[RustamB]

How much performance improvement I will gain if I compile KDE from sources, instead of using prebuild packages? Is there any benchmarks displaying advantages of running compiled from sources and prebuild KDE? Platform is P 1.6Ghz M CPU, 1GB RAM, i855 chipset mainboard with onboard audio/video laptop.

[sether]

This is the kind of question that could start a religious war, but I'm going to give you my honest opinion:

You as a human being aren't going to notice a performance increase. In addition, you would have to compile it with the right GCC optimizations for it to be faster. Any non-standard compiler optimizations could potentially to expose bugs in the code and cause stability issues. Not to mention the fact that it would take hours, if not days, to compile KDE.

Use the precompiled packages.

[psic]

I agree with sether. I don't think it's worth the trouble. If you want something faster, checkout a lighter GUI, perhaps Xfce. Though IMHO you probably would notice a small difference, probably right after the login prompt. But compare the difference on my P3 800 Mhz laptop with 128 Mb of ram, from login to usable desktop:
KDE: around 15 sec.
Xfce: around 5 sec.
Enlightenment 16: around 3 sec.

I think a custom compiled KDE might shave off something like 5 sec. maximum off of this time.

[RustamB]

Actually, I don't experience slow performance on my linux system with 1.6Ghz Pen.M and 1GB of RAM On the other hand, I'm always looking for the ways to optimize the utilization of the system resources, and I've gone far well with it, and started thinking of compiling KDE (maybe even all the rest) from sources. But if you say, that it doesn't actually worth that, well, I trust you

[St. Joe]

Your performance would most likely deteriorate substantially, and that's if you get lucky and don't break a fair amount of functionality and stability. The binary pkgs developed for applicable distros are tuned for that specific environment. Trying to do it yourself would likely result in a very nasty outcome.

[Cabhan]

My only experience with compiling any sort of graphics thing on my own (before Gentoo) was the X Server, which destroyed my graphics.

But as has been said, you will probably not notice any sort of difference. In Gentoo, you can choose which KDE components you want, so it's worth it then, but I don't believe you can do this otherwise. If you can, it might be interesting, but it would still be very risky.

[Lost_scrib]

Additionally the prebuilt packages are shipped with sane configuration files in them, so you don't need to spend hours by customising the look of your desktop. (My personal experience )