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AKA, Gnome 3 style fallback mode for KDE.

Plasma has a lot of nice features; but it also eats up a lot of memory, is slow to start, and does not perform very well on netbooks and other slow computers.

Thus, I propose a radical step backward: a "light" desktop that does not use Plasma.

The desktop would essentially boil down to a Qt-based panel. It would have a button that would start an action menu, a taskbar/iconbox, a notification area, and a clock; there could also be optional applets, such as a battery meter and launcher buttons. Basically I'm thinking of something like a Qt version of LXPanel.

There would be no desktop icons; the desktop background would be set via a setting in the panel's configuration dialog. (Just to make things obvious, the menu entry that brought up the config dialog would be called "Configure Panel and Desktop.")

So, the first time KDE is started, the user would be greeted with a configuration dialog, which would among other things ask about using the light desktop...

Code: Select all

Desktop Mode

KDE supports two main modes: the Plasma desktop and the light desktop.

[ ] Use the light desktop

The light desktop is designed for old or slow computers. Any KDE application will run in it, but it does not support desktop icons or applets.

[*] Use the Plasma desktop (default)

The Plasma desktop offers all of KDE's features, including desktop icons and applets of all sorts.

The main problem I can see with this idea is that the desktop it provided would probably be less intuitive - e.g. you're right-clicking on the panel to configure the desktop background, that sort of thing. On the other hand, Plasma seems to be one of the major sources of perceived sluggishness in KDE 4, and when you get down to it is not really vital for the desktop to work. An alternative desktop choice that did not use Plasma might allow KDE to work better on old and budget hardware; which would in turn benefit users who couldn't afford the latest and most powerful hardware (or the proprietary operating systems to go with it).

I don't think it's very likely to happen; you might be interested in following the Quantum Project instead: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=125088

You can always use another (more lightweight) desktop environment instead of KDE Plasma/KWin, and still continue to use KDE applications with it.

Probably the most popular light-weight desktop environments are:

- Xfce (http://www.xfce.org) - used by default in Xubuntu
- LXDE (http://lxde.org) - used by default in Knoppix and Lubuntu

Both use GTK for their built-in tools, but running KDE apps in them is no problem.

If you want to go *really* minimal, you can also try one of the X window managers that already come with some minimal desktop functionality (like a desktop background with right-click menu on it, in some cases also a built-in task bar etc.):

- Fluxbox (http://www.fluxbox.org)
- Openbox (http://openbox.org)
- Enlightenment (http://www.enlightenment.org)
- ...

You could say that this is already implemented - just change the session properties to not launch plasma-desktop and launch your other panel and background manager.

As for a panel written in qt: razor-qt (http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/r ... =Main_Page).

My counter to this is that plasma is only so "heavy" as you make it. You can load it (desktop and/or panel) up with plasmoids, or you can trim it down to a bare few. My current setup on KDE 4.5 has one activity and a panel with pager, smooth tasks, a few app launchers, system tray, clock and menu button in the panel, and no plasmoids on the desktop is currently sitting at 34 MB.