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Comment by JamesMcMinn | Hacker News Reader

The author wants to remove JavaScript from their desktop and does this by disabling all extensions in the hope that it will also disable Gnomes JavaScript engine. What the author does not appear to understand is that extensions are written in JavaScript because Gnome shell is written in JavaScript.

Gnome works very well for my workflow, and I find much of the "bloat" to be quite useful in day to day usage, but can understand the desire to remove things like maps and Tracker if you don't use them. My single biggest issue with Gnome stems from the performance of Gnome-shell which lags and stutters its way through animations leading to a desktop which often feels like it's struggling even on powerful hardware.

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I don't think Gnome is bloated from a feature sense (they keep removing features in fact) its just horrifically bloated from an efficiency sense, it could be orders of magnitude faster than it currently is. It chugs and judders on a first gen i5!

This is not my experience at all. I am using it on my first gneration i3 media center PC and it runs reasonably well. I don't use it for any heavy lifting -I am just starting browsers, running media players and watching videos, but for me it works fine - so well that I don't have any need to check out more lightweight options.

It has more problems with the spotify app than with any of the things I am doing with Gnome (btw I am using Arch on it - so I am still using the latest version).

I suspect it is mostly RAM related, not CPU related. My laptop is an older i5 with Intel graphics and 4GB of RAM, and Gnome Shell (on Wayland) uses about 1GB more memory than Sway (a tiling Wayland compositor) does, which makes a big difference with the same applications. But when it's not under RAM pressure, Gnome is perfectly smooth.

Then you've surely hit the memory reclaim problem. I checked just now and my GNOME Shell started this morning is using 153 MB memory (resident).

There are some latency issues after moving to Wayland, though. Don't have a good link, but AFAIK it has something to do with Mutter or the Shell which were never specifically optimized for latency ending up being responsible for input handling.

It's not just Gnome Shell. I mean, I do hit the memory reclaim issue, but Gnome Shell is still not using that whole extra 1GB. The rest is evolution-data-server and so on.

I have a brand new i5 laptop with 12GB RAM and the stupid application list opening animation looks like it runs at 10FPS.

I see lots of comments like this. What I want to know is: if you have this kind of complaint about Gnome, why do you keep using it? There's a bunch of different desktop environments for Linux. KDE works pretty well, and if that doesn't suit you, I've been finding Xfce is quite speedy for me on my work machine.

This isn't like Windows where you're stuck with it if you need that OS for its applications.

I like KDE, but I like Ubuntu more. I've tried Kubuntu, but it's too unstable to be my daily desktop. Gnome is too limiting, but at least it is stable enough.

Because Gnome is in a league of its own in the UI tastefulness and general UX department.

I like that they are a little opinionated regarding how you use it, in practise that leaves you with a visually tidy and tight desktop environment.

KDE just does not look nice (in my opinion at least), the proportions are weird, menus are too cluttered, it feels like somebody has been throwing widgets at the wall to see what sticks.

Which KDE distros and versions are you referring to?

I liked 3 and I like 5 (the current). I never liked Kubuntu though.

Mandrake (later Mandriva) used to make a beautiful desktop and I also find Neon excellent.

Then again: I'm not really a designer and I'm partially colorblind like many other men for what I know others might find it ugly.

You can partially improve it by disabling all of the search integrations and just leave application lookup running. Its not perfect, but it fixes the 10 second wait time after you hammer a search term in.

I use XMonad but used to have lots of Gnome based services running in the background, in order to have sensible "modern" plug-and-play and easy configurability (e.g. printers, monitor layout, network, etc.) Sadly, as they move more and more things to the Shell, this is becoming a harder task. gnome-control-center which used to be very useful even in my custom setup, is now useless if you don't run a full gnome-session or gnome-shell. My setup has become a Frankenstein of pieces of, xmonad, taffybar, suckless, Xfce4 and Gnome.

But I don't blame them, since I understand that their goal is to provide a sensible and consistent user interface for general users and that I am a total exception :-)

Similarly I run StumpWM as my main WM. I just run a full gnome session on a separate x server and when I want to setup a printer or whatever I just switch to gnome with ctrl-alt-F2.

