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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate a bit more? Like Did you notice a decrease in quality?

The JavaScript extensions, besides requiring a rewrite from the old C model, for a long time were the root cause of performance issues given how much GNOME has outsourced into extensions from what used to be core features in the GNOME 1.x and 2.x days.

Here is an old example,

https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...

Fair. I do think it's unfortunate how "bare bones" Gnome core has gotten.

It's also a gigantic pain in the ass how major releases often break good extensions. It does seem that is getting better, but for a while there I actively tried to stay on release n-1 because otherwise my extensions would all be broken.

I think it's important to note that GNOME extensions aren't a "real" thing as they have no API. They are runtime modifications injected directly into the GNOME environment. This means if their instantiation, cleanup, or operation are not well defined or are buggy, they can break the entire shell. It's not a plugin or add-on system using a dedicated/sandboxed API set to integrate while isolating them from the core platform.

https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/architecture.html

Gnome feels frame-droppy and janky and things that should be instant take a while. Plus the nutty levels of system resource use. I assume that’s all the JavaScript (it certainly wasn’t like that before) since that’s often what happens to platforms that start using or are based on JavaScript, but maybe it’s not.

Is it a 6 years old take or what? Because it certainly is very smooth on even low-end machines nowadays.

I'm typing this on Fedora 41 (Gnome 47, the latest drop, totally stock no extensions) on a nearly 10 year old 8GB/i5 Thinkpad X1 Carbon and it works just fine. If anything it feels like Gnome has gotten faster with the last few releases.

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