Personally I don’t really favor the K Desktop Environment, but I do happen to use a lot of the application it provides. I actually did decide to give a try to the new KDE, in Debian, version 4.
So I added the repositories of the Debian KDE team, and install was a breeze. The first thing I wanted to check if rumors are true: that KDE4 is lighter. So I switch the default Log-in manager to KDM, and restarted the computer.
Here are my first observations regarding memory usage of KDE4:
Before loginning in with just KDM runing the ‘free’ command returns the following values:
used: 188396 KB, free: 839448 KB.
after login with no application running:
used: 343224 KB, free: 684620 KB.
The same test with GDM and gnome desktop 2.22.3 yields:
used: 175692 KB, free: 846440
after login with no application running:
used: 294576 KB, free: 733268 KB.
I wish I am wrong about KDE’s memory usage.So, it seems GNOME takes it a little bit more easier with regards to memory usage. Never the less, maybe my test is not the best one (I’m whiling to accept criticism here, and improvement suggestions).
But the applications the come with KDE4 seem great and hopefully the discussed infrastructure improvements are better. For now, I’m playing around with KDE4 when I have some free time, but GNOME stays as default because I feel more at home. With that said, I am not a puritan. I do mixed applications.
My favorite player is Amarok, and I prefer KPDF as my default PDF viewer. Now it’s even better Okular is just great and has build it annotation capabilities. For a long time Ktorrent was my favorite Torrent app (but then Deluge came and replaced it…). The is no second to Kile as a Latex IDE. And K3B is the best CD tool I found so far…
So my impression is that in general GNOME is better as a DE, but K-apps are better as apps. I suspect it has to do with who develops both DE’s. Maybe because they are mostly developed by users comparing to gnome which is more company driven (I saw some number’s on that somewhere, will update my sources later).