The Gnome Project released version 2.12 yesterday. We had a quick look at it by using the latest Gnome Live CD (1.12-pre) and Foresight 0.9.0 (2.12 final) and here are our thoughts over 2.12 and Gnome's status in general.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-06-29
XRenderAccel requires very little support. Both major vendors drivers should work fine with it. Compositing requires a bit more..
It, like every program ever written, requires fairly modern hardware. It feels fine with nv and a duron 1GHz, and the same on a 700 celeron with trident card.
"Telling people to use hardware acceleration is not an excuse for what they're seeing."
Would you rather have highly flexible and powerful applications which look good or ugly ones with a weak API that run blazingly fast?
If you've found performance problems in gnome or gtk, please feel free to use your time to fix them and send in patches. Otherwise, complain about serious problems not "I can just barely see the app draw a few things."
RE[4]: Gnome is overrated...
Member since:2005-07-06
XRenderAccel is NOT supported by the ATI closed drivers and cards from the R300 series and up have no hardware acceleration from the open source drivers. NVidia is the only major card maker that has a decent set of drivers for Linux.
Relying in Render acceleration to get decent speed is a big mistake from the GNOME developers because only NVidia cards will have it.
Member since:2005-07-06
XRenderAccel requires very little support. Both major vendors drivers should work fine with it.
What about those people with graphics cards not by the two major vendors (which is just about everyone)?
Would you rather have highly flexible and powerful applications which look good or ugly ones with a weak API that run blazingly fast?
That depends which way round your putting that, because both sides of the coin there are wrong. I'd rather have efficient applications work on the widest variety of hardware possible so people could actually use an open source desktop. I think you're missing the goal here.
Member since:
Member since:
2005-07-06
Gnome feels much faster with video hardware that supports acceleration of the Render extension
Wonderful. So Gnome needs hardware acceleration to get acceptable performance? Hardware accelerated XRender requires supported drivers (of which there are a selection of one) and it is notoriously buggy to the point where it isn't an option.
As was pointed out in another thread, the Glitz/OpenGL back-end for GTK/Cairo is not turned on for a reason. That reason is because to get any benefit out of it you really do need a solid, reliable hardware accelerated OpenGL implementation. Since the only manufacturer producing good enough drivers is nVidia, and they are closed source (and not always 100%), relying on one company's drivers simply to get your GUI up and running is simply not acceptable. You know, people promote desktop Linux as being able to run on older hardware......
Telling people to use hardware acceleration is not an excuse for what they're seeing.
it also is noticably faster when using a compositing manager, of course this results in more instability of X.
Well that's not really an option, is it?