
Ubuntu 19.10: It’s fast - feross
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1623735
======
cheald
It's worth it to try KDE Plasma rather than GNOME. It's lighter and faster
than GNOME by a fair margin, and it's far more customizable. GNOME is great
for your OS X convert who isn't used to anything being customizable, but KDE
is an utter delight for everyone else.

~~~
garaetjjte
Unless something changed recently, it is weird to say that GNOME/KDE is
heavier/lighter when they are both insane resource hogs. I use Xfce or MATE
nowadays.

~~~
ambrop7
Plasma/KDE is mostly great, but a major thing that GNOME and Xfce still do
better is GVFS and GVFS-FUSE. That means I can browse to smb://something or
sftp://something, double click a file and it just works whatever the
application is (e.g. play in VLC, edit in VS Code). This has never worked in
KDE where only KDE apps can open remote files (and even that has bad
performance).

~~~
mceachen
GVFS/GIO is nice, but at least on LTS, it can be a bit rough (with i/o errors
under load, at least during PhotoStructure imports). Also, somewhat
frustratingly, the GIO system mounts network file systems with paths that
include a colon character, which breaks standard PATH parsing.

------
boudin
A bit more information about the work done around performances and what's
still being worked on: [https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-
perfor...](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-performance-
of-gnome-shell-3-34-in-ubuntu-19-10/13095)

~~~
ZeroCool2u
This is a _great_ read with extremely clear breakdowns of what are clearly
complex bugs.

------
sandGorgon
> _Most improvements in 19.10 can be attributed to the latest release of GNOME
> 3.34, the default desktop for Ubuntu. However, GNOME 3.34 is faster largely
> because of work Canonical engineers put in_

At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now. Secondly, Fedora 31 has had
Gnome 3.34 for more than a month now. This article does seem like a
disservice.

~~~
garaetjjte
>At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now.

Performance isn't only reason for that. Mainly bizarre GNOME3 design
decisions: lack of taskbar, tablet-like interface, atrocious file picker
dialog, etc. Also maintainer attitude to themes and extensions, here's one
rant from 2012: [https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-
rotti...](https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-
threes/)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Are you seriously claiming that Gnome hasn't changed at all since 2012?

~~~
garaetjjte
No, but most critique is still valid. Weird tablet-like UI, missing features.
(like that absurd file chooser which lacks prefix-search in current directory)

------
simosx
There is an article [1] by an Ubuntu engineer that describes the performance
boost.

For Ubuntu 20.04, there will be extra work for performance boost on high-end
computers.

For Ubuntu 20.10 there will be extra work for performance boost for low-end
computers.

1: [https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-
perfor...](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-performance-
of-gnome-shell-3-34-in-ubuntu-19-10/13095)

~~~
jagger27
I'd like to see them quantify/qualify what they mean by low and high-end. I
would have considered low-end to be a dual core i3-class CPU with no dedicated
graphics but by the time 20.10 is out I'd be more inclined to say a quad core
is low-end. Obviously a Threadripper is high-end today and will be even
higher-end next year, with 64 cores perhaps.

~~~
farisjarrah
When Canonical says low-end hardware, I'm inclined to believe they mean actual
cheap low-end hardware. Ubuntu has supported the raspberry pi for years now. A
raspberry pi is much much lower end then even a bottom of the barrel i3
processor

------
rebelwebmaster
Meanwhile, Gnome still can't manage to display a desktop wallpaper when
running at 4k resolution and 200% scaling.

[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-
shell/issues/1175](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/1175)

Kind of hard to get excited about perf improvements when relatively basic
functionality manages to be broken for at least 7+ months and counting.

~~~
proverbialbunny
This is why I am on Mint. Turn off CPU vsync, turn on full-frame composition
(which uses the vsync on the graphics card), and bam! silky smooth 60fps, with
quick responses and no lag. I haven't tested it, but I imagine this new "fast"
version of gnome will still feel slower and choppier than cinnamon when vsync
is handled on the gpu. (I just wish it was the default setting.)

That and I'm not a fan of the side bar in Ubuntu. Most people agree, Mint's
desktop UI and UX is just more pleasant.

------
politelemon
I don't normally try non-LTS, I decided to give 19.10 a go, and I noticed the
performance boost. What was a real pleasant surprise was that my NVidia GPU
drivers were automatically installed, something I've always had to do myself
before.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Glad to hear it. 18.04's NVidia on Wayland situation is so broken it's
ridiculous. It's a major headache for any kind of machine learning
workstation.

