On 02/03/2012 09:00 PM, Tod Hansmann wrote: > I have run Win XP on both and it seems to completely out-perform the > popular Linux variants. Why are things not responsive and zippy when > I'm doing nothing but browsing the web or editing text files?
One of the main reasons why you are perceiving a speed difference is not necessarily speed, but latency. X11 is an asynchronous. So sometimes this manifests itself as very stuttery resizing of windows as the content struggles to resize itself. There have been a number of things proposed to fix this, including a special X11 extension that would allow widget toolkits like GTK or Qt to synchronize things like redraw. And by sync I mean sync the frames to the screens' refresh rate or something like that. On OS X, things appear silky smooth because everything is synchronized to the screen refresh rate. Moving windows does not tear the window, and resizing windows is smooth (though even just a few years ago this was actually very slow on OS X). Compositing managers on Linux smooth out the display and make it seem faster as well. In the olden days you could drag a window across another window and it would visibly redraw the underlying window. Now of course each window has its own backing store, which makes some things like dragging windows faster and smoother now. So things are getting better, but yes, I agree, Linux desktops still don't feel quite as "fast" as the competition. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
