Gnome Shell : heavy weight DEs are fine for audio?

[warkus]

I have been experimenting with Gnome shell 3.2 installed on top of kubuntu 11.10. Most people advise against using DEs such gnome/kde for music production.I would like to hear if anyone has encountered any performance issues with using gnome-shell for audio production.

Since installing gnome-shell i have not had a single x-run
My cpu is a 2GHz sempron and i have only 1Gb of ddr2. nvidia blob for my gt240.
Lexicon lambda USB 2 interface. (Lexicon don't support GNU/Linux)
Recording in Ardour with 8ms latency while switching windows/workspaces launching Hydrogen etc. still not a single x-run.

I just cant understand why anyone would advise users to not use "Heavy" DEs when they seem to work flawlessly on very modest hardware.

[Pablo]

Glad to read your experience!

Anyway, I think the recommendations not to use DE's such as Gnome3 (or Unity for this matter) are not especially related to being "heavy". My point of view is that, because of the modular approach of many linux audio apps, one might want a DE which is more flexible and faster with regards to placing/closing/opening several windows. For example, I want rakarrack, guitarix and gx_tuner sharing a workspace, ardour editor in another one, ardour mixer in another one, maybe hydrogen in another one... Is this easy with gnome3?

Cheers! Pablo

[Scary Hallo]

@warkus: Thats a good point. I think no one really tried it out. Maybe make the stress-test a little harder. I usually run Ardour, Hydrogen, QSynth and a MIDI-Sequencer simultaneously.
I have a quiet older laptop. And I've changed from Gnome 2 to LXDE. Quite no change in X-runs but all Applications are faster. I can run more Apps at the same time.
But maybe it's also the fact, that you don't want the feeling that your DEs main task is to provide you with chat-clients - facebook - youtube. I like the DE to stay in the background.

[Havoc]

But maybe it's also the fact, that you don't want the feeling that your DEs main task is to provide you with chat-clients - facebook - youtube. I like the DE to stay in the background.

That's the problem of the person using it. At the moment I'm using XFCE but I don't find it faster or more responsive than KDE. In fact I feel it reacts slower to keyboard and mouse input. A lot of this is very subjective and another part depends on distro and/or particular package. When I used KDE I never had hald polling the usb every 2 seconds to see if there is something plugged. But in XFCE it does if I have automounting for removable devices disabled.

[slowpick]

you can use the ps ux
command to see the memory and cpu hit of running processes.

I use E17, and some gnome and kde things are lurking, but not using
much in resources. A larger toll is taken in various conflicts between
the sundry gui toolkits, and system monitors. You can gain some
performance by using all pci devices, and unplug usb peripherals, until
they are needed for a task.

You can also craft a DAW session barren of eyecandy and startup apps, using multiple desktops,
with screen resolution that is native, and no larger than the largest window of your apps.

[fourfour]

It's probably okay with new computer. On my old machine I had some issues with memory consumption. Firefox is mainly to blame, but using Fluxbox instead of KDE will significantly reduce memory consumption if there is only 1GB on the system.

Personally, I use my CPU and memory to run audio apps (as opposed to running a DE). Some people might be okay using a heavy weight DE.

[warkus]

Okay, thanks for the replies. I guess that i was looking for any cases of Gnome shell getting in the way of jackd, as i have read one or two complaints which suggest this. I think the people who have complained about gnome shell interfering with jackd may have not configured their system properly? I do agree that Gnome Shell is sluggish compared to LXDE etc.. But I still haven't found any specific conflicts between Gnome Shell and jackd, others may have different experiences.

[steevc]

You can take lightweight to extremes. I found this via LAU (which I skim through now and again)

http://xouba.net/post/12203917289/floss ... n-claassen

Julien is blind and uses Nama, which can be driven from a console and works with his Braille display.

[msepsis]

I'm actually in the midst of doing some benchmark tests to get tuned for RPM 2012 (http://rpmchallenge.com/)...
It depends on what you mean "fine for audio". If you dont get XRuns and you're happy then that's great.

Contrary to apparent believe in this thread people HAVE benchmarked and compared DEs against each other, it's not a myth.

No doubt about it my benchmark tests also confirm the fact that the more lightweight the DE the more processing power gets dedicated to audio processes. I'm planning on posting the findings of my benchmarks here later on after I do several more rounds of tests

Nobody is saying your system will fail for audio if you use gnome or KDE... but the fact remains, if you use a light weight DE like LXDE or XFCE you will have (even if slightly) more CPU power dedicated towards audio.

In my tests LXDE>XFCE>GNOME>KDE hands down, no questions about it. numbers don't lie Just start up jack and compare ranges of CPU overhead for a good indication.

Try it out for yourself! Its not hard to install several DEs and compare them.

[Capoeira]

@msepsis
how about including e17? it's allready perfectly usable. lightweight as lxde and beautiful and costumizable as KDE

[GMaq]

Hi,

It will be interesting to see your results. In my experience XFCE is only marginally less resource intensive than Gnome2 and LXDE is significantly lighter as far as RAM usage goes. It would be interesting to see what the difference between Fluxbox is vs. LXDE.

[warkus]

Nobody is saying your system will fail for audio if you use gnome or KDE...

Yes, actually that is why i started this thread, I read complaints on the gnome mailing list about gnome shell causing xruns... this seems to be false assumptions (made by people who don't like gnome shell).

It is true that a light weight system leaves more processing power for DSP etc.. But light or heavy is relative to the hardware in question. While i consider gnome shell to be a resource hog on my current computer, I presume it would be snappy and responsive on a new sytem with an 8-core CPU and 16GB of ram.

[studio32]

Depends on your needs and hardware. I prefer fluxbox (focus on shortcuts), but I've also gnome3 installed (Debian). I think I prefer gnome-shell above Unity. It's lighter imo and the GUI is better organized.

[i2productions]

I guess it really depends on your setup more than anything. I have noticed any slowdown since I switched to using Gnome3 in a cario-dock session. Then again my primary computer has an i7 2.93 Ghz quadcore with 9 GB of RAM. My mobile studio is running the same desktop with 2.6 Ghz Core Duo, 4 GB of RAM. If I was running anything older, I'd probably run AV Linux to keep the processes in check.

[ufug]

I was an Xfce user for many years (never was a Gnome fan), but started playing with Gnome-Shell when 3.2 came out. I'm completely addicted to it now. I tried going back to Xfce and I just... can't. You can customize how the shell looks so easily with a little css, add extensions to the desktop through a web browser, get to any app with a single key press. That stuff matters to me enough that I'll sacrifice a little bit for it. But it doesn't seem to be a big deal. RAM consumption after startup is nearly identical for me to a Xubuntu session (although to be fair, that's a bloated implementation of Xfce).

In answer to the poster, KXStudio seems to be working fine for me based on Mint 12 with the shell, although the volume applet doesn't launch (that's no biggie to me). But like msepsis says, numbers don't lie--I haven't run tests. I'm sure I'm taking a performance hit, but the feel is as snappy or snappier than Xfce for me and I've had no negative issues recording yet.

Oh and hi, long time lurker, first time poster.