Kwin is awful for me, with or without compositing after 15 mins of use the entire desktop becomes unusable because of unresponsiveness. So i use other WMs like xfwm4, openbox etc with kde(I dont like compiz).But with those WMs activating compositing does not make the panel transparent, so is the case with cairo-compmgr and xcompmgr. So is there a way to make the panel transparent with WMs other that kwin and compiz?

As far as I am aware, Plasma is supposed to be able to work with other compositing managers if they are available. I would recommend filing a bug report at bugs.kde.org regarding this. Please post the link here so that future searchers can find it.

You could look into why kwin performance is so bad for you, maybe here or at an Arch forum. Might it be lack of ram, your graphics card drivers or an old version of KDE? Obviously your experience isn't the norm.

I only have the problem of KWin compositing unresponsiveness on KDE 4.5 beta 2. But I guess that's a bug in the beta. Will have to wait to see if it getx fixed. And I'm using a decent videocard, it's almost a year old, so it is pretty new.

You may wish to try disabling the "Blur" desktop effect.

bcooksley wrote:As far as I am aware, Plasma is supposed to be able to work with other compositing managers if they are available. I would recommend filing a bug report at bugs.kde.org regarding this. Please post the link here so that future searchers can find it.

I know from experience that Plasma-workspace works with compiz as the window manager (I use it that way with openSuSE 11.2 due to Kwin 4.5, even at RC2, being slower than compiz by a Very Large Degree) even though Kwin is the *preferred* window manager for KDE. (I don't use metacity with compiz+KDE for window decoration, either; instead, I use Emerald for window decoration. For some confounded reason, despite the seeming kludge, KDE 4.5 RC2+compiz+Emerald is faster, and by far, than KDE 4.5 RC2 + Kwin 4.5 RC2 + KDE's default window decorator. What I can't understand is that compiz has no real optimizations for KDE 4.5's code, and especially not for the Plasma-Workspace; so why is Kwin, which is supposed to be optimized to handle the load, getting severely waxed?)

I notice that general 2D takes a serious hit when I enable compositing with OpenGl, so I've started using XRender which is *slower* but 2D is generally faster and it uses less cpu utilization. So there's a tradeoff: faster compositing effects for slower 2D across the board, or slower compositing effects for faster 2D across the board. I've gone for the latter, but I shouldn't have to. Either the Intel video driver is absolute butt, or Xorg or KWin. I think it's probably the former two.