Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 24, 2009 20:46 UTC (Fri) by sebas (guest, #51660)
Parent article: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

I'd be interested in how the scaling and preview of the desktop is done?
Is that the arrival of Clutter already? Will the new GNOME shell require a
video card and driver that is able to do compositing? Are there fallback
options for those that cannot or do not want to use compositing?

to post comments

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 24, 2009 21:42 UTC (Fri) by jayavarman (guest, #19600) [Link] (15 responses)

Yes, it is using Clutter. My understanding is that there won't be fallbacks, unless someone comes up with an implementation that doesn't jeopardize the current design and leanness of the code.

This is 2009 after all and a new desktop shouldn't compromise on old hardware. For older hardware you have alternatives like XFCE.

Why would you not want to use compositing?

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 24, 2009 23:31 UTC (Fri) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] (4 responses)

Well let me tell you something. Here I have some freakin' Nvidia 7800GT, and my thought was that with a card that powerful, a 2D-composited desktop with some simple 3D effects should totally fly with, like, 300 fps. But here I am, with KDE4, and that doesn't look too smooth at all. Yes, it's bearable, even to the point that I decided to leave this hush-mush on, but jeez, sometimes I just want to run IceWM for a change. It's SO much more responsive. Which makes me wonder, is it really 2009 or what?

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 2:03 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

Have you tried the latest Nvidia drivers? With 180.29 and up, I have had no problems with KDE4 (I have a GeForce 8600M GS).

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 9:32 UTC (Sat) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] (2 responses)

That's what I use right now. Somehow I've got the feeling that my notebook's GeForce7400 is better with compiz than my desktop 7800GT.

Point is, compiz and friends are quite demanding, be it year 2009 or not.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 30, 2009 7:33 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

They are not demanding, NVIDIA just sucks. To say it in short. Even Intel graphics with maybe 1/10th of processing power and bandwidth of your 7800GT works pretty fluently compiz.

By the time these applications are ready, either a) NVIDIA fixes their drivers (very probable, but specific card owners might be left in the cold), b) Nouveau will come to the rescue from binary blobs c) change to FLOSS-friendly manufacturer (AMD, Intel, maybe Via soon).

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 30, 2009 8:25 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]

Actually, my experience with Intel was a bit worse than with Nvidia. Anyways, drivers or whatnot - my main point is that right now Linux desktop isn't at the place where it can just silently enable Compiz and suppose everything would work nicely. The "try another card" approach doesn't pass muster here.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 10:06 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (9 responses)

Because you want to use 3D? Unless you're one of the roughly 2% of people
who can use DRI2 and kernel modesetting, and possibly even then,
compositing and other apps trying to use OpenGL really don't get on, IIRC.

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted Apr 25, 2009 10:44 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (8 responses)

Unless you're one of the roughly 2% of people who can use DRI2 and kernel modesetting, and possibly even then, compositing and other apps trying to use OpenGL really don't get on, IIRC.

Do you believe that'll be the case 2-3 years down the road? There are enough support to develop this thing now and if you'll be unable to use DRI2 and kernel modesetting when GNOME 3 will be ready it'll be your own fault...

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted Apr 25, 2009 12:21 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (7 responses)

Aha. So everyone has to replace their current machine to use GNOME 3?

I remember when Linux worked well even on machines more than three years
old. (I generally upgrade only every eight years or so, because it takes
that long for the old machine to start to seem slow.)

It's nice to know that this is being comprehensively forgotten.

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted Apr 25, 2009 16:03 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I generally upgrade only every eight years or so,

Yep. All our desktops at work run Linux, and all of the machines are at least 5 years old. If GNOME stops working on our hardware, we'll switch our non-technical users to something else (probably XFCE.) The developers already stay away from GNOME, so no problems there.

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted Apr 25, 2009 16:36 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (5 responses)

Have no fear. This will be like when that awful spatial fad swept the Gnome community. http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html

Gnome discovered (after shipping unfortunately) that spatial actually sucks rocks in general usage. The distros turned off spatial for one release, Nautilus backpedaled, and within 6 months everything was back the way it was.

I also submit Longhorn for your consideration. Microsoft explored and marketed all these exciting new technologies, then jettisoned them all before shipping Vista.

Let the Gnome guys play for now. Hopefully they hit on some really neat new features. And hopefully the distros will paper over their mistakes.

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted Apr 25, 2009 20:28 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (4 responses)

> Nautilus backpedaled, and within 6 months everything was back the way it was.

Do you only use Ubuntu for your desktop?

With Fedora and Debian, at least, spatial mode is still the default, and always have been the default since that was introduced by Gnome. As far as I know Ubuntu is the only one that does browser mode by default.

