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What I really like about #GNOME46 is that it turned out to be a great release for old and low-end devices. One of my test devices is Thinkpad T400. That hardware is over 15 years old and actually got faster over the last few years - especially this release.
One of my favorite improvements here, headed by Christian Hergert, was the boost to VTE. Terminals using #gtk4 are now much faster and responsive. I mean, damn, even switching tabs doesn't trigger a full redraw!
There were also a bunch of improvements to screen casting, resulting in #GNOME46 being the first release where I can make fullscreen recordings on this device at reasonable speed. I can even play video during recording, as long as hardware decoding is used (only mpeg2 :P).
@rmader any hope to see that coming to oldish distros like Ubuntu 23.04? #Ubuntu #GNOME46
I'd rather keep running a supported distro on my @frameworkcomputer laptop but the new shiny is tempting :)
@fabrice @frameworkcomputer I'm afraid you'll have to wait for Ubuntu 24.04 - but that's just around the corner, no?
@rmader On that topic, any thoughts about the implications of the NGL renderer for older devices?
@tbernard It doesn't work on GL(ES) 2.x, so these devices will stick to the old GL renderer. IIUC the idea is to keep that around and - as long as people test and file issues - keep running. But yeah, they will slowly be left behind when it comes to more newish stuff like good fractional scale support.
the T400 can make it to the 20 years mark still being supported and running smoothly.
@rmader Ah interesting, that's good to know. I guess the problem is devices old enough for NGL to be slow, but new enough to not get the fallback. Would be nice to have some numbers on how many devices are affected by that 
@tbernard @rmader so far we've gotten the most complains in #postmarketos with msm8953 (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_450/625/626/632_(MSM8953) ) devices, which triggered: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6576 That's probably just a data-point, but might be fun to know? We also had a family of older devices that we had to directly revert to the old renderer, so in similar status as the T400. So far otherwise nobody massively complained :)
@pabloyoyoista @tbernard @rmader Adreno 500 series would need some extra love within Mesa. All development happens these days on Adreno 6xx+. We still have them in CI for testing, there is most likely many low-hanging fruits fixes and improvements, so it may be interesting challenge for someone! :opensourceparrot:
@pabloyoyoista @tbernard Yeah, granted, there's also some fallout with the new GTK renderer. I wonder if on these devices still got faster with GTK 4.14 when sticking to the old renderer, though - because of the switch to GLES (over big GL) by default and new features like the Wayland offloading (even though not many apps make use of that yet).
@rmader Huh, I wish I could say that’s been my experience. My 2013 laptop has been getting faster until a bit after 2020. New media codecs and security mitigations really tanked its performance (though the former saved me quite a bit of disk space).
@Seirdy When it comes to the web I must agree - even though that device probably has H264 decoding - and you can force websites like youtube to use that via extensions like (enhanced-)h264ify (and on yt specifically disabling ambient mode helps a lot here).
I also would like to point out that I came to enjoy a bunch of native apps more and more. Such as Shortwave, (Gnome-)Podcasts, Fractal, Tuba etc.
@rmader vp9 actually got partial hwdec support several years in which saved some battery, and dav1d eventually got really good hand-optimized assembly for AVX/AVX2 support. Neither really compares to H.264 when it comes to decoding performance, though.