Re: [Tails-testers] Poor desktop environment choice and heav…

Hi,

sprick@??? wrote (25 Dec 2015 15:06:46 GMT) :
> I have been talking with two other users in the Tails IRC channel and we
> all agree that the choice of GNOME 3 as the desktop environment for Tails
> 2.0 is a poor one given its intended purpose.

Thanks for testing and sharing this feedback!

On the short term, it's basically impossible to change this entirely
without (re-)investing a huge amount of time and energy, so in this
thread I'll try to focus on the specific problems you're experiencing:
I bet we can fix some of them :)

Longer-term, if still relevant once the most severe actual bugs have
been fixed or worked around, we could have the more general underlying
discussion on the tails-dev@??? mailing-list. I will personally
focus on getting Tails 2.0 out of the door first, before I participate
in this discussion, though.

> GNOME 3 (particularly the
> Compiz animations and other 'fancy' graphical features) is somewhat
> sluggish and slow on our reasonably modern western computers.

Which exact animations are slow in your experience? I think we can
easily disable some of them.

Also, it would be good to get more information about what exact
hardware such problems arise on: such problems are generally Linux
kernel or X.Org video drivers problems that can be fixed, rather than
GNOME Shell bugs per-se. Filing detailed bug reports with WhisperBack,
and asking frontdesk to forward them to me, would help :)

(Technical detail: we do not include Compiz, the visual effects we're
discussing are a feature provided by GNOME Shell.)

> The boot times are also much longer.

I would appreciate hard numbers measured on the exact same hardware
(computer and boot medium), so that I get a better idea of how this
problem is severe in practice. Here again, please provide
hardware specs.

> Isn't systemd supposed to speed them up?

Not really, at least when the operating system is on a slow storage
device such as a USB stick.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri