Linux Mint 19 ‘Tara’ cinnamon launches faster app-launching
The Linux Mint operating system is not slow, however, their development team found that when using the Cinnamon desktop environment, the application startup of the system seemed slow. Although there is no evidence, they believe that the Mate and Xfce versions are faster in this area. They are uncertain whether they are perceived or indeed performance problems.
As a result, the Linux Mint development team spent some time earlier this year investigating the performance of Linux Mint using the Cinnamon desktop environment when launching the application.
The team compared Cinnamon with the window manager Metacity and found that the window construction time and recovery time were four times slower than Metacity. Through the elimination method, the development team determined that it was not caused by the following factors:
- HiDPI support
- Theme complexity
- Effects/Animations
- Applets/Desklets
Then tested Muffin (Muffin is a library used by Cinnamon to implement the window manager, and it can also be run independently) and found that both Muffin and Cinnamon have performance problems. After the problem is solved, Cinnamon’s speed becomes as fast as Metacity, and You can quickly build 200 windows and recover.
For technical details, please see: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/pull/7251
In addition, the team also took the opportunity to improve the window animation effect. Although they have no responsibility for slowing down, they have an impact on the experience. New animations look cleaner and performance improvements make Cinnamon experience better.
Source: Linux Mint Blog
