is it just me?

is it just me or does linux seem much slower than windows? browsers for example. it takes opera 3-5 seconds just to load. in my windowsXP IE open instantly. is there a reason my linux is so much slower or is there any way to speed it up?

Well, there are several things that could slow your system down. Many distros, Red Hat, for example, run lots of unnecessary services, which consume resources. To reclaim these resources, you need to stop these daemons from loading. The way to do that is distro specific, but you can usually figure out which things you are running by watching the messages printed to the screen as the system boots. Then, after you've figured out which ones you don't use, consult your distro's docs to see how to disable them.

Running big desktop environments, like KDE, can also slow down the system. There are lighter weight window managers, like FluxBox, that are much faster.

Personally, I've found Linux to be equal to or faster than Windows XP. I'm not sure how much of that is because Linux apps are faster than Windows apps or due to my optimized Gentoo install.

Comparing Opera to IE is apples and oranges. I run mozilla under windows and Linux, and under both OSes it takes about the same to load. I'm sure running Opera under XP will produce the same type of slowdown that you will see under Linux, and thus the problem lies with Opera, or Mozilla in my case, and not with Linux or XP.

One thing right off that bat that you can turn off is sendmail. I found that with a lot of distros sendmail automatically starts up, and that can be a real hog. Type ps -a | less at a command prompt to get a listing of every process that is running. For a standalone PC I would turn off unnecessary networking processes, multipule getty processes, and gpm for starters.

IE is a part of XP as a whole and so it gets loaded basically when XP boots. That way when you open IE it's almost completely ready to load. Mozilla, firebird, opera and the like have to completely lod and so takes longer.

well, i realized that IE displays a window almost immediately, but you can't use it for a few seconds anyway. but i'd be willing to take a performance hit with linux anyway. i'm so bored with windows i try to avoid using it at all costs now. lol
i had to teach my family how to properly shut down linux and boot into windows.

i think konqueror and mozilla are the fastest and with the services thing all i have running is syslog and keytable. in redhat

yea, i really don't have many services running. ony the ones that, given their descriptions, i really need.