Improving KDE Plasma Performance on Low-Resource Systems

Dear KDE developers,

I know that GNOME and KDE Plasma are modern and feature-rich desktop
environments. However, I believe that performance and resource efficiency
should receive much more attention in the future, especially for low-end
computers and tablets.

My system is a good example of this problem: **an Intel Atom Z3735
processor, 1 GB of physical RAM, 1 GB of ZRAM, and 1 GB of disk swap**.
Even with 1 GB of ZRAM and an additional 1 GB of disk swap, running GNOME
or KDE Plasma puts an extremely heavy load on the system.

The biggest problem is that the system starts struggling even before I can
comfortably open a basic application such as a web browser. Opening another
application while the desktop environment is running, using multiple
applications, or simply running a modern web browser can make the system
extremely slow. The hardware itself is not completely unusable, but the
user experience becomes very difficult: applications take a long time to
open, the system becomes slow to respond, and stability problems can
sometimes occur.

I am not asking GNOME or KDE to abandon their modern features. Instead, I
believe it would be extremely useful if these desktop environments offered
**much more aggressive performance optimizations and dedicated low-resource
modes**.

For example:

* Reducing idle RAM usage as much as possible,
* Reducing unnecessary background processes,
* Automatically reducing animations and visual effects in a low-resource
mode,
* More aggressively optimizing memory usage,
* Ensuring that the desktop itself consumes as few resources as possible
when RAM is limited,
* Reducing CPU usage on older and low-power Atom processors,
* Improving resource sharing between the desktop environment and user
applications under low-memory conditions,
* Providing a genuine **"Low Resource / Performance Mode"** that users can
enable without having to manually configure dozens of settings.

These improvements would be extremely valuable.

In my opinion, low resource consumption is not important only for old
computers. **Resource efficiency should always be an important design
goal.** Using less RAM and CPU means better responsiveness, less swap
activity, lower power consumption, less heat, and potentially longer
battery life. It also allows the operating system to remain usable on a
much wider range of hardware.

A device with 1 GB of RAM may seem extremely old or insignificant today,
but there are still millions of low-end computers, tablets, educational
devices, and older systems in use around the world. Instead of completely
excluding these devices simply because their hardware is limited, making
them usable with an efficient Linux desktop environment would be a
significant advantage for the Linux ecosystem.

On my system, even **1 GB of RAM + 1 GB of ZRAM + 1 GB of disk swap** is
not enough to comfortably run the desktop environment together with
everyday applications. The fact that the system already struggles before I
can even comfortably open a web browser demonstrates how critical desktop
environment resource consumption is on devices with very limited RAM.

For this reason, I would strongly encourage the GNOME and KDE teams to
place greater emphasis on performance improvements, reducing memory
consumption, and improving stability on low-specification systems.

Modern features and visual improvements are certainly important, but
**being able to run a desktop environment smoothly, reliably, and with the
lowest possible resource consumption should be considered just as
important, if not one of the fundamental priorities.**

I hope to see serious performance and resource-efficiency improvements that
can make GNOME and KDE genuinely usable on low-end systems.

Thank you for your work and for considering this feedback.