Re: using Gnome-Shell with 90% of all applications is absolute garbage.

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 3:15 AM, jordan <triplesquarednine gmail com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

i usually do not like to post negative comments, but in this case i
think it is about time, and it is warranted.

I have been a long time gnome-user (around 7years). I have always
enjoyed gnome's interface and flexibility, and have used it as my
primary desktop, with absolute loyalty. I may try out other desktop
environments, but that's as far as it goes. I prefer Gnome :) Also to
note here;  I use Linux for both work and at home, so both
professionally and for pleasure, as my primary desktop ( i also
dual-boot with MacOSX, as well at home).

Aside from some more Sys-admin / web-dev stuff at one of my Jobs, i
mainly use linux for 2 types of applications, aside from the obvious
stuff like Web, email, etc.
these types of applications go as follows;

1. Graphic Design/animation/video processing

the applications i tend to use;

a. Autodesk Maya - for those of you not familar, it is the
professional animation suite used as the industry standard. think
Pixar, Dreamworks, etc.
b. Cinepaint - fork of Gimp, geared at Photography and film. Cinepaint
supports a number of features and formats that gimp cannot.
c. Mypaint - digital painting.
d. Cinelerra-monty - a fork of cinelerra, a video editing suite. But
monty supports 1080p and some other handy new features too
e. Processing - an interactive programming environment geared at
designers and digital artists.

(you get the idea)

2. Pro-audio / recording

a. Ardour2/3 - multi-track editor
b. Renoise - music composition, tracker interface
c. Fst/wine-rt - to support Windows VST instruments
d. LinuxSampler - sampler
e. Jack-audio-connection kit

(this 2nd llist could go on forever).

Obviously, from the applications and usages - you can probably imagine
i have some "stiff requirements" both of how the kernel and linux's
backend is configured,
and in very much the same fashion - how my desktop is managed. these 2
types of applications, will accept no less. not if you plan on getting
any real work done on a stable system...I'm going to try to outline a
few real problems with gnome-shell, that i don't see going away any
time soon, if ever. Which is a big deal to anyone who actually uses
Linux in a Professional way, and has significant money invested...

1.  Mutter absolutely ruins any decent graphical performance on either
system that i have been testing on. Even firefox4 has a severe
decrease in FPS in any sort of benchmarking. I usually get above 60
FPS, gnome-shell less than 30 FPS.... Now before you blame that on the
fact that i use  compositing in mutter or suggest that other
compositors would cause the same issue - Compiz++ (0.9.4) ~ has little
to no impact on performance. - Not on FireFox, Maya, Cinelerra or any
other application. mutter seems to be by far the WORST compositor for
linux, hands-down, even Cairo's is better.

By "cairo's", do you mean http://cairo-compmgr.tuxfamily.org/ ?

Ssome simple hardware information would help: if you are using a proprietary driver like nvidia's, performance is slow, as was compiz was at first. nvidia eventually fixed their driver for compiz, and now it's blazing fast. Similarly, I've heard that the latest beta version of nvidia's proprietary driver supports gnome-shell much better.

If we can get a bug with your software/hardware setup, and some hard numbers with  the included performance tool, that would be even better! See http://blog.fishsoup.net/2010/05/26/measuring-gnome-shell-performance/ for some details.

as a side note, linux gamers have also been reporting very poor
graphical performance in Gnome-Shell too. none of this is a good
thing, if not for professional use and not for gaming (to major
players on any desktop, on any platform) What exactly is GnomeShell
Designed for then?!?!  Is the plan here for gnome-shell only
compatible with very basic desktop applications? where even Web
browsers will take a severe performance hit???

2. Realtime audio applications - Gnome-Shell does NOT play nice with
Jackd on either of my systems.  In gnome2 - ZERO xruns, running
stable. the only exception would be the odd Wine VSTi, that causes
them - which is expected, usually on startup... in Gnome-Shell,  xruns
are frequent... and generally is a very buggy crappy experience.
Gnome3 also depends on Pulseaudio - bad move!  ~  PA while all good
and dandy, it often gets in the way of Jackd and many proaudio users
prefer a system to be "pulseaudio free", not only that but PA these
dayz doesn't actually work with some audio interfaces supported in the
linux kernel, as is the case with the ICE chipsets - you used to be
able to hack it....   Requiring a user to have PA is a dumb idea, and
should not be required, at all.

The big thing is that we shouldn't really write the same piece of code four or five times to handle alternative audio backends, so we chose PulseAudio, which was already a major component of every major gnome desktop, including the volume applet and control panel, so it seemed to be a sane choice for a dependency.

JACK is quite complicated to set up, so I doubt JACK would ever be supported.

... and if PulseAudio has some problems with chipset support, file a bug!

3. Managing Windows/applications - I do like some of Gnome-Shell's new
style and way of doing things... to some degree. but, Gnome3/Shell
touts itself as being a better interface for touch interfaces and
tablets - i am actually finding this to NOT be the case. Managing
applications and navigation is often slower than gnome2, and as a side
note, navigating through gnome-shell actually causes some xruns on my
system. Back not too long ago, the old Compiz, may have done the same
thing. But now compiz+ does not, nor does Cairo's compositing window
manager... 

this leads me to believe there is something seriously wrong in how
mutter is implemented. not good.

This is another performance complaint?
 

it has been said in the gnome3 FAQ - that gnome2 will be supported by
distro's for years to come. maybe this is true in some distributions,
like Ubuntu LTS or Fedora.
In other Distributions this will not be the case. So many gnome-users
are now being faced with having to switch entirely <--- This wouldn't
be the case if gnome-developers had plans of maintaining and putting
energy into the Gnome3 "fallback" mode, but this doesn't seem to be
case.

Why isn't it important to Gnome to also keep a stable 2d
environment??? (no-compositing) - even Ubuntu plans to maintain a 2d
version of Unity.

The biggest resource related to that I can find is the evas-based version of their Netbook Desktop Environment, which is a different beast entirely.
 

It really seems to me, the designers/developers of Gnome3/Gnome-Shell
never really considered how some people actually use their
gnome-desktop. Especially in the case of people using "higher-end"
applications with Linux, rather than just "general desktop usage"....

**** i'd like to hear some other people's experiences, using gnome3
for more "serious applications" and the pro-s and con's as such.
     im not trying to start a flame war, im curious.  ****

I just feel that i have valid concerns about the future of gnome (on
my computers, anyway). i obviously realize gnome3 is still young, and
slightly buggy, but at this point - it has been pushed out the door &
officially released - so i would have expected a slightly more stable,
decent environment - that doesn't totally make almost every
application either A: useless or B: have serious performance
regressions.... :( 

We set a bunch of goals, and we were tight on time and needed to make a release. I think we did an excellent job managing the time and limitations we had, and hopefully it only gets better. gnome 3.0 is only the beginning, and hopefully every release should improve as much as gnome 3.0 did on 2.32!
 

...it's really sad stuff, im just glad it's only in a test environment :)

(and if it continues this way, i am glad some WM's still give their
users choices)

jordan
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