Right, this is a completely personal observation. On my redhat 8 box here at work, KDE just kicks the ass off Gnome 2 for speed. I don’t use the file manager of either environment much, so this is simply and observation on how using Galeon, Gnome Multi-terminal, xchat and Kmail work. They just work faster!
I have to say I was not impressed last night when I went to open up a 20k doc in Open Office on my RH8 Gnome box last night. I hadn’t used OO in a while, and it took almost a minute to open up on what is otherwise a speedy machine (Dell Inspiron 933Mhz/256MB RAM). Was thinking of installing KDE and giving it a whirl.