To be fair, in comparison to most other DEs, it is still rather heavyweight. Definitely more heavyweight than LXDE and Xfce, and Unity is pretty well-optimised at this point, too.

But yeah, for what KDE is capable off, especially in comparison to GNOME or the Windows-world, it's actually incredibly lightweight.

I run it on a 4 year old mid-range laptop with 4 GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000, and as long as my system isn't under heavy load, it's buttery smooth, even with many of the bells and whistles enabled.

> I run it on a 4 year old mid-range laptop with 4 GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000, and as long as my system isn't under heavy load, it's buttery smooth, even with many of the bells and whistles enabled.

It is a desktop environment, not a 3D game. It should ALWAYS be buttery smooth. You can run a desktop environment on a 20 year old machine.

I used to run Kubuntu (with KDE 4) on an old Yakumo laptop, with 384 megs of RAM and a 600 MHz Celeron. Ran very smoothly. Coudn't have more than 2 apps open at a time, though. (And even that was sometimes pushing it.)

I don't know what they do, but Kubuntu does seem to be a bit heavy compared to Plasma 5 on other distributions. I seem to recall KDE devs calling out Kubuntu for its poor KDE integration.

Tell me, why do I need TWO kwallet daemons?

Why do I need to disable a filesystem indexer by default that slows the system to a crawl?

> Why do I need to disable a filesystem indexer by default that slows the system to a crawl?

As far as I'm aware, that's considered a thing of the past. I haven't seen it recommended for any recent version anywhere and at least for me, it runs perfectly fine without disabling it.

I also only have one kwallet daemon running right now.

That's on Plasma 5.8.

I think Ubuntu 16.04 is on Plasma 5.7 or older. (That's where I experienced this).

My rule of thumb: don't use Kubuntu, use some other KDE distro ( used to be mandrake/mandriva, now possible OpenSuse or Arch or something, I don't follow it too closely ATM.)