I have very much enjoyed using KDE for most of the last twenty or so years that I have been using Linux. Not to mention many of the KDE applications that I find useful. However, over the years, KDE has become massive, komplicated, and monolithic; it is fat and the pieces are so interconnected and interdependent such that it can no longer be properly managed.
I really like many of the KDE features and applications, but KDE insists on having not just one or two but several daemons running underneath the slick desktop in order to accomplish many tasks that I find useless. These daemons do everything from keeping track of files and directories to managing core dumps. KDE itself has become unstable so that core dumps are a common occurrence.
All of this results in a Linux experience that is slow most of the time, and positively glacial at worst.
I have been using other desktops for months, now and am finding the experience much better, However some of the KDE applications I still like have infected my otherwise decent LXDE desktop with remnants of their crapware. For example, Gwenview, a KDE application, is great and it meets all of my needs in an image viewer. However it seems to crash frequently these days and those crashes result in kactivitymanagerd generating many core dump files in /var/lib/systemd/coredump. This takes huge amounts of disk bandwidth and slows down the entire system. More than once it has also resulted in filling the /var filesystem with core dumps which brings the entire system to its knees.
Just to be clear, these problems occur on multiple computers and whether the system was upgraded or installed to bare metal. I have even seen them occur on virtual machines. Google searches indicate that I am not the only one experiencing these problems. Of course this is in addition to the regular five-year release of KDE that is almost completely broken and unusable.
So I am saying goodbye to KDE for the foreseeable future. I will be using LXDE which meets my needs and is also much slimmer and faster than KDE. I also intend to try other desktops from time to time in case they might also meet my needs, but for now I will use LXDE and remove all vestiges of KDE from all of my systems.
See my article “Removing kactivitymanagerd” for details on removing the kactivitymanagerd program.
