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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

First versions of KDE4 were unstable (notably, there were memory leaks I think, and frequent crashes - maybe related to the memory leaks - in plasmoids), but last versions were rock solid (starting from version 4.4 maybe), and it was a very nice desktop environment back then.

(Now, we have Plasma 5, and Plasma 6 in a few days, which are even better :-))

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Yeah, KDE 4.0 wasn't bad because of its design philosophies or functionality. Everytime people hear that phrase, they instantly jump to that conclusion for some reason. No, it was resource hungry and crashed a lot (mostly due to aforementioned resource needs).

The later versions of KDE4 didn't change much, they just pared down resource requirements, stabilized things and let the average computer specs catch up to them. Now KDE is considered the more "conservative" DE.

I wouldn't call it conservative. Compared to Gnome probably. Compared to XFCE not as much.

But it's totally with the resources <3

Totally worth i meant. Oops

There were also basically no applications for it when fedora decided to ship it

>No, it was resource hungry

Was it really, or was that just a rumor from non-technical "C++ is bloated" Linux crowd?

I used to run KDE in the early 00's, and it run just fine, in very primitive CPUs of the time.

KDE4 was latter half of 00's. Oh, the bitter memories of having your CPU and memory getting hogged by the mysterious daemon called Akonadi. Or was it Nepomuk? At that time, many waved away concerns that Linux was simply using the unused memory for caching stuff, which is why the resource usage viewer displayed very small free memory amount, so they say. Well, that didn't explain the excessive swap thrashing that was occurring in the background.

Hunted for workarounds only to find out that disabling the above services also disables some essential desktop features, and made me rethink whether the switch from GNOME 3 was worth it. Sure, GNOME 3 had horrible UX, but at least my PC still had resources to do other stuffs then. But I sure missed GNOME 2 at that time.

I was a KDE mainliner and switched to GNOME2 because KDE4 was too resource intensive for my machine.