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KLyDE: Lightweight KDE Desktop In the Making
jrepin writes "During Hack Week 9 at SUSE, longtime KDE hacker Will Stephenson started working on a project codenamed KLyDE. This project's aim is to bring KDE Plasma to the lightweight desktop market. It applies KDE's strengths of modularity and configurability to the challenge of making a lightweight desktop." Better said, Stephenson was able to devote lots of time to it; he's been working on the project for a few years now.
Removing the more bloated 'features' KDE is laden with by default would get most of us there. I suspect 99% of KDE users would be just fine without the Akonadi MySQL instance in their home directory.
Regardless of size, I recall seeing some performance tests on Phoronix showing KDE being significantly faster at pretty much everything than Unity and Gnome. That was a couple of releases ago, but it was pretty impressive.
Razor QT is a light, QT based DE.
KDE is also using QT, but is an entirely different DE. Razor is not KDE. You can't start plasma widgets on Razor. You don't have the KDE libs either.
KlyDE is actually compatible with large parts of KDE, specifically, plasma.
Will has been contributing to KDE for many, many years and was on the OpenSUSE KDE team until quite recently. There's a lot of work by Will in various KDE projects, and when this is ready for prime time I am sure it will also appear in some form in shipping product.
Lightweight is no longer about size... cheap systems are coming with 8GB of Flash and 2GB of RAM these days.
What's important is speed on relatively (400MHz) slow/weak low power processor cores.