I have my Linux install running reliably and sharing a library with Aspect on Windows 10 in a dual boot machine. I notice that the Linux install responds slowly to any input. It is very noticeable when scrolling though a library. It takes 9 click stops on the mouse wheel to move up or down 1 row of pictures. Two clicks would be much better and in line with some other image viewing software I am using on Linux. Also it takes about 4 seconds to scroll one page, about 7 long rolls of the mouse wheel. This is at a fast scrolling speed but not video game action speed:-) I feel that 1 long roll should move one whole page at a time or, just less than a whole page to prevent location confusion in the user, that would be me.
Everything else seems a little slow as well. Like when switching between the Photo Stream and the collection view. Or, selecting multiple files while holding down the CTRL key. It’s not as noticeable as the mouse scrolling issue but still feels slightly sluggish.
System: MX Linux (Debian derivative) with the KDE desktop, Intel i7-11700K, 32GB ram, NVME drives. The settings window says Aspect is using 7.8GB of RAM for the cached thumbnails.
These are just some observations about my Linux experience and may only relate to my setup. I thought it might be useful info for you. I am happy that you are working on a Linux version at all.
Glad to hear that the Windows/Linux setup has worked out! The slow scrolling speed is indeed very noticeable when using a mouse wheel. I’ve always been testing with a gesture based track pad and didn’t notice it there. We’ll look into this!
As for the general sluggishness of the UI, my first suspicion would be that this might be GPU (driver) related. Although even the Intel integrated GPU of my laptop runs smoothly, something like a particularly large display resolution used together with an Intel integrated GPU might become a bottleneck due to the 16-bit floating point processing that we do for internal color management. I can try to hook up a 4k monitor to my laptop to see how that runs.
On the other hand, there might also be some temporary slowdowns caused by background processes, such as “Synchronizing file system…” (there will be some improvements for this particular case in the next release). So the question here would be - can the sluggishness also observed when everything is idle, or is there still any background activity shown in the notification pane at the bottom right of the main window?
There is no activity showing in the Notification center and the mouse is still slow. I have restarted Aspect and rebooted/restarted and it is still slow.
The Aspect installation in my laptop is also slow. Both on MX Linux and on Linux Mint Debian Edition. I haven’t check on Windows 10 yet. I will check the next time I boot to it.
FYI, when I start Aspect on MX Linux the UI locks up until the Synchronizing file system stops as reported in the Notification center. The file synchronization takes approximately 7minutes, I have timed it twice so far. The library is 557 GB and has 102,194 files on a fast NVME drive.
Also, Aspect is listed under the Utilities category not Graphics in the Application launch menu.
I’ve tested on my Laptop (Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon Edition) and what I could observe was that as soon as a plugged in the external 4k monitor, the frame rate of the whole system appeared to drop (I didn’t measure, but it felt like 30 fps vs. 60 fps normally) and also there were some very evident tearing artifacts when moving windows around. Because of that, I couldn’t really tell whether Aspect itself was slower, too, because it was limited by the system wide refresh rate anyway. I’ll have to play with some settings to see whether I can get the base system to perform well with this setup first.
FYI, when I start Aspect on MX Linux the UI locks up until the Synchronizing file system stops as reported in the Notification center. The file synchronization takes approximately 7minutes, I have timed it twice so far.
The synchronization duration is far too long for a normal synchronization and of course there should also be no UI lock-up - but hopefully that will be fixed with preview 38 already.
Also, Aspect is listed under the Utilities category not Graphics in the Application launch menu.
I’ve fixed the desktop entry to use the “Graphics” category and also corrected the lower-case application name.
Turned out the HDMI interface is simply not able to do more than 30 Hz for a 4k resolution. There is a thunderbolt port, but I’ll first have to order an adapter cable to test with that.
All those cables, adapters, dongles and converters can get mixed up easily. I am glad it wasn’t something serious or a lot of work. Thanks for looking into the Linux category assignment, it’s not a serious thing but seemed out of place under Utilities. Keep up the good work. I’ll keep on breaking things and passing them to you to be fixed.
The new release is installed and seems stable on MX Linux. Great! The UI performance issues on Linux are still the same as reported earlier, not so great. But, Aspect now shows up in the Graphics category, hooray, thanks. As far as networking goes, Aspect can see other instances on the network and connect but can’t share a library. Some trial and error was required and I had to set up firewall rules to get things working. I used the Gufw firewall utility for that. I will keep on experimenting and report any progress I make to you.
Thanks for all the great work,
Gord