In the latest Ubuntu daily installation, the app window’s movement is jerky. I am talking about the default Ubuntu with Gnome DE. For comparison, the app window movements in Xubuntu and Kubuntu are smoother.
Move the Nautilus window (as seen in the below screenshot) around and you’d see what I mean.
Yes, we know things are jerky in Gnome Shell.
The first thing you should check is that the jerkiness is not coming from your input device. I know in switching to libinput some laptops have more jerky touchpad movement than in previous years. You can fix that by:
sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
and then log into Xorg (default) sessions only, not Wayland.
Short term, make sure you’re logging into “Ubuntu” (Xorg) sessions because the Xorg option presently performs much better than the Wayland option.
Medium term, there are some related bugs you can subscribe to here:
https://trello.com/c/Q6JYXPPs
Also the Gnome guys are having a meet-up in May specifically to focus on fixing performance issues:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Performance2018
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OK!
Its Xorg and the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics is there. Not using Wayland.
If this jerkiness won’t go away, before the final release, it is going to be quite ugly to use.
For me, It’s like that from the beginning. A deep rooted issue. The comments on this issue highlights some important things.
The thing is, everyone appears to know about this, but no one is taking real action on that, or action cannot be taken. This problem doesn’t happen in Unity too, just as in Xubuntu or Kubuntu. This doesn’t happen in Ubuntu on Openbox, so it might not happen in Lubuntu too. This is a critical Gnome DE problem.
Actually I’ve spent many days on the performance issues this year. So it is not accurate to say “no one is taking real action”. The problem is that such fixes take a lot of time to implement, and then a lot more time to reach release. I agree Gnome is not in a high-performance shape yet to compete with Unity but we’re trying to get it there ASAP.
My first priority was to get inaccurate touchpad cursor movement in libinput fixed. And working with libinput upstream we have partly achieved that in v1.10.3, although some of the really good stuff is in future version 1.11 only.
Another performance improvement (to Wayland session rendering) is included in the upcoming mutter 3.28.1 release: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/commit/b2f9de98
Another more significant performance boost (for both Xorg and Wayland sessions) I spent all of yesterday rewriting: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/70
but have no ETA for its release yet.
I am also working on fixing memory leaks and high CPU usage in the background. But we all have other responsibilities too.
Upstream, other people are also contributing performance improvements coming in mutter 3.28.1 such as https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/commit/8286557a
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Sorry, if I made you feel bad about it. That’s why I said, maybe it cannot be done. Hope you’d succeed in getting this working and also the memory leaks. Lately, I found that Ubuntu doesn’t succeed in installing Grub to the EFI partition. I had to create the folder myself and fill it with the necessary files. This happened in Ubuntu and Xubuntu. There is also an upgrading problem, which I found. I am not writing to ask help, but just to report, which might be of help to the developers.
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