Ubuntu 19.10: It’s fast | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 19.10: It’s fast

arstechnica.com

290 pointsfeross181 comments

It's worth it to try KDE Plasma rather than GNOME. It's lighter and faster than GNOME by a fair margin, and it's far more customizable. GNOME is great for your OS X convert who isn't used to anything being customizable, but KDE is an utter delight for everyone else.

Personally I prefer to stick with KDE neon for a full KDE experience. It's built on Ubuntu LTS but uses the latest KDE packages. I've found it to be a lot more stable than just using KDE on top of a Ubuntu release.

The major downside to KDE Neon for me is that, although it's Ubuntu-based, because it ships its own Qt, it breaks PPAs for Qt-based applications such as FreeCAD or QGIS.

I've tried KDE Neon, but ran into issues installing Nvidia drivers. The only Ubuntu flavor I've found that supports them really well is Pop_OS!.

I get it, I should be using FOSS drivers, but I do a lot of work involving neural networks and CUDA, so Nvidia's drivers are non-negotiable.

FWIW I've had good luck with Nvidia binary drivers on Mint, both the Cinnamon and Mate-based variants.

My main work machine runs i3 with KDE. I'd avoided kde in the early 2000s because it seemed clunky at the time. Then used Macs for a while before switching back to linux. KDE plasma is great.

I've gone back and forth between thinking of switching to KDE Plasma and sticking with gnome. Moving DEs comes with a significant time commitment and my old experiences with KDE were just too jarring.

Well you compare a heavy JavaScript based DE (Gnome) with a C++ one (KDE, with Qt). That's also unfair.

But if you try i3 or OoenBox, they are way faster

> But if you try i3 or OoenBox, they are way faster

But those are just window managers no? You can run them alongside KDE or Gnome.

Gnome 3 doesn't let you configure an alternative wm. KDE does but it's broken by default with minimal wm. For example it wants to start a full screen window that would normally be the desktop interface over everything.

It's questionable how much value is added by running a plasma session over simply running KDE apps and services.

Eventually, you won't really have a choice about whether to run a desktop session once Wayland is here. I don't expect my favorite window mamager to be updated with Wayland support.

Which window manager is that? For i3, the Wayland equivalent (or at least 99% equivalent) is Sway (which I'm using right now over here). For Awesome, there's way-cooler.

WindowMaker

from the article:

> Canonical's write-up of the work done to improve GNOME is also interesting for the long list of what didn't work and how wrong some of the developers' initial assumptions were—especially regarding GNOME's use of JavaScript. > It turns out JavaScript had next to no effect on performance. So sorry JavaScript haters, but "assuming that JavaScript is slower than everything else written in C" is evidently a bad assumption

In 2011 gnome 3 was released with a memory leak due to a mismatch between compiled code and Javascript which saw memory allocated during animations that would be freed in no reasonable time frame. Eventually all memory in the system belongs to gnome shell.

As this is really hard to fix they fixed this by constantly running the gc in December 2018. This worked OK but didn't fix the issue for all until 2019.

Does making it broken for 8 years so usability comes 8 years late count as making it slow.

It should be noted that 3.34 has also seen some work on moving stuff from JS to C. Notably animations are now far less dependent on the JS part, with better performance as a result.

Be aware that QTs QML makes use of a Javascript variant too.

You know what they say, old habits, they die hard.

Unless something changed recently, it is weird to say that GNOME/KDE is heavier/lighter when they are both insane resource hogs. I use Xfce or MATE nowadays.

Plasma has made massive improvements especially around performance over the past couple of years. I switched from MATE myself and haven't looked back. I recommend giving it another look!

Both the KDE and GNOME stories have actually changed quite a bit the past few years.

I disagree. I started on Ubuntu 19.10 with GNOME but switched to sway because gnome-shell was always taking 3+% of CPU. It's hard to understand why something that should be doing nothing is one of the largest power draws on my laptop.

Plasma/KDE is mostly great, but a major thing that GNOME and Xfce still do better is GVFS and GVFS-FUSE. That means I can browse to smb://something or sftp://something, double click a file and it just works whatever the application is (e.g. play in VLC, edit in VS Code). This has never worked in KDE where only KDE apps can open remote files (and even that has bad performance).

GVFS/GIO is nice, but at least on LTS, it can be a bit rough (with i/o errors under load, at least during PhotoStructure imports). Also, somewhat frustratingly, the GIO system mounts network file systems with paths that include a colon character, which breaks standard PATH parsing.

KIO is also gaining that capability.

If this article is to be believed, then there are situations in which KDE is actually more light weight on system resources then XFCE.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...

Well, XFCE resource usage grew with GTK3, probably :(. But there's something off in their test methodology. They claim to measure idle RAM usage, and there's 2x difference between tests, on same distros..? (for comparison, my Arch XFCE install takes 480MiB after boot)

I'm appreciating the time-passing irony in suggesting MATE, given it is a fork of GNOME 2.x and that it had plenty of it's own share of "resource hog" complaints back in its day.

