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: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:2005-07-06
Nvidia Riva TNT2 does not support RENDER, either in nv or the NVIDIA propietary drivers. So with a Riva TNT2 you get basically 0 hardware acceleration on a GNOME desktop-sure you get pixmap blits and fills for free, but you have to remember what GTK+ and Cairo are providing: fully anti-alaised internationalized text(Pango) and porter-duff based high quality rendering(Cairo). If GTK+ and Cairo were only delivering what you got with straight Xlibs or FLTK/TCL-TK/Motif etc. you might have a point in saying they are slow. They are slow on hardware incapable of producing high quality modern graphics. The rendering tech used by GNOME is superior in terms of rendered graphics quality to either what that of MS XP/VISTA or MAC OS X. You don't judge the performace of a modern GUI tool kit based on the performance of a graphics card which hasn't been manufacutered in almost 10 years.
Member since:
2005-11-12
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.