New gcc,
New x.org,
etc etc etc

What do you think?
Will it bring greater performance to older hardware?

Probably not. Old hardware will probably cripple any newfound power introduced by the changes.

In my experience the change from GCC 3.3 to 3.4 has definately been an improvement on my older hardware, along with newer KDE releases, etc

Do you think GCC 4 and the new toolcahins, etc will be faster than what was in slackware 11?

Hmm, well that is definitely good news in your case .. In general, GCC4 will *probably* be more efficient, if not exactly 'faster', but the 2 like to go hand in hand, so.. Hopefully..
I think it has the potential, yes.

Unlike the Microsoft world, newer software doesn't mean you need newer hardware. My machines perform much faster running the 2.6 kernel than the 2.4, even my machines down to ~100 Mhz, for example.

The new software introduced will increase system efficiency in a number of areas, but some changes are really just changes in how the software is packaged.

That said, Slackware is clearly moving away from the old-hardware friendly stance it has had in the past to keep up with the demands of the modern Linux community. You will obviously still be able to run Slackware on nearly any machine, but that is going to become less of a concern for Patrick in it's overall development.

If you're using xfce then you definitely want to upgrade to 4.2.0 -> 4.4.0. I can't say for certain how it does with old hardware, but it's a major improvement on the user end. Thunar is just leaps and bounds better than the previous file manager and mousepad is my new favorite text editor (but I still use Eclipse for coding).

I just "slackpgk upgrade-all" but it wasn't as smooth as I imagined it would be (still beats downloading 50 packages by hand!). The split 'which' package caught me, still getting some odd errors here and there, but the new X (+fxce) worked right off the bat which is good. At least I can use FF (officially upgraded to 2.0.0.3 btw).

Overall I'd say the update was definitely due.

I'm confused.

You say that 2.6 runs better on your old hardware, yet you think that Slackware is "clearly moving away from the old-hardware friendly stance"... ??

I don't know why you would think that, but I would guess that it's because Pat is finally going to drop support for the 2.4.x line of kernels. This move will take more advantage of the features offered by 2.6.x.

Please clarify.

2.6 runs fine on my older hardware (Pentiums, etc)

MS3FGX said "That said, Slackware is clearly moving away from the old-hardware friendly stance"

Is it?

I don't believe it is, which is why I have asked MS3FGX to clarify the point.