Special Sauce in GTK+ 2.4?
I finally got around to pulling Fedora Core 2 Test 1 last weekend because I'm a good contributing citizen and all that. It looks nice thus far, no problems that I wouldn't expect. Feeling bleeding edge I went ahead and decided to sync up with rawhide, which was also pretty painless. Today I had 50 or so updated packages come down including the just released GTK+ 2.4.0. I restart X and come back to find what seems to be an enormous increase in perceived responsiveness of the entire GNOME environment. I usually run with the stock Bluecurve theme because I really just don't care that much about themes as long as they are tolerable and don't bog the system down. However, on this day, with GNOME acting all balls to the wall, I decide to load up the Milk 2.0 Theme [screenshot].
I've been envying a guy at work who lugs his PowerBook G4 17' into the office everyday—the panther GUI really does have amazing style and polish. I take the scenic route, passing his cube, to the coffee two or three times a day; sometimes, when he's not around, I admit I walk up and rub it softly and promise to come back for her when I have an extra $3,000 laying around.
Milk is pretty heavy on the pixmaps. I tried it for about 10 minutes about a week ago and was just completely disappointed at how much it slowed things down. Not now. I'm back around the same responsiveness I got with Bluecurve under GTK+ 2.2, which wasn't bad by a long shot. It's just kind of amazing how you can get serious system-wide increases by optimizing in sweet spots. We should be looking for more of these.