Hi,
Is it just me or Windows is slower than Linux? I mean like in general task, Linux lag more than Windows... I have a AMD Sempron 2600+ with 512MB of RAM and a swap of 1GB with a ATI Radeon 9200 SE 128MB... Is there any distro of Linux that is faster than others or is there a difference between KDE and Gnome...

Windows: WinXP?
Linux: Suse 9.2?
2.4 or 2.6kernel?
Please be more specific...

lol sorry,

Windows XP, SuSE 9.2, Kernel 2.6, KDE 3.3.0

I have almost identical specs to yours and have to say that I have run Mandrake 10.1 (ce & official) Suse 9.1, ubuntu, and slackware. I currently favour mdk with gnome and find it slick and stable. Suse was a bit sluggish but not noticeably more than xp. Everything else seems to be fine. What is it that you are doing that seems to be slower? Kde and Gnome are probably the most resource hungry of window managers but shouldn't be so bad as to be comparable to xp with your specs.

Ok, so what exactly is slow? E.g. Have you tried different web browsers or office document editors? Do you often see activity in that ridiculously huge 1Gb swap partition? Have you tried a lighter-weight window manager like Fluxbox? There are some distros that are compiled for i686 or higher, or source based ones like Gentoo where you can compile for your exact hardware. Have you properly configured all hardware acceleration-disk access, graphics?

Yeah!!! I would say its just you...

KC

Well, all is slow, when I do web browsing, to start the system, to send a file to someone, to open a program, etc. It's not that I don't like Linux and I can live with that but, it's not as that bad... and, for my RAM it's always used to at least 400-500MB (when nothing is running except background applications) and for my CPU it's not that bad... and again for my RAM, it's used most with Disk Cache... even if I don't transfer anything... but, the swap is really not bad it's only used at 10%

is DMA enabled with linux if not that would slow it down alot when your using swap space

SuSe does seem to come in i386 binary format, which means it's able to run on everything Pentium compatable, whereas say Mandrake is i586 (PPro or P2 iirc) and as I say others are i686 or custom, taking advantage of the extras processors have gained since the P1's invention.

10% of your swap is 100Megs, that's huge swap usage and would normally kill performance. Why is your swap partition so big? I remember the advice being 2xRAM up to a max of 512swap. ATM I'm running Mandrake10.1 on 256RAM and no swap.
Using all your RAM is good, if as you say it's disk cache-means faster access to apps&data you've previously used, plus it'll be used for loaded apps if it needs to.

Linux is faster than windows, atleast that's what I've seen.

Basically, I'm downgrading my pc because linux is so much faster my system seemed like overkill.
I'm using a 800mhz system now instead of my Barton 2500+ and the only slowness I've experienced is video lag, which will be resolved soon with a decent card.

The slowness you're seeing is probably related to the WM (kde, gnome, etc) they are hungy managers and tend to slow things down with things otherwise would not be slow.
Instal fluxbox and see how you like it, I love it the interface is simple and doesn't have the unneeded bloat that some managers have.
http://username17.com/images/screenshot.jpg

My context menus are transparent as well, I just didn't catch them in the screenshot.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna try another WM like fluxbox and I don't think my DMA is enabled thats what I'm gonna go do... brb :P

What are you doing when you use 500 MB RAM and 102 MB of swap??
Post the output of the ps aux command so we can see what all is going on in your box.

I have a system thats been running KDE 3.3.2 for 61 days and it's only using 356 MB of 512 RAM and 0% swap, which is probably very close to average.

