KDE 4.11 Gets Memory Usage Improvements

[smitty3268]

But the store being closed could've provided motivation to start the project. That doesn't mean that the store had to remain closed while he finished the project.

Did you not see the emoticon in the blog, practically declaring flat out that it was a joke?

Seriously, sometimes i wonder about the people who post on phoronix. And sometimes i'm sure.

[Awesomeness]

Anyone knows if the microblog plasmoid is fixed? (Twitter won't work).

Once someone ports the Choqok fix to the Plasmoid.

[Kurosan]

No, it's because many KDE programs are not "pure qt" programs, but interact with kde services and stuff AND they have a lot of features so they start slowly.

Dolphin is a good example. It has gotten much better (I'm using 4.11 rc), but it's still noticeable. Go to a terminal, type

dolphin & thunar

press enter and tell me what you see (do it twice so both have their libraries cached). Yes, dolphin has many more features, but when using kde you'll notice that a lot of the default programs are "heavier". Now try the same with

kate & mousepad

. It also doesn't win against gedit. Geany is a bit quicker too. gwenview vs. eog. okular vs. evince. Just try it.

As you admit, all of those KDE examples have more features/functionality, in some cases many more. Kate versus mousepad? Pffft, no contest. All those "light" apps are very limited. Below a certain threshold launch time is irrelevant anyway, can you really tell the difference between 500ms and 300ms? How long does it take kate versus mousepad to save a 10K line text file? Now that's relevant.

For me, I'll take features over perceived speed every time anyway.

[alcalde]

KDE is not heavy

I get tired of still seeing people complaining about KDE being a "resource hog" or "bloated" or heavy. I've wondered if it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome from the early days of Linux when the UI was terrible compared to every other OS... maybe then Linux users started labeling anything with more features "bloat" and actively tried to convince themselves that the less powerful the software the better it is? I don't know.

Anyway, I have an ancient laptop with a 1.8GHZ 32bit single core AMD Sempron, 512MB of DDR RAM, and a 75GB 4200rpm(!!!) IDE hard drive. I'm able to install the latest OpenSUSE with a full KDE desktop and apps to it and use it just fine. LXDE and XFCE shaved off a slight bit of memory use but at crippling loss of functionality and configuration. One does not want to do any serious multitasking on this old gal, but other than that, I'm able to run Firefox, an IDE, Python, LibreOffice, Okular, Kmail, all the normal stuff. I can even play 720p video files with XBMC - granted, with a CPU usage in the 90%+ range, but still...!

If KDE can run in 512MB, I don't know what people with 4GB or 8MB or more of memory are complaining about. If it can run on the world's slowest hard drive (didn't even know they made 4200rpm drives, and its cache is measured in kilobytes) then I don't know what people with large capacity modern drives or SSDs are complaining about. The alternatives look and feel like Windows 95 with a feature set to match while KDE can match or beat the features of the most popular, mainstream OS desktops. I got this laptop because the person who owned had actually taken to throwing it in frustration - Windows XP loves to swap to disk, and with 512MB, single core and a 4200rpm hard drive, that was often and a performance killer. I was gifted it after helping them pick out a new laptop with 3GB ram and Win7 and configuring it/transferring files. OpenSUSE and KDE gave this laptop a whole new lease on life and made it usable again. I haven't tried it on the laptop yet, but I expect zram (and zswap in the next kernel release) will add even more performance to this old machine. KDE is an excellent piece of engineering today and statements like "KDE is bloated and heavy" have as much weight in 2013 and "Linux requires you to configure everything from a command line" - antiquated half-truths.

[Panix]

I get tired of still seeing people complaining about KDE being a "resource hog" or "bloated" or heavy. I've wondered if it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome from the early days of Linux when the UI was terrible compared to every other OS... maybe then Linux users started labeling anything with more features "bloat" and actively tried to convince themselves that the less powerful the software the better it is? I don't know.

Anyway, I have an ancient laptop with a 1.8GHZ 32bit single core AMD Sempron, 512MB of DDR RAM, and a 75GB 4200rpm(!!!) IDE hard drive. I'm able to install the latest OpenSUSE with a full KDE desktop and apps to it and use it just fine. LXDE and XFCE shaved off a slight bit of memory use but at crippling loss of functionality and configuration. One does not want to do any serious multitasking on this old gal, but other than that, I'm able to run Firefox, an IDE, Python, LibreOffice, Okular, Kmail, all the normal stuff. I can even play 720p video files with XBMC - granted, with a CPU usage in the 90%+ range, but still...!

