Well if you recompile your kernel and leave in only the devices that are needed + turn on the arch optimizations you should be able to see the difference. I know i can on my laptop when i fiddle around with the kernel options anoth ;).But on my laptop i find kde and gnome to slow any way(iceWM is the only way unless showing ppl that linux is user freindly). Window decorations, desktop backgrounds, ... do make a differnence as well but most of it is down to ram size and what your trying to fit in there i think. Ive always found debian to run very cuclutered and things like SuSe, Mandrake(9.0 seemed better then 8.*) to be bloated.

Dennis

Unneeded service installations aside, should there really be that much difference between different distributions anyway. I know some complie their packages with Pentium optimisations and others not, but no-one really does any heavy optimisation on the kernel do they ?

Or is it just things like default themes that are making all the difference ?