KDE hardware requirements blown out of proportion

[qalimas]

http://linuxreviews.org/software/desktops/

Now, maybe it's just me, but that confuses me a little, and I worry that it'll turn up in too many Google results and give people the wrong idea.

The article says KDE needs 512MB of RAM. I have 724MB in my laptop, but I have a Karama theme monitoring my system, I've never seen it use over 256MB, not even while I'm doing a lot of multitasking. The same goes for Gnome. And my friend had his Xfce install down to using only 30MB, 50 or so once Gaim, Firefox, XMMS and the like were running...

I just though I'd get clarification of what they suggest so much RAM for, if anyone knows or has any ideas?

[stimpack]

Prima BS article. Not least Gnome and KDE with the current versions have completly identical ram usage. Anyone can test that if they have both installed.

[aysiu]

I've used KDE on 128 MB, and after some KPersonalizer tweaks, it runs just fine.

[ComplexNumber]

guys, don't forget that not all RAM runs at the same speed.

[aysiu]

guys, don't forget that not all RAM runs at the same speed.

Tell that to the person who wrote the article.

[Mathias-K]

guys, don't forget that not all RAM runs at the same speed.

That's right, but if KDE loaded 500MBs of klibs/kicker/kio-slaves/ktanlibglk5.0-1-2 files into your RAM, performance would go down even if your lone 256MB stick was the most insanely overclocked DDR2 PC2-1000 speed

[njf]

That's right, but if KDE loaded 500MBs of klibs/kicker/kio-slaves/ktanlibglk5.0-1-2 files into your RAM, performance would go down even if your lone 256MB stick was the most insanely overclocked DDR2 PC2-1000 speed

Stop the fud non-sense please.

[jdong]

KDE and GNOME [the environments themselves] will both run comfortable within a 128MB system. However, if you expect to be able to run more than one program at a time, you'd want to step up for 256. Even at 256, running a particularly RAM-hungry program (Azureus or Openoffice, as examples) can cause RAM starvation and the kernel to terminate a RAM hog.

As a result, I recommend at least 256MB RAM to use KDE/GNOME, while I'd say that 'power users' want in excess of 512MB. I personally stick 1GB in all my systems, as more RAM yields better overall performance (especially with Linux's caching abilities).


As far as GNOME vs KDE, nowadays both are around equal in terms of RAM consumption. As far as performance, that's really a touchy and mixed field. Most of the times they are on par, but with 2.14 GNOME has received a bunch of performance tweaks that should improve its performance compared to KDE. I have only seen GNOME numbers to support that claim and I do not really feel any difference in my day-to-day use, so I can't confirm that except by running synthetic benchmarks and saying "Yep. It draws 10,000 windows faster than KDE. Wonderful."

[Jucato]

But then again, those RAM-hungry programs aren't KDE apps at all. And the same programs would behave the same way (RAM hungry) whether or not they run in KDE, GNOME, or even Windows! Specially these two, as they are using Java (particularly Azureus).

I was able to effectively and satisfactorily run KDE on my system with only 256 MB of RAM. and that's with SuperKaramba themes and some other apps running in the background. 512MB RAM for KDE? that's just plain *@%$#!!!

[jdong]

I'm not defending the article's author. I agree that saying KDE (or GNOME or whatever DE is commonly available) requires 512MB RAM is just ridiculous.

However, a desktop environment is just the base and is beneath everything you do on your system, so there definitely are users that would need 512MB RAM. Is it KDE's fault? Not at all. It's whatever program demands so much RAM. Often times it's not a bit associated with KDE.

However, if that person is to use, say, Fluxbox (which uses under 5MB RAM at all times), would that make a difference? Perhaps, if the 80 or so MB of RAM that KDE would be using is freed, it could make the difference between run and doesn't run.