For a very long time now, I've been on the hunt for a distribution that really put a lot of effort into their KDE4 implementation. This has been a frustrating search, full of broken installations, incredibly slow performance, and so many visual artifacts they made my eyes explode. Since KDE 4.3 is nearing release, I had to pick up this quest in order to take a look at where 4.3 stands - and I found a home in the KDE version of Fedora 11. Read on for a look as to where KDE 4.3 currently stands.
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Member since:2008-02-02
It actually greatly varies per driver. While the biggest performance problems with the NVidia binary driver have been fixed a couple of months ago, the people using a recent version of this driver will have an OK, but not stellar user experience (in terms of KWin compositing). I'm noticing a slight delay in many operations with the NVidia driver.
Comparing that with an integrated Intel chip on my notebook actually made me notice this. With a recent Intel driver, Xorg and Kernel the window management feels really snappy and reacts immediately.
With the Free radeon driver on an old-ish ATI integrated chip in another notebook, the difference is made the the MigrationHeuristics setting in xorg.conf's Device section. Leaving it at default (i.e. not mentioning it in xorg.conf) makes the desktop really snappy, but can cause corruption once in a while in Kate and Quassel. Setting it to "greedy" makes this problem go away, but it causes this "laggy" feeling, noticable for example when bringing a minimized window to the foreground.
My general impression is that pretty much all of the graphics hardware for laptops and desktops built in the last 3 years is capable of running a smoothly composited desktop -- as long as the drivers work well.
Member since:2006-01-04
Member since:
2005-07-08
Kwin has good performance here for the basic operations (it used to be slow in the first releases, but these days it works so fluid that I can go months without noticing it is enabled), and I'm using a crappy Intel embedded graphic chips. So your poor performance is probably caused by the weird problems that sometimes propietary drivers create...