I’ve had to entirely wipe my kde config folder enough times because I dragged a widget and created phantom toolbars taking up space I couldn’t interact with or completely broken toolbars that I just don’t have the patience to use it anymore.
I brought my KDE idle RAM usage down to 500MB just by using the GUI options that come with it. That’s about the same amount a default Xfce or LXQt needs.
I disabled all animations, the baloo file indexing and all services that start automatically at login.
I also installed not the full KDE Suite but just Plasma Desktop and then uninstalled all parts I don’t need.
So technically, I’m not running KDE but Plasma. From the KDE application Suite I use Dolphin, Konsole, the archiver, the image viewer, the PDF viewer and the system settings tool.
Ever since KDE made their software more modular with Plasma 5 / Frameworks 5, a Plasma session can be cut down by a lot. Personally, I don’t think it matters much because as soon as you browse the web, the RAM demands of the web browser dwarf that of even a fully decked out desktop anyway, but the options are there – perhaps for certain use cases that don’t involve web browsing.
Yes and no. They should really separate the fancy stuff from the base stuff. Like have a kwin-wayland-base and kwin-wayland-extras.
I guess some other features are not easy to rip out, but having only simple animations etc would really make sense.
I will try Plasma 6 on an Intel core Duo in some time though, exited.
They have an issue with disabling not needed stuff. XWaylandVideoBridge, legacy app tray support, GTK global menu adapter, and other cool but edge case stuff is just always running in the background.
Same for accessibility, GUI keyboard and Orca, even though they will be somehow dynamically loaded, they are not controllable transparently by the user.
I love being in control, I use neovim for this reason. But I remember when I bought my laptop I originally wanted to use awesomewm again as I was on my family PC but I remember spending so much time on basic features like brigness control and such that I moved to KDE insteadd which had these features out of the box. Am I missing something here? Or do people who use window managers actually implement every feature they need from scratch? No offense to anyone or any project, they are all awesome
KDE has a really nice suite of applications and utilities. No other desktop environment really compares on that level (and Amarok is back!).
XFCE &etc are also good if you are running lightweight hardware (not just old hardware) but still want a desktop environment.
CLI is best for servers and remotely managed/headless systems.
KDE has crazy complex apps like Krita, digiKam, KDEnlive, Kate, Konqueror, etc etc.
They went more minimal and dedicated over time
Amarok -> Elisa, Kasts
Konqueror -> Dolphin, Falkon/“just use Firefox”
I dont get why we have Gwenview, Kolourpaint, Spectacle edit and digiKam though, this feels absurd
Missed opportunity for krazy and komplex.
Was Amarok gone?
I used to use it maybe 16-17 years ago even though I used GNOME rather than KDE. It was the best music player I’d found on Linux.
I’m finally switching back to Linux so I’ll have to try it out again! These days I usually use Plexamp though.
Development was dead for years, so dead that it wasn’t included in new release repositories
Clementine was a fork that was pretty good, but I think had more ambitions than active developers.
Strawberry later forked from Clementine and is still being developed, and they’re doing well, but they aren’t building on the KDE framework.
Do you know if Elisa is related?
Crazy that we can use 3 forks alongside each other, feels wrong.
They recently managed to complete porting to QT5 framework. Thus it is still missing in distributions that do no longer ship QT4, like e.g. Debian 11+.
I prefer KDE for touchscreens. What is it about GNOME you feel gives it an edge?
I’ve had to entirely wipe my kde config folder enough times because I dragged a widget and created phantom toolbars taking up space I couldn’t interact with or completely broken toolbars that I just don’t have the patience to use it anymore.
It does look and act like a cellphone OS :P
I think latly, especially in plasma 6, KDE got as viable on old machines as XFCE and surly mint and cinnamon.
I brought my KDE idle RAM usage down to 500MB just by using the GUI options that come with it. That’s about the same amount a default Xfce or LXQt needs.
Damn can you list some of the options you remember changing?
I disabled all animations, the baloo file indexing and all services that start automatically at login.
I also installed not the full KDE Suite but just Plasma Desktop and then uninstalled all parts I don’t need.
So technically, I’m not running KDE but Plasma. From the KDE application Suite I use Dolphin, Konsole, the archiver, the image viewer, the PDF viewer and the system settings tool.
Yes baloo is a hog. Note that the background services systemsettings page will be hidden in the future but accessible from the global search.
Ever since KDE made their software more modular with Plasma 5 / Frameworks 5, a Plasma session can be cut down by a lot. Personally, I don’t think it matters much because as soon as you browse the web, the RAM demands of the web browser dwarf that of even a fully decked out desktop anyway, but the options are there – perhaps for certain use cases that don’t involve web browsing.
Yes and no. They should really separate the fancy stuff from the base stuff. Like have a
kwin-wayland-baseandkwin-wayland-extras.I guess some other features are not easy to rip out, but having only simple animations etc would really make sense.
I will try Plasma 6 on an Intel core Duo in some time though, exited.
They have an issue with disabling not needed stuff. XWaylandVideoBridge, legacy app tray support, GTK global menu adapter, and other cool but edge case stuff is just always running in the background.
Same for accessibility, GUI keyboard and Orca, even though they will be somehow dynamically loaded, they are not controllable transparently by the user.
Eh, I used it on an HP Pavilion DV2000 (3 GB RAM) from 2009-2017. With Gentoo. It worked just fine.
Gnome 3, on the other hand…
Well thats not Plasma 6, but it likely didnt get worse.
Fluxbox ftw!!
Do you think installing extensions is really that difficult on Gnome?
I love being in control, I use neovim for this reason. But I remember when I bought my laptop I originally wanted to use awesomewm again as I was on my family PC but I remember spending so much time on basic features like brigness control and such that I moved to KDE insteadd which had these features out of the box. Am I missing something here? Or do people who use window managers actually implement every feature they need from scratch? No offense to anyone or any project, they are all awesome
Installing an extension by itself? That’s easy.
Finding all the extensions you need, actively maintained and quickly updated? Yeah, that’s really difficult, depending on your needs.
Cinnamon isn’t that lightweight. You will probably find KDE uses less resources.