GNOME Shell Hurts Gaming Performance

An anonymous reader writes "According to recent benchmarks by Phoronix, using the GNOME Shell will cause a large performance hit when running OpenGL games on Linux. Using Unity and GNOME Shell are also hitting various bugs in the open-source drivers."

Comments

You can actually play games on linux?

[aywang31]

I didn't know graphics intensive games existed on linux.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[calmofthestorm]

ppracer ftw!

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[TD-Linux]

no, extremetuxracer ftw. Yay for 4 forks!

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[dimethylxanthine]

Unreal Tournament is the first thing to come to mind.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[bky1701]

Quite a few operate well enough through wine. There even are a few that run better on Linux/Wine than windows.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[bmo]

Steam games run fine.

I don't know what you're talking about.

--
BMO

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[metacell]

Civilization IV is faster and more responsive on Linux/Wine than on Windows XP, for some reason. In particular, it loads much faster.

But in general, graphics performance is noticeably slower on Linux due to the lower quality of graphics drivers. The gfx card manufacturers don't feel the need to spend that much time writing drivers for Linux.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[atomicbutterfly]

Steam games? Or Source engine games?

There are a lot of games on the Steam platform - make sure you're specific on what works. I tend to avoid Wine because I've encountered regressions going from one version of Wine to the other, and having a game start bugging out just because of a bump in Wine's version number does tend to suck (particularly if there have been improvements in other areas of Wine which benefit other games).

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[bky1701]

I've not found this to be true. The drivers are buggy - not slow. Speed problems resulting from wine are often from inefficient stopgap code in the Direct X components of wine, or simply games doing things that the wine programmers didn't expect. Direct X is one of the most complicated parts of windows and wine depends mostly on Microsoft-provided documentation and reverse engineering to get it to work. It is really amazing anything can work, I think. Wine is perhaps one of the most impressive programming accomplishments in history.

But I do have a problem with something. As much as drivers cause problems on Linux, using them as a defense for Open Source failings to provide stable and quality libraries and programs is pathetic. I'm not accusing you of this, but already I see posts on here excusing GNOME because somehow, ATI/NVIDIA drivers are worse on GNOME than KDE... yeah, right. It is part of GNOME's job to make sure their library works with the drivers out there. That might not be right, but it's how it is, and making excuses gives Linux a bad name.

Guess what? Proprietary developers have to put up with it, too. The hardware makers aren't (generally) singling out Open Source libraries to mess with. They don't sit in dimly kit conference rooms, laughing maniacally from under their black hoods, saying "ha, we got GNOME to look bad today!" At some point, developers (I'm looking at you, GNOME), need to grow a pair and stop complaining about the world around them.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Nursie]

I have started noticing this recently, it's quite annoying.

I guess it's a difficult proposition, trying to keep things working that already are, but adding in tweaks for known not-working programs almost always seems to break something else.

Some steam stuff works, some doesn't. I've been playing PvZ quite happily, but that's not exactly graphics intensive. The last actual 3D game I played under wine was Portal.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we could simply not use non-free code. Nuff said. My system runs great and I refuse to use or buy products which depend on non-free drivers/firmware. Except for a BIOS (which is currently not possible to get laptop without such) i got a freedom compatible system.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

urbanterror.info

savage2.com

Sure, they're a little old. But still tons of fun.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Second Life. Especially when nearly every texture is an unoptimised beast of a thing and if you enable deferred rendering.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Ash Vince]

But in general, graphics performance is noticeably slower on Linux due to the lower quality of graphics drivers. The gfx card manufacturers don't feel the need to spend that much time writing drivers for Linux.

Actually if you read the article you find out that the biggest problems are with the open source drivers or the ATI provided ones. The NVIDIA provided closed source driver had no issues and only seemed slightly slower although this was probably due to then using a much older NVIDIA card for their test.

It seems that NVIDIA is the way to go for anyone using 3d intensively under Linux.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[DrXym]

Or we could simply not use non-free code.

Yes you could do that if you're a masochist who wants to suffer an inferior, possibly unusable gaming experience. Meanwhile people who want to use their hardware to its potential rather than in some gimped, buggy form will take any driver that's going whether it is open or closed.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[metacell]

Well, that may be true for this specific issue, but nVidias drivers for Linux still have noticeably worse performance than their drivers for Windows. (I'm using nVidia myself.)

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[metacell]

That may be true; I'm not an active programmer myself, and have to rely on what friends and journalists tell me.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

This runs well under linux, even ati drivers (somewhat buggier than nvidia, at least for my oldish card) I get decent performance but then I use fluxbox.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgOxU0HWo0k&NR=1

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[metacell]

Do you play 3D games, and if so, what graphics card with free drivers are you using?

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[atomicbutterfly]

In my opinion, if you're gonna play games on Linux for any length of time, stick to native games. There are quite a few of them if you know where to look, and they're not all crappy Quake clones either* (Amnesia and the Penumbra series come to mind). If you want to play Windows games, there's nothing wrong with dual booting simply for Windows games. The best tool for the job is sometimes not the one you'd prefer, but if it gets the job done the best, so be it.

*I use "crappy" subjectively. Most Quake clones I happen to like. :)

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[atomicbutterfly]

Yes you could do that if you're a masochist who wants to suffer an inferior, possibly unusable gaming experience. Meanwhile people who want to use their hardware to its potential rather than in some gimped, buggy form will take any driver that's going whether it is open or closed.

I wish more GNUtards understood this. People have standards - they don't want to have to "live" with an inferior experience when compromising yields great benefits, particularly if they gain very little from sticking to the inferior option. It's just how the computing experience is at the moment.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Nursie]

I wish more anti-GNU-tards understood this. People have standards - they don't want to have to live with a compromise when working with an entirely open source stack yields great benefits, particularly if there's little (only really gaming) they gain from compromising. It's just how some folks like it.

The hard-line FOSS type of thinking is not for everyone. It has benefits and drawbacks. If games are more important to you than access to source code then you go for your compromise system.

Calling people retarded because they have different priorities to you is pretty dumb. When they try and force you to do things that way then feel free to complain, until then I suggest you stick with Windows, sure it's a bit of a compromise, but your games will run just fine!

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Nursie]

Having just flamed you further up I now feel silly... sorry...

Anyway I agree, if you want to play windows games windows is probably the best option. In fact I keep it around just for that.

the last thing that broke under wine was a small VB application (from the look of it, I'm not 100% sure) for calculating the propertiesd of beer you'll get out of a homebrew setup. You tell it what grains you're going to put into the mix, which hops, how long it's going to be boiled, various other things, and it tells you how strong the beer will be, what colour and how bitter. Why a simple form-based app like that would choke on the latest version, where steam doesn't I have no idea.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

we call gnutards that way because they buy proprietary hardware and joke themselves about using open source free-as-in-stallmanfree drivers.

if that's not hypocrisy and borderline schizophrenia, then they're just plain retarded.

if you value so much freedom and such, why re you using proprietary hardware? because it's better? don't you see a contradiction right there?

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Post you're replying to is bashing the GNU crowd for hand waving away the enormous issues of performance that are still left to be solved. Hand waving some more doesn't really prove anything here.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[gman003]

Precisely. I like open-source stuff, not because it's inherently better or more ethical than closed-source, but because the open-source process tends to produce better end product. I have no problem with running closed-source programs when they're superior to the open-source options. I go with what works.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Yvan256]

But that's not a Linux game, that's a Windows game.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[arisvega]

There is this great search engine called 'google'. You can start by clicking here.

You then enter keywords for what you want to look for, like "+linux +games". As an example, here is what I found: http://kahvipapu.com/blog/2007/06/16/linux-gaming-part-one-first-person-shooters/

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[Plombo]

I play 3D games on Linux using open drivers. I have an Nvidia GeForce GT 330M using Nouveau. It's a very stable setup that's more than performant enough to play most games at a good framerate.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[CronoCloud]

Oh god yes. SL is a beast that wants as much hardware as you can throw at it.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[drinkypoo]

And it shall be ever thus while there are more Windows users than Linux users. On the other hand, nVidia usually keeps pushing performance updates to their drivers which benefit older cards for some time, so at least the situation improves over time. AMD just abandons you. I bought a netbook with AMD/ATI chipset/graphics, and the day I got it home there was no linux support; the ati driver didn't support it because it was too new and the fglrx driver didn't support it because it was too old. Now the ati driver supports it well enough to get massive graphics corruption even with RenderAccel disabled, and don't even ask about OpenGL.

When I plugged my GT 240 in (I was going for low power... 75% of the performance of the 250 for less than 50% of the power budget and at the time, half the cost...) the driver didn't officially support it but it worked anyway. Updated my driver and it crapped itself so I went backwards. Clocks and fan speeds were misreported but everything else worked. Eventually the driver support appeared and that stuff was fixed. Now I actually have great luck with it in Linux while I have actually seen blue screens (I added some delay so I could experience their glory) on the XP side. For some games I need the latest driver, but for older games I run the driver which shipped with the card, without which I get blue screens. Hooray for nVidia on Windows! Er, wait.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[DrXym]

Well it's not just gaming. It's basically the entire desktop experience that benefits from better drivers. The likes of Ubunu and GNOME 3 make heavy use of GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, clutter and OpenGL to produce a modern compositing desktop. If your graphics driver is non-optimal you're going to suffer an inferior experience.

In an ideal world perhaps everything is open source, but we're not in the ideal world. If I happen to have own some hardware which is better served by the closed driver than the open, I'll pick the closed every time. Of course I'd prefer the open source one if it worked but I'm not a masochist.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[_Sprocket_]

I wish more GNUtards understood this. People have standards - they don't want to have to "live" with an inferior experience when compromising yields great benefits, particularly if they gain very little from sticking to the inferior option. It's just how the computing experience is at the moment.

The irony is that many "GNUtards" do understand this. But the call for a higher standard is still put out in the hopes that the environment can make strides towards that ideal. There's nothing wrong with goals. Even if we fall short of those goals.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[c0d3g33k]

I *used* to play 3D games on Linux, both under Wine (GoG titles, mostly) and native (Freespace Source Code Project [http://scp.indiegames.us/], OpenArena, native ports of iD engine games, Introversion titles etc.). Graphics card: Radeon HD 4670. Driver: the most recent proprietary ATI fglrx driver compatible with my kernel. There were some minor issues but for the most part everything worked and performance was great.

Then I switched to the open-source radeon driver. Most of the titles that used to work, particularly the Wine-based games, the native commercial games like Quake4 or the games that fully use the modern 3D graphics api (eg. Freespace 2 Open) don't any more. Sometimes the system just locks up, goes to black screen or otherwise becomes unstable. Some games work, but poorly with many visual glitches or performance issues. A few open source games like OpenArena and the like, play just fine. This is true for both the latest "stable" drivers available from and distributions (OpenSUSE 11.4, Ubuntu 11.04) and the latest nightly builds.

At present, using the open radeon driver, games don't get played much on my system. (To preemptively address the claims that 'game x, y or z plays just fine using the open drivers', the games *I* want to play don't work very well, and that's really all that matters to me.)

