it seems to be related to compositing. I have installed LXDE and I'm already working all morning without any problems opening and closing programs, browsing the web etc. In 'plain' Ubuntu I would already have had artefacts causing me to restart X. There a lot of problems with Nvidia and Nouveau run systems apparantly. It seems not to be related to the drivers though, but a problem with compositing.
It all started for me in 12.04: this was totally unusable for me: complete freeze every 10 minutes or even less. 12.10 runs into problems as well. Nouveau shows artefacts, but I can at least restart X by myself. With Nvidia drivers installed (all versions tried out, including those of x-edgers and x-swat) my system becomes suddenly less responsive, fans sound like an aircraft going up in the sky and then X crashes and restarts. I truly hope that 13.04 will not have this problems anymore. I will try a beta as soon as I can. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to xserver-xorg-video-nouveau in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1113454 Title: Artefacts with nouveau driver Status in “xserver-xorg-video-nouveau” package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: On my laptop, Acer Aspire 7520 with a Geforce 8400m G graphics card I can't get the nvidia driver working correctly: this driver crashes my system (brings it to a total freeze, not abililty to start another session or reboot) totally at least 3 times a day. With Nouveau drivers it seems to work fine, but after some time, I get artefacts in programs, on the desktop and the unity bar. It gets unusable very fast. Restarting X solves the problem, but causes (obviously) a restart of all running apps. I have added x-edgers ppa instead of the regular source, but this brings only a very slight improvement (at least so it seems), Well, I have includes a screenshot of my messed up desktop. I have seen that this was a problem in the past as well (found some bug reports for plain vanilla debian). To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-nouveau/+bug/1113454/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
