On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 09:09:28AM -0700, erich(a)ericheickmeyer.com wrote:
Hi all,
I'm considering moving Fedora Jam from KDE Plasma to GNOME. There are
multiple reasons for this, and I think part of it would be beneficial
to the overall GNOME and Fedora communities as it would be a way to be
helping improve the situation in GNOME that exist as the biggest
objections from the community of musicians and Linux audio enthusiasts
in the overall community.
The biggest objections are resource usage, since the more resources
that are in use, the more it tends to interfere with real-time audio
processes, causing buffer overruns and/or underruns. These overruns and
underruns are known as Xruns. The fewer Xruns, the better, as Xruns
cause pops during recording. When doing real-time audio work, you want
to have as low of latency as possible which requires as small of a
buffer as possible. The goal is to have a small buffer to get minimal
latency while avoiding Xruns.
Unfortunately, GNOME has, since 3.0, traditionally interfered with
these processes and caused Xruns. My goal, by moving Fedora Jam from
Plasma to GNOME, is to help GNOME improve this situation.
I'll be blunt here. I don't think this is a good _motivation_ for the
change. If you want to improve Gnome, you can do switch your own
desktop and do tests, and you can write patches, or you can review
other's patches, or you can talk on gnome mailing lists to make the
issue more prominent. But a spin for users should use whatever is best
for the purpose of that spin, period. Users != guinea pigs.
The other reason for switching away from Plasma is the overall
negative
attitude I see from Fedora KDE users and former Fedora KDE
contributors. It seems to be an attitude against the progress of
improving the Linux desktop for the better, and simply complaining. I
know some of this attitude comes from Red Hat dropping KDE from being a
desktop in REHL, among other changes. That attitude is regressive, and
does nothing to help the community if all you do is complain. I could
name names, but for the sake of the "Friends" foundation, I will not.
I'd prefer to talk about which DE is better (now, or in the
foreseeable future). While too many complaints are indeed tiring,
those human-related reasons don't seem like enough to switch the
desktop either.
(I have no knowledge whether KDE or Gnome is better for music. If the
pipewire stuff works out then the situation might be quite different
than in the past... The switch might be well motivated by this and
other reasons, I just think that the two listed above are not good.)
Zbyszek