A SUSE Linux developer has started a new project called KLyDE. The focus of KLyDE (K Lightweight Desktop Environment) is to provide a lightweight KDE desktop.
Will Stephenson, the SUSE developer who has been involved with KDE for years, has been brewing this idea for a while and is beginning to take action on this lightweight KDE implementation. “KDE is not intrinsically bloated. At its core, it jumps through a lot of hoops for memory efficiency and speed, and is modular to a fault. But most packagings of KDE take a kitchen sink approach, and when you install your KDE distribution you get a full suite of desktop, applets and applications. The other major criticism of KDE is that it is too configurable. The KlyDE project applies KDE’s modularity and configurability to the challenge of making a lightweight desktop. However, what I don’t want to do is a hatchet job where functionality is crudely chopped out of the desktop to fit some conception of light weight.”
What the Lightweight KDE Desktop project is seeking is to provide a minimal footprint through packaging changes by factoring out optional components of the KDE desktop, configuration / profile changes, and to ship a simple configuration. This lightweight KDE will also focus upon a fast start-up timeby refactoring startkde or looking at other alternative KDE start-up systems.
There’s some KlyDE packages being offered right now on the Open Build Service for SUSE 12.3 and there’s other progress advancing elsewhere. More details on this lightweight KDE desktop can be found in this blog post.
I’m finding KDE the most congenial of the available desktops. However, I probably only use around 5-10% or what it provides. So KLyDE might be something to consider in the future.
Yes thanks for that. I already deselect various packages when installing openSUSE, but I would cut more out if I knew what I was doing :))
KLyDE sounds like an answer to what many people would like to see in an installation.
@zerum, thanks for posting. An interesting project. Some years back it was possible to do a working minimal openSUSE install with KDE3, but it became too difficult and then came KDE4m akonadi, nepomuk, and all the blah, blah …
Yes, someone claims that is what razorQT is doing. This is also for what I have read a very early stage of the project, so they are still discussing on what to leave out and what to leave in. So substantially, this will lead to Akonadi and Kmail left out of KDE, also Nepomuk, and well, Strigi AFAIK is bound to be substituted completely anyway.
Personally I see this with a laughing and a crying eye. This is running away from problems IMO. Developers’ claim was that, with the Akonadi framework, the GUI would have been less important, so the choices of user interfaces would have gone up. It was also thought that this framework would have reduced redundancy of the separate programs because information would have been stored only once. Desktop-search Strigi and indexing service Nepomuk should have given higher functionality (here is a nice article about what it should have been). I do not know if you notice but there is a huge gap between reality and dream.
Every new version of KDE there is at least with me a problem of Akonadi. Data changes (I continue to have about 50 contacts every time in my PIM agenda that have the same birthday of my ex-girlfrien. Unfortunately, it is only her birthday that I registered, restaurants and industry should not have a birthday and people I do not know intimately not either…), data is lost, the system performance is quite low, the overall functionality is IMO not ready for mission critical use and not ready for reliable every day work. (Is it? Try to open mails in Kmail where Akonadi decides to send to the nirvana mail and attachment forever…and filter send your mail to trash, to the wrong mailbox or …simply do nothing at all).
So now here comes Will Stephenson with the idea of light KDE. So we take off the things that obviously do not work (or are too heavy) Akonadi, Nepomuk?, Strigi?, Kmail and PIM, …etc.
What is left? If you think of it, this exists already three times:
KDE3
TDE
razorQT
And they are already up and running. So now we do ANOTHER desktop project …
I have another great idea about this. Finish what has been begun or abandon because it was the wrong way. The first would mean a fast, not too resource intensive Akonadi framework, a working PIM and a harmonic plasma desktop. The second: byebye Akonadi, Nepomuk, and Strigi all together, a fast and traditional Kmail1-neo and a working PIM that does not invent birthdays. And hop, you have it all ready there your KDE light…without being limited of functionality.
Well, at least in my opinion, split manpower on another project will make at the end everything worth. While the doctors consult, the patient dies.
My thought too and it’s already quite well put together.
I tried it on a sandbox and it’s nice. Just needs some desktop integration refinements and it would be an ideal option
Not really. Razor-qt does not need KDE to run. It needs QT (like KDE), but that’s not the same. If you install razor-qt on a system with no KDE it has no dependencies to any KDE packages.
That’s what I understood. I use RazorQt on a couple of netbooks (the people using them are KDE users, they found the LXDE interface “too different”), it uses Qt, hence has a bit of the KDE looks, but it’s by no means a lightweight KDE. More of an LXDE on Qt.
No, it’s not what Razor-Qt does. Razor-Qt isn’t KDE so that’s the end of that story.
KDE3 is lighter yes but it’s also old, not in development (?) any more and doesn’t get the latest KDE stuff and is a dead so that’s not comparable, an answer or something I want to run anyway.
From the little I’ve read about “Trinity” it’s a mess and beyond that it’s more or less KDE3 so the same answer for that I suppose. Except it still got some (bad?) development. I’d much rather have the more like bigger more active project thank you.
Also the bloat of KDE4 isn’t necessary bad. It’s bad on this limited setup but on a heavier machine which handle it reasonable well or very well than the additional features/benefits may be worth it. For instance being able to search through all your mails (fast) is a nice feature. It’s just a pain fetching all that data on my machine and kmail, amarok and clementine are all too heavy for it. Throw in 8GB or more of RAM and it’s likely ok for now.
I used razor-qt for quite a while after problems with my KDE desktop made it unusable and the only things I missed were the clipboard and the wastebin; I could still set most things as I wanted because it respects any existing KDE settings.
RazorQt does not respect KDE settings. It’s the KDE apps that do, and you Qt config. Just an example: RazorQt will not display the wallpaper you selected in KDE.