~~~
opencl
NVIDIA on Wayland is still ridiculously broken and NVIDIA has zero desire to
fix it. The "solution" is to continue using Xorg.

~~~
nickserv
Unless you need CUDA, the solution is to use AMD.

------
ZeroCool2u
Currently running this on my XPS 13. Works beautifully and honestly battery
life is insane. _Much_ better even than just 19.04. It's easily on par with my
2015 MBP. I'm getting almost a week out of a charge using it for a few hours a
day running just Chrome, PyCharm, and Signal most of the time.

~~~
KitDuncan
I think I am doing something seriously wrong then. My 2015 XPS 13 only lasts a
couple of hours.

~~~
egdod
4 years is long enough for lithium batteries to decline pretty noticeably.

~~~
ZeroCool2u
Sorry, the MBP was my old work computer. I don't have it anymore. I was
referring to its battery performance at the time.

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Whenever I see claims like this "Old Hardware" seems to invariably mean "5
years old" and "fast" means "not as perceptibly slow as the bloated crap, but
noticeably not as fast as actually fast things".

~~~
dannyw
I’d give it a try yourself. It’s really fast.

------
kingosticks
I've been running it for a while and it's great except it still takes a
ridiculous amout of time the time to launch gnome calculator. Ever since they
changed it to a 'snap' it's been awful.

Edit : It looks to be pretty easy to swap the snaps for regular debs:
[https://blobfolio.com/2019/10/psa-upgrading-to-ubuntu-
eoan-m...](https://blobfolio.com/2019/10/psa-upgrading-to-ubuntu-eoan-might-
convert-some-local-apps-to-snap/)

------
tsar9x
While Gnome 3.34 is great, there is still some basic (for me) functionality
missing (talking about Wayland, because I can't stand screen tearing on Xorg):

\- no option to set mouse scroll speed

\- hidpi support

\- no tray icons (and extensions doesn't work great...)

\- notifications system

\- gestures/trackpad

I'm planning to move to MacBook to see how it is, in case I need more power, I
will just use my workstation/gaming PC (with Nvidia, right now I'm using AMD
with the only reason being Wayland support, because hardware is much worse).

------
vilhelm_s
Based on my experience from using Ubuntu, it's perhaps more accurate to say
that the Ubuntu 19.04 (and earlier) compositing window manager is slow enough
to make new hardware feel old. It's extremely noticeable.

The blogpost they link to says as much:

> Gnome Shell 3.32 in Ubuntu 19.04 feels slower than Unity and other desktops.
> If you have a slow machine then it won’t run smoothly. Perhaps more
> surprisingly even if you have a fast machine then it still would not run
> completely smoothly.

([https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-
perfor...](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-performance-
of-gnome-shell-3-34-in-ubuntu-19-10/13095))

~~~
zozbot234
Well, before 3.30 GNOME wasn't even remotely _usable_ , so I would still call
that progress. Make it work, _then_ make it fast.

------
audidude
Wow, I've never had so much of the hard work myself, colleagues, and
individual contributors have done misattributed to one company.

For those interested in what actually was improved, and some attribution for
those involved, see [https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2019/11/22/a-review-of-
gno...](https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2019/11/22/a-review-of-gnome-shell-
mutter-3-34/)

~~~
Jasper_
Come on, Christian. Daniel van Vugt at Canonical did a huge number of
performance fixes on mutter and gnome-shell this release. Some of those I had
to personally vouch for because your colleagues wouldn't land them otherwise.

~~~
traverseda
Can you elaborate on that a little? I've always gotten the impression that
gnome is actively hostile to new contributors and anyone who isn't part of the
"inner circle", so I'd be interested in hearing more about what that actually
looks like, from someone who isn't very anti-gnome.

~~~
Jasper_
As someone who went through the pipeline, GNOME is not actively hostile to new
contributors, and is actually really friendly, as long as you agree with the
overall design and direction of the desktop. In one of the cases, I'd say that
what happened was that there were two competing methods for how to fix a
performance issue, and some of the maintainers involved were not graphics
experts, so I was able to guide the team to determine which version to land,
which happened to be the version by Canonical.

Canonical's version:
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/189](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/189)

Endless's version:
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/402](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/402)

This is much more well-understood now that open-source is popular, but it
wasn't understood very often back in the day, which is that maintainers have
the power to say "no", and do so frequently. If you are a new contributor and
you try to change the design, you won't have a great experience.

~~~
traverseda
I mean sure, but a lot of open source software is driven by the idea that
developers "scratch their own itch".

