With 256 RAM I am already swapping memory the first web browser I open?
I've done this test myself with other boxes running KDE with 256MB RAM. Boot the system and open a terminal and type "free" and check out the "used" column before you run any apps. Then run Firefox and run "free" and you will probably see that you have used some swap.
Following up a bit on this, I checked memory usage with the 'free' command, and PCLOS is not using any swap to load firefox with 256MB of memory. I wonder if the difference in load time has something to do with what libraries need loading on a KDE install for firefox that xfce already has. Then again, I think I recall firefox taking longer to load in xfce PCLOS than it did in vector standard.
When I load Konqueror in PCLOS it has much quicker response time...and I think it is because the KDE libs are already loaded. The system as a whole is really responsive and was easier to get configured than in vector. But I am more and more convinced that Vector is likely a good deal faster at many things, and am excited to keep working to get everything going on this laptop with it.