[dleslie]

Every few years I give KDE a shot, and the result is always the same; it's too unstable and slow to be a daily driver.

The latest time was just last month, and the _stock_ panel widgets kept crashing, forgetting their preferences, and so on. The desktop environment itself occasionally crashed-to-login.

Well, back to Gnome2! (MATE).

[shmerl]

I've been using it for a long time and didn't notice any slowness (make sure file search is off).

What's bugging me though is that subsurfaces clipping bug in Wayland session. Kmail is still broken in 5.19.x.

[dleslie]

Critically, I tend to use low-power machines because I hate fan noise and excessive heat.

I was using KDE on an RPi4 and Pinebook Pro. For basically all the computing that I do these machines are more than powerful enough; but apparently not for KDE (or Gnome3!)

[shmerl]

I like silent operation too, but I do the opposite, get a big case with 200 mm Noctua fans and double Noctua CPU cooler :) It runs very silently even with high end Ryzen.

The heat as long as it's dissipated out of the case to keep the system cool doesn't bother me.

[dleslie]

That doesn't provide a low-power solution, just a silent solution; you're still dissipating a lot of heat.

[shmerl]

Yes, but I don't need a low power solution. I need something that can compile things in reasonable time.

[dleslie]

I have a separate server for that, tucked away where I can't see it and I can easily vent the heat.

Builds never slow down my desktop experience.

[dTal]

For what it's worth, I use a T480. It has a nice quad core i7 processor and it draws 5 watts at idle. That's hardly more than your Pi4 or your Pinebook Pro. The fan never spins up unless I'm burning 100% CPU. I run Plasma 5 and it's always perfectly snappy.

I don't think you're gaining a lot, using such low end hardware.

[dleslie]

I just looked.

There's no way I can afford a T480.

FOSS developers really should be using minspec machines to test.

[dTal]

Well, okay. You said you hated "fan noise and excessive heat", not "spending money". I'm just pointing out that this isn't a reason to avoid a fast, x86_64 computer.

That said, I'm sure there are many modern laptops for a fraction of the price of a T480 which will do the job just as well, and a lot better than a Pi4. What is "minspec" anyway? You have to draw a line somewhere. Should I expect to run a modern DE on my smartphone from 2011? How about my desktop from 2005?

That said, by the spec sheet, those machines should be easily capable of running Plasma. If you're having problems, perhaps it's not Plasma's fault, but something to do with the blobby GPU driver stack?

[dleslie]

> Should I expect to run a modern DE on my smartphone from 2011?

No. That's a phone.

> How about my desktop from 2005?

Why not? That's approximately within the ability scope of the Pi4 and Pinebook Pro that I have.

DEs haven't really improved so significantly since then that they should need that much more power.

Their need for more computing ability has more to do with shoddier development practices than it does features.

The problems with KDE that I noted were mostly crashes and general broken behaviour; performance is more a Gnome3 problem, it only recently was capable of running on a Pi.

[dleslie]

They play Doom, Dosbox, and RetroArch (up to PSP/Dreamcast) just fine.