Not wanting to start a flame war here but, seriously, why KDE? Especially KDE4? I fail to realise how does it commit with KISS and slackware's philosophy. Honestly, I think it is bloated.

PS: I know, I can't skip it or install something else (as I did) but that is not the point.

It is full featured, with usable office suite style programs, requires minimal custom configuration and is comfortable to anyone coming from a Microsoft Windows background.

PS- I find 'bloat' a very subjective term. If your hardware can handle it, then the so-called 'bloat' is just utilising the power of your hardware to give you a satisfying user experience.

6 members found this post helpful.

If you have a newer PC then KDE4 is an excellent full-featured desktop environment. It works very well indeed. I made the move to XFCE after KDE 3.5.x. XFCE has enough features and bling to keep me happy.

1 members found this post helpful.

You don't even need a newer PC, it works fine on my 3 year old netbook. It actually ran find on my 10 year old laptop until the alternate intel video driver was removed from Slackware so I can't run any new versions to see how the latest is.

You are right, but I would go even further. Why XFCE? It also isn't KISS. And why Fluxbox? Isn't Twm the only real KISS window manager? Also, let's remove all the file managers, KISS people use the CLI anyways. And we don't need Thunderbird and Firefox, Slackware comes with Mutt and Lynx already.

Seriously, why not KDE? I use it for guests (somehow most "normal" people handle my i3 tiling WM)and they can use it intuitively. And it isn't bloated. KDE uses on my laptop (4GB of RAM) about 440MB, directly after boot. The big advantage of KDE is that it is fully configurable, you won't find a DE that can be better optimized to your needs. So I just disabled all what I don't need and you see how that works out. Running the same programs that I start automatically on i3 (Firefox, three urxvtc-clients running Mutt, Ranger and Htop, some background programs like Dropbox) KDE uses about 730MB. The same configuration with i3 uses about 500MB. For a fully featured DE this is actually pretty astonishing, I would say.

3 members found this post helpful.

I would agree with allend on "If your hardware can handle it, then the so-called 'bloat' is just utilising the power of your hardware to give you a satisfying user experience." It's too bloated for my older systems, though.

I also find too many niggling annoyances (bugs?) in KDE that keep me from using it, that never seem to get fixed. Just this past weekend I did a Slackware 14.1/KDE install on my T61 for the hell of it; that lasted for a couple of hours... too slow, too much bling, too much configuring to get something marginally usable. So I pretty much just do an Xfce-only install when I install Slackware. I might keep twm, fluxbox, and Windowmaker, but usually not. Most of the time I'm using framebuffer + tmux, anyway.

Why KDE? Because I like it. Never been keen on the other "heavyweight" DE: Gnome. On my desktop, I've got more than enough RAM to run it comfortably. LXDE is my favourite for my laptop and netbook.

Let's not forget that "the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones." KDE 3.5 was incredibly solid, feature-full, intuitive and easy on resources. Then the KDE team faced a decision - stay comfortably in the past. or take a big risk and leap into the future. Personally, while I respect bold moves, I think they leaped too soon.

KDE4 at first was an unparalleled disaster. Coupled with already changing an intuitive interface with a huge fanbase came the nightmare of massive, runaway resources from strigi, nepomuk, et al and nobody even really knew why KDE chose to fix something that clearly was not broken. Many jumped ship at that point.

KDE still has never adequately publicized why they made these changes in my opinion. One has to actually go to KDE forums to see The Big Picture. They had the idea that social networking was going to be huge (imagine that :P ) so the big move was to create a database within the DE that could coordinate and integrate all of the apps seamlessly, among other things. For example, if you had an email list of contacts they easily could be imported, or were already there, in other apps with a contact list.

KDE4 is now incredibly powerful, gets what you need and gets out of the way, and like the phone ads, you can bet "they have an app for that". Frankly, since I don't Facebook and my contact lists are short and easily fit into 3 categories, I don't make use of all that KDE can do, but many of their apps are just the most developed and solid, so I tend to use Xfce with KDE libraries loaded upon startup.

I'm one of the few who were at first appalled and outraged with the change but hung in there. Many bailed on KDE and many of those still recall their outrage and still to this day speak loudly and often about how "bad and bloated KDE is" even though they have little or no experience with it since it became fully-formed and solid.

They still apparently have some problems on more bleeding edge distros where plasmoids keep breaking but on Slackware KDE excels. Plus they are slower to adopt systemd (that's apparently Gnome's job) and how bad can that be?

1 members found this post helpful.

I thought I read somewhere they had to switch due to QT swi
thing from 3to 4.

The problem with the transition to Kde 4 was that a) the developers have chosen the wrong versioning system (4.0 was not intended at all for production use) and because of that b) many distributions included it way to early.
Later versions were much better and nowadays I consider KDE to be the only DE that actually can compete with modern Windows on the desktop.

Hmm, I might have been unfair with it because the last version I've used was 4.1.0 but I pretty much still dislike it (part of KDE that probably didn't change much): I dislike the menus (I think they are clunky), I dislike the way it looks and the "control panel".

Yeah, early KDE 4 was rough, but it's not now. And especially not for Slackers, with Alien Bob's packages available. I'm running his 4.11.5, and he's working on 4.12.2 now - ready soon.

Ready now. Installed it about 30 minutes ago. Almost every time Alien Bob is kind enough to provide new packages I download it and run it for a while, but always go back to Xfce in a day or so, if not just a few hours.
KDE 4.xx has come a long way, but when I see the amount of resources it uses just for the "eye candy" I don't think it is worth it, regardless of how much horsepower may be under the hood of your car er... computer.

For something lightweight, I prefer LXDE to XFCE. Each to his/her own taste.
Off Topic:
Everybody seen the Poll results? Slack in second place to Ubuntu.

Wow, KDE 4.1.0 was released over 5 years ago. You dislike how it looks, even though you can customize pretty much every aspect of how it looks? I think you need to spend a little more time exploring that control panel.

So you're the type of person who buys a Lamborghini and never breaks 65mph?

As for resources... even my "ancient" AMD x2 3800 w/ 2GB RAM runs the newest KDE without a hiccup. Not sure what you're running, but it might be time to upgrade.