To be fair, many things that were buggy under the proprietary drivers (Video playback, KDE KWin compositing) work perfectly using the open drivers (which is what prompted me to switch to begin with. I'll take a stable desktop over functioning games any day. I can always dual boot if I really want to.)

The opensource drivers are coming along nicely, but at present they still leave much room for improvement. With all their problems (both ethical and technical), the proprietary, closed-source ATI drivers are just better. Let's hope that isn't true for much longer (though it has been so for the better part of the last decade, so I don't have much hope.) At least ATI/AMD are actively open to the development of the open drivers, so the developers don't have to battle manufacturer indifference in addition to the technical challenges.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[HiThere]

Speaking personally, ...
Yuck! Why on earth would I want *that*?

I don't *want* my desktop to be "a modern compositing desktop", It's generally covered anyway. I just want it to be unobtrusive, efficient, and useful. I can see wanting applications that can handle graphics adroitly, but that's a separate matter. Currently, with just the browser visible, I only have two thin bars, one at the top of the screen where I invoke applications, and one at the bottom where I switch between active applications. And the rest of the desktop is hidden. I don't have a large enough monitor that I WANT to see more desktop than that.

Gnome2 & KDE3 do what I want. I preferred KDE3 to Gnome2. But Gnome2 is a lot better than KDE4 was the last time I tried it. KDE4 is very sloppy about how it uses the screen space, or it was the last time I tried it. Gnome3 & Unity, however, look to be much worse. (Mind you, I haven't tried a live version of either of them.)

An additional factor is that my computer won't run 3D acceleration. So Gnome3 can't really be installed. And I *prefer* it that way.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[node 3]

Yeah, you end up with all that freedom, and no way to use it. Brilliant!

You only give up a nominal amount of "freedom" by using Windows or Mac OS X, yet you gain much more capability in terms of being able to actually make use of your computer. You've traded "freedom" (rights) for "freedom" (things you can do).

It's your computer, so obviously whatever floats your boat, but you clearly overestimate the appeal having a "freedom compatible system" will have on others. Hell, you can't even meet that ideal yourself!

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[metacell]

Thanks, will check it out.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[DrXym]

There's no problem with that. Clearly your desktop is not performance driven and you don't need to compromise. People who do want those things, or media players, or games clearly do need performance and shouldn't have to compromise.

Re:You can actually play games on linux?

[HiThere]

Sorry, but there *IS* a problem. KDE3, e.g., is no longer maintained. If I want to use the configuration that used to be my favorite, then I'd got to maintain it myself, and frankly not only would it take too much time, but I don't have the skill set.

So now Gnome 2 is being replaced by Gnome 3. Which looks to be aimed at palmtops. Not at all what I want. (And if you think that the developers support classic mode, I invite you to try it in KDE4.)

So now it looks like I'm going to be driven to something that would be my 3rd or 4th choice if everything were available. No, I'm not pleased at all. I don't know just where I'm going to end up when Gnome2 disappears, only that I will be quite unhappy about it.

Hextris performance Terrible

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Hextris, Quadrapassel and GBrainy run terribly under GNOME shell.

You see?

[Eric Smith]

This is why we can't have nice things!

Not seeing the downside to this

[notsoclever]

GNOME shell exposes performance issues and driver bugs, which in principle means that those performance issues and driver bugs will (hopefully) be fixed, making the drivers more robust and performant down the road. How's this a problem?

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

YES! And since this is open source, the million eyes will solve the bugs right?

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[The Dawn Of Time]

Asphyxiation exposes breathing issues and air quality problems, which in principle...

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[SanityInAnarchy]

Unless the bugs are in, say, the nVidia driver.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Anything that bugs out on you and doesn't work is actually A Good Thing (tm). Those who disagree run Windows.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[SharpFang]

for the good of all of us,
except the ones who are dead.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

I contend that those who disagree grab an IBM Selectric off eBay.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[pipatron]

There's no problem at all, unless of course someone would go ahead and make this the default setting for the most popular and visible Linux distribution for non-techies out there today. But why would someone put together a hack like this and release before it's stable.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[bky1701]

Oh, I've got to remember that one. "Oh, sorry I crashed your car, but hey- you should thank me for proving it couldn't stop that fast! Hopefully, you'll buy a better one next time."

You do realize this is why people don't take open source seriously, right?

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[VortexCortex]

There's no problem at all, unless of course someone would go ahead and make this the default setting for the most popular and visible Linux distribution for non-techies out there today. But why would someone put together a hack like this and release before it's stable.

::Sigh:: Well, perhaps its due to the fact that this "unstable" hack is not a long term support release. If any other OS Vendor released every 6 months you may find the same situation for the newest releases -- Even with infrequent OS releases what's the saying? "Wait till service pack 1 before you upgrade."

There are no doubt "non-techies" that accidentally installed an operating system that was not as stable as they would like.

For this I can make no excuse. If only it were noted somewhere prominently on the download page: "...long-term support (LTS) releases are supported for three years on the desktop. Perfect for organizations that need more stability..." -- Perhaps it would be best to place such text right next to the download options, near the giant "Start Download" button.

If only there were several ways to try out the operating system before installing it, as well as step by step instructions on how to do so; Perhaps these should go on the download page as well?

Alas, What fools they are! If only they were even more user friendly! Or -- Perhaps they've made it too easy to upgrade. MS wouldn't think of having a single button + admin password upgrade feature... I bet they don't have this problem on Windows.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[VortexCortex]

You do realize this is why people don't take open source seriously, right?

BWAHAHAH HAHA HA Ha ha... heh... oh. You're serious? GYHA, HAHA HA Ha ha... ha... Oh, no -- PLEASE stop, you're killing me!

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[lucm]

> Those who disagree run Windows

And as a first witness I call the infamous "On error resume next" statement in VB.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[multi io]

Unless the bugs are in, say, the nVidia driver.

...which, according to TFA, they aren't. In fact, the bugs seem to be in anything BUT the proprietary nVidia driver.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[lucm]

You make a lot of very bold statements

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a problem because of several of those performance problems cannot be fixed just by programming: They use technology which should be licensed.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[VortexCortex]

You make a lot of very bold statements

Not really, but do I insinuate them with my boldness.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Jesus_666]

Well, Ubuntu does have some failings. IIRC, their upgrade process just tells you that there's a new version of Ubuntu, not whether it's LTS or unstable. (And yes, after 11.04 I won't assume that "release" means "well-tested and stable".) The download page gives you everything you need to make up your mind but the upgrade screen implies a simple "newer = better" relationship.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[lennier1]

I think I'll get myself some cake from the fridge. ;)

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with infrequent OS releases what's the saying? "Wait till service pack 1 before you upgrade."

Not for the last 2 years it isn't :) Those are only words of linux users that try their hardest to look smart and clueles people. but who can see a difference...

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

When your code makes an error, you get fired and have to send your resume to the next employer?

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a point, but you're considering the wrong choice.

The choice is not between "bugs" and "no bugs" (if it was, then yes, "no bugs" would obviously be preferable).

"Bugs" is already a given. The choice is just between "bugs get fixed" and "bugs linger". Now bugs get fixed when they get hit, and maybe it would be preferable to not hit them in the first place, but - sooner or later, you would hit them anyway (after all, that is precisely the thing happening here).

Long story short: everybody already agrees that "fixing bugs = good". However, there is also a general consensus that "finding bugs = good" (as long as "finding bugs" then results in "fixing bugs"). And this is because, as above, "bugs" is a given: "no bugs" is not a choice in practice.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[the_other_chewey]

LTS versions are only offered upgrades to the next LTS version
unless non-LTS upgrades are explicitly enabled by the user.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the desperate defence comments which are marked Insightful, and parent is Flamebait.

If you had literally just switched the word Gnome for Windows, the response would be completely different.

Just pathetic, slashdot, really.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[itsdapead]

If only it were noted somewhere prominently on the download page: "...long-term support (LTS) releases are supported for three years on the desktop. Perfect for organizations that need more stability..." -- Perhaps it would be best to place such text right next to the download options [ubuntu.com], near the giant "Start Download" button.

If only they went the extra mile and made the giant "Start Download" button default to LTS. If only they warned people that, in Ubuntuspeak, "Latest" meant "Unstable" and "Long Term" meant "anything after six months" and "Support" meant security bug fixes rather than any application updates. If only they hadn't got the reputation as "the Linux for the rest of us" which lets them lead potential "switchers" up the garden path. If only Linux devs were as good at designing GUIs as they are at writing solid systems stuff. If only they'd finish playing (GUI) catch-up with OSX 10.2 and Windows XP before they tried to play catch-up with iOS and Android. If only Linux GUIs didn't still feel like a cargo-cult mishmash of eye-candy ideas from Mac and Windows thrown together by nerds who only ever use a GUI to run 6 copies of vim side-by-side.

Linux in general has a major problem with its model: the only user-friendly way of installing applications is via the distribution repositories, forcing such people to upgrade their entire OS when they just want to upgrade one application (unless they're lucky and someone backports it). Techies see only openness (I wouldn't run a server on anything else, and I usually end up building all the server-side software from tarballs anyway), but non-techies see a garden with even higher walls than an iPad.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity never should have been made the DEFAULT UI unless it was stable.
Period.
Unity == KDE 4.0 in terms of shoveling shit out the door just to say you've released.

And 11.10? Unity only.
I doubt it will work any better then than it does now.

Unity2D is STILL full of basic usability bugs ESPECIALLY when using two monitors. But, comeon, only developers do that! And no developer would be caught DEAD running linux

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a problem at all. You go run gnome shell, discover bugs and battle with them. I run a leaner desktop that starts in 3s and always has good performance. Because I don't run anything gnome or kde or other bloat. Your bugfixes are still welcome though. :-)

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Jesus_666]

Ah. Okay, that lessens the danger of running into a bad upgrade.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunally, a feature of any shell script by default.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I was able to update Shotwell ahead of the next release by adding the Yorba PPA. I helped test an Empathy fix by adding the test PPAs. I was able to install VirtualBox and keep it updated by adding the VirtualBox PPA. And for any of these I had the option of downloading the *.DEB install files and double-clicking on them to install. There are also third party RPM repos (RPM Fusion) and standalone RPM packages that can be downloaded and installed.

The only difference between this and Mac OS/Windows is that we actually have the option of using a repository.

The system isn't broken. People who update every six months on release day (like me) should expect to encounter issues. But you're right... distributions (and Ubuntu in particular) should be a lot more forthcoming about the instability of non-LTS releases, especially if they stick with time-based releases come-what-may.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[itsdapead]

I was able to update Shotwell ahead of the next release by adding the Yorba PPA. I helped test an Empathy fix by adding the test PPAs. I was able to install VirtualBox and keep it updated by adding the VirtualBox PPA.

You lost 90% of the non-technical audience at "adding the Yorba PPA". Where do I find that under the "Add/remove Programs" menu? (That's rhetorical - don't answer it).

.DEBs and third-party repos are great when they work, provided you get the right one for your distro and don't hit any dependency hell problems.

