well, I can see the difference on my notebook ... especially when you run X applications and so on ...

I would prefer Slackware-Source-Version to compile everything ... :)

Benchmarks, please....

I have never done any ... I had Slackware 9.1 compiled 100% with i686, -O3 etc, and it was faster than before ...
I have now just a standard 10.2, so I am not able to make any benchmarks.

To be honest, I have a x86_64 distribution on one partition, and nothing feels faster at all (than Slack with -march=i486 -mcpu=i686). Sure, if you do benchmarks, there will probably be a small gain in performance because the system is fully compiled with optimizations for the latest AMD CPU generation, and performance will increase significantly where 64-bit math can be used.

But is it worth to sacrifice compatibility with older computers for a slight performance gain? IMHO it is not.

I have Slack 10.2 with 2.6.13 kernel running on an old laptop PII 166MHZ 80M Ram 4 Gig hardrive. XFCE is the only window manager that works well, but that is because of the graphics adapter. I tried all of the other WMs listed, they work, but, when I start Firefox it causes a color shift on all the menus that makes them unreadable. XFCE is the only WM that doesn't do that on this machine.

you can also try it with fluxbox. i had a simillar problem last year with one of my old machines, and fluxbox didn't have this problem too. i don't like xfce because the panel cannot be strechted to 100%.

M.

I hide the XFCE panel then run /opt/kde/kicker and use the KDE panel.