- "Smoother pointer movement: performance improvements mean that the pointer will move smoothly even when the computer is busy."
That's a very short description of what sounds like maybe a very interesting optimization? There've been giant HN threads arguing about why mouse pointers are not smooth.
> it uses a CRTC vblank deadline based approach to postpone posting KMS updates until as late as possible, and uses this method to achieve lower latency cursor movements, as well avoiding potential cursor stutter when the main thread is too busy to manage completing a frame in time.
Mouse movements no longer happen on main thread.
And the RT KMS thread delays posting the update until just before a deadline, to make sure the mouse is samples at the last possible moment! What a neat & straightforward & simple hack, sampling late. I'm sure this kind of stuff is what Good game devs have been doing for decades but still amazes me to read this.
Yep in gamedev it's called frame pacing. If you have a 16 ms frame budget and you know rendering will take about 4 ms, you can sleep for 10 ms, sample the latest possible inputs, and kick off rendering just in time to make the deadline.
If you estimate wrong, you start missing frames. If you don't do any frame pacing, the game always has a little bit of preventable input lag.
I only learned about this a couple years ago, but I think I felt it years ago - One of my games just seemed to feel better with a 10 millisecond sleep right after I submitted each OpenGL frame. In a world where you can't control hardware and OS lag, that 10 ms of free lag reduction is wondrous.
TBF, for the longest time XFree86/XOrg handled pointer events/updates in a signal handler. The only time you'd have pointer stutters in that epoch of X on Linux was because interrupts were disabled for too long (`hdparm -u` ring a bell for anyone?).
At some point this was moved to an input thread, probably around when glamour happened. You can't do complex junk like OpenGL calls from within a signal handler.
Some things were easier to do better when X implemented the full graphics stack.
Nowadays in a Wayland world the compositor is still hamstrung by what execution contexts it can call its underlying GPU-acceleration API from. So I doubt we'll see the same kind of lean and mean signal handler approach of ye olde X. The best you can probably do there is a dedicated high-priority thread.
It's not just Linux, it's everyone really, and for many things (not just Amigas). There are many places where people have failed to learn from the past, and reinvented the wheel badly.
Gnome's polish is probably the best of the Linux DE's but it removes far too much configurability and features (in the name of simplification) for my tastes. I'll stick with KDE. Each release gets more and more polished, and I'm very much looking forward to Plasma 6 and the Wayland Goodness it will bring.
Having said that, I think the competition between them makes both of them better so I'm glad that both exist. And where they depend on common libraries, both benefit once again from the contributions from the other's contributions.
Although I do prefer look and feel of the GNOME and most of the software I use is GTK, I use Plasma as well. The main issue I personally have with GNOME is it's dependency on 3rd-party extensions. For start, it's missing clipboard manager and notification tray that you get with Plasma out of the box (as well with other DEs and OSes). You want the dock? Again, you need the extension. Then you upgrade and at least one of the extensions is lagging behind.
No kidding. If I can get same battery life as macOS on my MacBook, trackpad gestures, OS-wide Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts and Microsoft office I'm not going back. Proton has made it possible to run previously Windows-only games.
There are numerous examples on freedesktop.org. Right near the top of the page you've got things like D-Bus and NetworkManager in there. Then there is FreeType, Wayland, and so on.
Looks really good, will be updating soon. It's crazy there's a free, open source desktop that showcases the latest tech ... and yet we choose to constrain ourselves to MacOS and Windows by default.
You have to use the terminal to set your desktop background to a plain color.
Speaking of the terminal, it also has poor Unicode support compared to macOS Terminal.app (though to be fair, VTE-based terminal applications seem to be the best on Linux).
I switch between Gnome and KDE pretty regularly on my primary workstation because I occasionally get bored and procrastinate by telling myself that I should check out the latest thing on the other side.
It makes literally zero difference to my productivity. If it affects your productivity, it's a skill issue. Telling people they "haven't thought about it" is a social skill issue.
I'd say that maybe the fact I didn't have to think about it is a good sign. To me it means that the desktop is out of my way. I can customize it for my liking and I don't need to keep fiddling with it. Sometimes the overly minimalist approach that GNOME is taking bothers me a bit, but not too much.
I also use KDE sometimes and I quite like it but it feels a little bloated and a bit unstable sometimes. Still love it though but I'd rather use GNOME as my daily driver.
I'm still trying to get used to tilling window managers and 8 have been giving Sway a try, but the radical metaphor change takes some time to get used to.
IMO the so called "phone UI" is better than the "traditional desktop UI" where you have toolbars with 100's of small buttons. Even on other platforms, apps are moving to the new UI paradigm which makes the UI less cluttered.
Use it again! It's much better now. I promise. Not perfect, but pretty nice. Cohesive integration could be better, but it's getting there. I swear.
(Been on Unix ~18 years, whatever "Unix" even means nowadays, or Windows for a decisive portion of my adolescence, and occasionally beyond... unfortunately.)
To each their own. I love Gnome 3+. It's getting better, faster, and smoother every update.
I wish they weren't so Gnome about things like CSD/SSD and GTK weirdness, and libmutter can use some work to get the Nvidia's shit drivers in check, but the UI is a lot smoother than any alternatives I've tried.
I'm very finicky with the way my desktop works, for example, I want each window to always start maximixed in the same monitor, and I want its siblings/dialogs to follow suit. I want a different desktop background for every monitor. I want independent docks for every monitor, each with different widgets, and a few other small things.
Gnome is rock solid, but it can't do any of these things, and some aren't even possible to do manually. KDE does, but it's less stable, so every couple of years I try Gnome again, only to switch back after a couple of months. Gnome is not ugly, it's actually elegant in its simplicity, but it's too plain, too vanilla.
I’m looking forward to upgrading to Fedora 39 soon, but am _really_ wary of GNOME 45, for two reasons:
- The GNOME team has been progressively decimating themeing (no, I don’t like the libadwaita default look, never have, never will).
- Every time there is a GNOME upgrade half my extensions break because they decided to change some baseline assumption in the APIs.
That said, it is the nicest DE for me UX-wise, since it requires only a couple of tweaks to satisfy my Mac-centric reflexes. But the first few weeks of a new release are always a pain because of subtle breakage that should never gone past the beta stage, and I don’t see a lot of ongoing feedback to the desktop experience being acted upon.
I do need a map with navigation on my tablet and phone, though, and I'm glad Gnome provides that.
Fractional scaling and backwards compatibility with old system tray icons are annoying issues, but Gnome has had configurable keyboard shortcuts for years now.
> Gnome has had configurable keyboard shortcuts for years now.
No, since the moment they retired the shortcuts CSS. There is no replacement for it. You may only configure WM shortcuts and local shortcuts in select apps.
That's a very short description of what sounds like maybe a very interesting optimization? There've been giant HN threads arguing about why mouse pointers are not smooth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34095032 ("24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse", 253 comments)