Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Did you actually read the list of required dependencies? This is on a fairly minimal server without X Windows, so getting all the dependencies installed requires a great deal more than it would on a server with X already on it.

If you look at the direct depends carefully, most of them are very basic libraries for sound and graphics, as well as a couple for talking on specific IM networks. The only two that are directly KDE-related appear to be kdelibs4c2a and libqt3-mt. kdelibs is about 10 megs, libqt3 is about 3.5, and kopete itself is 8 megs. So it's a total KDE-related footprint of about 21 or 22 megs, which is maybe a little high, but considering you're getting the QT and KDE libraries with it, not at all unreasonable. The rest of the dependencies are really basic things that you'd usually have installed if you were on X Windows, even if you don't have KDE at all.

Ubuntu is quite different; they've put a TON of dependencies on kopete, and even starting from X, you'll end up with an extra 215 megs of stuff. So the clean packaging is quite clearly optional. I presume that they've compiled more features into Ubuntu kopete, but I don't know that for sure.

Basically, it looks to me like the KDE claims of fairly strong differentiation between the desktop environment and basic requirements to run individual pieces of software are quite accurate. If I just 'aptitude install kde', it'll take 1,139 megs.

As a point of comparison, in a quick search, I don't see any GNOME applications that do the multi-network connection. GnomeICU does ICQ only, and takes 111 megs with dependencies.

For context: 'aptitude install gnome' requires 1,587.