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feaneron
Personal blog · feaneron.comprogrammingsystems
feaneron is a personal blog at feaneron.com about programming and systems. Since 2016, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “The Infamous Gnome Shell Memory Leak”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Georges Basile Stavracas Neto's posts as primary technical accounts of GNOME and Linux desktop problems, such as the 2018 GNOME Shell memory leak, OBS Studio on Wayland, and portals.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter says the original developer post on OBS Studio on Wayland is a better link than a secondary write-up that adds no information.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Infamous Gnome Shell Memory Leak8 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-04-21
- OBS Studio on Wayland4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-31
- Flatpak 1.16 Is Out3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-14
- On Being a Free Software Maintainer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-03-29
- /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-12
- The Burial of the Filechooser Meme2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-15
What Hacker News says?
The only one out of those that's a intentional design is multiple monitors. The other ones are known shortcomings that are just really hard to fix. The memory leak was fixed a few years ago: https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-memory-leak/
on “Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment”Submitted On Being a Free Software Maintainer as a story · 261 points
HN discussionWow. I was suprised to read that OBS doesn't work with Wayland. I found some articles [0] on how it runs well using XWayland [1] - which I guess let's you run X-Clients under Wayland - but it seems that the amount of work to get this to work is not trivial, considering the official PR for the work, is on part 3 and that has been open since March![2]. Oh, how did it get so bad? --------------- [0]: https://feaneron.c…
Comment linking /2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-studio-on-wayland/
on “On Abandoning the X Server”Submitted GNOME Shell and Mutter as a story · 79 points
HN discussionMy reading is that performance problems are caused by interactions between reference-counted GObjects and tracing GC, nothing to do with "not having a V8 class implementation". > https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gjs/-/issues/361 Now what can we learn here? Well, the most important lesson is that getting properties from GObjects seems to be very expensive and a major bottleneck [...] Also generally (and as expected), r…
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem
on “Gnome has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked (2021)”Submitted Smarter half tiling in Gnome Shell/Mutter as a story · 76 points
HN discussionMaybe it is competitive now, it hasn't always been like that. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gjs/-/issues/231 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gjs/-/issues/361 https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem... Just to give you a taste of the issues. When I complain about something, usually it is based on experience and knowledge. And if I wanted to have a desktop where JavaScript gets used everywhere I w…
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-memory-leak/
on “Gnome has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked (2021)”Submitted On Being a Free Software Maintainer as a story · 20 points
HN discussionDid you read the bug report? The entire problem is that GC isn't working right. See https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem... for more info.
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-memory-leak/
on “A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)”Submitted The Infamous Gnome Shell Memory Leak as a story · 14 points
HN discussionThere was an update for OBS recently, which sounds like it fixed the Wayland issues. https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/
Comment linking /2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/
on “HW accelerated Xwayland rendering for Nvidia merged”Submitted Rewarding Our Friends of Gnome as a story · 6 points
HN discussionWell, https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-memory-leak/
on “Gimp 2.99.2 – GTK3 user interface toolkit”Submitted The Infamous Gnome Shell Memory Leak as a story · 4 points
HN discussionEven stuff such as OBS Studio was significantly slower on Wayland than on X11, at least until the efforts done _last year_ (e.g. https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/ ) . Single-Window support for screencast API is also only a couple years old! Before that it would just error out, even if the D-Bus interface was there ( https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/blob/b2b5e... ). That's why I…
Comment linking /2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/
on “How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition”Submitted Flatpak 1.16 Is Out as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSome of your comments are valid and I agree with them, but some of them are a lot of nonsense. >This was caused by a weird mismatch between its javascript desktop and its compiled code that was too hard to fix so they decided to just constantly run the garbage collector and marveled at how not horrible this performed in actuality. No, this is not even close to what happened. There was never any weird mismatch, the r…
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-memory-leak/
on “Farewell, Elementary”Submitted Flatpak 1.16 Is Out as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think the original blog post from the developer is a better link: https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/ Michael added zero extra information on top of that.
Comment linking /2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/
on “OBS Studio Now Ready with Wayland Capture Support”Submitted OBS Studio on Wayland as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe JavaScript extensions, besides requiring a rewrite from the old C model, for a long time were the root cause of performance issues given how much GNOME has outsourced into extensions from what used to be core features in the GNOME 1.x and 2.x days. Here is an old example, https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-memory-leak/
on “A React Renderer for Gnome JavaScript”Submitted New Gnome 3 Control Center as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> however the new public API has an animation, after which a special window opens and requires you to click a "share" button before Flameshot can work with the screenshot. You need to go through that every time you use Flameshot. This is indeed very frustrating. Something related is in the works for screenshares, a "remember this decision" option. https://feaneron.com/2021/11/13/adventures-with-portals/ At some poin…
Comment linking /2021/11/13/adventures-with-portals/
on “Flameshot v11.0.0”Submitted The future of Gnome Music as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe news is, that it finally landed! https://feaneron.com/2017/10/03/improved-half-tiling-availab...
Comment linking /2017/10/03/improved-half-tiling-available-in-mutter-3-26-1/
on “Smarter half tiling in Gnome Shell/Mutter”Submitted On Being a Free Software Maintainer as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> It doesn't leak memory ( https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem ...), it doesn't crash, it doesn't change (UI/UX is a kind of stable, too), and it can seamlessly restart itself in place without any disruption to the actual user session. None of that was true when I last used i3. YMMV.
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem
on “Updated GNOME User Interface Guidelines are now official”Submitted In Celebration of Accessibility as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"polished" is subjective enough that I won't say you're wrong (although I don't agree ), but how can you be more stable than i3, in any sense? It doesn't leak memory ( https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem... ), it doesn't crash, it doesn't change (UI/UX is a kind of stable, too), and it can seamlessly restart itself in place without any disruption to the actual user session.
Comment linking /2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-memory-leak/
on “Updated GNOME User Interface Guidelines are now official”Submitted Flatpak 1.16 Is Out as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