It's a bit of a pain that so many patchsets need to be maintained separately
for common "scratch my own itch" type features in GTK, instead of the feature
just getting buried in a gconf setting somewhere. There are an increasing
number of little things in GTK that require you to do things the "gnome way"
or maintain separate patch-sets. Any attempt to figure out how we can satisfy
both parties gets disregarded pretty quickly.

Obvious examples include thumbnails in the file-picker or type-ahead instead
of relying on gnome's tracker or slow file-search.

I guess there's some subtle difference between "hostility" and "refusal to co-
operate with other stakeholders" that I'm not getting.

~~~
Jasper_
Thumbnailing is one of those things that's difficult because it's a desktop
service. Windows / OS X has one desktop, so there can be a tighter integration
between the toolkit and the desktop. My recollection is that thumbnails in
GTK+ work fine assuming you have the GNOME thumbnailer running, but lots of
people use GTK+ outside of those environments, and it doesn't work there.

This is usually when someone says the word "standards" and expects everyone to
go "oh, we haven't thought of that!", but standards take a lot of work, and if
there are disagreements in the design and direction of the system, no standard
is going to be made. My recollection is that thumbnailing was just one of
those things.

~~~
traverseda
Sorry, I think I misspoke. Thumbnails do generate properly and show up in GTK
file picker, without needing any kind of hard dependency on gnome or any
desktop services. That's not actually a hard problem, it was standardized way
back.

The actual problem is this 15 year old bug:
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233)

This right here has collected most of the patches I'd consider to be
important, and the maintenance requirements do not _appear_ to be significant.
Of course it is work that doesn't directly benefit the gnome DE.

[https://github.com/krumelmonster/gtk3-mushrooms](https://github.com/krumelmonster/gtk3-mushrooms)

But it's important to note that GTK is not gnome. It's really important to
recognize that as gnome fights harder to become it's own platform, that other
platforms do make use of GTK. The gnome-foundation being completely inflexible
on the needs of other projects means that at the end of the day it is really
hard for other people to collaborate on GTK.

Gnome can do whatever it wants, but the idea that GTK is only supposed to
serve the gnome project does seem like a bit of a betrayal. That seems to be a
pretty common thought:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK#Criticism)

------
gambiting
I tried upgrading a fresh installation of 19.04 to 19.10 and it permanently
broke itself during the upgrade process. Twice. So it seems like there's some
issue with the upgrade process at the moment.

------
mikhailt
A little off topic but mentioned in the article, does anyone know why macOS
does feel slower than Windows and Linux on the same hardware? Does it have to
do with the 2x scaling Apple is doing all the time?

~~~
proverbialbunny
I don't know what hardware you're using or what "slower" exactly means here,
but OSX has always been silky smooth at 60fps for me, focusing on that nice
feel, more than an instant responsiveness. To be fair, MacOS is still highly
responsive, but it's polished, causing an intentional minor frame delay, which
increases smoothness.

Windows, on the other hand, is responsive, but has incremental stutters from
time to time. It happens in video playback, to the point when I'm out and
about and at a mall a tv with a video is playing, I can tell if it is on
Windows or Linux. It's more obvious in video games which has these
microstutters all over the place, starting with DX9.

Linux has page tearing, and depending on the desktop can be highly responsive
or not at all. Many linux desktops can be manually configured to turn on gpu
acceleration on the desktop so the gpu handles the vsync and everything else
making it butter smooth like OSX with more responsiveness, but you have a
trade off at that point between how much responsiveness vs how much polish you
want.

(When you drag your mouse across the screen, it skips pixels. When you're
dragging a window, does the compositor follow the mouse flawlessly, skipping
around, or does it smooth behind the mouse a frame or two making it look
nicer?)

Maybe you're running a 4k60 external monitor out of a 2015 MBP. In that
example, you'd be maxing out your GPU on the desktop, potentially causing a
delay when dragging windows around that may or may not be noticeable. On this
hardware setup, Linux and Windows are both lighter weight and will be more
responsive. ie, ymmv depending on your setup.

~~~
mikhailt
I tested this with my iMac 5k with 32GB of memory and Radeon m295x (4gb of
vram). The apps start slower than what I noramlly see on Windows but I don't
have a lot of the same apps, so it's hard to compare. I agree that it has to
do with responsiveness but I don't know, sometime I prefer the responsiveness.
I do see stutter in Safari once in a while, it is not always 60fps for me.

The screen is set to default for display.

My previous 2012 rMBP was the same difference between Windows 10 (Bootcamp)
and macOS.

iOS on my iPad Pro (first gen) is very responsive and smooth at the same time.
I wish I could get the same experience on my Macs.

