New member! General question, I'm using Inkscape to draw up some comics I plan on throwing on a website. They're about 900 x 400 pixels with a fair amount of detail. I'm working in OSX on a Macbook (2 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2.5 GBs Ram) and was wondering if I would have fewer issues with screen lag on running in Linux.

I haven't spent much time with graphics programs of this nature before (I'm familiar with 3D, and the requirements, but not detailed 2D). I think my main limitations are the fact that it's being drawn through X11, and the 5200 RPM hard drive (as the read/write performance is through the roof). Would running Ubuntu on a 4GB desktop with a real graphics card make a noticeable difference?

Thanks for any info. It's only an issue once there's a fair amount of blurred objects, or if I start working on something that's multiple lines (ie, 900 x 800, x 1200, etc), but I've got half the parts for a build laying around, and if it will be a noticeable improvement in Linux with more RAM, I'm going to pull the trigger and build a new box.

I shouldn't see why X11 under linux would be faster than X11 under OSX. Having said that, a video card won't improve performance. Blur can be taxing and I would guess only a faster CPU and RAM can help. I believe the development version has improved performance with blur if you wanted to try it.

The only thing I could think of with running X11 in OSX was that with two window managers running at once, the virtual memory gets a bigger load. Add iTunes, and some programs running in the background, and I think the I/O of the laptop hard drive is getting killed.

I'll try a 4GB build and report back. In the mean time, I'll leave the blurred objects until the end of my workflow. Thanks for the quick response, I'll be sure to post my work up here once I get some done!

The nightly builds have an display mode called "no filters". That might help if it's only the blurring that's taxing your system.

You can also reduce the quality of the blur to speed things up.