[Lazarus] KDE 5

Juha Manninen juha.manninen62 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 6 14:07:02 CEST 2017


Moved from the "Release Candidate 3" thread:

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 10:57 AM, Michael Van Canneyt
<michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
> {
>   "OutOfTopic" : ["If by mature you mean 'bloated', then yes.",
>                   "KDE has become so bloated, it has driven me away.",
>                   "To linux mint and cinnamon." ] }
>
> ;)

This is a little out of scope of the whole Lazarus list but I comment anyway.
KDE 5 is not bloated at all. It is slimmer that KDE 4. If you only use
KDE and QT applications, it is very snappy and light.

The only bloat effect comes when you must start an application made
with other widget libs like GTK 2/3. Firefox and LibreOffice are good
examples. They start slowly and hog memory.
However that does not mean KDE is bloated. It means the "foreign" apps
and their libs are bloated.
Yes, I believe Firefox starts faster in a system built on top of GTK
libs because the shared libs are already loaded there.

Example:
I have a 64-bit system with 4GB mem.
With a resource monitor KSysGuard open 0.4GB mem is used.
When I also have Dolphin and Qupzilla with 8 page tabs open the mem
usage goes to 0.7GB.
I have plenty of eye-candy desktop effects enabled and services like
"KDE Connect" for my Android phone etc. It is not a stripped down
system anyhow.
There are KDE specific versions of most SW: picture view and edit, PDF
view, diff view (kompare, good!), music and video players, etc. etc.
...
When I use them, everything is snappy and around 1-1.3 GB mem is used.
Most of the memory is free and used for Linux file system buffering.
I have to start Firefox for some special web pages because Qupzilla
has problems with them. Then memory consumption jumps higher.
Still, the swap partition is almost never used.

My 32-bit e-machines mini-laptop with 1GB mem also has KDE 5 which
then takes much less memory, less than 0.5GB. 32-bit code needs less
mem and the kernel also adjusts its usage for lower total mem.
Only if I start many big apps, things get a little sticky there.

In real life situations KDE can be lighter and snappier than the so
called light desktop environments because there are so many apps made
with KDE/QT libs. With "light" DEs you typically get diverse widget
libs with all the diverse apps.
Gnome / Cinnamon have the same benefit as KDE with their dedicated apps.

In general the obsession for very light window managers is useless.
Their GUI experience is more limited. They may save few MB of memory
but when a user opens all those big bloated apps hogging 2GB, who
cares about the window manager's memory?

Modern Linux distros can still run on old computers with low memory.
KDE is very usable in a machine with 0.5GB memory. Yes!
... but how many people really use such machines?
I have an abundant 4GB, many people have more.
When I run only KDE apps and look at the resource monitor, I feel 4GB
is too much. It could run with much less. This is the opposite of
bloat!

Ok, when I debug Lazarus with another instance of Lazarus and have
music player and browser and other apps running, then 4GB is nice.

Regards,
Juha


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