I’ve been using Zed a few months on my fedora laptop (thinkpad x230) and haven’t had any performance issues. Definitely faster than any other graphical editor I’ve used. Perhaps a driver issue would be slowing it down?
You should report an issue with your specs, not just say “other applications don’t have this problem” — especially as a Linux user.
For one, not all applications are GPU accelerated.
Two, their UX may need to be improved for a specific hardware configuration. I have used Zed with good performance on Intel dGPU, AMD dGPU, and Intel iGPU without issue — my guess is a missing dependency?
Meh, it's not worth the trouble. I don't care enough about using Zed to fix their Linux distribution problems or debug something for them. This isn't some volunteer backed FOSS project where they get a free pass or free QA work from me.
What's the point of commenting that it's slow if you don't care about using the program and switched to something else? Also, how is whether the project is volunteer-run relevant? Would you file a support ticket for commercial software you use saying "it's slow" and then when they follow up asking for details about your setup, you say "sorry, you don't get free QA work from me"? Do you really think that would lead to them fixing your performance problem?
The point was contradicting another comment with my own experience, not to putz around with bug reports or trouble shooting.
I don't care about Zed fixing anything - they're Zed's issues, not mine. All I'm saying is that contrary to what someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried it and at startup, it was unusably slow. I'm what you would call a failed conversion.
> Also, how is whether the project is volunteer-run relevant? Would you file a support ticket for commercial software you use saying "it's slow" and then when they follow up asking for details about your setup, you say "sorry, you don't get free QA work from me"
So this is kind of needlessly antagonistic imo - the point between the lines is that FOSS projects run by volunteers get a lot more grace than venture backed companies that go on promotion blitzes talking about their performance.
But you run Linux, with its myriad of software configurations. And if this thread is correct Linux support is already far along, if it runs well on something old like the X230. It is not a realistic expectation for any project to work on your hardware if you are not at least willing to report an issue, or rather: No software will run flawlessly on all hardware always, that's not realistic.
Error message, hardware configuration, done.
From my perspective that is not something you do for zed, but something you do for your distro and hardware.
And ofc, your first comment was fine either way. But the attitude of the latter is just poor.
Once you get a knack for it, you can see that the original comment of "So I guess it's only fast on macos?" already has an attitude, and the rest of the thread comes at no surprise.
How about "I'm getting <1FPS perf on {specs}" instead of the snark.
This. Honestly, their issue based on Zed’s issue tracker is likely with NVIDIA drivers inconsistencies, which ironically is due to the closed source nature of NVIDIA drivers (its workarounds all the way down bringing pain to app and driver developers), not Zed (which is indeed FOSS, just not “volunteer” driven).
You’re both being antagonistic. While Zed may be VC backed, they’re providing a world class open source editor experience for free. There are no expectations in either direction. You’re not a special customer paying them to care about Linux. And you also don’t owe them volunteer effort to help resolve some Linux issue you encountered. They failed to convert. You missed out on honestly possibly the best editor out there right now. That’s that.
The antagonistic part is assuming your specific Linux configuration is innately Zed’s issue. It’s possible simply mentioning it to them would lead you quickly and easily to a solution, no free labor needed. It’s possible Zed is prepared to spend their vast VC resources on fixing your setup, even—which seems to be what you expect. Point being there’s a middle ground where you telling Zed “hey it didn't work well for me” gives Zed the chance to resolve any issues on their end in order to properly convert you, if you truly are interested in trying their editor. You don’t need to respond to the suggestion with a lecture on how companies exploit free volunteer labor and anything short of software served up on a silver platter would make you complicit. It’s really a little absurd.
If I had to guess, your system globally or their rendering library specifically is probably stuck on llvmpipe.
You don’t need a high-end gpu zed runs perfectly fine on embedded graphics. There are no shortage of software configurations on linux that result in cpu graphics rendering, which is the problem.
There is great enthusiasm for the editor in this thread. A personal anecdote indicating subpar performance on a common developer environment (Linux) is a useful signal that took a few seconds of effort.
Putting together a high quality, actionable bug report is a much higher bar that can often feel like screaming at the clouds.
So, only positive feedback allowed in this thread?
As a Linux user, I am sadly accustomed to some software working in only a just-so configuration. A datapoint that the software is still Mac first development is useful to know. Zed might still be worth trying, but I have to temper my enthusiasm from the headline announcement of, “everything is great”.
Is it even Zed’s fault if your linux system/setup over-eagerly prefers cpu rendered graphics because of old political and religious driver licensing issues?
I'm under Debian and i3wm/X11, sometimes it does some stuff that blocks input for a while so I can't drive the window manager until its done.
At least it did a month or so ago, and at that time I couldn't figure out a practical use for the LLM-integration either so I kind of just went back to dumb old vim and IDEA Ultimate.
When its fast its pretty snappy though. I recently put revisiting emacs on my todo-list, should add taking Zed out for another round as well.
I think that’s the same issue I’ve had with i3 and the sole reason why I switched to bspwm. I think it happens when the cursor is on a GPU accelerated window and you quit the app - it’s like i3’s keyboard input gets trapped in that pane and can’t escape (my work around was to create a terminal and kill the GPU app with skill using my mouse)
That sounds a lot like a CPU fallback of the rendering that should otherwise happen on the GPU. Isn't there any logs that could suggest that this is the case?
Edit: I just saw your edit to your reply here[1] and that's indeed what's happening. Now the question is “why does that happen?”.
That's interesting[1], what was slow when you tried it on MacOS?
[1]: people experiencing sluggishness on Linux are almost certainly hit by a bug that makes the rendering falls back to llvmpipe (that is CPU rendering) instead of Vulkan rendering, but MacOS shouldn't have this kind of problems.
