I think this may have been true in the past, but KDE 5 is nowhere near as bloated as KDE once was. (And they've also made huge strides in consistency and a sane UI experience.)

I've tested comparing Gnome/KDE on old hardware (eg, 2 GB of RAM and CPUs built for power conservation), and subjectively I found KDE to be a lot snappier (Gnome Shell always choked for me when hitting Activities) and, after a few hours of uptime, found it used less memory than Gnome. On the same box, it even gave Xfce a run for its money, which was surprising.

Although, when it comes to peddling Linux to other people, I'm hesistant to install KDE for anyone because it's a bit too configurable. I'm always afraid of getting asked for help because of someone accidentally messed up their UI and losing their taskbar or something like that. KDE's came a long way in recent years, but that "you can configure everything" core will always probably be there. And on the flip-side, if I install Gnome, people often find it outlandish and barebones...

Did you try it recently? That was also the stigma of KDE 4.x. 5 is snappy and bloated is probably the wrong word to featureful. I just can't stand gnome exactly due to the opposite: bare bones, missing features, lack of integration and mainly lack of standardized ux.

Add that Gnome it's painful slow and uses more resources that KDE.

> more bloated (in terms of features and options)

that might be subjectively correct to a lot of people, but I find that they are usually set to sane defaults and a lot is disabled by default. Also, I would like to emphasis that the choice of disto kinda matters here as they sometimes change defaults.

That was my opinion as well until about 4 month ago when I actually seriously tried an up to date KDE for the first time in years. Turns out I was completely wrong.

Plasma Desktop uses about the same amount of resources as XFCE.

If you use it with every basic extension, like Kubuntu's default setup, then it's really bloated (Akonadi and MySQL is a dependency for KMail), but thankfully it's highly modular and enough fast for my taste.

I’ve not used Kubuntu in years but there was a time when it was consistently running 50% slower than every other KDE orientated distro (and some distros that were DE agnostic too).

I think Kubuntu did more harm than good for people’s perception of KDE.

Akonadi supports at least four DB engines. To combat bloat, select the SQLite dependency instead of MariaDB/MySQL.

I wish there was the option of not installing Akonadi, but apparently it's not possible any more to run sticky notes and feed reader without it.

Good joke.