Hallo everyone, a lot of people are complaining about the fact that the OpenGEU Sunshine and Moonlight Themes are really too heavy and hard on the system. On certain slower machines, it even looks like the CPU usage jumps to something like 90% when the sun beams in Sunshine shines down on the desktop…

The OpenGEU Sunshine (left) and Moonlight (right) themes

Well, these are animated backgrounds and the animations are not little pictures but cool and somehow big effects. What can I do about it?

• I modified a little the themes. Now the pictures inside them are much more optimized, resulting in an immediate gain in speed, no loss in quality and lighter files. You can already find the new opengeu-e17-themes in the repos, just update and then upgrade.
• I understand that while OpenGEU is also about eye-candy, Sunshine and Moonlight with such heavy animated backgrounds are still very hard on the CPU cycles. This means that if you have a slow machine you may probably prefer to change your current background to a static one (any of the pictures contained in OpenGEU or any other picture from the net will do). You’ll find an immediate gain in speed after changing to a static background, but e17 is also about effects and animations…. you can’t have everything. Sorry. E17 can be as light or heavy as you like.
• I’m creating two new OpenGEU Themes for you. Murrina Sunshine and Murrina Moonlight, these themes will have animated backgrounds but these BGs will be very easy on the CPU cicles and very little animated. So they’ll be very fast yest visually appealing. Instead of a PNG based GTK engine, these themes will use Murrine, a very nice yet extremely fast GTK engine by a fellow Italian, Cimi. Also the entire E17 theme will be the fastest possible, so I hope these themes will be very fast and that you’ll like ‘em. Also, the next OpenGEU, Luna Crescente, will have these themes as defaults, since they’ll be fast. Sunshine and Moonlight will always be available in the repos anyway if you’ll prefer them and find them fast enough for our likes

What can you do about it, if you think that Sunshine and Moonlight are still too slow for you? As I said, you can just change the background to a static one for now. And you can also wait for the new OpenGEU Murrina Sunshine and Murrina Moonlight themes

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