Re: Milestones document

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

"Poletti, Don" wrote:
> 
> > 1.  switched to netscape 3.04 (from 4.x)
> 
> I'll probably try again with Mozilla

I wouldn't.  Mozilla is even slower than Netscape 4.x, probably because
it hasn't been tuned yet and because it still has a lot of debugging
code in it.  I'm sure it'll be faster when it gets released -- Netscape
betas and alphas have always been slower than release versions.
 
> > 2.  switch from E, first to blackbox and now sawmill

I'm using icewm right now, and it really rocks.  The main thing I like
is that it behaves like a Windows user expects, as far as window focus
and integration with Gnome's desktop window.  E likes to fsck with these
a lot.  Plus, E still isn't conceptually stable -- it doesn't know what
it wants to be when it grows up yet.  (Just look at all the behavior
differences between E15 and E16: they're totally different window
managers.)  

E with the Blue Steel theme is painfully beautiful, but it's equally
painfully slow and unusable.  I speak as one running it on a dual
Celeron-400 with 192 MB of RAM and a 4MB Matrox Millennium.  One large
background image for all desktops.  Complex themes just make E way too
slow for my tastes.

> > 3.  use a sensible gtk theme  (ThinIce is a good one)

Or just use the default Gtk theme.
 
> I guess I don't understand how the gtk themes and the E themes interact.
> Should
> one of them be disabled?

Window manager and Gtk themes don't really interact, they're
complementary.

Window manager themes in general control the title bar and the borders
around the windows.  E themes also control the appearance of E's own
widget set, which you see in its desktop-click menus, the icon box, the
pager, and its Help system.  A similar example is Window Maker, whose
WINGs library controls the appearance of the WPrefs configuration
applet.

Gtk themes control the insides of what you see in Gnome and other Gtk
apps: the buttons, the notebook tabs, etc.  The easiest way to see the
difference is to change to something garish, like the Cheese Gtk theme,
and see what changes in an app like Gnumeric and what doesn't.
 
> I have a pretty basic video card Trident 9630 (I think that's the number) It
> has some basic acceleration. I'm using the matching driver so I assume I'm
> getting the same acceleration in gnome as windoze.

Not necessarily.  Acceleration isn't an on/off phenomenon.  It's up to
the driver to use the card's functionality in the best possible way. 
The Windows driver was almost certainly written by Trident themselves,
or at least a contractor Trident hired for the purpose.  The XFree86
driver was probably written by some hackerly type who had one of their
cards, and may or may not have had some decent documentation for the
card.  It may be a fast driver, or may simply be "functional".  

One way to find out is to switch to a window manager like icewm and a
theme like "nice" (very much like Win9x's UI).  Then work with the
system, and see if Linux behaves as quickly as Win9x would in the same
situation.  If it doesn't, the driver may be weak -- it may be that not
enough people have that card to justify someone making a fast driver.
 
> 1) Clicking on the main gnome menu. First time there is a 2-3 second delay,
> This
> would be completely unacceptable if it happened everytime. I assume there
> the graphics
> are not pre-loaded. On subsequence clicks the menus are just a tad slow but
> there
> a slight delay between clicking and having the menu appear. In windoes it is
> so quick
> as to appear instantanieous.

This is normal.  It's not because the icons aren't preloaded, though
this is a contributing factor, I guess.  The main reason for the delay
is that the Foot menu goes out and checks to see if all the apps in the
menu are still out there.

This is a good thing.  With Win9x, if an app unexpectedly disappears,
its Start menu item just stops working; with Gnome's Foot menu, the menu
item disappears, too.  But even cooler, if the app subsequently comes
back, the menu item will reappear automatically.

This is used a lot by Linux distributors: they put items in the Foot
menu for all the apps in the distribution.  That way, the RPMs don't
have to supply their own GNOME menu items: they're already there, just
waiting for the application to appear.

The delay gets shorter each time because Linux has a really good disk
cache: it remembers that GNOME is interested in a particular set of
applications, so it keeps info about them in memory, if it can.  GNOME
isn't getting faster, Linux is just learning what GNOME needs from the
disk, so it can provide it quickly the next time GNOME asks for it.

> 2)I launched gnomepad+ with nothing else running it could not keep up with
> my typing its was 5-10 characters behind. I'm pretty sure I was not memory
> limited
> in this case.

That's pretty rotten behavior.  Try gEdit 0.6.0 or better -- it seems to
be under more rapid development.  (Stay away from 0.5.4 -- _way_ buggy.)

If it's still slow, then maybe your video card driver really is
horrible.  You might be able to borrow a better video card to test this:
there are a lot of used Matrox Millenniums laying about out there: this
is still one of the best 2D cards ever made, and XFree86 just loves it. 
I remember seeing them at auction for dirt cheap prices: $9-15,
typically.

The newer AGP Millennium II should be even faster, but not nearly as
available on the cheap.
-- 
= Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m