[Lazarus] KDE 5

[R0b0t1]

On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 7:07 AM, Juha Manninen via Lazarus
<lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

Hello,

If such comments are not unwelcome I would also suggest there are many
architectural improvements in the code and invite Mr. Canneyt to
peruse the Plasma 5 source (KDE 5 doesn't exist).

That said there are some changes that have broken UI compatibility
with KDE 4 and made the menus slightly harder to use for people with
poor eyesight, but many things have similar problems.

> 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.
>