(Of course users can select one or the other)

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted Apr 25, 2009 21:45 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (3 responses)

Ack, yes, you caught me. Debian and Centos on the servers, Ubuntu on the desktop. I try Fedora every few releases but I run into graphics (Radeon 3650) and printer (Samsung ML2510) driver issues, too lazy to fix em.

Microsoft and Apple ditched spatial almost a decade ago; I thought Linux had finally caught up. My condolences to anyone who still has to open and drag around 22 separate windows just to find the song you want to play. :)

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted Apr 26, 2009 14:23 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh, Samsung's proprietary printer driver is awful. Ditch it and just use
pxlmono...

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted Apr 27, 2009 8:13 UTC (Mon) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]

"I try Fedora every few releases but I run into graphics (Radeon 3650) and printer (Samsung ML2510) driver issues, too lazy to fix em."

What bug numbers? Seems strange that the same or similar bugs would be present in various releases of Fedora but not also affect other distributions.

That would be a remarkable coincidence, since Fedora stays close to upstream and isn't likely to have broken those things in distro-specific patches.

GNOME 3 is not ready yet

Posted May 1, 2009 15:54 UTC (Fri) by kov (subscriber, #7423) [Link]

Finding songs to play is done by Banshee, for me. Why would I use a file manager for that? =)

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 24, 2009 22:30 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (4 responses)

> Are there fallback options for those that cannot or do not want to use compositing?

Probably OpenBox. Which is my current fallback when I get tired of Metacity's McHappyMeal-ness.

----

As far as hardware goes.. At the current time; All ATI cards since the R200-days should be 'ok' for handling compositing desktops. Similar for Nvidia, as long as they are supported by the proprietary drivers.

You won't be able to do it with the Intel 8xx series chipsets which some got sold with the Pentium-M era laptops. The 915 and 910 Intel chipsets can barely do it comfortably. But with modern UXA/GEM/setup anything 945g and newer should have zero problems managing a compositing desktop. The performance hit from running something like 'compiz' is negligable.. and as the drivers support for acceleration improves (like getting rid of needing software rendering for any part of EXA or whatnot) then performance should only get better.

I am running a Dell Mini-9 with 1.6ghz Atom and 1GB of RAM and it uses the 945g-era video chipset. It can run OpenGL composition quite well.. Well relatively well.

Mind you this is Fedora 11 beta with latest-and-greatest-everything. It took a while for Fedora 11 folks to get the drivers beaten into a good enough shape that performance is decent enough. It seems like the Ubuntu 9.04 folks missed the boat a bit with that one, but I am not sure.

The only problems I have are when watching large flash video. If you use UXA and then force Adobe's Flash to use OpenGL* then on the Mini-9 you can play Hulu.com videos well if the video is not maximized.

*
~]# cat /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
WindowlessDisable=true # a little bit more stable
OverrideGPUValidation=true # a nice performance boost

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 5:02 UTC (Sat) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link] (3 responses)

> The performance hit from running something like 'compiz' is negligable..

In my experience, on a laptop with GM45 Intel graphics (less than a year old), running compiz results in a significant performance hit for OpenGL applications (Google Earth, in particular, becomes unusably slow) -- and besides, every combination of compiz+mesa versions that I've tried over the past 6 months causes random X lockups, unsuspend problems, and so forth.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 11:25 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

These are just bugs that needs to be filed and fixed. Working around them is not a long term solution.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted May 3, 2009 12:30 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

which is what the KDE developers said when they released 4.0 - and the
result was an amount of shit which, if it were real, would cover the US.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 20:38 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

There is a bug with how Linux does it's CPU speed scaling. For some reason it won't scale the cpu up to make graphics run faster.

If you set the cpu speed at maximum or choose the 'performance' governer then it will make things quite a bit faster. For example in ManiaDrive I average around 50-70fps with my cpu at 800mhz and 150-190 when its at 2.0ghz.

However even with that your still going to see some performance drop. Like I said the only thing that I've found that works well so far is Fedora 11 beta... and even then it took quite a bit of time before they got it working well. As the new code paths mature I have no doubt that they will be able to exceed the capabilities of the old versions of the drivers.. especially when the drivers gain more capabilities.

----------------------

The trade off here is that with a composited desktop OpenGL applications prior to UXA/GEM/DRI2/etc was completely unusable...

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 22:05 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Even Ubuntu's netbook launcher uses Clutter -- if netbooks can do it, so can your laptop/desktop!

On a more serious note, as long as the backend rendering libraries themselves are not inseparably tied to Clutter, I'm sure there will be an alternative desktop shell that you can use.