It seems that It is a never ending problem of resource consumption by the Gnome Shell desktop environment within Ubuntu.
And although recently the people in charge of Gnome development within Ubuntu They have made some announcements about the work they are carrying out.
Including They have solved various bugs that have been fixed in Ubuntu 18.04 but that at the same time lead to some bugs within the Ubuntu 19.04 trial versions.
We can see this as detailed in the following statement where they report on some solutions that they made but that in Ubuntu 19.04 make the desktop environment consume too many resources. The link is this.
On the other hand, another Canonical developer has shared their updates on different bug fixes which aim to reduce the GNOME Shell CPU usage by a third to maximize windows.
gnome-shell CPU usage on an i7-7700:
Before:
Small window in the middle of the screen: 9%
Small window touching the dock: 14%
Maximized window touching the dock: 16%After:
Small window in the middle of the screen: 9%
Small window touching the dock: 9%
Maximized window touching the dock: 11%
The most important solution is to eliminate tons of CPU usage when a window is redrawn by touching the dock.
The consumption problem with Gnome is constant
And is that this problem has been arising in each new version of Ubuntu (with Gnome Shell) which is not a recent problem.
Such is the case that some of you will remember where Gnome had a big problem last year about a bottleneck in which the consumption of the environment was ridiculously excessive.
Also, that with each version the requirements to run the system grow. It is true that with the passage of time new technologies are emerging, but it is absurd to allocate a considerable portion of resources in just running the system.
Some of the other performance work includes high CPU regression caused by GNOME Shell leaks, jaggies handling of the wallpaper in various cursor changes and out of the scope of performance.
Not everything is bad for Ubuntu 19.04 development
Although at the moment the main focus of Ubuntu 19.04 development is on stabilizing the environment and avoiding memory leaks, on the other hand, Also within the weekly reports of the developers are positive points.
Since as mentioned some time ago, Canonical asked users to make some test reports on the behavior of Nvidia video card drivers on the system.
And is that this It has started to pay off as some people have started doing various jobs to improve the performance of open and private controllers.
Since, as it is something concurrent, the classic problems that many users of the distribution have when installing the private drivers.
These jobs are detailed a bit in this weekly report and especially the work done in Wayland since as we will know Canonical wants to promote the use of this graphic server on its products.
Finally, among other things that have arisen during these days, are the improvements towards Gnome applications.
It is more than clear that the folks at Canonical must put an end to all these concurrent problems of Gnome Shell memory consumption once and for all.
It is clear that the developers in charge of the Ubuntu desktop do their job in making the necessary modifications to match the environment according to the needs of the system.
But instead of making optimizations or improvements, the result is simply worse than the improvement.
Finally, if you want to know a little more about the work that has been done in Ubuntu in general, you can follow the weekly report In the following link.
the truth is that Gnome already looks like the old KDE and now even though it has a lot of cloth to cut, Plasma is almost as light as LXDE which is saying a lot
They use KDE and solved
Shouldn't we start with GTK?
My 3rd gen core i3 will thank you
It seems to me that they are partial visions. I have no problem with Gnome on Fedora. Its memory consumption is higher because it does not use the CPU so much, it is a development policy. There are no better environments in terms of computing. Make a comparison, open X number of applications in KDE and Gnome at the same time, then write down the results (Do that in a virtual machine with the same settings). The others (XFCE, LXDE, Mate) cannot be compared, as they do not present the same graphic quality.
Gnome has to be improved and there are many things to improve, but it is normal for almost any software, such as KDE, kernel and compilers.
I like ubuntu better with KDE
plasma and that's it, the best today, three launcher alternatives, fluid desktop effects, aesthetics and a long etc.
I went to Antergos with KDE Plasma and issue solved! What could go back to Ubuntu? Of course! But I need less resource consumption and the friendship-agreement with Microsoft scares me. Mind you, I miss apps like 4k Video Download that only work on Ubuntu (or so I think).
«... with each version the requirements to run the system keep growing», I know several users who wearing seventh generation core i7 had to disable the graphical effects to relieve the stress of using that Gnome Shell.
A sadness what is happening in Gnome. Your manager has to step aside. Not only is its performance, the modular concept that provides a basic OS and all additional functions must be activated separately through extensions maintained by users with good intentions but abandoned at any time and are not integrated into the system, which at the end of the day can that Gnome I managed to improve its consumption but it goes off again with the use of some extension.
Gnome's lag in relation to KDE (the well-known duo) is abysmal. Currently, while the KDE team is seen as ants working on new functions and adding features integrated by default to the system because Plasma is a rock, Gnome has to rethink its structure from that mess called GTK3 and that will delay it even more.
I agree with your comment, the idea of having a desktop full of effects and functionalities is good, unfortunately not all users take advantage of everything that the environment offers.
So filling it with new things every time only loads the system and the same goes for web browsers that I have already said on more than one occasion, it is ridiculous that just by running only the pure browser you are already consuming little more than 200M of RAM (Firefox, Chrome and Opera).
And it is what many of us think that all that additional should be complemented by modules that the user can activate and deactivate and with this they would also have a measure of whether it is relevant to continue maintaining "X" function by the level of download or requests.
Greetings.
I love Gnome and its applications but it has become impossible to use it. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 20.04 and updated everything as I always like terminal, the store seems slow and heavy. When I check the resource consumption I had 2.8 gb of ram used and I see that an application uses 1.3 gb (snap store), I installed kde neon and it consumes about 800mb at startup with everything installed.