Improving KDE Plasma Performance on Low-Resource Systems

[Nate Graham]

I think there are a few salient points we can take away from this thread:

1. There are opportunities to optimize KDE software, in a "patches 
welcome" sort of way.

2. On a device with very low memory by modern standards, swap management 
is a crucial topic. Zswap plus a large swapfile will do a ton better 
than Zram (which IMO needs 8+ GB to work well on its own). And Zram 
should only be used alone — not in conjunction with Zswap, a swapfile, 
and/or a swap partition.

3. Regardless of the above, the bottleneck is likely to be the modern 
web, which is resource-intensive these days. Should it be? Probably not. 
Is it? Yes. Can KDE do anything about it? No. Therefore it needs to be 
treated as a static limitation to keep in mind, with expectations 
tempered accordingly.


Nate