[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.

[dTal]

Ah. So, to be clear, this entire performance discussion was a red herring?

For completeness's sake I will just note that DEs are vastly different from 2005, notably in using GPU compositing; this is nicer in many ways and more power efficient, but stresses the driver stack a lot more. The crashing issues you mention are not common, so I would try running it on some different machines before blaming the instability on Plasma.

Interestingly, 2011 smartphones and 2005 desktops have broadly similar specs.

[dleslie]

IMHO, KDE has better perf on low end machines than Gnome3, but it's still a problem.

I had compiz back in the day; compositing isn't new. It's also not all that important; I'm basically using the same bones of the Windows 95 DE, 25 years later. Except Win95 was fast, lean, and incredibly unstable. ;)

I try KDE every year or so, and _always_ abandon it due to instability. I've filed tickets in the past but KDE developers, and to be fair Gnome devs too, seem to have your attitude: old and slow devices aren't worth their time, despite the large install base worldwide.

Hell, they're not much slower than Chromebooks or the previously popular Netbooks.