[alxlaz]

I'm not a big fan of "large" DEs, but I take KDE for a spin every other release or so.

The tiling features are all scripts now, they're not part of the base Kwin code anymore. They work pretty well in my experience. (That being said, if you haven't used Kwin in a while, it's worth noting that it also lost window tabbing along the way, so tiling is far less useful than it could be).

In terms of resource use, Plasma 5 is a lot more lightweight and snappier than we've come to expect from KDE in the post-4.0 era :). You can tell it's QML all the way down because the latency is nowhere near as good as in the 3.x days, but it's not too bad, and in terms of resource consumption (RAM, CPU, whatever), it's better than it's ever been in the last 10 years. And it's very good overall.

In terms of power consumption, I can't say I've noticed a difference between KDE and the more lightweight setup that I use. I haven't ran numbers though -- so all I can say is that, if there's a difference, it's small enough that I haven't noticed it. Probably because the biggest power drains account for so much of the power drain that KDE & friends don't account for much anymore :)