I use OpenSuse since ver. 10.2. I didn't have performance issues back then. When I updated to 11.2 with KDE 4.3.5 (KDE 4.3.5) I started having the system locking and slowing down for no apparent reason and despite of whatever I was doing.

Anyway, it may be the kernel and not KDE but I'm considering updating to 11.3 as sort of a last chance to this Linux distro and I read that there's a LKDE, since performance is important to me since I work with hi-res images, I like to know if LKDE will allow installation of software such as GIMP, Open Office, SAI, etc.. as well as common device susch as scanners, printers, etc..

In short words, is LKDE a full KDE with no fancy effects and therefore less demanding of the CPU ? so it'll free more CPU/GPU resources than using the standard (fully featured) KDE 4.4+

Never heard about LKDE, maybe you're thinking about LXDE? Most applications don't depend on which desktop/window manager you choose, so they should work just fine. LXDE is said to more lightweight than KDE, but it isn't related to KDE.

Regarding your performance issues it sounds like something is wrong with your system, I'm running Plasma Desktop 4.5.1 on my netbook and my old desktop with Pentium 4 and almost everything is smooth.

Thank you for your response, I'm just starting to read about the update so it must be LXDE, will check it out and yes, I also think something is wrong with the system,but haven't been able to figure out what it is (or from Suse forums).

Did you update from 10.2 to 11.2? Or do a clean install? Sometimes updates can be problematic especially if there have been multiple releases in between. You might consider a fresh install.

If you update install the kernel-desktop instead of kernel-default (unless you have older hardware) this should be faster.

I did a clean install. As for my general hardware, it's :

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.80GHz
NVidia Quadro2 Pro 64 MB
RAM 512 MB

In short words, the problem is very evident slow on the system in general and complete stop of the computer while there's disc activity, sometimes timed, it was each 30 mins, no matter what I was doing, even if I turn on the computer and don't open any program.

As for some measures taken, never have the automatic update running or the berry indexer.

Do you have Strigi enabled? It can slow down the computer a bit when indexing. If you want a snappier experience, I would also recommend to upgrade the RAM (it's quite cheap nowadays).

Trying out LXDE should be very easy, you just need to install it and then you can choose which session you want to start (KDE, LXDE etc.) in the login screen.

when the system slows can you run htop (or top, system monitor, etc) to see what process is using your cpu

And you can run iotop to see what is using your disk if it's disk activity showing your system

note: htop and iotop need to run in a konsole window

no, I was unable to use the system monitor to see (per sure) what was happening since it also locks it.

I plan to upgrade the computer soon, so investing in RAM (which is not cheap on this computer: $600 for 1 GB) is not something I have considered.

htop and iotop are command line items that don't use much cpu so you could leave them running

$600 for 1gb? what kind of ram, rdram? "$"=U.S. dollars?

yes, last time I checked, it was $600 for 1 GB, It's the type of RAM this computer uses (DELL Workstation), it is very fast, that's why I'm so disappointed with the performance of Suse 11. I have all indexers turned off and even un-installed.

I'll make a new clean install before December when I think Ican have a non-working computer to do it.

did you check on Ebay? the search is for 512mb rdram ecc pc1066 http://computers.shop.ebay.com/i.html?_ ... m270.l1313

I think you over estimate the impact of ram speed on normal processing, if you feed more data then the cpu can process you just clog the pipeline

True on the CPU, but my main point on OS performance was that.. it didn't happened with 10.2.

The only thing that I didn't do on the installation of 11.2 was a re-format of the drives (home, /) since I wasn't going to modify the partitions, I'll do that next tie since I have a new HD installed.

I think the problem is: KDE 4.x needs much more memory than the 3.x series (which worked fine with 256 MB of memory) and your system has not enough and thus has to page a lot resulting in the performance issues you observed.

I had the same problems with my Dell Latitude D600 with 512 MB of memory. I solved the problem by abandoning the KDE desktop in part. I resorted to fluxbox - a window manager with a panel able to dock applets like the KDE wallet manager, the KDE network manager, and the like. On a Debian system, installing the package fluxbox also adds the fluxbox session type to the login manager. Thus you can switch between fluxbox and KDE sessions.

To regain some of the KDE amenities, I added the following lines to my fluxbox startup file:

kwalletmanager &
knetworkmanager &
kpowersave &
kxkb &
kmix &
korgac &
klipper &

(kpowersave is not a part of KDE 4.4 but it co-exist happily and there is no suitable replacement for it.)

I am still looking for a way to start the KDE device notifier which is not provided as an executable but as a shared object.

You may wish to try running "plasma-windowed notifier" or "plasmoidviewer notifier".

plasmoidviewer works fine but the plasmoid does not dock into the fluxbox systray. Is there a way to make it dock?