Comment 171 for bug 269904

01:00.0 0300: 10de:042d (rev a1)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro FX 360M (rev a1)
nvidia-180-kernel-source:
  Installed: 180.11-0ubuntu1

None of the suggested workarounds helped avoid the damage bug. Loose binding does not help. I see no difference at all between the 173, 177, and 180 versions of the driver.

Of the applications I use, these three are affected:

  1. (seldom) Firefox: damaged and non-damaged areas overlap and become unreadable while scrolling with the mouse or with window scrollbars. Paging with the keyboard works correctly.

         Remedy: transfer focus to another window and back or click anywhere on the window boroder.

         Sometimes I can work for days without seeing it. But once it starts happening (usually in one of many open firefox windows, it tends to continue until I restart X11). But sometimes it can return to normal without me consciously doing anything.

  2. (often) Gimp: bits of paintbrush cursor hang on, leaving a messy track.

         Remedy: zoom in and out.

  3. (almost always) xterm: typically, sending a large amount of text (more than a few lines), leaves it with only the top part of the window rendered correctly when the process completes; the bottom part remains blank. Sometimes just one line will fail to render, as in the case of 'date'; it will look as if 'date' is still running, while in fact it will have finished instantly. I can't get used to it: I often find myself waiting for the commands to return because their output is not visible.

         Remedy: click into the window or transfer focus to it.

         xterm had its own rendering bugs since about 1994, the most obnoxious being the incorrect command line wrapping in wide windows; the other prominent bug is falure to erase the old text on update. I associate that (not knowing much about it) with the transition from termcap to whatever other system we use today. If I recall correctly, I first encountered it in the first RedHat release, and it hasn't been fixed since then. I think it affects other readline-based terminals besides xterm. This, combined with the compiz damage bug, makes xterm close to unusable. But I can't make myself use anything else. I'm getting old.

I see no ill effects reported by some users in the window decorations. Nautilus always works fine (although I don't use it much). Have never seen problems in emacs-gtk. Overall, I am not sure whether I'd rate this problem as mild or severe; I think I have enough patience to carry on like this, but I "severely" desire to have it fixed one day.