If KDE can run in 512MB, I don't know what people with 4GB or 8MB or more of memory are complaining about. If it can run on the world's slowest hard drive (didn't even know they made 4200rpm drives, and its cache is measured in kilobytes) then I don't know what people with large capacity modern drives or SSDs are complaining about. The alternatives look and feel like Windows 95 with a feature set to match while KDE can match or beat the features of the most popular, mainstream OS desktops. I got this laptop because the person who owned had actually taken to throwing it in frustration - Windows XP loves to swap to disk, and with 512MB, single core and a 4200rpm hard drive, that was often and a performance killer. I was gifted it after helping them pick out a new laptop with 3GB ram and Win7 and configuring it/transferring files. OpenSUSE and KDE gave this laptop a whole new lease on life and made it usable again. I haven't tried it on the laptop yet, but I expect zram (and zswap in the next kernel release) will add even more performance to this old machine. KDE is an excellent piece of engineering today and statements like "KDE is bloated and heavy" have as much weight in 2013 and "Linux requires you to configure everything from a command line" - antiquated half-truths.

Bull. Once you have all the features/plasma crap enabled, it eats way too much memory (plus, cpu resources) and if you're multi-tasking, things slow down. Especially, if you combine firefox and kde. It's bloated. Perhaps, not as bad as Unity, but no other DE compares in being bloated.

[david_lynch]

KDE resource usage

Bull. Once you have all the features/plasma crap enabled, it eats way too much memory (plus, cpu resources) and if you're multi-tasking, things slow down. Especially, if you combine firefox and kde. It's bloated. Perhaps, not as bad as Unity, but no other DE compares in being bloated.

From my standpoint kde is the best option, providing the best tradeoffs. First of all, I use gmail, so if I'm in gnome I nuke evolution, if I'm in kde I nuke the whole kdepim stack, and I also shut down the whole indexing thing. Once I do that, the desktop response is extremely snappy, with effects and all. I've tried various low resource desktops and different gnome versions, and nothing has provided any better performance than kde.

Since I have set up a window rule to turn off effects when I'm playing 3D FPS games, kde is very good at getting out of the way and letting me play. I installed gnome 3.6 to check it out, and when playing open arena, there was an extremely annoying choppy juddering which made the game unplayable. I logged out, logged back into kde and launched openarena, and everything was back to being smooth as glass.

kde for the win!

[Awesomeness]

Bull. Once you have all the features/plasma crap enabled, it eats way too much memory (plus, cpu resources) and if you're multi-tasking, things slow down. Especially, if you combine firefox and kde. It's bloated. Perhaps, not as bad as Unity, but no other DE compares in being bloated.

The thing about optional features is that they are optional.
A cut down KDE PW installation does in my experience eat only a little bit more RAM than a functioning LXDE setup (that means that stuff like nm-applet runs) and then I still get screen flicker under LXDE because Openbox isn't composited and also LXDE's .desktop file parser is completely broken and doesn't even execute most of my applications via UI.

I wouldn't even be surprised that RAM usage will turn to KDE?s benefit when PW2 can run without Xorg (using Wayland) whereas ?lightweight? DEs will probably still depend on Xorg. Or is anybody aware of attempts to port Openbox to Wayland?

[curaga]

(troll restart: one month old necro mode much, Panix?)

[alcalde]

Bull. Once you have all the features/plasma crap enabled, it eats way too much memory (plus, cpu resources) and if you're multi-tasking, things slow down. Especially, if you combine firefox and kde. It's bloated. Perhaps, not as bad as Unity, but no other DE compares in being bloated.

I'm glad my entire experience has been dismissed as simply "bull". Define "too much". I just started OpenSUSE 12.3 on the laptop in question and about 212 MB are being used. I don't have Nepomuk turned on, but I did actually turn some extra eye-candy on . Activities, multiple desktops, everything else is stock for OpenSUSE. This is an old, single core desktop - when you multitask, things slow down no matter what OS you're running. It's also running Firefox. The graphics chip specs out to about the performance of the desktop card I had in 1999, so thanks to WINE I can actually run a lot of 1999-era games on it too such as Dungeon Keeper II, the original Half-Life, Impossible Creatures, etc.

What some people call "bloat" I believe the rest of us call "features". Three years ago when first trying Linux I tried XFCE and LXDE. They saved about 50MB but the loss in features was unbearable. They felt like using Windows 95 again. LXDE was missing even tiny things like most recently used files. XFCE was missing the ability to configure many things such as advanced power management and the palm rejection I'd come to value as a new laptop user. The default KDE application launcher is still the most elegant of any OS I've ever used, perhaps even moreso under OpenSUSE as all their packages have menu sub-categories as well as categories available. I switched back very quickly and have never regretted it.