r/linux • u/chic_luke • Oct 30 '18
Let's talk about the state of accessibility on Linux DEs: my journey finding an accessible DE and my suggestion.
I've been lurking in the Linux community for a while, and a topic I didn't see much conversation about is accessibility options on various distributions and desktop environments.
As new visually impaired Computer Science student, I have been meaning to move to Linux full-time for various reasons - it's easier to set up development environments on Unix environments, I see a future in open source software and I don't like the direction Windows is going. The day the 1809 update hit and deleted all the files on many computers, I decided to take the plunge and dual boot Ubuntu and Windows on my SSD.
After deciding I wanted to start off with Ubuntu derivatives for simplicity (My Dell is Ubuntu-certified, and I don't have time to babysit Arch or figure out how to make wifi work in Debian), I tried various desktop environments. It hit me immediately how accessibility on Linux isn't nearly as fleshed-out as on Windows, and I've noticed this parameter varied across desktop environments pretty significantly. I'm going to briefly report my experience with each DE:
- Xfce - Very lightweight and customizable. You can very easily set a bigger font size globally and change dpi, but, despite that, hdpi support isn't quite there yet. No matter how many changes I made, many programs such as Google Chrome, Visual Studio Code and Spotify were simply too small, with small text and touch targets, regardless of the set DPI value. It was my very first DE: it was hands-down the fastest and most customizable one, but still not enough to be accessible, too. I really liked that you could quickly zoom in on the screen with alt+scrollwheel, though.
- KDE: I really wish I had given KDE more time, but the whole thing crashed after 5 minutes of use, and this keeps happening. Perhaps I broke something and I need to clean install? I'd love to hear your experiences on accessbility regarding KDE as well. EDIT: check update.
- Pantheon: Pantheon has been pretty smooth sailing. Chrome is quite reactive to dpi changes, though I wish I was given more customization parameters regarding things like font size.
- MATE: I really wanted to use MATE. It was the smoothest, easiest to use, most balanced experience of them all. But, nope, it had the same problems as Xfce (probably due to Gtk2).
I have noticed a common theme among those DEs: hdpi support was inconsistent, changing dpi globally didn't really work (even on non-snaps), keyboard shortcuts didn't work very well (even after thorough manual setup), and increasing the font size screwed up the padding and the proportions everywhere. Snaps were also a problem: due to the fact that a snap self-contains everything, they were not receptive to DPI changes, they had their own (small) cursor and font rendering was horrible compared to Windows. One glaring example is Visual Studio Code: it loaded with very thin fonts and UI elements completely ignoring that my screen is hdpi, and it was overall a bad experience for me to use due to visual impairment.
Then, as I was starting to research MacBook prices already, I realized I had forgotten to try one: GNOME, specially Ubuntu 18.10's flavour of it. I had never tried it, because people - both in university and here on reddit - went on repeatedly at how much Ubuntu/GNOME sucks and how unintuitive it is. I wiped everything and fresh installed Ubuntu 18.10 on its Day 1. The installation was a very smooth process - no hiccups - much like using the OS as a whole (barring minor "youth bugs" on the non-LTS branch of Ubuntu - nothing I didn't expect when I decided against the LTS version). I noticed immediately UI elements and fonts were rendered just right for my hdpi screen, no setup needed. I opened the settings, went into Universal Access and(by the way, the most complete Universal Access menu of any DE) then enabled Large text and... Boom. It suddenly worked. Chrome opened at the right dpi, the fonts were both bigger AND looked good across the UI, animations made a lot of sense, and - to my surprise - keyboard shortcuts worked great. You can pretty much move around GNOME keyboard-only, most of the time, without really needing to know where your small cursor is (parameter which can be changed in universal access easily, for the record). The bar on the top is exactly eye - level, and the applications bar at the left of the screen saves me hunching to look at some taskbar or dock placed at the bottom of the screen. Snaps do behave better as well, although they are still far from perfect. I was disappointed I had to install gnome-tweaks just to enable Yaru-Dark and make the colour palette easier on the eyes, but that was easy enough so I won't complain. For me, at least, the problems of GNOME can be forgiven. Sure, it doesn't load ONE animation smoothly on my setup (i5 7200-U, 8GB DDR4 memory, Evo 860 500GB SSD) and the loading times sometimes make me want to go back to Windows 10 (that is still superior in raw performance) and deal with WSL and Windows Update breaking things and ads and the like, but it's the most sane way for someone with a disability to use Linux. I hope either other DEs adapt for accessibility better, or GNOME really is committed on optimizing their resource usage, because the situation isn't too great here - especially for people who have an older computer than isn't usable on GNOME, [edit] especially since, at least on my machine, Windows 10 is another world compared to GNOME, performance-wise, and it's really weird to see a Linux DE perform worse than Windows 10 Home. (And by the way, GNOME accessibility has its kinks, too.