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.7 0.0 596 236 ? S 19:36 0:01 init [5]
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN 19:36 0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< 19:36 0:00 [events/0]
root 4 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< 19:36 0:00 [khelper]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< 19:36 0:00 [netlink/0]
root 6 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< 19:36 0:00 [kacpid]
root 22 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< 19:36 0:00 [kblockd/0]
root 32 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:36 0:00 [pdflush]
root 33 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:36 0:00 [pdflush]
root 35 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< 19:36 0:00 [aio/0]
root 34 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:36 0:00 [kswapd0]
root 618 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:36 0:00 [kseriod]
root 1484 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< 19:36 0:00 [reiserfs/0]
root 2000 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:36 0:00 [khubd]
root 2051 0.0 0.0 1360 308 ? S<s 19:36 0:00 udevd
root 2513 0.0 0.0 1432 444 ? S 19:36 0:00 [hwscand]
root 3491 0.0 0.0 1432 396 ? S< 19:36 0:00 [hwscand]
root 3692 0.0 0.1 1444 620 ? Ss 19:36 0:00 /sbin/syslogd -a
root 3695 0.0 0.1 1516 576 ? Ss 19:36 0:00 /sbin/klogd -c 1
root 3715 0.0 0.1 2032 696 ? Ss 19:36 0:00 /sbin/resmgrd
nobody 3725 0.0 0.0 1428 496 ? Ss 19:36 0:00 /sbin/portmap
root 3807 0.0 0.3 5144 2052 ? Ss 19:37 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -o
root 4088 0.0 0.1 1388 532 ? Ss 19:37 0:00 /usr/sbin/acpid -
root 4104 0.0 0.2 2500 1160 ? S 19:37 0:00 /usr/sbin/powersa
lp 4175 0.0 0.3 5220 1976 ? Ss 19:37 0:00 /usr/sbin/cupsd
root 4195 0.0 0.1 2620 728 ? Ss 19:37 0:00 /opt/kde3/bin/kdm
root 4214 3.7 2.7 159060 14284 ? S 19:37 0:05 /usr/X11R6/bin/X
root 4233 0.0 0.2 3500 1340 ? S 19:37 0:00 -:0
root 4290 0.0 0.2 4216 1456 ? Ss 19:37 0:00 /usr/lib/postfix/
postfix 4309 0.0 0.2 4260 1452 ? S 19:37 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo
postfix 4310 0.0 0.2 4292 1484 ? S 19:37 0:00 qmgr -l -t fifo -
root 4317 0.0 0.1 43088 804 ? Ssl 19:37 0:00 /usr/sbin/nscd
1000 4409 0.0 0.2 3492 1320 ? S 19:37 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/X11R
1000 4530 0.1 1.9 24388 10292 ? Ss 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: Running.
1000 4533 0.0 1.7 22884 8804 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: dcopserv
1000 4574 0.0 1.9 24860 10252 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: klaunche
1000 4582 0.2 2.8 28596 14652 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: kded
1000 4613 0.5 1.4 13512 7264 ? S 19:37 0:00 /opt/kde3/bin/art
1000 4615 0.0 3.1 33008 16052 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: knotify
1000 4624 0.0 0.0 1376 316 ? S 19:37 0:00 kwrapper ksmserve
1000 4626 0.0 2.3 25028 12040 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: ksmserve
1000 4627 0.5 2.8 27460 14700 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: kwin -se
1000 4636 0.5 3.2 28756 16512 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: kdesktop
1000 4635 0.0 2.4 25424 12384 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: khotkeys
1000 4644 1.3 3.7 31196 19220 ? S 19:37 0:01 kdeinit: kicker
1000 4647 0.0 2.1 26184 11004 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: kio_file
root 4678 0.0 0.1 1660 604 ? Ss 19:37 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
1000 4686 0.2 2.7 27012 14276 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: klipper
1000 4688 0.2 2.7 28212 14388 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: profile_
1000 4690 0.3 2.9 27012 14984 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: susewatc
root 4693 0.0 0.1 1824 620 tty1 Ss+ 19:37 0:00 /sbin/mingetty --
root 4694 0.0 0.1 1824 620 tty2 Ss+ 19:37 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tt
root 4695 0.0 0.1 1824 620 tty3 Ss+ 19:37 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tt
root 4696 0.0 0.1 1824 620 tty4 Ss+ 19:37 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tt
root 4697 0.0 0.1 1824 620 tty5 Ss+ 19:37 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tt
root 4698 0.0 0.1 1824 620 tty6 Ss+ 19:37 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tt
1000 4699 0.6 3.1 33624 16476 ? Sl 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: suseplug
1000 4703 0.3 3.2 28972 16692 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: kmix -se
1000 4707 2.0 5.9 51424 30812 ? S 19:37 0:02 amarok pp
1000 4709 0.5 3.9 35968 20152 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: konquero
1000 4710 1.1 4.3 43384 22568 ? S 19:37 0:01 kopete -session 1
1000 4719 0.1 2.5 33332 13248 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: kio_http
1000 4722 0.0 2.1 26184 11040 ? S 19:37 0:00 kdeinit: kio_file
1000 4723 9.7 7.5 75760 39184 ? Sl 19:37 0:08 /opt/MozillaFiref
1000 4732 0.2 0.5 5304 2880 ? S 19:37 0:00 /opt/gnome/lib/GC
1000 4760 0.0 3.2 30532 16940 ? S 19:39 0:00 kdeinit: konsole
1000 4761 0.0 0.3 3864 1800 pts/0 Ss 19:39 0:00 /bin/bash
1000 4769 0.0 0.1 2372 704 pts/0 R+ 19:39 0:00 ps aux

if dma isn't on your giving windows an unfair advantage (ill bet its using dma)

Just teasing. Really though. you have twice the RAM and Processing speed I do and my system runs very fast. First there is some program that is eating your memory. When you start Linux even with all the background apps, Internet, Terminals, Gimp, Editors and such, at least my system rarely get's over 65-70% ram usage. Try opening System Guard (if your using KDE) and killing some apps to see if your memory is being freed up. Also, I think your swap is way to big. Even though most say use the Double your RAM quotient, I think using over 500meg is wasting.

Have you tried any other Linux Distrobutions. I have found some are faster then others depending on your hardware and software requirments. Try some other's http://www.linuxiso.org/ before just saying that Linux is slower then windows.

Anyway, Your system should be running much faster and should have much more free RAM that it has now. Look into that first.

KC