If you have desktop effects enabled, that may be a factor. Moreover, Konsole in KDE4 is a new app with extra features, so for one app to launch more slowly for me is not an indication the whole DE is slow.

The only thing that is slower for me in KDE4 is logging on, but I am a **** for widgets and eye candy. Once logged on, the system feels at least as responsive as KDE3 or maybe faster. Window painting has definitely improved a lot, and Krunner alone has made my work quite a bit easier.

desktop effects are off - wouldnt make any sense complaining with these fancy things on

konsole is just an example, it's slower on all applications. it's not only the window manager - it slows xterm, too - but also the qt4 libs, as any apps are slower even under plain X.

BTW, what fancy new features are in konsole to justfy that?

it looks like kde 4.3 has soved the speed issue. on my test masches it's equally fast if not faster than kde 3.5. all desktop effects turned off, of course

That's weird... I've got KDE running on a 256MB RAM machine no problems...

it's not a memory problem. it looks like qt4 or kde4.2.4 sometimes switched to software rendering.

Oooh. Yeah, you might want to try the latest Qt, because there were several performance improvements and bug fixes... 4.5.2 is the latest, I think.

Silly question; but has 4.3 sorted out some performance issues with KWin on?

My particular problem was that I could have KWin effects on, yet launching a movie player would sort of lock up the desktop...