Emacs was called a resource hog, once.

What we get from older technologies is better tuning.

You can make an argument for something, without demeaning something else

I'm not demeaning GNOME at all, I'm contrasting against it. GNOME is a great product, but I didn't like that its recent incarnations seem determined to smooth out the user experience by removing user choice. I tried out KDE (having used it long ago) and was very pleasantly surprised to find it both faster and more tweakable than GNOME. I'd expected tweakable, but the performance was unexpected. Plasma is a far cry from the KDE of old.

The GNOME project seems to have made a conscious decision to go for the consumer market, which usually cares more about things "just working" than their being tweakable. That's a good thing - that market needs to be served - but it's not what I wanted. A big part of the reason I run Linux is for detailed control of my user experience, and KDE is the better product in that regard for my use case.

> OS X convert who isn't used to anything being customizable,

> KDE is an utter delight for everyone else

The way you frame it as OS X convert vs everyone else is kind of rude. I would say the hardcore Linux customizer is the minority, and everyone else prefers the easy to use out of the box UIs of OS X and Windows.

I'm a "hardcore Linux customizer" in many ways, but I'm also a happy Gnome user on my day-to-day development machine. I do love KDE but fiddling with it was distracting from my work.

To be fair, this probably says more about me than it does about either environment.

If I recall correctly, Gnome was touted as lightweighter than KDE back when KDE4 was released :-)

In...2008? That does sound right from my memory (given that Metacity didn't even have composting effects back then), but it was literally over a decade ago.

Gnome was lighterweight than KDE for a long time. It genuinely surprised me to find Plasma to be as agile as it is, but I was happy to be surprised!

It's been a long time coming, Plasma was a massive resource hog and pretty unstable for the longest time. It's brilliant now, though.

they swap places every five years or so

I'm that guy who inexplicably loves Unity.

I'm running 18.04 LTS and Gnome 3 is unusable due to lag/resource consumption on a i7-2600 system with an nVidia 710 GT whereas Unity runs butter smooth.

Unity doesn't get in the way of me interacting with my desktop applications and is fairly utilitarian compared to GNOME and KDE based desktops.

Is there any difference between installing KDE Plasma on Ubuntu v/s just using Kubuntu?

A bit more information about the work done around performances and what's still being worked on: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-perfor...

This is a _great_ read with extremely clear breakdowns of what are clearly complex bugs.

>Most improvements in 19.10 can be attributed to the latest release of GNOME 3.34, the default desktop for Ubuntu. However, GNOME 3.34 is faster largely because of work Canonical engineers put in

At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now. Secondly, Fedora 31 has had Gnome 3.34 for more than a month now. This article does seem like a disservice.

Fedora, despite being awesome, doesn’t have the name recognition or market penetration that Ubuntu does. Ubuntu shipping with 3.34 is realistically when the bulk of Linux desktop/laptop users will see it.

>Ubuntu shipping with 3.34 is realistically when the bulk of Linux desktop/laptop users will see it.

Fedora is up there. In 2019 Fedora may potentially have a larger "desktop" user base than Ubuntu. Often times people will lump in Ubuntu based distros as Ubuntu, inflating Ubuntu's popularity, but in this day and age Mint probably has more desktop users than Ubuntu.

Ubuntu's popularity is being reduced to AWS these days, but lets be fair here: Who uses Ubuntu as their primary desktop of choice when there is better distros for every user need? Right now, Ubuntu is the goto desktop OS for those who want to run two gpus on a laptop and that's about it.

> ...but in this day and age Mint probably has more desktop users than Ubuntu.

I find that claim very hard to believe. I'm an Ubuntu developer. I see both bug reports from users, and fixes being landed. It is rare to see a report from a Mint user, and even rarer to see any fix that is attributed to having come from the Mint community, whether that's landing in Ubuntu directly or via upstream.

Either the Mint community keeps fixes to themselves (I doubt it because it's very difficult to maintain a derivative distribution that way), or Mint users and developers aren't affected by or don't report/fix any bugs affecting them whose root cause is upstream (seems unlikely, given the firehose of reports and patches Ubuntu developers send upstream), or there are relatively far fewer Mint users than you think.

Disclosure: I'm also a Canonical employee. However this opinion is my own and I am not representing my employer in making this comment.

Could be that Mint users are generally less technical (I say this as a Mint user -- it is advertised as the user / noob friendly option) and thus less likely to report issues to the proper authorities.

I don't think so. Ubuntu paved the way for non-technical users, and unfortunately this is evident in the quality of a large number of bug reports that we receive.

Trying to stay objective, it's certainly not in dispute that Ubuntu is also "advertised as the user / noob friendly option" and continues to take this stance.

From this perspective, the difference between Debian user feedback and Ubuntu user feedback is night and day (I'm also a Debian developer). I don't think the difference between Ubuntu and Mint is anything nearly like that.

