I'm just wondering if anyone has any info on why X seems to need so much CPU power?
Way back when, probably around 1996 or 1997, I first tried to install Linux. Back then, I tried distro's from Corel and Redhat. My system was a Pentium 133 with 48 (and then 96) MB Ram. This system ran both Win 95 and Win NT 4.0 reasonably well, but when I made the switch and installed Linux, any sort of desktop - eg Gnome or KDE, not a vanilla WM) was just so slow as to be unusable. Eventually I gave up for a while and went back to WinNT for some time. For the past 3 years or so, my workstation has been exclusively Linux, first Mandrake on a PIII-800, and for the last year, I've been hooked on Debian on an Athlon XP 1700+, and on both of those systems performance has been just fine, so I didn't really think about the troubles I originally had, and when I did, I figured I must have done something wrong on my first install attempts on the Pentium system. A few months ago, I decided to put debian on my old Laptop, an IBM Thinkpad 770ED (PII-266, 64MB Ram). Once again, with KDE running, the desktop was so slow and unresponsive as to be really unusable (except in an xterm window). This is a system that has run Win95, Win98, and WinNT just fine over the years. So, my question is: Why does X seem to need so much more CPU power than windows - such that systems I have tried to use that worked fine with various windows flavors just were unusable with KDE loaded? I assume the problem isn't in Linux itself, since my old Pentium 133 was just fine with X not running, and enough people have attested to the ability of systems with Pentium processors running Linux without X being able to handle massive firewall, router, web server duties, etc. Maybe the problem is KDE and not X - but I had similar trouble with Gnome, so it isn't just a KDE issue. I'm just curious and wonder if anyone has any thoughts. Thanks. nl -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
