applet has a 5 second delay

[Ron Koerner]

When I click go-home, it takes about 5 seconds until the windows are hidden. Minimizing the windows by hand works and shows the background instantly.

I'm using UNR 9.10

[Ron Koerner (ron-koerner)]

Actually it is more around 2 seconds...
After a little digging in the sources I found that the evildoer is not the applet but netbook-launcher, even if you can argue whether it is the best way to go through the whole initialization and startup stuff of netbook-launcher only to hide all windows (and show the "Favorites").
I guess a dbus interface would probably be the best thing to implement.

Since the go-home-applet is a central point of the user interface experience it might have a bad effect on (new) users causing them to say "Linux/Ubuntu/UNR/go-home-applet is slow on my netbook, while Windows was/is much faster". I don't think we should scare people away because of something like this...

[Ron Koerner (ron-koerner)]

A typical invocation of netbook-launcher from shell looks like this, where the most time seems to be spent before the "Low graphics mode" line.

$ time netbook-launcher -s

(netbook-launcher:14126): GLib-WARNING **: g_set_prgname() called multiple times

(netbook-launcher:14126): GLib-WARNING **: g_set_prgname() called multiple times
(netbook-launcher:14126): libnetbook-launcher-DEBUG: CONFIG: Low graphics mode: False
(netbook-launcher:14126): libnetbook-launcher-DEBUG: CONFIG: Font dpi: 96.000000
(netbook-launcher:14126): libnetbook-launcher-DEBUG: CONFIG: Font changed: Sans 10

(netbook-launcher:14126): libnetbook-launcher-DEBUG: CONFIG: Connecting to ConsoleKit for suspend/resume restarting

real 0m2.129s
user 0m1.348s
sys 0m0.460s

It seems that netbook-launcher is already using dbus to show the favorites. It might not be that hard to copy the relevant sections to the applet.

[John Baptist (jepst79)]

The delay is more like 3.5 sec on my system, but it's enough to be annoying. I notice that the delay only occurs when I am using metacity, and disappears when I use compiz. My uninformed guess is that netbook-launcher or gohome-applet are waiting for the transition effect to complete, when there is in fact no transition effect. Does that make sense?

[Dieki (dieki-ubuntu)]

Hm... the exact timing varies for me, but I experience this as well.

A workaround for affected users: Replace go-home-applet with the "Show Desktop" applet. Same functionality, but instantly responsive.

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

To be exact, not same functionality: you can't drag and drop an url there to create a favorite.

[Devin Samarin (eboyjr14)]

Maybe someone can work on a patch so that in addition to calling "netbook-launcher --show-favorites", it should hide all the windows just as the show-desktop applet does. This way, all the windows (except the netbook-launcher itself) will hide instantly and then 2-5 seconds later, the favorites will appear if it isn't already.

The show desktop applet is written in Vala and uses libwnck to show/hide the windows, so it shouldn't be too hard.

All you would probably need to do is in the applet.c file:

#include <libwnck/libwnck.h>

And then in the on_button_press function on line 192, adding:

WnckScreen* screen = wnck_screen_get_default ();
if( !wnck_screen_get_showing_desktop (screen) ) {
    wnck_screen_toggle_showing_desktop (screen, TRUE);
}

I haven't tested it, but it might work well.