I appreciate the discussion Martin, especially coming from you. You have to understand that there are no distros (I've tried a few) that have KDE 4 running in even 200MB quoted on the previous e-mail. I've previously saw ~350MB on Gentoo, stripped down install, and never less than 600MB on Ubuntu. Gnome 3 and Unity are similar, for whatever reason. That's just a class of memory usage that's not suited to a lot of devices. If you think it's possible to go lower, much lower, I'd love to see that in default installs, as currently RAM usage on Linux desktops is up to Windows standards and going higher with each passing year, for no apparent reason to the end-user.
1) Sorry for my misleading previous e-mail, the 200MB were for Trinity+system and the 140 supplemental MBs for KDE4+new X server. I did the tests again just after having uninstalled gtk+2 for the purposes of the test (I have some python/gtk2 autostarted applets I suspected of taking up some significant amounts of RAM): -On console mode (with Intel KMS) the system takes 110 MB RAM (but it could be better since I use the "huge" kernel, which is basically a "make allyesconfig" kernel). -With just KDE4 started, and a Konsole fired up from the Plasma desktop, the total memory usage went up to 201 MB: 91 MB for KDE SC 4.4.3 + X server (Nepomuk, strigi and KWin desktop effects not activated). -With just Trinity started, and a Konsole fired up from kicker, the total memory usage (KDE4 was exited) went up from 110 MB to 159 MB: 49 MB for Trinity 3.5.13 + X server. 2) Tiago, do you use x86 or amd64 ? There is a significant increase in memory usage if you use amd64. The system on which I gave the RAM measurements has x86 userland and amd64 kernel. 3) +1 for the defaults, I don't consider for example that setting the Oxygen effects by default at "Very high CPU" is sane.
Best regards, Tiago
Kind Regards Martin Gräßlin