Gnome 45
foundation.gnome.org
foundation.gnome.org
That's a very short description of what sounds like maybe a very interesting optimization? There've been giant HN threads arguing about why mouse pointers are not smooth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34095032 ("24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse", 253 comments)
[0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2777
Mouse movements no longer happen on main thread.
And the RT KMS thread delays posting the update until just before a deadline, to make sure the mouse is samples at the last possible moment! What a neat & straightforward & simple hack, sampling late. I'm sure this kind of stuff is what Good game devs have been doing for decades but still amazes me to read this.
If you estimate wrong, you start missing frames. If you don't do any frame pacing, the game always has a little bit of preventable input lag.
I only learned about this a couple years ago, but I think I felt it years ago - One of my games just seemed to feel better with a 10 millisecond sleep right after I submitted each OpenGL frame. In a world where you can't control hardware and OS lag, that 10 ms of free lag reduction is wondrous.
At some point this was moved to an input thread, probably around when glamour happened. You can't do complex junk like OpenGL calls from within a signal handler.
Some things were easier to do better when X implemented the full graphics stack.
Nowadays in a Wayland world the compositor is still hamstrung by what execution contexts it can call its underlying GPU-acceleration API from. So I doubt we'll see the same kind of lean and mean signal handler approach of ye olde X. The best you can probably do there is a dedicated high-priority thread.
Having said that, I think the competition between them makes both of them better so I'm glad that both exist. And where they depend on common libraries, both benefit once again from the contributions from the other's contributions.
How much of this actually exists in reality though? It seems like the two really go their own separate ways for most things.
I wish they weren't so Gnome about things like CSD/SSD and GTK weirdness, and libmutter can use some work to get the Nvidia's shit drivers in check, but the UI is a lot smoother than any alternatives I've tried.
It's worse than any other desktop environment. Pretty sure you can get more work done faster on GNOME 1.
It makes literally zero difference to my productivity. If it affects your productivity, it's a skill issue. Telling people they "haven't thought about it" is a social skill issue.
I also use KDE sometimes and I quite like it but it feels a little bloated and a bit unstable sometimes. Still love it though but I'd rather use GNOME as my daily driver.
I'm still trying to get used to tilling window managers and 8 have been giving Sway a try, but the radical metaphor change takes some time to get used to.
My battle with Gnome was when they tried to merge touch screen devices with desktop, and every day tasks took multiple more clicks or navigation.
Use it again! It's much better now. I promise. Not perfect, but pretty nice. Cohesive integration could be better, but it's getting there. I swear.
(Been on Unix ~18 years, whatever "Unix" even means nowadays, or Windows for a decisive portion of my adolescence, and occasionally beyond... unfortunately.)
Go, Gnome!
Gnome is rock solid, but it can't do any of these things, and some aren't even possible to do manually. KDE does, but it's less stable, so every couple of years I try Gnome again, only to switch back after a couple of months. Gnome is not ugly, it's actually elegant in its simplicity, but it's too plain, too vanilla.
The improvements from 20 years ago are excellent.
Life on Linux is really good lately.
Speaking of the terminal, it also has poor Unicode support compared to macOS Terminal.app (though to be fair, VTE-based terminal applications seem to be the best on Linux).
xterm is still the best terminal on linux, and it is not VTE-based.
100% agree. I made the jump from macOS and have never looked back. The one or two apps I missed from macOS, I have found alternatives.
Who's "we"? Speak for yourself. I can't remember the last time I used either of those.
Not sure if the writer of this post is here, but I assume they meant 2024 here.
- The GNOME team has been progressively decimating themeing (no, I don’t like the libadwaita default look, never have, never will). - Every time there is a GNOME upgrade half my extensions break because they decided to change some baseline assumption in the APIs.
That said, it is the nicest DE for me UX-wise, since it requires only a couple of tweaks to satisfy my Mac-centric reflexes. But the first few weeks of a new release are always a pain because of subtle breakage that should never gone past the beta stage, and I don’t see a lot of ongoing feedback to the desktop experience being acted upon.
Just make super+c/v copy paste since you can't make ctrl+c copy in all applications.
I need working fractional scaling for xwayland apps, working system tray and configurable keyboard shortcuts. Gnome can't offer me that.
Fractional scaling and backwards compatibility with old system tray icons are annoying issues, but Gnome has had configurable keyboard shortcuts for years now.
No, since the moment they retired the shortcuts CSS. There is no replacement for it. You may only configure WM shortcuts and local shortcuts in select apps.