You have probably tried it in 4.0 days. Plasma 5 is nowadays actually one of the lightweight ones and it is very fast. Especially when you consider how many features/flexibility it has compared to other lightweight desktops.
I have used KDE through Kubuntu and Arch for some time after trying virtually every DE/WM out there. It's not perfect, but it's really good. I don't know how people use the stock Ubuntu DE. It's tragic.
Another Ubuntu based distro with KDE, and one that I think most people haven’t heard about, but which I am personally fond of is KDE’s own KDE Neon.
> More than ever people expect a stable desktop with cutting-edge features, all in a package which is easy to use and ready to make their own.
> KDE neon is the intersection of these needs using a stable Ubuntu long-term release as its core, packaging the hottest software fresh from the KDE Community ovens.
I've found KDE Neon to be WAY more stable than Kubuntu. And this has been the case on multiple LTS versions. I just think this is odd since, in theory, they should only differ by the KDE apps that are installed.
I wish KDENeon was around when I was kde-crazy, back in 3.x/4.x times. Finding a distro that was both reliable and able to run nightly builds of KDE apps was really really difficult. Despite all efforts of some outstanding maintainers, Kubuntu always felt like a hack, with unavoidable GNOME stuff popping out all over the place.
I've tried Neon in virtualbox and it looks nice and consistent. Performance wasn't great but that's more or less a given under VirtualBox. I might give it a go on my next laptop.
I'm using Ubuntu+gnome in the hope integration issues have been worked out faster compared to Ubuntu with an alternate DE that just isn't exposed as much, and that'll give me just trouble and less info on askubuntu.com etc. But since gnome doesn't cut it for me, I'm going to switch distros alltogether anyway. OpenSuse or something else having KDE as preferred DE? Don't know yet; would be cool to have a mainstream systemd-less distro with KDE.
I'm using KDE for years, and it's a great collection of software. The main issue I have about performances is Akonadi, it's eating CPU, memory and lot of disk space (and I have disabled files indexing in settings, as I don't need it, so I don't get why it's taking GiO), so I often just kill the server and it works well after that.
By the way, does anybody know a method to disable it cleanly, or at least make it for resources friendly? The article I've found after quick search are years old and not relevant anymore.
It seems like you are confusing two pieces of software: There is Baloo, which is the KDE file indexer. And then there is Akonadi, which is the storage service for all PIM related things (so emails, contacts, calendars etc.). If you disabled Baloo in the settings it should not show up as a process anymore and certainly shouldn't be using any system resources.
Akonadi is required for the usage of KMail, KOrganizer and such (because they use it to store their data, so that is rather essential). If you don't use those applications, you can simply remove it with your package manager. Otherwise we'd appreciate a bug report with regards to the high CPU / memory usage on bugs.kde.org. Thank you for using KDE software :)
> It seems like you are confusing two pieces of software: There is Baloo, which is the KDE file indexer. And then there is Akonadi,
Oh right, seeing those Gio in my ~/.local/share/akonadi, I was supposing that it was for file indexing and that was somehow the storage for Baloo or something like that.
I haven't investigated more than that as I don't want to spend too much time on it and just killing Akonadi server from its console is enough (the downside is that after killing it I can't use KMail anymore, which otherwise is a really great MUA).
So maybe it has something to do with my email settings then? I'll try to find time to investigate and check if I haven't activated anything like offline storage, otherwise I'll create a bug report.
Anyway thanks for the great work over the years, beside this little issue, KDE works flawlessly and I like to be able to customize just what I need when I need.
I'm guessing it is seen as poor taste to not praise KDE in a thread with lots of people that like KDE since you get downvoted. I have the exact thoughts you did. It is amazing because in my experience KDE was one of -if not the- slowest desktop in Linux when I tried it. I'm guessing it was KDE 4. Gnome was way better and faster back then for me, both in Ubuntu and Debian. Great to hear it has become faster. Not so great that KDE users would downvote someone for speaking the truth.
After failing to get XFCE to run without terrible tearing on my Ryzen 3400G, I recently installed KDE for the first time since the early KDE 4 days. And I have to say I was really really impressed. It is all around much faster and better these days. In fact it might just become my new favorite desktop
Activities are like a new set of workspaces for you to switch to. Like let's say you use your laptop for work and for fun at home. At work you use 4 workspaces and plain desktop backgrounds and conky to watch processes. Then when you punch out at work and want to relax you want just one workspace with cycling wallpapers or whatever. You can set up a "work" activity that fits those needs and then a "home" activity that is much simpler for at home. I think of it as like a third dimension for workspaces.
Okay so as I understand it: virtual desktops are additional space that add screen space that you can jump to ; workspaces are like a more malleable version of virtual desktops ; and activities are an additional dimension on top of that with which you can switch between different virtual desktops and/or workspaces configurations.