Re: Improving KDE Plasma Performance on Low-Resource Systems

On Fri, Aug 21, 2026 at 1:05 PM Lost Nebula <[email protected]> wrote:
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> Dear KDE developers,
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.

It's worth noting that modern web browsers and the modern web as a
whole is very resource-intensive. One tab with a modern chat
application (Element) can consume a gigabyte of RAM on its own.

If you're trying to do serious work, the reality is you may simply
need a faster computer. You could probably use the device you're
looking at with a lightweight desktop like IceWM, and it can still do
things like chat on IRC, compose text documents, and run a text-only
web browser or perhaps a very lightweight, incomplete browser like
Dillo or Netsurf, but what you're trying to do is simply not something
your system can handle.

--
Aaron

> 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**.
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> For example:
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> * 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.
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> These improvements would be extremely valuable.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.**
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> I hope to see serious performance and resource-efficiency improvements that can make GNOME and KDE genuinely usable on low-end systems.
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> Thank you for your work and for considering this feedback.
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