The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Do you know what configuring you did to make your KDE fit in 110 MB RAM? (For some reason my KDE after cold boot uses 1 GB, vs. GNOME which uses about 300 MB, so I've stuck with GNOME.)

(sorry for the late reply)

As you would probably suspect the answer is "turn off things you don't need". Of course the trick is to learn what you don't need.

So I'll show what it looks like on my system, which is an older desktop pc using wired networking. Things might need to look different on your machine.

I actually checked again, and it turns out that memory usage right after startup is 98 MB RAM, which includes some services that for you might be "un-needed", such as ntp, cups and a mailer etc.

The running processes after full KDE startup and login (including the shell running pstree and free):

pstree:

init-+-acpid
     |-console-kit-dae---64*[{console-kit-da}]
     |-cron
     |-cupsd
     |-2*[dbus-daemon]
     |-dbus-launch
     |-dhclient
     |-dirmngr
     |-6*[getty]
     |-gpm
     |-hald-+-hald-runner-+-hald-addon-acpi
     |      |             |-hald-addon-cpuf
     |      |             |-hald-addon-inpu
     |      |             `-3*[hald-addon-stor]
     |      `-{hald}
     |-irqbalance
     |-kaccess
     |-kded4
     |-kdeinit4-+-2*[kio_trash]
     |          |-klauncher
     |          `-ksmserver-+-kwin
     |                      `-{ksmserver}
     |-kdm-+-Xorg
     |     `-kdm---startkde-+-kwrapper4
     |                      `-ssh-agent
     |-kglobalaccel
     |-kmix
     |-knotify4
     |-konsole-+-bash---pstree
     |         `-{konsole}
     |-krunner---{krunner}
     |-ntpd
     |-nullmailer-send
     |-plasma-desktop---{plasma-desktop}
     |-polkitd---{polkitd}
     |-rsyslogd---3*[{rsyslogd}]
     |-start_kdeinit
     `-udevd---2*[udevd]

And the memory usage:

free -m:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1008        470        537          0        192        178
-/+ buffers/cache:         98        909
Swap:         1906          0       1906

So here's what I did to configure my system like this, mostly from memory. Again, your needs might be different from mine:

• Configure what services run in my default runlevel with 'rcconf'
• Ran 'kwriteconfig –file kres-migratorrc –group Migration –key Enabled –type bool false' (once) to stop Nepomuk's migration business on every login. (I believe).
• Turn off un-needed taskbar applets in KDE.
• Run the 'System Settings' applet/program in KDE and performed the following:
• In network settings -> network monitor unchecked "Start Knemo...."
• In autostart uncheck the services not needed to autostart.
• In desktop search uncheck nepomuk and strigi.
• In service manager uncheck all the startup services not needed. The ones I have unchecked in my system are: KDE write daemon and PowerDevil.

Hope you find it useful.