Either due to my nvidia card model (GeForce 9100M G) or bugs within plasma-desktop, and due to the increasingly resource hungry and memleaky performance of Akonadi and friends, Nepomuk et Strigi, I've found it almost impossible to work within a KDE environment any more.

For quite some time now, I've been living on an xfce desktop (custom themed, of course) but using KWin as the window manager, kcminit along with a few KDE apps outside kdepim. As for kdepim, Opera has filled in that gap very effectively.

What I have found is that there is no visible loss of functionality (unless you are one of those who finds activities useful) but at the same time a massive speed increase and in some cases aesthetically more pleasing.

http://ompldr.org/vYWc5OQ

Anybody else find themselves in a similar situation?

Sort of.

I've mostly given up using KDE on my netbook, with the exception of occasional KDE apps; the sluggishness is just too much. I still use it on my laptop; but even there the startup and application launch times get on my nerves. And the laptop is a relatively powerful computer, with a 1.6 GHz processor and 1.5 GB of RAM. There's no reason anything should be slow on it.

Basically it's been 4 years since KDE 4.0 was released, and I'm finding that most of the performance issues have still not been solved. I like KDE, and I'd contribute code if I could... But my C++ is bad and my programming skills seriously lacking.

So I'm gradually becoming less and less optimistic about this desktop environment's future. IMHO Windows Vista failed in part because end users will not tolerate sluggishness on high-end machines, and if the performance issues aren't fixed, I think KDE4 will fail in the same way.

What I've discovered is that outside a plasma-desktop environment, KDE apps and KWin apps are at least 2 times laster. I've no idea why, but it's very refreshing and eye-opening. I'm not the only one to have discovered this, so perhaps give that a shot before you give up on KDE altogether.

Edit: it seems as though you have come across this too with your "Profiling KDE" thread. Hope you figure it out! I'll be keeping a close watch.

I was using a startkde desktop environment with the Awesome window manager. Since this was only a window manager switch, there is not much difference in terms of memory consumption or startup time.

Just today I switched to a simple .xsession script (no startkde, no kde services) that launchs awesome, krunner and my custom Plasma shell. Now I enjoy a session start time cut down from 20 seconds to 3 seconds.

I have not measured nor noticed differences in application loading times.

Moult wrote:Edit: it seems as though you have come across this too with your "Profiling KDE" thread. Hope you figure it out! I'll be keeping a close watch.

Alas, no luck.

I've given up on trying (and failing) to squeeze more performance out of stock KDE. My laptop now runs Fluxbox 1.3.1 with KDE applications. I use:

- Fluxbox's menu generator to keep the menu in shape
- wicd-curses or wicd-cli for network management
- Dolphin (and HAL) for mounting and file management
- dmenu as an all purpose launcher
- xlockmore as a screensaver/locker
- sudo and pm-utils for power management

It starts in less than a second, runs things faster than "pure" KDE, and IMO is less clunky to use. Theming and configuration using the KDE control center work fine... The only real pitfall is the lack of a good battery monitor.