The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

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hm11
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The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by hm11 »

Hello folks,
Some time ago i dived deep into getting awesome performance out of my linux box. I looked at hardware, bought some, i looked at workflow modifications and etc. Then i arrived at the desktop environments. Now i had been using kde plasma for some time now and i gotta say its very nice and it plays well with jack, as in i dont recieve much xruns and if i do, is not enough to interrupt what im doing. Recently, ive been looking at gnome and in terms of usability for me, it looks like it can serve me better than kde.. I mean the gnome apps to be exact are well integrated and are very 'complete' specially since im contemplating making a mobile workstation. Now, i know i can get the apps and use kde at the same time but i highly prefer to keep everything in uniform, itll drive me crazy if i dont.

A while back i looked at a blog of someone (cant remember his name) that did latency tests for pretty much all the main DEs and it resulted in kde doing better than all of them, while xfce followed (maybe lxqt afterwards or about the same) and then gnome. Now the argument for gnome was that it introduced alot of xruns due to gnome's desktop acceleration, mutter its window manager to be exact, made things worse. I believe i also read somewhere that mutter is single threaded so that definetly contributes. Anyways id like to know if there is anyone here using their pc with the gnome desktop to record vocals or midi, or make beats, etc.. Whats your experience with it? Do you have a battle with clicks and pops and latency? Does the latency argument still hold up today (as of 9/16/2020)?
Last edited by hm11 on Wed Oct 21, 2020 2:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by nick87720z »

Its hard to read such bug monolithic paragraph, it could be split to some smaller paragraphs.

You are unlikely to find gnome users among pro-audio people. At least gnome3.
It could make sence to try mate or cinnamon.
And, whenever possible, avoid running applets or services, written with javascript or python - they can really contribute into resources usage.

Or just stick to whatever is used by default in all the proaudio distros like kxstudio and ubuntustudio. Enlightenment is (was when I looked) choice in AVLinux, but I disliked it because it integrated bad into other DE as pure window managers.

As for me, I used xfce4 most of time thanks to its configurability, but now moved to xsession, running xfwm4+picom, tint2, dunst, sxhkbd, and using rofi for desktop menus.
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by hm11 »

You're right! So i have indeed broke it down into two paragraphs.. Anywho, i gave gnome a chance and it was absolutely horrid. Still Not suitable for audio. I gave it a spin after i saw this video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFKWstGO0QY
Which is not very indicative of what is trying to say.. I mean you could do it; just take out gnome and the experience would indeed be justified.
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by robin »

I use a Gnome-Shell based desktop on Arch and cant complain. I've checked Openbox/Tint2 xinitrc-Session for performance tweaks, and while it did reduce DSP-Load a little it wasn't worth the workflow-downgrade. The only major customization is that I use lightDM instead of gdm, maybe that makes a difference since the display manager takes care of hibernation an power management (at least gdm does, thats why it got replaced). Also I use X-org, not Wayland. I've also read a lot that the Network-Manager applet in Gnome causes glitches when searching for Wifi networks, which doesn't apply to my desktop.
I cant imagine KDEs kwin or Mate's /Cinnamon's Mutter-Forks to perform way better than Gnome performancewise, they all do compositing, which is the major effect imho.
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by hm11 »

hmn, interesting. ill check it out again. But in my experience, with plasma it performs really well but with gnome there are constant xruns, stock right out of the box. As far as the compositing goes, from what ive researched there seems to be somewhat of an issue with the way mutter does composition being single threaded.. I also understand about the performance tweaks you can do but honestly, that's kinda too steep for me lol

PS: about the power management stuff, i use something like gamemode or just change the governor, as that should be the first thing we all do when producing music and lessening latency and xruns. I'm also talking about Gnome (like regular gnome, not any other gnome desktop)
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by robin »

Gnome-Shell is the core component of gnome, the "Desktop" itself if you will, so I kind of use stock gnome just skipping a lot of stuff that comes with it. My CPU is far from top-notch and pretty old, so I think it is some kind of a configuration or hardware thing.
Maybe its actually Wayland beeing the problem, which has been default in Gnome for some time already so it already hit "Major Distros" like Ubuntu and Fedora, but will also be coming to KDE/Kwin sooner or later, depending on your distro. If you try Gnome again, I would be curious to hear if using "Gnome on X-Org" as a session instead of just "Gnome" works better for you.
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by hm11 »

Ok! I think at the time i tried both waand and xorg. Xorg was better but still not good for me. But ill try again
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by GMaq »

nick87720z wrote: Fri Oct 16, 2020 7:38 pm Enlightenment is (was when I looked) choice in AVLinux, but I disliked it because it integrated bad into other DE as pure window managers.
Huh?

AV Linux has used XFCE4 for years and LXDE/Openbox prior to that, I've never even installed or looked at Enlightenment (other than as a spiritual improvement...)
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by raboof »

hm11 wrote: Tue Nov 10, 2020 12:27 am from what ive researched there seems to be somewhat of an issue with the way mutter does composition being single threaded..
This does not sound accurate to me. It might well be that mutter composition is single-threaded, and that might increase the latency of GUI updates. That in itself should not lead to audio xruns, though: the audio processing thread should never block, and definitely never block on GUI updates. If it does then I would consider that a bug in the audio application.

Are you encountering xruns with particular applications, or even when running 'idle'?
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Re: The Gnome Desktop and Music Production

Post by nick87720z »

GMaq wrote: Thu Nov 12, 2020 1:30 am Huh?

AV Linux has used XFCE4 for years and LXDE/Openbox prior to that, I've never even installed or looked at Enlightenment (other than as a spiritual improvement...)
Yup, it's not case now. But I exactly remember some proaudio distro, mentioned in kxstudio IRC discussion long time ago, when kxstudio had kde4-based livecd - possible time range is around point in 2012..2013. Not sure whether it was ELive - www.elivecd.org doesn't claim it even as media production dedicated.
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