That's like saying I work at Microsoft and I haven't seen much bug reports sent to me about OSX, so I'm skeptical with the idea that people use Apple products.

Unfortunately we don't have anything more accurate: https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

I've reported a bug on github over at https://github.com/linuxmint I've reported bugs elsewhere too, but I just write what Ubuntu version I'm using within Mint, because that's more relevant. shrugs

I'm not sure people were hating on Gnome because of performance. Their overall design decision to pretend that v3 was somehow running on a tablet instead of a desktop is still pretty questionable.

It has paid off though as touchscreen devices have become a lot more common. The fact that one can now run a modern Linux desktop on an actual tablet is also pretty nifty.

Which tablet?

There are x86 tablets out there and also many people have done raspberry pi touch screen builds.

Arguably, the tablet revolution never came, but the large smartphone revolution did. Software like PureOS en PostmarketOS exists because KDE and GNOME and other software was made touch-friendlier.

I have a Surface, easily the most popular x86 tablet.

Running Linux on it had been a nightmare, I tried surface-linux and that just broke sleep.

To this day I cannot reliably get Wi-Fi to work out of sleep despite trying every fix in the book.

Sound breaks out of sleep.

Hi-DPI support is still a joke, which is a problem when most (all?) high end x86 tablets have hi resolution screens since they're meant to be used up close.

At one point I started to get logged out every 60 seconds if I tried to put the cover on it. Turns out hibernation was improperly configured, so instead of warning me, it'd log me out, try to hibernate, then try again 60 seconds later.

What problems are you having with HiDPI? Is it the lack of fractional scaling?

Well there is fractional scaling, it just looked like garbage and had tearing.

But also handling a mix of low and high DPI displays... and any solution that includes the command `xrandr` is wrong, either because of clarity issues, or tearing/performance issues, or graphical bugs in the DE, or a mix of all of the above

I don't get it, why can't we all just copy what OSX did. They got HiDPI so right with such a flexible solution, that I literally forgot that was still a thing until my latest endeavor with Linux

It sounds like you weren't using Wayland if you were playing with xrandr, and it handles mixed dpi screens without any issues

I tried both Wayland and X11.

I feel like I'm going crazy because every time I mention the words Linux and HiDPI I have this same conversation, and it's been happening for years.

The my takeaway is always, Linux users have ridiculously low standards for what works when it comes to UI.

The conversation usually goes something like:

"I don't know Wayland works for me with X setup"

"What about the blurriness with fractional scaling"

"Oh I'm used to it/It only happens with some programs <usually all programs using some incredibly ubiquitous UI toolkit>"

Or:

"What about when you move a window from one screen to another"

"Oh I don't do that/Oh it gets a little blurry/Oh just use X11 and <insert Xrandr hack to mess with the frame buffer>"

Or:

"What about the tearing"

"I got used to it/What tearing, I'm not gaming?"

Or:

"What resolution are your screens"

"2k small screen and 4k big screen , I can just run the same scaling on both"

I remember one time I had this conversation in person, and we failed at the, "move that window to the other monitor" step when it blew up the window to 200% size on the smaller screen.

"Why do you expect the window to automatically resize itself and change the font"

"Because the application is unusable when every UI element is twice as big as it should be?"

"But I want my application to be unusable [paraphrase], you just think it should resize because that's what OSX does, stop bringing your OSX mentality to it and it's fine"

I think that's when I should have stopped ever hoping for anything better and stop saying Linux and HiDPI in one sentence... but here we are...

> "What about the blurriness with fractional scaling"

I'm not experienced in this, but isn't fractional scaling inherently blurry?

I hate to bring my OSX mentality into this... but I have no idea

OSX just has a set of "zoom" levels that let me make everything smaller or bigger in a very "fractional scaling-like" way (intermediate levels are between 100% and 200%) , and it works perfectly.

And it's not like just the font changes, it scales every type of UI element perfectly implemented with every type of UI toolkit

I know part of it is rendering to a frame buffer that's larger than the physical screen's resolution and scaling that, it might just be oversampling enough to not lose visual information when scaled back down.

But that's the beauty of HiDPI in OSX, I have literally never spent a single brain cycle trying to learn how it works, because for me as a user it's easy (just hit the size looks right), and for me as a developer it's seamless (just add 2x assets).

GNOME on Wayland seems to handle moving windows between displays with different DPIs, it's not super graceful and seems to only apply the new DPI once >50% of the window is on the new display though.

I haven't used fractional scaling, but it's supposed to be behind a flag. But I suppose it could be blurry.

Has it, though?

Sure, you can now fat-finger a launcher icon and the comically oversized hide/close buttons, but basically all graphical applications (even the tiny handful of redesigned Gnome apps) are still primarily designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse.

You need to throw that model out the window if you want a program to really work well on a touch screen. But if you do that, running the program on a desktop will be infuriating.

