Pixmap Themes too slow (was gnomepad+)

["Poletti, Don" <don poletti comverse-in com>]

I completely agree with Mike, The solution "if its too slow don't
use it" is a terrible response. This is a classic problem in engineering
the engineer knows how a system is designed and understands the inherent
difficulties so is sympathatic to the poor performance. In other words he
only looking at how it works when the end user generally doesn't care.

History is full of failed companies that accepted this mentality in their
products they last until another company blows them out of the water by
solving something they wrote of as "well that's how it is get over it"

I'm sure there are many places the pixmap themes could be speed up. 

someone wrote
> > Pixmap themes are slow because the computer has to 
> coninually do real-time
> > transformations to the pixmaps. For example, as the 
> progress bar goes
> > up, the "progress-bar" pixmap is stretched to reflect this. 
> Hence, themes
> > that consist of A LOT of pixmaps get really slow down your machine.
>

Why continual? why stretch? a Progress bar has three parts the start where
the 3d highligting is different the middle and the end. When a progress
bar is first drawn the engine should know the dimension it could make
the start and end "caps" and make a single pixmap for full middle section
and only copy as much as needed. This would have a problem that the border
between the caps and the middle of the progress bar might not line up but
that worth the speed increase or maybe that just something the theme
designer
has to live with.

At a MINIMUM there should be a warning when a pixmap theme is selected that
says "on some systems pixmap themes can slow your system by over 50%". This
is very important as someelse mentioned I was one of the people who just
about
abandonded gnome because it seemed bloated and slow. And before you write me
off as a idoit or newbie understand my background. I have 10 years
programming
experience, graduated in the top 20% (not great but no slouch) blah blah BUT
I'm
old married and have three kids under 3. I simple don't have time to poke
around
looking for improvements. AND i never dreamed that one setting would more
than
double my speed so I just about switched to KDE. I'm sure I'm not alone.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike [mailto:mnugent@goamerica.net]
> Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 5:32 PM
> To: Loban Amaan Rahman
> Subject: Re: gnomepad is too slow (thread of Milestones document)
> 
> 
> Loban Amaan Rahman wrote:
> > 
> > > The pix map theme does slow everything down but the way 
> the gtk-textedit
> > > widget turns into molasses has to be fixed. IMHO the marble theme
> > > is simply unusable due to this bug the overall slowdown.
> > >
> > > Is there any way to speed up the pixmap themes? Is there something
> > > inherent in X11 or gtk that makes them slow?
> > 
> > Pixmap themes are slow because the computer has to 
> coninually do real-time
> > transformations to the pixmaps. For example, as the 
> progress bar goes
> > up, the "progress-bar" pixmap is stretched to reflect this. 
> Hence, themes
> > that consist of A LOT of pixmaps get really slow down your machine.
> 
> Is there any way to load them in as pixmaps and then 
> transform them to a
> differnt kind of data once loaded?  I would imagine that a lot of new
> users will choose one of the "pretty" themes and find GNOME horribly
> slow.  While we all know it's the theme's fault, they don't.  
> They just
> see GNOME as slow and bulky.  Maybe a small program that would change
> the format of the theme once it's on the system?  It seems this is a
> real problem, because all the solutions that I've seen boil 
> down to: use
> a different theme, get over it.
> 
> --
> Mike Nugent
> mike@illuminatus.org
> 
> 
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