KDE 4.1 was released as a RC recently and will soon be released. While it will be a very usable and stable desktop environment ready to be used almost everywhere most users with NVIDIA cards will not be pleased: their proprietary driver spoil the fun.
The Current Situation
KDE 4.1 will be the first major release since KDE 4.0 and will come along with quite some features many people missed in the 4.0 release, most notable the KDE PIM suite. Besides, many performance and stabilization fixes went into the release, and with RC 1 KDE is already usable on a daily base (although there are hick ups once in a while, of course). To get an idea about the current state a safe way is to install KDE4Daily in a virtual machine. It is snappy, fast and simply works.
However, if you install it afterwards on a real machine, you might be surprised to see that KDE 4.1 can also be sluggish, slow, sticky and whatnot – although it is running on a power machine. The reason behind that is most likely the graphics hardware: a NVIDIA card. The proprietary drivers for these cards have numerous 2D problems and especially a set of problems with the newest Qt/KDE.
This wouldn’t be a major problem if the Open Source community would be supported by the company to develop free drivers – like AMD/ATI, who hand out documentation, or Intel, who at least pay developers and provide them NDA documentation. NIVIDIA only provides a basic 2D graphics driver. While that is still nice, it is simply not contemporary any more.
Of course, NVIDIA has a long, long history of a very strong Linux supporter – their 3D drivers where of high quality over years. And the community is very thankful for that! But the quality of the drivers declined considerably during the last releases, and there are more and more problems reported. Also, the days of hidden documentation and secret hardware specs are almost over, and if NVIDIA doesn’t keep up with the times they might become the bad guys in the hardware world.
Some Workarounds
Unfortunately, atm it doesn’t look like that NVIDIA will fix the drivers anytime soon. But there are hints and workarounds available to the ones who are willing to fiddle with the details.
The first workaround is to fine-tune the proprietary drivers. KDE’s Techbase has a collection of experiences in that regard.
Second, if there is no need for 3D the nv driver might help with a special option: make it greedy. Top do so, make sure that you force the right driver in your xorg.conf, and add the two options AccelMethod and MigrationHeuristic:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nv"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
EndSection
Third, a workaround would be to run XGL – that should solve the problem as well.
However, almost all of these solutions require that you either switch to a beta driver of NVIDIA or use the nv-EXA, which is also just in beta state atm. But for some people it might be the only option.
For others the best option might be to look for another vendor…
Update:
Please be aware of the fact that, while this post focuses on KDE, the mentioned problems with the newer NVIDIA proprietary drivers are not only with KDE. There are numerous reports about issues with other programs as well.
And btw., thx to tackat for the tip with the greedy option!
