Plasma stability issues with KDE 4.3.1

[oz]

I'm experimenting with KDE4 again and keep running into various plasma stability issues. The text in the title bars of windows will scramble itself at times, the panel running across the bottom of the screen decides to enlarge itself (height-wise) just whenever it wants to, and the playing cards in the card games become scrambled regularly.

In addition, it's amazing how much faster and more stable the system is after disabling Desktop Effects.

Are any of you that are running KDE 4.3.1 experiencing such issues, and if you are, have you found any fixes for them?

KDE4 has been out for more than 20 months, so it's a little hard to believe these things haven't been fixed by default, yet.

Thanks in advance for any fixes!

[daark.child]

I'm running 4.3.1 on openSUSE 11.1. I've not experienced the bugs you've mentioned and my installation is very stable even with the desktop effects enabled (and usable to the point where I scrapped my Mint 7 GNOME install and switched back to KDE). The only minor annoying bug is that some icons for apps docked in the panel don't show up or use the wrong icon. I've seen bug reports from other openSUSE 11.1 users for this issue, but I am not sure if its a KDE 4.3.1 bug or something introduced by the openSUSE devs.

[oz]

daark.child, are you able to tell if the issue you have is plasma related, or do you think it might be caused by something else?

[reed9]

You're running Arch, right? I maintain a laptop running Arch and KDE 4.3 for a friend of mine, and she hasn't experienced any troubles with it. We had lots of plasma crashes with KDE 4.2, but things have been fine since 4.3.

[oz]

You're running Arch, right? I maintain a laptop running Arch and KDE 4.3 for a friend of mine, and she hasn't experienced any troubles with it. We had lots of plasma crashes with KDE 4.2, but things have been fine since 4.3.

Yes, it's 4.3.1 under Arch.

All the plasma issues go away if I disable Desktop Effects, and I get a very noticeable improvement in speed. I'm pretty sure these issues have nothing to do with my hardware, or video drivers. I'm running a Q9550 Quad Core CPU, 8 GB RAM, with a GTX 260 Core 216 nVidia graphics card, so the hardware should be able to handle KDE4 and plasma, easily.

These are actually the same issues that I had when using my previous computer which was a dual core E8400 CPU, 4GB RAM, and a GT9600 nVidia graphics card. In other words, upgrading hardware hasn't helped with KDE4.

[daark.child]

daark.child, are you able to tell if the issue you have is plasma related, or do you think it might be caused by something else?

I think its caused by something else because disabling desktop effects doesn't make a difference.

[oz]

I've done simple upgrades of the system with the last few releases, so I could be bringing any preexisting issues along that the upgrade itself won't fix. Maybe I'll do a fresh install the first time I get a chance to see if that clears things up.

[reed9]

Yeah, we don't run the desktop effects. The performance hit is too great, and her laptop just has an Intel GM965, which has suffered with all the changeups to xorg and the intel driver.

[hugortega]

From the KDE site (about 4.3. verison):

Most performance problems with the NVidia binary graphics driver have been resolved in the latest releases of the driver available from NVidia. However due to recent changes in the graphics stack on linux, certain software and hardware configurations might still encounter issues with drawing speed and general slowness. Please contact your distribution vendor or driver developers if you encounter issues.

Maybe that's an issue with certain configuration of your nvidia driver.

Hugo

[oz]

I'm aware of the issues that some have had with nVidia cards and KDE4, but I don't believe those issues would apply in my case because I haven't had any slow drawing, or general slowness, although there is a definite snappiness that comes about once Desktop Effects are disabled.

The big issue is that of certain components on screen becoming scrambled, or changing size on their own, such as the panel issue described earlier. This has been the case with two different computers using different hardware. I do always run the latest nVidia drivers, but changing drivers hasn't ever had any impact on these issues. The start menu used to start up scrambled quite often and then would straighten itself out, but that hasn't happened lately, so things do still seem to be improving.

I'm really not very fond of special effects on the desktop, so I probably should continue to run KDE4 with them turned off.