Darrell Anderson wrote:
> KDE4 will not run on older hardware. An idle, stripped-to-the-bones KDE4 desktop (along with the underlying operating system) requires more than 512 MB of RAM. That more or less excludes people on fixed incomes with older computers and people in developing regions of the world from using KDE4. From my perspective KDE4 has become a geek's playground and geeks almost always have bleeding edge hardware. Understandably so because time is money. The faster development proceeds the faster the results. Better hardware improves that kind of environment. But that kind of environment is not what non developers use, which is where software should always be tested. Fellow geeks using bleeding edge hardware and sharing similar opinions seldom provide good feedback for usability testing.
>    
This isn't necessarily true. I've been running a somewhat stripped down 
(no compositing or Nepomuk/Strigi) KDE4.4/Debian Squeeze installation on 
a ~6 year old Thinkpad T42 (PM@...) for the past year or so. The 
system has 'only' 512MB of RAM, and rarely uses it all! (idles at about 
200 in fact.) I have another modest system running KDE4.7 on SUSE that 
idles at 220MB used. I haven't done any real optimization on these 
systems, just disabled desktop effects and Nepomuk/Strigi. Now, I still 
wouldn't use it on anything *really* old, but KDE4's certainly more 
capable on older hardware than it gets credit for.