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Unfortunately, in my experience, GTK+ is slower than ever, especially with the modern GNOME themes (Clearlooks et al.). It's been only getting slower and slower since 2002 (the move to Cairo was the biggest disaster for performance, but the recent GTK+ themes have really exploited the slowness potential). It is now - in 2008 - so slow that I can see the individual widgets (spin buttons etc.) being slowly drawn to the dialogs, one by one. I can even easily make screenshots of it. Plus, of course, the Metacity window manager is so unbeliavably superslow it's ridiculous (it can consume the whole CPU just by moving the mouse cursor over the close/maximize buttons, it can only manage to change its title about twice a second, and generally the decoration always appears on the screen with a noticeable delay after the window contents).

Sadly, the GUI performance is a disaster.

You my friend have a graphic card which has no RENDER support. This has nothing to do with GNOME-it has simply to do with the quality of the driver support for your graphics card. For all users of graphic cards even with only minimal RENDER support GNOME via its user of Cairo(which is a RENDER-based drawing API) runs (ie. draws, renders, paints etc.) far, far faster than ever before.

Now it is possible that you are just using a graphics driver which is horribly outdated-but in all likelihood you simply have a graphic card which cannot be adequately accelerated with EXA(the new RENDER-based acceleration driver architecture which is currently replacing the old-school XAA drivers). I use GNOME 2.20 on 4 different machines using 3 different graphics cards and slowness of GNOME/GTK+/CAIRO is something I have yet to encounter- 1) nvidia 6600GT 2) Intel 815 3( Radeon Express 200m. Of these 3 cards both Intel and Radeon (fglrx) have very weak RENDER support-yet I do not experience this tremendous slowness of GNOME/GTK+.

Now stop wasting your breath making pointless accusations about GNOME/GTK+. Inform yourself about the version of the driver you are using and see if there are not newer drivers available. Check out EXA status page at http://www.x.org/wiki/ExaStatus to see what kind of EXA work has been done for your card. If it turns out that your card cannot be accelerated by EXA, and your graphics is not built into the motherboard of a laptop or desktop with no expansions slots, simply fork out 30-40 Euro for a newer graphic card and your concerns will be history.

Look, bud. I have, overall, about 90 users on Gnome. I have console users running with the crappy graphics cards that come in servers. And I have lot's and lot's of XDMCP users running remote X. And I have even more running sessions over the WANs using NX. I have my laptop, my umpc, my desktop, and a few of my users have standalone desktop boxes.

Another poster has guessed that your driver does not support render. I will be more blunt and say that your post is full of it. I have never observed the behaviors you describe (with such apparent glee) in the years in which I have had many users using Gnome in diverse rendering environments.

I *have* observed that the redrawing of Mozilla apps is very noticeable slow. But complaints about that should be directed at Mozilla Corp. (Epiphany, which uses gecko but is a Gnome app, redraws very snappily.)

Sounds like you're using some unaccelerated driver like fbdev, or something is really wrong with your xserver.

I run Gnome 2.20 on a PIII 500 with a crappy ATI rage 128 graphic card and I have none of the problems you describe.