------
LeoPanthera
GNOME 3.34, which the article attributes most of the speed increase to, has
been available on Fedora for a while already.

But I wouldn't think that running GNOME on "old hardware" is a good idea
anyway. Except for very generous interpretations of "old".

~~~
sosodev
Yeah, I’ve been running the latest Gnome on Arch for awhile and it’s really
stellar performance upgrade. It’s worth noting that later releases of Gnome
are now targeting less resource usage now that they’ve worked out most of the
critical performance issues for high end hardware.

~~~
markosaric
Same here. Been running it on Debian and it looks and works great. I'm
relatively new to Linux (moved from macOS last year) so don't know much about
the past, but I really don't get all the negative comments about Gnome the way
it is today. It's a perfect way for a macOS user to get introduced to Linux
too.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Most of the negativity is on ideological grounds - they don't like that it is
"opinionated" and offers minimal customisation compared to KDE. And there's
some backlash against the fact that a lot of the UI uses Javascript. (Though
recent benchmarks have shown that it doesn't cause any kind of performance
hit.)

Frankly, I don't think that Gnome is particularly un-customizable, it just
does it in a different way, using extensions that you can install. I do
occasionally try out new versions of KDE to see what I'm missing, and I'm
always surprised how buggy/crashy it is.

------
undersuit
I upgraded my Intel Compute Stick to 19.10 Lubuntu last month from 16.04LTS.
It's running great and I didn't have to mess with any of Ian Morrison's
wonderful tools he made for running Linux on the Intel Atom platforms. Not
saving my resolution settings across reboots is a slight issue, but that is
something I can fix. After reading the article maybe I should try Gnome again.

~~~
slantyyz
Does that mean you didn't need to use a boot drive with a 32 bit boot loader?

I've been having trouble getting any of my sticks (one an ASUS Vivostick, the
other a no-name) to even boot a Linux installer off USB or CD, but that could
be because I've been trying to get Ubuntu Server, which may be part of the
problem. If the Ubuntu desktop path is better, maybe I'll try that.

~~~
zozbot234
Fedora supports 32-bit boot out of the box, even on actual 64-bit OS's. The
Debian multiarch image does as well, but the 32bit-boot/64-bit OS arrangement
fails if secure boot is on, so make sure to turn that off beforehand in the
firmware UI.

AIUI, Ubuntu doesn't support this.

~~~
slantyyz
After seeing @undersuit's comment, I decided to try the Ubuntu Server 19.10
ISO and it booted fine off a USB drive.

Good to know that no tricks are required (such as these:
[http://www.linuxium.com.au/home](http://www.linuxium.com.au/home)). I had
been banging my head against the wall trying to get older versions of Ubuntu
Server installed on my stick PC.

~~~
undersuit
Good to hear!

------
mmcnl
Am I the only one who doesn't notice a huge difference between 19.04 and
19.10? I wouldn't have noticed if these articles didn't explicitly mention the
performance improvements to be honest.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Using Gnome3? If not, it doesn't sound like the fixed performance regressions
would apply.

------
mixmastamyk
Reading between the lines I gather this release fixed a performance regression
in a previous Gnome3 release. So it is not a clear performance boost in the
absolute sense.

I suppose those of us on Ubuntu Mate, KDE, XFCE, etc can disregard that aspect
of the article. Unless there are some perf improvements in the kernel or X as
well?

------
klyrs
The review doesn't touch my longest-running gripe with Ubuntu... does it still
run tracker/nautilus/baloo in the background, sporadically choking on a
developer's filesystem and hanging the entire UI? Because I'm really not
impressed by a clean install being snappy.

~~~
pmontra
Tracker does run in the background. I disabled some of the things it indexes.
I don't experience any slowdowns.

Nautilus is there, it's the file manager. I installed Nemo because I want to
keep using type ahead in the local folder. I still get Nautilus in the file
dialogs and tracker in the full screen modal opened by the super key (is it
the dash?)

Baloo, no idea what it is.

Overall 19.10 it's faster than 16.04 on the same laptop. It's 3 years of work
and a clean install (dual booting for now, two different SSDs.)

~~~
ac29
Baloo appears to be the KDE equivalent of GNOME's tracker. Not sure why both
would be running on the same system.

~~~
doubleunplussed
It wasn't implied that they were on the same system. The grandparent was
either implying that they don't remember which is which, or that which one is
running depends on which Ubuntu flavour (gnome or KDE) you're running.