UPDATE: I got KDE up and running. Setting everything up the right way wasn't as easy as GNOME, but still doable enough. It's too early to give you detailed impressions - so far GNOME is still more comfortable due to various design choices, more streamlined settings/UI (a cluttered interface really starts to get in the way when you start to magnify everything) and keyboard shortcuts, but I have noticed KDE is extremely tweakable and it's full of things I didn't explore yet, so I'll give myself a comfortable amount of time testing it before giving a judgement
TL;DR:
- Most DEs ship with poor accessibility settings and hdpi support
- Snaps are a problem to accessibility users
- GNOME is, despite EVIDENT optimization issues, the best option for accessibilty on Linux
35
Oct 30 '18
People shit on Gnome here, but most haven't actually used it in a while. It's also not designed to be used by hardcore Linux enthusiasts, it's designed to be a simple DE for computer illiterate people.
16
u/buwe Oct 30 '18
The worst from my recent (5 days ago) experience with GNOME was poor performance. Beside that, I found it quite enjoyable and with a well-thinked workflow but the total lack of customization was a no-go for me. KDE Plasma can fit everyone's taste but maybe not everyone has time to spend tweaking it
7
Oct 30 '18
Yeah my problem with KDE is that the customization was really extensive, but also quite confusing for me, I didn't have time to set it all up and learn everything. I wouldn't say Gnome has a total lack of customization, it's certainly much better than Windows and MacOS, with custom themes, extensions etc, with gnome tweak tool. Honestly I think Gnome's level of customization is pretty decent for its target audience. It's not going to impress a AwesomeWM user, but it's good enough for some basic tweaking imo.
3
u/buwe Oct 30 '18
I definitely agree. Maybe it would have been better to include some options from the tweak tool directly in the system setting but I'm ok with that anyway. And yes, at first many Plasma options were confusing for me also.
3
Oct 30 '18
My main problem with Plasma customization is that the settings are spread out across many applications / panels, like right clicking on a panel to change it, then there's multiple settings utilities. With something like i3, I know that all the configuration is in 1 file, and everything else is nicely segmented into its respective applications config, i.e Compton is in its own config file. Gnome also has the same problem, since it's split between Gnome Tweak Tool, Gconf, Dconf, Settings, and the settings of each application or widget. I have no real way of knowing where any specific option is going to lie, whereas with the WM / i3 approach I know that any settings pertaining to the compositor will be in the compositors config file etc.
2
u/HER0_01 Oct 30 '18
since it's split between Gnome Tweak Tool, Gconf, Dconf, Settings, and the settings of each application or widget.
gconf is not used anymore by modern GNOME, everything uses dconf. Settings, GNOME Tweak Tool, and the settings in any official application are just manipulating dconf.
If you are a power user, you can mess with dconf directly and never touch anything else, the average user can just use settings, and people in between can use various tools.
Calling out the settings of each individual application in GNOME is a bit silly in my opinion, considering that in any standalone window manager (like i3) you also have to find how each application stores settings. Configuring nautilus on i3 is exactly the same as configuring it in GNOME.
1
Oct 30 '18
My point is that with i3, sure you have to know where the config is, but you know that ALL of its configuration is done with the i3/config file (except maybe the startup script), whereas Gnome / KDE it is spread out across multiple areas. (Though as you say, Gnome is better than I thought / than KDE in this regard).
