Re: [Tails-testers] Some criticism about the 2.0 beta

> Hi,

Hello.

> I assume you mean the graphical animations provided by GNOME
> Shell, right?

Yes.

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

Pretty much all of them lag a bit but especially the boot animation
where the desktop expands from the middle.

> 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 :)

I've used the 2.0 beta on two machines, I've experienced the lag on both
of them.

The first machine is a Lenovo Thinkpad x200, using the integrated
graphics in the Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor.

The second machine is Asus N53J laptop which has Nvidia GeForce GT 425M
graphics card.

The laptops aren't very new. But they're not much older than what I
expect the average Tails user to have.

I don't experience any video lag on these machines with older versions
of Tails or other distributions so the video drivers shouldn't be an
issue, it's just that GNOME 3 is designed for the latest hardware and
their aim is not to work flawlessly on older machines. It's Tails' job
to judge if they want to only support the latest ant the greatest or do
they want to make a distribution for everyone who wants to be more
secure and anonymous.

For a DE that is more friendly to older hardware but is still very
newbie friendly I suggest the devs take a look at the MATE desktop
environment.

> I suspect that addressing them will also address this one at the same
> time.

It's not the lagginess of the animations what makes me dizzy so
addressing that won't help this. I also feel similiar dizzyness when
using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

> Note that such animations have usability advantages in my opinion:
> seeing a smooth transition from state A to state B conveys better what
> is happening, than having state A brutally turn into state B with no
> transition at all. I don't want to enter this debate too much right
> now, but I figured it would be useful to let everyone know that we're
> not merely discussing 100%-subjective aesthetics.

While the animations might be helpfull to the new users it should also
be considered what the target audience of Tails really is. Will a newbie
start using tails as their first distro? Most likely a newbit that will
choose Tails has someone there to help them, that's why they'd make the
choice in the first place.

> > Also having an option for more
> > keyboard driven DE/WM would be nice for powerusers and
> > especially those of us who only have the thinkpad nipple as
> > our mouse.
>
> Can you please have a look at the list of actions accessible with
> keyboard shortcuts in GNOME Shell, and let us know what exact action
> you are missing? It may be that it's easy to add support for it :)

As I said in my initial feedback I don't know what GNOME can do with
keyboard shortcuts as they are not presented to me after booting up and
I don't use GNOME on any other machine. I also have no desire to learn
to use GNOME, I'll much rather start another X session on another TTY
with a better environment that does't treat me like I was braindead.

> I stopped reading the log when it turned into a very broad discussion
> about GNOME Shell and Tails strategy. If there were specific,
> actionable bug reports to be found later on, then I would appreciate
> if someone extracted them for me. Thanks!

The others said they sent out emails with the bugs so I don't think that
work has to be repeated. The log was just to show how dissatisfied
others were as well.

Happy new year :)