11.10 - Excruciatingly slow Gnome Shell 3.4

[XEtedBear]

I installed Gnome 3.4 shell, using the Ricotz PPA, as explained at http://www.noobslab.com/2012/03/install-gnome-34-on-ubuntulinux-mint.html. The performance is terrible - many seconds between each keystroke response or button click. Is this because I lack the necessary hardware (graphics card as well as processor) or should I be looking for another explanation.

Unity on 11.10 has acceptable performance (but its usability is not to my liking, hence the move to Gnome shell) - so I guess the hardware is minimally OK. Things work fine with Gnome Classic shell - which I am using here - except that it is a bit old-fashioned now.

What things should I be checking to find out the cause of the poor performance?

[Rodney9]

It is hard to know as you didn't say what hardware, cpu, ram, etc, you have.

For slower and/or older machines there are the Ubuntu Flavours of Lubuntu (http://lubuntu.net/) and Xubuntu (http://xubuntu.org/).

If you want something different, but low on resources have a look at the Ubuntu derivative Bodhi - http://www.bodhilinux.com/about.php


Rodney

[markbl]

I installed Gnome 3.4 shell, using the Ricotz PPA,
That's an awkward way to do it though, on 11.10. Why not upgrade/clean install 12.04 + apt-get install gnome-shell 3.4? Then add the gnome3 team ppa and you will have a much more up to date, stable, and supported gnome-shell 3.4 system.

[XEtedBear]

That's an awkward way to do it though, on 11.10. Why not upgrade/clean install 12.04 + apt-get install gnome-shell 3.4? Then add the gnome3 team ppa and you will have a much more up to date, stable, and supported gnome-shell 3.4 system.

Yes, I tend to agree - but would this explain the very slow performance?

[markbl]

Yes, I tend to agree - but would this explain the very slow performance?
From reading around here and elsewhere, IMHO most people seem to find that gnome-shell performs slightly more responsively than Unity. So given what you say above, I would guess you have some kind of installation problem.

[XEtedBear]

It is hard to know as you didn't say what hardware, cpu, ram, etc, you have.

For slower and/or older machines there are the Ubuntu Flavours of Lubuntu (http://lubuntu.net/) and Xubuntu (http://xubuntu.org/).

If you want something different, but low on resources have a look at the Ubuntu derivative Bodhi - http://www.bodhilinux.com/about.php


Rodney

Thank, but I don't want something different. Although not being specific about my current resources, I did say that my system runs Unity with no performance issue from my perspective. Are you saying that Gnome shell 3.4 has such dramatically increased requirements that would cause a typical mouse click response time of 1 or 2 hundred milliseconds to increase to 7 to 10 seconds? A path-length increase of say 30 to 50 times? It's hard to beleive.

I'm using a 2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2, on an Abit A8V motherboard, with 2 GB DDR2 DRAM and an nVidia Quadro 292 (equivalent to FX5200) graphics card with 128 MB RAM on board. It runs Win 7 with MAGIX Audio cleaning (a big CPU consumer) without problem.

[XEtedBear]

From reading around here and elsewhere, IMHO most people seem to find that gnome-shell performs slightly more responsively than Unity. So given what you say above, I would guess you have some kind of installation problem.


I have now done a clean install on a newly repartitioned hard drive and upgraded to Gnome-shell 3.2.2.1 with ubuntu 11.10 - but the performance in Gnome (not Gnome Classic) is still an order of magnitude slower than Unity.

Where should I be looking for an explanation? I cannot find any definitve list of 'qualified hardware' for Gnome 3.