How To Speed Up Linux Desktop by 30%+

I am using Linux (Fedora Core 6) on a pretty high end hardware (at least when I bought it) - Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz (4M shared L2 Cache) with 2 GB DDR2 RAM, nVidia dual-head graphics card for over a year now. And yet a simple change made it at least 20-40% faster. Even my firefox (with 100+ tabs always open) feels much faster. So what is this magic change?

I switched to Xfce desktop from Gnome desktop (default). That’s it folks!
Contrary to popular belief Xfce doesn’t only make low end hardware faster, it makes pretty high end hardware faster too and by a significant margin. I also didn’t notice any UI issues after migration. Yes, the desktop looks a little different but you can easily get used to it.

Try it, you won’t regret it, especially if you are a power user.

Notes:
1. You can always switch your desktop environment to a different one while logging in by changing your session.
2. You get same applications in both environment