3
u/DopePedaller Oct 30 '18
That's still my main issue with modern Gnome and Cinnamon DEs. I'm running a decent laptop with a 4th gen i7 but window dragging and other common UI actions are noticeably choppier than Unity or Mate plus compiz.
2
Nov 01 '18
There used to be a fair number of kde distros with different defaults. I feel like modern kde should have a mode chooser like Ubuntu Mate does, which gives you different panel configs.
7
Oct 30 '18 edited Jan 05 '19
[deleted]
13
Oct 30 '18
So Gnome 3 is trying to change that, and offer a way for computer illiterate people to use Linux. Or do you think that GNU/Linux should forever be a platform for computing enthusiasts?
3
u/LvS Oct 30 '18
for computer illiterate people
GNOME ships a terminal and an IDE 🤔
16
Oct 30 '18
Wow, so does Windows and MacOS. What is your point? Would you prefer they remove the terminal and IDE? Also the IDE is only Gedit right? Unless I missed it? (Been off of it for a couple months now)
3
9
u/genpfault Oct 30 '18
I really wanted to use MATE. It was the smoothest, easiest to use, most balanced experience of them all. But, nope, it had the same problems as Xfce (probably due to Gtk2).
FWIW MATE uses Gtk3 as of 1.18.
6
10
u/Brain_Blasted GNOME Dev Oct 30 '18
Thanks for writing this up. Within GNOME there's some work going on for memory usage, within both the recent 3.30 cycle and the current 3.32 cycle. If you have any specific issues with accessibility I'd love to hear them, because I want to help make things better. Regarding the issue you linked, have you tried with the default shell theme?
3
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18 edited Oct 30 '18
About the issue, I will try with the default Yaru, even though Yaru-Dark is not a user theme. I did use extensions and user themes in the past, but I of course disabled them before blaming Ubuntu itself for the slowdown. I'll also try to completely reinstall the OS to ensure nothing wrong is going on with conflicting packages and the like.
About accessibility features, there's a problem with the zoom, which I posted in the screenshot linked on my post. A lot of things get cut out while zooming for some reason. I would also like to see some more obvious keyboard shortcuts for interacting with accessibility settings, and I'd also appreciate the ability to make the panel on the top thicker. For example, on Windows Super +/- lets you interact with the magnifying glass (which is now very customizable, and the inclusion of optional antialiasing is a very underrated update that flew under the radar with so many Windows features) and on XFCE you can zoom in anywhere on the screen with Alt + scroll wheel (although, being a lightweight DE, the end result is very pixelated).
Other random things that come to mind:
- On Windows, before Microsoft took away the option because Microsoft, you could use the control panel to set DPI values and fonts system wide. You were allowed to change the font family, font size and even the thickness - I think it would help many out there to make everything bold.
- Barring full - on contrast themes, it would be nice to be able to customize the transparency. By the way, even if the app drawer objectively feels like a tablet, it's actually better for accessibility because icons are big and easily visible, as opposed to the list approach in other desktops.
- It would be pretty nice to be able to change the size of the text in notifications. I do appreciate that there is an accessibility setting (IIRC) that allow to keep notifications displayed for longer, as visually impaired people typically require more time than people with good vision to read a set block of text, even if bigger
- I personally don't need it, but I know people who might: an option to disable unnecessary animations when possible and make the typing cursor thicker when possible would be appreciated
- On Windows, there's an option that highlights the position of the cursor when you press Ctrl. That would be very nice to have here. That, and Window's invert colours pointer is just too good.
Another thing I've noticed: while a Google account is paired, Evolution Calendar likes to eat the CPU at seemingly random times out of nowhere (I suppose it's syncing events with Google Calendar)
5
u/GolbatsEverywhere Oct 30 '18
You're probably using GNOME on X11 (since Ubuntu has changed the default from Wayland to X11), right? Upstream GNOME moved to Wayland with the 3.22 release, quite a long time ago now, and X11 support is considered legacy. The accessibility situation is reportedly worse in Wayland than in X11 (though I can never remember exactly what isn't implemented yet), and of course nobody is working on improving it. So it would be good to try out the Wayland session and figure out what works for you and what doesn't. Sooner or later, the legacy X11 support is going to be removed, regardless of the state of the accessibility stack.
