Hello there,

I only use Linux on my machine since 2009 and I have been a Gnome man, I knew another main GUI (or whatever technically you call it) existed but never tried it just because what my distro (you can guess which) brought by default worked good.

Then that distro changed the GUI + it got a bit heavy, so I looked for better alternatives.

Now I run arch linux, and I'm happy with it but that distro forces users to choose a GUI without providing any by default, so I've tried, in this order, LXDE, enlightment, XFCE and KDE.

Even if I have a quite modern and powerful pc, I was feared by KDE heaviness (don't ask me how I was convinced KDE was heavy if I never tried it) and low reliability so I installed it at last.

Now I'm really astonished by the elegance of kde desktop and how it looks; I feel using a very modern pc, you can have the most updated hardware but human-machine interface, is what you work with. And for "bugs", while I got some errors, I was able to solve them at ease (perfect softwares do NOT exist).

I think I could enjoying KDE more even before but I never got the chance (or a valid reason) to try it in the past.

I hope you can use my experience to improve KDE diffusion and removing some common places, "kde is too heavy" and "kde is full of bugs", specially.

p.s.: and I like a lot kde default applications (kGet, JuK and kTorrent,...) and their integration.

Hi and welcome to the KDE Community Forums! I'm glad to hear that you had a pleasant first experience with KDE. You'll probably like it more the more you use it , and also discover that KDE is more than software, it's a very nice community.

As for the heaviness, I believe it partly has to do with faulty graphics drivers and that the file indexer used quite much resources in earlier versions. For me it has run fine since 4.2 on an old P4 desktop computer and a netbook (which has more RAM than my desktop!).

For some reason it feels like Arch users generally don't complain about KDE Software being slow. Maybe it's because of packaging (it's mostly vanilla and optimized for i686/x86-64), or it's because of the users. Probably it's a combination of both.

I think his reference to KDE feeling "heavy" was more a common perception issue, not a specific technical issue; i.e. people conclude somehow (based on external observation, without even trying it) that KDE is "heavier" than other environments as opposed to KDE uses more RAM, or KDE makes things run slower by x%, or KDE takes up much more space on my hard drive.

The technical things we can certainly work on, and many of those points have been worked on. KDE 4.6 is arguably quite a bit leaner than the likes of 4.2 or 4.3.
As for the perception of KDE feeling "heavier", that's mostly a matter of evangelism (and counter-evangelism where others are comparing themselves as being leaner than KDE).

airdrik wrote:As for the perception of KDE feeling "heavier", that's mostly a matter of evangelism (and counter-evangelism where others are comparing themselves as being leaner than KDE).

Can't count how many times I've read that KDE is heavy. It's rather humorous, as I've used Kubuntu 10.10 and KDE 4.6.X on old PC's just fine. And it continues to get better with each release.

airdrik wrote:I think his reference to KDE feeling "heavy" was more a common perception issue, not a specific technical issue; i.e. people conclude somehow (based on external observation, without even trying it) that KDE is "heavier" than other environments as opposed to KDE uses more RAM, or KDE makes things run slower by x%, or KDE takes up much more space on my hard drive.

The technical things we can certainly work on, and many of those points have been worked on. KDE 4.6 is arguably quite a bit leaner than the likes of 4.2 or 4.3.
As for the perception of KDE feeling "heavier", that's mostly a matter of evangelism (and counter-evangelism where others are comparing themselves as being leaner than KDE).

Yes, this post is what I was trying to write, it is really scandalous how I was one of (sadly) many people saying "kde is a big no-no, I want a reactive desktop" as that is "common sense-knowledge" so I don't need to try it.

Even if I think kde's community was aware of that, I was feeling right to add another guy's experience, so you get more data for fixing those common places.

Unfortunately, the KDE Desktop receives a lot of bad press from people who don't actually use it. But this happens with a lot of things. People hear something and assimilate it as truth without contrasting facts, then expand that "truth". Sad.

Luckily, there is also people who try by themselves, realize the myths were... well, myths, and then expand *their* real experience.