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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I'm less convinced about gnome3. I've given it a number of goes, it shows promise, but is not there yet.

1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram and a massive graphics card, yet draging windows about has lag, pressing the meta key has lag. Its just not fast like mate or lxde.

2) shortcuts are hard. I have a number of shortcuts for my most often used things, and they are always clickable, no matter what. Gnome 3's favorites are _almost_ the same, but its much harder to create custom entries (if its not in the applications list you're out of luck)

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>1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram and a massive graphics card, yet draging windows about has lag, pressing the meta key has lag. Its just not fast like mate or lxde.

I am going to say this is probably only partly GNOME 3's fault. I have only lukewarm feelings about GNOME 3 but was blown away when I ran a distro on a very old Intel NUC only to see GNOME 3 running buttery smooth.

My guess for why is due to the high quality of the open source Intel graphics accelerator drivers on Linux. NVIDIA and AMD do not offer this at all, and at best performance can be tricky depending on what extensions and features your driver supports (and how well your card is supported if using open source drivers.)

Basically, I don't think GNOME 3 is bloated or slow. I think it uses relatively reasonable CPU, but compositing in Linux is complicated due to second-class graphics driver support, and that causes a lot of the lagginess/glitchiness/general wonkiness that you get with the desktop experience. (edit: An example is that I've had issues with resizing Windows that I have found to be NVIDIA-specific.)

(Of course, you can get around this by not using compositing at all, but I think the case for compositing is more than solid at this juncture.)

AMD and Nvidia both have better drivers than Intel, although admittedly Nvidia only offers proprietary drivers.

There is a open source NV driver which is usually the default that gets installed and it really really sucks a lot.

Its the first thing I banish on any image I create.

In my experience, the Intel drivers are always the most stable and the closest to their Windows performance. Although I haven't tried the new AMDGPU yet.

Gnome IS slow. Have you used unity 7? It has more animations and effects but still performs way better than gnome3. Gnome3 isn't bloated, it's just written with js. Plain and simple.

It's known that driver support is bad. But I think the main problem with gnome is that it uses js. Its runs a whole damn browser (firefox). It's js that owes to the numerous memory leaks that end up hogging extreme amounts of memory.

To build on this: even KDE tends to feel snappier than GNOME3. That's even if I'm going crazy with transparency and wobbly windows and 3D-cube-virtual-desktop-switchers and desktop widgets and all that.

Transparency, wobbly windows, 3D-cube-virtual-desktop-switcher and desktop widgets shouldn't make any impact on any computer with hardware made since like 2007. Windows Vista did it in 2006, and it's 2018 now. We have phones with better hardware than we had at the time.

Gnome 3 isn't "written with JS." I am aware that a large amount of gnome shell is written in JS and I have my opinions about that, but they have their reasons. Either way, the bulk of important code (Gtk, Mutter, etc.) is written in C.

Also, I don't think it's unlikely you found different desktops that perform better. I still find KDE on proprietary NVIDIA to be lackluster. Does it show it's possible to do better compositing on some setups? Yes. I am guessing GNOME relies on the existence of certain GL extensions to composite efficiently. Still: if it can perform well on super low end systems and poorly on high end ones, I doubt it has to do with JS.

I was not necessarily talking about performance when mentioning JS. It was the memory leak. Gnome performs "fine?" at bootup, but starts becoming sluggish as you use it because their JS interpreter doesn't automatically have GC. This kind of behaviour is fine for websites since nobody really uses it for an extended period. But for a desktop (which I for once, use for quite long stretches) is unacceptable. I've had cases where I had to forcefully reboot the machine because gnome froze.

Even if you ignore the memory leak (and say that it's being fixed) I would argue that the overall latency of the desktop is just not there. I have used xfce, gnome3, unity7, kde, mate and budgie (daily driver) on the same machine, with the same Intel iGPU Mesa driver; gnome3 is the most sluggish. The time it takes for stuff to happen on the screen from when I press a button is quite high for my taste.

P.S. I usually disable animations.

The design of the desktop is definitely unique and admittedly refreshing to see (except the hamburger menus). However, the sluggishness just makes it impossible for me to use.

Oh, and Gnome3 is absolutely "written with JS"

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/graphs/master/cha...

> bulk of important code (Gtk, Mutter, etc.) is written in C.

Exactly why budgie desktop is fast. Uses Mutter as WM, and the gnome applications (like Nautilus, control centre).

For instance, gnome-shell starts up at around 150MB of memory usage, climbs upto around 1GB, eventually halting.