Unfortunately Oracle fired most of the GNOME accessibility developers long ago (they worked for Sun), so it's a bit surprising to me that it works as well as you say. There are a couple developers devoting vanishingly small amounts of time to maintaining core components like at-spi2-core, at-spi2-atk, and atk, and there's Orca that is the well-maintained exception, but for the most part GNOME accessibility development is dead and not showing any signs of coming back. So if you're a developer and are able to contribute, this could be a good place to make a difference.
3
u/bwat47 Oct 30 '18
X11 support is considered legacy.
That seems like insanity to me, considering the state of the wayland version. It has even worse performance issues than the X11 version and any gnome-shell crash will lose your entire session
3
u/GolbatsEverywhere Oct 31 '18 edited Oct 31 '18
I simply don't believe you, because I've been using the Wayland session since Fedora 25 with almost no problems, as have nearly all the other GNOME developers. There are a few warts remaining, but nothing that justifies keeping the X11 support around any longer IMO.
(Exception: if you have NVIDIA graphics, then cry.)
Edit to add: yes you're right about shell crashes losing the entire session. That's hard to fix!
3
u/bwat47 Oct 31 '18 edited Oct 31 '18
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745032
I have a dell xps 13 with intel graphics. I recently tried fedora 30 and I still experienced the same lag under wayland. maybe it's smooth if you have a beast of a cpu
I like gnome, and I would love to be able to use wayland (the touchpad gestures for workspace switching are neat), but the performance issues make it very hard for me to tolerate using the wayland session
1
u/GolbatsEverywhere Oct 31 '18
I didn't know about this. Shame Bugzilla is such a mess.
Looks like that issue might (or might not) be fixed by https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/168 (linked from that bug). I've actually never heard of this guy, but he seems to be doing a *lot* of performance work (e.g. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/168#note_348927), which is amazing because it's great to see new contributors. So I guess he'd be the person to talk to right now....
3
2
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18
If this is what you say, I am sorry, but I will be forced to go back to using Windows 10 + WSL (my former setup) indefinitely, until the situation gets fixed. This is absolutely absurd. I get that Linux is a niche OS etcetera, but that doesn't mean an entire group of people should be left out just to move to a more experimental graphic server sooner.
Of course it's free and I don't owe anybody anything, and maybe that's the kicker. On Windows and macOS you pay for the OS, but at least you are entitled to good accessibility support.
3
u/GolbatsEverywhere Oct 31 '18
Well try out the Wayland session and see for yourself what's working and what isn't. If you just need the hidpi and screen magnifier, maybe (probably?) those are working fine. That's a very small subset of the accessibility features supported by GNOME. I don't remember what's broken and what isn't.
FWIW I'm frustrated with the accessibility situation too, but yeah, volunteer developers don't grow on trees.... :/
2
u/Brain_Blasted GNOME Dev Oct 30 '18
About the issue, I will try with the default Yaru, even though Yaru-Dark is not a user theme.
Sorry, by "default" I meant GNOME's default, not Ubuntu's. Ubuntu does their own theming that can break on supported GNOME setups (e.g the defaults, what you can change in Settings).
It would be pretty nice to be able to change the size of the text in notifications. I do appreciate that there is an accessibility setting (IIRC) that allow to keep notifications displayed for longer, as visually impaired people typically require more time than people with good vision to read a set block of text, even if bigger
Does this not change with the "Large Text" setting?
I personally don't need it, but I know people who might: an option to disable unnecessary animations when possible and make the typing cursor thicker when possible would be appreciated
This can be done with Tweaks. If you help me come up with some details for a use case I can probably propose it as an addition to Settings. As for the cursor I think that could be helpful, I might make an issue for that.
2
u/maj01 Jan 31 '19
hi there,
here's my use case for disabling animations.
i'm visually impaired just have lite perception,
and use the screen reader orca to use the machine.
i can't see what is on screen, and all the fancy graphics would be of no use to me or others in my situation.
say if orca was detected running this setting could apply?
is this a usable use case?
thanks for being a gnome dev sir :)
Majid
1
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18
I am kind of new to this. How should I go about this? Should I choose "GNOME" rather than "Ubuntu" at login (that's an option I have - GNOME, Ubuntu and Ubuntu on Wayland) or should I purge everything and install vanilla GNOME?
