The GNOME development community has announced the official release of version 2.22 after six months of development. GNOME is an open-source desktop environment that supplies a complete user interface and an assortment of programs for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. GNOME 2.22 includes some important new architectural features and a handful of significant new programs. Among the most important enhancements in GNOME 2.22 are the GVFS virtual file system framework, which brings improved network transparency to GNOME desktop applications, and the PolicyKit framework, which provides improved support for secure privilege elevation.
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Member since:2005-07-06
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Now it is possible that you are just using a graphics driver which is horribly outdated-but in all likelihood you simply have a graphic card which cannot be adequately accelerated with EXA(the new RENDER-based acceleration driver architecture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.
Member since:2005-07-24
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.)
Member since:2005-11-12
Member since:2006-01-09
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.
While certainly not as bad as the experience that the parent poster describes, I have used GNOME on a Celeron 800 machine and a P4 1.5 Ghz both with 256 MB of RAM and an old Nvidia Riva TNT2 with 32 Mb of VRAM and I can tell you that it is really slow, feels a lot slower than either KDE or XFCE and yes... Sometimes one can indeed see the GTK+ widgets being drawn one at a time! And it doesn't matter if I used the Nvidia driver or the OSS nv one, the result was all the same.
In order to see its slowness in action, one needs to be using a sub-1Ghz machine as it is a lot harder to spot on faster machines (There are some profiling tests out there that show that accurately, though). Actually, that was one of the main reasons that drove me and kept me into KDE in the first place: I didn't see a reason to dump a perfectly good machine and shell out more money buying a brand new one when I could use a full featured DE comfortably on the current one, the other being the excessive dumbing down of the UI.
I don't think that GNOME should receive all the blame though as I have tried running XFCE as well and although snappier than GNOME as far as desktop responsiveness is concerned, the overall tearing when drawing UI widgets, moving windows around or just scrolling a text field can be perceived as well. And as another poster has already pointed out, Firefox (Gecko) has its share of the blame for UI performance problems, too.
With GTK+ being notoriously slow compared to most modern GUI toolkits and the ongoing efforts to address this problem, I wonder how can most of you guys deny this fact with such a straight face? (That's not aimed at you specifically, nxsty, it is more of a rhetoric question.)
Edited 2008-03-14 19:26 UTC
Member since:
2005-07-24
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.