Well, I'm going to switch from my desktop computer to a notebook to become more mobile and flexible sometime within the next weeks (as soon as my finances allows me to do so )

There are plenty of different companies selling uncountable amounts of different notebooks...

What experiences have you done, what would you recommend me to have a strong, not too small, but robust notebook with full support for those amazing kwin 3d effects and power management?

I'm using an old Acer laptop with an intel graphic chip. Except for the cube, all kwin 3D effects work flawlessly and smoothly.

Something without an nvidia card, this is making plasmoids be slow as hell

Anything that is Intel graphics based.

I have laptop with intel x3100 and kwin effects doesn't work for me...
Ther are only black windows...

I have installed Linux on laptops twice, both were Acers and both ran/run fine. Only problem with Acer is that the keyboard isn't quite industrial strength while I am a heavy user (12+ hours per day), so after a year or so I start losing keys...

KWin effects work for me with Intel X3100. Makre sure you select XRender instead of OpenGL.

Arkold Thos wrote:Something without an nvidia card, this is making plasmoids be slow as hell

Hi, it seems that this problem does not arise with new nvidia graphics cards. I got a Samsung Q210 with a shared nvidia graphics card and all the composite effects work well.

Also I can use the VGA and HDMI port, which is really cool to see HD content. It works with the NVIDIA X Server Settings without configuring anything at Xorg. I am using kubuntu 8.10.

Cheers, m.

I use an old Acer Travelmate 2312LC_L with 1Gb RAM.
It works great with KDE4.1.

Keep in mind that Intel cards may not be suitable if you wish to use dual monitors. I have a 945GM, and i can use two monitors alright, but only in clone mode. I would love to be able to use an external monitor with a different image than the LCD screen, but the card only seems to support a maximum res of 2048*768, in other words two monitors of 1024*768. On a 1280*800 LCD that is horrible, and 1024 is small anyway for presentations.

Is there any way to has a kwin in opengl mode with intel x3100 945GM

A good choice for linux notebooks is dell
Every hardware component runs out of the box.
Dell delivers ubuntu, but it is a small step from ubuntu to kubuntu :thumbs_up:
No formatting necessary
They use Intel video card and kde 4 runs smoothly.

Hi,

I'm also looking towards a new laptop and am tempted to get a DELL with X3100 graphics. My opinion is that any wirthy DE should fit comfortably in this chipset... Experience though makes me concerned that it will not cope with the graphics requirements of KDE. I have noted for example that the snow effect brings my acer (X3100) to its knees. Also puting "thumbnails aside" really slows down the user experience. The 3D task switchers are also pretty unusable.

Those that have X3100 and are running a recent KDE, how well are effects and compositing working for you? I.e. not just a plain setup. What I would like to know is whether the slowness I see is just a build or settings issue that will go away in the future or whether I should never expect X3100 to achieve good performance with these effects?

Thanks

Toshiba is also a good alternative. I'm using a Satellite P200-17D with intel 965 graphics and everything is perfect, even the integrated Chicony webcam. In fact, with the new xorg 7.4 I can see video with compositing enabled!