Well,

I like some KDE apps a lot: amarok, k3b, konsole are among my favourites.

I like to think I'm a fair person and KDE is becoming too bloated, too heavy-weight, too too-much. And as far as I'm concerned I don't really need all of KDE's bloath-ware.

I care for good font rendering, some 2D and 3D acceleration, a lightweight DE/WM.

Anyway, as Eric Idle's character on Monty Python's "Life of Brian" (a must see!) chanted on the final scene "always look on the bright side of life", this KDE "crash" might come in handy for further exploration of other DE/WMs.

Other choices may require more or less customization on the part of the user, such as XFCE, Fluxbox and others. Sometime ago I also tried gware (http://www.gware.org/) thought the developers seem to be unable to deliver new versions to keep up to date with Slackware's development, it's a great port - light, fast, pretty.

Right now I'm using XFCE and one thing I miss greatly (an assumed bad habit inherited from long term KDE use) is the ability to make quick launch icons right from the context menu. Then again, another possibility is that I just missed a few simple steps...

I also have seen screenshots of fluxbox and enlightenment that left me dumbstruck.

I think I'll build up some Slackware64-current VMs and try out some different VMs. Even though I won't be able to have full hardware access for proper 3D acceleration testing, It'll be fun!

Radeon HD 3870x2 works only with 2D acceleration using fglrx. I haven't got any 3D accel yet, although I've read (I guess it was on phoronix) that some guys could get 3D accel by activating one GPU only.

Slackware-current X86 works ok with Radeon HD3850 using fglrx 10.2. On my laptop (slackware64 current with KDE 4.4) with a intel GM965 I use the intel driver with KMS enabled and that gives satisfactory results for desktop use and Celestia.

Software: slackware64 13 + all patches to date + self-compiled 2.6.30.5 kernel + ati 10-2 x86_64 driver.

Hardware: Radeon HD 3200 on motherboard(ASUS m3a78-emh), 256M shared, AMD Phenom 8450

Desktop: xfce 4.6.1

Process: download 10-2 driver, follow instructions. I did this in X while running the GPL Radeon driver so had to reboot to get things sorted.

ATI Control Center show up under xfce menu under Applications -> Settings as promised.

With defaults, glxgears runs about 80% of an older nvidia PCI-e add in card (GeForce 7600 GT, 256M). With high quality settings turned up, somewhat slower as you might expect. For my purposes, works well enough speed and image quality wise for me to remove the nvidia card.

As Father Jack said, "I'm a happy camper".

Cheers,

Meh. I bought a graphics card in 2004, in the dark days of 3D when all the vendors were now hostile to open source drivers. (Note that all had open drivers prior, then closed up, and ATI is a late-comer to linux, and then just closed up too because they had to *compete* that way) I bought the card specifically because of the open source driver support, and the fact it could play all games that there were out for linux. It simply worked out of the box. On slackware, you just had to point it to the video driver by changing one line in the XFree86 config file. On other distros, they just auto detect it. I used the card for 6 years could use all the compiz just like anyone else cared for. Went well past any support binary driver I could have been using, and I could update slackware to the latest through every release without worrying about breaking it or recompiling the wrapper. I only bought a new card because I don't have an AGP slot in my new board.

I know you generalized, but reality is if you picked a card specifically ignoring that it doesn't have a real open driver like the nvidia you have, or picked an ATI during the period it didn't cooperate (and fglrx still sucks), then how can you compare it to my situation where I had a open driver simple worked? It might be better to stick to facts here and not generalize 'open source is difficult'. If it takes just a little bit of research to find out which cards are supported well in linux with open source drivers by asking questions, then let those who know speak up.

Wine is a moving target.


All distros need to do to get kms is version bump all the typical packages.


As for R600-R700, the upcoming radeon drivers is pretty well working -- 3d-too. R800 is only a matter of time.