[hvis]

Unity was very good in a lot of respects. Both its UI elements and its performance. Unfortunately, Unity 7 depended on Compiz somewhat heavily, and when it came to writing a replacement of the full stack, Canonical didn't manage to execute.

But have you been following last year's improvements to GNOME's performance and responsiveness? A lot of it is Canonical's devs bringing their experience from Unity.

[bgorman]

Gnome 3 runs like an absolute dog on my Skylake notebook using Ubuntu 19.10. I don't know what metrics you have been looking at, but as a regular user I "feel" that the UI is constantly lagging during regular use. I didn't think it was this bad when I was using Fedora in the past, but that was a wayland based installation.

[RMPR]

Enabling the BFQ scheduler reportedly boosted the responsiveness https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1738828 and I can't remember where I saw someone saying it had a positive impact on Gnome in particular.

[bgorman]

Thanks, this is definitely worth a shot

[Pmop]

Weird. I'm on a ThinkPad x230 Ivy Bridge and Gnome (3.36) is butter smooth for me (Ubuntu 20.04, fresh install). I did the minimal installation though.

[bgorman]

What were you using prior to 20.04?

[Pmop]

Windows 10.

And Void Linux/ i3-gaps before that.

And Linux BBQ / OpenBox before that.

[hvis]

It's better than 19.04 was. :-)

20.04 should be better still (I've yet to upgrade).

[5-]

it's not a fair comparison, but for many years i have been running i3wm+dmenu+xterm as my desktop environment (and dwm instead of i3wm before that), and not even once i had given as much as a thought about performance of that. it just responds to my commands... instantaneously?

there is no need for latency-hiding animations and subsequently trying to make them run smoothly on the gpu if there's no perceptible latency.

[RMPR]

The only caveat is the initial configuration which makes many people reluctant to use i3 or WMs in general.

[eitland]

> Unity was very good in a lot of respects. Both its UI elements and its performance.

I hear a lot of praise for Unity and I'm the kind of person who enjoy trying out new stuff and Linux Desktops is no exception.

For me, Unity was broken because of alt-tab (behavior and lack of configurability).

It might work for everyone else but when I want to switch back to the last or second last thing I worked with I want that done now.

I don't want to look at the tab switcher to ponder what to do next, just alt-tab, done.

This has worked consistently in every Windows since at least 3.1 (the first my family owned), and in every Linux desktop environment I've used except Unity and Gnome 3. And in Gnome 3 it was at least configurable.

This might seem trivial to a lot of you but to keep focus I keep one application maximized most of the time. I don't use them side by side. Then when I need to reference something (Jira, vendor documentation etc) I alt-tab. Same goes for slack.

[hvis]

I also Alt-Tab a lot, and don't remember this being a problem. Either I got used to its behavior quickly, or it was configurable too.