FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: Speed and Transparency

michuk writes "PolishLinux.org has published a review of FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: "FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX, based on FVWM. Crystal can be used even on very old machines, thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.""

Comments

Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications

[QCompson]

Every time I have experimented with a lightweight fast desktop (fluxbox, icewm, xfce, etc.), I am initially impressed at how snappy the desktop itself feels, but once I launch a few applications, I am again disappointed at the overall slow feel of the apps themselves.

FVWM with Nautilus? When I use nautilus in another environment (window manager, whatever), it always starts slower than it does in Gnome (I know, I know, preload gnome-stuff and all that, but if you have to do that, what's the point?). Once nautilus is open, it still behaves sluggish and ackward. And it's not just nautilus. I have the same issue with konqueror, firefox, music apps, k3b, and more. A lightweight desktop is fast if I just want to login and look at your wallpaper, but once I try to get something done, I have the same old issues.

I can't quite describe the problem, but even after the tremendous improvements that have been made to the Linux desktop in the past few years, it still feels... slow. I'm not trying to troll here. I love Linux, and I wish it all the success in the world, but it just doesn't feel as snappy to me as windows 2000/XP. Seems like lost mouse-clicks and slow window redraws are a large part of the problem. Perhaps the problem lies with X, or with my own warped sense of perception... who knows?

Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications

[Kaypro]

I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows. Some of the widgets just look awkward no matter what theme engine you use. Don't get me wrong I use Linux most of the time, but in my experience Windows still reigns in speed even compared to OSX. OSX has the appearance down pat but still is slow compared to Windows. It's minor nitpicking I know. Productivity is what counts but it would still be nice to clear these two issues up.

Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications

[ultranova]

I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows.

In other words, GTK is a great UI library except it's slow and looks bad :). But no, I don't think that GTK is the problem. I have a gtk-gnutella instance running in a 200MHz box, accessed over XVNC, and it reacts just fast even when the machine is under load. No, I think that the real culprit is that Gnome apps typically use a hundred libs each and Firefox has its interface rewritten in XUL. All this adds layers of abstraction that increase reaction time and decrease speed.

Gnome has its own virtual file system driver, for crying out loud ! WTF does a desktop need a file system driver for ?!?

Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications

[MartinG]

My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit.

Well it just so happens that gut feeling, despite being the most popular tool, is almost totally useless when applied to performance measurement in software.

Seriously, I solve performance issues in a range of applications on an almost daily basis as part of my job. After a few years, you stop being surprised at exactly how little correlation there is between your gut feeling of what is causing slowdown and what really is.

Measurement is the only useful approach to performance. I've said it many times before, and many greater programmers than me said it long before that.

A couple of quotes:

"Measurement is a crucial component of performance improvement since reasoning and intuition are fallible guides and must be supplemented with tools like timing commands and profilers." - Kernighan and Pike

"You cannot tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so do not try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is." - Rob Pike

Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications

[Cid Highwind]

If you don't believe me, get a 200 MHz computer, run a GTK+ 1.2 app from back then (e.g. X-chat), then run the same app that has been ported to GTK+ 2.0. You [i]will[/i] notice a difference!

You mean there's a price to be paid for having anti-aliased text, real unicode support, and using resolution-independant vectors to draw the widgets and icons? Say it ain't so!

Wow!

[Goaway]

So basically "eye candy" means "skins and transparency"? That'd be pretty awesome, in 1996.

Re: WNT

[MsGeek]

WNT is to VMS what HAL is to IBM. QED.