I don't really have a dog in the fight. This is mostly observational and piques my curiosity. Two roughly comparable systems with different behaviors:
1. My wife's e-Machines desktop:
- AMD Sempron ~1.8 GHz
- 2 GB RAM
- nVidia GeForce using propriatory (sp?) driver
- Stock Slackware64-13.37
- Runlevel 4 w/ 2 X sessions: 1 KDE + 1 XFCE or Fluxbox
2. My new (to me) Lenovo T60 laptop:
- Intel core duo 1.6 GHz
- 2 GB RAM
- ATI Radeon using open radeon driver
- Slackware64-current w/ Alien's KDE 4.7
- Runlevel 3 w/ single X session KDE (or XFCE or fluxbox)
Seems like both should be modern enough to run KDE4, but it is slightly laggy on the laptop. I didn't really notice until I fired up kbreakout on the laptop and had serious refresh problems. I quit X and restarted using XFCE, and performance was fine. Never had this problem on the desktop, even running two desktops with several Firefox tabs each!
.
Do you think this is a video issue? I haven't disabled any KDE bells or whistles.
Another bit of info is that the laptop USB controller is non-functional. (Got it cheap!
) Could some KDE component be choking trying to poll USB devices?
Will try some other tests and tweaks. Meanwhile any other ideas?