Bob Doolittle wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: >> Peter Tribble wrote: >>> I would concur. Once you've got into GNOME it's not too bad. >>> But am I the only one to think that's really not good enough? >>> After all, I remember a SPARCstation 2, and that *was* zippy. >>> I, for one, want that zip back. >> The funny thing about light-weight environments is that as their >> userbase increases, so does their feature set, and inevitably people >> wish for the 'good old days'. >> >> Rather then abandoning GNOME, I think the right answer is to find >> ways ways to improve it, as inevitably, when current 'light-weight' >> solutions began adding the extensive accessibility, >> internationalization, and other that GNOME has (and is required in >> many cases) you will inevitably lose some of that 'zip'. >> >> And I say this as a user of GNOME since 1.4.x (or earlier; been too >> long to remember).... > > All good comments (and I say this as a Linux 0.9 user long before > GNOME or CDE ever showed up :) ). > However, we tried to push the "light" agenda at the Gran Canaria > Desktop Summit recently and the GNOME leaders just didn't seem > particularly interested. Who knows, maybe some of it got through, only > time will tell but it doesn't look promising at the moment. I missed the desktop summit, at what level did we push this? If we presented anything on this, can you provide link? I was at OSCON09 and even though it isn't as desktop focused, I did learn that the moblin project is working on some of the performance issues we've seen. For example, they noticed 350 gconf lookups during metacity start and the fact that each required a DNS lookup. So DNS caching made a noticeable improvement in desktop startup. (though I wonder if metacity really needs 350 config settings!) Between netbooks, Nokea and other mobile device gnome users, Sun Ray and Linux thin client projects, you'd think we will eventually have enough sway to discourage Gnome projects from allowing some of these more egregious performance killers.
One of the troll dead ends on the original thread mentioned the relative lack of OpenSolaris desktop market share. It would help us if we could point to even a rough order of magnitude on the number of GNOME on thin client deployments on Solaris because I'll bet it exceeds the number of 'opensolaris on laptop' distributions which, unfortunately seems to be our focus. > > It's the "shiny object" syndrome - it affects developers too I'm > afraid. It's a real problem in the FOS Community. It's always easier > to get people to work on a shiny new feature instead of tightening up > code or reducing memory consumption or network bandwidth. After all, > hardware just keeps getting faster, so "why bother" is the usual > argument. Good point, for the same reason it is difficult to get a commitment to resources for improving performance until it gets so bad that it results in a Sun or customer escalation and then it's usually much more expensive to fix. By time we scale up enough to see these bugs, the community has moved on and we end up spending more of our time and money patching legacy code that the maintainer isn't very interested in anymore. I hope we can continue to push gnome light both here and in the community, but for it to really sell at a GUADEC/Summit, we have to provide benchmarks, some patches and more benchmarks to show what can be done to make GNOME more scalable and this requires more resource commitment on our side. > But IMO we seem to be able to out-pace increases in hardware speed > with code bloat, and it doesn't serve the users (or the environment) > when they keep having to chuck out their old hardware and buy new just > to keep up. We're all so used to upgrading gear now we hardly think > about it - it's just expected. It'd be fantastic to have an > opportunity to reverse that trend a bit. > > -Bob If you made it past the troll section of the original thread, eventually you'll find some sound ideas in encouraging Gnome developers towards more sustainable 3 layer multiplatform approach and other good practices such as those which l10n has adhered to. After all, good code is much easier to port to any platform. On our side, I think we should, at the very least, come up with a more coherent approach to working with Gnome's X86 fat client isms and linux'isms in GNOME code so we won't sound like a bunch of old luddites who hate any change. For example: Issue: Window manager's hard dependency on OpenGL Why is this a problem?: Thin clients don't have 3d accel hardware. Workaround suggestions: Q:Why not add OpenGL primitives to clients? A:Requires more power and complexity on the hardware side of the clients... Q:Why not make it a soft dependency? A: ? Issue: Hard dependency on Policy kit Q:Why is this a problem? ... We could work with the gnome bug team and use Bugzilla for these kinds of issues. Ideally we would work with FreeBSD/NetBSD/Moblin and other non-linux non-fat environments so we could tag some issues as broken on multiple platforms. > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
