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petrus4
June 6th, 2009, 06:53 PM
Hey everyone,
I wanted to ask what the minimum system requirements are for running KDE 4? I have a 3.0Ghz 686 Intel processor with 1 Gb of RAM, and an nVidia 8600GT video card, which has 512 Mb of RAM I think.

I hope people don't mind me posting this here, but I wasn't sure where to ask the question.

I did feel a little uneasy asking it here though because truthfully, I'm not actually running Ubuntu myself right now. I have, however, advocated it to both a cousin and a friend, and there is a high likelihood that it will end up installed on both of their machines.

I am currently running FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE, and I will admit that I am a lot happier. While I consistently advocate Ubuntu for novice users offline, truthfully I myself am not a novice.

Ubuntu's greatest strength, I feel, is the fact that a novice user can put a CD in the drive, answer a couple of simple questions, and have a complete system (hopefully with fully working hardware) with a welcoming, non-intimidating graphical interface, in less than 30 minutes. They don't normally need to use the command line until they're ready, either.

However, Ubuntu has a number of under-the-hood technical issues which I truthfully wasn't happy with. I can elaborate on those at greater length if it is desired, in the interests of providing hopefully constructive feedback on where I feel Ubuntu needs to improve.

FreeBSD, on the other hand, has taken me a solid month to customise to exactly the way I want it. Thus, in a way FreeBSD and Ubuntu are almost mirror opposites of each other.

FreeBSD takes a long time and a lot of work to set up and learn, but is extremely stable and reliable once you have done that. Ubuntu, by contrast, can give a user a full system in less than an hour, but my experience at least was that robustness unfortunately is not there to the same degree.

I hope this post is not seen as trolling; truthfully it ended up longer than I intended, but I wanted to communicate this here, in a hopefully diplomatic manner.

I have engaged in some trolling on these forums before, and I apologise for that, because I have come to genuinely see that Ubuntu is a potentially extremely valuable means of converting new users to the larger UNIX ecosystem.

unknownPoster
June 6th, 2009, 06:57 PM
I've run KDE4 on my Pentium 4 with 1 GB RAM before. It wasn't as snappy as something like XFCE, but it was definitely usable. I'm not saying it was sluggish either. I could have definitely have used it as a day-to-day system, but I chose not to for personal reasons.

swoll1980
June 6th, 2009, 06:58 PM
Hey everyone,
I wanted to ask what the minimum system requirements are for running KDE 4? I have a 3.0Ghz 686 Intel processor with 1 Gb of RAM, and an nVidia 8600GT video card, which has 512 Mb of RAM I think.

I hope people don't mind me posting this here, but I wasn't sure where to ask the question.

I did feel a little uneasy asking it here though because truthfully, I'm not actually running Ubuntu myself right now. I have, however, advocated it to both a cousin and a friend, and there is a high likelihood that it will end up installed on both of their machines.

I am currently running FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE, and I will admit that I am a lot happier. While I consistently advocate Ubuntu for novice users offline, truthfully I myself am not a novice.

Ubuntu's greatest strength, I feel, is the fact that a novice user can put a CD in the drive, answer a couple of simple questions, and have a complete system (hopefully with fully working hardware) with a welcoming, non-intimidating graphical interface, in less than 30 minutes. They don't normally need to use the command line until they're ready, either.

However, Ubuntu has a number of under-the-hood technical issues which I truthfully wasn't happy with. I can elaborate on those at greater length if it is desired, in the interests of providing hopefully constructive feedback on where I feel Ubuntu needs to improve.

FreeBSD, on the other hand, has taken me a solid month to customise to exactly the way I want it. Thus, in a way FreeBSD and Ubuntu are almost mirror opposites of each other.

FreeBSD takes a long time and a lot of work to set up and learn, but is extremely stable and reliable once you have done that. Ubuntu, by contrast, can give a user a full system in less than an hour, but my experience at least was that robustness unfortunately is not there to the same degree.

I hope this post is not seen as trolling; truthfully it ended up longer than I intended, but I wanted to communicate this here, in a hopefully diplomatic manner.

I have engaged in some trolling on these forums before, and I apologise for that, because I have come to genuinely see that Ubuntu is a potentially extremely valuable means of converting new users to the larger UNIX ecosystem.

Why did you feel the need to explain all of that?

jrusso2
June 6th, 2009, 07:49 PM
I find of gig of ram runs KDE 4 pretty well.

SunnyRabbiera
June 6th, 2009, 08:12 PM
KDE4 is very tricky sometimes, for something that was supposed to use less memory and resources then KDE3, KDE4 does a **** poor job at it.

petrus4
June 7th, 2009, 11:27 AM
Why did you feel the need to explain all of that?

I guess you're right; I just wanted to express it...I didn't really think about why.

Although I've also seen elsewhere here a place where people post feedback/testimonials, so I thought that was something which was wanted. Maybe I should have posted it there instead.

3rdalbum
June 7th, 2009, 11:49 AM
I've used KDE 4 on a netbook with integrated Intel graphics and 512mb of RAM. I had to turn off Nepomuk or whatever it's called.

Name change
June 7th, 2009, 12:27 PM
I personally installed KDE on Arch on a 488 mhz with 265MB of RAM, it was slow, but it worked...
And there are many other users that did similar things...
You could see this threads for more info:
http://forum.kde.org/how-lightweight-is-kde-trying-to-be-t-28523.html
http://forum.kde.org/kde-4-performance-t-59040.html