Does SUSE or KDE have a plan on getting this time down?
As far as I know, the KDE team tries to optimize for speed too. But don't expect new versions of KDE to be fast on a 550 MHz PIII machine, the CPU is too obsolete now. On modern machines with e.g. 2.4 GHz P4, the KDE performance is quite OK.
Quite OK? Try switching from Konqueror to Firefox and feel the difference in speed.
It's not more than 4 minutes - it's 2 minutes and 40 seconds on an obsolete machine. Sure, it would be nice if didn't take more than 20
Well, I got a Compaq 2.8 GHz with lots of RAM and it still is way to slow. It is not even the problem of starting up (who shuts down his computer these days?) but the interface responsiveness, those short, but noticeable delays when you click a link in konqueror or select a menu item from KDE menu. But then, of course, noone forces you to use KDE. I use Window Maker, standard xterm (and not konsole, which is slooooooow), Firefox or Opera as the primary browser. I have but libkde3 and some minor tools (like kdm, which I rather like) installed; but if you want, you can always use KDE programs outside of the KDE environment.
seconds but most income comes from the server market now and these machines reboot just several times per year.
Remember that on many machines users have to log in and log out all the day, and KDE is slow not during the reboot process, but after you log in. Our students curse the KDE because of that, "just like Windows" -- they say. By the way -- anyone using pam_unix2 authentification here? We use krb5 authentification with the LDAP server. I always takes around 20 s to just log in; at the same time, with Debian and pam_unix it takes almost no time at all. Anyone shares this experience? Regards j.