Is my system too underpowered for KDE?

DisappearingOak · 08-09-2012, 02:10 PM

What the heck? I have 4 gigs of RAM, 3.4Ghz quad core, on AMD's 880G chipset. I installed OpenSUSE 12.1 and it's slow as a snail. The animations are jerky, start menu takes two whole seconds to load and multiple windows make it even slower. Next, I tried Kubuntu, and, surprisingly, it was much fatser than OpenSUSE, animations and speed in opening apps were smoother overall. But I found the default KDE themes to be real ugly, so I installed a bunch of aurorae themes. Changing to aurorae themes made moving windows slightly slower, and the aurorae themes are ugly as hell also. So I switched to a QTCurve theme, and ahh- at last I found something nice-looking, and then moving a window is SO SLOW! Man. So slow it feels I'm dragging my hair off my head. So, I wonder if my system is too low-spec'd for KDE, beacuse Unity, Gnome Shell, even Aero seem to be working fine. I thought Linux was supposed to run smooth even on older hardware. This is sick.

cortman · 08-09-2012, 10:48 PM

It shouldn't be too low-spec'd.
Install htop and run it, see exactly what your RAM and CPU usage is and which processes are dragging it down.

onebuck · 08-10-2012, 10:33 AM

Hi,

Look at 'lspci -vv' for the Graphics. Plus AMD 800 chipset series - Wikipedia shows Radeon HD 4250 for your chipset.

Look at the '/var/log/Xorg.0.log' to see which driver is in use;

Quote:

excerpt sample from '/var/log/Xorg.0.log';
<snip>
[312574.680] (II) LoadModule: "radeon"
[312574.681] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so
[312574.682] (II) Module radeon: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[312574.682] compiled for 1.9.5, module version = 6.14.1
[312574.682] Module class: X.Org Video Driver
[312574.682] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 8.0
[312574.682] (II) RADEON: Driver for ATI Radeon chipsets:
<snip>
....
ATI Radeon HD 4290, ATI Radeon HD 4250, AMD Radeon HD 6310 Graphics,

The above is a sample for 'radeon' '/var/log/Xorg.0.log' entry.

Your 'dmesg' will also show how the graphics are initially setup. My money is on incorrect driver.
HTH!

DavidMcCann · 08-10-2012, 12:57 PM

The most realistic distro when it comes to listing the requirement of various GUIs is probably Agilia, and even they only suggest 2GB and a dual-core CPU.

Some distros have a lot happening after the boot: Nepomuk indexing things, an update manager chatting away on the internet, etc. But persistent sluggishness with your specs is almost certainly a bad video driver.

DisappearingOak · 09-04-2012, 09:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by onebuck

Hi,

Look at 'lspci -vv' for the Graphics. Plus AMD 800 chipset series - Wikipedia shows Radeon HD 4250 for your chipset.

Look at the '/var/log/Xorg.0.log' to see which driver is in use;
The above is a sample for 'radeon' '/var/log/Xorg.0.log' entry.

Your 'dmesg' will also show how the graphics are initially setup. My money is on incorrect driver.
HTH!

In Kubuntu, the driver being used is definitely the open source 'radeon', I checked. so the problem can't be an incorrect driver. But there's still sluggishness. Is there a way to check framerates, etc via terminal to see if they're ok? If yes, please tell me what command to put and also what normal range should be. Thanks.

jefro · 09-04-2012, 11:33 AM

I run opensuse on some really old stuff and I have never seen that issue. Your system should fly. Some video issue I'd think. Could there be some issue with built in video?

Does the live dvd/cd act this way?

Might as well wait a day for the next 12.2. The kernel is supposed to be must faster.