> You need to throw that model out the window if you want a program to really work well on a touch screen.

I'm not sure that you do. The main issue really is having big-enough controls, and supporting things like scrolling via touch. The nice thing about Gtk3 is that it heavily nudges designers to make their applications touch friendly.

Hardly. Microsoft did the same thing (or even started this trend) with Windows 8 but finally recognized they were wrong and did a almost a complete 180 with Windows 10.

> At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now.

Meh, I won't. Gnome 3.34 might be faster, but you can't reasonably expect that to last across the future releases. Gnome developers have a week established tradition of fucking up their users.

I'll keep my simple life on Xfce.

>At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now.

Performance isn't only reason for that. Mainly bizarre GNOME3 design decisions: lack of taskbar, tablet-like interface, atrocious file picker dialog, etc. Also maintainer attitude to themes and extensions, here's one rant from 2012: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...

I tried out Ubuntu the other day and couldn't figure out how to make a text file from the GUI. I googled it and it looks like you have to create an empty file in the templates folder in order to get that option when you right click.

My assumption is that they went out of their way to remove the menu option for creating text files, because apparently that's not something normal people want to do.

Is there a good "best of FLOSS drama" feed I can subscribe to? :)

Are you seriously claiming that Gnome hasn't changed at all since 2012?

No, but most critique is still valid. Weird tablet-like UI, missing features. (like that absurd file chooser which lacks prefix-search in current directory)

Maybe if the devs stopped hating on end users, people would stop hating on GNOME.

There is an article [1] by an Ubuntu engineer that describes the performance boost.

For Ubuntu 20.04, there will be extra work for performance boost on high-end computers.

For Ubuntu 20.10 there will be extra work for performance boost for low-end computers.

1: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-perfor...

I'd like to see them quantify/qualify what they mean by low and high-end. I would have considered low-end to be a dual core i3-class CPU with no dedicated graphics but by the time 20.10 is out I'd be more inclined to say a quad core is low-end. Obviously a Threadripper is high-end today and will be even higher-end next year, with 64 cores perhaps.

Linux supports hardware for a much longer duration than windows and Mac OSX. I wouldn’t be surprised if low end is an Intel atom.

When Canonical says low-end hardware, I'm inclined to believe they mean actual cheap low-end hardware. Ubuntu has supported the raspberry pi for years now. A raspberry pi is much much lower end then even a bottom of the barrel i3 processor

I think you're being far too generous. Low end would be systems which just about meet the system requirements, regarding CPU, GPU and Memory.

Meanwhile, Gnome still can't manage to display a desktop wallpaper when running at 4k resolution and 200% scaling.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/1175

Kind of hard to get excited about perf improvements when relatively basic functionality manages to be broken for at least 7+ months and counting.

This is why I am on Mint. Turn off CPU vsync, turn on full-frame composition (which uses the vsync on the graphics card), and bam! silky smooth 60fps, with quick responses and no lag. I haven't tested it, but I imagine this new "fast" version of gnome will still feel slower and choppier than cinnamon when vsync is handled on the gpu. (I just wish it was the default setting.)

That and I'm not a fan of the side bar in Ubuntu. Most people agree, Mint's desktop UI and UX is just more pleasant.

Strange, I have this exact setup and my wallpaper displays just fine.

I don't normally try non-LTS, I decided to give 19.10 a go, and I noticed the performance boost. What was a real pleasant surprise was that my NVidia GPU drivers were automatically installed, something I've always had to do myself before.

Glad to hear it. 18.04's NVidia on Wayland situation is so broken it's ridiculous. It's a major headache for any kind of machine learning workstation.

NVIDIA on Wayland is still ridiculously broken and NVIDIA has zero desire to fix it. The "solution" is to continue using Xorg.

Unless you need CUDA, the solution is to use AMD.

That may be true but it's no excuse for Ubuntu's gdm + desktop setup refusing to work out of the box without a bunch of command line fiddling.

It's like they didn't QA it at all despite it being a very common setup on an LTS release.

If been having serious issues with my Nvidia card and 18.02 (driver is installed properly, but games either dont recognize the card name or misreport card details). Is there anything in 19.10 that might improve this? I've already updated my kernel so excluding that.

Currently running this on my XPS 13. Works beautifully and honestly battery life is insane. _Much_ better even than just 19.04. It's easily on par with my 2015 MBP. I'm getting almost a week out of a charge using it for a few hours a day running just Chrome, PyCharm, and Signal most of the time.

I think I am doing something seriously wrong then. My 2015 XPS 13 only lasts a couple of hours.

with laptops, it really pays to make sure your kernel as recent as possible

try to put powertop --auto-tune into /etc/rc.local (before 'exit 0'!)

4 years is long enough for lithium batteries to decline pretty noticeably.

Yup, my xps 15 battery of that same vintage had to be replaced at the beginning of the year (under warranty).

