Description
KDE Plasma is a great, performant, customizable, well maintained and modular Desktop. But still, by default it can be seen as pretty bloated. It includes animations, has baloo which is notorious for consuming too much resources, has preinstalled plasmoids that are not removable. There are many things in the UI that are not performant and dont work well on old hardware, or in virtual machines, maybe also solutions like KASM (a VM accessed throug the browser)
Splitting up Plasma into the main packages, like "kwin-wayland" and "kwin-wayland-extras" and keeping an eye on removing as many soft dependencies as possible, will help to make Plasma a good alternative to LXQt or others, which are simply not well maintained.
The end result should feel the same, and Distributions would just install the "-extras" packages along, but users are able to have a minimal install, or Distros could allow package groups or whole editions for low powered devices.
What it will take
Changing many packages, moving many elements into separate ones, make the modular approach work.
Splitting it into a barebones version, without many animations, blur, transparency, effects, and many not essential things. This could become opinionated.
How we know we succeeded
When Plasma works well on very old hardware, with 2GB RAM or less, and very bad GPU. When Plasma works well with a normal CPU and software rendering in a VM.
When users are able to remove the preinstalled plasmoids without removing plasma.
Relevant links
Champions
We want this year's goals to be driven by small teams. Who will be this goals champions if selected? If you don't yet have a small team please mention what you are looking for still so others can step up. We believe a goal generally needs someone who can carry the vision of the goal forward, someone who can technically steer it and someone to promote it.
I am willing to put work into this
I am interested
- kenning