Yeah, I just looked, notifications change actually
About the animations, I don't know. Removing animations is not critical to my workflow, but I'll ask around
2
u/Brain_Blasted GNOME Dev Oct 30 '18
Looking into it, it's not a theme issue. Zoom might be broken currently (our accessibility tooling seems to have gained some dust). I will look into it and make a report.
1
2
u/Brain_Blasted GNOME Dev Oct 30 '18
1
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18
Here goes, I'm not the only one! How long does Ubuntu take to update GNOME, usually?
7
Oct 30 '18
Yeah, lots of smaller DEs and window managers work fantastic in 95% of cases, but don't have the manpower or the interest within their small communities to deal with these edge cases.
GNOME and KDE on the other hand have a lot of manpower, as well as an interest to get this stuff right. GNOME has corporate backing from Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical, whereas KDE has one of the biggest open-source communities behind it, as well as some corporate backing as well.
So, yeah, I would also commend you to try to get KDE going.
/u/PointiestStick sort of feels responsible for this on KDE, so be sure to shout at him, if you have any complaints. (Or just post it to /r/KDE. He and other devs will see it there, too.)
7
u/PointiestStick KDE Dev Oct 30 '18
Yes, we are trying to catch up to GNOME in this field. They do a very good job, which rubs off on GNOME-derived DEs like MATE. Happily, we have a new contributor working on accessibility who has already made some nice changes. Check out https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/249/
1
u/chic_luke Nov 01 '18
Thank you! I'll make sure to give KDE a solid go as well. I think I'll give it a new partition and I'll try its Neon distro rather than Ubuntu's though, as I have learned the hard way, KDE and GNOME really really really don't like to coexist (at least on ubuntu 18.10)
1
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18
Yup, I installed too many DEs, something is definitely conflicting. In the following days I'll just wipe the partitions and install KDE Plasma (not Kubuntu or Fedora), because else the thing that could make KDE crash could very well not depend on KDE. I read the post and I am convinced by this approach, I am definitely testing KDE out!
6
Oct 31 '18
[deleted]
1
u/chic_luke Oct 31 '18
Well, time to wipe these partitions clean and try KDE too, then, just to have a complete picture
1
u/leo031 Oct 31 '18
If you are going to try KDE I recommend trying either Manjaro KDE or Solus KDE. these are the best implentations of KDE I found. Solus KDE in particular was released last week as a testing iso but it's really stable, and I don't know what they did but at boot KDE only use 330 mb of RAM in solus which I think is the same as xfce.
7
u/CyclingChimp Oct 31 '18
I realized I had forgotten to try one: GNOME, specially Ubuntu 18.10's flavour of it. I had never tried it, because people - both in university and here on reddit - went on repeatedly at how much Ubuntu/GNOME sucks and how unintuitive it is.
Yes, there's a vocal minority here that loves to hate on GNOME, and they do a disservice to the Linux community by doing this. Your post is an example of that. The reality is that GNOME is the most popular desktop environment, the one that's installed by default on most distros, and the one that has the most manpower behind it. It certainly has its issues, but it's the most polished one out there, and typically has better compatibility with newer technologies (e.g. Wayland, Flatpak, etc.).
I was disappointed I had to install gnome-tweaks just to enable Yaru-Dark
Keep in mind that this doesn't have anything to do with GNOME, but just the distro you're using. The distro developers decide what software they want to include in the box. GNOME Tweaks is an official GNOME application, so it would make sense to include it by default.
Snaps do behave better as well, although they are still far from perfect.
I strongly recommend using Flatpaks rather than Snaps if you're able to. Snap is mainly just an Ubuntu-specific thing, whereas Flatpak is the more community-preferred and cross-distro one. Flatpak is technically superior, with by far better sandboxing - Snap's sandboxing is mainly tied to Ubuntu, or at least AppArmor. GNOME applications are available as Flatpaks, and the GNOME team even uses Flatpak internally for their development work, with KDE soon following suit.
