Needing a GPU might be hyperbole, but no, it’ll still be slow on older hardware. It looks lightweight on neofetch since, at rest, the RAM will appear as low as XFCE’s, but it’s not nearly as snappy.
Actually I tried out KDE Plasma on my grandmother’s budget laptop from about the same time. It was a little too slow with default settings, but once I killed the animations (can be done in Settings app) it ran pretty well. It ran a whole hell of a lot better than the Windows it came with.
I also tested KDE vs XFCE in my old gaming computer, and I actually managed to get slightly less RAM usage in KDE than XFCE, so long as no plugins were used.
Both systems were tested with Debian 12. On the gaming PC, I actually used the XFCE iso, so it was installed first.
So depending on how your distro ships the default KDE Plasma settings or how you set it up, it actually can be a lightweight option compared with XFCE.
It’s all relative. Ubuntu desktop is minimal compared to Windows, and I’ve found KDE to run much better than default Ubuntu. It’s lightweight for how much it offers.
Kde is minimal now? Doesn’t it require a GPU? Aren’t there animations?
I remember trying it out a few years back on my laptop from 2012 and it was unusably slow. Like 10 seconds just to open the menu.
Xfce ran just fine though. That’s a minimal DE.
Needing a GPU might be hyperbole, but no, it’ll still be slow on older hardware. It looks lightweight on neofetch since, at rest, the RAM will appear as low as XFCE’s, but it’s not nearly as snappy.
Actually I tried out KDE Plasma on my grandmother’s budget laptop from about the same time. It was a little too slow with default settings, but once I killed the animations (can be done in Settings app) it ran pretty well. It ran a whole hell of a lot better than the Windows it came with.
I also tested KDE vs XFCE in my old gaming computer, and I actually managed to get slightly less RAM usage in KDE than XFCE, so long as no plugins were used.
Both systems were tested with Debian 12. On the gaming PC, I actually used the XFCE iso, so it was installed first.
So depending on how your distro ships the default KDE Plasma settings or how you set it up, it actually can be a lightweight option compared with XFCE.
It’s all relative. Ubuntu desktop is minimal compared to Windows, and I’ve found KDE to run much better than default Ubuntu. It’s lightweight for how much it offers.