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I was using Linux on a P2 for several years. In fact, I was using Linux even on a Pentium ("I"), 133 MHz. That was in 1999, when I started using Linux as my main OS. And it was perfectly usable. I definitely could not see every redraw. But somehow, I can see it now, in 2009, on a machine that's 20 times faster.

Yes, Cairo made GTK+ much, much slower. In fact, GTK+ 2.x was slow before Cairo, many people were complaining about it, but now in 2009 I would be so happy if it was as slow as it was in 2004...

And yes, Linux is getting slower and slower every year. And it's not only redrawing. For example, in 2009, I often have difficulties just entering text like this into a textbox on a webpage, because I'm using Opera in the Qt4 version and just editing text (entering letters, selecting text etc.) in it makes my CPU go to 100%, and every action can take many seconds when it's completely frozen... I didn't have these problems with the old Qt3 version. The kernel is getting worse and worse, too (jerky behaviour under load, heavy disk I/O in recent kernels kills interactivity so you can either copy files or interact with the computer, doing both is imposibble).

But this generally applies to everything GUI-related in Linux. Whenever I upgrade something important (distribution, kernel, windowing system, application framework, graphics driver, GUI toolkit, desktop environment, or even just an application), everything is suddenly 10 times slower.

Edited 2009-07-16 21:18 UTC