I wonder how come my Red Hat EL WS is very slow on my P4 1500 with 1G RAM and ATI Raedon 9800 128M video card compared to Windows XP. I really like to use linux for the fact that most software are GPL and open source programs.

By saying slow I mean GUI is sluggish (moving firefox window across the sreen leaves trailing behind) despite the fact that I have already installed latest video card driver from ATI website.

Programs startup slow despite that fact that RH is on ATA-100 hard drive

Well, I might not have corretly setup the machine but shouldn't this be taken care of by having OS installed.

As far as the ATI driver goes, did you choose 2D or
3D acceleration? My understanding is that the ATI
driver can only do them one at a time. If you're using
3D that would explain why desktop-stuff is slow.

For a test you could try running the radeon driver that
comes with Xorg for a while.

[edit]
Btw, the title "Linux is really slow... How come?" is not
very descriptive, something like "Slow desktop action
using ATIs binary drivers. Why?" would have been more
appropriate.
[/edit]


Cheers,
Tink

I know that would have been more appropriate. It also may be different from one distro to another with my current hardware. But can't really deny the fact that out of the box latest release from RH can't really be measured up to XP.

Yes, I used the raedon driver that comes with Xorg (still leaving trailing) and then I updated to ATI driver (improved a bit but still leaving trailing though 3D accreleration is significantly improved I must say)

Anyway, I still want to try it out and find out how to correct the 2D performance from my card which I know it's still a decent video card after all.

Have you tried using a different window manager--IceWM, Fluxbox, or XFCE?

the red hat people are absolute experts at make things run slow. They know every obscure trick in the book for that and never fail to discover all the new ones.

with that said it is possible for you the user to get rh working alot better

Thanks for the informative comment regarding RH being such a slow OS. I uninstall it and then install Mandrake 10. To my supprise, it's extremely faster than RH for sure (with trailing of any kind If moving a window across monitor) with native ATI video card driver

Second, the SBlive driver including in the OS is much better. Qualy of sound is clearer and almost like in Windows. WOW, it is much differernt from one distro to another like I have said it.

i find KDE to be painfully slow. if you want a nice clean fast and unobtrusive desktop environment i would suggest using something like blackbox. IceWM is good too, i have both installed.

I've heard KDE 3.4 is reasonably quick, haven't tried it because I don't want to jumble my toolkits up and I use a number of Gtk apps that don't come in the Qt flavour.

I use slack current and kde 3.4.1 and its fast, takes about 1 and a half seconds, maybe 2 for kcontrol to load up. And k games like kolf take about the same aswell.

I recently installed CentOS 4.1 and KDE 3.3.2 and was surprised how fast it is. And when I upgraded KDE to 3.4.1 it went even faster.

The difference between this and my old SuSE 9.0 + KDE 3.1 is several times faster.

Red hat's linux, but it Red hat 8,9,fedora or RHEL, run freaking slow on my machine....

But when i switched to Debian....everything is like run in lightspeed....

IHMO, RH linux sucks at speed department.

Suse also sucks at speed department.

my advice: Use arch, slackware, debian instead of rh's linux

You could try recompiling the kernel or compiling more things from source with optimized flags on, most of the time the RPMs from RH aren't exactly top notch.