I don't want to sound ungrateful, but I must say I really like the path KDE's going. Here's only one of the reasons why:

After upgrade to 4.7 I've noticed my disk's free space was radically reduced. After a bit of research, I've found out that KDE is dumping a huge cache for - a freaking desktop theme! In the folder /var/tmp/kdecache-USER there's a file named like "plasma_theme_THEMENAME.kcache" which is 80.5 MB! Now, on my KDE I have three accounts, if you're good at math that's 241,5 MB, only for the default theme! Plus, there are other cache files. Needles to say, if I change my desktop theme the previous theme's cache file remains. So every month or so I have to clean the contents of /var/tmp/ just because KDE piles up almost a 1 GB of garbage! I really don't understand why does the freakin' desktop theme has to have a cache file which is 10 times its size.

Really, guys, KDE is on a path to become a bloatware, and not just because of the nuisance I've described above.

Just the two cents from a long-time KDE user.

Cheers to all.

These cache files only build up because of excessive changing of colour, icon or plasma theme changes. Normally you only have one set of these files.

Further, prescaled versions of wallpapers, and the http cache are stored in there. It is ~250mb on my system.

I have to agree with the sentiment here: my kdecache dir is on RAM and this brought my netbook grinding to a halt. I've posted a bug Bug #283921 about it, in fact.

I won't rehash all that I wrote there, but read the "Steps to reproduce": try one other theme, switch back, customise one theme in one aspect: is that really "excessive"?

The main issue is that these files are so disproportionate to any other cache contents: I mean what is actually in there, that it takes 81MB every time? Can't some amount of resource-sharing be implemented here?

Interesting... I have my system set to periodically clean /tmp/ (every 5 days) and /var/tmp/ (monthly) directories on boot. Even with this set-up, kde temp dir uses more than 900 MiB!!
Yes, I tested a few plasma themes last week but... 900 MiB!!
I think I'll change MAX_DAYS_IN_LONG_TMP for something smaller...

Try mounting /tmp and /var/tmp on tmpfs. I've been operating this way for a couple years now with various distributions and haven't seen any ill effects.

Add these two lines to your /etc/fstab:

Code: Select all

tmpfs  /tmp      tmpfs  noatime,mode=1777  0 0
tmpfs  /var/tmp  tmpfs  noatime,mode=1777  0 0