Every now and then I think I should go back to using #GNOME because it would be simpler than my own weird mix of Mate and i3 and look a lot nicer, and then I try one of their apps… I just tried out their official Markdown editor and it starts running n...

Sam Whited

@gnomelibre yah, that's the one. It's not every gnome app, but I've had similar experiences with a lot of them (and with just using gnome itself. I don't know if it's a python thing (which I think is what Apostrophe is written in, IIRC), a GTK thing, or what, but if you have to have a recent computer to use a text editor we're *really* failing way more than I thought we were. Honestly, my computer isn't latest top of the line, but it's pretty good too.

julian

@[email protected] honestly I'm not sure whether it's GNOME or not but a significant part of it is snap.

The calculator app on Ubuntu takes 4-5 seconds to open.

The calculator app fer chrissakes

Jeff Fortin T.

@sam @gnomelibre Gimme a sample file and clear reproduction instructions and I will performance-profile it as a public service, if you can't.

Sam Whited

@nekohayo @gnomelibre I don't really know what you'd need for this or how this works in the Python/GTK ecosystem, but thank you! That's really very kind of you and a great service!

Jeff Fortin T.

@sam @gnomelibre I'm running 15-years-old hardware and I made the latest versions of GNOME Shell + apps fast on it over the past year of profiling and reporting.

You'll need to be MUCH more specific than your description above. Provide a way to instantly test your exact data and context (distro, software versions, packaging format, graphics driver, graphics server…). The basics of https://handbook.gnome.org/issues/reporting.html

No guarantees, as Sysprof doesn't do Python yet; manually profiling Python would be a pain

Sam Whited

@nekohayo @gnomelibre I can provide os and package info (https://share.riseup.net/#7evaE8je0xyLw4tVqqDuRg) but I'm not sure about the rest of it; despite having been in this industry in the past, consider me a non-technical user for the purpose of this as this is all well outside my field. There's no specific steps to reproduce, just from the moment of opening it many things are randomly very laggy. Animations seem particularly bad, and this is not a particularly old or slow computer (i7 vPro 8th gen, 16 gigs ram).

Jeff Fortin T.

@sam OK, so Intel GPU, not nVidia?… you're running on Xorg though, that'll slow you down a bit.

I see GTK 4.14.3 in your list of packages with Apostrophe 3.0. I'd bet the problem is that this version of GTK is running its new "NGL" renderer. It's the sole reason I haven't upgraded to Fedora 39 / GNOME 46, as I'm too scared of the glitches and perf regressions, with the amount of issues with that "gpu renderer" tag mentioned in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6411

Try this trick: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=294168

Sam Whited

@nekohayo thank you, that seems to have done it! Animations are still unbearably slow but something as simple as pressing the menu button doesn't seem to be freezing up anymore!

Jeff Fortin T.

@sam Which animations where? And you are running Intel graphics (or at least open source AMD graphics), not nVidia, right?

Worst case scenario, you can disable most animations globally with GNOME Control Center's "Reduce Animations" accessibility setting, but animations "shouldn't" be slow if the graphics stack is in order.

Sam Whited

@nekohayo like when you open and close panes and what not. Actually, I thought I had turned off animations, so I'm not sure if it's ignoring that setting because it's got a bunch of custom widges, if that only applied to gtk3, or if I just re-installed my system at some point and forgot to re-do that (or if I just made that up entirely). I should try to figure that out again.

I think it's intel, but I'm not sure? I didn't do anything special, so I'm assuming it's whatever the default is.

Jeff Fortin T.

@sam Also use https://developer.gnome.org/documentation/tools/inspector.html to check the global properties of the app's graphics stack, and see if you see any mention of "LLVMpipe" in there. If so, that would mean the app/GTK is somehow running in software rendering mode, without any GPU assistance, everything on the CPU, and that's terribly slow. Also watch out if it's running Vulkan (instead of GL) on a GPU that is not actually Vulkan…

Sam Whited

@nekohayo whoa, this is pretty nifty, I had no idea this was all built in here! I don't see anything about LLVMpipe:

GL_VENDOR=Intel
GL_RENDERER=Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2)
GL_VERSION=4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 24.0.6-arch1.2
Vulkan Device=None

morganist

@sam that's WebKitGTK for you, in a text editor nonetheless. i like ghostwriter for writing markdown, it's written in qt and uses a QtWebEngine, but i feel like it's noticeably snappier.

Sam Whited

@morganist ahhh, it's an entire web browser? I didn't look, but there is no trend in computing I hate more than that… figures.