I'm running Ubuntu Edgy (or, as my fingers mistyped it, Ubunty) Gnome desktop on a P3 800Mhz box at work. I'm pleasantly surprised. It's surprisingly usable. Maybe it's the 640MB of RAM. I've tried Gnome on other distributions on similar hardware and they were slow to unusable.
But then those were 128-256MB boxes. RAM makes a lot of difference. It still gets slow (firefox, in particular, and evolution with 4GB of mail in there, are the main culprits although the occasional CPU eating php command line program steps in to be counted too). But it's very usable.
I may try to install KDE on this box to see if KDE is similarly usable. KDE on my wife's 1.5Ghz 256MB laptop isn't particularly snappy. It's usable, but there are irritating pauses, particularly when starting applications, or even just new instances of gnome-terminal. I need to get more RAM for that box so she'll be happier. Either that, or sell the laptop and buy the incoming Thinkpad R50 :-).
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