KLyDE: Lightweight KDE Desktop In the Making

jrepin writes "During Hack Week 9 at SUSE, longtime KDE hacker Will Stephenson started working on a project codenamed KLyDE. This project's aim is to bring KDE Plasma to the lightweight desktop market. It applies KDE's strengths of modularity and configurability to the challenge of making a lightweight desktop." Better said, Stephenson was able to devote lots of time to it; he's been working on the project for a few years now.

Re:KDE and lightweight.

[Nerdfest]

Regardless of size, I recall seeing some performance tests on Phoronix showing KDE being significantly faster at pretty much everything than Unity and Gnome. That was a couple of releases ago, but it was pretty impressive.

Re:Why?

[kangsterizer]

Razor QT is a light, QT based DE.
KDE is also using QT, but is an entirely different DE. Razor is not KDE. You can't start plasma widgets on Razor. You don't have the KDE libs either.

KlyDE is actually compatible with large parts of KDE, specifically, plasma.

Re:This effort could be spent better!

[Anonymous Coward]

Will has been contributing to KDE for many, many years and was on the OpenSUSE KDE team until quite recently. There's a lot of work by Will in various KDE projects, and when this is ready for prime time I am sure it will also appear in some form in shipping product.

Re:KDE and lightweight.

[martin-boundary]

Except speed and size are highly correlated. Computer architectures are still designed in such a way that if you use as little RAM as possible, and have a small computation footprint that's highly localized, then your performance skyrockets. So the available 2GB RAM is irrelevant - if you actually make full use of it, you'll be running a lot slower than if you can fit everything you need to do in 4K.

Re:KDE and lightweight.

[sgunhouse]

Already been several mini-distros (the whole system is under 100 MB) that do use KDE. Things like Nimblex come to mind, though that's been a few years ago now. Admittedly not sure they kept Plasma though ...

But as KDE is supposed to be able to run on phones now, it should be easy enough.

Re:KDE and lightweight.

[silviuc]

You should revisit those tests. There are new ones where KDE pretty much got its ass kicked by Unity: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNDk [phoronix.com]