[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.