GNOME needs to be faster
FOSS desktops are certainly better compared to almost anything out there in the market. I personally find GNOME far more usable then Microsoft Windows or even Mac OS X. However, this doesn’t mean GNOME is perfect; it does have its share of annoyances.
My current pet peeve is that small GNOME apps take an annoying long time to load. Take, for example, the date/time GNOME applet. It’s useful and works well, until you click on it to bring up the calendar. That takes a whole 3 seconds. Pressing Alt+F2 to bring up the Run dialog box takes another 3 seconds. Clicking on the GNOME menus should be instantaneous but it is not - it takes half a second to load up the menu. I have shite load of gnome-terminal’s running and launching a new one should not take one second, it should be instantaneous.
Latency is annoying. Latency is a bugbear to productivity. Latency is a hindreance to efficiency. I propose the following principle for desktop usability in the context of latency: A commonly used application and all loaded GNOME applets must load many magnitudes faster (if not instantaneously) then it does today.
I’ll be investigating sources of bottlenecks noted by other GNOME users and report back accordingly.