Here's the thing, I like GUIs on an OS. I'm not ashamed to say it.
I like to see what's doing. As of late, I have been messing around with 3 versions of RH w/ GNOME and KDE. I found response times to be slow when working w/ these GUIs. I tried speeding up my hard drives settings, but still no good. I am using:

AMD 350mhz
U66 IDE hard drive, don't know the RPM.
160meg PC100 mem
4x CDrom

It's hard to find info on what people are using to run these GUIs properly. However, I do read that people are having slowness problems alot. I had the opportunity to test Redhat 7.3 w/ a full workstation install last night on a rather powerful low end server.
Here what it has:

MSI dual AMD MP Motherboard running 200mhz
2 AMD MP 1.22 CPUs
Acard U160 SCSI card
Seagate U160 18gig 10k RPM SCSI HD
512 meg DDR 2100 memory
52x CD-ROM IDE

First off, it loaded the full WS install in 21 minutes. Apps opened in 1 second flat. Netscape took 2 seconds, where as it took 18 seconds w/ the 350mzh system. I found that GNOME ran just a tiny bit faster than KDE, but both still ran fast!

I did a hdparm on he subsystem- 128meg in .55 seconds!!!

Unfortunately, it's not my machine to keep.
Seeing this example of speed has really inspired me to move directly into Redhat Linux instead of Win 2k Pro.

Hope this info helps to give some of you new guys an idea of what's up.

This killer OS needs killer hardware.


Vince

It's well known issue with GNOME/KDE - they're hugest memory hogs, espacially on low-power machines. Than there is a hardware factor, SCSI drives are fast, then DDR memory is as twice faster than PC100/133 SDRAM, and CPU's you have 350 Mhz and the monster is running off 1.22 GHz (dual CPU configuration doesn't mean your processor speed is doubled, but the CPU time is utilized much better then a single processor configuration this is only true if the program is designed to optimize/utilize whatever SMP (symmetric multi-processing) can offer), so here you have to suffer unless you opt for a lightweight windowmanager like flux/blackbox, WindowMaker, Xfce, etc.