6 Feb
2012
6 Feb
'12
11:43 p.m.
Darrell Anderson wrote:
KDE4 will not run on older hardware. An idle,
stripped-to-the-bones KDE4 desktop (along with the underlying operating system) requires
more than 512 MB of RAM. That more or less excludes people on fixed incomes with older
computers and people in developing regions of the world from using KDE4. From my
perspective KDE4 has become a geek's playground and geeks almost always have bleeding
edge hardware. Understandably so because time is money. The faster development proceeds
the faster the results. Better hardware improves that kind of environment. But that kind
of environment is not what non developers use, which is where software should always be
tested. Fellow geeks using bleeding edge hardware and sharing similar opinions seldom
provide good feedback for usability testing.
This isn't necessarily true. I've been running a somewhat stripped down
(no compositing or Nepomuk/Strigi) KDE4.4/Debian Squeeze installation on
a ~6 year old Thinkpad T42 (PM(a)1.7GhZ) for the past year or so. The
system has 'only' 512MB of RAM, and rarely uses it all! (idles at about
200 in fact.) I have another modest system running KDE4.7 on SUSE that
idles at 220MB used. I haven't done any real optimization on these
systems, just disabled desktop effects and Nepomuk/Strigi. Now, I still
wouldn't use it on anything *really* old, but KDE4's certainly more
capable on older hardware than it gets credit for.