As another kid who got into Linux at the time, KDE and Qt had a reputation at the time for poor performance on low-cost hardware. To give you an idea, my compu

As another kid who got into Linux at the time, KDE and Qt had a reputation at the time for poor performance on low-cost hardware. To give you an idea, my computer at the time was a used machine that was duct taped together and any fancy desktop would cut my battery life to about an hour. So out of necessity I was driven towards lighter weight software