GNOME News Archives


1,259 GNOME open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.

Experimental VRR Support Might Still Land For GNOME 46
Experimental VRR Support Might Still Land For GNOME 46

The long in-development work for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support plumbed into GNOME's Mutter compositor might still make it for the GNOME 46 desktop release due out this month. It's still being treated as an experimental feature at this point but a feature freeze exception is being sought to allow its inclusion this release rather than waiting for GNOME 47 in the autumn.

1 March 2024 - GNOME 46 + Experimental VRR - 25 Comments
GNOME Prompt Becomes Ptyxis
GNOME Prompt Becomes Ptyxis

The GNOME Prompt terminal emulator in-development by Christian Hergert with a focus on GPU-acceleration and being a very speedy and beautiful terminal option has been renamed to Ptyxis.

29 February 2024 - GNOME Ptyxis - 69 Comments
The Current State & Future Of GTK's New Unified Renderers
The Current State & Future Of GTK's New Unified Renderers

GTK recently merged their new "unified" rendering code with a focus on Vulkan API support and where Linux distributions are now encouraged to build with the Vulkan renderer. Prominent GTK developer Mathias Clasen at Red Hat has written more over the weekend about the state and future of the new Vulkan and NGL renderers.

29 January 2024 - GTK Renderers - 46 Comments
GNOME's Dynamic Triple Buffering Now Latency Optimized For Raspberry Pi & X.Org
GNOME's Dynamic Triple Buffering Now Latency Optimized For Raspberry Pi & X.Org

While back in December the GNOME dynamic triple buffering was self-proclaimed to be "ready to merge", so far that hasn't happened yet. With the GNOME 46 feature freeze scheduled for 10 February, it remains to be seen if this long-worked-on dynamic triple/double buffering will be ready in time for this six month release. In any event, this past week saw a new optimization queued for this code.

22 January 2024 - Dynamic Triple Buffering - 11 Comments
Linux Distributions Now Encouraged To Build GTK With Vulkan
Linux Distributions Now Encouraged To Build GTK With Vulkan

Last week I wrote about GTK landing their new unified GPU renderer and as part of that the Vulkan API support is set to be enabled by default. Linux distribution vendors are being encouraged moving forward to indeed ship with the GTK Vulkan support enabled, so we'll be seeing more Vulkan API use on the Linux desktop with OpenGL slowly fading away.

17 January 2024 - GTK + Vulkan Rendering - 24 Comments
GNOME 46 Alpha Released With Many Improvements
GNOME 46 Alpha Released With Many Improvements

If you happen to be impacted by snow storms today or otherwise have extra time on your hands this weekend, GNOME 46 Alpha is now available for testing this latest desktop environment that will be going head-to-head with KDE Plasma 6.0 later this quarter.

12 January 2024 - GNOME 46 Alpha - 51 Comments
GNOME Gets A New Terminal Choice: Prompt
GNOME Gets A New Terminal Choice: Prompt

A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn't want to develop a new terminal becase "creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days." Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop.

15 December 2023 - Prompt Terminal - 26 Comments
GNOME Terminal Working To Migrate To GTK 4, VTE To Overcome 40 FPS Cap
GNOME Terminal Working To Migrate To GTK 4, VTE To Overcome 40 FPS Cap

As part of the effort to make GNOME Terminal and the VTE terminal emulator library render faster, the GNOME Terminal has been seeing more work lately in being ported over to using the GTK 4 toolkit. Additionally, the VTE terminal library has been working to overcome its long-standing 40 FPS rendering cap.

5 November 2023 - GNOME Terminal - 32 Comments
Experimental Zero-Copy Support For Nouveau With GNOME Mutter
Experimental Zero-Copy Support For Nouveau With GNOME Mutter

Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt has been working on enabling zero-copy support for discrete GPUs within GNOME's Mutter compositor to deliver faster performance. This appears to be working so far with the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver.

26 October 2023 - Nouveau Zero-Copy - 5 Comments
More Optimizations Made For Making GNOME/VTE Terminals Go Faster
More Optimizations Made For Making GNOME/VTE Terminals Go Faster

Back in September GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of being much faster based on his experiments. While at the time he didn't plan to pursue it further, in the weeks since he's been making enhancements to GNOME's VTE code that is used by GNOME Console and other apps.

21 October 2023 - Faster GNOME Terminals - 15 Comments
Another Bug Found That Limits GNOME's Performance For Secondary GPU Setups
Another Bug Found That Limits GNOME's Performance For Secondary GPU Setups

Daniel van Vugt of Canonical's desktop team for Ubuntu Linux has been on a spree recently tackling various GNOME bugs -- often performance issues -- while also continuing to work on the dynamic triple buffering support and other GNOME desktop enhancements. His latest discovery is around finding another performance bottleneck for multi-GPU setups.

10 October 2023 - Secondary Frame Rates Suffer - 8 Comments
GNOME's VTE Seeing Improvements For Faster Terminal Performance
GNOME's VTE Seeing Improvements For Faster Terminal Performance

GNOME developer Christian Hergert recently demonstrated how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of running much faster. At the time it didn't sound like he would pursue the matter further but more recently he's begun working on folding some performance improvements into GNOME's VTE for a faster terminal experience.

4 October 2023 - VTE Terminal Performance - 17 Comments
Linux Terminal Emulators Have The Potential Of Being Much Faster
Linux Terminal Emulators Have The Potential Of Being Much Faster

Prominent GNOME developer Christian Hergert announced he created a new terminal emulator that is twice as fast as the closest GPU-based renderer he's found yet so far on Linux, which was Alacritty. Unfortunately though he currently doesn't have any plans to develop this experimental speedy terminal emulator any further.

23 September 2023 - GPU-Accelerated Terminals Much Faster - 66 Comments
GNOME's Sysprof Integrates CPU Scheduler Data
GNOME's Sysprof Integrates CPU Scheduler Data

GNOME's Sysprof is a wonderful system-wide profiling tool for helping developers analyze bottlenecks and debug other challenging issues. This system profiler has covered both kernel and user-space but to date has not provided any insight around the CPU scheduler behavior and thus developers have had to resort to other tooling there. But for the GNOME 45 release, Sysprof has integrated CPU scheduler details.

22 August 2023 - Sysprof + CPU Scheduler Info - 1 Comment
GNOME 45's Mutter Implements A Dedicated KMS Thread
GNOME 45's Mutter Implements A Dedicated KMS Thread

Recently merged to GNOME's Mutter compositor development code is implementing a dedicated kernel mode-setting (KMS) thread and allows for pointer motions to bypass the main thread during cursor sprite movements. Ultimately this effort is around lower-latency cursor movements.

7 August 2023 - KMS Thread - 5 Comments

1259 GNOME news articles published on Phoronix.