Now that I've got a stable Slackware current system, I'm looking at ways to optimize. Is KDE performance likely to increase significantly if I do a custom compile on my machine? It's not super-speedy (PIII 850MHz), but I thought that if generic KDE is compiled for even slower processors that I might benefit from a custom compile.

As far as features go, other than excluding Xinerama support in qt, I'd probably go with the plain vanilla config.

I know I could just use a lighter desktop, but there are a lot of things I like about KDE, at least at this point in my Linux odyssey.

Sorry if this has been asked before. I couldn't find anything on LQ-Slack specifically about the benefits of compiling KDE and qt.

I doubt it, although a load of gentoo freaks will probably come in here screaming blue that compiling yourself turns your computer into a super computer

I don't expect it will make a terribly big difference, but it's REALLY easy to do thanks to the Konstruct tool available from KDE website. So if you can put up with a few hours of compile time, it probably can't hurt.

http://developer.kde.org/build/konstruct/

Just make sure you setup you setup your desired install locations BEFORE building...some of the paths apparently get hardcoded in, as I found out the hard way...

I see a couple of reasons to recompile KDE:

1. There are a lot of optional dependencies left out in Slackware. If you want support for those as well you will have to compile a lot of software before compiling KDE. See the KDE website for those dependencies. If you don't want any of them than this is not a good reason to recompile.
2. The latest version of KDE 3.3.1 at the moment. IF you like to use that version on a Slackware stable and it isn't in your version of Slackware it could be a reason to compile it yourself or use third party packages.
3. You stock-Slackware-KDE does not work very well. Recompiling it on the machine running it could be (might not) a solution there.

If none applies to your situation I would advise you not to go into the trouble of compiling KDE. For me all three reasons were valid so I did compile my own KDE 3.3.1

There won't be a significant difference in speed between using the official Slackware packages or compiling it yourself..........While the official packages are backward compatible for the i486 cpu, they are optimized for the i686 cpu..............

I agree with rotvogel, if you need certain dependencies not in the official Slackware packages, then go ahead and compile KDE from source..................for your current rig, you'll be looking at 30+ hours compile time if you compile all the packages, including QT and Quanta. I have an Athlon 900 cpu and it took over 30 hours for me to do them all for KDE 3.2.2, a while back.......And I didn't use Konstruct, I used the SlackBuild scripts and modified the configure options to suit my preferences........Pat does a fine job with his SlackBuild scripts and I recommend using them instead of Konstruct for Slackware installation..........Those scripts will not only compile KDE, but also create the Slackpacks, which will be found in the /tmp directory by default........Then it's just a matter of installing the newly created package........You can also see what options are compiled into KDE by default from those scripts

Try to look closer at each KDE packages, and if you want to compile it, just choose the packages that you will need. I personally don't use most of KDE softwares, so I just install arts, KDEbase and KDElibs for my laptop.

Recompiling will give you slight increase in performance, but in most cases it's not noticable unless you are trying to put -O3 and -march. But the good point is you can include more features by including other packages in the build. KDE website has the list of software dependencies that enable specifics features.

Thanks for the very practical advice, everyone. I decided to hang on to my pre-compiled KDE, but I added IceWM to get my speed fix.

IceWM .... fluxbox !

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Yeah, fluxbox is cool. I've been fooling around with it and with pekwm and I like them a lot. Soooo fast. For a long time I've been using bblean on Windows, and it's from that same minimalist family.

In Linux, though, I find I'm preferring a little more than the minimum at this stage, so IceWM is a happy medium for me right now. KDE is great for having all kinds of stuff at your fingertips, but now that I know more what I need and what I don't need, it's overkill. My main complaint, though, is how sluggish it seems to be on my system.

Maybe later, when all I care about is speed and I want to make my old 'puter seem youthful and spry again, I might go on to fluxbox. IceWM, for now, is just right, to quote the famous young blonde.