Hey guys. I love net runner. I recently installed the rolling edition to a Dell M6500 with a nvidia quardo 2800M graphics card. Using the nvidia driver (340 gor G92 chip) I get artifacting on the screen using plasma. It’s mostly in when scrolling in the ‘start’ menu. Or when scrolling in firefox. It’s kind of like tearing but a huge line of small black lines in the top quarter of the screen going horazontally.
Changing to the open source driver fixed it a little, but the menu’s become very slow and I got artifacting in the menu itself rather than on other parts of the screen.
I installed the debian version to see if that was diffrent and I got the same issues.
I then installed Arch linux using xfce and I dont have the problem anymore. The video preformance is not as fast as I sxpected it to be but it works without artifacts. I may try installing kde on arch but I am very happy with the xfce I built on arch now.
I will be upgrading my kubuntu on my main PC to netrunner rolling though as the AMD open source drivers are pretty good now and plasma 5.5 is pretty bad compared to 5.10.
Sounds like an issue with the compositing in kwin. You can change the compositor settings in systemsettings and switch the opengl version for example which could improve the situation with the free and non-free driver.
Hey man. Thanks for the reply. I just got it to happen in arch by clicking links in octopi to be opened in firefox. Its the exact same thing that was happening on netrunner. I am using compton compositor with xfce here, tried -lts and non les kernels and dkms and non dkms nvidia 340 drivers as well as OS ones where 3d didnt work. I will boot up netrunner on another partition and try changing a few things around under Plasma tomorrow. Thanks for the tip. I will let you know how I go.
Ok. Just an update to this, I just installed netrunner to my HDD and setup nvidia 340 driver and open source driver to test. I must not use openGL compositor to get artifact free desktop. I found a good trick to test is to enable the Application Menu. scrolling though that will make the screen draw boxs around most things. Its hard to explain. Might try and get a picture of it. Open source driver shows garbled colours in half of the menu as it appears.
Disabling openGL 3.0 and 2.0 to Xrenderer or disabling compositor fixes all issues. This goes for netrunner rolling with KDE 5.10 and Arch with XFCE. Disaling compositor and removing compton fixed the minor issues I had when opening links.
I assume this is a problem with xorg or something due to my old video card. Seems to work fine with compositor disabled for now.