LinuxPlanet: Colorful KDE 3.1 Performance On Low-End Hardware

“People have become accustomed to the convenience and beauty of
the modern desktop. However, some people shy away from packages
like KDE 3.1 because they think it’s going to run like frozen
molasses on their six-year-old Pentium machine. Let me put your
fears at ease and tell you how it works on ancient iron.

“The trend in desktops, across all operating systems has been to
continuously add features and graphics with each new release.
Unfortunately, cool icons, animation and complicated multi-paned
desktops have usually required increasingly capable machinery. For
various reasons, Linux desktops seemed to have suffered less from
this performance crunching bloat than other packages, such as
Windows XP.

“KDE 3.1 has actually reversed the trend. To prove my point, I
loaded it on an antique 133 Mhz. Pentium desktop machine. The box
had 128 MB of RAM, 256K of L2 cache, a 2.5 GB disk and Debian. Even
though KDE took about two and 1/2 minutes to load, most of the
programs, menus, icons and animations seemed to appear almost
instantly and ran without a hitch…”

Complete
Story