Hey all,

I finally got my OpenSuse 10 ISOs burned and I installed Suse on my new laptop (alongside Fedora Core 4 and Windows XP). I'm impressed with the features and the fact that some hardware works "out-of-the-box" with Suse that I've yet to get working with Fedora.

Only big problem I'm noticing: OpenSuse 10 is noticably slower on my laptop. I'm a long-time RedHat/Fedora user, so I'm using that as my benchmark. As mentioned, I've got FC4 on this same machine (both running GNOME, BTW), and things just take longer in Suse. I'm speaking specifically about program loading time: Firefox takes longer, OpenOffice takes longer (a lot longer), loading the desktop takes longer, and Suse just generally seems to take longer to boot. I don't know if Suse just comes bloated by default or what--I do know that the first thing I do when I install a distro is to disable any services I don't need, so that shouldn't be the issue. Also, I do have DMA enabled in both distros (Yast claims it's running at UDMA-100).

Is this a known issue with Suse?

( FWIW, this isn't supposed to be a slow laptop: It's running a Turion 64 (3700) processor with 1GB of RAM and a 5400 RPM hard drive. )

Well I'm not overly impressed with the speed of SuSE 10 OSS on my PC either, so haven't yet upgraded my 3-year old laptop. So I think the best we can do is follow the progress of the SLICK / SUPER SuSE projects on www.opensuse.org.

Sounds like that'd be a good deal, if only it included GNOME...

(Incidently, the performance of KDE in OpenSUSE--at least the bit that I played with it--isn't all that bad.)

I've noticed the same thing. I'm not sure why, but it's almost to the point of being unusable for me. I didn't notice it much at first, probably because I wasn't paying attention. I would be reading a man page while something was loading in the background or searching for something online. But once I got my system up and running to the point I wanted it, that's when I started noticing.

It's slow to respond to everything. I'm running it on a Toshiba m30 with 512MB RAM, yet when I click the suse icon to bring up the menu, there's a delay there. There's a delay in drawing the icons. A small delay, but a delay nonetheless which should really not be an issue with this system. It's also slow to draw icons in directory contents in nautilus.

I'm debating whether to drop my current config, which was to do away with Windows *spit* entirely and do a dual boot. I require Photoshop to run on my system. I haven't got it installed here yet to run under Wine, but I do have wine up and running. But I fear that it will be completely unusable if the rest of the desktop/system performance is any indicator.

Is it faster when plugged into mains power?

I haven't used SUSE 10 yet, but I had noticed similar things running slow on my laptop with previous versions.

What I didn't like was that when running on battery, the CPU was only allowed to scale to 50% of CPU speed. Good for battery life, but it would never scale to top speed. Check out the YaST/System/Power Management settings, and have a look at the schemes there. You might like to choose some other(s).

hth
ws

I'm also using OpenSUSE 10. I've noticed a small speed INCREASE. Programs respond faster, and it's just faster in general. It may be because you're using the GNOME desktop. For some reason, it's slower in SUSE 10 then it was in the older versions (I've been with SUSE since 9.1, I would know). SUSE seems to be more of a KDE distro. Try loading up KDE (if it's not installed, install it first) and if it's faster, then there you go.

Hope this helps.
-Richie

Edit: One more thing. If you're not a KDE person, I suggest you either stay with Fedora, or go with Ubuntu. Ubuntu is very fast and has a nice GNOME desktop

?? how to delete a post :~ sorry to edit this text like this

I've been using SuSE with KDE for a number of releases. Boot and shutdown is faster with 10.0. Suspend to disk is even faster. Choice of window manager has a big impact on startup. Perhaps one of the more slim stealth managers will suit you better. I also run Puppy Linux on hard disk. It's much leaner and is very fast in all aspects. Firefox and OpenOffice are slow to start. I would think their heavy use of Java is a factor.

Hmmmm Thought it was just me. I too have Observed a very noticable steady decrease in performance since 9.1 or there about. It would be interesting to know what kind of processor everyone is using. Perhaps SuSE is optimized for a particular processor at the expense of others. Anyone know if there any tuning Docs for SuSE ?

For your information. My laptop (Samsung R50 II) is running fast with Suse 10. There is no noticable differnce in speed when compared to my desktop (P4 2800@3100 2GB Ram). It's also faster then 9.2 & 9.3.

Mine is an AMD Athlon XP-M 1400+. The kernel can be compiled for a specific processor but I have no idea of the level of improvement. Applications can also be optimized for a processor. Anything i586 runs on all. i686 runs on mine which is a k7. My machine is no barn burner but it seems to run well. I also have 640MB of memory. Started with 128MB. Adding another 128MB did increase speed. Swapping one of the 128's for a 512MB module made more difference when I had lots of aps open. I would class SuSE 10.0 as faster than previous releases.