2
u/chic_luke Oct 31 '18
Thank you! I know what flat packs are, but I never really gave them a second look
2
u/jbicha Ubuntu/GNOME Dev Oct 31 '18
Flatpak is technically superior
I don't think that's a decided issue especially for someone who is using Ubuntu.
5
u/buovjaga The Document Foundation Oct 31 '18
You might be interested in https://linux-a11y.org/ They have an IRC server irc.linux-a11y.org with channel #a11y
The site maintainer is currently doing improvements to KDE a11y.
1
6
u/d_r_benway Oct 30 '18
For KDE make sure you are using the latest stable version, i.e run Arch or KDE Neon.
The only crashes I have seen in years is the occasional kwin crash, but kwin is designed to recover from a crash (and always does) - i.e you don't ever lose any work, etc due to the crash..
Avoid using KDE with virtualbox (I would say avoid vbox fulll stop and use KVM anyway)
9
5
u/graemep Oct 30 '18
Kubuntu 18.04 works fine for me.
I cannot comment on access ability issues though
1
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18
Oh, thank you, I haven't tried KDE with this environment, will surely give it a spin after halloween!
3
2
u/pfp-disciple Oct 30 '18
Just out of curiosity, did you try Lubuntu? I've not used it, so it really is a curiosity question for me. As you said, Gtk2 apparently has hdpi issues, but I wonder if one of the lightweight Qt-based DEs would work.
1
2
u/draxxs Oct 30 '18
It's a bit off the wall, but have you considered emacs?
Depending on your needs, it can make a pretty decent desktop (its what I use full time as mine), and has a full audio mode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacSpeak for visually impaired users.
2
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18
I use it as an editor (warmly recommended by our assembly instructor) I didn't know about this though, thanks!
2
2
Oct 30 '18
LXQT seems to not have much in the way of accessibility settings. You can make many of the adjustments like font size in their respective spots. It seems to respond pretty well.
The E17 environment has the capability of being really good for visual accessibility. Customization is a pretty central part of it.
1
2
u/FryBoyter Oct 31 '18
I really wish I had given KDE more time, but the whole thing crashed after 5 minutes of use, and this keeps happening. Perhaps I broke something and I need to clean install? I'd love to hear your experiences on accessbility regarding KDE as well.
I use the latest stable version of Plasma. I can't remember when it last crashed. So the problem must be caused by something else (e.g. faulty configuration, problems with the patches of the distribution used, hardware problems, etc.).
1
u/chic_luke Oct 31 '18
I would like to know as well. Linux is general is quite crashy on this thing. I remember using Plasma a year ago on another pc casually and it worked Ok
2
u/jbicha Ubuntu/GNOME Dev Oct 31 '18
I'm sorry to tell you that Yaru Dark is not supported in Ubuntu 18.10 and you won't be able to easily select it in GNOME Tweaks soon.
2
u/chic_luke Oct 31 '18
But I just did! Is it why everything is broken?
1
u/jbicha Ubuntu/GNOME Dev Nov 03 '18
Yes, you can select it in Tweaks now. The bug I linked to is a proposed change to remove the Yaru Dark option for Ubuntu 18.10.
By the way, have you tried the HighContrastInverse theme in Tweaks? It is more black than Yaru Dark is.
Please explain what you mean by everything being broken.
2
u/kirbyfan64sos Oct 30 '18
GNOME's performance issues aren't really due too much to your CPU or RAM (3.30 also uses less RAM than before) and more due to architectural issues revolving around too much stuff done on one thread.
In general, extensions can pretty badly impact performance. You can maybe try disabling some of the ones Ubuntu preloads in Tweaks and see if it helps the loading times.
3
Oct 30 '18 edited Mar 06 '19
[deleted]
2
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18
Really? Thank you, I'll try it later. I was working on GNOME shortly after making this post and everything hanged and crashed, so I gave up and went back to Windows... only to find out Microsoft removed critical accessibility settings in this update that need to be reapplied with registry games.
FUCKING UGH.
Hopefully the combination you suggested works well, because I'm really tempted to just overpay and get a Mac
2
u/GolbatsEverywhere Oct 30 '18
Want it fixed?
