Improving KDE Plasma Performance on Low-Resource Systems

[Konstantin Kharlamov]

On Mon, 2026-08-17 at 10:13 +0300, Lost Nebula wrote:
> 
> 
> Dear KDE developers,
> 
> I know that GNOME and KDE Plasma are modern and feature-rich desktop
> environments. However, I believe that performance and resource
> efficiency should receive much more attention in the future,
> especially for low-end computers and tablets.
> 
> My system is a good example of this problem: **an Intel Atom Z3735
> processor, 1 GB of physical RAM, 1 GB of ZRAM, and 1 GB of disk
> swap**. Even with 1 GB of ZRAM and an additional 1 GB of disk swap,
> running GNOME or KDE Plasma puts an extremely heavy load on the
> system.

I don't think your description fits an average lower-performance
system. I see two problems in your configuration, both heavily
influencing your poor experience, and I kind of hope other users of
similarly old/low-end hardware have no these.

1. 1G of disk SWAP. Like, why? Allocate at least 8G, what are you
afraid of? Swap storms? Well, fear not: modern Linux kernel for
multiple years has MLRU that was contributed by Google with focus on
SWAP performance on Android devices, and that's enabled by default in
pretty much every popular distro. MLRU allows kernel to choose "cold
memory" much better, so you have much less probability that application
would try to use memory that's residing on disk/in swap.
2. You're using ZRAM with SWAP, that's just wrong. You want either
"just ZRAM" or "ZSWAP + SWAP". Your combination of "ZRAM + SWAP" isn't
going to give you the experience you expect. I can refer you to this
article that goes deeper into this topic:
https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html

-------

If you have specific points to improve when these configuration
problems are fixed, I think it could be interesting to discuss. But as
you currently represent the situation, there's just nothing specific to
KDE (or to any DE for that matter).