alt Hacker NewsIndeed. Much of a modern Linux desktop e.g. runs inside one of multiple not very well optimized JS engines: Gnome uses JS for various desktop interactions, and all major desktops run a different JS engine as a different user to evaluate polkit authorizations (so exactly zero RAM could be shared between those engines, even if they were identical, which they aren't), and then half your interactions with GUI tools happens inside browser engines, either directly in a browser, or indirectly with Electron. (And typically, each Electron tool bundles their own slightly different version of Electron, so even if they all run under the same user, each is fully independent.)
Or you can ignore all that nonsense and run openbox and native tools.
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Which is baffling as to why they chose it - I remember there being memory leaks because GObject uses a reference counted model - cycles from GObject to JS then back were impossible to collect.
They did hack around this with heuristics, but they never did solve the issue.
They should've stuck with a reference counted scripting language like Lua, which has strong support for embedding.
I've found that Gnome works about as well as other "lighter" desktop environments on some hardware I have that is about 15 years old. I don't think it using a JS engine really impacts performance as much as people claim. Memory usage might be a bit higher, but the main memory hog on a machine these days is your web browser.
I have plenty of complaints about gnome (not being able to set a solid colour as a background colour is really dumb IMO), but it seems to work quite well IME.
> Or you can ignore all that nonsense and run openbox and native tools.
I remember mucking about with OpenBox and similar WMs back in the early 2000s and I wouldn't want to go back to using them. I find Gnome tends to expose me to less nonsense.
There is nothing specifically wrong with Wayland either. I am running it on Debian 13 and I am running a triple monitor setup without. Display scaling works properly on Wayland (it doesn't on X11).
COSMIC is gaining ground as a JS-free alternative to current desktops, so hopefully you won't be limited to openbox and such.
A month with CrunchBang Plus Plus (which is a really nice distribution based on Openbox) and you'll appreciate how quick and well put together Openbox and text based config files are.