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Comment by rvdginste | Hacker News Reader

> The usability of KDE aside, it's not exactly the most lightweight interface.

I wonder if that is still true. I switched from MATE to KDE several months ago and from what I read, KDE invested a lot in optimization of their code (both cpu performance and memory use) in the last couple of years. I switched to KDE on all of my machines. The oldest one it is running on is a Thinkpad X200t with a Core 2 Duo (SL9400) and 4GB RAM (with SSD), and it is running fine when using it with chrome, okular, krita, ... I thought they were kinda forced to focus on optimization because of the development of plasma mobile.

Obviously, it'll still be beaten by LXDE, but compared to Gnome it should perform a lot better nowadays than some years ago.

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I heard KDE still uses ~500MB RAM on idle, which is too much for older computers. I don't care for animations and hiDPI but i would care to have <100MB RAM usage and 0% CPU usage on idle.

EDIT: Also catering to slow hardware is not just about memory usage, it's also about how much you need to read from disk. In this regard, both GNOME and KDE are pretty bad when running from HDD.

EDIT2: For comparison, Haiku OS says 384MB RAM is the minimum to run the entire system with desktop environment.

That may be true about the ~500MB RAM, I did not measure it or anything and I agree: if you want to go for <100MB RAM you'll need to look for something else. I actually used i3wm (with separate programs) before on my older computers, but I was pleasantly surprised by KDE performance and decided to stick with it.

>I heard KDE still uses ~500MB RAM on idle

Plasma is using around 225MB right now on my machine, plus a little bit (like 2 and 6MB for session and gdm).

Cool. I'll be sure to give it a try!

Interesting, my Kubuntu VM uses like 1G when idle running nothing. Not sure how much of that is plasma, but it can't be a negligible amount.

I'm using KDE on a System76 Lemur, and it's snappy. It's also not a twelve-year old Thinkpad like my previous computer, for which KDE was not appropriate, but KDE is lighter relative to current hardware than it was eight or ten years ago, when I last used it in earnest on a machine that made sense. I never expected to use KDE again after my experience back then, but they've made it perform well while doing everything I could want a DE to do.

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