Mint Y theme slow animations or laggy in a lot of computers. | (22.1)

[MemoSainz]

Note

Description:

Hello, I want to report a trouble. Is not a big trouble for me, not at all, as I can disable the animation or change the theme to "cinnamon, Mint X or Mint L" and this is fixed. The problem is that I was watching two or three forums, things for communities in Reddit and forums from Mint. And no matter what if someone were using a thinkpad with an iGPU, or had a dedicated graphics like both AMD (opensource) or Nvidia(proprieraty); and this was mostly reproduced with dedicated GPUs. When having the default theme of Mint Y, and activating the animations for menu, there was a trouble. Even updating the drivers won't fix this trouble.

It's okay for me, as I have a good experience. No matter deactivating the animation or just changing the theme. But I wish there would be a way to report to the developers of Linux Mint.
I'm personally using an RTX 2060 FE. And also didn't made a rice or something. It's almost vainilla!

I'm someone that doesn't have all the time to go to more forums and search more or put emails, I wish but have things irl, but I long if someone else can put this post to another Mint developer and tell that this trouble exists, as I hope everyone can have a good experience with the animations. After this small trouble, is a good distro!

Important

Steps to Reproduce

• Prepare real hardware (not a VM), especially dedicated cards like:
       AMD (RX 4xx, 5xx..., 6xxx, 7xxx, etc) or an Nvidia (RTX 20xx, 3xxx, etc) - I'm using a RTX 2060 FE
       It's also valid to use the typical iGPU from the beloved Thinkpad.
  
  
• Try with a live USB linux mint &/or install in the PC with all the drivers. (By preference: install it with drivers)
  
• Left click on the menu, and click to "configure".
  

• Under 'Behavior' select "use menu animations"

• Try clicking the menu and see the lag, the slow animation.

Important

After this:

• Select a new theme, like Mint X, Mint L or default cinnamon
• Try clicking the menu again and see the difference.

Note

Expected/actual behavior

Instead to have a smoothly animation in Mint Y theme, it's slow. It has lag in comparison with other themes.

Tip

Additional Information here

There's more people than just me having this troubles. I saw this in several forums and subreddits like this ones:

• https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=438145
• https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/1j5p48d/slow_task_menu_animations_with_cpu_spikes_when/

Tip

Specs, Theme, driver & and useful data of my rig:

i7 9700k
b360n wifi
rtx 2060
ssd 1tb
1080p monitor (connnected with display port)

I've almost have Mint as default. Nothing of ricing.

It's the 22.1 version.

Note

Tell me if it's necessary more specs or something. I think this problem is reproducible in most of hardware with dedicated GPU.

[mtwebster]

This is why that menu animation is disabled to begin with.

The menu applet has to do a lot of intensive work the first time it's opened - by default the 'all applications' category is selected, and all of those app entries need to be rendered and allocated for. This would have an impact on the opening animation, especially the first time the menu is opened. Subsequent openings would usually be more acceptable, but users were happier with a menu that instantly opened (and could be typed into immediately) than one with a nice animation.

Can you try your test with different themes, but with restarting Cinnamon after changing the theme each time. I get more or less the same behavior regardless of what theme I've chosen - what seems to matter more is whether or not the applet menu has been shown previously.

[MemoSainz]

Can you try your test with different themes, but with restarting Cinnamon after changing the theme each time. I get more or less the same behavior regardless of what theme I've chosen - what seems to matter more is whether or not the applet menu has been shown previously.

Got the same result. It seems at first is fixed, but later on, the problem persist by the time passes. I've tried several themes recently, but the one that has troubles are the "Mint-Y" themes.

[MemoSainz]

The Cinnamon theme is what I find without problems, no lag... and pretty aesthetically pleasing... modern!
And seems pretty stable as I've described in the post along other themes that aren't "Mint-Y". Even after restarting it.

I don't see any problems with the applet issue as far as I see. Also, as an opinion, I think some users will like more to have animations enabled rather than deactivated, it will make Mint more modern for these days.

Anyways. I'm enjoying the distro. It's kinda indispensable for me. And I love it a lot, good job guys btw! @mtwebster