KDE on Intel i5-3337U with 4GB ram

PacketMan

PacketMan

Hi all,

I was thinking of trying to get KDE working an a Toshiba laptop equipped with a Intel i5-3337U and 4GB ram. Should I even bother, or go with something lightweight like XFCE? It it works, is a bit slow I am fine with that. If it's gonna spend all its time swapping then I'll go with XFCE, and save the time.
 
astyle said:
I'd suggest going with something ligher, like XFCE. At least XFCE will be up-to-date. I like KDE, but it does need at least 8 GB of RAM to function properly.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that is where my mind is/was, and I think you just nudged me off the fence. Thank you.

Thanks again,
Packet Man
 
XFCE is not exactly a light desktop. The stuff it drags in seems excessive.
1740 - I 0:00.02 /usr/local/libexec/gvfsd
1743 - I 0:00.01 /usr/local/libexec/dconf-service
2482 - I 0:00.03 /usr/local/lib/xfce4/xfconf/xfconfd
2484 - I 0:00.01 /usr/local/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor (gvfs-udisks2-volume)
2486 - I 0:00.02 /usr/local/libexec/gvfs-mtp-volume-monitor (gvfs-mtp-volume-mon)
2488 - I 0:00.02 /usr/local/libexec/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor (gvfs-gphoto2-volume)
2490 - I 0:00.01 /usr/local/libexec/gvfsd-metadata
Click to expand...

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Install Openbox on FreeBSD

In this tutorial, I'll explain how to install the Openbox window manager on FreeBSD. Openbox is a very stable and fast window manager. I...
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pkg install openbox obconf xorg xfe xpdf lumina-calculator mplayer librewolf drm-61-kmod tint2
Editing the openbox menu is so easy with an XML file used for configuration. I never figured out how to edit the XFCE menu.
(Note: obmenu from tutorial is no longer in ports due to py27 dependency) XML is structured plain text. So easy an idiot can do it.
The tutorial mentions Leafpad. OK editor but xfe includes both an XWriter and Image Viewer as standalone applications. xfw and xfi
So feh only if you want a background image and I feel that goes against a light desktop..

To me it seems the window manager trimmings are nothing more than a distraction.
 
14.3 with KDE 6.4.1 running on a VMware virtual machine with Intel i5-4670k CPU (3 cores enabled) and 8 G RAM, a couple of minutes after startup:

69 processes: 1 running, 68 sleeping
CPU: 13.3% user, 0.0% nice, 6.7% system, 0.0% interrupt, 80.0% idle
Mem: 895M Active, 723M Inact, 755M Wired, 5531M Free
ARC: 487M Total, 134M MFU, 333M MRU, 132K Anon, 3108K Header, 16M Other
394M Compressed, 900M Uncompressed, 2.28:1 Ratio
Swap: 2048M Total, 2048M Free

On a 4 G system it will leave around 1.5 G free. Is this enough for you?
 
siealex said:
14.3 with KDE 6.4.1 running on a VMware virtual machine with Intel i5-4670k CPU (3 cores enabled) and 8 G RAM, a couple of minutes after startup:

69 processes: 1 running, 68 sleeping
CPU: 13.3% user, 0.0% nice, 6.7% system, 0.0% interrupt, 80.0% idle
Mem: 895M Active, 723M Inact, 755M Wired, 5531M Free
ARC: 487M Total, 134M MFU, 333M MRU, 132K Anon, 3108K Header, 16M Other
394M Compressed, 900M Uncompressed, 2.28:1 Ratio
Swap: 2048M Total, 2048M Free

On a 4 G system it will leave around 1.5 G free. Is this enough for you?
Click to expand...
If it's idle, great. But if you try to run Firefox with many tabs, like for DIscord, ESPN, and whatnot, that will eat up your RAM in a hurry.
 
astyle said:
I like KDE, but it does need at least 8 GB of RAM to function properly.
Click to expand...
There's no way. GNOME has the rep for resource usage, and I know it (at least up to somewhere 40s) runs fine with a few Firefox tabs with 4GB system RAM :p KDE likely wouldn't have a following if it was somehow more than that.

I'd just use Xfce. It works well, and I used it on FreeBSD with a fresh boot around 700-900MB.

I had two Firefox tabs open after fresh boot on Win11 and I'm barely at 3GB :p About 20 minutes later I'm at 3.5GB (2nd screenshot). While I doubt GNOME and KDE could be worse, Xfce has way lower usage fresh boot.
 

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I would install i3 if under X or sway if Wayland.
I myself am already switching from XFCE4.20 to WM today.
It is not as easy as I thought, but it definitely makes sense.
KDE and GNOME are like baking pies, they generate so much heat.
4 GB, as was correctly written here - will quickly be eaten by the browser itself,
if you actively use it.
You need to look for a lighter browser, disable java script, disable images, etc., and not just
change DE.
 
I've run kde in the past on 4GB machines... believe it or not there was a time when 4GB was a huge amount of memory. Sometimes I went in and turned off a lot of stuff to cut the number of processes (baloo search, etc) to cut the footprint. But I haven't tried running kde on a 4GB machine for a few years now. My kde5 plasma box has 16 GB ram. I would look at openbox/windowmaker/fvwm3 and make a nice cut-down system. There is so much bit-bloat stuff you don't need... well, depending on what you want to do with it, of course.

I run windowmaker on an old thinkpad with 8GB RAM and it works very nicely on this hardware, I can do pretty much anything I want with it short of run a lot of VM's. Of course windowmaker isn't the only light-weight window manager around.
 
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