KDE-Forum.org

I hope you do realise that a lot of the sluggishness of KDE can be caused by other programs, etc. What distro are you using? Distributions like RedHat, SuSe and Mandrake are 'famous' for installing and starting up lots of services you don't really need. More 'handson' distros like Debian, Slackware, Gentoo and the like, have less problems with that. Just like with Windows, having a lot of stuff running in the background makes your 'real work' go a lot slower.

Then the next item on the list. A lot of distro's are not highly optimized. This goes for both the kernel and all the other software. With the apple, they could tune all the applications as well as they could, since it would only run on one family of CPUs. In the x86 arena, you have to cater to a whole slew of CPU families. One has SSE, the other doesn't, one has 3DNow, the other doesn't.. etc. Also, there's a difference in general optimisations for the original pentium, the PII, the P!!!, the P4, the AMD CPUs, etc. Each CPU has it's own preferences in that area.

And last but not least, apple only has to cater for a very limited set of graphicscards. On x86, you can have just about anything. Some have better drivers than others, and some distros have more recent drivers or drivers developped by the hardware manufacturers themselves. If you use the standard driver that comes with X, you shouldn't expect wonders in the performance department.

If you give us some clues about your distro, we might be able to give you some clues about how to at least speed it up a little. I am not claiming it can be -as- fast, but I am sure we can improve it at least a litte

Check out this site for hard disk tuning if ur using a modern fast hard disk and ur using redhat then this will definitely help cause redhat uses a minimum set up and for a very good reason because the wrong option good screw a lot of things up

http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html

And what he doesn't mention is u can configure /etc/sysconfig/harddisks file so that hdparm will retain those settings on boot, instead of writing a script.

Also remember to do -tT <harddisk> to check thoroughput after every change . Its not necessary that more variables mean more speed so be thorough while doing this.

Also i suggest u go though your list of services and turn off what u don't need.

And for tweaking Xfree86. If ur card has AGP (most likely) then add this to ur XF86Config file
under [devices]

Option "AGPMode" "<no>"
for eg. "2" for 2x
"4" for 4x and so on.

On my sys
its

Option "AGPMode" "2"
since i am using intel i740 2x agp card (it's a old sys 233 p2 128mb ram with redhat 8 on it and i am getting very reasonable performance after tweaking mind u)

Alternatively in redhat 8 u can goto ur display configuration and add it to that advanced options list in ur card configuration dialog.

If ur card has hardware acceleration make sure ur driver supports it And make sure it is enabled.

Finally if ur still desperate install gentoo and compile everything for ur system, ) but i think most users will happy with the above.

And like the above user said a little bit more detail about ur system conf would be nice.

Happy hacking !!

Bharat