The point is not that there aren't technical solutions to these problems, it is that they are relatively inaccessible to non-technical users c.f. windows (download and open the installer) or Mac (download the .dmg and drag the icon where the big arrow points) - assuming the apps don't have their own auto-update. and there are a zillion different distros to worry about. The best way to get upgrades to users is through the regular distros. Of course, I completely understand why distro maintainers working for nothing would rather add sexy new features to the OS than spend time backporting packages to a 2 year-old OS for the benefit of lusers who can't tell their .RPM from their .PPA.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[cortana]

C is always 'on error resume next'. :(

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[CynicTheHedgehog]

If we called PPAs "subscriptions" or "app stores" instead, we'd be fine. That's all it is. If we made it to where the ppa: URL scheme was associated with the software store and automatically launched it when clicked, then viola, problem solved. Prompt the user for their admin credentials, confirm that they want to add the subscription/store/software source, run apt-get update, and then prompt them to install new packages. Not hard. There's probably even a way to monetize PPA subscriptions that way, too.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[WWWWolf]

Linux in general has a major problem with its model: the only user-friendly way of installing applications is via the distribution repositories, forcing such people to upgrade their entire OS when they just want to upgrade one application (unless they're lucky and someone backports it).

Except that's not the repository model's fault. Sure, you can try to install and run, say, a Windows 3.1 app in modern Windows - and the first things you'll say is "it works really wonkily, if at all, and it was not very easy to uninstall because it left crap all over the filesystem". Yes, you could unpack the .deb and stick it in a non-Debian/Ubuntu system, or older version, and it might work. (If not, the package maintainer is fully within their rights to say "See? Told ya it wouldn't run on libc5.") The value of the package management is that it knows what files belong to a package and which versions of the librariers are known to work.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[itsdapead]

Sure, you can try to install and run, say, a Windows 3.1 app in modern Windows

I'm not talking about trying to install 20 year old apps on new operating systems - I'm talking about trying to install a 3-month-old app on a 6-month-old OS without (as you say) grabbing a .deb and crossing your fingers or knowing how to build a tarball.

Re:Not seeing the downside to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow it seems that the Ubuntu people hijacked the thread. This is a "shell" story. The only distros running the shell are what we are talking about.

Number 1: Fedora 15: I run fedora 15 and I do it with the clear understanding that I am supporting "bleeding edge" software. I expect some problems, but I also know that we have some of the mostest kick-ass devs in the world who do their very best to keep all of us up and running. Slight speed loss in gaming is chicken scratch.

Others: also going bleeding edge, maybe based on fedora. Same, same, no different. This is a non-story, but something that does need to be used to remind people. Linux is not windows. We have many multiples of distros for many multiples of different purposes. Leave us alone at your own risk. Bother us at your own risk. Come and join the party AT YOUR OWN RISK.

nuff said

It also mentions KWin.

[SanityInAnarchy]

...and I have noticed some weirdness here. It seems like KWin disables desktop effects on fullscreen windows, yet disabling them entirely (there's a hotkey to toggle it) has a huge impact on the performance of most things (like games) that use the GPU.

Re:It also mentions KWin.

[Carewolf]

Disable thumbnails in desktop effects. This was what used to kill full-screen windows. While it usually do not impact performance of kwin, it seems for some reason to impact performance of apps with many updates per second.

Btw. Do not disable deskop effects on nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver. Disabling effects on nvidia will make graphics slower and use more power. The problem is the nvidia has terrible 2D performance, the composer uses XGL which is heavily optimized in the nvidia driver.

Re:It also mentions KWin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Disabling thumbnails kills desktop switching performance, so I imagine it's not really thumbnails that are disabled, but caching window contents in general.
That's precisely what makes compositing seem faster - no need to redraw window contents on every expose event. Nothing is actually drawn faster than without compositing, it doesn't make Qt or GTK magically use GL[X] for drawing, it just makes redraws happen asynchronously.

Re:It also mentions KWin.

[Carewolf]

it doesn't make Qt or GTK magically use GL[X] for drawing, it just makes redraws happen asynchronously.

No, it magically makes kwin use GL for drawing (or xrender, there are two backends). I am not sure about the rest, window caching and cached thumbnails are not the same as far as I know.

GNOME - Making 'fast' computers slow since 1999.

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME - Making 'fast' computers slow since 1999.

What, no Intel?

[Chuck Chunder]

Seems a shame not to test Intel seeing as they go to the trouble of producing open drivers.

Intel might not be your first choice if gaming was the primary function for your computer, but then Linux probably wouldn't be either.

Re:What, no Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Why someone would want to play games on Linux when they can get free Windows (either OEM or pirated), is beyond me.

Re:What, no Intel?

[oiron]

Not needing to reboot, and not having to maintain two installations is major win...

Re:What, no Intel?

[Omnifarious]

I like to know that the code for the software I run could be independently evaluated by a third party. Whenever I run Windows, I'm worried my computer is doing something behind my back that I don't want it to be doing and have no control over.

Re:What, no Intel?

[bipbop]

OEM costs money, and pirating requires a lack of ethics. That said, I spent the money, but I still prefer to play games on Linux when I have the option, since Windows is just annoying.

More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you ask the graphics hardware to composite your display using opengl and wonder why opengl apps aren't as fast as when the gpu isn't busy with other things?

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why I disable desktop effects in kde before gaming and will NEVER use a desktop package that required compositing to function like fucking gnome 3...

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[shutdown -p now]

When a game runs fullscreen, there should be nothing to compose (if things are done right).

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[MrNemesis]

Amen, I'm not sure why people don't see the connection. At times I feel like the only guy on the planet who immediately disables all this compositor nonsense the second I get a new machine/profile - and it's got nothing to do with gaming (although it causing video playback failure under linux is simply inexcusable). Apart from everyone else in my house who saw my laptop and said "how did you get it to stop doing all that stupid swooshing stuff?" and duly went through a customisation binge, swiftly followed by a "wow, it's so much faster now!".

3D accelerated desktops seem to create more problems than they solve IMHO, and I'm not quite sure what problems there were meant to solve in the first place (other than "We don't have as much eye candy as apple yet"). All this talk of freeing up the CPU seems bogus as well, as long as 2D acceleration works fine I've never seen any WM/DE chew significant cycles drawing widgets. Composited desktops however result in higher aggregate power usage for me at least (tried on both an intel 4500 and a low-end nVidia under linux), seemingly all for the sake of squidging up a window when it's minimised and giving me a rotating cube instead of alt tab. I guess I'm just old an inherently old fashioned in that I even use win7 in a theme as close to windows 2000 as I can get (except it's greyer). All that fast-moving whizz bang stuff is just horribly distracting to me. Perhaps someone can explain what I'm missing?

Maybe in a CPU generation or two when we get an on-CPU framebuffer and decent drivers across all OS's and WM/DE designers will show a bit more restraint and tact, but the trend certainly seems to be to spend more and more resources on making Joe Sixpack's netbook resemble something from Hackers. I'm not against giving people a choice, by all means keep your flashy bling if you love it so much, but making it the default and impossible to turn off? Stupid. I think Gnome must have had a frontal lobotomy to think that mandating composition, and hence wholly bug-free drivers for 3D graphics cards in linux, was a good idea - in all my ten years of using it on the desktop I've never encountered a wholly bug-free driver. Same goes for windows for that matter.

</rant>

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[DarkOx]

I use XFCE and have used it since its 3x days; I am running 4.6 now. I love it. Its a great desktop IMHO. My thanks and applause to anyone who has contributed the XFCE project who may read this. Its stable and its pretty. It might not be as flashy as OSX or even KDE but its still prettier then Windows 7 and the "eye candy" is actually useful.

I actually like the transparency effects quite a bit. 3D accelerated desktops let me see through menus, and inactive windows thru to what is underneath and that actually means I am not moving things around so much.

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[MrNemesis]

XFCE's the DE I use on most of my remaining linux desktops, with one running fluxbox for better performance. It's definitely a nice, lightweight but full featured environment that doesn't foist itself upon you. It's definitely come into its own over the last 18 months or so.

Never got my head around transparency though, but I rarely move things around (I'm a spatial + muscle memory type so I navigate faster when things stay in the same place) and I usually find a quick minimise -> maximise from the taskbar is the quickest way of finding an errant window, transparency is too visually busy for me.

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[drinkypoo]

3D accelerated desktops seem to create more problems than they solve IMHO, and I'm not quite sure what problems there were meant to solve in the first place

I have most of the eye candy turned off, but I find Expo and Scale Windows to be immensely useful. And yes, it's some eye candy we associate with OSX; however, I have the Expo reflection turned off so it's just function.

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[GameboyRMH]

How is it with multiple monitors? I'm looking at other desktop environments since Gnome has crapped all over itself. I use XFCE on my home server but I pretty much only look at it through a VNC session.

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[oursland]

Note that those two operations have little to nothing to do with 3D, and have (in some incarnation) existed on many desktop environments.

I am yet to see someone actually give a compelling argument for 3D desktops. The surface (monitor) is 2D, the content is 2D and anything that alters the content will only serve to reduce functionality. Sure, the cube desktop thing looks cool at first, but you can't read the content when using that. Heck, I am not certain it even does a good job as a switcher because the content alteration during use.

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[drinkypoo]

I use the desktop wall, but the cube doesn't have to float windows.

Both of those tools use the GPU, nothing of which I am aware but Metisse is an actual 3D desktop for X.

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[oursland]

I hadn't heard of Metisse before, but you are incorrect. From their website:

Metisse is not focused on a particular kind of interaction (e.g. 3D) and should not be seen as a new desktop proposal. It is rather a tool for creating new types of desktop environments.

Furthermore, Metisse is a research environment for HCI and their work over the last several years has dropped any work on concepts of 3D and focused on improving UI, not shoehorning a natural 2D interface into a 3D interface. In fact, their videos demonstrate the futility of a 3D desktop. View their transforms video from 2005 and notice that when they make an out-of-plane transform the text becomes hard, if at all possible, to read. Then a circular transform is demonstrated, which doesn't even try to be useful.

I do not need nor want out-of-plane transformed windows. I do not need nor want spinning or rotated windows. I do need an interface that lets me quickly launch, switch and close applications. I do need to be able to quickly know the status of the computer such as cpu, memory and network utilization.

Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance?

[drinkypoo]

Well, Metisse used to let you do that kind of stuff. So now there is nothing. My bad.

Duh

[Megatog615]

It's because they're not skipping fullscreen applications from compositing, like Compiz does.

Re:Duh

[AvitarX]

Doesn't unity use compiz?

Memory Hog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome shell is the second biggest memory hog on my system. Only below firefox.

Not particularly the brightest concept using javascript for all it's display work. A shell should be minimal and fast. Scripting GUI's is something belonging in the domain of mentally challenged applications developers, not important operating system components.

That said.. It's certainly very pretty on my Ubuntu box, and makes me at least feel more productive. I don't mind feeding a few GPU/CPU cycles for the sake of that.
And it's a lot more functional than Unity (which is nothing short of a piece of crap: Screw you ShuttleDork - that was your worst mistake ever.)

There's always XFCE/FVWM/console etc..

Re:Memory Hog.

