GTK != Gnome. KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it. One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.
If you find yourself using the term bloated you should in most cases find a new word because it communications only imprecision. It neither uses excessive RAM, nor requires excessive storage, nor runs slowly. Do you mean it has too many features?
In the context of the prior comment which was choosing between Gnome and KDE the fact that applications require you to have half of KDE is meaningless as you are if you pick KDE going to install all of KDE already.
In the context of installing KDE apps outside of KDE this is fairly overblown. Most people have hundreds of GB to TB of storage available and will install games which require 60GB. At this point in time worrying about KDE installing a few gigs of deps is like worrying about the difference in ram used by Emacs vs Vim.
> KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it.
I use GNOME myself but GNOME is anything but lean and stable - Alt+F2 r is for me a staple and it doesn't work correctly under Wayland, it's GUI is horribly slow, every extension worsening the problem. I mostly only use GNOME myself because I stopped caring about how slow things are and I'm lazy.
> One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.
Well, any GNOME thing wants to pull the entire GNOME thing AND systemd. Much worse.
In the context of the prior comment which was choosing between Gnome and KDE the fact that applications require you to have half of KDE is meaningless as you are if you pick KDE going to install all of KDE already.
In the context of installing KDE apps outside of KDE this is fairly overblown. Most people have hundreds of GB to TB of storage available and will install games which require 60GB. At this point in time worrying about KDE installing a few gigs of deps is like worrying about the difference in ram used by Emacs vs Vim.