How is KDE Plasma nowadays regarding being lightweight? Back ages ago I remember it being one of the heavy desktop environments, but it ran just fine on my 15 year old laptop (was ~10 years old during that time) alongside gnome which IIRC worked better under nouveau...

but now I see GNOME has gotten heavier (which wasn't unexpected), libadwaita apps are inefficient. How's KDE Plasma on that regard?

also can anyone recommend a good lightweight web browser to use on an old armv7 tablet with max OpenGL ES 2.0 gpu? Preferably something packaged in Alpine (tablet runs pmOS)

@fun IMO, the KDE bloat comes from the vast amount of applications and specific services (*looks at akonadi/baloo*) and not exactly from the core DE itself (kwin/plasma)

@pj that's nice to hear.

@fun
Just ditched Dolphin in favor of PCmanFM because it launches faster on my laptops, pretty important for a filemanager.

Also installed Krusader but it doesn't support drag&drop between apps (couldn't drag my music to Audacious) even on old reliable X11.
Guess I'll use one of the other billion Norton Commander clones.

@fun
The actual kwin Window Manager runs fine on my dual core Ivy Bridge laptop, even with transluscent windows and a 1440p panel as the display*.
Menus (full fat start menu, calendar, clock) take a little longer to show up than they should, but it's not as bad as Vista on an entry-level machine full of OEM bloatware.

This is on MX Linux (one of the dozen "Debian: Home Edition"-type distros aimed at low end computers).

* not a high refresh rate panel, but still a worthy upgrade for any Thinkpad T420/T430 enjoyer
* Intel HD Graphics 4000

@fun Outside of the obvious firefox and chromium, there is epiphany aka gnome web as a relatively complete webkit option.
While not in alpine, there is the flow browser demo which is one of the fastest lightweight browser engines that's also capable of displaying most of the web(discord, youtube etc), though the ui is currently limited when it comes to tabs etc: https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
You can also try servo or ladybird but they're very incomplete.

@DenJohn Epiphany is GTK4+libadwaita so it's guaranteed that it will be completely unusable on this hardware, because it renders everything in software, and it's very inefficient at doing so especially with all the libadwaita eye candy.
Servo uses WebRender, same as firefox, so it will be very laggy as well.

Flow .. I'll give it a try, thanks!

@fun ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

@fun I feel like I should point out that the flow browser is proprietary and has worse website compatibility than even WebKit.

Though it is better than Servo (for compatibility, not freedom).

@UndeadLeech Ah, bummer.

@UndeadLeech well yes I'll try kumo but I wanted some other browsers too so I have a list of what I could try next :)