~~~
klyrs
Indeed, I've used multiple flavors over the years, and these have been
culprits on various occasions. I'm not an expert on OS's so the uncertainty I
conveyed was deliberate.

------
grizzles
I had to downgrade. There is a regression and you can't run it off a USB stick
anymore.

------
Frenchgeek
Or maybe (not so) current hardware is insanely fast, and windows really slow:
Just to see if it could work I tried to install linux on a Chuwi Hi8
(windows/android atom based chiinesium tablet. Not enough space for windows
now and really ancient android) Ubuntu was so slow, by the time I finally
managed to begin copying files to the disk, the tablet ran out of battery.
(And the thing eat more power than its charger can provide)

(as for the result of the experiment: it can work, but the amount of work
needed was way beyond what I was ready to invest. And not exactly stable)

------
FullyFunctional
The Raspberry Pi 4 info is out of date AFAICT. The initial release had non-
working USB on my 4 GiB RPi4, but fixes came a few(?) weeks ago that apt
update (over ssh) picked up. As best I can tell, it works flawlessly now.
Mindbogglingly, I can comfortably do serious development work on $55 computer
(albeit overclocking recommended).

At the other end of the spectrum, it's also running on my 5K iMac and that it
just worked.

On the Dell XPS 15, the audio didn't work out of the box, but there's a common
workaround for that.

------
DanCarvajal
Imagine if that Unity experiment didn't suck up five years of time.

~~~
fabrice_d
Imagine that they learned a few things working on Unity and they applied them
to improve Gnome Shell.

------
mileycyrusXOXO
Maybe it's time I give Ubuntu another shot. Unity was too bloated for my
tastes and Gnome has always seemed kinda subpar. Lets see if the gnome changes
can change my mind.

Does Ubuntu still have advertisements for Amazon search and whatever other
crap they were pushing?

~~~
thibran
Unity2D was super fast. So sad that they didn't continue to develop it, and
instead went for GNOME. If Ubuntu GNOME is now quick, good – it took a long
while to get there. It's important for Linux and FOSS to have well known and
widely used software. Without Ubuntu, we would probably have no Steam Linux
client.

~~~
zozbot234
> So sad that they didn't continue to develop it

You can run MATE with the Mutiny desktop preset, if performance is an issue.
It's essentially the same workflow as on the old Unity 2D, and it isn't even
Ubuntu specific.

> Without Ubuntu, we would probably have no Steam Linux client.

SteamOS is actually based on Debian, and Steam is even in the Debian non-free
repos.

~~~
Shorel
> You can run MATE with the Mutiny desktop preset, if performance is an issue.

No. In comparison it is unstable in ways that make Gnome look like NASA
software.

It often forgets it is Mutiny and no other of the presets.

Quality wise it is still way below Unity.

------
anewguy9000
so i just installed it, and like, right away i notice every app always opens
in the top left of my screen and their positions are not remembered?? :(

speed seems irrelevant if windows cant be arranged lol. google is coming up
empty. is this a bug?

~~~
anewguy9000
update for posterity: windows seem to open in some kind of a logical fashion,
so they use all the available real estate of the screen dynamically. its
pretty cool! generally i prefer it cuz i never have to move new windows out of
the way. but it would be nice to have a setting to remember some windows in a
fixed position. as is the case w gnome lately many such settings are
hidden/removed for the sake of simplicity. cheerz!

------
useryman
Does wayland+gnome work with propietary nvidia drivers yet?

I've been using unity since 18.10 because gnome always blackscreens on my
1070. (I'd been using it since it became the default, for the sake of support.
But preferred unity)

------
crispinb
It's fast and also magical, transmuting my laptop into an effective heater.

------
anthk
If you like Ubuntu and Gnome services such as the account manager, install
Ubuntu Budgie, it will run much faster. Try getting the future LTS release, it
will be safer.

------
akerro
I noticed absolutely no difference after upgrading from 19.04. Do I need to do
anything?

~~~
proverbialbunny
Is your monitor running at 30fps? I imagine in that situation the changes
wouldn't be noticeable.

Also, upgrading from 19.04 to 19.10 isn't super stable, so it could be it
didn't upgrade properly.

~~~
akerro
It's a Dell latitude laptop, screen is at 60Hz

------
karmakaze
TL;DR

Ubuntu 19.10: Gnome 3.34 is fast, like “make old hardware feel new” fast.

------
paulcarroty
Be honest, Ubuntu feels fast 'cause people compare it with bloatware/telemetry
overflowed Windows 10.

If you wanna a really FAST distribution - try Clear Linux from Intel.