Sorry, the MBP was my old work computer. I don't have it anymore. I was referring to its battery performance at the time.

I think the big differentiator is power top actually. When I upgraded to 19.10, I was prompted to check the differences between the old/new versions of the power top config file. The new version had a few more comments and was clearly updated, so I used the new config file during the upgrade process and went through all the options to make sure they made sense for my laptop.

Are we the same person? I could have written the exact same post. And was going to. Agreed about battery life while running Chrome and Signal a few hours a day.

Whenever I see claims like this "Old Hardware" seems to invariably mean "5 years old" and "fast" means "not as perceptibly slow as the bloated crap, but noticeably not as fast as actually fast things".

I’d give it a try yourself. It’s really fast.

I've been running it for a while and it's great except it still takes a ridiculous amout of time the time to launch gnome calculator. Ever since they changed it to a 'snap' it's been awful.

Edit : It looks to be pretty easy to swap the snaps for regular debs: https://blobfolio.com/2019/10/psa-upgrading-to-ubuntu-eoan-m...

While Gnome 3.34 is great, there is still some basic (for me) functionality missing (talking about Wayland, because I can't stand screen tearing on Xorg):

- no option to set mouse scroll speed

- hidpi support

- no tray icons (and extensions doesn't work great...)

- notifications system

- gestures/trackpad

I'm planning to move to MacBook to see how it is, in case I need more power, I will just use my workstation/gaming PC (with Nvidia, right now I'm using AMD with the only reason being Wayland support, because hardware is much worse).

Based on my experience from using Ubuntu, it's perhaps more accurate to say that the Ubuntu 19.04 (and earlier) compositing window manager is slow enough to make new hardware feel old. It's extremely noticeable.

The blogpost they link to says as much:

> Gnome Shell 3.32 in Ubuntu 19.04 feels slower than Unity and other desktops. If you have a slow machine then it won’t run smoothly. Perhaps more surprisingly even if you have a fast machine then it still would not run completely smoothly.

(https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-perfor...)

Well, before 3.30 GNOME wasn't even remotely usable, so I would still call that progress. Make it work, then make it fast.

Wow, I've never had so much of the hard work myself, colleagues, and individual contributors have done misattributed to one company.

For those interested in what actually was improved, and some attribution for those involved, see https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2019/11/22/a-review-of-gno...

Come on, Christian. Daniel van Vugt at Canonical did a huge number of performance fixes on mutter and gnome-shell this release. Some of those I had to personally vouch for because your colleagues wouldn't land them otherwise.

3.34 wasn't a one-person show Jasper. This article reads like it was a one company thing.

Sure, there was a ton of great collaboration, but "mis-attributed" is wrong. Canonical's desktop team definitely lead the charge of compositor performance. Be nice; there's no reason to keep the Canonical/GNOME rift open anymore. They did absolutely fantastic work this release.

And thankfully we've been lucky enough for your important contributions as well.

Can you elaborate on that a little? I've always gotten the impression that gnome is actively hostile to new contributors and anyone who isn't part of the "inner circle", so I'd be interested in hearing more about what that actually looks like, from someone who isn't very anti-gnome.

As someone who went through the pipeline, GNOME is not actively hostile to new contributors, and is actually really friendly, as long as you agree with the overall design and direction of the desktop. In one of the cases, I'd say that what happened was that there were two competing methods for how to fix a performance issue, and some of the maintainers involved were not graphics experts, so I was able to guide the team to determine which version to land, which happened to be the version by Canonical.

Canonical's version: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/189

Endless's version: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/402

This is much more well-understood now that open-source is popular, but it wasn't understood very often back in the day, which is that maintainers have the power to say "no", and do so frequently. If you are a new contributor and you try to change the design, you won't have a great experience.

I mean sure, but a lot of open source software is driven by the idea that developers "scratch their own itch".

It's a bit of a pain that so many patchsets need to be maintained separately for common "scratch my own itch" type features in GTK, instead of the feature just getting buried in a gconf setting somewhere. There are an increasing number of little things in GTK that require you to do things the "gnome way" or maintain separate patch-sets. Any attempt to figure out how we can satisfy both parties gets disregarded pretty quickly.

Obvious examples include thumbnails in the file-picker or type-ahead instead of relying on gnome's tracker or slow file-search.

I guess there's some subtle difference between "hostility" and "refusal to co-operate with other stakeholders" that I'm not getting.

> It's a bit of a pain that so many patchsets need to be maintained separately for common "scratch my own itch" type features in GTK, instead of the feature just getting buried in a gconf setting somewhere.

In this case, the pain is in the right place. Mainline needs to be very careful about signing up to maintain new code, especially if it's used by almost no one.

Thumbnailing is one of those things that's difficult because it's a desktop service. Windows / OS X has one desktop, so there can be a tighter integration between the toolkit and the desktop. My recollection is that thumbnails in GTK+ work fine assuming you have the GNOME thumbnailer running, but lots of people use GTK+ outside of those environments, and it doesn't work there.

