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diff --git a/content/permadraft/000_gnome_vs_unity.md b/content/permadraft/000_gnome_vs_unity.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..357744d --- /dev/null +++ b/content/permadraft/000_gnome_vs_unity.md @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +Title: Why I still use Unity +Category: Blog +Tags: /dev/diary, linux +Date: 2018-04-04 +Status: Draft + +In early 2016, AMD announced a new graphics driver for Linux: `amdgpu`. +I was incredibly curious what they had been doing and as such, +I installed Ubuntu 16.04 on my workstaton/ gaming PC +and bought an R9 380X graphics card to test the new driver +(previously using an older NVidia card). +Over the following months I played around with custom Kernel modules, +tested driver flags and did *so many benchmarks...* + +Late 2016, after I finished Google's [summer of code] program, I bought a 4K display. +This would turn out to be more complicated than I initially thought. +Using Ubuntu with Unity I had absolutely no issues with the new resolution. +I switched the UI (not just text) scaling to `1.25` +which made elements large enough to interact with without cluttering the screen. +Performance was nice, even with an (at the time) experimental graphics driver. +I was pretty happy. + +[summer of code]: https://spacekookie.de/blog/what-i-have-done-in-gsoc-2016/ + +Until...the summer of 2017, when I decided that I didn't really want to use Ubuntu anymore +and installed Arch on the desktop computer, the same OS I use on my laptop and two servers. +But, this would turn out to be a lot more complicated than initially thought. +There were a few problems that I encountered because of this +and this blog article is meant to both track and inform about them. +A lot of things are happening in the Linux desktop environment world +and maybe this could be considered a snapshot of a changing ecosystem at some point in the future. + +## The competitors + +There were two desktop environments I tried. +`gnome` and `cinnamon`. +Both are Gtk+ based which is why I chose them. +Note that KDE is being excluded for exactly that reason; +I *really* don't like the way that Qt applications look and feel. + +GNOME and Cinnamon both share some common components. +In fact Cinnamon started as a fork of GNOME +but has since moved a bit further in their own direction. +The most important component (in my opinion) is the window compositors: +`mutter` and `muffin` which is a fork of the former made by the Cinnamon project. + +#### Compositor? + +Now, you might be asking: why a compositor? +Can't you live without flaming windows or stupid transition effects? +And my response to that is...well...that's not really all a compositor does. +In a modern operating system the compositor provides windows with an off-screen buffer to draw into, +then later blipping all the windows together onto the screen. +The X server handles the screen and coordinates on it, +the compositor is responsible for laying out the windows, scaling and moving them. +Most bugs and performance problems with graphical desktop environments are at the compositor level, not X itself. + +### The problems + +But anyways, I was being side-tracked here. I was talking about problems. + +- Window performance (moving, scaling, minimising) under GNOME and Cinnamon is jumpy and laggy. + - Cinnamon (`muffin`) actually does a slightly better job at this than GNOME (`mutter`) +- Switching workspaces (either directly or into an overview, then to a new workspace) is laggy + - GNOME is doing slightly better than Cinnamon in this regards. But neither are acceptable + - When I had switched to either of them, I actually stopped using workspace entirely +- Neither GNOME nor Cinnamon support fractional UI scaling. **This is being worked on by GNOME!** + |