Comment by munchlax

Comment by munchlax 7 hours ago

9 replies

What are you guys doing with your desktop environment that you need it to be performant and multithreaded?

Aren't all computers plenty fast enough now?

Twirrim 6 hours ago

They should be, but with the speed and resources available on machines these days, people don't spend as much time optimising every little thing, and even make trade-offs, e.g. Gnome 3 desktop has the spidermonkey javascript engine in it, and an increasing numbers of components are using javascript.

pjmlp 4 hours ago

Depends on how much Electron crap is running alongside the desktop.

shmerl 7 hours ago

Not necessarily the environment, but compositor itself must be fast. It shouldn't introduce any delays that would affect for instance input latency in its processing loop. Gamers would for sure complain.

Someone could totally make it do everything in a single thread and not think about that, which would be pretty bad.

  • winrid 6 hours ago

    That doesn't require multi threading.

    • nasretdinov 3 hours ago

      On a high enough resolution, especially with 5K-6K displays a single-threaded software-only compositor is absolutely going to have horrible performance. Even on Full HD it's actually quite noticeable

    • shmerl 4 hours ago

      If it does almost nothing - may be not. Otherwise you'll be doing something in the main thread which will take time, unless you also squeeze concurrency (i.e. multitasking) into one thread and then again, why not use multiple threads already.

wiseowise 6 hours ago

“Don’t you guys have fast computers?”

  • munchlax 4 hours ago

    My computers are old and slow.

    They run XFCE just fine.

gigatexal 7 hours ago

We are called power users ;-) we can do more than one thing or ten things at a time and want things to be responsive and fast and not drop frames and not crash the whole session when some plugin fails etc etc. you know, a well designed thing