Which is the fastest...

[Hairybloke]

KDE or Gnome. I'm using an old"ish" system (200mmx processor, 32mb ram) for running Linux with Gnome, but the actual GUI is pretty slow. Which is faster, KDE or Gnome. At the moment Gnome is pretty slow, especially compared to the Windows GUI running on the same hardware. Would KDE be faster, as speed on the GUI is quite important for me if I am going to use it as a desktop machine.

[kuber]

IMO KDE is slower. What window manager are you using? If you are looking for speed stay away from enlightenment. I would suggest staying away from Gnome/KDE all together. Try just running Blackbox. It is simple, fast, and has enough features. Or perhaps WindowMaker if you want more of a graphical graphical user interface...
Kuber

[Hairybloke]

Yea, i'm using enlightenment. I'll take a look at black box, I remember hearing about it once before. Thanks

[jbstew32]

if you still insist on GNOME try using a WM like sawmill or windowmaker with GNOME. GNOME is just a panel and file manager bundled with software its not a whole WM

[kuber]

True dat. Gnome doesn't actually use much resources-it was mainly enlightenment killing your performance. I have a pIII 700 w/ 512ram and I still wouldn't want to run enlightenment. It is crap, IMO.
:cool: Blackbox :cool:

[Tyr-7BE]

Oh E is GREAT if you want eye candy...it's just a big juggernaut. I keep it around, but I don't know for how much longer. I use sawfish with gnome. Here's a question...can you start the panel without starting gnome?

[kuber]

You can start the panel w/o gnome...

[rick420]

I use Gnome/Sawfish on a 750 AMD Athlon w/192 RAM and it runs pretty damn fast. But when I tried out Enlightment, that **** was alot slower. People tell me Gnome is a little faster than KDE, but black box is suppossed to be faster than gnome.

[Tyr-7BE]

Yeah E sucked my mem like a pig. 192 Megs ram, and running E, Gnome, and a few others, I was down below 90. Now I run Sawfish and Gnome and it's up around 135...I figure I could get it higher if I could kill Gnome...forum search time :)

[kuber]

If you want to get rid of gnome just edit it out of yer .xinitrc, or perhaps .xsession if you are using XDM. Not sure how it works if you are using GDM or KDM, maybe the same.

[[GoRN]]

/usr/gtk/bin/panel & will start the gnome panel with out the gnome-session, however i installed mine with an unusual prefix, try /usr/bin/panel or /usr/local/bin/panel

or just panel if it's in your path

good luck

also icewm is a slim fast and feature full window manager (hard to configure but icepref helps check freshmeat.net for it) it has a taskbar so you don't need gnome's panel! :-D

-out-

[Hairybloke]

I put on sawmill, and the speed difference is amazing. I didn't realise how bad elightenment was slowing it down until I got rid of it. Thanks guys.

[Tyr-7BE]

NP...if you wanna make it pretty, www.themes.org (http://www.themes.org) carries sawfish/sawmill themes :)

[Tyr-7BE]

Ya know, I'm gonna give IceWM a shot. I never did before because its interface looked a lot like windork, but I'm gonna give it a while and see how I like it. Without Gnome running, I have a good 25 megs more ram free. I just need a shortcut launcher :) Thanks all :)

[MkIII_Supra]

XFCe3 is pretty fast as well. I like it and so does the wife.

[Tyr-7BE]

Not bad...a lightweight desktop environment...I like it. The default desktop settings look like I puked all over them, and the sounds are a little annoying, but that's easily remedied. Just takes quite a bit of getting used to...I'm not used to a desktop environment running alongside all my other procs and using only 30 megs of ram!