Did you even considered than there may be people which considers very useful those Akonadi and KDE-Pim?

BTW, I read already your "low footprint of 492M memory consumption" so I like to inform you that my Plasma5, as full install with Plasma 5.19.90, Frameworks 5.75.0 and Applications 20.08.2, well all of this, by graphical shell only, it consumes around 400M of memory. BUT, meantime, I can arrive easy to 3-4GB of memory eaten by Firefox or Chromium.

And please do not compare Slackware with Kubuntu. Because Kubuntu, like Ubuntu and Debian, splits the packages on myriads of subpackages. Then, they can isolate the features which depends on KDE-Pim.

But, from what I seen, Slackware make a point of pride to ships everything at whole. So, this splitting will not work on Slackware.

PS. The one which is behind the desktop search is Baloo and it behaves crazy when the user has tons of files on his/her home, BUT the Akonadi business is just the address books and other PIM things.

Fair, and I do not mind stripping out Akonadi myself if I have to as well as KDE-Pim. As for the memory footprint it was just a default Kubuntu install in a VM so that is what I was going by in some cases.

Now, I do not know in what way Patrick will distribute Plasma5 packages, but the way I do it, I split the whole bunch into frameworks, kdepim, plasma, plasma-extra, applications and applications-extra. Actuually that is also mostly the build-order.
As a user, you can simply decide not to install the packages in the kdepim subdirectory of my 'ktown' repository. Some things in Applications may break, but that will be marginal.

High-profile multimedia distros like KXStudio and Ubuntu Studio who were traditionally using a light DE like XFCE so that the real-time audio recording and processing applications would not be affected by the DE's resource usage, have switched or are currently migrating to Plasma5 instead. Read this article which compares resource usage of XFCE and Plasma5, guess who wins? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonev.../#f17a6a26d216

11 members found this post helpful.

This confirms my subjective experience that KDE-plasma is not that resource intensive. I'm looking forward to running KDE-plasma on Slackware when it arrives.

Plasma 5.20.0 was released today -- October 13th 2020 -- It is not LTS but it sure is a major step in the Plasma 5 line.


Plasma 5.20
New and improved inside and out
A massive release, containing improvements to dozens of components, widgets, and the desktop behavior in general.
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.20.0
Tuesday, 13 October 2020.

If one looks at the memory footprints of simple applications, GTK 3 uses half the memory of Qt5 (32MB versus 65MB). Both are quite bloated compared to using just X (5MB).

Ed

Perhaps, but not everyone will be wanting to use a basic X setup such as motif or twm or some other xdg type setup, plus I think the point is moot since as soon as you launch a web browser; memory usage skyrockets which is sad. Gone are the days when a page didn't tax your resources, and this is still with pages that are not using flash - it is just the web browser loading extensions, and maybe depending on the site using Java which will increase memory usage even more.

But is the memory usage due to them using GTK3 vs Qt5 or is it something else related to the program? It might be interesting to test something that offers both qt and gtk support. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is transmission.

IMHO Ktown is substantially better than KDE v4, The sooner Plasma 5 is default, the better. Being default will remove considerable complication and it's not like the KDE dev team is planning on regression. FWIW I do have an older 14.2 install where I went to the trouble to install Trinity (essentially something like KDE 3.5 iirc) and though it is simpler and snappier, I almost never login to it because it lacks things that are actual improvements. On the flip side I use /opt to provide minimal kde3 support for a couple apps I don't want to lose, so I don't see how making Plasma5/Ktown default hurts any slacker.

I see 32MB as the minimum memory footprint on many of my programs that use GTK 3. This represents a floor below which the programs simply won't run.

I sampled only a few Qt5 applications, but maybe readers can post if they find any with a footprint smaller than 65MB.

Memory footprint matters because every running GUI application pays this cost. The footprint can easily be multiplied by 10x.

In contrast, web browsers use a lot of memory for caching. The amount is fungible (but the floor is probably still huge).

Modern machines run bloatware so well that it can be hard to tell it is bloatware (quiz for the reader: from the ps output, how much memory does my machine have?) My point was that there is no "lite" software nowadays. The choices are bloated and more bloated.
Ed

But there have also been tests done (one such test was linked earlier in this thread by Alien Bob) and Plasma5 (Qt5) and Xfce (GTK3) show similar memory usage and sometimes Plasma5 came in less than Xfce. Knowing many people consider Xfce to be less "bloat" than Plasma5, it is really interesting to see their memory usage so similar.

Also, in some searches online, some people (mostly on forums, so no clue on the depth of their knowledge) state that Qt is lower in memory usage than GTK due to GTK having more functionality than Qt.

It is true that developers will use what's available to them and as we get more capacity of hard drives and memory, they will use more and more (I remember reading that the new Modern Warfare will not even fit on a 256GB SSD). I remember my first computer (that I actually owned and wasn't my parents) had 32MB of RAM and a 4.3GB hard drive. I managed to bump that RAM up to 192MB and I was able to run Windows 98 and Windows 2000 on there with no problem (even before I bumped up the RAM, things still ran fine). You could also browse the internet with that without issue. Jump to Windows XP and you really should have at least 512MB of RAM. Now with Windows 10, you should probably have a minimum of 4GB, although, modern browsers displaying a site like Facebook and Amazon will chew up that 4GB of RAM with no issues.

All that being said, my machine has 64GB of RAM, so if an application uses 64MB instead of 32MB, it's not worth my time (and probably not worth the developer's time) to try and shrink that down. Even if I had 4GB, it still probably isn't worth the effort to save 0.8% of my RAM. But, it is definitely worth Infinity Ward to try and make Modern Warfare smaller and the same goes for Google and Mozilla with their browsers. When you start seeing a single program take up 1GB or more of RAM, it's very likely that there's improvements that can be made for memory usage.

2 members found this post helpful.

Looks like Plasma 5.20 was released. I'll offer a scientific wild ass guess that the Current change log soon will reflect the news.

Caveat emptor: I'm horrible at predicting the future.

1 members found this post helpful.

I can't say for sure, but I know that it is not less than 16GB.

Too low. The machine has 64GB. ps is rounding down the memory percentage.
Ed

Is KDE-4 still supported? I was under the impression that it was obsoleted some time ago. If so, what is it still doing in -current?

Thanks to Eric's efforts, I've been running Plasma 5 for some time now. It is stable and reliable and provides many applications that are critical to my needs. I am not a programmer in any sense of the word, but my background is in electronic engineering, and I cannot for the life of me see what the hold up can be.

As far as I can see, Slackware is the only full blown distribution still shipping the obsolete KDE-4! At this rate, everyone else will be shipping KDE-6 before we get Plasma-5 integrated officially!

<sigh!>

--
Pete

3 members found this post helpful.