I have a fresh install of Slackware 14.1 and defaulted to
to KDE. From the command line it takes a good 50 seconds
to load X. The only thing I have done so far is to install
the NVIDIA driver for my GeForce 8400 GS but it was slow before
that installation. Has anyone experienced this and what did you
discover?

Thanks.

Tom

I also found KDE too slow, although I didn't time it. If you like simplicity and don't mind starting programs from a terminal or a right-click menu rather than using icons, you might want to give Fluxbox a try. Here is an article on it:
http://lggagnon.wordpress.com/2012/0...r-x-unixlinux/
You can also find more information here:
http://fluxbox.org/help/

Greetings
There is no need to change your choice of WM/DE. All of them are configurable to be suitable for just about any hardware you'd care to run. Because of your post I timed my own. It may be off a bit for direct comparison because I don't boot to desktop or use startx or startkde or startxfce4. I use KDM and select WM/DEs from it's menu, so I had to stop and restart my stopwatch to try to match your way. Mine is probably a little bit slower.

For me on this box I can see KDE desktop in 20 seconds from command line but it takes another 10 for the Startup Sound to chime, telling me everything is ready. There's still some applications operating in the background but even at 20 seconds I can begin to launch programs of my own choosing. Incidentally I have not disabled any of "The Evil Few" and I have a few Plasmoids and a complex Conky loading as well. If you're not loading all of that your time should be faster on similar hardware. Within 2 minutes of launching KDM, KDE settles down to about 3% CPU and 720MB RAM with all the services I'm running. It is trivial to knock that down to 1% and 300MB if I start turning stuff off.

It might be worthwhile for you to run "ksysguard" the KDE System Monitor to see what processes you have running. You may have daemons and services you never use or only need to launch on-demand. Turning those off default will speed things up. Also, and probably partly in reaction to all the brouhaha over intial release of KDE 4, things are made slower by default so as not to chew up resources. If you look in KDE System Settings > and select "Desktop Effects" you will see an animation speed control. It defaults to Normal which is quite slow. Even a single increment up to Fast is a huge improvement. There are 2 faster increments after that.

It seems to me silly to swim halfway across a river only to decide you can't make it and swim back :P Build on what you know and learn to set things the way you want. It's worth it.

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I had similar experience after the update to 14.0 (64-bit) on my (relatively) new laptop (with a GeForce GT 635M graphics card). Runlevel 3 scripts were terminating at the same as before but X startup suddenly began to take much longer time. The screen would go black, then it would return to the console for a moment (like when X restarts), then come up again with black screen for a while before I could see the login manager. With 14.1 it is faster, but still not as fast the pre-14.0 version I believe. I wasn't able to find a solution (I didn't notice anything unusual in the logs).

By the way, I'm running Slackware 14.1 on 3 other computers as well (2 of them being 64-bit) and they don't have such problem. I suspect that a certain hardware configuration might be triggering this behaviour.

I'm not sure how deciding to go with Fluxbox after trying KDE amounts to "[swimming] halfway across a river only to decide you can't make it and swim back." Choosing Fluxbox over KDE is not "silly." Fluxbox starts instantly; I don't need to wait 20 or even 5 seconds. Moreover, I didn't have to turn anything off to attain that speed. For those who want speed and prefer to work from a terminal anyway, Fluxbox is a valid choice.

Sorry I wasn't clearer. I assumed OP was used to KDE from previous installs. So to be clear, I agree, choosing Fluxbox is not silly but I think changing to it is not a fixit solution, especially if one has invested time and effort in another platform of any kind. Frankly I don't care much about startup time because I rarely reboot. I care about app launch time and Fluxbox is no faster in that regard. Example - Firefox takes just as long on any WM/DE. As for working from a terminal any WM/DE does that. With KDE I can setup activities so that one is eye-candy galore for messing about, another for gaming that is lean and mean, and another for terminal work that insures I never have to take my hands off the keyboard.... basically whatever I want.

But to be clearer still, my argument is not with fluxbox. My argument is with switching an environment and expecting there not to be any tradeoffs. I love motorcycles but I'm not going to take my family on vacation on one or recommend that you do. I suspect OP needs to "Fix the disease not the symptom".

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My experience with KDE is that, the first time you start it after a reboot, it is slow to load because of all the KDE background stuff it has to start. The less RAM you have, the more noticeable it is.

If you log out of KDE and back in, it loads faster for subsequent sessions, until the next reboot.

Me, I use Fluxbox or E17. KDE starts a lot of services and background stuff that I have no interest in or need for whatsoever.

As has been pointed out KDE loads considerably faster on reloading(~10 sec). A look
with ksyguard showed a mountain of stuff which I now need to sort out. I think much
of it can be turned off. Thanks to all for responding. I consider this question
solved.

Tom

Opting to use fluxbox is not quitting, its the smart decision. KDE is so slow bloated and needlessly complex someone should just put it out of its misery. Run fluxbox, its fast, you dont have to wait for it, and should you absolutely need to run a kde program you can do that from fluxbox.

In fact imo kde is so bad, you might as well just give up completely and use windows.

I wouldn't go as far as fogpipe does. If you have sufficient resources and you have a need for some of KDE's features, it can serve you well. There was a member of my LUG (he's since moved to another city) who found KDE's "Activities" feature to be extremely useful, because of how he organized his workflow.

To power all that stuff, though, you need resources, particularly RAM. I would rather devote my RAMs to speeding up my machine, rather powering what are, in my workflow, bells and whistles.

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The problem of the OP (based on what he tells) is not related to the window manager. X itself takes a lot of time to start, like in my case. You can't solve it by changing the WM.

Exactly this ^^. It also seems that as a result of this thread he has discovered that he may need, and can if he chooses, reduce his overhead in ANY WM/DE he chooses. Conversely, he could also take any WM/DE, even Blackbox, and fill it up with wasteful junk (to him) that would slow it to a crawl. In general, Linux as a whole is what you make of it. It's just as crazy to try to stuff your family into a motorcycle sidecar for a cross-country vacation as it is to use a 14 wheeler to deliver one grape.

PS kudos frankbell for exercising reason instead of falling prey to the old Chevy vs/ Ford "debate"

That is odd, my X starts almost instantly (regardless if I am using i3 wm or XFCE)

Not necessarily odd as it will depend a lot on what video driver one uses and whether compositing and such are enabled. I could probably speed mine up by just disabling the nVidia splash screen but I've grown used to seeing it as an indicator that all is well and I don't restart enough that the few seconds bothers me.