I quite like PopOS and also their extension on top of Gnome Shell. I can get that Gnome is frustrating to work with. I'd love to know why they discounted switching KDE. NIH? Outdated biases around the QT license? Or something about the codebase that doesn't fit core objectives?
They don't even need to switch to Plasma. KDE is build on libraries [1] that build on Qt. You can build a custom desktop environment like LXQt [1] from them.
Lack of bindings is a big problem with Qt that often gets ignored. Generally speaking people don’t want to write C++, even if Qt is nicer than average for writing UI with.
In theory it should be possible to use TypeScript or ClojureScript on top of QML. It's beyond my knowledge if this is enough to write applications. A few people have done some work in this regard, but none of the projects really took off:
I haven’t played with QML in quite some time but recall it being rather bare-bones compared to Qt Widgets, GTK, AppKit, etc and it felt a lot more mobile-oriented than any of those. I think any alternative to Qt Widgets or GTK is going to need to be more “batteries included”, with a wide variety of highly capable widgets ready to use out of the box.
The usability of KDE aside, it's not exactly the most lightweight interface. While a VM on my system can run GNOME without issues, a KDE one starts showing signs of slowdowns. Both are easily beaten by LXDE though, as crap as it is otherwise.
Given that they're doing it in Rust one'd hope that the end result could be both very usable and fast at the same time, but only time will tell.
KDE Plasma is generally less resource-intensive than Gnome, and has been for a number of years since it was optimized for low-power devices such as the original Pinebook and PinePhone (essentially low-end ARM SBCs, RPi3-class, in different boxes). VM performance may not be representative there.
Not that it's not a very valid use case to perform well in VMs, but that can be down to specific details of emulated drivers, etc. For example in a VM without good 3D acceleration Plasma can be run in software emulation of OpenGL -or- directly via CPU-based 2D rendering, and the latter is a lot speedier.
> The usability of KDE aside, it's not exactly the most lightweight interface.
I wonder if that is still true. I switched from MATE to KDE several months ago and from what I read, KDE invested a lot in optimization of their code (both cpu performance and memory use) in the last couple of years. I switched to KDE on all of my machines. The oldest one it is running on is a Thinkpad X200t with a Core 2 Duo (SL9400) and 4GB RAM (with SSD), and it is running fine when using it with chrome, okular, krita, ... I thought they were kinda forced to focus on optimization because of the development of plasma mobile.
Obviously, it'll still be beaten by LXDE, but compared to Gnome it should perform a lot better nowadays than some years ago.
I heard KDE still uses ~500MB RAM on idle, which is too much for older computers. I don't care for animations and hiDPI but i would care to have <100MB RAM usage and 0% CPU usage on idle.
EDIT: Also catering to slow hardware is not just about memory usage, it's also about how much you need to read from disk. In this regard, both GNOME and KDE are pretty bad when running from HDD.
EDIT2: For comparison, Haiku OS says 384MB RAM is the minimum to run the entire system with desktop environment.
That may be true about the ~500MB RAM, I did not measure it or anything and I agree: if you want to go for <100MB RAM you'll need to look for something else. I actually used i3wm (with separate programs) before on my older computers, but I was pleasantly surprised by KDE performance and decided to stick with it.
I'm using KDE on a System76 Lemur, and it's snappy. It's also not a twelve-year old Thinkpad like my previous computer, for which KDE was not appropriate, but KDE is lighter relative to current hardware than it was eight or ten years ago, when I last used it in earnest on a machine that made sense. I never expected to use KDE again after my experience back then, but they've made it perform well while doing everything I could want a DE to do.
Surprised you mentioned LXDE and ignored lxqt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXQt
I find KDE fully featured and lightweight enough on every modern laptop and desktop I’ve used in the last decade. I haven’t had a reason to switch from KDE, it’s like a much better Windows GUI.
