The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:50 UTC (Tue) by cunagcleas (subscriber, #29132)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by sramkrishna
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

> Someone mentioned the use of 3D.. let's consider this. We have graphic
> cards with all this power and we're not using it. When we don't use it
> there is nothing is driving us to make those 3D drivers better. When the > drivers get better we have even new uses for them.

This is the comment that really made me shiver. I bought a Dell Studio laptop early in June 2010 with a Radeon 5000 GPU. I've used Gnome 2 on it perfectly happily, but 10 months later I'm still waiting for full 3D support to appear in the xorg driver (it's present in preliminary but buggy form in xorg 1.10; most 3D applications still freeze the X server). There is no reason to think that conditions are going to change such that the pace of development in this difficult area is going to be any faster in the future than it is at present. In this context, it's lunacy to make something as basic as the desktop environment depend on 3D support.

The actual consequence of this decision will surely be to pressure people in my current situation to use ATI/AMD's proprietary drivers and thereby to decrease the user base for the open-source drivers. This is not going to make the open source 3D drivers better. Rather the opposite.

Very sad.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:08 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (18 responses)

Well it seems kind of broken that we can't have a consistent 3D experience across the board. Every other OS does? Don't think that's a gap that we need to bridge?

Now, I'll grant you, depending on 3D when we aren't quite there is going to painful. We have our own internal arguments regarding relying on 3D features. But the flip argument is that we don't rely on it we have no way to push for a consistent 3D experience in the first place on par with what you get with another OS. You paid a price for your laptop, and you should be able to get your moneys worth out of the hardware you have.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:20 UTC (Wed) by Tara_Li (guest, #26706) [Link] (1 responses)

Why do we *NEED* so desperately this 3D experience? Look at what 3D has done to the gaming industry. It's turned it into a wasteland of Yet Another First Person Shooters, and other similar wastes. All the 3D I really need is generally provided by making the top outline of the box being drawn lighter, and the bottom outline darker.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 8:55 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Just about everything that is wrong with the mass-market video game industry can be blamed on it being largely run by a handful of large publicly listed companies or their subsidiaries, turning it into a case of "we need you to write a game we know how to sell", with only a few "rockstar" designers like Peter Molyneux or Will Wright really getting free rein to do whatever the hell they like because the companies can sell the damn thing by slapping the rockstar's name on the front cover.

3D is a red herring in that argument.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:38 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (3 responses)

I don't want a 3D desktop, period. I have a 3D capable graphics card so that I can run glxgears occasionally. Once upon a time, I used to play Quake 3, but that's about it. I'm not a gamer and I don't care (at all) about 3D desktop effects, or any of these things. The only reason I can think of for using 3D effects on my desktop is to be distracting, or to look cool in reviews/demos, etc. It's ok that these features exist, but many of us are not asking for them :)

It's a similar story with things like smooth-transition from bootloader to X with KMS. Sure, it's a nice pretty thing, but I don't care at all (the first thing I do is turn off this and go back to a real bootloader setup). One thing I would have liked to see is a Mac-style graphical panic screen. That would actually be useful, but the rest is just pretty dressing to me :)

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 8:29 UTC (Wed) by alexl (guest, #19068) [Link]

I think using "3D" to describe this is a bit ingenious, as it doesn't at all describe what e.g. gnome-shell does. Its nothing like Quake 3.

However, what gnome-shell does is use the graphics card hardware in the way that modern graphics accelerators really work, not like the previous generation of graphics hardware worked.

Current graphics cards have none of the traditional bitblit or drawing primitives in hardware, and the "native" way to program them is with an API like OpenGL or Direct3D. That doesn't mean you can only program a 3D game using them, it just means that is how you program them.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 19:59 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link] (1 responses)

so you claim you use Mac OSX on weekends because it does things the Linux desktop isn't sufficient for your needs and yet when anyone tries to improve the Linux desktop, you moan like a kid. Go use Mac OSX full time if you like it so much.

You are using a 3D desktop on Mac OSX every time you sit at it. You are seeing a smooth boot when Mac OSX boots. Why be a whiner when Linux tries to be better?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 21:14 UTC (Wed) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

we might need some working 3d-enabled graphics/video drivers first ;-)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 4:40 UTC (Wed) by cunagcleas (subscriber, #29132) [Link] (9 responses)

> You paid a price for your laptop, and you should be able to get your
> moneys worth out of the hardware you have.

I did get my money's worth. I don't want the `3D experience'. I'm completely happy with my 2D laptop.

But that's neither here nor there (just my preference). More important is that linux has always been about giving users *a choice* about such things and control over their working environment. And it's disappointment about that fundamental point that runs all through this thread. I don't want to stop using GNOME, but if you push this through, then my choice will be between (i) giving up on GNOME (ii) turning to the proprietary drivers. Me, I'll give up on GNOME first, but I'm sure I'm in a minority.

> But the flip argument is that we don't rely on it we have no way to push > for a consistent 3D experience in the first place on par with what you
> get with another OS.

