Disclaimer: I’m not going to go on a Windows vs. Linux comparison here - it’s pointless for me, since I will never move back to Windows (voluntarily) - I use openSUSE for all my business needs, including laptops. Switching distros is I guess an option, but only for the right reasons.
Having said this, I do need to vent a little about KDE 4 and/or Nvidia. I purposely switched from ATI to Nvidia when I got this latest laptop since I drew the conclusion that there were less issues with Nvidia than with ATI.
That was a mistake.
The only “problem” I had with ATI was that I had to recompile the native driver for every kernel update. Boy, do I long for the days that those were my only problems now that I have an Nvidia card.
With the specs shown in my signature, I have to turn off Desktop Effects on this highly spec’d laptop in order to have a decent experience in KDE 4.5.3. I say “decent”, not perfect, since the dreaded kernel/Nvidia driver bug (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=625339) happens independent of Desktop Effects, so my “baseline” performance is still crappy.
With Desktop Effects turned on, this laptop is a joke - kwin will use 20-40% CPU on this multi-core machine.
I guess I’m looking for some moral support - I read the really bad news that the Nvidia bug is still present even in the latest of the latest of kernels and going from KDE 4.4.4 to 4.5.3 made matters worse, so the future doesn’t look bright to me.
If I understand this correctly, this is not a kernel bug, nor is it a KDE4 bug, it’s an NVidia bug. It can be solved by downgrading the NVidia driver.
And to be fair: generally NVidias cause less troubles and are better (longer) supported than ATIs. That is not to say that ATI does not run at all or “less well”, but it seems to me ATIs cause trouble more often - this, however, will depend on many parameters. I personally use NVidias since five or six years and never had any issues with them, so I can not complain.
Edit: I am using KDE 4.5.3 and the latest 260.19.21 driver (not from the repo, but directly from the NVidia site, I don’t know whether that makes any difference here).
I always thought the primary purpose of linux was to use an open operating system which is unix like, more secure than MS windows, free, and more configurable? And in a sense a political statement since its very essence is contrary to the corporate, military/industrial complex promoted by western powers. Where does the GUI fit in here? I am beginning to believe that for some users the GUI is it! Do you go to the theatre to view the lights and the sets or to watch acting?
Try running a business on text-mode only computers and you’ll soon find out that northern, eastern, southern and western “powers” will put you out of business within weeks. I have yet to meet a sane person who doesn’t run a GUI on his/her laptop, even in the darkest jungle of Africa.
That’s the depressing part: I am running (older) version 256.53, which is supposed to work.
Edit: I am using KDE 4.5.3 and the latest 260.19.21 driver (not from the repo, but directly from the NVidia site, I don’t know whether that makes any difference here).
Interesting - I am running the driver from the repo, not directly from the site. I will give that 260.19.21 a try. Do you have Desktop Effects turned on?
OK - one more update. I switched my Advanced Settings - Compositing Type from OpenGL to XRender and this is MUCH MUCH better.
Any experts out there that could explain this? According to Wikipedia, XRender is “designed to target the 3D graphics capabilities of newer video cards.”
Wow - as I’m typing this I can’t believe the difference here. This laptop’s screen updates has never been this fast.
Good to hear you found a solution. For me it’s just the other way around: when activating XRender, the desktop becomes extremely s-s-s-l-l-o-o-o-w-w-w and after about a minute the effects get switched off by the system automatically. I am using a Geforce 9500GT here, I suppose it can not be considered a “newer video card”.
One last important update for those that get to this thread by searching: today, after reading a similar post on the KDE forums, I performed the following and now the OpenGL compositing is working perfectly fine on my laptop:
Boot into Runlevel 3 (this may not be required, but I thought it would be safe) - to do this, reboot the box and at the Grub boot option screen type the character 3 and hit enter.
Log in as yourself
MOVE (not copy) the following file to your home folder (or any other place outside the ~/kde4 folder tree):
mv ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc ~/
Reboot (into the normal runlevel)
su -
[password]
reboot
This forced KDE to create a fresh new kwinrc file and no more slowness for me.
Sorry - one more addendum - after doing the “move kwinrc operation”, go into Personal Settings - Desktop Effects and turn off the “Blur” advanced setting.
lol. The ‘Nvidia’ bug in 32bit opensuse is never going to get fixed until it’s realised there is no bug in the nvidia driver, well not one that’s causing the problems with 32bit opensuse. Has nobody ever come across uninitialised pointers and memory locations that get corrupted when they shouldn’t. Whoever wrote the code that introduced this 32 bit bug should be banned until they learn how to write stable code. It really has pissed of quite a few people , including me. And probably caused quite a few to jump ship to Kubuntu which personally I think is far more reliable than opensuse. That’s a big shame, I’ve been loyal to Opensuse for a long time (even buying the boxed sets). But that bug in my opinion is a show stopper, for anybody using a multicore processor, nvidia card & 32bit opensuse.