stoolpigeon's Journal: Video Sadness

I was reading this front page story about a 3 monitor set up and I have to confess that it made me feel rather inadequate. I don't want three monitors - I just want two but it's a real pain. I got home and back in the office last week and ran updates on my fedora machine. I don't remember where things stood last I checked but as of that update - starting Firefox means my systems completely locks up and I have to force it to shut down with the power button. Chrome works - but if I close it after using it for a bit - same deal. The entire system locks up and nothing I do with keyboard or mouse has any effect. I have to power it down and start it up again. This is all with the Nvidia drivers. If I try to run the Nouveau drivers I can't get the system to boot at all - which is fine as they didn't work well before anyway. The proprietary drivers sort of work - with the exceptions noted above.

Oh - shut down/restart wont work from the launcher. Nothing happens. I have to open a terminal and shut down from the cli. Locking works but only to lock and unlock. Trying to switch users ends up with a non-responsive machine that must be hard powered down.

It got to me enough today that I thought about switching distros. Because I see a lot of people are using KDE and Nvidia and not having all these issues. But maybe it is my card and so it wouldn't matter. Plus I know Fedora best so I'm reluctant to change. I could go back to using the on board video and one screen but I really don't like working that way. Maybe I will have to do it though. I'll give that some serious consideration this week. A lot of what I do on the second screen is looking up documentation and what not - windows is good enough for that so my little travel laptop hooked up to the second monitor would suffice.