I noticed that Kubuntu 10.10 looks quite a bit slicker on my laptop, a three-year-old 1.6 dual core machine with Intel 965gm graphics, than 10.04 is. Is this specifically about KDE 4.5 vs 4.4.2 or are there other tweaks I can try? (When I used Ubuntu there were lines to add to xorg.conf to make effects smoother. Maybe there's an equivalent in Kubuntu?)

Is there a way to upgrade KDE without getting the effects disabling symptom I've seen in both 10.10 and Fedora 14 KDE? I don't see a facility to upgrade KDE in Synaptic (I installed that because KPackagekit was annoying me).

Or will an upgraded KDE for Kubuntu 10.04 still likely be more laggy on this machine for some other reason? I put 10.04 on a tri-core 3.1 ghz AMD machine I built for a friend and it was beautifully smooth. System Monitor on my laptop shows about 300mb in use and roughly 10 to 60 % cpu.

I already disable the sliding boxes and box switching, cover-switching etc. XRender was worse.

I think Linux Mint 9 KDE was a bit smoother than Kubuntu for some reason, but I don't want to do yet another install, I'd like two years off the distro-hopping...

Thanks.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu use the same base, so you can modify xorg.conf the same way in Kubuntu. I don't know what you mean by "slicker", but for one thing I think Blur was enabled by default in 4.5.

Is there a way to upgrade KDE without getting the effects disabling symptom I've seen in both 10.10 and Fedora 14 KDE?

You can try to disable functionality checks in the Desktop Effects module (under Advanced) in System Setting.

I don't see a facility to upgrade KDE in Synaptic (I installed that because KPackagekit was annoying me).

See http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-release-day-453-1004

Create some script in ~/.kde/env called as you want (I called it qt-graphicssystem.sh) containing a line:

Code: Select all

export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=raster

Then make it executable and restart KDE. It should help.

P.S. You can also use this:
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/KC ... ent=129817
and choose raster option.

martosurf wrote:By the way, the script path should be ~/.kde4/env.

That depends on your distro's config

Regards