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 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.