On Sun, 2003-07-06 at 12:30, expatriate wrote:
Her first impressions so far are: "It is slower to boot" "It does not start up applications as quickly as W2K" (OpenOffice definitely loads more slowly than Office2000) "Repaints take longer" (When shifting windows around)
Well, yes, a reasonably complete install of SuSE 8.x (don't know about the earlier ones) with KDE or GNOME will be slower. This is because there are a lot of services running that you probably don't need. Things that I generally disable: atd cron nscd portmap hwscan (once all my hardware is set up - this wastes a lot of time) sendmail/postfix if I don't intend on using local delivery rpmconfigcheck if you don't intend to mess with software upgrades too much - you can rather run it manually when needed. splash* - these are really slow on the class of machine you describe. I used to have a Celeron 500 with a TNT2 card, and the splash animations definitely slowed things down. Another thing you really shoud do is change the (sometimes stupid) defaults of KDE. They make it look really pretty, almost as if they want to "out-cool" WindowsXP and MacOSX, but not everything is practical. Icon zooming, minimize/maximize animation, all sorts of gui effects slow down your system. And with a nVidia card if you don't have the official nvidia drivers installed, it's even more noticeable. I always switch off all animation, all gui-effects (except the bit that says "display content in moving/resizing windows" but disabling it would result in more speed). I also change the default theme/style and window decoration to something more simplistic and light (currently qtcurve with kwix - quite snappy and looks good!). This all improves responsiveness greatly. Even on a Athlon 1.5ghz with Radeon I can see a huge difference. Unfortunately, KDE, just like the Windows GUI, sometimes also becomes heavier after a fair bit of use. Logging out and logging back in usually fixes this. Hope this helps Hans