VMware Workstation 11 and kwin - hangs and hiccups (solved?)

Since updating to VMware Workstation 11 (from the Gentoo vmware overlay), I've experienced a lot of hangs of my KDE environment whenever a virtual machine was running. Basically my system became unusable, which is bad if your workflow depends on accessing both Linux and (gasp!) Windows 7 (as guest). I first suspected a dbus timeout (doing the "stopwatch test" for 25s waits), but it seems according to some reports that this might be caused by buggy behavior in kwin (4.11.21). Sadly I haven't been able to pinpoint a specific bug report.

Now, I'm not sure if the problem is really 100% fixed, but at least now the lags are much smaller- and here's how to do it (kudos to matthewls and vrenn): 

• Add to /etc/xorg.conf in the Device section

  Option "TripleBuffer" "True"

• Create a file in /etc/profile.d with content

  __GL_YIELD="USLEEP"
  

  (yes that starts with a double underscore).
• Log out, stop your display manager, restart it.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what these settings do. (Feel free to explain it in a comment. :) No guarantees of any kind. If this kills kittens you have been warned. Cheers.

KDEPIM without Akonadi

As you know, Gentoo is all about flexibility. You can run bleeding edge code (portage, our package manager, even provides you with installation from git master KF5 and friends) or you can focus on stability and trusted code. This is why we've been offering our users for the last years KDEPIM 4.4.11.1 (the version where KMail e-mail storage was not integrated with Akonadi yet, also known as KMail1) as a drop-in replacement for the newer versions.
Recently the Nepomuk search framework has been replaced by Baloo, and after some discussion we decided that for the Nepomuk-related packages it's now time to go. Problem is, the old KDEPIM packages still depend on it via their Akonadi version. This is why - for those of our users who prefer to run KDEPIM 4.4 / KMail1 - we've decided to switch to Pali Rohár's kdepim-noakonadi fork (see also his 2013 blog post and the code).The packages are right now in the KDE overlay, but will move to the main tree after a few days of testing and be treated as an update of KDEPIM 4.4.11.1.
The fork is essentially KDEPIM 4.4 including some additional bugfixes from the KDE/4.4 git branch, with KAddressbook patched back to KDEPIM 4.3 state and references to Akonadi removed elsewhere. This is in some ways a functionality regression since the integration of e.g. different calendar types is lost, however in that version it never really worked perfectly anyway.

For now, you will still need the akonadi-server package, since kdepimlibs (outside kdepim and now at version 4.14.9) requires it to build, but you'll never need to start the Akonadi server. As a consequence, Nepomuk support can be disabled everywhere, and the Nepomuk core and client and Akonadi client packages can be removed by the package manager (--depclean, make sure to first globally disable the nepomuk useflag and rebuild accordingly).

You might ask "Why are you still doing this?"... well. I've been told Akonadi and Baloo is working very nicely, and again I've considered upgrading all my installations... but then on my work desktop where I am using newest and greatest KDE4PIM bug 338658 pops up regularly and stops syncing of important folders. I just don't have the time to pointlessly dig deep into the Akonadi database every few days. So KMail1 it is, and I'll rather spend some time occasionally picking and backporting bugfixes.