Xfce pretty slow?

[Stephan Arts]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Michael Schmarck
<michael.schmarck at habmalnefrage.de> wrote:
> Hello.
>
>  I installed Xfce 4.4.2 on a Gentoo Linux ~x86 system (I installed
>  xfce-base/xfce4-4.4.2 from the Portage tree). I then started Xfce
>  after setting /usr/bin/startxfce in ~/.xinitrc and then doing a
>  startx. xfce started up just fine and seems to work.
>
>  But, compared to Gnome, it feels pretty "slow" or sluggish. For
>  example when I change from one desktop to another one, it's by
>  far not as smooth as it is with Gnome or fluxbox. I don't have
>  many (X) applications running when I tried that - just one
>  Terminal.
>
>  How can I speed up Xfce or is it just a fact that Xfce is slow?
>

When using Terminal in combination with composite, then indeed it can be slow.
This can be improved with exporting the following before starting X
(or just terminal, i dunno about that)

     XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

Another possibility is to disable composite.

The true cause of this issue seems to be the nvidia drivers. But I am
not sure about that one (hear-say).

Regards,

Stephan