Submitted by “KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. This update is the first in a series of stabilization updates to 4.5.0, coming every month, as if delivered by a cronjob. 4.5.1 brings bugfixes and translation updates on top of KDE SC 4.5.0.”
the blur effect introduced in 4.5 is ‘eating up’ the cpu with nvidia ‘proprietary’ drivers. Just disable blur effect if we need a good performaning desktop.
Though Blur Effect is awesome, but it makes the ‘desktop awful’. even scrolling becomes sluggish.
one can see the ‘increase cpu usage’ just by enabling [x]blur, in kwin effects.
by the way is there an alternative GPU video card, which is good with KDE 4.5?
ATI cards used to crash a lot, I dumped them. Intel not enough performance.. nvidia has the kde compositing problem!
Is there a savior?
ah, that would explain the issues I’ve been seeing. Now gotta figure how to turn off the blur effect
In System Settings, obviously.
right-click on the titlebar -> Configure window behavior-> Desktop Effects ->All effects [tab] -> scroll down to “appearance section” and ‘untick’ the [ ] blur, effect.
booo, turning off blur still makes kde 4.5 unusable with effects turned on. Will have to dig around some more to figure out what’s going on. Works fine without effects though.
And yes, using an nvidia card.
Visit https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242985 and tell your GPU model and driver version.
The KDE people can’t fix buggy closed source drivers but they’ll add your configuration to a blacklist to automatically disable blur.
I’m currently using 4.5 with ATI Radeon 9600XT and open source drivers and the blur enabled and it works very well. Also works fine on a laptop with ATI Mobility Radepn HD 5470 and closed drivers. And when I was still using NVidia they usually were quite good with fixing bugs if you reported them. Just follow instructions here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=46678
The blur effect works fine with my nVidia card.
That said, I am running an i7 with 4GB RAM, so even Vista should run snappy.
My S3 cards work very well under linux
As do my ATI cards.
Several options :
1/Use windows until support for your graphic card has become okay (it generally happens some years after the release of the product)
2/Just disable those silly compositing effects, it’s an attempt by the Devil to distract you from your work
Edited 2010-09-03 08:49 UTC
or 3/ use CompizFusion instead. (Loving the Devil’s distractions comment too by the way).
Personally I don’t have a problem with nVidia and KDE4.5; it runs really smoothly for myself. In fact, I’ve only ever had one graphics card (well onboard graphics chip) not recognised in Linux and that was down to ASUS rebranding the hardware so the chipset didn’t register as the chipset it actually was (and you can hardly blame Linux for this). However – and perhaps ironically given the opening post – OpenSuse still detected it where every other distro didn’t. The best thing was it only took a few months for the rest of the distros to follow suit.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is this: I keep hearing people complaining about Linuxes support for graphics cards, but I personally have never experienced any problems. I’ve had problems configuring Xorg for dual monitors and the silly non-standard rebrand described above. But aside that, I’ve been running Linux on the desktop for about 10 years and had every graphics card detected and running smoothly.
But then I’m not a gamer – I’m just a power user who likes his “Devil’s distractions”
Well, I’m currently using windows + cygwin because of my new laptop, so I can tell that bleeding-edge graphic chips are still an issue on linux
(And on windows too by the way. Having compositing randomly killed and never coming back almost each time an application goes full screen, even with latest drivers, is just laughable. Especially knowing that full screen apps in low resolution (e.g. starcraft) are not stretched. But well, at least it boots properly and is easy on the battery…)
Edited 2010-09-03 09:52 UTC
My current laptop is bleeding edge too and works perfectly. But perhaps I’ve just been lucky over the years *shrugs*.
If it’s any help to you, I’m currently running ArchLinux x86_64.
I did find that when I first got my laptop, the current ISO didn’t have the latest ethernet drivers I needed so I had to download a nightly build or something (I can’t recall off hand, but I have the details at home). But that was the full extent of my problems.
Edited 2010-09-03 10:07 UTC
In my case, on several distros (Fedora, OpenSuse, Pardus) and with default settings, X shows a pretty dark screen when launched, and then the computer becomes unresponsive (ie Ctl+Alt+Fx things won’t work, power button won’t shut the machine down, and so on).
Tried to update NVidia and intel drivers to the latest release, no luck. Tried to force X to use the nvidia proprietary driver, no luck (no card detected). Tried with intel, no luck either (same symptom). 640×480 generic driver (VGA ?) kind of works, but it’s just useless (insanely high screen brightness that can’t be changed, eats up a fully charged battery in less than 2 hours, no room on screen, ugliness).
So I’ll just consider that support for my hardware is not ready yet
Some years ago, I’d have fought with the command line until it works, but now I’m tired of this : either it works out of the box/with simple fixes or it doesn’t work.
Edited 2010-09-03 10:21 UTC
I had a simular problem but that was related to Xorg’s crappy new hotplugging not detecting my keyboard.
So dumb question, but you’ve checked that you’re keyboard is being identified?
IIRC I fixed by adding one line to xinitrc.conf
[edit: fixed broken engrish]
Edited 2010-09-03 10:34 UTC
But if the keyboard is the problem, why would X work in 640×480 generic mode ?
Edited 2010-09-03 10:43 UTC
None of the new Xorg builds make any sense to me. But I would have a quick look to see if it’s Xorgs hot plugging playing up or if it’s the drivers themselves.
If the former, then it’s an easy fix (even if it’s the fault of the screen or GFX chip detection during hot plugging!), if it’s the drivers then you’re right that you’re better off sitting it out for now.
I will tell it again and again and again. The problem is that gfx and other devices do not conform to a standard that would help create cross-OS drivers targeting the standard and not vendors. No matter how good are the programmers the Linux/Haiku/Solaris …. drivers will be crippled. We need one standard, like VESA, for capabilites exposed by the HW to the OS developer that should encompass GPUs and APUs (AMD’s terminology). You just swap the GFX, not the drivers.
I would love it if a well-known standard like VESA or OpenGL specified how software communicates with hardware for 3D acceleration too, but I think it’s a dream. Hobby OSs should do their best with VESA standards and forget 3D acceleration until they’ve got sufficient momentum.
Edited 2010-09-03 15:22 UTC
I’m not sure what hobby OSs should do, but my Kubuntu Linux installation has got usable 3D acceleration installed via the open source xf86-video-ati driver from Xorg.
Although it is not yet as fast as the closed binary driver, it does enable the driver to be part of the Linux kernel, and the KDE 4.4 desktop uses this graphics hardware acceleration to very good effect.
Through the implementation of kernel mode-setting, an in-kernel GPU memory manager and other newer X innovations, it has recently become possible for open source graphics drivers to be run “rootless” (i.e. run with only ordinary user privileges).
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzM2MA
This feature alone makes open source graphics drivers worthwhile.
From the web site:
“KWin, the window and compositing manager has a regression fixed that would prevent desktop effects from being used”
Does this mean I can finally get the wobbly windows to work right outta the box with openSUSE? Never had a problem with Ubuntu or Mint, but for some reason, can’t get it in openSUSE KDE….
If you have an NVidia card: No, not out of the box.
NVidia drivers are proprietary and SUSE does not host the proprietary drivers in their repository. NVidia does that, though the NVidia repo is easily accessible through YaST -> Repositories -> Community Repositories.