Which is heavier in system resources, KDE Neon PLasma 5 or Windows 10?

you will never be able to compare them, they use the available resources in a quite different way. Therefore it also highly depends on the usage too.

To build on what pan64 said, Windows is an operating system; with Win95, MS decided the intertwine the GUI interface with the OS (the way ivy intertwines with and eventually strangles a tree). KDE is merely a desktop environment.

In general, though, Windows tends to have a heavier footprint than Linux. That's why you will find many, many articles and blog posts telling you how to use the latest Linux distro to revitalize computers that do not have adequate system resources to run the latest Windows.

Hi & WELCOME Bob...

Tell us about your 'setup': PC/OSes... (&experience maybe)

I'm thinking you mean something like:
[first] stop-watch time a 'heavy' website [ebay home-page?] loading.
[deeper] 'monitor/measure' the cpu & mem usage [of same]
in each/both of: KDE & MS-WinX

Do you have the 'resources' to do this (&report back here!)?

Going to try KDE 5 Neon on a intel laptop with 4gb of ram.

Some of you may think, use lightweight desktop managers for low specs machines, but I don't like them. They're kinda ugly and look like windows 95'ish.

This looks like W95? I decided I do not want icons on my desktop, so there's none. When no apps running the OS and the DE take about 86 MB of RAM total.

If it's a reasonably contemporary CPU, 4GB should be adequate for any Linux desktop environment.

Look cool.

Anyway, I meant to say when using the default layout and look of a lightweight desktop manager. I almost never customize my linux desktops.

I'll probably might reserve even more ram for the system if I turn off visual effects and eye candy. I am not a fan of them.

I didn't customize it. I put it together from scratch. First, I run OpenBox, added Tint2 for taskbar and Wbar for most used apps. Then conky for fun.

Windows 10 will run on most hardware that's around today and working. The Windows installer and Windows has many self-adjusting features, and user-adjustable features, to reduce the load of the operating system on older hardware, and to suck up resources on newer hardware.

Windows has a kernel--like linux--sort of. But the Windows installer compiles the windows kernel according to the hardware it sees. It doesn't have all the device drivers that the linux kernel has, but there is still a lot of leeway in the compile. On really old machines Windows 10 will be slower. But it's made to run well on a lot of different hardware.

Windows since XP does many things only Microsoft is aware of. It could be doing practically anything. There's no way to tell, because it's closed-source. Linux and KDE are more straight forward. The kernel is precompiled for the processor architecture, i.e. i686 or amd64. Since the kernel is modular, it loads only what it requires to run the system.

The most glitzy combination of desktop effects in KDE is trivial compared to the resources consumed by Windows 10. With 4GB of ram you probably wouldn't need a swap file (pagefile.sys in Windows). On my personal system, on which I make no effort to conserve resources, I can have a 1080p movie running in one window, print jobs going, updating the Debian mirror in the terminal, a Windows virtual machine running in another window, editing photos in another window, and I use about 1.5GB of ram, and the laptop doesn't even break a sweat.

I'm pretty sure Windows 10 would just crash on any hardware doing that. My lappy is about 5 years old. So, go to it. You won't want to look back!

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Are you using a better cpu like an i3 or higher? The intel notebook I have has a 1.6ghz celeron. Haven't tried kde neon yet as I am busy. Maybe a project to do this weekend.

Here is the link of KDE's Neon Plasma 5.8 from distrowatch.com

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=09578

I ran full KDE Plasma 5 on a Chromebook with Celeron 2.1 GHZ dual core 4 GB ram without issue, so that should be able to handle it if it's a modern Celeron and not an older single core.