[icebraining]

Scripting GUI's is something belonging in the domain of mentally challenged applications developers, not important operating system components.

Awesome is scriptable and it's only using ~7MB here.

Re:Memory Hog.

[lucm]

> Scripting GUI's is something belonging in the domain of mentally challenged applications developers

so I take it you are one of those not mentally challenged people who still believe that compilation makes things run faster?

I had a coworker like that, we used to call him "CGI Bill".

Re:Memory Hog.

[multi io]

Gnome shell is the second biggest memory hog on my system. Only below firefox

So Gnome ISN'T using firefox to render its desktop? That must be remedied ASAP!

Re:Memory Hog.

[somersault]

What? Of course compilation makes things faster. Modern interpreted languages use just-in-time compilation, but it's still compilation.

Re:Memory Hog.

[GameboyRMH]

Firefox? Step aside old-timer. We're rendering this bitch with a Mono-based re-write of Chrome running on a python-based Mono interpreter running on a Java-based python interpreter running on OpenJDK. It' s going to be the desktop of the FUTURE!

Re:Memory Hog.

[lucm]

And I suppose modern interpreted languages also launch a new process? That would indeed make things "as fast" as compilation.

Dropping in Quality

[bky1701]

Not that long ago I had to actually make a decision as to which window manager to use based on the features they supported. However, over the last three years, I've watched both Gnome and KDE go from stable to hacked together pieces of crap that barely run. I stayed on KDE3 for a very long time after 4 was released, because, as has become common, it was released completely unfinished. However I was forced to upgrade because almost no distro supports KDE3 anymore.

Well, that was great! Almost every feature I used either gone or mangled. It can no longer render windows properly, causes video playback to jump and freeze, and is now almost entirely unusable with my new video card. Gnome is even worse.

So, as a strong proponent of open source software, I am really dismayed. I can't even use Linux anymore because no window manager works right with my ATI card, and even before that, were barely usable (older Nvidia) without glitches. How am I supposed to advocate that others use it if I can't?

I think Linux needs a complete change in focus and methodology, or it is going to end up losing what little market share it has. It is time to stop trying to copy Apple UIs and time to start worrying about stability. This whole batch of project managers has failed us - we need mass forks of major projects.

But then, what do I know? I'm a windows user, again...

Re:Dropping in Quality

[ILoveCrack83]

Well I'm running KDE 4.6.0 to my full satisfaction! Everything works as it should, it has a lot of features and it looks good. Seriously, I'm turning into a fanboy over here...

Re:Dropping in Quality

[serviscope_minor]

[all WMs seem to suck now...]

Use FVWM :)

I think Linux needs a complete change in focus and methodology, or it is going to end up losing what little market share it has. It is time to stop trying to copy Apple UIs and time to start worrying about stability.

I wholeheartedly agree (caveats below). The obsession with copying interfaces is getting really annoying now. Back in the day when Win9X seemed to be the thing to copy, I could afford a Windows machine (in fact I had a partition then), but I preferred the unixy UI that Linux had. I found creeping windows-isms an unpleasant change. Now Apple seems to be the thing to copy. I can afford to buy an Apple if I want one, but I don't. I prefer the user interfaces that Linux has available, and so I find the creeping appleism's really annoying.

It also comes with this rather annoying de-facto assumption that anything Apple does must necessarily be better.

Ever time I sit down at a new ubuntu install, I find the interface less like what I am used to, and more like interfaces that I actively avoid.

It seems like the only thing I can do is to keep using Linux while the things I love about it are slowly chipped away by people who seem intent on destroying it for what?

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Psychotria]

Before the above comment is moderated away as a troll or something (it isn't by the way), I'd like to completely agree! I used linux almost exclusively from 1994 until about 2009. Then I gave up, despite my ideals, and just installed Windows. I even bought Windows 7 when it came out and am happily using it. Why? Because I just want shit to work. I don't have the time any more to tweak an OS to a point where it almost works; I need to get work done. But even with that considered I was using linux and KDE to develop my open source app using KDE and KDevelop until KDE 4 came out. Yes, yes, yes, I could have changed my development methods and made things work, but I had (and have) very little spare time these days to "set up an environment" so I just stopped developing it. My app didn't even rely on KDE... had nothing to do with it in fact, but my dev environment was KDE-Based and I had no time to adapt. I reckon others may have been in the same position. I still have linux installed, but instead of on my primary partition it's not even on a real partition anymore -- it's in a VM. I can't see that changing in the near future because, as I said, I need to get shit done and not fuck around with tweaking an OS.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[AvitarX]

Which ui is copying apple?

Birth kde sets are fairly their own, with the desktop one most like windows pre seven.

Gnome three was completely it's own thing when I last tried it.

Gnome two was perhaps an updated take on os 9, maybe, but again I'd say it was more it's own thing.

Unity is closest to os x, but also is quite different.

Unity makes default old apple features (menu at top), and the dock is fairly similar to os x, and the button placement, but it still looks and feels fairly different (window snapping, and multiple desktops being front and center).

Honestly, windows 7 may be my favorite window manager and panel at the moment, followed by gnome two with compiz, but kde 4.6 started to make me rethink that, and unity isn't bad.

Windows' lack of always on top is a bummer, but the new dock/task bar is really fantastic. If unity's starts to work like that I will probably favor it (there's a few rely stupid bits to injury too, but over all, I like it, I think we are in a desktop golden age, with apple being the one that's behind.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[the_humeister]

First of all, Linux is doing quite well from servers to cell phones. What you're complaining about is GUIs that run on top of X, both of which do not rely on Linux for their existence. GNOME and KDE may have issues, but those issues don't involve Linux at all.

And with regard to desktop environments, I used XFCE 4: it's relatively small, lightweight, and not resource intensive. OTOH I use my XBox 360 and PS3 for gaming.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Psychotria]

Yes, so you don't actually use your OS to do work and get things done (apart from maybe web browsing or development).

Re:Dropping in Quality

[the_humeister]

Yes, so you don't actually use your OS to do work and get things done (apart from maybe web browsing or development).

What exactly do you consider "work"? And no, I don't use the OS to do work. The OS gets out of the way while I do work, which is exactly what it should do.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Bambi Dee]

Me too; funnily enough, I've set it up rather like Unity with a vertical hybrid task-manager-with-launchers. Being KDE, though, it's easily malleable to new whims and needs. Plasma is a bit of a assemble-your-own-desktop kit. And I love Kmail and Knode, Kate, K3b, and Dolphin. It looked like a gutted toy version of Konqueror at first, but it can easily be set up as an informative but uncluttered and elegant file manager.

But I did disable Nepomuk/Strigi and the fairly puzzling aggregating notification system. Seriously, I could barely tell what was going on with that thing...

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been a long time Red Hat (started 6.0) and Fedora user. Due to the limited support cycle of 1 year, I recently had to upgrade my Fedora 13. Decided to go straight to Fedora 15 to avoid the same trouble 6 months from now. Unfortunately, that GNOME 3.0 thing is totally f*cking UNUSABLE. They indeed tried to mimick Mac OS X but then a job very badly done. It is a pity that a couple of arrogant developers think they are usability experts. Same thing happended years ago with the Spatial view in Nautilus, after a few years they also realized they were wrong, a decision that any sane person would have taken from the start. The sole reason I kept dualbooting my Mac with Fedora was because I was accustomed to having launchers on my gnome-panel to open links to web pages via zenity front ends. On GNOME 3 there's unfortunately no panel anymore, they've decided that that was to easy. If GNOME 3 is supposed to be the future then Linux on the desktop is DEAD. Apart from that, even plain simple wired networking didn't work anymore with Fedora 15 out of the box! Goodbye Linux, I am going to port my stuff over and won't look back.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[gottabeme]

"Almost every feature I used either gone or mangled. It can no longer render windows properly, causes video playback to jump and freeze, and is now almost entirely unusable with my new video card."

No; no; and no. All the features from KWin 3 are there. It renders windows fine. Video playback is fine.

"I can't even use Linux anymore because no window manager works right with my ATI card, and even before that, were barely usable (older Nvidia) without glitches. How am I supposed to advocate that others use it if I can't?"

Sounds like a driver problem to me. My Radeon HD 4770 works fine with Kubuntu Natty. So does my NVIDIA 8400M laptop. I use KDE 4 and KWin and it's fine now, just like KDE 3.5 was--better, even.

"I think Linux needs a complete change in focus and methodology, or it is going to end up losing what little market share it has. It is time to stop trying to copy Apple UIs and time to start worrying about stability. This whole batch of project managers has failed us - we need mass forks of major projects."

1. Linux (the kernel--and yes, you need to be specific when advocating changes) is not what your complaint is about (unless it's a driver problem, in which case you should complain to ATI or spend a few bucks and get a slightly newer or different card that has decent drivers--the info you need is out there).

2. A complete change is not needed.

3. You are right about one thing: stability is the most important thing.

4. However, we do not need mass forks. Good grief, man, do you have any idea what that would mean? What are you going to do, clone every developer and install a brain implant so they will do your bidding? What do you even mean by, "This whole batch of project managers"? You're speaking in terms so broad and vague that your words are meaningless.

I'm afraid your vague anecdote is worthless and irrelevant. Either your video card is so old that it's just not supported anymore by current distributions, or it was too new at the time to have good support, or you happened to use a poorly-configured distro and didn't fix it or try a different one.

The fact is that hardware support and out-of-the-box configuration in Linux distros has never been better, and it works better and more simply than Windows in most cases. And the fact that you switched back to Windows simply lends credence to the suspicion that you didn't know what you were doing and didn't bother to find out.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

And no, I don't use the OS to do work. The OS gets out of the way while I do work, which is exactly what it should do.

An OS is a tool, just like a hammer or a calculator. If your OS 'gets out of the way' - if it doesn't support the work you do, you're a fool for using it.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[D4rkforce]

WjVpqhp7

Re:Dropping in Quality

[D4rkforce]

What the ...? This was not what the preview did show me ;). So, I will just sum up what I wrote before. KDE 4 has not been very stable or high performance for me either. However, to me this was not a huge problem, because I have been working with fluxbox for a long time anyways. The people around me using KDE4 migrated to XFCE and seem to be happy with their choice. What I do not understand is: Even if KDevelop stopped being a reasonable choice for you (even using another window manager/desktop manager), was your project so heavily dependent on features offered by KDevelop? If there was no time to migrate to a new IDE, how did you have time to actually work on your project? I'm not trying to troll here. I just don't understand what was so special about KDE and KDevelop to you, that you just stopped working on your project because of KDE4 and migrated to Windows 7 (where you had to change to a new IDE anyways).

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why? Because I just want shit to work.

Yeah, painless installs and consistent performance without all fussing with license keys, AV and application updates, drivers not supported anymore... oh wait, did you say windows????

