Was this using Unity? I found Unity unusably slow on my old netbook — 5 seconds to open Terminal wasn't too far off the mark. But Xfce was so snappy it made tha

Was this using Unity? I found Unity unusably slow on my old netbook — 5 seconds to open Terminal wasn't too far off the mark. But Xfce was so snappy it made that thing useful again. I'm not disagreeing with your general point, but I wonder if a lighter DE would make a big difference. (Unless you were already using Xfce, and got the results you describe... that would be bad news.)