How "snappy" can the Openmoko GUI get using GTK?

[Giles Jones]

On 2 Sep 2007, at 14:57, denis wrote:

> Watching a lot of videos about Openmoko and the GUI I saw that it is
> very slow and yards away from being "snappy". (regarding the  
> application
> startup and the acting inside an application) I know that speed is not
> the priority thing in developement  at the moment but how fast and
> "snappy" can the Openmoko GUI using GTK get? I'm looking at this from
> the user point of view, I'm not a developer so it would be very
> interesting to me what can be expected in the future. What are you're
> expectations? Will it get as snappy as the old PALM Pdas had been?
>
> I'm really looking forward for your answers.
>
> Regards, Denis.
>

Launch speed is something that can be fixed, I'm not sure if the  
build system is using pre-linking? if not it will be something to use  
as this is the cure to application launch speed delays on Unix like  
systems.

The interface is VGA and so there's a lot more to draw and this makes  
the GUI less responsive than QVGA. The acceleration in the next gen  
hardware will solve this.

The Palm PDAs were using task switching, it wasn't a full  
multitasking OS, so you have to realise that a Linux based PDA will  
always lag behind a very simple OS.