[swiley]

I think most people who say it’s slow are comparing it to xterm+cwm (or xterm+fvwm or whatever) which it will probably never beat. I installed dolphin the other day so my girlfriend can use my computers and that still does a lot of stuff which can be pretty slow depending on the hardware.

[KozmoNau7]

Anything's going to be slow in comparison to a minimalist X for people who really just want to have a bunch of terminals on screen at once and barely anything else.

KDE (and the other DEs) offer a whole lot more than that, obviously :-) Dolphin does do thumbnails and all of type of stuff, but it's not really a heavy application in itself, it just does a lot of disk-intensive tasks.

Obviously generating thumbnails for a whole folder of photos is going to take a little while on an eMMC drive, just like it takes a little while to get a list of all the shared folders on a network.