David Gerard wrote:
So something around 500MHz will happily run Pango and the other cutting-edge internationalisation stuff if you fill it with memory.
My experience is that with a 500Mhz Pentium 3 (512K cache, 512mb RAM, Matrox G450 AGP graphics), Gnome (2.6 tested) is unbearably slow. A large factor here is the Xft font rendering (Ok, you could use xterm instead of gnome-terminal, or switch off antialiasing), which is unaccelerated (at least was then), and _brutally_ slow. If you run something with copious output in gnome-terminal, it'll more or less lock up the entire machine. I don't normally use Gnome, but evaluated it on that old machine for some reason that is of no interest here. KDE is a bit faster, don't know why, but seems to use more RAM. IMHO you need at least a 2.8 or 3GHz P-IV for that kind of desktop to get things to run well, and, in my experience, raw CPU power here is the dominating factor. Of course these machines are still perfectly usable with windowmaker, or fvwm, or similar.
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