You are moving the goalpost once again. First to be light the DE (i.e. Plasma) had to be light; then the DE had to be light, but not Plasma (?), but your redefinition of DE as in Plasma, plus a random set of apps (Dolphin, Konsole and Kate – none of which are distributed with Plasma, by the way).

As that also proved to be light, now you are basing your argument on (a) a poll (?) and (b) that there is at least one desktop that is lighter and that does not need swap.

I am perfectly willing to admit the latter, mainly because it is true: there ARE DEs lighter than Plasma. But it is a strawman argument, as admitting that does not invalidate the statement that “Plasma is light” and “KDE’S software is not bloated”.

I wish you would stick to one thing and argue in good faith. You seem incapable of that so, I’m done.

Probably. I would imagine they look to help you do that, though.

For what it’s worth, there’s the Upcycling Android project by the #FSFE.

I made you a video.

I’m taking about KDE the project.

No you are not. Or you weren’t. Allow me to quote your own post:

I’m talking about the “DE” part of KDE in general;

As the DE is Plasma, that is the part I am addressing. Now you are moving the goalposts. That said, I do not know what you mean when you refer to “the KDE project”, as KDE encompasses many projects.

In any case, I don’t doubt that KDE can’t run at all under the specs you mentioned

So you don’t doubt it is light. Of course if we pile on a bunch of apps, like we could throw in Blender open 50 times rendering 4K animations and I’m sure it will make the laptop run slow. But that would be because of Blender, not the DE.

However, for the sake of argument, I did try the three examples you quoted, Dolphin, Konsole and Kate, and as you can see in the aforementioned video, they are all also very light and worked perfectly simultaneously on the 2008 machine. I do not have Konqueror installed on that machine, as it is not considered an essential part of Plasma anymore and is not widely used.

I’m afraid you are definitely out of the loop: Plasma is the DE. That is what it’s called: Plasma, not KDE. KDE refers to the organisation, the community and all the software the community produces, which includes Plasma (the DE), but also all the apps, frameworks, widgets, etc.

I find it a bit ironic for KDE to be pushing this message, when it’s a heavy DE (relatively speaking)

You didn’t seem to read my message. Allow me to repeat the gist here: Plasma (the DE) works fluidly on a machine bought in 2008 which comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1.8GHz. This machine has an onboard Intel GMA X3100 GPU and 2GB Memory. I doubt a heavy/bloated environment like you are imagining would even be able to display the log in screen on that.

I would advise you stop repeating third-hand FUD, as it is not true, and you tried the software out for yourself. I am sure you will be surprised at how light Plasma (the DE) is.

I think that what you are calling “KDE” may be “Plasma”, since you are comparing with another desktop environment.

To answer your question, yes, and the process started some years ago. It sounds like you may be a bit out of the loop, as Plasma now weighs more or less the same as XFCE, or thereabouts (these things are harder to measure than one may assume). I personally installed Plasma 6 on a Dell XPS PP25L from 2008 and it works flawlessly.

I still play the games. Testing GCompris is a massive time sink. You get caught up in all the activities.

You can also turn things on its head, like

“Krita supports a wide range of tablets and drawing devices out of the box, so you won’t miss expensive closed proprietary alternatives like Photoshop one bit”.

👆 improvised, but you get the idea. You get to reference something the user may know (and this helps you out giving them a clear idea of what you are talking about), and you cast “the alternative” (Photoshop) in a less positive light than the free/libre software at the same time.

JSON is really, really stupidly simple though.

I think “free” is okay. If the software does come at no upfront cost, then fine, why not add that as an incentive to get people on board. They will figure out how to “pay back” sooner or later.

I can tell you a word I do avoid, and that is “alternative”. It makes FLOSS items sound like cheap knockoffs, always playing catch-up with their supposed proprietary and closed equivalents, always seeking feature parity, but never really getting as good as the original. This is not the case. Most software projects, once they reach maturity, more often than not, evolve into their own thing.