Intel HD Graphics in a productive environment

[jk1-infotech]

I was wondering if anyone out there is using Intel HD Graphics (Sandybridge) in a productive desktop environment.

My problem is that the drivers are really unstable.

Early this year, when I bought my new computer with a i3 processor, the graphics part were completely unusable.

The desktop crashed every time after a little spare time.

This could be fixed by using the most bleeding edge drivers and dependencies out of the xorg-edgers-ppa repository.

Regardless, there were still crashes on many opengl accelerated applications / games, and i switched over to a dedicated nvidia graphics card,
not without filling in a bug report for every error that appeared to me.

At christmas this year, i gave my nvidia graphics card to my father so he could run a dual monitor setup.

I thought, nearly twelve months were enough for the intel developers to fix the drivers. This was not the case.

I got again reproducible errors, even when I try to watch an ogv video with vlc, totem or any other video player.

The GPU locks, I get a lot of hangcheck timer entries in dmesg and a big i915_error_state in debugfs.

I am looking forward for any ideas that do not belong in writing another bunch of bug reports and a non usable system.

Thanks!

[Kano]

Dont use composite and everything will be more stable. In KDE you can disable effects or use xrender backend. Both fix the instablities in most cases.

[jk1-infotech]

Ive tried several solutions for my problem, but even with naked X, I get a system freeze when I start a video player with hardware acceleration enabled.

I could buy a low cost nvidia graphics card for just a few bucks, but i would prefer to have audio over hdmi (what works fine) and lower power consumption through using the intel integrated hd 2000 graphics.

Any further suggestions?

Thanks!