Re:Dropping in Quality

[DEmmons]

no, you're on to something. I'm neither a windows user nor a KDE user, i like Gnome 2 on Fedora, but my experience is the same. it's supposed to be about personal choice. Gnome 2 was simple and gave room for customization and generally had become something i could proudly show my friends and have them say "oh, this is Linux? it's not hard to use. and the effects look nice! why did i keep hearing Linux was hard?". Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell, or even in fallback mode, is crap. it takes away tons of tools, features, customizability etc. that are sorely missed and gives in return, what? a new ugly interface that no one likes, which is clearly designed for touch screens. why do i need a touchscreen interface for my six-year-old laptop? it means several extra clicks to get anywhere and a first-time Linux user isn't going to intuitively find Firefox or LibreOffice and be able to get to work on it like they can with my current setup. I can see making this interface available as an option for high-end touchscreen computers, but making it the default for everyone with no way to get back the old, useable Gnome 2 desktop? it's unforgivable. I'll hold out until my Fedora 14 install starts showing its age too much and jump to XFCE. note to Gnome devs: there are many people using linux with touch screens - they're using Android. We Gnome users are using actual, proper computers, and we want a proper desktop, or at least one customizable enough to turn into a proper desktop with a little tweaking, and you already made that. wtf is this new crap?

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Gaygirlie]

And the fact that you switched back to Windows simply lends credence to the suspicion that you didn't know what you were doing and didn't bother to find out.

He used Linux for 15 years as his primary OS and happens to also develop his own software. It's quite likely he does indeed know what he's doing. And I am in a similar position myself too: I started using Linux as my primary OS somewhere in 1996 and dropped it last year. I simply got tired with something always breaking or not working correctly and I feel quite a bit more satisfied nowadays.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[DEmmons]

lol, it's almost more like they're trying to mimic iOS! but if you start to miss Linux, and have some time, try using the XFCE spin of Fedora some time. it still contains a lot of what was good about Gnome 2

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

All I can say is give XFCE 4 a go. The complete train wrecks of Unity and KDE got me to try it again and I was very pleasantly suprised at how good it was. All the little niggles I found when using previous versions seem to have been fixed and it's really configurable, pleasant on the eye, and seems fast and stable.

It's now my desktop of choice on all Linux boxes I have and I'm not going back to any of the other crap.

I only hope XFCE doesn't go down the same drain as Gnome/KDE or I'll just give up on Linux desktops and will go out and buy a copy of Windows. At least with Windows the interface remains reasonably usable and consistent between versions.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Fluxbox. Configure it once, stick your fluxbox.conf in a dropbox or similar, and just symbolically link it. K, thanks, come again.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[salparadyse]

KDE on slackware 13.37 works beautifully.

My only complaint is the inclusion of the nouveau driver - which despite being present as the default driver for all NVIDIA cards, doesn't work with all NVIDIA cards. It's included in every distro I've tried recently, despite this shortcoming - a poor decision from all distros.
Not a problem with slackware as it treats its users as intelligent beings instead of clueless eyecandy junkies and installing the blacklist package is a doddle.

There's little, if any, reason to have to install the latest release of any distro - half the world is still using XP and that came out 10 years ago. Don't like Unity? (Can't say I blame you - it's a piece of filth from a design/user awareness point of view) - stick to an earlier version.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[BreezeC]

Linux is the winner in server,that's true,and the smartphone market.
We should know the truth that only Linux likers use Linux as desktop and the number not large.
I use Xfce4 too.Linux should choose a way which belong to Linux,not others.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[loufoque]

Maybe it you just used the default settings instead of incorrectly trying to tinker with stuff, it would work for you as it works for everybody else?
I have no problem with Gnome 2 nor KDE4, be it on ATI or Nvidia cards.

Now it is widely known that some ATI cards were only well-supported by fglrx and fglrx dropped support for them (ATI's decision), so if you're using one of those (like the Radeon 9800 Pro) you're better off buying a new one if you're using Linux.
But the nvidia drivers usually work flawlessly and they don't drop mid-old cards like this.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[BreezeC]

I run Xfce4 on my slackware 13.37 and that's great.
I like Xfce4 after Gnome change to three.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

It's people like you who drive others away from linux, this and the "it's open source submit a patch" mentality.
Most people expect things to work out of the box and that is how it should be.
The year of the linux on the desktop will only be when devs will understand that the customer satisfaction comes first.
People don't care why your stuff is not working, even if you have a perfectly good excuse for it.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[arnodf]

accidental password copy-paste?

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

********

That explains why it just shows asterisks.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[cnj]

> open source software ... ATI card ... (older Nvidia) without glitches.

Since you don't say, and from experience, I'm forced to wonder if you were using ATI's fglrx or Nvidia's proprietary drivers, which would seem to go counter the impression it seems that you're trying to make (open source failed you).

Really there isn't much else to respond to. You don't say what it was that you were using (did you need 3D and compositing? or simply 2D?). I've never come across problems with open drivers just running wmaker or fvwm; and I've run Compiz fine on older Radeon cards (open) and currently on Intel (open) cards.

The biggest problems I've run into was trying to maintain a system using proprietary drivers. I've decided it's just not worth the hassle. Closed drivers in an open system isn't any better than closed drivers in a closed system.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Sir_Kurt]

If I had mod points today I would mod you up. I have been a Redhat user since the old version 4.2 and Fedora since V. 1. When the Gnome developers made spacial view the default, I truly began to question their judgement and competence as interface designers. I mean WTF? What are these people actually doing with their computers? Not much apparently or they would "get" why these interface solutions are increadibly irritating to true desktop users. And no amount of comment from disgusted users seems to make a difference.

So I will hold out on Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.04 untill bitrot gets to me, and then switch to XFCE unless the Fedora, and Ubuntu folks get a clue.

Kurt

Re:Dropping in Quality

[MrNemesis]

Sad as it is for me to admit, I'm in complete agreement. I used to have just one windows machine for games, I now have two more windows machines and two less linux ones simply because I also want shit to just work. I still keep linux on my HTPC's (using a light debian/XFCE or fluxbox/XBMC combo) and servers because it's so low maintenance, but for the most part the desktop swiftly started to vanish up it's own arse a few years ago.

When I started with linux back on mandrake 8, you had the utterly awesome sawfish/sawmill built into Gnome - I played with that for weeks just because it was fun, but when doing Real Work I found that some of those esoteric window functions really did make a huge difference to my workflow. Then metacity was brought in to the exclusion of everything else and I switched to KDE, which had broadly similar WM capabilities. So far so froody until everyone decided that desktops needed to be 3D accelerated because apple had done so (and everyone loved the swooshing dock), so both KDE and Gnome throw the baby out with the bathwater and redesign their WM's from scratch, losing a lot of the functionality along the way (or almost all of it in the case of Gnome 3), because apparently "most people don't use feature X" means the same as "no-one uses feature X". Granted, KDE4 is still pretty configurable and IMHO orders of magnitude better than Gnome 2 or 3 but I still feel like I'm fighting it for attention all the time, when it should really be getting the hell out of the way.

Windows 7 may try very hard to make you fit into it's "the user is stupid" mould, but with the right reg hacks I can customise it almost as much as I could on my KDE setup; heck, focus-follows-mouse support (an utter deal breaker for me) is waaaay better in 7 than it was in 2000/XP and doesn't cause half the glitchiness in some apps like it used to do. Overall, it's not perfect, but good enough and once the initial pain of configuration was done with (and then exported to a reg file which makes it a 2s change on every other machine) I no longer have to fight it. Throw cygwin + mintty and a few other choice apps into the mix and all of a sudden I've got me the best of both worlds (cue Borg joke).

My main problem is usability "experts" and neophiliacs who keep telling me that I'm doing things the wrong way, or that "clicking on a launcher is so old hat, that's why we removed launchers! Just open the X menu, start typing what you want to run, and then click one of the programs that show up!" or other such counter-intuitive bullcrapshitturds which for some inexplicable reason have become the default in all the major DE's. Not interested, and yes I have tried it. Not against new ways of doing things by any means, but devs shouldn't expect users to re-learn every paradigm at the drop of a hat because some self-appointed expert says "this new way I just invented is the best for me, therefore it's the best for everyone!" and then someone else sees that as a great way to do away with the old "inferior" method, making it painful to add back. A bit like Wikipedia deletionists actually; "shading the window of type X is not notable enough, and therefore will be removed!".

Not that I'm singling out Gnome here, almost every non-niche DE/WM I've used in the last few years is guilty of the above, MS and Apple included.

</second rant of the thread>

Re:Dropping in Quality

[shovas]

Same here. I've been using CentOS w/KDE 3.5 simply because I couldn't yet get used to new distros with KDE 4. CentOS 5 is getting a little long in the tooth (can't run Firefox 4) but you'd be surprised how usable it is (and it still gets security updates).

To be honest, I think people like you and I really need to investigate the alternative WMs. Some of them have never changed from their core presentation as far as I can see. Maybe that's the kind of stability we want.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Try getting rid of Ubuntu ( Linux for dummies).

Re:Dropping in Quality

[TheDarkMaster]

And was there ever quality in the Linux desktop? I've never seen. Whenever I complained of some functionality missing or defective, someone replied with a tone of fanatic "but it's free and so is better than Windows !!!!"

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid your vague anecdote is worthless and irrelevant. Either your video card is so old that it's just not supported anymore by current distributions, or it was too new at the time to have good support, or you happened to use a poorly-configured distro and didn't fix it or try a different one.

The fact is that hardware support and out-of-the-box configuration in Linux distros has never been better, and it works better and more simply than Windows in most cases. And the fact that you switched back to Windows simply lends credence to the suspicion that you didn't know what you were doing and didn't bother to find out.

As always, it's the user's fault, never Linux's fault.
And I see freetards created a new definition of the word "fact", driver support in Linux is laughably bad, always has been.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[somersault]

An OS is more like a desk or bench on which you put your tools (hence why we have the term "desktop", and Amiga OS was even called Workbench). You want it to be there, holding everything up and easy to hand, but you don't want it to get in the way.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Hatta]

Huge desktop environments on *nix have always been crap. All you really need is a window manager and a terminal. Nothing on Windows comes close to the convenience and power of a simple wm and terminal.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[drinkypoo]

Why don't you just buy some hardware that hasn't been (or has minimally been) poisoned by Microsoft? The two machines I have that work the best are a Gigabyte-boarded and -video carded machine with Phenom II, AMD chipset and nVidia GPU running Natty, and an Asus EEE 701 OC'd to 900 (mine is a 600MHz model) running Maverick. (If it ain't broke...) And yet I also have an AMD chipset and GPU notebook with R690M chipset and L110 CPU which can only run Vista. Since I bought all of this stuff either used or assuming I'd be running a lot of Windows I often didn't even give any thought to Linux compatibility, but on these two machines I did and it paid off. I could have given a little more and had an even smoother ride; nVidia dragged ass on properly supporting my video card but it worked so long as I ran a slightly old driver. This only illustrates my point, however.

It is unquestionably easier to shop for stuff that "works" with Windows, but often the stuff works like crap under windows with a lot of band-aids in the driver that can't fix some crap hardware. They don't spend the time on the Linux driver because they don't care. You're still getting an inferior experience to doing your due diligence. (Yes, I know I'm abusing the term, but I like considering that I owe myself something.)

Re:Dropping in Quality

[CronoCloud]

I updated from F14 to F15 and made sure I had XFCE installed, just in case Gnome 3 wasn't for me. It wasn't.

