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I've been using Debian w/XFCE for a while and I find that I use mostly KDE based apps. The catch is that I have an older computer. XFCE is naturally quite snappy in it's performance. Will KDE's performance be affected by the specs of my machine:
Processor - Intel® Pentium® N3700 (1.6 GHz; Quad-core)
Memory - DDR3L 8 GB
Storage - 1 TB hard drive
Drive Interface - SATA 3 Gbps
Graphics - Intel® HD Graphics (DDR3L Shared graphics memory)
Connectivity - 802.11a/b/g/n/ac wireless LAN & Gigabit LAN
I use the machine for our family photos (no heavy editing), web surfing, genealogy, FLAC playback. Not really heavy lifting i guess.
Last edited by fozhebert on 2018-03-30 02:25, edited 2 times in total.
My daily driver is similar in specs except I have a mobile i7 quad rather than a pentium. I'd imagine that yours will run Plasma just fine.
One of the beauties of linux distros is that most can be tested via a live disk. Get the kde live spin of debian and load it up. Worst case all you lose is download time. Or better yet, if you don't mind adding to your current system, just install the kde-desktop package and load it from your display manager. Probably the quickest method to test it.
After trying KDE, I did notice a performance hit on my machine. It was slight, but still enough to drive me nuts eventually. I've gone back to XFCE and will spend time learning to pretty up XFCE. Yes I am vain...
As the years went by, KDE kept causing more and more mysterious problems. The final straw was when Kmail got too slow to use. For the most recent install, the only KDE I kept is Okular plus minimal libraries ( unfortunately including Pulse Audio ), and I only keep Okular to fill PDF forms when necessary.