Are you aware of a community effort to create a KDE Lite that would run well on old hardware [5-7 years old computer]?
I am thiniking something in the spirit of XFCE for GTK.
Sample desktop manager with a simplified Dolphin. The target would be home users. So focus is on main essential tasks performed by average Joe. No need for all complex, networked, management features that apply only to server administrators or high advanced features like metaTAG... that only few aware people are using anyway.

Maybe it would be possible to flag a special build within the main code base.

Thank you.[hr]
I have found old projects that seem to be dead:

http://integrity.sourceforge.net/index.php
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rwm
http://qlwm.get.to/

They are all QT based windows manager in their early development.

Anyone interested in revive on of them. Or we can start from there.

I'm using current 4.1 desktop on a 2003's computer.
and it's not slow at all.
and for some strange reason, using xfce on that very same computer is slow, mostly because they don't have all apps that I need, and I need to launch gnome and kde programs, overloading the memory with diferent libs.

and if it's a stripped down version of the libs and the apps, it's a fork,
please, repeat after me, "NO MORE FORKS, NO MORE FORKS"

I'm running KDE4 on a 5 year old 2.5 GHZ Celeron (eww...) with 640 MB RAM and performance is pretty OK!
In my opinion KDE4 is already pretty lite as it is.

JontheEchinda wrote:I'm running KDE4 on a 5 year old 2.5 GHZ Celeron (eww...) with 640 MB RAM and performance is pretty OK!
In my opinion KDE4 is already pretty lite as it is.

What about a 1.2 GHz PIII with 128 MB RAM, for example?

I installed Kubuntu Intrepid Beta in a VM machine with 92 MB RAM, and it ran normally, despite of taking much time to initialize.

I think the user should be able to choose which effects he would like, like real transparency or fade, for example. There's no easy way to turn on/off these effects and they, sometimes, make system slower - on the nVidias, for example.

So, KDE 4 lite would be nice.

no easy way to turn of the effects?
just deselect one checkbox and you're done
Also, if your system isn't fit for effects, kde won't use it (my laptop didn't have any 3D available in kde4 because the graphics card wasn't fit for it)

I'm talking about Plasma's effects, not the Kwin ones.

Transparency, fade, show plasmoid content while resizing/moving, etc...

R_Rios wrote:I'm talking about Plasma's effects, not the Kwin ones.

Transparency, fade, show plasmoid content while resizing/moving, etc...

Well transparency, fade, shadows etc. are kwin effects, which can also be easily configured. Plasmoid resizing is not something you do all the time, however, prerformance of that and similar plasmoid managing actions is greatly improved in latest KDE builds (trunk).

I've tried KDE4 on my old P3 800Mhz with 512 RAM and old Nvidia Gf 4 Mx440 and compared it with KDE3 and I must say that I was very surprised that it runs more than decent and can sometimes even outperform KDE3 in some actions.

Githzerai wrote:

R_Rios wrote:I'm talking about Plasma's effects, not the Kwin ones.

Transparency, fade, show plasmoid content while resizing/moving, etc...

Well transparency, fade, shadows etc. are kwin effects, which can also be easily configured. (...)

Plamoid's transparency and fade, not windows'.

F.e.: "Folder view" plasmoid - that has a translucent background by default - is very slow when I use the official nVidia driver.

I'm running KDE 4.1 on an old 1.2GHz Celeron machine with 256Mb ram - Its not as fast as the two new ones. But when I turn off most effects it has great workstation performance and it still looks nice