Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 24, 2009 23:31 UTC (Fri) by ikm (guest, #493)
In reply to: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME? by jayavarman
Parent article: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Well let me tell you something. Here I have some freakin' Nvidia 7800GT, and my thought was that with a card that powerful, a 2D-composited desktop with some simple 3D effects should totally fly with, like, 300 fps. But here I am, with KDE4, and that doesn't look too smooth at all. Yes, it's bearable, even to the point that I decided to leave this hush-mush on, but jeez, sometimes I just want to run IceWM for a change. It's SO much more responsive. Which makes me wonder, is it really 2009 or what?

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Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 2:03 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

Have you tried the latest Nvidia drivers? With 180.29 and up, I have had no problems with KDE4 (I have a GeForce 8600M GS).

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 9:32 UTC (Sat) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (2 responses)

That's what I use right now. Somehow I've got the feeling that my notebook's GeForce7400 is better with compiz than my desktop 7800GT.

Point is, compiz and friends are quite demanding, be it year 2009 or not.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 30, 2009 7:33 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

They are not demanding, NVIDIA just sucks. To say it in short. Even Intel graphics with maybe 1/10th of processing power and bandwidth of your 7800GT works pretty fluently compiz.

By the time these applications are ready, either a) NVIDIA fixes their drivers (very probable, but specific card owners might be left in the cold), b) Nouveau will come to the rescue from binary blobs c) change to FLOSS-friendly manufacturer (AMD, Intel, maybe Via soon).

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 30, 2009 8:25 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link]

Actually, my experience with Intel was a bit worse than with Nvidia. Anyways, drivers or whatnot - my main point is that right now Linux desktop isn't at the place where it can just silently enable Compiz and suppose everything would work nicely. The "try another card" approach doesn't pass muster here.