KDE slow startup when home is mounted over NFS (solved)
If you experience slowness in KDE startup process when having your home directory mounted over NFS, try exporting your home with the async option
With sync behaviour, and KDE opening lots of files on startup, the client issues a zillion of getattr requests, thus slowing down the logon process.
In /etc/exports, for example
/home 192.168.0.0/16(rw,async)
You might also want to use TCP option, specially on gigabit ethernet mixed environments, where UDP may have problems.
This has been a problem which I hadn't solved through years (since sync behaviour was default) and never had the time to look at it thoroughfully, because I configured GNOME as a default for users.
But I find KDE much more intuitive and appropiate for beginners (specially because of konqueror file management, rather than nautilus) so I finally managed to solve it. It has taken me so long to fix that I had to write it in my webpage for others to be able to google it.
This also solves other problems on applications updating their profile on NFS links like firefox slow startup after an update.
NOTE: Use async at your own risk. You risk file corruption in some scenarios.