It's a comment at [link|http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2006-07-27-013-26-NW-GN-RL-0000|Linux Today]:
Remember when GNOME promised major performance improvements a few versions back? Well, they delivered... they shaved back the memory and speeded up code. Unfortunately, the developers behind GTK2.8+ decided to sabotage that... and any version of GNOME based on a GTK version later than 2.6 is hopelessly slow.
One of the reasons was the forced introduction of Cairo -- which has serious performance problems across a wide variety of systems. You don't need to believe me... Nokia are quite clear on the matter: [link|http://www.maemo.org/maemowiki/MaemoGtkRoadmap|http://www.maemo.org/maemowiki/MaemoGtkRoadmap].
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Cheers,
Scott.