This is usually when someone says the word "standards" and expects everyone to go "oh, we haven't thought of that!", but standards take a lot of work, and if there are disagreements in the design and direction of the system, no standard is going to be made. My recollection is that thumbnailing was just one of those things.

Sorry, I think I misspoke. Thumbnails do generate properly and show up in GTK file picker, without needing any kind of hard dependency on gnome or any desktop services. That's not actually a hard problem, it was standardized way back.

The actual problem is this 15 year old bug: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233

This right here has collected most of the patches I'd consider to be important, and the maintenance requirements do not appear to be significant. Of course it is work that doesn't directly benefit the gnome DE.

https://github.com/krumelmonster/gtk3-mushrooms

But it's important to note that GTK is not gnome. It's really important to recognize that as gnome fights harder to become it's own platform, that other platforms do make use of GTK. The gnome-foundation being completely inflexible on the needs of other projects means that at the end of the day it is really hard for other people to collaborate on GTK.

Gnome can do whatever it wants, but the idea that GTK is only supposed to serve the gnome project does seem like a bit of a betrayal. That seems to be a pretty common thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK#Criticism

Speaking of whom, anyone knows what's up with Mr. van Vugt? He hasn't been active in GNOME's gitlab in the past month.

Canonical engineer on performance improvements on GNOME for Ubuntu 19.10: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-perfor...

Canonical fixed gnome

I tried upgrading a fresh installation of 19.04 to 19.10 and it permanently broke itself during the upgrade process. Twice. So it seems like there's some issue with the upgrade process at the moment.

A little off topic but mentioned in the article, does anyone know why macOS does feel slower than Windows and Linux on the same hardware? Does it have to do with the 2x scaling Apple is doing all the time?

I don't know what hardware you're using or what "slower" exactly means here, but OSX has always been silky smooth at 60fps for me, focusing on that nice feel, more than an instant responsiveness. To be fair, MacOS is still highly responsive, but it's polished, causing an intentional minor frame delay, which increases smoothness.

Windows, on the other hand, is responsive, but has incremental stutters from time to time. It happens in video playback, to the point when I'm out and about and at a mall a tv with a video is playing, I can tell if it is on Windows or Linux. It's more obvious in video games which has these microstutters all over the place, starting with DX9.

Linux has page tearing, and depending on the desktop can be highly responsive or not at all. Many linux desktops can be manually configured to turn on gpu acceleration on the desktop so the gpu handles the vsync and everything else making it butter smooth like OSX with more responsiveness, but you have a trade off at that point between how much responsiveness vs how much polish you want.

(When you drag your mouse across the screen, it skips pixels. When you're dragging a window, does the compositor follow the mouse flawlessly, skipping around, or does it smooth behind the mouse a frame or two making it look nicer?)

Maybe you're running a 4k60 external monitor out of a 2015 MBP. In that example, you'd be maxing out your GPU on the desktop, potentially causing a delay when dragging windows around that may or may not be noticeable. On this hardware setup, Linux and Windows are both lighter weight and will be more responsive. ie, ymmv depending on your setup.

I tested this with my iMac 5k with 32GB of memory and Radeon m295x (4gb of vram). The apps start slower than what I noramlly see on Windows but I don't have a lot of the same apps, so it's hard to compare. I agree that it has to do with responsiveness but I don't know, sometime I prefer the responsiveness. I do see stutter in Safari once in a while, it is not always 60fps for me.

The screen is set to default for display.

My previous 2012 rMBP was the same difference between Windows 10 (Bootcamp) and macOS.

iOS on my iPad Pro (first gen) is very responsive and smooth at the same time. I wish I could get the same experience on my Macs.

OS X/macOS have always been slower than Windows and Linux on the same exact hardware in my experience. I've been comparing them since the early 2000s and here are my observations: Programs are slower to start, dragging and resizing windows is slower and programs that need to display a large amount of text/data are less response e.g. when selecting text, scrolling, waiting for navigation, etc.

These problems are exacerbated by the poorly implemented / missing window management features of the Mac OS, the general lack of a good keyboard acceleration system and Apples penchant for hiding useful features beneath label-less icons or hidden/stateful gestures.

The upgrade from El Capitan to Sierra was a huge performance hit. My 2010 MBP went from wholly useable to being a quaint poky relic. CI test run elapsed time doubled in length after the "upgrade."

GNOME 3.34, which the article attributes most of the speed increase to, has been available on Fedora for a while already.

But I wouldn't think that running GNOME on "old hardware" is a good idea anyway. Except for very generous interpretations of "old".

Yeah, I’ve been running the latest Gnome on Arch for awhile and it’s really stellar performance upgrade. It’s worth noting that later releases of Gnome are now targeting less resource usage now that they’ve worked out most of the critical performance issues for high end hardware.

