and I can't remember where I put it, I just type it in and launch from that.

I understand your use case here, but it doesn't apply to all users, me included. You see, that's one of the things I don't like about GNOME: it tries to be different just for the sake of being different. All DEs sort applications alphabetically, but GNOME does not do that and it does not even allow the user to do that. It's even worse: having a fresh install every boot (because I use Porteus) I noticed that each boot the items are sorted differently! What's the sense behind this?

You CAN open a new instance of a program from the Applications List by just right clicking it and selecting New Window. You can do the same from the Dash. If it's the active application then you just click the Application Menu on the top right in Panel and select New Window from there too.

This is a screenshot of the Applications List not allowing me to open a new instance of the Archive Manager: https://www.mediafire.com/file/xfqjv...list-issue.png

But, yes, on the Dash it's possible -- well, sometimes, as I pointed in the article.

When you pin something from the Applications List to the Dash, the other icons DO shift over and when you unpin it is DOES go back to it's original place.

The items shift left, indeed! I'll fix that in the article, thanks! But they not always go back to their original position (e.g. you add 2 items to the Dash bookmark and then remove the first one; it won't back to its original position).

Thanks for your constructive message

[Myownfriend]

• Animations get clunky if GNOME does not like certain combinations of GPU and drivers, even if they are not older than 5 years [8]
• To navigate from one folder to another Files takes more time than all major desktop environment’s file manager
• After installing a small application it takes around 5 seconds until it can be found in the Applications List, while in other desktop environments this is instantaneous
• Terminal render performance is just average — slower than QTerminal and much slower than Alacritty
• Although GNOME has fewer features, its memory consumption is higher than Cinnamon, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce
• When a new image is added for the desktop background it gets duplicated in ~/.local/share/backgrounds.

That first point would be true about any GPU accelerated software. For example, the EGLStreams backend of Gnome was always buggier and less smooth than it's GBM backend. Which reminds me, were you running any of your tests on Wayland or were they X11? I'm hoping you were on X11 because you have an Nvidia card and you're on drivers that predate both GBM and DMA-buf support so you'd be using EGLStreams and XWayland applications would be running with no hardware acceleration at all. If you weren't on Wayland, then I'd recommend you update your drivers to 510.x and try it out because it's Gnome's native backend.

For what it's worth, a good chunk of Gnome's memory usage comes from Gnome Software and PackageKit running in the background and slowly starting to use more memory in the background. Both can be killed and it can free up a lot of memory. Then there's going to be some amount of memory used by things installed by the distro. For example, I run Fedora 35 and I've never used less than 1.3GB but if I launch Gnome OS in virtual machine, it uses about 750MB without swap memory at start up. Killing Gnome Software (packagekit isn't installed with Gnome OS) and XWayland (which will be auto-closed by default in Gnome 42), it uses around 700MB and System Monitor is using up 12MB of that.

[You-]

I understand your use case here, but it doesn't apply to all users, me included. You see, that's one of the things I don't like about GNOME: it tries to be different just for the sake of being different. All DEs sort applications alphabetically, but GNOME does not do that and it does not even allow the user to do that.

It does: https://extensions.gnome.org/extensi...ical-app-grid/