I'm a Windows 'poweruser' who is exploring Linux/Unix/etc OS's for over a year now. I've tried countless dristro's and WM/DE's. I've come to the conclusion that I like KDE the most for all of it's features/functionality/usability.

Everywhere I see people complaining about how much of a performance/memory hog KDE is. But, if you like at my signature, would KDE really be that much of a burdain to my system?

Is this war about DE's the same as the vi VS emacs, in a sence that on old systems emacs might be a huge hog but on modern systems 8mb memmory doesn't matter at all?

It's really all about preference. If you're coming from Windows, KDE is very similar to Windows. So, you'll like the familiarity that comes with KDE. I have heard that it does use more resources than Gnome, but if you have 768MB of RAM or more, i don't think you have anything to worry about. Go with what you like and don't let anyone tell you differently.

Regards,

Brandon

> would KDE really be that much of a [burden] to my system?
Absolutely not. I think my absolutely largest memory usage is at 512 mb, and that's only after leaving various big and leaky programs open for several weeks; also, some of it is swapped out. CPU-wise, the only thing I've noticed is that firefox is somewhat faster than konqueror (IIRC; it's been a while since I've last used firefox).

Try it out--you can always go back if you don't like it.

> in a [sense] that on old systems emacs might be a huge hog but on modern systems 8mb memmory doesn't matter at all?
Something like that. My experience is that vi starts considerably faster (0.1 vs 1 second), and both operate at "wire speed" once started. Eric Raymond has some comments at http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/...emacs_editing; I would bet that a modern vi-like editor (that is, vim) uses about the same amount of memory as emacs.

I'm not asking for "Should I use Gnome or KDE?". I'm asking if KDE is heavy on my pc?

EDIT: Thanks jonaskoelker. I was making this post at the same time you allready made yours ^_^

I run a Machine pretty similar to yours(2.4ghz, 1gig RAM, 256mb ATI Video card, among other things), and while I absolutely hate the look/feel of KDE, I've not noticed a real slowdown with KDE. I have KDE, Gnome, and Xfce all set up on my Ubuntu install, and while I think KDE is probably slower than the other three (definitely slower than Xfce), but if you like it, I think you'll be ok.

IGF