Admittedly there are tweaks you can do to make it more "normal" but yeah it's very iOS-y. Fallback mode isn't a solution because you lose some functionality that way, and you can't theme fall back mode to look more Gnome 2-ish. As far as I know there IS a way to add app launchers to either the top bar or bottom bar thingy.

I had no problem with wired networking at all on F15.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[CronoCloud]

No need to use a "spin", just use the standard DVD and choose to install the XFCE group. Why they don't make the DVD the default download instead of the CD I'll never know. We constantly see people over on the Fedora Forum posting on how their new Fedora install doesn't have Open/Libre office, and then they mention they installed the CD.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I have stayed with iceWM.
It works just fine. It manages windows - and *nothing else*. It doesn't use any graphichs card features at all, so it works fine even on frame-buffer device.

Don't get me wrong,a nice openGL-supporting card is cool. But not for running the bloody window manager! It is for games, video, photo editing and so on. The window manager should stick to 2D only and provide a way of moving the windows around. No more is needed, and it lets me have the same familiar desktop on a weak portable with 2-year old intel integrated graphics, as I have on the workstation with the nice ATI card.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[chanchao]

Agreed; Ubuntu simply doesn't run for me anymore. Not Unity, and also when going back to 'classic' and completely turning off all fancy graphic effects then I'm still experiencing freezes (Nautilus), and overheating to the point that my laptop doesn't even fully charge. (Something is eating up CPU..)

And this is on a bog standard Lenovo Thinkpad biz notebook. (With built in NVidia gfx, which I suspect has a lot to do with it.)

Re:Dropping in Quality

[chanchao]

Yes, so you don't actually use your OS to do work and get things done (apart from maybe web browsing or development).

What exactly do you consider "work"? And no, I don't use the OS to do work. The OS gets out of the way while I do work, which is exactly what it should do.

"work" I would consider 'Things (the desktop (nautilus)) not freezing on me, wifi not shutting down, the laptop not to overheat, and get out of the way so that I can work.

Currently, it really doesn't anymore and I've been using Ubuntu since Hoary (April 2005!) Here we are 6 years later and it really doesn't work anymore.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Gaygirlie]

Why don't you just buy some hardware that hasn't been (or has minimally been) poisoned by Microsoft?

I wasn't talking about hardware, I was talking about software. Sure, I have had issues with hardware under Linux, too, but usually it's software that one way or another crashes or doesn't work and that's exactly what I got so fed up with.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[supersloshy]

However, over the last three years, I've watched both Gnome and KDE go from stable to hacked together pieces of crap that barely run.

Have you ever fiddled around with panel widgets in GNOME 2? Do that, resize your monitor a few times, install some third party applets that crash half the time when logging in, and THEN talk to me about "hacked together pieces of crap that barely run". If anything, by not supporting user-movable panel applets, GNOME 3 is improving on the GNOME 2 design. Sure, you can use extensions (and there's a TON of those), but by no means is it "hacked together" and more than GNOME 2 was. I can't speak for KDE, though, as I'm not a KDE user.

I stayed on KDE3 for a very long time after 4 was released, because, as has become common, it was released completely unfinished.

If I'm not mistaken, even KDE itself said that 4.0 wasn't meant for mass consumption and it was meant for developers. I could be wrong on that quote, though.

Well, that was great! Almost every feature I used either gone or mangled. It can no longer render windows properly, causes video playback to jump and freeze, and is now almost entirely unusable with my new video card. Gnome is even worse.

File a bug report or two? Maybe it's not KDE/GNOME's fault. That sounds like video card driver issues to me. Have you tried the open-source equivalents of your graphics drivers? I notice some problems when using the binary Nvidia driver that I don't notice with Nouveau, and vice-versa, for example.

I think Linux needs a complete change in focus and methodology, or it is going to end up losing what little market share it has. It is time to stop trying to copy Apple UIs and time to start worrying about stability. This whole batch of project managers has failed us - we need mass forks of major projects.

Oh my...

1) GNU is not Linux, GNOME is not Linux. KDE is not Linux. You can use one without the other just fine.

2) Your problems, from what I'm reasing, have absolutely nothing to do with the DEs but rather ATI.

3) I highly doubt that GNOME/KDE are trying to be terrible. If you have good suggestions, get in touch with the designers! Find out their priorities and make something that will please everyone. I, for one, love GNOME 3 (gasp! but that's against the Slashdot groupthink that GNOME is a feature-removing, unusable piece of trash!). Very much. If there's ever something in the UI that I don't understand, I ask about it and try to wrap my head around it. If I think of a better way to do something, I ask them about it and maybe file a bug report about it.

4) You wanna fork GNOME/KDE? Be my guest. It's a lot more work than it sounds though...

On a related note, do the Slashdot mods always mod up negative-sounding people because dissent is seen as smart for some reason, no matter whether or not the person is being smart? Is the anti-current-desktop groupthink really that strong? If it's so impossible to like current desktops, why do I love GNOME? Has anybody ever thought that just because some picky people on Slashdot don't like them, that they have to be terrible no matter what anyone thinks? How depressing...

Re:Dropping in Quality

[rubycodez]

nonsense,like any other major iinux distro, you can put whatever desktop manager you like on Ubuntu, plenty of lightweight ones to choose. Or run it with no window manager. Just as you can put a bloated window manager on any major open source desktop OS, from FreeBSD to Gentoo.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want a pretty desktop UI, I DEMAND A FUNCTIONAL UI.

They want to force me to use awkward clumsy interfaces because they're "FUCKING SHINY MAN"

Your new design is garbage, and if you want to take away standard features and not even provide an option to turn them back on, ill go elsewhere.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[rubycodez]

hah, bad news for you, Windows UI and the office suite UI have changed, more suck, more bloat, more cycle-stealing unnecessary eye candy, harder to find necessary functions. In fact, i think that's exactly what drives the KDE and GNOME teams now, getting into the billy-bloatware groove. Fuck them all, several nice lightweight window managers out there, choose a distro that puts thought into integrating well with one.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just the hardware. My computer has Linux-supported on-board ethernet. At the start of last year (ish) Ubuntu asked me if I wanted to upgrade to the next release and I accepted. When it finished I had no internet. The ethernet device was being recognised by the kernel but Ubuntu had fucked up the configuration (which was completely standard, I'd never touched it) so the device wasn't getting an IP address. Nothing I could do in the GUI would fix it so I had to resort to hacking config files to get my network access back. Good luck doing that if you're an average user with no internet access.

That is by no means the only upgrade problem I've had and I'm fucking sick of it. But I look forward to hearing how it's my fault.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[rubycodez]

I have Nvidia, my advice is to do the Ubuntu->Xubuntu (xfce4 desktop on fwm4 window manager) changeover, and then plan your migration to another distro. Things have worked much better for me, no weird freezes or "blackouts". Now I just have to decide what my next distro is, maybe Debian or Arch

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so displeased with the latest iterations of GNOME and KDE that I've switched to Xfce now. For me, whether on a straight install or a VM, it's proved for more stable and much less resource-intensive.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[AlXtreme]

You want it to be there, holding everything up and easy to hand, but you don't want it to get in the way.

I think that every Linux distribution and DE developer should have this as a mantra.

For everything that has been developed over the last 10 years, a lot of it has been busywork that serves to only stroke the ego of the developers. Every desktop and every distribution should be easy to use, but most importantly shouldn't get in the way of the user. Switching interfaces (KDE 4, Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3, Unity) might be fun for developers (Ooo shiny 3D windows!) and keep them interested, users just can't give a damn and either are forced to learn yet another interface or switch DE/OS.

Look at Windows 95 -> Windows 7. Anyone comfortable with one can easily switch to the next. The interface might not always be pretty but it is consistent, gets out of the way and lets you get to work.

Just like XFCE4 actually, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[sl4shd0rk]

Use FVWM :)

Agreed..
or Sawfish, or XFCE, or Fluxbox, or Enlightenment....
There are many more.

Ignorance assumes; google enlightens.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

has windows really changed so much in the last decade that everything 'just works' and there aren't 100 little nigglets that will never change?

I develop on, maintain, and install nix for a living...including on any of my friends computers who can't keep their windows in order. After install support ends and they're happily ever after using nix...but i still hear from windows friends VERY frequently about X happening or something complaining, or blah blahb blahblhablhablah.

I must just be incredibly lucky.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[drinkypoo]

I will readily agree that Ubuntu in particular is fairly careless about this, but it's not an inherent property of Linux. I happen to have highly supported hardware now, but if you plan to run Ubuntu it behooves you to buy what will work well with it, just like if you're going to build a hackintosh, or for that matter, if you're going to run Windows.

That is by no means the only upgrade problem I've had and I'm fucking sick of it. But I look forward to hearing how it's my fault.

Ubuntu has done a lot of things I find frustrating, and indeed support for my bluetooth module has become extremely dodgy in a way which I am led to believe is unique to Ubuntu (at least the extent of the problem.) On the other hand, it's started working again recently... And I think I may have had the same problem you had with your network interface, or if not that one, a similar one. I don't think they're perfect. I am willing to go on record as saying so :p

Re:Dropping in Quality

[mattbee]

After screwing around moving from Unity to KDE 4.6 the other day, and finding that simply RESIZING A TERMINAL WINDOW stiffed my whole laptop, I tried xfce and my god - I forgot that's how the desktop used to work! The compositing & whizzy effects didn't work very well on an Apple last time I tried, so god knows why GNOME & KDE folks want to copy it. I'm back to a simple window manager and shell that works, and I'm not going to be talked out of them again for a while.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[gottabeme]

I don't mean that Linux distros are perfect. I, too, have been bitten by the stupid bug in Ubuntu in which, upon upgrading, NetworkManager "unmanaged" the eth0 device, requiring editing /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf to fix it. I've filed or commented on the bug...it boggles my mind that it happened at all.

But I still honestly think the user experience is much smoother, reliable, safer, and plain better on a good Linux distro than on Windows.

As for drivers, the fact is that Linux has better hardware driver support than Windows. It's more frequently updated, and bugs are actually fixed--compared to Windows, where a vendor dumps a driver on a disc or a web site and may never update it again, and may be nearly impossible to contact about it (maybe you can talk to some screen-reading supportbot through a stupid support form on a web site, but Linux has bugzilla.kernel.org, among others). It's not even close to "laughably bad"--you're apparently ignorant or misinformed.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[gottabeme]

You must have been doing strange things or using a very poor-quality distro if "things kept breaking". Debian stable or an Ubuntu LTS release will work reliably for many years, and those are just two examples. I used Kubuntu Hardy 8.04 on my laptop for nearly three years before finally upgrading to Maverick and Natty, and it was far more reliable than any Windows installation. Things didn't suddenly break--it just kept working, even as I applied regular updates.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[DEmmons]

yeah, i figured someone who drops Linux because they don't like the Fedora defaults might be more likely to try a LiveCD (or better, Live USB media) as a weekend project than do another install from DVD sources and install a non-default desktop. When I get a new computer I'll just use groupinstall and load all three desktops on there and see what i end up really using (I'm holding out hope the Gnome devs will come to their senses eventually). As a side note, would you believe I don't have access to a DVD burner or a USB key large enough to put the DVD ISOs on? People like me are probably what is holding Fedora back in that regard. Either way, live media is for many people the first taste of Linux, and also a good way to test whether a release supports their hardware, and people will download a smaller ISO for that if they can. so probably they should just show both prominently and trust people will understand the choice.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[bky1701]

"No; no; and no. All the features from KWin 3 are there. It renders windows fine. Video playback is fine."

