Mate 18.04 - Extreme Slow Content Scrolling on Mate Specific Desktop Apps on old 32bit laptop

Along other PC’s , I own 3 Thinkpad T42 laptops with Radeon HD 9600 and 9800 (RV350), that according to today standard are obsolete products, but unfortunately I sometime use them, as each of them have an assigned rarely used task.

The main issue after upgrading from 16.04 to 18.04 through 17.10 is that on this desktops the scroll bars on all Mate apps works extremely slow out of the box after upgrade. So scrolling par example through Notepadqq or Mozilla Firefox looks at least 20 times faster. So I go to Mate tweek and change compositor from Marco default software one to Marco GPU to get them at list more faster but also extremely slower by comparative with Notepadqq or Mozilla, or how it works in 16.04
I note that on Mate 16.04 this scrolling was extremely fast. The slowest scrolling I noticed first in Control Center, but Mate terminal is neither faster on all this laptops.

I think that some code was removed from Marco compositor or … that made the mate desktop scrolling extremely slow, or is an issue with with some window scrolling / content acceleration that was changed in Marco.

I also hope that someone will update mate desktop on 18.04 to fix this slow content scrolling “acceleration” and come with an update in next months. Other apps like Mozilla Firefox can scroll content extremely fast on this desktop by comparing with scrolling of Mate Terminal, so Mate developer should fix this … as it works on 16.04 OK, it should work also in 18.04. As other apps work OK, also Mate / Mate desktop ones should work OK, and not stay behind saying “we drop further 32bit support”

Thank you all for all this grate work on this grate desktop.

I make an investigation with this issue and I observe that different systems that I have have different acceleration regarding windows and window content based on how apps are made.
Worser acceleration like in 18.04 on 32bit system I have never in my life no mater what OS or OS version I use. So I have following option

  • investigate more
  • fill a bug for Marco Compositor “regression”
  • reinstall 16.04
  • switch to a different distro
  • switch back to my dual boot Windows XP, witch works perfectly.

As two of my 32bit system is un-usable with Mate 18.04,

  • almost frozen desktop, (mate desktop issue)
  • the system does not want to power down sometimes (ubuntu release issue)
    I have downgraded the OS by reinstalling older 16.04 version of Ubuntu Mate on one of my T42 Thinkpad.
    The 16.04 has a consistent Desktop (V1.12.1), a professional grade quality. Everything return back to normal, so proceeding in couple of minutes with the next one.

I have also tested this days on this systems KDE Plasma desktop, and it can’t scale so good on small resolution monitor, so Mate desktop has an advantage here. KDE is working more smoother than Mate on my 32bit system, but because of bulkiness it was a no go, so why not using mate 16.04 as it works impeccably and has worked before upgrading to 18.04

This bad experience with Mate 18.04 on all my system, without any minor update or fix in one month after release, might me thing that I might / or should consider other desktops for future.