Same here. Been running it on Debian and it looks and works great. I'm relatively new to Linux (moved from macOS last year) so don't know much about the past, but I really don't get all the negative comments about Gnome the way it is today. It's a perfect way for a macOS user to get introduced to Linux too.

Most of the negativity is on ideological grounds - they don't like that it is "opinionated" and offers minimal customisation compared to KDE. And there's some backlash against the fact that a lot of the UI uses Javascript. (Though recent benchmarks have shown that it doesn't cause any kind of performance hit.)

Frankly, I don't think that Gnome is particularly un-customizable, it just does it in a different way, using extensions that you can install. I do occasionally try out new versions of KDE to see what I'm missing, and I'm always surprised how buggy/crashy it is.

I upgraded my Intel Compute Stick to 19.10 Lubuntu last month from 16.04LTS. It's running great and I didn't have to mess with any of Ian Morrison's wonderful tools he made for running Linux on the Intel Atom platforms. Not saving my resolution settings across reboots is a slight issue, but that is something I can fix. After reading the article maybe I should try Gnome again.

Does that mean you didn't need to use a boot drive with a 32 bit boot loader?

I've been having trouble getting any of my sticks (one an ASUS Vivostick, the other a no-name) to even boot a Linux installer off USB or CD, but that could be because I've been trying to get Ubuntu Server, which may be part of the problem. If the Ubuntu desktop path is better, maybe I'll try that.

Fedora supports 32-bit boot out of the box, even on actual 64-bit OS's. The Debian multiarch image does as well, but the 32bit-boot/64-bit OS arrangement fails if secure boot is on, so make sure to turn that off beforehand in the firmware UI.

AIUI, Ubuntu doesn't support this.

After seeing @undersuit's comment, I decided to try the Ubuntu Server 19.10 ISO and it booted fine off a USB drive.

Good to know that no tricks are required (such as these: http://www.linuxium.com.au/home). I had been banging my head against the wall trying to get older versions of Ubuntu Server installed on my stick PC.

Good to hear!

Am I the only one who doesn't notice a huge difference between 19.04 and 19.10? I wouldn't have noticed if these articles didn't explicitly mention the performance improvements to be honest.

Using Gnome3? If not, it doesn't sound like the fixed performance regressions would apply.

Reading between the lines I gather this release fixed a performance regression in a previous Gnome3 release. So it is not a clear performance boost in the absolute sense.

I suppose those of us on Ubuntu Mate, KDE, XFCE, etc can disregard that aspect of the article. Unless there are some perf improvements in the kernel or X as well?

The review doesn't touch my longest-running gripe with Ubuntu... does it still run tracker/nautilus/baloo in the background, sporadically choking on a developer's filesystem and hanging the entire UI? Because I'm really not impressed by a clean install being snappy.

Tracker does run in the background. I disabled some of the things it indexes. I don't experience any slowdowns.

Nautilus is there, it's the file manager. I installed Nemo because I want to keep using type ahead in the local folder. I still get Nautilus in the file dialogs and tracker in the full screen modal opened by the super key (is it the dash?)

Baloo, no idea what it is.

Overall 19.10 it's faster than 16.04 on the same laptop. It's 3 years of work and a clean install (dual booting for now, two different SSDs.)

Baloo appears to be the KDE equivalent of GNOME's tracker. Not sure why both would be running on the same system.

It wasn't implied that they were on the same system. The grandparent was either implying that they don't remember which is which, or that which one is running depends on which Ubuntu flavour (gnome or KDE) you're running.

Indeed, I've used multiple flavors over the years, and these have been culprits on various occasions. I'm not an expert on OS's so the uncertainty I conveyed was deliberate.

no, use xfce. Ubuntu is many systems and as a "Hacker" of course you make it your own - that is the reason for running Linux, you control every process.

I use i3wm these days. But no, I prefer good defaults so I can do things with my operating system, rather than waste hours cleaning it up.

I'm using Regolith, which is a Ubuntu distro with i3wm. Compared to the default GNOME 3 setup, I find it a lot easier to customize from Regolith and reach a productive state.

https://regolith-linux.org/

Yes, that is one of the most important reasons for me to use Linux on Notebooks and Workstations everywhere - so much time gained not baby sitting the OS every few weeks, that is still a great experience!

I had to downgrade. There is a regression and you can't run it off a USB stick anymore.

Or maybe (not so) current hardware is insanely fast, and windows really slow: Just to see if it could work I tried to install linux on a Chuwi Hi8 (windows/android atom based chiinesium tablet. Not enough space for windows now and really ancient android) Ubuntu was so slow, by the time I finally managed to begin copying files to the disk, the tablet ran out of battery. (And the thing eat more power than its charger can provide)

(as for the result of the experiment: it can work, but the amount of work needed was way beyond what I was ready to invest. And not exactly stable)

Imagine if that Unity experiment didn't suck up five years of time.

