Originally posted here by pwaring
An Athlon XP 1.8Ghz with 256MB RAM. However, you can't compare Gnome compilation with KDE because one uses C and one uses C++ (broadly speaking this is). There are, as far as I am aware, currently no pre-compiled header files for C++ so KDE will take a LOT longer to compile (Gnome took around 4 hours probably on my machine, KDE takes 5 times that long at least).
Really? That's good to know, and it is packages like that that where you would use precompiled packages if possible. I don't see myself using KDE for a while (until they get the issues in 3.2.* worked out), and I prefer Gnome anyhow.

I hear OpenOffice also takes a long time to compile. Do you know how that compares to the KDE compile times? I hear it uses java (at least in parts of it), so if C++ code takes a long time to compile, I'm sure that java does as well.