3 ms·

most criticism i seen nowadays is rooted in the KDE 4.X days. KDE 5 has been excellent and suprisingly lightweight aswell.

simion314 9y ago
I am still on KDE4, my setup works fine for me so I don't dare to change it, the problem was in the begining with KDE4.0 and the next few years, the transition from KDE3.5 was rough.
SXX 9y ago
I would agree, but Plasma still using up to 400-500MB RAM for me with no obvious reason since I use pretty much default panel with 6 saved app launcher icons. While it's not problem on 32GB machine it's the part of KDE with most memory usage of all KDE apps that I use.
- makomk 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure every KDE 5 version of Plasma has a memory leak somewhere, but it seems like tracking it down would probably be hell.
  - SXX 9y ago
    Might be it's time to finally run it under Valgrind's massif and try to fix it myself.
    - jcelerier 9y ago
      You should look into using heaptrack instead, it's much much faster than valgrind and has a very efficient UI - the memory flamegraphs in particular are fantastic. It's built by folks at KDAB so works fine with KDE / Qt apps.
yoran 9y ago
Just out of curiosity, how does KDE compare to XFCE feature-wise? I am using XFCE for it being lightweight. However, I'd be willing to give KDE a shot if it has some nice features that can enhance my productivity while remaining lightweight.
- lallysingh 9y ago
  The file manager, dolphin, is nice. Open up a shell in the window for that directory. Second best for manager I've ever used after Mac+default folder x
  - znpy 9y ago
    > dolphin I really can't understand why people would want to use something as dumb as dolphin (created to be as dumb as nautilus) when you have the great and awesome Konqueror at your fingertips.
    - seba_dos1 9y ago
      It's the same kpart, just in a different UI shell. Dolphin has some overly simplistic defaults, but you should get the most (if not all) that you can get with Konqueror out of it.
- Sylos 9y ago
  KDE's search, called KRunner, is pretty nice, too. It searches applications and files, mails and calendar entries etc. (if you use the KDE Kontact suite), can calculate things and convert between units, allows you to jump to windows that you have open and many more things. It's also got autocompletion and acts intelligently to a limited degree (basically it remembers that when you typed in "Fi" last time, you wanted Firefox, not Filezilla, so it puts Firefox at the top). Of course, this does use up more CPU cycles than the pretty basic search in Xfce. You can turn off some of those search features, if you don't think you'll need them. And here's some random examples of the features that KDE has: I do some webdev, so I need a color picker every now and then. I have one of those in my panel. I also have a little button in my panel that I can click on, which pops open a list of the most recently modified files in my Downloads-folder, effectively acting as a direct access to my downloads. Lastly, you might want to play around with turning off compositing in KDE's settings. That does limit some features, but should speed things up quite a bit, too.

simion314 9y ago

I am still on KDE4, my setup works fine for me so I don't dare to change it, the problem was in the begining with KDE4.0 and the next few years, the transition from KDE3.5 was rough.

SXX 9y ago

I would agree, but Plasma still using up to 400-500MB RAM for me with no obvious reason since I use pretty much default panel with 6 saved app launcher icons. While it's not problem on 32GB machine it's the part of KDE with most memory usage of all KDE apps that I use.

makomk 9y ago
I'm pretty sure every KDE 5 version of Plasma has a memory leak somewhere, but it seems like tracking it down would probably be hell.
- SXX 9y ago
  Might be it's time to finally run it under Valgrind's massif and try to fix it myself.
  - jcelerier 9y ago
    You should look into using heaptrack instead, it's much much faster than valgrind and has a very efficient UI - the memory flamegraphs in particular are fantastic. It's built by folks at KDAB so works fine with KDE / Qt apps.

yoran 9y ago

Just out of curiosity, how does KDE compare to XFCE feature-wise? I am using XFCE for it being lightweight. However, I'd be willing to give KDE a shot if it has some nice features that can enhance my productivity while remaining lightweight.

lallysingh 9y ago
The file manager, dolphin, is nice. Open up a shell in the window for that directory. Second best for manager I've ever used after Mac+default folder x
- znpy 9y ago
  > dolphin I really can't understand why people would want to use something as dumb as dolphin (created to be as dumb as nautilus) when you have the great and awesome Konqueror at your fingertips.
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    It's the same kpart, just in a different UI shell. Dolphin has some overly simplistic defaults, but you should get the most (if not all) that you can get with Konqueror out of it.
Sylos 9y ago
KDE's search, called KRunner, is pretty nice, too. It searches applications and files, mails and calendar entries etc. (if you use the KDE Kontact suite), can calculate things and convert between units, allows you to jump to windows that you have open and many more things. It's also got autocompletion and acts intelligently to a limited degree (basically it remembers that when you typed in "Fi" last time, you wanted Firefox, not Filezilla, so it puts Firefox at the top). Of course, this does use up more CPU cycles than the pretty basic search in Xfce. You can turn off some of those search features, if you don't think you'll need them. And here's some random examples of the features that KDE has: I do some webdev, so I need a color picker every now and then. I have one of those in my panel. I also have a little button in my panel that I can click on, which pops open a list of the most recently modified files in my Downloads-folder, effectively acting as a direct access to my downloads. Lastly, you might want to play around with turning off compositing in KDE's settings. That does limit some features, but should speed things up quite a bit, too.