Irritating pause before menu is displayed

[ChrisOfBristol]

Why is there a pause after I click on the menu? I can hear the disk work when I click on the menu (usually but not always), is this why? Why does the disk have to be accessed to display the menu?! Surely this is what is making it slow, and it would be faster if the menu was in memory (not that I know much about it). The same applies to all the applets I have tried which supply alternative menus.

It's obviously only a fraction of a second, but it is extremely irritating because I am used to quickly selecting a program (for example from the old Gnome2 Applications/Places/System menus), but now there is a stupid pause while I wait for the menu to appear
Mint Cinnamon is wonderful otherwise.....

[phill1978]

this has been mentioned many times where something like 75% of users noticed on all types of hardware.

not sure if cinnamon 1.8 has fixed this? have you had a look around on the cinnamon website / bug tracker ?

I also think it makes the whole of cinnamon feel gloopy and slow.

[phill1978]

ohh forgot to add this may at least explain how its not the mint teams fault..

Oh this is so pissing me off.

Apparently, it's impossible to preload an application menu and application switchers within the current GNOME Shell codebase.

The crappy macBooks from my colleagues are snappier. They laugh at this powerful hardware literally lagging basic stuff. While they laugh, I cry, on the inside.

Mint devs said the problems are introduced upstream (GNOME) and are near impossible to fix due to lack of documentation. Which is scary. Because Shell (and it's fork Cinnamon) is the only thing close to keeping up with Windows and OSX IMO.

The thread is on page 2 of this forum and has the most views 8000+ and pages. Its clearly a big unfixable issue, this and cover flow lagging also.. until its fixed cinnamon cant compete with KDE or even MATE because the root causes of lag ruin the whole experience. The devs dont know what code their platform is running on top of ?? time to ditch that code and re-write im affraid, go beyond a fork and make it completley separate.

big shame.

[ChrisOfBristol]

phill1978 - Thanks for backing me up! It is a significant problem - until recently I was using Mate because it was so irritating, now I have put a load of launchers on the panel so I can usually avoid having to use the menu. I will do as you suggest and post something on the Cinnamon page.

[ChrisOfBristol]

The thread is on page 2 of this forum

I think I should read that, but I'm not quite sure what you mean, could you tell me where to find it please?

[phill1978]

its just the number at the bottom of the specific forum list, a historical numbering of pages. It 'was' on page two but by now it might be 3 or 4

hang on..

[phill1978]

Here ..

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=116702


Last post.

I belive cinnamon is being re-written or moved from gnome so eventually it will get fixed.

I have to be honest with you my experience of DE feedback has been great on XFCE, the community cares. With cinnamon you have all the beatuy of the interface and a sense of the arogance you get with apple.. it must be a creative thing

[ChrisOfBristol]

a sense of the arogance you get with apple.. it must be a creative thing

Haha

Here .. http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=116702 .. Last post.

I haven't read all the posts yet but I can see that that topic covers exactly what I am talking about. I have switched back and forth between Mate and Cinnamon because I keep hoping a new version will sort it and then it doesn't.

I have brought a friends old computer back to life by replacing XP with Mint, and another friend is showing interest after a demo, but I am afraid it will have to be Mate as I won't damage Linux's reputation in front of a newcomer by installing an operating system where you have to wait for a disk access before you can see the menu.

I'll switch to that forum now, thanks phill1978.

[roblm]

Is the menu opening speed the same if you hover over the menu, after changing the setting in Cinnamon Settings > Menu to “Activate
menu on hover”?
Had anyone tried to temporarily deselect all the categories in the menu editor to see if there is any change?

[d00med]

Some menus are faster than others. Like the "Win7" menu found in panel applet list. Much faster here, and I think, better organized than the default.

[ChrisOfBristol]

Is the menu opening speed the same if you hover over the menu, after changing the setting in Cinnamon Settings > Menu to “Activate
menu on hover”?

There is no improvement and the hover means that it is not possible to edit the settings because the menu pops up before you can right-click.

[ChrisOfBristol]

Some menus are faster than others. Like the "Win7" menu found in panel applet list.

Unfortunately this is one of the many "applets" that won't load with "Add Applets to panel"/"Get more online" and don't even work when manually downloaded and put into the right directory. When clicked it just shows a bar about as big as a mouse pointer.

[ChrisOfBristol]

Is it possible to use "preload" to speed this up? If I could work out where preload's configuration file was, perhaps I could put 'mintmenu' in there so that it is always preloaded in memory.

Edit: After a bit of investigation it looks as though preload can't be configured to load specific packages.