I don't know why this never occurred to me. Thanks for the idea. I've always exited i3 when I have the rare need for something from gnome I don't know how to do without the UI.

I don't think the author fails to understand that, They know that Gnome Shell is written in JavaScript and are not trying to eliminate JS from their desktop -- they are trying to _minimize_ the amount of JS running and thereby limit the scope of the memory leaks.

"... I’m not sure that disabling user extensions actually disables the Javascript engine completely, but it definitely minimizes it to the least possible scope."

Actually, it does seem the author is unaware of the extent of JS usage in Gnome Shell:

> User extensions are a mechanism that allow users to write GNOME extensions in Javascript, similar to how Chrome and Firefox extensions work. In my opinion this idea has dubious merit, and my personal feeling is the less Javascript in my life the better. I felt somewhat vindicated about this decision during recent coverage of a memory leak in GNOME Shell. The underlying issue was related to the Javascript garbage collector in GNOME Shell not collecting object references in a timely manner. I’m not sure that disabling user extensions actually disables the Javascript engine completely, but it definitely minimizes it to the least possible scope.

Wow. Gnome Shell is written in javascript? How much of it is javascript? I find this a really odd decision.

AFAIK the window manager/shell is javascript. You can bring up a JS console and inspect/move windows around, or extend the shell UI - sort of like you would create a browser extension.

I suspect they made that choice because... well.. javascript is everywhere and there are lots of developers that know it.

It's not so different from writing a Qt app in python. The C code does all the heavy lifting with JS doing the UI bits. That setup is way faster than the DOM because the JS is manipulating native widgets. While that's not as efficient as writing everything in C, it is much faster to write and bugfix and results in more stable and secure code.

I've no problem with javascript being available for desktop development. More power to javascript devs! What I find mind-boggling is that a mostly unstructured, dynamically typed and unsafe language is pushed as the MAIN language for desktop development.

Has the world gone bonkers?

Path of least resistance. JS is what you target if you want to maximize the amount of potential contributors.

Likely. I find it sad that we disregard lots of advances in programming languages that would help us construct faster and more reliable software just because it's not the path of least resistance :/

One or two years ago someone posted on HN a command line tool (let that sink in) for shredding hard disk data written in javascript. It required lots of dependencies to build (!), it was redundant because native tools for this task already exist (!!) and more importantly, it didn't work because the author didn't understand how modern hard disks work (!!!). To me this symbolizes everything that's wrong with javascript: using the wrong tool for a job which is already solved, and solving it wrong.

Most servers run on millions of lines of perl, python, or bash. The same things said about JS can be said there, but most of those things are at least as bad with the added problem that they probably run with sudo privileges. JS is at least as good as these languages while being much, much faster.

True dynamically typed code does type checks at runtime which means that performance may suffer, but you are guaranteed to never have critical type failures (the type errors will occur and throw before something actually unsafe happens). This is a huge step up from C which is weakly typed and even untyped via void pointers.

Dynamically typed code is still typed. JS is not an unsafe language from a type perspective and from a security perspective, it may actually have the safest language implementations ever created.

If we're leaving the dynamic scripting language zone, options are very few without becoming tightly bound to Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc. There are other great open alternatives (for example, SML would be faster with a great type system), but most of those have small communities (which can mean death to open-source projects).

What you say makes some sense.

However, do note I wouldn't advocate developing most desktop apps using bash or perl, and even python is doubtful. Yes, I know this can and has been done, but I don't consider it a good idea.

Re: dynamically typed code, that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go down now. It's the stuff of flamewars usually. Let it be said I consider dynamically typed languages ill-suited for large or complex apps, for a variety of reasons. Javascript is probably the worst of them all.

What I'm asking is this: javascript and its ecosystem are NOT the most suitable tools for developing desktop apps. Why is it then being pushed as the MAIN language for this? Not as an alternative, not as an option for web developers who don't know other languages, but as the MAIN language for everyone coding Gnome apps?

Budgie is a good, "lighter" replacement for Gnome if you want to keep using Gnome's software.

And he sets /org/gnome/shell/disable-user-extensions to false which means he enables extensions. I think these kind of options should be called something like /org/gnome/shell/ENable-user-extensions to avoid mistakes like this.

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