Linux loads the gtk libs when your desktop starts because it’s a major component of gnu/gnome. Windows doesn’t until you launch an app that would use it. It’s not a small library.
It’s not a small library.
it’s featherweight compared to Windows Desktop, tho
Sure… But the point is that it’s an apples to oranges compare when half of gimp is loaded by the OS at boot under Linux and at runtime on Windows.
Does Gimp load slowly for people who use KDE?
I don’t use KDE any more so I don’t follow closely. But it used to be significantly slower. I recall some years back they were working to change KDE loading of gtk libs but I’m not sure what came out of that
for me, it takes a few seconds on my decent spec laptop. (kde)
pro-tip you can run gimp on WSL2 and have its xwindow appear within windows just like a normal application. The ONLY way to run gimp on windows imo.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps
How
Here is the WSLg repo if you’re curious about how it works: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg
Basically, Microsoft take a Wayland compositor (Weston) and modify it to add support to enable automatic RDP connection to the Windows host. They also added support to RDP individual application window instead of the full desktop. The result is the Wayland compositor will render the application windows over RDP when you run any GUI app.
Wait, so are people going to claim that the start-up speed is the problem with GIMP on Windows and not the god awful UI? This is the problem with the Linux crowd. You guys write software to write software and not because you are a user of that software. A clunky UI - which is far, far too common on open source applications - will cost someone a heck of a lot more than a few seconds in getting work done.
There’s alot of irritation and bad general assumptions here lol. Krita, vlc, firefox, kdenlive etc exist and are amazing.
Gimp’s ui is pretty bad though imo, even if it’s good enough. I’d pirate and use photoshop as it is now if I could.
This is the problem with the Linux crowd. You guys write software to write software and not because you are a user of that software.
It’s a problem you have since your OS pretends that Software (or a Computer in general) isn’t complex.
Linux crowds use *NIX principles that are >50 years old and didn’t change a lot, because they work. Not because some software devs circlejerk or want to annoy you.
A clunky UI - which is far, far too common on open source applications
So, what are you going to do about it ? Contribute ? Learn the ins and outs of gimp, and propose some UI changes ? And if you don’t have time to do that, who does / who cares enough for that ? People who code stuff like GIMP generally don’t really care for UI, or have the time. They’re volunteers, passionate people. Not designers.
That’s also a broad generlization. Firefox has bad UI/UX ? (Sometimes yeah on some niche things but I wholeheartedly believe google is at fault somehow) What about Krita ? Blender has been doing UI work last I heard of it, so that’s also that. Paint.net was also open source. Chromium has bad UI ? Android ? Vs Code ? GNOME ? KDE ? Element ? Jitsi ? Signal ? Wordpress ?
Yeah, gimp sucks. And the type of people who are “linux elitists”, that tell you you suck for not enjoying bad UI, also suck. But why not make a meaningful change to the world ? Try to hope for a world where GIMP is actually usable ?
Everything loads slower on Windows. I’ve run programs through fucking Wine that still load faster than they do on Windows.
Just measured startup time on Windows. 37 seconds from click to splash screen, 40 seconds from splash screen to UI
Everything seems to be way faster on Linux than on windows for some reason.
On one occasion I tested a build that took ~10 min on windows, in a Linux VM installed on the same machine, it finished in ~1min.
I have searched around for an answer for quite some time now, I could not find any definitive reason. Some say that process creation is slower on windows, some say IO is inefficient. Still struggling to explain 10x increase in throughput.
Here is a funny instance: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/17783/why-does-emacs-take-longer-to-start-on-windows-than-on-linux
IMO it’s because Windows is targeted for general use so they don’t bother optimizing anything. They’ll just convince people that thei have aging hardware when things become slow and say stuffs like “unused RAM is wasted RAM” to justify taking up half of my memory on idle.
Even running Linux from a USB is still a way smoother experience than running Windows for me.
I thinks it caused by two reasons:
- process creation has much higher overhead on windows. On top of that, the antivirus system adds additional overhead not present in Linux because it scan every process on launch and monitor its behavior until the process finished. This result in any workflow that relies on launching a bunch of processes (e.g. make-style compilation which launch the compiler process recursively) to be very slow on Windows.
- file access on windows is also significantly slower on windows due to its filesystem filter. Also, antivirus typically hook into this filter and inspect every opened files. You can imagine this would result in significant slowdown for any workflow that relies on opening a lot of small files (e.g. compilation)
If you disable the antivirus (including windows defender) performance would definitely improve, but it’ll still slower than on Linux.
In order to gain sufficient performance in windows, you’ll have to use threads instead of processes (basically a single program doing everything instead of chaining multiple program Unix-style) and put your data in a single file so it can load all at once instead of in a bunch of small files loaded recursively. Basically a complete opposite of what people do on Linux.
It’s been a while since I’ve used GIMP, but I recall even loading it on Linux taking over a minute.
Sometimes it does take a few seconds for me as well, but not even close to a full minute. That must’ve been on an HDD, right?
It’s been a while, so it may have been on a HDD.
Kind of funny because I was using an old laptop earlier to recover a partition that Mac fucked up.
Instead of clicking GParted, I accidentally clicked GIMP. For a Core2Duo computer with 4GB RAM, 2 seconds wasn’t an exaggeration.
Distro was Manjaro.
krita 😊
In my case Alacritty on Windows 10 takes like 30 seconds to open + 15 seconds waiting for Powershell, on Linux Mint Alacritty + Fish shell takes only 1-2 seconds to open
On Windows for me it takes a solid 5 seconds, on Linux it’s barely a second.
