[plug] Gnome's annoying Windoze-isms

[Daniel Pittman]

Jason Posavec <jasonposavec at iinet.net.au> writes:

> I run gnome primarily because it is meant to be faster and lighter
> than the KDE alternative,

This has never been true to any measure I have found, with the one
exception that without prelinking the C++ code used to cost more in
startup dynamic linking overhead.

Certainly, today, I am unable to find any measurable difference in
memory or CPU use, and this has been true for quite some time:

http://swik.net/GNOME/Planet+GNOME/Callum+McKenzie:+KDE+vs.+GNOME:+Memory+Use/qmla
http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

> while still keeping functionality.

In my experience, this is also untrue — but those are fighting words,
and probably mostly because I have never bothered to learn how to make
GNOME do the same thing. ;)

> But as of 2.24, I've noticed some cpu-intensive "decoration" creeping
> in. The biggest being the thumbnail views, even in list view. An
> example is 200Gb of Doctor Who avi's I have on a portable hard
> drive. When I click on that directory, it can easily take up to a
> minute before I can do anything with the files while all the hundreds
> of thumbnails load.

That is a huge surprise; isn't GNOME supposed to cache those thumbnails
or something?  Certainly KDE does, in my experience.

> List View used to be text only, and that's how I liked it. Now I can't
> seem to turn the thumbnails off at all. Does anybody have any
> suggestions?

I would start by looking into why the GNOME thumbnailer is regenerating
the thumbnail each time — because, certainly, there is no other reason
that displaying a few icons is going to use significant CPU.

(Displaying the icon, in fact, is substantially *less* CPU intensive
 than drawing the text next to it.)

> Is there a gnome toolbox I don't know about?

Don't these sort of options usually hide in the registry ^W gconf
database so they don't confuse the end user?

Anyway, I believe that totem is the most likely candidate for generating
video thumbnails, so I would start in the documentation there.

Regards,
        Daniel