Imagine that they learned a few things working on Unity and they applied them to improve Gnome Shell.

The Raspberry Pi 4 info is out of date AFAICT. The initial release had non-working USB on my 4 GiB RPi4, but fixes came a few(?) weeks ago that apt update (over ssh) picked up. As best I can tell, it works flawlessly now. Mindbogglingly, I can comfortably do serious development work on $55 computer (albeit overclocking recommended).

At the other end of the spectrum, it's also running on my 5K iMac and that it just worked.

On the Dell XPS 15, the audio didn't work out of the box, but there's a common workaround for that.

Maybe it's time I give Ubuntu another shot. Unity was too bloated for my tastes and Gnome has always seemed kinda subpar. Lets see if the gnome changes can change my mind.

Does Ubuntu still have advertisements for Amazon search and whatever other crap they were pushing?

I don't see much difference between GNOME 3.4 and Unity tbh... I'll stay on MATE or Cinnamon.

Yah imho Mint is just a more pleasant experience.

You still need to set the gpu to handle vsync or you'll get page tearing though.

Unity2D was super fast. So sad that they didn't continue to develop it, and instead went for GNOME. If Ubuntu GNOME is now quick, good – it took a long while to get there. It's important for Linux and FOSS to have well known and widely used software. Without Ubuntu, we would probably have no Steam Linux client.

> So sad that they didn't continue to develop it

You can run MATE with the Mutiny desktop preset, if performance is an issue. It's essentially the same workflow as on the old Unity 2D, and it isn't even Ubuntu specific.

> Without Ubuntu, we would probably have no Steam Linux client.

SteamOS is actually based on Debian, and Steam is even in the Debian non-free repos.

The distribution of the proprietary Steam client you can install on GNU/Linux systems ships a 32-bit Ubuntu runtime, I believe based on 12.04.

> You can run MATE with the Mutiny desktop preset, if performance is an issue.

No. In comparison it is unstable in ways that make Gnome look like NASA software.

It often forgets it is Mutiny and no other of the presets.

Quality wise it is still way below Unity.

Ubuntu, like many Linux distros, is a system you can make your own, that is the reason why people who called themselves "Hackers" preferred to use Linux distributions.

It is very nice to have a good set of software offered in a central repository - that is how software is distributed in many Linux systems - but many Linux users tend to customize their systems to their own needs. This is very easy to accomplish with Linux, that is actually the point in using it.

You should try it and maybe you can experience that it is also a very self-enabling experience to get out of that consumer mindset and finally start to "own" you operating system. It will also make you a better developer.

From what I know there is no pre-installed Amazon advertisements, at least I did not see such a thing for many years with Xubuntu - this is a very slick variant of Ubuntu that comes with the XFCE Desktop. You see, you can even change the desktop environment quickly.

Even if there was something installed by default that you do not like, I am sure as a proud HN contributor you will be able to learn quickly how to "apt remove package-i-do-not-like". Overall it is very recommended to dive a little bit into the fantastic package management system - this is also a very good learning experience for aspiring developers!

Only one warning: if you once understood what "software freedom" really means, there is no way back, also you will look with a mixed feeling of compassion and incomprehension on people that are still using commercial operating systems, which simply can not compete with that level of freedom - which is really worth jumping some obstacles in the beginning, but these are very minimal nowadays.

Have fun!

so i just installed it, and like, right away i notice every app always opens in the top left of my screen and their positions are not remembered?? :(

speed seems irrelevant if windows cant be arranged lol. google is coming up empty. is this a bug?

update for posterity: windows seem to open in some kind of a logical fashion, so they use all the available real estate of the screen dynamically. its pretty cool! generally i prefer it cuz i never have to move new windows out of the way. but it would be nice to have a setting to remember some windows in a fixed position. as is the case w gnome lately many such settings are hidden/removed for the sake of simplicity. cheerz!

Does wayland+gnome work with propietary nvidia drivers yet?

I've been using unity since 18.10 because gnome always blackscreens on my 1070. (I'd been using it since it became the default, for the sake of support. But preferred unity)

It's fast and also magical, transmuting my laptop into an effective heater.

If you like Ubuntu and Gnome services such as the account manager, install Ubuntu Budgie, it will run much faster. Try getting the future LTS release, it will be safer.

I noticed absolutely no difference after upgrading from 19.04. Do I need to do anything?

Is your monitor running at 30fps? I imagine in that situation the changes wouldn't be noticeable.

Also, upgrading from 19.04 to 19.10 isn't super stable, so it could be it didn't upgrade properly.

It's a Dell latitude laptop, screen is at 60Hz

TL;DR

Ubuntu 19.10: Gnome 3.34 is fast, like “make old hardware feel new” fast.

Be honest, Ubuntu feels fast 'cause people compare it with bloatware/telemetry overflowed Windows 10.

If you wanna a really FAST distribution - try Clear Linux from Intel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com