KDE Plasma 5.13 Beta Released With A Compelling Number Of Improvements

[R41N3R]

One thing I would have wished for the redesign of the screen locker and the SDDM theme is a replacement for the ugly login button...

[grigi]

I set up Plasma as a desktop on an old Core2 notebook for my dad, and surprisingly it is both super-slick and only used 90MB or ram. That was until I enabled a slideshow background. Now it uses 350MB of ram. Quite surprised at how much difference in memory consumption that did!

The only real problem with that notebook is the nvidia gpu. Noveau runs better for desktop, but you can't suspend/hibernate.
The nvidia driver package forces me to downgrade the kernel (cause it is legacy) and now suspend/resume works, but GUI isn't quite so slick as it used to be and there is regular partial screen corruption.
(ok, I'll stop with the off-topic rant)

The point is, Plasma 5 is a lot lighter than KDE Plasma 4 ever was.

[matthewtrescott]

I set up Plasma as a desktop on an old Core2 notebook for my dad, and surprisingly it is both super-slick and only used 90MB or ram. That was until I enabled a slideshow background. Now it uses 350MB of ram. Quite surprised at how much difference in memory consumption that did!

The only real problem with that notebook is the nvidia gpu. Noveau runs better for desktop, but you can't suspend/hibernate.
The nvidia driver package forces me to downgrade the kernel (cause it is legacy) and now suspend/resume works, but GUI isn't quite so slick as it used to be and there is regular partial screen corruption.
(ok, I'll stop with the off-topic rant)

The point is, Plasma 5 is a lot lighter than KDE Plasma 4 ever was.

Try switching to a different OpenGL-version backend in System Settings -> Display and Monitor -> Compositor -> Rendering backend. Might be that the nVidia driver is buggy with one OpenGL version and better with another.

[TheBlackCat]

They sure seem to change the system settings layout a lot.

The previous change was mostly for the overall system settings tool, while this seems to be about improvements to individual settings pages.

[Nth_man]

As it has been said a lot of times: it's not only how much memory a desktop environment uses, because users launch programs, and simpler environments will offer fewer services... each program (or a group of programs) will have to implement those services, and there will be more wasted memory.

It's normal that computers with Plasma 5 end up using less memory because Qt5+KF5 offer *a lot* of services.

[LaeMing]

"- KDE System Settings has been redesigned."

That can be pretty-much taken as read for every point release :-P

[Kver]

Krunner though needs some serious code redesign. It's now getting stuck left and right, and once it's stuck it never comes back, until after relogin, hanging on some socket forever. It should use non blocking async I/O instead.

There is a project to do so called "Blade", I think being spearheaded by Ivan. It's using multiple processes with an asynchronous design and has other advantages too, such as simplification of the codebase, but from what I understand it's a while off before it's ready to replace Krunner.

[ⲣⲂaggins]

For those complaining about login times, I've found two things make a huge difference:

• Turn off QT_LOGGING_RULES, to suppress the default generation of vast swathes of debug messages.
• Run it under libeatmydata to defers disk syncs, which kde makes a lot of during login.

[Guest]

I like how they started to call Plasma a LIGHTWEIGHT desktop... i really like it haha

In comparison to Gnome 3 it's really lightweight.

[Vistaus]

I set up Plasma as a desktop on an old Core2 notebook for my dad, and surprisingly it is both super-slick and only used 90MB or ram. That was until I enabled a slideshow background. Now it uses 350MB of ram. Quite surprised at how much difference in memory consumption that did!

The only real problem with that notebook is the nvidia gpu. Noveau runs better for desktop, but you can't suspend/hibernate.
The nvidia driver package forces me to downgrade the kernel (cause it is legacy) and now suspend/resume works, but GUI isn't quite so slick as it used to be and there is regular partial screen corruption.
(ok, I'll stop with the off-topic rant)

The point is, Plasma 5 is a lot lighter than KDE Plasma 4 ever was.

90 MB? Come on, we all know that's not true. I use Plasma 5 myself and I know it has become more lightweight, so I'm not hating or anything, but only 90 MB of RAM is simply not true.