For a while now, I’d been running Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad T61 (work machine) with Visual Effects disabled.

Why?

There were weird bugs with compiz and xterm that caused corruption at times. So I shut it off and never thought about it again. But a few days ago, I upgraded to 8.10 despite the apparent increase in WiFi related lock-ups I can expect to see (apparently I don’t have the Intel wireless in this machine… grumble).

Switching virtual desktops, or “Workspaces” as they’re called, seemed to be even slower than before–almost intolerable. Just for kicks I decided to go play with the settings.

Imagine my surprise when switching that selection from “None” to “Normal” resulted in an dramatic increase in virtual desktop redraw perfomance.

Yay!

Counterintuitive, but yay anyway.

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