Hey guys,

I recently installed Kubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake and find my KDE a little slow.

So will recompiling help?
And if so, how do I do this?

I couldn't find any decent information about it, and I would like to know.

Hop you can help me out here.
Thanks in advance!

Kubuntu doesn't compile KDE. You use a binary package. I don't think recompiling will help much. If you're really concerned about speed, use Fluxbox or XFCE.

No, it won't.

Despite what you hear, building your applications from source really doesn't help that much in terms of performance. This is particularly true for things like KDE that depend on a large number of external libraries. If you see any visible performance increase at all (which you probably won't), it would most likely be too small to justify the effort.

If, however, your problem is application start up time, one less painful alternative for speeding up KDE might be prelink. Prelink is a utility that pre-calculates information for the dynamic linker, thus speeding up load times. I've heard claims that prelinking can cut startup times by more than half, but I've not see that kind of gain. However, the difference is definitely noticable and prelink is pretty easy to set up, so it's worth a shot.

Some things in Linux are slow. Why?? My GUESS is that the pressure to get all the features in has caused things to evolve with less than perfect efficiency.

KDE and Gnome are both slow at some things--but not others. What exactly is slow--what operation?

As the other response says, try XFCE--it is pretty snappy.