So first my question, is kde 3.1 any faster than the 3.0 series?
I dont need it prettier, I dont need more features (its so top heavy with features at this point that its more of a sitting duck than an x solution), I need it faster and I dont want to download the monster if its just as pokey as its predecessor.

And now the general whining:
Why is there no gnome2 window manager that has any real confiuration features?
Gnome2 is a huge slow bloated file manager so feature rich that it can barely move, coupled with a window manager thats so feature light its practically useless, what in the hell were these guys thinking?

IMHO KDE 3.1 may be a bit faster than 3.0, but not much. We'll see in 3.1.1...

What's the specs on your box? cpu and ram

Any newer version of software will 99.9% be slower... I don't care what anyone says...

Gnome2 runs fine on mine but if you have a slower system then -- yeah -- its going to drag

Remember: unlike Windows, you can use another Window Manager besides Gnome&Sawfish or Gnome&Metacity et al
Try FluxBox or even OpenBox

*99.9 % of the time

Yes gnome2 is an alternative. My system is a 1gig athlon with 512 mg ram and nautilus is slow on it. At least compared to windows explorer or gmc its slow, so I use rox filer.

Metacity is missing features a good window manager should have most notably horizontal and vertical maximization and skip window list features.

Sawfish the other gnome2 alternative isnt stable on any system that Ive ever run it on and windows seem to want to stick to the root window.

Fluxbox is a great window manager and i applaud its developers, however it too is lacking an important feature, a taskbar window list and pager. (is there a skip window list in fluxbox?) also getting to the window list in fluxbox entails a desktop click and wading through a menu. I want the window list for my current desk top available with one click or a mouse move.

I guess my real problem with gnome2 is that the file manager is bloated and slow, compared to gmc and that it doesnt work with enlightenment.

gnome1 with enlightenment, was a great interface, i had been using it since 0.60 and myabe i got spoiled by enlightenments speed and wealth of features.

EDIT: some of my more egregious spelling errors

man... what kind of stuff you guys got running on dem boxen? mine is 733mhz with 192 mb of ram and I can run any wm i like with turtles like Redhat and Mandrake. With LFS, my box is unstoppable. Either you are running an assload of services or to you fast means instantaneous.

If its running to slow try a diffrent distribution. i have red hat 8 and slackware 8.1 on my box and i can say without a doubt that slackware 8.1 is faster and crisper. the downside is its a pain in the @ss to do anything with but it is really fun.
im kinda new to linux so if some one disagrees feel free to shoot me down

for a faster distro, Vlad The Impaler, you are on the right track!

more on Vlad Tepes: ->HERE

Im running apache, sendmail and postgres, nothing that gets alot of use or is resource intensive.
As far as another distro being faster, I dont see how that could really be.
Im running 2.4.20 with the preempt kernel patch, compiled for the athlon arch with some gcc 3 optimizations, gnome 2.2.0 compiled from source and neither kde3 or gnome 2 is as fast as gnome1 or windows98 for that matter.
Nautilus especially is slow.

Did you override the default flags for the kernel?That might be your problem if you did.

Take a look at IceWm and XFce, maybe one of them has the balance between speed and features that you want.
And of course don't forget about Gentoo for distro!