4

By wall clock measurements, KDE and the Windows 7 desktop actually take similar amounts of time to finish starting on my netbook.

The major difference is that, in Windows 7, the desktop menu and launchers are fully responsive pretty much as soon as they appear. Whereas under KDE 4, the menu lags and flickers, and the launchers remain frozen and unresponsive, until the last tray applet finishes loading. This delay is IMO rather annoying.

My suggestion is to have a list of plasma widgets that should be loaded before the rest. By default, any launchers or menus would be in the list, and everything else would be loaded later. Ideally the list could be somehow customized by the user, but IMO the important thing is to reduce the delay before the desktop is usable.

I am not sure if this is really KDE fault. I mean - system tray is populated with icons from programs, which needs to be run. They must be read from hard disk, put into memory, probably do some computing at start. And as we start quite a few of them, we must wait until they all finish.

I wonder, if this operation could be put behind KDE starting screen (splash). I am willing to wait longer at splash screen, but get perfectly responsive desktop after, than be fooled that KDE has started, while it still needs something to load.

@Gullible Jones - clarification, you have no apps automatically loading? it is just widgets? not all system tray items are widgets some are apps and if these system tray apps are autorun they can be delayed by using the sleep command

Have you considered hibernating to disk instead of shutting down as a way to bypass this?