I use Trinity (TDE) full time now. I always liked KDE 3.5... KDE 4 made me throw up in my mouth, especially in its early days.

Plasma 5 is pretty slick, and I like it, but it's bloated and messy as Hell... it makes package management a nightmare, and it spams your home directory with configuration files all over the place. That will never be going on any of my systems again.

I keep Trinity and its "tqt3" self contained in /opt/trinity and only build the parts and enable the functionality I want. It's the snappiest desktop I have, and while you couldn't say it's lighter than XFCE, it's certainly faster. I'm quite unhappy with what has become of XFCE (modern versions... gtk+3 bites the weenie, I really hate it) it's far from the light weight desktop it used to be.

I just noticed people are talking about Slackware 14.2, probably an older XFCE. I still have an older 4.12.x version of XFCE on an older box that's fast and light. Mostly GTK+2 still, at that time.

2 members found this post helpful.

The latest ktown is pretty nice. A lot of improvements.

Bloat? As in? Sure there things that come with Plasma 5 I don't use, just like there are things that come with Slackware I don't use. I've been using Plasma 5 since Eric Hameleers (aka Alien Bob) introduced it in ktown. Quite satisfied with it.

Spams your home directory with configuration files all over the place. Perhaps you are referring to Dolphin and it's ".directory" files? I turned that off ages ago. Just for grins, I searched my home directory, found 44 (now zero) of them, oldest was Jan 10, 2011. My home has 215.6 GiB, 136998 files, 10900 sub-folders. Of course if you want Dolphin to remember properties for each folder, then you get those.

Make package management a nightmare. Unless your referring to maintaining your own set Plasma 5 packages, perhaps I can agree somewhat. With Alien Bob's ktown (Many thanks Eric!) set, it not much of a nightmare at all. Even better add slackpkg+ to slackpkg and it's the nightmare is totally gone. even better.

1 members found this post helpful.

I switched to XFCE years ago when Gnome went off the rails. I've tried KDE several times since then, the most recent with 14.2's default install, but it always felt a little slow and klunky to me, a little too complex. IMO XFCE strikes a good balance between minimalist DEs and KDE with the options it presents.

I voted for KDE, although I agree with w1k0: It should have been titled "What window manager do you use?"

Plasma 5 meets my needs; it has several programs I just couldn't live without. As for those who claim it's "bloated", Plasma 5 is more memory-efficient than you may realize. I also had a bad taste in my mouth from the time of the transition from KDE 3.x-4, but I have moved on since then. I don't let one bad experience color my impressions of a certain thing forever. Change is inevitable, and it can be for the better, which it clearly is in this case. The KDE developers have learned their lesson, and have produced a world-class desktop, at least IMHO.

Just my

1 members found this post helpful.

You might want to look in ~/.cache and ~/.config
There are 67 plasma related file in ./config alone, not counting the subdirectories and whatever might be in them.

Slackware 14.2 had XFCE 4.12.1 (with some packages still 4.12.0, like the appfinder and dev-tools) and 14.1 even had 4.10.1 still, with i.e. the xfce mixer 4.8.0

Even back then the bloat was starting to occur.

I was at that box today (Crux Linux, 2016'ish), it's XFCE 4.12.0 and I compiled it so it's not linked to a bunch of gnome junk or anything. I quite like it, it's snappy happy.

I remember how snappy XFCE was when it was a GTK+ 1.2 environment. It also had funny boingy sounds when you clicked shit (which very soon got disabled when the novelty wore off) lol

I do fondly remember the XFCE in Slackware 10.x (which was a 4.2.x one).
One thing I really disliked about XFCE is how the config files kept on being totally redesigned every 4.x version, you couldn't easily do all your modifications again in the upgraded version.

With the GTK3 path that Xfce is taking, maybe it's time for me to consider an alternative for when Slackware 15 comes out. I can tolerate individual GTK3 programs, but a whole desktop environment will be too much. Pity.

Agreed. Plasma 5 is memory efficient on my Arch box. I do know that one can't make direct comparisons to Slackware. KDE-plasma boots up using less than 400 MB RAM.

That’s exactly how I arrived at XFCE, too. For me, XFCE strikes the right balance as well. I’ve never been much of a fan of KDE (3.x or 4.x, for that matter). I haven’t looked at what we around here call KDE 5 (but which the KDE developers don’t seem to want to hear).

Anyway, should the next KDE version ever become a part of the Slackware distribution (first in Current, then in the next Stable, I guess), then I would certainly try it out, but I would likely be hard-pressed to drop XFCE for it.

2 members found this post helpful.

Those two locations are supposed to be there. They are defined with XDG Base Directory Specification. Directory ~/.cache base directory relative to which user-specific non-essential (cached) data should be written. Directory ~/.config base directory relative to which user-specific configuration files should be written. Seems a bit silly to not want Plasma 5 to place files in those directories.

1 members found this post helpful.

No, I did not say that, but, regardless, IMHO, it is too intrusive.

You are correct, you did not say that. Fixed my post.

Intrusive: affecting someone in a way that annoys them and makes them feel uncomfortable.

I am the one who said that.

The problem is that it LITTERS ~/.config (and other directories... ~/.local/share) with haphazardly placed files and directories in among other configurations you don't want to nuke. It's a royal pain to remove (think messed up KDE/Plasma profile... I know people that have had to create a new user and migrate their data) and it can affect other desktop environments too. The crap in ~/.cache doesn't matter as much.

Also, the packages themselves... it's not so bad on Slackware at this time, as you can just use wildcards in /var/log/packages (e.g. ~alien) and not have to worry about package dependencies (reinstall anything if you break it). Try sorting out package dependencies with apt/dpkg or pacman.

The dependencies you will install for KDE Plasma 5 can also creep into your builds too. For example I had to recompile a lot of my stuff in /usr/local after cleaning up that mess because I unwittingly and unknowingly pulled in things like OpenAL and Wayland.

Bugger the living snot out of that. Never again. Use whatever language you want, it's invasive and intrusive.

3 members found this post helpful.