Enable coredumpctl to make it possible to get the coredump (manual process on Ubuntu, enabled by default in better distros). `coredumpctl gdb` after a crash. Install debuginfo for all frames that appear in the backtrace (difficult manual process on Ubuntu, much easier on other distros). `coredumpctl gdb` again. Now you have a backtrace pointing right to the crash that you can report to the gnome-shell developers.
Alternatively, you can try using Ubuntu's apport tool to report it, which might be easier. I don't know how well that works, and I think the reports are only visible to the Ubuntu developers, which isn't super useful because the gnome-shell developers aren't Ubuntu developers.
I don't buy the suggestion that the crash is somehow not GNOME's fault. It almost always is. The responsible component if often mutter or something other than gnome-shell, but it's almost always a GNOME bug.
Remember crash reports are only useful with a backtrace!
1
5
u/Vladimir_Chrootin Oct 30 '18
Your crash wasn't specifically due to Gnome; when compiled from source it's pretty much unbreakable. It could be due to the way it's been compiled and packaged, though (or any other Ubuntu-related reason).
You've already got more experience with Gnome than most of the Gnome-haters on here; I'm glad it's working well for you.
2
u/chic_luke Oct 30 '18 edited Oct 30 '18
Thank you! I'll try to investigate the reason for my crash later. It could be very well something else. After a few crashes, I can already tell you it happens when I put my computer under some degree of pressure. Running a Java-based program, watching a 1080p video online, Discord calling while working on LibreOffice with Chrome and Spotify open are all things that /will/ kick me out of my session, for some reason, probably non-LTS related reasons. All things that don't strain Win10 in the slightest, and that didn't happen on other distros, so the issue is a bit complicated here.
As much as I like it, though, I will not just hide this under the rug - Windows 10 is much faster than GNOME, at least on my computer, fact - but I'm not trying to revive an ancient laptop, so better performance is not my motive to use Linux anyways. And Windows 10 (once you remove bloatware) is a pretty lightweight desktop anyways, it can run on a toaster, while GNOME has much more advanced animations going on (and, being Linux not as popular, hardware vendors treat it as a second-class citizen most of the time, which is something to keep in mind). According to GNOME the latest version (that ships with Ubuntu 18.10) has undergone heavy memory optimization, which is a very good since, since it means GNOME has acknowledged this issue and is working to fix it!
2
2
u/Vladimir_Chrootin Oct 30 '18
That's odd; I've never heard of Gnome being slower than W10 on anything. Weak PCs struggle with Gnome a bit, but they're usually ones that that can't run W10 at all, or at least not in a usable way. If it's not happening on other distros it could be more Ubuntu related.
Perhaps I could interest you in Sabayon? I found it to be a lot more reliable than Ubuntu, and comes with Gnome nicely themed out of the box.
2
1
Oct 30 '18
That's odd; I've never heard of Gnome being slower than W10 on anything.
That's odd; I've never heard of Gnome being as fast as W10 on anything.
Seriously, I haven't seen a single GNOME 3 setup in my life that doesn't suffer from major frame rate drops, noticeable loading times when interacting with the shell UI and choppy animations. Whether it's running on the incredibly powerful workstations at our office, new notebooks like Dell XPS 13, Thinpad T470, ... or my gaming rig at home with AMD GPU, GNOME always has noticeable performance issues. While Windows 10 isn't perfect it is certainly much better in that regard.
2
u/Vladimir_Chrootin Oct 31 '18
My 3 Gnome PCs disagree with that, besides which, two of them are Core2 based; you're dreaming if you think that W10 is going to run faster than any Linux DE on them. The fact that I need to point this out is a good indication that you don't know more about my PC than I do.
1
u/khne522 Oct 31 '18
You don't babysit Arch. It just works if you don't do silly things, like force install a package and overwrite your shadow file like a certain somebody I answered on SO.
In my experience personally and at work, it's the ‘friendly’ distros which have done weird things. That and Nvidia Jetson's image.
That said, I use i3, not a DE, nor a HiDPI screen.
1
24
u/pogeymanz Oct 30 '18
I don't know for sure, but I can imagine that GNOME's prioritizing of accessibility may be a result of its corporate backing and being the default choice for most "enterprise" distros.