A lot of performance-oriented work has been done in the lower levels of the GNOME/Linux stack. Numerous kernel/udev improvements combined with the creation of systemd have helped a lot. However, as things stand, GNOME 3 is not snappy. The startup time of GNOME, the launch time of GNOME applications, and the rendering libraries themselves need work in this regard. We need to start being as obsessive about speed as web browsers are.
The aim of this talk is to highlight the parts of the stack that the speaker feels are most critical to this venture, and propose possible solutions to the problems of improving the performance of the stack, keeping it fast, and motivating authors to keep such things in mind.