by murallo on Tue Nov 15, 2011 6:00 pm
Hi, Like you I upgraded to Gnome 3. I did check beforehand and was a touch worried that a certain Linus Torvald didn't like gnome 3. That should have warned me. Well, I've installed enough linux versions by now, I can de-install, re-install without losing the plot. So I went ahead. All sorts of weird happenings,distorted icons, icons containing garbage, several screens-ful of icons when you open Activities and a whole new desktop concept without a word of help, but the main showstopper is abysmal performance. Now this PC, while not new, performs perfectly adequately on Gnome 2, KDE, even Solaris. On Gnome 3, I get fairly consistent 5 second response times. Not really usuable. Look at the system monitor and processor one is running regularly over 50% up to 90. Processor two a bit less. What's running? Gnome-shell. Nothing else. What's it doing? Who knows.
Fortunately, my previous research (thanks Linus) points me to 'Gnome fallback'. Login again with this instead of 'Gnome' and I have a working desktop again. If anything it's even faster than Gnome 2 and CPU usage is <10%.
Now, as I understand it, I am still running Gnome3 but not using the new desktop?? Gnome-shell does not appear as as a process now.
In short, I might try Gnome3 again if the slow running is fixed. But I'm not impressed. I can always defect to KDE since I already have half a KDE system just to run Amarok.
Best Regards,
Harry Anderson