Must be imagining things then.

"Sounds like a driver problem to me. My Radeon HD 4770 works fine with Kubuntu Natty. So does my NVIDIA 8400M laptop. I use KDE 4 and KWin and it's fine now, just like KDE 3.5 was--better, even. [...] unless it's a driver problem, in which case you should complain to ATI or spend a few bucks and get a slightly newer or different card that has decent drivers--the info you need is out there"

It almost certainly is a driver problem in part. That is not an excuse, however, to do nothing to work around the problem or avoid it in the first place. In the non-open source world, complaining that something you depend upon has a glitch is not typically a defense for "but my program stopped working!" and if the major programs on Linux intend to be taken seriously, they need to be held to the same standards. That means no hand waving from supporters.

However I'll refer you back to where I said I watched the performance and stability of every major window manager deteriorate... on my old card. From a perfectly smooth KDE3 (and smooth but annoying gnome) to nearly unusable. Getting a new card certainly seems to have sealed the deal, though. Despite repeated attempts, the major problems have not been solved 5 months later.

"1. Linux (the kernel--and yes, you need to be specific when advocating changes) is not what your complaint is about."

I don't feel I do need to be more specific. The window managers and surrounding programs are what make Linux an operating system in the modern world. The fact that in a large part they are all backsliding pretty much negates any attempts at being specific.

"2. A complete change is not needed."

Alright. Say that again in 10 years. I'll be waiting.

"4. However, we do not need mass forks. Good grief, man, do you have any idea what that would mean? What are you going to do, clone every developer and install a brain implant so they will do your bidding? What do you even mean by, "This whole batch of project managers"? You're speaking in terms so broad and vague that your words are meaningless."

Broad terms fit broad problems. It is not one single program or even a collection of them; it is the entire developer culture on Linux which has in recent years abandoned any semblance of professionalism. Aside from the distros themselves (which are not bastions of sanity), I could tell you horror stories of nearly every major project either undermining itself or those arround it. It needs to stop.

"The fact is that hardware support and out-of-the-box configuration in Linux distros has never been better, and it works better and more simply than Windows in most cases."

I'm sure this is the case for the subset you quote. It is not, however, a general fact.

"And the fact that you switched back to Windows simply lends credence to the suspicion that you didn't know what you were doing and didn't bother to find out."

I have used Linux for approximately 7 years, and as my main operating system for 5. I have managed both home-run web servers and remotely hosted Linux servers, contributed to a few projects, and used almost every distro at least once - Gentoo and Arch, not known for their ease of use - for most of the time. The fact I went back to windows shows I actually have a life which requires access to a working operating system, and little else.

But go on and claim I don't know what I am doing, because I am a heretic in the house of Linux, so I must obviously be wrong. And really - that's all your argument boils down to - I must not know anything because I disagree that problems do, in fact, exist. And that they need to be addressed, rather than excused.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[jemmyw]

I also have to agree. Actually Gnome was fine for years, I never got on with KDE, tried XFCE a few times and it was okay, but I preferred Gnome 2.x, does everything, looks okay. Until 2010. Why are they so determined to move us away from the layout that works to something new? It's not just a case of copying what Apple and Microsoft are doing, it's like they're trying to do one better and failing, and things KEEP changing.

Now I'm using OSX. It's fine, not as great as mac users make out, but fine, does everything, works ok, looks okay. So, same as Gnome 2.x.

Now people will say "oh you can just install this that out of the repos, you can configure it to look how it used to", but I don't do that anymore, I just install with the defaults and get used to them so I don't have to remember what happened later on.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh FFS. On one hand, you talk about not wanting to waste time having to configure your system.

Then you talk about how great Windows 7 is with a few "registry hacks"

The KDE4 window management craps all over Windows 7. When I can easily change my focus and raise settings, and when I can save window positions across multiple monitors, then it will reach a level of usability that's been with KDE for the last decade.

Re:Dropping in Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

but if you plan to run Ubuntu it behooves you to buy what will work well with it

Except I don't think it was a hardware problem. I got the impression that Ubuntu had been rejigging the network config to make it integrate better with the UI, I'd skipped a version and they hadn't tested the upgrade.

What's frustrating is not that they are imperfect (I could write a book on things that bug me about Ubuntu) but that really, really basic stuff sometimes stops working.

Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[Zombie Ryushu]

Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz. This has been known for a very long time, whether it be Warzone 2100, Quake 4, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament, or Warcraft 3. These "desktop effects" do nothing but slow the box down.

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[Bambi Dee]

Doesn't GNOME Shell use its own compositor (Mutter) instead of Compiz? It might be required to run.

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[nnull]

Cool story, ever tried to turn off desktop effects in the new version of Ubuntu? It's not in the usual place where you'd find it, in fact, that option is completely gone! So people unfamiliar with the terminal can't turn off compiz so easily. Thus you end up with a completely buggy desktop that's supposed to have been stable upon release (or at least close too).

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[drinkypoo]

Or you could log out and log back in with a Compiz-free session. Or you could create another user and switch to that user to play games. I have a limited memory system running Natty and I installed XBMC on it, created a user with a non-login "shell" not in /etc/shells, set the password to a nice mess of characters and then ate the characters, then permitted that user to log in to gdm without a password via PAM. If I were to install some game that wanted all the RAM on that system I'd make a user for that, too, but that's not that machine's purpose in life.

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[MikeBabcock]

For the longest time I kept a blackbox login for gaming from, because of the very low overhead.

I now do all my Linux gaming from within Gnome, mostly because I'm running 8GB of RAM though.

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[drinkypoo]

I now do all my Linux gaming from within Gnome, mostly because I'm running 8GB of RAM though.

you and me both. I don't even mess with window rules unless the game is visibly slow.

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[nnull]

Why should I have to log back in to a compiz-free session? Why can't it be disabled/enabled on the fly anymore as it used to be? Just seems like a really dumb idea to me.

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[Hatta]

The real question is, why do "desktop effect" have any effect at all when you can't see the desktop? I can see how moving a 3d accelerated window would compete for resources and slow down a game. But when you can't even see or focus on the window, why should it affect your game play?

This is just bad design.

Re:Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz.

[supersloshy]

And the GNOME 3 equivalent:
System Settings -> System Info -> Graphics -> Forced Fallback Mode

Then just log out and log back in. Another interesting thing to do, GNOME or not, is this:

xinit /usr/bin/insert-game-here -- :1

That runs the game in a separate X server, which, depending on your setup, can increase performance. You can switch between it and your standard desktop with Ctrl+Alt+F6/F7/F8/etc, so it's very helpful for games you can't minimize out of, or games that require a different resolution than your desktop is.

If you still want KDE 3.5

[Zombie Ryushu]

Support the Trinity Desktop Environment, it is KDE 3 upgraded to work on Modern distros.

Think again ;-)

[V!NCENT]

More intensive than Crysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4dPuQ4pw70

Re:Think again ;-)

[TheLink]

Crysis is not a game.

Only about 5 people in the world actually play Crysis. The rest use it as a benchmark or to demo/test stuff.

Summary

[erroneus]

The new GUIs are bloated pigs and eat processor and GPU resources.

Yeah, that's about the sum of it. I'm still on Fedora 14 and I don't see any cause to go to 15 just yet. I may never go to 15. If they resolve these problems, I might go to 16.

I hate to say it, but I think it's just about time that Linus Torvalds started wearing black turtlenecks and began influencing vendors and developers to come together under a grand mystical vision. The biggest problem with Windows is the multitude of directions development takes and the "I'm the only thing running on a computer" mentality we see from the likes of HP and other manufacturers and vendors. I think it is clear we are seeing similar mentalities at play here. Are various developers considering more than their scope of work? Are they ensuring that their UI software doesn't inhibit applications performance? Doesn't seem like it.

Re:Summary

[jgrahn]

The new GUIs are bloated pigs and eat processor and GPU resources.

So don't use them. Noone forces you to, not even on a new machine with all of some flashy, userfriendly new Linux distribution installed.

My desktop environment is, and has always been, at work and at home, on Linux and Solaris, on huge 16-core multiuser systems with 66GB RAM and on old Pentium boxes with 0.032 GB RAM, ctwm as a window manager. It has a menu for starting programs, and it has multiple desktops. It's supported everywhere, and always will be. The same goes for fvwm and many other window managers.

Re:Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

ctwm authors say: "Spending hours configuring CTWM is among the most fun one can have, if you ask me."
Linux that just works seems very far away.

Re:Summary

[equex]

Linux is good only if your time is worthless. Sad but true. As a regular geek I like tweaking OS's but Linux takes the cake sometimes. I stay with Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS! Seems newer Linux kernels has dropped support for the SB600 south bridge (a very common ATI chip) as well. Therefore the newest versions of Slackware, CentOS, OpenSuse and Ubuntu does not recognize my hard disks. If nobody fixes that soon i am going to the store to buy Windows 7.

Re:Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but Linus leads only Linux operating system development, not the GUI's or any other software top of the Linux OS.
You can turn to RMS to say something to GNU project what is responsible for GNOME desktop or Canonical who is about Unity.
Or LXDE and XFCE communities or KDE about KDE SC.

Or say RMS that he develops HURD operating system ready and stop choosing microkernel for it so you could get his favorite GUI, EMACS working on it...

Re:Summary

[Fri13]

Erh... what? You go to buy Windows 7 (OEM versions something like $100) and not older used compatible (CPU&RAM) motherboard with other chipset by $20-30 without need to re-install everything?

Do I smell troll here?

Re:Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest problem with Windows is the multitude of directions development takes and the "I'm the only thing running on a computer" mentality

Bingo! I don't want any services running, using polling or ram unless they are absolutely necessary. Yes they can be swapped to disk but that takes time and resources away from the applications I'm using. With mobile devices, developers are suddenly having to think about memory use again -- instead of dismissing it with tired old cannards about disk swapping. Some folks are making heavier demands on their machines than browsing the web and using email, IM and and office software.

Re:Summary

[thejynxed]

His point is that he shouldn't have to be forced to use old, outdated hardware because the developers of his software have shit for brains.

Re:Summary

[StuartHankins]

Every piece of hardware has a lifespan. It's not practical to continue supporting all hardware forever. Somewhere along the line you will either need to upgrade your hardware or stop upgrading your OS.

Depending on your needs, it may make sense to make a VM out of the existing system and migrate it to new hardware (as opposed to a reinstall). There are options to run VM's on hypervisors or on full-blown OS's, so you have some choice there.

get a life

[Anonymous Coward]

You people are a joke. Always complaining about which OS or which stupid WM is best. A modern computer user should simply use what is best for each job or task. You should be equipped with what is best for you. If its an Android device for this, an IPad for that, an XBOX for this, a Linux system for that. Anyone, that claims to be doing everything they need with one device or system ain't really doin much.

