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Linux/BSD replacements for XPians

Chuck(G) said:
BTW, disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox didn't cure the problem. I hit "Reqly" here and the response box still misses displaying lines or has other garbage from the screen in it.
Click to expand...

I remember years ago having a problem something like that with the Intel GMA drivers but it was a *long* time ago so I don't recall the details. I think I solved it by disabling compositing at the WM layer. Is there a setting to disable "Desktop Effects" or something similar in your particular distribution's settings panel? (When it comes to my desktop I'm a grumpy old coot and don't want transparent shimmery "look at them shake when I drag them!" windows so shutting that off is still something I do to this day whether it works or not.)

The other thing I'd probably try, given the relatively recent vintage of your hardware, is seeing what video driver you're using and switching to the other if that's an option. There are "binary" and "free" options for both Nvidia and ATI cards; Unless you're religious, which you're clearly not, the binary driver is usually the optimal choice with the Nvidia chipsets but there's some gray area with ATI cards. (Not much though, since ATI tends to be pretty aggressive about knocking cards off the supported list for their binary drivers as soon as the open-source driver works for them; the overlap is usually only a generation or so.) Honestly, since I don't game on my PCs, I prefer machines fitted with ATI cards old enough to be well supported by the open source ATI driver; it seems to be the least troublesome and do the job adequately. Because of Nvidia's "we don't document the hardware without an NDA" policy the open source driver for Geforce cards is probably always going to be broken to some degree or another. (Sad but true.)
 
I should be clear about the display bug--it's in Firefox and Thunderbird. To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't occur in other products. It has been reported to the Firefox people as early as 2009. It does not occur in the same version of FF when running in a Windows VBox session.
 
Strange. I'd still say try turning off compositing (if it's on) just to see, but as I noted I'm highly biased against it, consider it the root of many evils, and therefore it's almost certainly a bum steer. (I lump the early days of compositing into the same category as Gnome 3 near the top of my personal list of "way to make it look bad guys" milestones in the history of open-source desktop environments.)

On the subject of web browsers... I'll say up front that I don't really care much for Google Chrome, but because it's really the only way to get fully-baked Flash support on Linux these days I've been experimenting with it and it's astounding at least how quick it is compared to FireFox. To really give it a challenge I put it on my Debian Dell D600 last night and although I only had about 20 minutes to play so far it's amazing how well it works. Among other things I sicced it on several NewGrounds-style animations to test the Flash support and it didn't skip a beat. It was almost like being back in 2003 again, when those first Pentium M laptops amazed us with how quick and responsive they were compared to the P4M/Mobile Pentium 4 bricks they replaced. Firefox (or in this case, "IceWeasel") is an utter slug by comparison. (I wonder if I should check and see if it's trying to use hardware acceleration.) :p

I'll have to fiddle with it more but if it works this well I may have to get over my prejudices against Chrome. Not sure that'll be possible without actually resorting to a lobotomy, however. (Some of what it does borders on spooky, like when on the first run on the laptop it automatically fetched and installed the adblocker extension I'd put on the desktop the day before. Thank you Big Brother...)
 
It's still bloody quick. Just installed it on the XP Pro box. FF is a pig. Running Opera 8.5 on my RH 7.3 box was quicker that using FF 29 on this system.
 
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FF seems to have it's ups and downs with regards to speed across different releases.
For testing at work I use IE, FF, and Chrome and right now my default seems to be Chrome - but a few months back it was FF.
 
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