| EZ Speed Tips For Gnome & KDE Users
You can speed up your system a lot just by using some lightweight programs. Also removing some eye candy can help too.
When you install your favorite Linux distro on your computer, use the EXT4 file system format. EXT4 has the speed of RiserFS and the stability of EXT3. You can see as much as an 40% performance boost using EXT4 instead of EXT3!
Reduce the amount of icons on your desktop and in the panel. In takes system resources to load these icons and hold them in place. There is really no reason to have more than just your Home folder icon on the desktop.
Use no wallpaper on your desktop. It takes system resources to hold that wallpaper in place. If you do want to use wallpaper, try to keep it under 150kb in weight. If you don't think this is true, try to use a 3mb weight picture as your background and see how slow your system is.
Your file manager is the most used piece of GUI software on your computer. File managers used in KDE and Gnome are over featured and slow. Download and install the XFE or PcmanFM file managers. Both are super speedy and have enough tools to get the job done. Now you can use this new file manager for your Home folder on the desktop.
The second most used piece of GUI software is the web browser. Ten years ago Mozilla Firefox was very fast. Over the years, Firefox has got so bloated that it is much slower the the Mozilla-Netscape browser that it replaced. The solution is to use a speedy Webkit based browser or Opera. Opera is a good choice even though it does feel a little strange to those long time Firefox users. One of the speedy Webkit based browsers may be a better choice. Midori, NetSurf, and Chromium (Google Chrome) are the most stable. If you still want to use a Geko based browser, use SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey is the old Mozilla-Netscape browser, and is twice as fast as Firefox. SeaMonkey (IceApe) is fast enough that it is the choice browser in Puppy Linux. If you use the Gnome desktop, check out the Epiphany browser with the Webkit engine. It is fast and very stable too.
The third most used piece of software is your word processor. OpenOffice Writer has tons of features, but is slow as snail snot. AbiWord is a full featured word processor that is 5X faster than OpenOffice Writer. Other fast word processors that can read and write MS Word documents are Ted, Siag Pathetic Writer, and LyX. If you use KDE, Kword is a very fast word processor too.
The fastest to open video player I have used is Parole. Parole uses the Gstreamer engine and can play any files MPlayer or VLC can play as long as the Gstreamer Bad and Ugly plugins are included.
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