I am currently the owner of a 300 MHz Thinkpad 600E, with 192 MB of RAM. With
Windows 2000 and the latest version of Opera installed on it, this computer is
responsive enough for day to day use, and can handle Javascript-intensive
websites like Facebook. With Abiword installed it makes a halfway decent
desktop.
Unfortunately Windows 2000 is obsolete, software support is falling off, and
security is nonexistent. So, the Thinkpad now runs OpenBSD. And for an old
computer it works pretty well... Until I open any GTK2 application. GTK2
applications such as PCManFM render very, very slowly, even when using only
bitmap fonts. Click on a menu, for instance, and it takes 3-5 seconds for it to
open.
That is for PCManFM. Abiword is completely unusable on OpenBSD. That it should
be perfectly fine on Windows 2000, and unusably slow under X11, puzzles me. So,
I have three general questions...
1. What causes this issue?
I don't see why application behavior should vary so hugely depending on the OS.
What's going on behind the scenes?
2. What could developers do about this? More specifically:
- How could program developers write faster GTK2 (or GTK3) applications for
*nix?
- How could GTK2 or GTK3 developers theoretically address performance issues
with the toolkit? Would it be possible, for instance, to have an environment
variable that globally enabled or disabled double-buffering?
3. What can end users do about this right now?
There probably aren't many people using *nix on Pentium IIs, but there is a
visible and annoying difference between GTK2 performance on Windows and on *nix
even on more powerful computers (for instance, my Eee 1005HAB). Using only
bitmap font might work for some apps, but not for ones like browsers and word
processors that use all manner of different fonts. Is there anything I could do
to make Abiword, at least, usable on the Thinkpad?
TIA!
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