Re: Could KDE work adequately on a PC with 4 GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor @ 2.33 GHz?
On 10.03.21 13:51, Cmdte Alpha Tigre Z wrote:
(...)
My last doubt is if should use Debian 10 with KDE Plasma or Debian
Bullseye instead.
I recommend to use "testing" (currently Bullseye) on an individual
Laptop/Desktop Computer, and leave "stable" for server or cooperate end
user installations. Usually "testing" is very stable concerning
reliability for the every day interactive work and during the frequent
upgrades (which you should frequently apply).
"stable" is so stable, that it already when published is not being
perfectly up to date anymore with the newest software versions
available. But for sure the provided software releases are so long time
tested that no mayor bugs are expected to hit you under usual circumstances.
Where you cannot risk the work load to maybe having to react on
complaining users, or your running system simply does not need much
modernization because it is doing its job and then better don't touch it
unless a security update would need to be applied, then "stable" is
excellent.
If a user is willing to step by step face the changes of a system
following current software releases, then "testing" is offering this to
you. The all over experience of the users with "testing is, that it
rarely breaks. Actually I never experienced this. It simply runs. It is
not long time tested as "stable" because everything is always in the
"testing" period for the next "stable", but "testing" does not mean
"unstable". The comfort of having modern software releases available
instead of feeling parked for years on unchanged apps is often worth the
risk to maybe run into a bug found in a new release. In my experiences,
these bugs then are usually not mission critical and users can most
often afford to wait that the bug gets solved by a soon delivered next
release of the software, which you can expect to soon also arrive in the
"testing" distribution of Debian.
So, Debian "stable" is for mission critical apps and services, therefore
not offering short time only tested, newest software. Debian "testing"
brings the comfort of much more up-to-date software to the screen and is
commonly stable enough for the continuous, interactive desktop usage.
> Apparently, only the newer versions of KDE Plasma have the performance
> boost.
I cannot confirm this. KDE Plasma is high performant and low on memory
usage for years already. This was different in the far past. Consider
that the internet does not forget and still shows you complains from the
past although they might not apply to the current situation anymore.
Also, enthusiast of other graphical desktop environments sometimes still
publish such obsolete information, maybe because they years ago became
full satisfied with their desktop of choice and since then did not
notice the changes around anymore and are now no more well informed?
Having had the urgent need for a more modern but also low footprint
desktop to subtitute Window Maker, I years ago did not consider KDE as
my candidate, because of information from highly ranked links in the web
search engines. I ended up testing Xfce, Openbox and LXDE. And I tested
LXQt, which was still in experimental state that time - and found that
the window manager in use by LXQt could be exchanged for various
available candidates. Noticing that kwin performed excellent in LXQt I
wondered why KDE was reported to be sluggish and heavy on resources, if
its component kwin was performing so excellently in LXQt. I gave KDE
Plasma a try and found to have been blinded by obsolete reports still
popping up high ranked in the web search engines. KDE Plasma was that
time already a very nice choice for old machines, and nowadays it
continuous to do so. KDE Plasma resource requirements compete very well
with other "small footprint" desktop environments. In the end you might
ask why I then decided for KDE over LXQt with kwin. Well it is because I
much like the administration of keyboard shortcuts in KDE Plasma, and I
much like Kate and Konsole, and also Dolphin and Krunner are very
competitive, and baloo is quite helpful once the initial indexing is
achieved. All this comes with KDE Plasma kind of out of the box - and
perfectly competitive where only small hardware resources are available.
Best wishes, Marco.
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