KDE hardware requirements blown out of proportion

[briancurtin]

The article says KDE needs 512MB of RAM.

yeah, but if you tell people you only need 128 mb of ram, they will expect to be able to run everything they ever wanted on 128 mb of ram. 512 is a safe number

[aysiu]

yeah, but if you tell people you only need 128 mb of ram, they will expect to be able to run everything they ever wanted on 128 mb of ram. 512 is a safe number

Except that the article says Gnome needs only 384 MB:

Desktop 	Required RAM 	Required CPU
fluxbox/idesk 	48 	100 MHz
XFCE4 	128 	200 MHz
Gnome 1.x 	256 	500 MHz
Gnome 2.x 	384 	800 MHz
KDE 3.x 	512 	1 GHz

[jdong]

That article is clearly biased against the full-blown desktop environments with a particular grudge against KDE. Don't believe those ludicrous requirements for 'running KDE' or even 'running GNOME'

[Sushi]

I did a test with KDE once. Someone was telling the usual "KDE is bloated and eats RAM for breakfast!"-claim in Slashdot. And I wanted to shut him up. What did I do? I tried my best to make KDE eat as much RAM as possible. And I did that by loading bunch of apps. I believe I had Kspread, Kword, Kpresenter, Konqueror, Amarok, Konsole, Kate, Kdevelop, Karchive, Kstars, Calculator, Juk, Kontact, Kopete, *******, and few others all up & running, and IIRC the system was consuming about 360MB of RAM (not including cache and buffers).

So if someone claims that KDE NEEDS 512MB of RAM, you can be rest assured that he's full of crap.

[Mathias-K]

Stop the fud non-sense please.

I made no FUD, just a joke towards the funny naming schemes of KDE/Linux/UNIX system libraries like "glibgjc1-2". In fact, I prefer KDE over GNOME, I'm just exploring Ubuntu a bit.

What I really mean, and some may have overlooked, is that if a desktop environment (and I used KDE because it is the topic) has to use more RAM than you've got, your harddisk will be the bottleneck no matter how fast memory sticks you've got.

This is not a hardware enthusiast forum, and sometimes it's noticed. In Linux, people tend to overlook some basics principles of modern hardware.