KDE 4.9 Is Faster & More Responsive

[siride]

I think that most of the people who have issues with KDE being slow don't have enough RAM. That is KDE's biggest flaw. It uses huge amounts of RAM. Last I checked nepomuk slows things down too, but that's easy enough to disable. I'd say that KDE isn't bloated so much as it runs too much all the time. For instance, i don't need or want Akonodi (which consumes a huge amount of the RAM I've mentioned) running if I'm not using Kontact or something. I'd rather have the option to only run these components on demand, not all the time. It opens when I open kontact, it closes when I close kontact.

Btw, I can't speak for anyone else, but the Quick Access plasma widget is so amazing. I'm so spoiled on it that any time I use any other desktop envirnment, I get really impatient and flustered because I have to go through all of these extra steps to access documents and what not.

I have a lot of RAM, granted, but I don't find that it uses considerably more RAM than GNOME or Windows (Windows 7 is a real hog). If I only had a gig of RAM, I think it would still run fine. In fact, I ought to do a test and set the kernel command line to limit RAM to 1 gig and see how things run. If you have less than a gig, then yes, KDE will be slow and bloated. Then again, it's 2012. If you have less than a gig of RAM, buy a new computer or just use the lighter-weight, but lower functionality DEs. There's nothing wrong with them. They just don't do as much or look as pretty as KDE.

I disabled nepomuk and akonadi in my KDE install. They were taking up a lot of resources. Without them running, everything is very snappy. Maybe that's the OP's problem?

[boast]

The only sane desktops for power users and those who want to get work done are Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon.

lol, those are poverty desktops

[Thaodan]

I have kde atm running and nepomuk uses only about 25mb ram and akonadi uses about 80mb ram.

[Alex Sarmiento]

KDE is still far to bloated, sluggish and unstable to be considered a usable desktop environment. This latest update does nothing to address these flaws. The only sane desktops for power users and those who want to get work done are Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon. The rest are junk.

Whatever you say bro.

[GreatEmerald]

Whatever you say bro.

Indeed. "Visitors are kindly asked to not feed the trolls. It is for their own good. Thank you in advance."

[alcalde]

KDE is still far to bloated, sluggish and unstable to be considered a usable desktop environment. This latest update does nothing to address these flaws. The only sane desktops for power users and those who want to get work done are Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon. The rest are junk.

If by "bloated" you mean "has features", then yes, it is. :-) LXDE can't even list your most recently used files and programs. This is why Windows users laugh at us. A ZDNet article this week was highlighting distro release candidates and right away a Windows user said of a screenshot showing LXDE, "How did a Windows 95 screenshot sneak in there?"

I can run KDE 4.7 on a laptop with a 1.8GHZ single core 32 bit Sempron CPU, 512MB of DDR, and a 4200RPM 70GB IDE hard drive. I tried running LXDE and XFCE on it and found a 50MB memory savings at the expense of incredible amounts of functionality. Besides the aforementioned recent files/programs, the LXDE menu had no search function, the file manager paled with the freeware replacement I'd used on Windows XP, and both LXDE and XFCE were anemic compared to KDE in terms of customization. I was unable to reproduce the power settings I had in KDE, and even configuring the touchpad was a nightmare - something as simple as configuring tap to click was very difficult, with one of the two refusing to remember the setting change and needing it to be done again with every boot. Neither had the ability to disable the touchpad while typing, either. The list of simple features that were missing went on and on, let alone missing KDE's advanced features - places/bookmarks accessible from file open/save menus, etc. I found both to be too far backwards for too little gain. If I saw no worthwhile gain on a 512MB antique laptop, I can't imagine why anyone would want to give up KDE on an average desktop.

I've been using Linux full time for just over 2 years now (as of Wednesday), which means 8+ hours a day of home work use on top of using it on my own time... and since I no longer own a TV, my KDE desktop does double duty as my TV. I've yet to experience this "sluggishness" you speak of, and it's certainly not unstable either - maybe you've only used it on a distro that ends in "buntu"? :-) I assure you I've been getting work done this whole time... data mining, programming, and assorted number crunching and data processing with RapidMiner, LibreOffice, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Free Pascal, Python, R, mathomatic, VirtualBox, GNUCash and others, along with personal use software such as SMPlayer, VLC, XBMC, Banshee, calibre, etc. Today I had a power problem that resulted in the power dropping just quickly enough to cause the system to reboot on two occasions within a half hour and I was very impressed to find that Linux, ext4 and KDE were able to recover very quickly and cleanly to the point you'd barely notice the extra reboot time and there were no anomalies with the desktop once I was back in. Firefox remembered what I was browsing and LibreOffice was able to recover an open file as well.

KDE is the last of the major desktops that still looks like a desktop and capable of competing (and beating) Windows 7's desktop on features and customizability. I don't think you should be unfairly beating up on it when it's doing an amazing job. The fact that a Windows user can take to it like a fish to water (and discover its own unique features later on) is a definite plus.

[1c3d0g]

If by "bloated" you mean "has features", then yes, it is. :-) LXDE can't even list your most recently used files and programs.
...

Why would I want it to do something useless like that? Just because YOU need a feature, does not mean it should be included in a DE. This is the purpose of LXDE, to keep it light without all the b.s. of other desktops. I respect that. If it's not for you, simply move on to a more "feature-full" DE.

[Kano]

@siride

The Kanotix default install has got no virtuoso-minimal installed btw. That means no background processes that index the data by default. It is no problem to use a netbook with KDE 4 with it that way - 1 gb ram is definitely enough. Only when you have got a cpu with many cores and you want to use gcc with more theads this can be a problem. Like when you run make -j8 on a system with 2 gb ram and you want to surf in the net the same time then your ram will be full. So best is to have at least 1/2 * cores (including ht) gb ram when you want to compile without swap.

[devsk]

This is the purpose of LXDE, to keep it light without all the b.s. of other desktops.

I think someone aptly called it poverty desktop....

[1c3d0g]

You can call it whatever you want, but for a lot of people, these light-weight desktops don't get in their way and actually allows them to get serious work done. Different strokes for different folks.