>since I knew from the get-go it was a low powered machine and Plasma was just going to chug on it. I run openSUSE with KDE on all my machines, and it's respon

>since I knew from the get-go it was a low powered machine and Plasma was just going to chug on it. I run openSUSE with KDE on all my machines, and it's responsive and snappy even on the Thinkpad X220i (Sandy Bridge Core i3, upgraded to 8GB RAM + SSD). Firefox is what generally eats resources, but below 15 tabs it's fine. Even on my Raspberry Pi 3, KDE is perfectly fine. It's not fast fast, but still feels responsive and usable. KDE was kind of slow in the KDE4 days. Not so anymore.