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Linux-DesktopEnv: KDE Plasma 5 Desktop Environment

 


KDE logo (omgubuntu.co.uk/)

KDE Plasma logo (subdiff.org/projects/plasma/)

KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was first released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new default theme, known as "Breeze", as well as increased convergence across different devices. The graphical interface was fully migrated to QML, which uses OpenGL for hardware acceleration, which resulted in better performance and reduced power consumption.

— Wikipedia

KDE Plasma 5 is built using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, predominantly plasma-framework. It improves support for HiDPI displays and ships a convergable graphical shell, which can adjust itself according to the device in use. 5.0 also includes a new default theme, dubbed Breeze. Qt 5's QtQuick 2 uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL(ES) scene graph (canvas) to compose and render graphics on the screen, which allows for the offloading of computationally expensive graphics rendering tasks onto the GPU, freeing up resources on the system's main CPU.

    I felt left out KDE desktop environment in my search for a lightweight desktop environment a bit biased. So I decided to do one just for KDE. I am using Sparky Linux 6.2 KDE stable version for this review. Below is the RAM usage results after the installation. 

Sparky Linux 6.2 KDE htop console

    Surprisingly, the KDE Plasma 5 only uses 425MB of RAM after a fresh install. I have been put off using KDE as it was historically big on RAM desktop environment. Seems like the developers have decided to reduce its RAM usage and make it a lightweight desktop environment now. Since it is based on Qt 5, anyone using more Qt applications is more suitable to use KDE Plasma 5. 

    There is a lot of KDE apps for this desktop environment. You may go to https://apps.kde.org/ to find out what are applications available if you use KDE. 

    However, KDE Plasma 5 comes in last for my RAM usage tests results post, a 25MB more RAM compared to MATE desktop environment. Like I said, if you have limited RAM, 25MB spare RAM can be quite a lot to someone with only 1GB RAM on netbooks. 

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