I'm running Kubuntu 11.10. I run it without any desktop effects because I don't think the performance hit is worth it. It's always been a minor irritation for me that I couldn't work out how to change an application's icon in the window switcher, but it's become more urgent with the recent upgrade to KDE 4.8. The switcher has now grown, but not all of the application switchers have grown with it. Now when I change windows it's a total mess, and inefficient to boot. Here's a picture to show an extreme example of what I mean...



Amarok and Dolphin are a decent size, in proportion with the switcher. Firefox is tiny, Calibre is overgrown to the point it pushes other icons out of the way and makes navigation confusing.

I'd appreciate any help folk could offer in putting this right. Getting the scale right is something I really need to do, the ability to change icons so I can switch over the ones I think are ugly (i.e. most of them) would be nice as well.

what if you enable effects but disable everything?

what king of graphic hw and drivers do you have that are causing the performance hit? have you tried running xRender instead of OpenGL for composting type