OTOH, budgie-wm stays at a cool 25-30 MB usage.

More on how the budgie thing works : https://budgie-desktop.org/2017/01/25/kicking-off-budgie-11/

> NVIDIA and AMD do not offer this at all, and at best performance can be tricky depending on what extensions and features your driver supports

Desktop environments usually rely on the most basic features.

Games or Unity desktop somehow manage to perform well with their animations with the same drivers.

I'm using the closed nVidia drivers because everything else is an act of madness. (why else would you buy a powerful graphics card if you're not going to use the drivers!?)

As a comparison, using kivy (https://kivy.org/) I'm getting constant 60 fps at 4k (I have vsync on and full compositing pipeline to avoid tearing)

Compositing in gnome2 was never a problem (once it was stable, back in late 2009) I don't see why its should be a problem with gnome.

Now I'm willing to admin that compared to a web app, its snappy. But thats still not fast enough.

I use the nvidia card for games, but intel for the desktop. It's much better.

Could you please elaborate a bit on your setup? I don't even know how to check which card is doing the rendering, let alone how to switch it.

> My guess for why is due to the high quality of the open source Intel graphics accelerator drivers on Linux. NVIDIA and AMD do not offer this at all

Serious question: Is your opinion of AMD based on the old radeon driver, the old Catalyst driver, or the new amdgpu driver? Those are three entirely separate and vastly different experiences. I'm using amdgpu at home and have not experienced any performance issues with it at all.

I've been using amdgpu for a year or so (though I just recently stopped, due to computer changes) and it's better yeah. I had a bit of stability issues but it might've been the card.

>I am going to say this is probably only partly GNOME 3's fault. I have only lukewarm feelings about GNOME 3 but was blown away when I ran a distro on a very old Intel NUC only to see GNOME 3 running buttery smooth.

Not true. It is 100% gnome's fault. I've used gnome 3( fedora) and I have played a ton of games on the same intel laptop and I have noticed gnome lagging a lot more than any other environment I have ever used. There is a reason for that: Everything is in one thread, including plugins and the js engine and runs on the cpu( no kidding).

https://anholt.github.io/twivc4/2018/05/30/twiv/

I believe that’s something that is being seriously considered, see https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GnomeShell/GnomeS...

The slowness was very apparent for me too. I used to keep restarting the shell (Alt F2, then r) to get it back to normal speeds(this doesn't close the running applications).

In Wayland, they removed this shortcut. I've since switched to KDE.

You can blame js for that. It's known as the famous gnome memory leak.

Modern KDE also uses JS.

So I guess Qt's implementation is of better quality.

Qt projects tend to use js as the js was originally intended: small one-liners (in this case, to glue some QML together).

> In Wayland, they removed this shortcut.

I'm usually not one to come to Gnome's defence, but it's very likely they did not really have any choice there. In Wayland, the compositor is the parent process of the entire session, so you cannot restart it willy-nilly. That's a design choice made by the Wayland protocol, not by the Gnome devs.

The real problem was that the shell got slower over time. If that was fixed, the choice of Wayland vs. X wouldn't bother me.

Gnome is slow because it uses js. I don't understand how anyone would agree that using js on a desktop is a good idea. Goddamn, designers...

lxde for the win! Seriously, I run it on a 12 year old laptop, and newer laptops and htpc's. It just can't be beat, in my opinion. The simplicity and customization is its power. I enjoy it more than xfce or mate. Though to be fair I have no tried mate on a non-ubuntu flavor.

I agree with that :) Though after a while I personnally traded simplicity* for more customization and performance and switched to openbox and now i3.

Edit: * Well no, "simplicity" does not exactly mean what I first thought it did. I guess I mostly traded ease of configuration / usage. Openbox and i3 are more difficult to approach but they don't lack on simplicity at all.

The one laptop I have running a Linux Desktop runs lxde, and it is pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's very customizable. Maybe I haven't spent enough time with it, but how do I add custom menu entries, for instance? How can I add additional menus to the panel? I miss Widowmaker/GNUStep, which still exists of course but no distro on earth uses it by default and Linux Desktops are enough of a pain to build from the ground up that people keep making distros with minor tweaks just so they don't have to do it again.

GNUStep could’ve been a contender. In an alternate universe, Gnome & KDE never fractured the desktop Linux space, and GNUStep became a first class alternative to macOS, eventually surpassing it.

This website shows how input latency has become worse over the years [1]. On the bottom there are more references, such as a comparison between terminals and editors (not that you asked for that, but still).

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

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