On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 8:48 PM Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 03, 2021 at 10:53:32AM -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> Has anybody investigated Jim Salter's claims that Fedora 32 is slow
> to launch applications? Recent article:
>
>
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/ubuntu-core-20-adds-secure-boot-w...
>
> "in my experience, Fedora 32 is noticeably, demonstrably more
> sluggish to launch applications than Ubuntu is in general."
I genuinely wonder if this is due to the launch animation. I know that
subjectively for myself using the Impatience to triple the speed makes my
desktop feel more snappy.
I do not particularly enjoy self-flagellation, but I think that
besides some conscious system-wide choices that could measurably
affect performance for everyone (e.g. compiler flags), we suffer from
a lack of interest towards bugs that happen behind the scenes and
impact a subset of our users. Even in cases when upstream is aware of
an issue and a fix is promptly made available, in some cases it never
finds its way to a supported Fedora version or that happens with a
considerable lag. In the last 4 or so years I remember issues with
tracker, gnome-shell, mutter/clutter and friends on specific GPUs,
default or popular shell extensions and dbus services. A recent bug
which is also related to the topic of Jim Salter's article is
#1916652. SELinux and Flatpak are supposed to be first-class citizens
in Fedora, yet we get bugs like that. There has been a flatpak update
in the interim, but it didn't address the problem. And while on a
16-core system this barely registers (unless someone has SELinux
Troubleshooter installed), I reproduced it on a dual-core Celeron and
it took almost five minutes to get the system to a usable state.