Re: new packages in gnomehide

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Christopher Keller <ckeller beamreachnetworks com> writes: 
> Without sounding critical, or like an idiot hopefully, i'm guessing part
> of the percieved slowness lies with gnome. I hung out for a few days on
> the gnome-devel IRC channel, bought HP's book, did a little research,
> etc. Seems like 1.2 is inherently slow at things, redrawing windows
> after a resize is my personal pet peeve (I think this is handled by
> GDK??). Anyway, the gist I caught from the developers was that it's a
> known issue and already been fixed and when we all migrate to Gnome 2.0,
> we're in for a major speed improvement.
> 
> HP is the resident expert, so if I misunderstood, please enlighten me. 

What I'm saying is that 1.2 _isn't_ slow at redrawing windows after a
resize. It just _flickers_. Flicker can't be cured by making things
faster; it's simply a matter of whether you put intermediate stages of
the rendering process onscreen. No matter how fast you do those
intermediate stages, people can still see flicker.

With GTK 2, some things are faster (e.g. drawing images), and some
things are slower (e.g. drawing text), but the net effect is that it
_looks_ faster and more solid, because it doesn't flicker.

Similarly with Nautilus, there are lots of cosmetic improvements that
have been made that most people interpret subjectively as "it's
faster," but really it isn't, it's just smoother. (Well, there have
also been some genuine speedups, but most of those were in 1.0.5, not
1.0.6.)

I don't understand the psychology of perception that causes this, but
it's definitely empirically true that making the UI more solid (less
flickery or "jumpy") makes people think the UI is faster. Internet
Explorer uses this to great effect, for example.

I guess you could argue that if it seems faster or slower, then it
effectively _is_ faster or slower from a user standpoint - I wouldn't
disagree with that claim. ;-)

Havoc