KDE 4.0 release delayed [LWN.net]

KDE 4.0 release delayed

Posted Sep 5, 2007 5:27 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: KDE 4.0 release delayed by Xanadu
Parent article: KDE 4.0 release delayed

I'm moving in the other direction: after 2 years of running KDE on my laptop, a low-end Celeron about 2 years old, I switched to XFCE a few days ago. I'm amazed how snappy it feels. Like upgrading to a new machine. And feature-wise, it's quite competitive with its bigger brothers, though it has some rough edges.

At the same time, I switched from firefox to epiphany, and from akregator to liferea. Both applications start up in less than a second, compared to several seconds in the earlier environment. The machine also runs a compositing WM (beryl) very nicely, with a cheap on-board Intel card; I'll be trying out compiz-fusion soon.

(Log in to post comments)

KDE 4.0 release delayed

Posted Sep 6, 2007 14:43 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

Well, indeed, XFCE uses a lot less memory than Gnome and KDE, as long as you don't start too many apps, that is. And firefox is a big memory hog, so dumping that in favor of ANYTHING is faster...

I don't have much trouble with KDE on 256 mb ram, as long as you don't run extremely inefficient apps like openoffice and firefox.

KDE 4.0 release delayed

Posted Sep 7, 2007 21:28 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I did a memory test of KDE vs XFCE on my (then-)384MB laptop earlier this
year. On KDE I was using Konqueror and Kmail, and always kept them open.
In XFCE I replaced them with Firefox and Thunderbird. (Epiphany is too basic
for me.)

I was pleased by the XFCE experience (and still use it occasionally), but once I
got it configured with equivalent apps and applets running, it was using more
memory than KDE. Of course, Firefox was the major culprit here, but it's
necessary if I want web features comparable to Konqueror.