Comment 5 for bug 601220

A few clarifications here.
First I must express my astonishment to the fact that so few people seem to have noticed the sluggish behaviour of desktops with new libcairo2 installed. The last version to work was the version 1.8.10 (in lucid), since then not any version has worked well.
One can easily see the sluggishness of the whole desktop (like in nautilus and synaptic) by changing gnome desktop themes (System-Preferences-Appearance).
For example, choose the theme Ambience or Dust Sand and in nautilus go quickly through menus or try to open a folder containing a lot of files (like .thumbnails/normal).
Then choose the theme Clearlooks and customize controls to Mist.
You will see a clear improvement in speed. But a lot simplier theme with no color blends.