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Comment by aortega | Hacker News Reader

Gnome 3 is the "Windows Vista" equivalent of Linux. It looks better? yes, but at what cost? it takes a lot more resources. I hope Gnome 4 pulls a "Windows 7" and comes back as a modern, optimized DE, with a "no 50 watts GPU/CPU required" mode for people that don't want/have it. Until then, Mate desktop it is.

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I run Gnome 3 on a four year old laptop with a Core 2 Duo and Intel GMA X3100* integrated graphics. No performance issues.

* View the internet in multiple colors! Run games almost a decade old on "low" settings! Sometimes capable of displaying HD YouTube videos without jittering!

My GPU is from 2007 or so and doesn't have a fan. It runs GNOME 3 perfectly fine. At that time it wasn't the fastest; I went for the cheapest fanless GPU that would still be supported by Linux.

That compositing requires more resources, yes, but IMO you're exaggerating on the resource requirements.

You still are talking about a x86 architecture with a discrete GPU. It would be nice if it worked fast with no GPU at all like Gnome 2 did, so it can be used in Virtual machines, OSes with crappy drivers (*BSDs), weird architectures (MIPS, ARM, etc.)

Gnome 3 sacrificed all that compatibility to gain some nices graphics, I think it's not worth it.

It doesn't require a GPU for hardware acceleration anymore, Gnome 3.6 uses LLVM for hardware where GPU acceleration isn't available.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM...

So it in case you don't have a GPU, it only requires a huge assload of CPU to work.

Why not turn the damn effects off? it is that hard?

Chiming in here to say Gnome has run great on all the hardware I've tried it on, which is more than I can say for Unity which is jittery on even mid/high-end-ish hardware.

I have no graphic card, and just an old i5 from 2011. It doesn't eat much of my computer power. For a light processor maybe, but I can't talk about that.

Old i5 from 2011, I hope you are trolling me.

You know just how hugely powerful an i5 processor is? the "no graphics card" that you actually have inside your CPU is more powerful than the latest gamer graphics card from 5 years ago. And consumes a lot of power too.

Gnome 2 ran quite fast on a 500 Mhz ARMv5, 200 milliWatts idle. Yes, it is a niche application, but it shows just how much hardware (and batteries!) Gnome 3 needs.

Your original post compared Gnome 3's performance to Windows 7. Windows RT is even snappier than Windows 7, and I doubt it'd be performant at all on the machine you mention.

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