Got an older Asus eeepc 901 and am thinking of putting something with KDE on it (using Gnome now). How well does the KDE desktop fare on netbooks and how responsive is it on weaker hardware?

How well do plasmids work on a weaker GPU and how much CPU do they take ? I know Gnome and X tend to take a quite a few cpu cycles sometimes, It would be best if most if not all of the graphic part would be sent to the GPU and there would be very little or no CPU involved.

I use KDE on an ASUS eeePC 1000HE. I haven't had too many issues. As I mentioned in a thread on using KDE on low end computers, the main things I've done is turn off wobbly windows and the blur effect and upgraded to 2GB of RAM (but I can't comment on what sort of difference that's made since I never really used it before the upgrade).

I can't really speak too much about plasmoids since I only use a few (news and weather on the desktop, battery monitor and such in the system tray) but desktop effects work well (aside from the two I mention above). Really, I feel that fears about KDE being slow and bloated are unfounded.

Also, for what it's worth, I work on parallel molecular dynamics software on this machine and, between compiling and testing the code, that little atom processor has been through a lot. The desktop still remains responsive while I have other things chugging along in the background.