You say "video card installed correctly" but which card and which driver? It is possible that the driver you are using, or even the only driver available, for your card is slow but unless you elaborate nobody can help.
Other things I've noticed which give me problems are Pulse Audio being a PITA with WINE games.
If you just want to poke holes in Linux then fine, but if you want to see whether you have a problem then elaborate and ask for help.

Please open a new thread stating distro, video card you have and the problem detailed along with any error messages - then we can maybe help you!

You should open a new thread with your issue, so that we can help you with that.

There were only a few instances where I have found linux to be slower than windows in the same machine.

The most noticeable/probably real (rather than just "felt") was we-browser navigation and/or rendering.

Another one was/maybe still is just displaying large lists of files within the same folder (browsing in a file manager). But I've never compared that one really carefully, it may have been just an impression, caused by me just usually having had more files around ever since I moved to linux, or even some graphic rendering aspect, which is perhaps something between the real and "felt" difference, depending on how the rendering affects actual usability.


For "everything else", it's either somewhat faster or equal/perceptually indifferent, most notably boot time (faster). Also some software upgrade/management actions are "faster" in a very pragmatic/non-technical point of view.



But indeed if you were to compile everything you'd use, that would take quite a lot of time. I don't know why one would do that though, specially in Debian, which is sort of renowned to have the largest binary repositories from all linuces distributions.

It will also depend quite a bit on the DE you're using. I'm used to a lightweight DE (openbox), and eventually when I log into gnome or KDE (perhaps mostly KDE) for some reason it is comparatively so slow it makes me want to scream.

If anyone who finds linux slow stumbles in this thread, perhaps one of the first things to search/google about is "noatime". This disables a mounting option that's commonly default, and it results in a noticeable decrease in disk speed performance. And it's not in exchange of something extremely useful, it only makes every file keep track of the last time it was merely accessed.

Then go de-eye-candying and look for things you may be running by default, that you don't really need.

The generalizing statement "Linux is slow" is wrong in so many ways.

Think about it: Reaction and speed always depend 1. on your host and 2. on the distribution you are using.

If you choose a bloated Ubuntu with a notebook that is almost 6 years old you will hate the developers for putting so much crap into it. If you put Slitaz on it, you will love the speed.

Its the same thing people do in the Windows world. If a computer lags on Windows 7, people put XP on it and are happy (yeah well, forget about the happy part > ).

Another problem can be an outdated distribution. Negative example again: Ubuntu. You probably noticed that the guys there are talking about LTS distributions, keeping them up-to-date for a long time and so on. In reality, they don't give a dump about it. People had to wait months for a new Firefox version. Outdated software, especially outdated drivers can make your Linux life very hard.

Choosing the right distribution for your machine is an important thing you will have to do before you put anything on your harddrive. The experience I made with most of the big distributions is, that they work really fine for beginners and sometimes have better hardware support than slight and tight ones like Slackware. They achieve that with making custom kernel patches and including custom scripts for various notebook models etc. The disadvantage of this is the lack of compatibility and speed.