The Xorg developers are already working flat out on the 3D drivers for these cards and they've made amazing progress recently. But the open source drivers for ATI and NVIDIA cards are probably always going to lag behind the proprietary drivers by about a year. This decision on your part is not going to make AMD/ATI any more cooperative than they are at present, nor is it going to suddenly produce a flood of money to hire new xorg developers. What it will do is push yet more users to the proprietary drivers (and thereby give AMD/ATI an incentive to be even less forthcoming than they are at present).

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:41 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (6 responses)

btw, I think it's *not* "neither here nor there" when it comes to the 3D stuff. It's a key point actually. Many of us could care less about 3D effects, smooth transitions, and all of these bells and whistles we are being given in return for losing even basic functionality that was there before. It's like we're getting all these great prizes, but I for one never entered the prize draw. I just wanted my desktop to keep going as before.

I make no pretence that I don't look at these things mostly from the point of view of a corporate/enterprise user. Users like myself care more about having a consistent experience that is well understood and easily adjusted than they do about having any of these bells and whistles.

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:20 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

The problem with this is that current graphics cards generally no longer accelerate 2D graphics in hardware. All modern OSes (except Linux) use 3D primitives even for their desktop drawing (as opposed to »real« 3D stuff such as games) already, anyway, so there is no point for graphics card manufactures to actually go to the trouble of including accelerated 2D graphics, and a reasonable incentive to leave out stuff that will just clutter up the chip while it isn't even being used.

So, from the point of view of a Linux desktop environment developer, it's either stay with 2D drawing even if it is unaccelerated and you need to jump through hoops to do it at all, or else move over to 3D primitives for desktop drawing, which will be accelerated even though the desktop doesn't actually »look« 3D. Since using the accelerated 3D primitives enables all sorts of other cool and indispensable things that 2D drawing doesn't give one (like a bunch of virtual desktops on the faces of a cube with video playback windows hanging across the edges), this decision is mostly a no-brainer.

As for the lost basic functionality, that's a different kettle of fish altogether which is nothing to do with 2D vs. 3D. If the GNOME developers, in the process of upgrading their software offerings, want to provide us with a radically changed (I'm deliberately not saying improved or worsened – as a KDE user I wouldn't know) user experience then that is their privilege. Users can always vote with their feet.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:35 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (4 responses)

2D still tends to use less power than 3D desktop though. Which means it's certainly still being implemented efficiently in hardware.

But hey, who wants longer battery hardware? Look at the shiny...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:46 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (3 responses)

That's not true. When Clutter is rendering animations, it actively throttles itself to avoid drawing faster than the VSync rate of the monitor to save power and avoid visual tearing. When Clutter is idle, the graphics hardware is completely idle. So since we're avoiding CPU-intensive expose events with a compositor, you actually likely have a net power savings, at least with Intel graphics. AMD and NVidia haven't yet managed to idle low enough and so they are frequently tied to an Intel graphics implementation. On proprietary OS's, if a game is not running, the Intel graphics are used. (We cannot do this in Linux, yet. Though it is on the horizon.)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:54 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Compiz with GNOME2 certainly used more power than normal metacity on my intel graphics laptop. I'm glad to hear that clutter tries to make efficient use of the hardware.

For the sake of clarity, are you saying that clutter ought to be more energy efficient than 2D metacity on modern hardware generally? That seems to be the implication given you're contradicting my comment.

Re dual-graphics and switching, I thought airlied has got that working?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:59 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

> For the sake of clarity, are you saying that clutter ought to be more energy efficient than 2D metacity on modern hardware generally? That seems to be the implication given you're contradicting my comment.

Yes, that is what you should find. It's likely to be very close but a good test is a bunch of open windows and then dragging one window around the desktop rapidly.

> Re dual-graphics and switching, I thought airlied has got that working?

Mm... I thought I was up to date on this but perhaps you know more than I do. My understanding until now has been that dynamic graphics switching requires the same Gallium state tracker in both drivers since the entire hardware state has to be moved from one graphics card to the other. Perhaps this is the milestone that has been reached to which you are referring?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:03 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

I've only got login/out switch working,

dynamic switching where it powers up/down the second GPU for running games is something I'm playing with now.

Complete switch at runtime for all X apps is also on the list but harder.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:31 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

Linux is not about choice. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-Ja...

Before you comment on the AMD/ATI situation you should probably be aware of the company stance on the issue: http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/

And actually, the proprietary drivers have turned out to be quite buggy.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 13:41 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

Linux is not about choice

...in the opinion of ajaxxx. Now maybe you happen to agree with him. But that doesn't necessarily make it right. Sure, he makes some valid points. But he also overlooks the fact that for some of us, it is (at least partially) about choice. By removing that choice, you're pissing off a non-trivial subset of your current users. Maybe you'll gain more in the process. If so, you might deem that to be a worthwhile exchange. But that doesn't make it any less painful for those of us that you're pushing away.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 8:55 UTC (Thu) by gleb (guest, #55308) [Link] (1 responses)

By requiring 3D you basically prevent GNOME3 to be usable inside hypervisor.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:11 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

This is not right due to two different reasons. GNOME 3 has a fallback mode which can be used in such circumstances and virtualization work is being done to support hardware acceleration (3D is a misnomer. GNOME Shell is not really 3D)

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-March/...