One of my perennial occasions to POUND MY HEAD AGAINST A WALL is trying to wrestle with video issues on Linux. This time around, I was trying to once and for all figure out why Kubuntu was doing such a poor job with giving me the available 3D & window compositing effects. My mantra which was written on paper and hanging on my cube wall in front of my eyeballs for years at my old job was, "Never install proprietary video drivers! Evar!!!1" I wrote that after wasting probably a dozen hours trying to get my Ubuntu box to run as I thought it should. This time, after trying XRender (which I don't understand), then switching back to OpenGL (which I don't understand), trying different NVIDIA drivers from the Ubuntu/Kubuntu repositories (I'm using 12.04), trying to tweak my xorg.conf, etc., I finally just went to NVIDIA's site and downloaded the latest driver, dated something like last week. Of course, I installed it, rebooted it, now everything is great.
