Quote Originally Posted by ardchoille View Post
Ubuntu uses the gnome desktop as its default and kubuntu uses the KDE desktop. I have found KDE to be faster than gnome, but the xfce desktop is faster than both of them. For older hardware, if you want to stick with an ubuntu derivative, I'd recommend you try xubuntu. It uses xfce as its default desktop (still uses the gtk toolkit) and it's a lot faster. If that is still slow, you could install Ubuntu and use a window manager instead of a desktop environment (such as fluxbox or windowmaker, both are lighter and faster) or you could try a different distro. That's one of the wonderful things about Linux, you can change almost any aspect of it without harming the system or having to reboot.
great! thanks!!