Improving KDE start time
One of the things about running KDE in linux is it can be a big resource grabber and be slow starting. By contrast “light” window managers can be up and running in a relative flash (xfce). OSnews has a story on SUSE/Novell KDe developers that have managed to get down to 4-5 second start time for KDE (which is fairly impressive.) Here are a few of their blog entries on the matter.
Some of this seems to be response to a recent George Ou post on “why does desktop linux have to be so slow.” From the zdnet blogs in the last week.
There are some performance tips for kde at the KDE wiki. Hopefully some of those tips will give you an idea for a starting place on tuning your pc’s performance. Among the suggestions I would have in general: turn off unnecessary services (system services and kde services). Minimize the number of apps preloading. In other words run as little as necessary. I’m sure the document linked above has some other, more thorough, suggestions.