Ubuntu 20.04 LTS To Optimize GNOME For Fast/Modern PCs, Ubuntu 20.10 For Slow/Older PCs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS To Optimize GNOME For Fast/Modern PCs, Ubuntu 20.10 For Slow/Older PCs

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt who has become well known for focusing on his GNOME performance optimizations over the past two years is not done yet. While recapping their performance achievements around GNOME Shell for Ubuntu 19.10, he commented on performance work to happen for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.10 later on...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-GNOME-20.04-Plans

[Raka555]

What I "hear" when I read this, is that you will need a fast machine to have gnome work properly on 20.04 ...

[Mike Frett]

Seems backwards. The LTS should be optimized for slow machines and 20.10 for fast machines.

[miskol]

It will be nice to have working ubuntu desktop on raspberry pi 4

[Hibbelharry]

Seems backwards. The LTS should be optimized for slow machines and 20.10 for fast machines.

Why? Don't people with a modern PC deserve best performance?

[Volta]

Seems backwards. The LTS should be optimized for slow machines and 20.10 for fast machines.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in my opinion they'll optimize Gnome even further for 20.10, so it will be more usable even on older hardware. For 20.04 they'll provide less noticable optimizations. Title of the article seems to be very misleading.

[Brisse]

Seems backwards. The LTS should be optimized for slow machines and 20.10 for fast machines.

They need to get the real-time blockers away first, otherwise they may be wasting their time at working on optimizations which may have to be thrown out of the window later down the line, hence this approach. I can see why you would think it might be "backwards" but it really isn't. In the end it will be optimized for both fast and slow machines anyway, it's just that all that work isn't likely to be done in time for 20.04.

Anyway, thanks goes to all involved. The difference the last few years really have been massive.

[berarma]

What I "hear" when I read this, is that you will need a fast machine to have gnome work properly on 20.04 ...

Then you'll need a slow machine for gnome to work properly on 20.10. Optimizations don't usually work that way when correctly implemented. It means that they'll focus first on the bottlenecks for fast computers, then the focus will shift to bottlenecks in slower ones. Slow computers will still benefit from some of the optimizations for faster computers, just no so much as they could because there's other bottlenecks that need to be worked out first.

[GrayShade]

Yup. Today it doesn't "work properly" on anything:

“Make it fast” means maintaining the full frame rate of your monitor with no stutters. “Fast machines” means anything that could already run Unity or Gnome desktops usably. But admittedly that’s a little subjective.

20.04 might be fast on fast PCs, then 20.10 might be fast even on slower ones.

[SofS]

The way I read it is first they will focus on design and feature related optimizations, then they will focus on micro optimizations. The fast/slow machines choice of words is more of an analogy.