Hmm, now that Slackware 10 is going to include Gnome 2.6.2...

[MDesigner]

...what would be the advantage of installing Dropline Gnome? Does it still perform better on Slackware than Gnome? Plus, I do like Dropline Gnome's nifty updater tool..though sometimes I find it annoying because I'll actually have a newer version of some software, and Dropline will want to "upgrade" it to an earlier version.

Thoughts on this?

[XiaoKJ]

The difference between dropline and non-dropline gnome is that dropline is for i686s <-- stated by someone in your earlier slackware thread...

And therefore if you have a i686 its gonna be faster, and as such it has its own series of packages and is slower to update [pitifully]

if you want gropline then you should stick with its packages, but if you want to be bleeding edge with no whatsoever reasons go gnome.

BTW, if you have i686, i would recommend dropline for slackware... if not gentoo :D

if you have gentoo or any other source-based distro then you almost have dropline :D

[MDesigner]

My machine is an Athlon XP 2500+. Is that i686?

BTW, hot Dropline Gnome tip: for much faster updates, edit the file /root/.dropline/download_mirror and change the URL to:

http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/dropline-gnome/

[Loki3]

Yep, your Athlon is definently an i686.

[madcompnerd]

Gentoo hype.
i686 is not going to make a speed revolution on your computer over i486, and you can compile your own Gnome 2.6.2 install as Athlon if you want.
Dropline has advantages in having apps that Gnome vanilla doesn't have. I don't know that it was ever much faster.

You'll see much greater speed increases from algorythmic improvement than from compiling with more instructions used (each x86 revolution adds instructions). Also, generic system improvements can make even bigger differences.
It's in the source more than how you compile the source. If you really want an uber optimized compile you'd use Intel's compilers anyway.

Don't stay on dropline because it's i686, that'd be silly.

Oh and a help for your future reference:
n86, greater values of n mean later iterations with backwards compatibility to 3. So, 686 > 586 > 486 > 386, but all of them will run 386 code. 386 is the breakoff as 286 was 16 bit. And Athlon is compatible with 686 and therefore also with 386. The 686 standard actually goes back to Pentium Pro (the PII predecessor). Oh, and x86-64 is not compatible with 386, but Athlon64 supports Athlon and x86-64 (did I get that part right guys?).