Mint 17

[Brian Cluff]

On 08/11/2014 10:38 AM, techlists at phpcoderusa.com wrote:
> I'm not sure why, however my Laptop running an
> i3 seems to be faster than my desktop running an i5.  I wonder if it is
> the OS alone that makes the difference.  Mint is a much smaller
> download.  Maybe it is optimized in some way.

It's most likely down to the default settings or possibly a driver issue 
such as you are running nouveau instead of the proprietary driver which 
is much faster.

The default setting can make a huge difference.  You can make your whole 
system feel faster by simply going to system settings -> Desktop Effects 
and changing animation speed from Normal to Fast.

If you are running an older version of Kubuntu you can get a HUGE speed 
increase simply by upgrading to the latest version.  The last few 
releases of KDE have been nothing but spit and polish and they did some 
serious polishing in the last year or 2.  One of the biggest speedups 
they did was in the last release where they swapped out nepomuk for 
baloo.  Nepomuk could go crazy at times and eat your machine making the 
whole thing slow.  Baloo is a compete rewrite and uses a much lighter 
database as well as a much better way of indexing files.  Unless you are 
doing an upgrade to an established system with lost of files on it, you 
won't ever feel it indexing in the background.  On an established 
system, it will slow down the system for a little bit while it indexes 
all your files, but after that it will be smooth sailing.
Newer releases also have much of the plasma interface as well as kwin 
ported to using QT quick which make the them run much faster and smoother.

Brian Cluff