Re:get a life

[Anonymous Coward]

who claimed that?

linux is mostly used for doing work, so naturally people expect a desktop that is suitable for getting work done.

natural selection

[Anonymous Coward]

Natural selection applies here. Unusable window managers will die out, others develop and thrive, a benefit to the users (eventually)...
Wishful thinking?

Re: Blaming the manufacturers is pathetic??

[yacwroy]

As much as drivers cause problems on Linux, using them as a defense for Open Source failings to provide stable and quality libraries and programs is pathetic ... It is part of GNOME's job to make sure their library works with the drivers out there.

I have to disagree here. Just because it's your job does NOT mean when you achieve slightly less (even if your progress is more impressive) than your competitors while being severely handicapped by forces outside your control that you can't blame those forces.

If the GFX drivers and/or architectures were open source, linux would have better performance, both natively and under wine.

In fact, in an alternative universe where linux graphics drivers had been open source for years, linux could possibly have the best graphics performance of any OS.

This defense isn't pathetic, it's 100% accurate. And it needs to be talked about, and blamed, if we want to get better graphics. I would go as far as saying this issue is the #1 thing holding linux back.

Just pull the chain already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome shell and Unity...

When will these turds get flushed ?

IceWM

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider icewm. Simple, works, gets our of your way.

http://www.icewm.org/

just gaming?

[Errtu76]

gnome-shell hurts productivity as well, taking away all the nice features that were in gnome 2. Like hamster-applet and being able to easily customize .. well, anything! Sure if you know javascript it's cool, but for those who were used to adding items to gnome-panel the new gnome-shell is horribly complex to use and customize.

It feels like we just jumped 10 years back in time.

Re:just gaming?

[donscarletti]

Gnome2 did that too, partially as a misguided effort for elegance by wholesale removal of functionality, but mostly because it had not been ported/implemented. Gnome 3 will be useable in a year or so. When software is actually used, you can tell what is important.

Re:just gaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try window decorations using Gnome, then try configuring them in KDE.

Re:just gaming?

[Svartalf]

Uh...here's a hint...

If it's not as usable as it ought to be, it won't get used as much- and more to the point, if it's in this sort of state, it probably ought not to have been fielded in the first place...Unity or Gnome Shell. Seriously.

Re:just gaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to KDE, Gnome has always been feature free.

wheres the fire?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to recent benchmarks by Phoronix, using the GNOME Shell will cause a large performance hit when running OpenGL games on Linux.

Sooo...... no problem right?

Switching is the issue

[Sits]

The problem comes when you have to switch from said fullscreen task. Let's say I have a game that is running full screen and while its playing I want to switch to another desktop. If it had an unredirected (?) window I now have to redirect the game window elsewhere which is going to take resources and introduce an unsightly flicker. I wonder if this is why OS X does its tasteful fade before certain games are run.

Perhaps what is needed is a mechanism for an individual program to say "I want to be unredirected" so that things you normally switch between that might happen to be fullscreen are left composited, whereas those that actually need the speed can request it.

Re:Switching is the issue

[shutdown -p now]

I now have to redirect the game window elsewhere which is going to take resources

If you're switching windows, then it's going to take resources either way, simply because compositing has to kick in. "Redirection" itself is not really resource intensive.

introduce an unsightly flicker.

Eh, no. The whole point of compositing is that you only see the end result once it's fully processed - no-one is drawing directly to screen. So first frame would be the uncomposited fullscreen one from the game, and next frame would already be fully composited, representing the start of the window switch animation. No flicker. I don't think the delay (from compositing kicking in) would be big enough to notice, either - not for just one frame.

Perhaps what is needed is a mechanism for an individual program to say "I want to be unredirected" so that things you normally switch between that might happen to be fullscreen are left composited, whereas those that actually need the speed can request it.

So far as I know, Windows has this (for D2D/D3D apps), but I don't see how would it help. You'd still have those transitions when switching.

GNOME 3

[JonJ]

Hid the 'shutdown'-button in the menu, forces you to press alt to reveal it. The logical step was to log out, and then shut down, was the claim of one of the GNOME developers. This is why I use KDE.

Please tag article

[Anonymous Coward]

defectivebydesign - the only way to describe free software

There are no Linux games so this is irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Games would be like BFBC2, WOW, COD, ... No, not available for Linux, next irrelevant issue please.

Re:There are no Linux games so this is irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW runs fine on Linux

GNOME-Shell certainly exposes more driver bugs

[GauteL]

.. with all the different compositing effects going on. And you would certainly hope that this will cause the drivers to improve in the long run.

However, there is a question why any desktop shell / window manager should have any noticeable effect on running OpenGL games in FULL SCREEN. Surely, the desktop compositor and all that jazz should be suspended while the whole screen is being controlled by a game?

Re:GNOME-Shell certainly exposes more driver bugs

[Svartalf]

That's because you're thinking that full-screen magically turns off the context that they're using in the desktop compositing process or that the desktop has quit running- which isn't what's going on. Each separate rendering context will use GPU resources, from memory to cycles if there's any activity going on in the background (Which is surely going on...it's part of why gaming performance on Fi...er...Vista was 20-40% lower at release when compared to XP.). How badly it does this is a noxious mix of the driver and the app using the same, whether it's the game or the compositing engine. It's the price you pay for 3D driven eye-candy.

don't use 3d window managers

[pizzap]

Compositing window managers are just a bad idea for anything besides office work:
* problems with gaming, even in fullscreen mode
* problems with hd video playback, tearing
* problems with suspend

Re:don't use 3d window managers

[drinkypoo]

* problems with gaming, even in fullscreen mode

The hardest part is getting ccsm to work right, it seems to not want to grab window IDs for me any more. WTF? Once you disable ARGB visuals for an application and maybe force it fullscreen then it tends to work.

* problems with hd video playback, tearing

vsync works here.

* problems with suspend

Suspend works here, too. Natty x64, GT 240, recommended driver. External disk on firewire. Seven or eight USB devices. Two internal disks and two optical drives to confuse things, too. Maybe you should buy more credible hardware.

Re:don't use 3d window managers

[Svartalf]

The first one's a given- part of the problem is the compositor, part of it is the GPU...
The second one's less the compositor and more the GPU driver (don't have this problem on all AMD devices and so far none of my NVidia ones...)
The last is more a problem with the driver and you'd have it on select 2D-only setups as well.

Games from the article

[pizzap]

Benchmarked:
* Nexuiz
* Open Arena
* Warsow
* World of Padman
* Urban Terror

I'd be interested in Wine performance: Word of Warcraft with OpenGL, borderless window mode in a dual monitor/twinview setup.

From the no-shit-Sherlock dept

[History's Coming To]

Running a GUI uses system resources. Shock. You seriously expect to run two biggish programs and not have the computer slow down?

Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux has OpenGL games?

Worth reading the article

[AdamWill]

...where you'll see that it's not as simple as the summary suggests (wow, on Slashdot, who'd've thought). If you look at the results for the NVIDIA proprietary driver, Shell keeps pace pretty much precisely with GNOME 2 / Metacity and GNOME 2 / Compiz. It's only with the ATI proprietary driver where there's a clear performance deficit.

The numbers for the free drivers are more mixed, and utterly incomplete anyway because they insisted on testing in Ubuntu for some bizarre reason.

Habit of ignoring return values

[tepples]

Slam "on error resume next" as much as you want, but it's analogous to the typical error-handling paradigm in a C program. Each function returns a value indicating whether it succeeded. For example, fopen() returns a pointer to a FILE on success and (FILE *)0 on failure, and fwrite() returns a the requested number of records written on success and a smaller number on failure. As I understand it, it's an antipattern only if you make a habit of ignoring return values.

No automated usability testing for GUIs

[tepples]

If only Linux devs were as good at designing GUIs as they are at writing solid systems stuff.

A developer can demonstrate that "solid systems stuff" is usable by running an automated test. GUIs don't work that way. Usability testing of a GUI involves human testers, and as I understand it, recruiting human testers who aren't already part of the project's in-group costs money.

(unless they're lucky and someone backports it)

[tepples]

Linux in general has a major problem with its model: the only user-friendly way of installing applications is via the distribution repositories, forcing such people to upgrade their entire OS when they just want to upgrade one application (unless they're lucky and someone backports it).

I was able to update Shotwell ahead of the next release by adding the Yorba PPA.

Then please allow me to rephrase the last parenthetical to capture what I think Cynic was trying to say: (unless they're lucky and someone makes a PPA for their distro version)

And for any of these I had the option of downloading the *.DEB install files

(unless they're lucky and someone makes a *.DEB for the system library versions in their distro version)

But then I might be missing something about how PPAs and .deb packaging work. Can someone clue me in as to how these are or are not the answer?

live resizing

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop effects / compositing slows down opaque/realtime window resizing too.

And just as Firefox got decent on it on current hardware.

I always turn them off and replace the window manager in GNOME.

My Solution

[Lose]

I only use distros that make stable releases, like Debian and CentOS. It may mean I'll be far behind the pack in about three years, might have to upgrade a few things manually here and there on occasion, but that's the price you pay for stability. If you live in the bleeding edge, expect to suffer the consequences of living on the bleeding edge.

WindowMaker

[waibati]

Lightweight, nice little applets...except a couple are kinda fracked now. Been running it since SuSE 5.something.

Re:WindowMaker

[Svartalf]

I'm thinking E17, myself... :-D

Composite anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides the inherent extras GPU context switches, any composite manager will hurt gaming specially fullscreen one, that is why compiz for example lets you unredirect fullscreen windows, no need for compositing if one window is fullscreen, right? (unless you want alpha to be honored)

Fedora makes us hate new stuff

[heson]

Fedora has "first" in its slogan, it adopts prototypes with the hope they will go stable. The result is that we Fedora users learns to hate the fucking crap they force upon us before they are stable and reasonabley bug free: yum, pulseaudio, NetworkManager, selinux, gnome3 and inconsistently named network devices (pci address is sooo easy to remember) were all almost unusable and mosly annoying at first (some are still). The big problem is that gnome3 is mandatory without a fallback to gnome2-metacity for those who does not want to change distro(and hates KDE). GDM does not even has keyboard seletion anymore, and where did accessibility go, I understand why ubuntu is changing DM.

4 letters to solve all your problems

[Anonymous Coward]

XFCE

I wish people would get "unstuck" from the whole Gnome/KDE mess, both WM's have been sucking miserably for the past few years now, and only getting worse, KDE seems intent on packing in as much bloat and as unusable an interface as Windows 7, while Gnome seems obsessed with removing "unnecessary" buttons from the interface. (Like....all the options, minimize, etc...)

Now, there's others too, but XFCE is a current favorite of mine, it's basically "Gnome as it should have been", simple but options to change EVERYTHING

Lots of time to fix this one

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think anybody is going to come after gnome because they are not able to play tux racer.

Everything has been going downhill

[uninformedLuddite]

since xeyes