[plug] Snappy UI

[Craig Ringer]

Nathan Alberti wrote:

> Try a lightweight Window manager, I like IceWm

Lightweight WMs etc are all well and good, but it's REALLY STUPID to 
have to even think about that on a 1.2GHz machine with 512MB of RAM. 
Even if it is a Celery - the PIII Celeron wasn't too bad, it's the P4 
Celeron that's jawdroppingly awful.

> endure your drives are 
> running at their optimum (man hdparm)

No argument there. Making sure the disks are using 32bit IO with DMA and 
(possibly) unmasked IRQs can make a big performance difference. 
Especially given that systems are increasingly disk bound. My next 
system will have a Western Digital Raptor 10kRPM SATA disk for the boot 
drive :-)

> You should really consider going down the re-compile path, upgrading a 
> kernel

I expect the issue is more with recompiling _everything_. Rebuilding KDE 
gets tedious, and rebuilding OpenOffice is a nightmare.

> with Debian is a snap and can make a big difference, strip out 
> all the crap you will never need, bare minimum config and compile for 
> the appropriate architecture.

It's not really cool to have to cut down your system heavily just to run 
acceptably on a modern low-to-mid-range system.

Craig Ringer