KDE is now my favorite desktop

Back when the lightweight desktops were popping up, KDE was considered pretty memory heavy. Thing is, KDE hasn't really kept up with growing RAM sizes as well as Windows has. ;-) So unless you're trying to run a Linux desktop on a potato, I'd say KDE should now be considered pretty lightweight.

We also did a lot of intentional action to get the resource usage down in the Plasma 5 generation and timeframe.

E.g. the machine we optimized for during at least one or two Plasma dev meetings I remember was the original Pine64 Pinebook, which was a very under-powered device. We had a stack of them to hand to devs. Intentionally as a "if we can get it to fly there, it'll fly anywhere".

So it's not just that we haven't gotten worse, we also did get legitimately better in later releases compared to some of our porkier ones (which also did exist).

Even back in the day KDE pointed out that in real world use they were not as memory heavy because everything depended on the same toolkits that were shared. Meaning your startup memory use was higher, but once you launched the applications/tools you were going to use KDE used less. (this of course depended on which tools you ran, KDE assumed all KDE tools, run a non-kde application and it doesn't work)

Thanks for this work. I switched from xfce when I realised that KDE was nearly as lightweight.

Yeah it legitimately trades blows with the lightweight desktops.

That's genuinely awesome! You people rock! :-D

Thanks to your work, I have stopped DE switching and am very happy with KDE - may you folks always have this user focus!