My thoughts on KDE

[imschmeg]

It looks like paul1149 has Vivaldi running in that KDE screenshot. And Vivaldi can be a resource hog all by itself, regardless of DE.

[paul1149]

Your conky shows kde using 2.9GB RAM! Wow! And that is considered low on resources ...

You scared me there. :) I looked and it's true. Then I simply closed Vivaldi, with many tabs open (though most are hibernating), and many extensions running, and it dropped to 1.16GB, for a session that's been up and active for seven hours.

I don't look at the resource level often, but just on the human level I've not seen any significant difference in performance between K and X on my machine.

[paul1149]

It looks like paul1149 has Vivaldi running in that KDE screenshot. And Vivaldi can be a resource hog all by itself, regardless of DE.

That's it. And can you believe how beautiful those icons are for Vivaldi, Libreoffice, and the rest? This is a treat for the eyes. Even the icon for xfce's terminal (looks like a "G"; just north of the vivaldi launcher on the panel) is classy. (The XFCE terminal is FAR better than KDE's Konsole).

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Your conky shows kde using 2.9GB RAM! Wow! And that is considered low on resources ...

I've just tried the Debian 10.3 Plasma live image and it boots to the desktop with 415MiB used (according to free(1)), which almost exactly same as the MX-19.2 live image. 4GiB of RAM were assigned to the VM in both cases.

[imschmeg]

And can you believe how beautiful those icons are for Vivaldi, Libreoffice, and the rest? This is a treat for the eyes.

Not for my eyes. I'm a Papirus icon fan-boy, and I only use solid color backgrounds. I am attracted to KDE for other reasons: it's migration to Wayland but without adopting CSD, and its ability to tailor window decorations/theming on a per-app basis.

When I see typical KDE Plasma-ized wallpaper and icons, I can only think of those lines from the Sound of Silence: "When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light, That split the night" and "And the people bowed and prayed, To the neon god they made."

[subluminal]

I've had KDE debian with 350-400 MB Ram usage. KDE has become almost, but not quite, comparable to XFCE in resource usage. The little difference that still exists hardly matetrs if one has 4 GB+ ram. Of course, aesthetics is subjective so I'm not going into that debate.

[srq2625]

I am interested in KDE; I've installed it a number of times. But it does not seem to play well with my Android phone - at least I've not been able to get it to do so.

<This is where someone get's to point at me, laugh, and provide comment on how to do it right!> :)

I plug the phone into the computer (USB).

With KDE I can not seem to be able to copy large numbers of files to/from phone to/from the computer. The first few will go, but anything over about 20 and it stalls. Likewise, getting a directory listing of a folder with a lot of files - just doesn't happen with KDE.

The above will work quite well with MATE, Xfce, and even Cinnamon.

[paul1149]

One further thought. Somewhere, probably the wiki, Jerry mentions that the font smoothing in KDE might not be as good as it is in XFCE. I have found this to be true. There has been a small degradation in the browser, much of which I was able to deal with by font substitution in local .css files, so it's seldom a problem. The biggest hit has been in Wine, where the fonts really lack their previous quality. I spend time there in a Bible program, which is all about reading, and it has hurt. Some of it font substitution has done well with, but some seems intractable. I didn't see a font anti-aliasing setting under Wine Configuration, which I'm quite sure had been there, but I did find a script that accomplishes the job. But it made no difference.

[dreamer]

One further thought. Somewhere, probably the wiki, Jerry mentions that the font smoothing in KDE might not be as good as it is in XFCE. I have found this to be true. There has been a small degradation in the browser, much of which I was able to deal with by font substitution in local .css files, so it's seldom a problem. The biggest hit has been in Wine, where the fonts really lack their previous quality. I spend time there in a Bible program, which is all about reading, and it has hurt. Some of it font substitution has done well with, but some seems intractable. I didn't see a font anti-aliasing setting under Wine Configuration, which I'm quite sure had been there, but I did find a script that accomplishes the job. But it made no difference.

My experience is that KDE or Qt is just as good at rendering fonts as GTK. In a GTK environment Qt applications seem to follow GTK font settings very closely. In a Qt environment only the font, but not the font settings are carried over to GTK applications. So in a KDE/Qt environment you often end up with different looking font rendering in Qt and GTK applications.

I don't think any KDE distro can be called polished until they fix GTK applications obeying Qt font settings. Or create a GTK module like KDE, but they forgot to include font rendering settings. One other problem worth mentioning is that it is highly likely that installing KDE with another desktop environment will mess with fonts in the other environment. The KDE GTK module can do just that.

KDE is impressive and may be the future given the direction of GTK, but I also find it intrusive/busy from a UI perspective - not relaxing. If I can get rid of Plasma shell which I consider the weak part of KDE and install Liquid shell, then maybe it will be another experience. Plasma takes longer than Windows from login to desktop and that alone feels weird. Simplicity and modularity make things easier for both devs and users. Make Dolphin standalone, make Plasma Media Center standalone. The vision behind KDE is probably to create something "integrated", but doing that is time consuming and for users it can be frustrating dealing with dependencies.

Fun fact: The most successful KDE distro on Distrowatch is KDE Neon ranked 11. antiX is number 12!!! Manjaro is number 2, but they list 11 different DEs.

[richb]

As long as we are giving opinions, I find KDE extremely fast loading and fonts look good to me. Once set up to my liking it stays out of the way, not intrusive at all.