Linux Tutorial

KDE / Kubuntu

One of the problems some users who use desktop environment KDE is a distribution out heavy and unresponsive.

In fact, just do some research on KDE to see that many users report this problem indicate that, even if the KDE team seems to have “lightweight” desktop environment especially in the new 4.7.x.
KDE is an environment innovative desktop to look beautiful, fully customizable and designed for any type of user.
A major problem that once installed give “weight” to our desktop environment is mainly due to the default configuration which uses a lot of effects (some useless) and other configurations in which if we have a last generation PC with plenty of ram no problems , but if our pc is dated or scarce resources definitely slow down and not just KDE.

We can speed up KDE? With this article we will try to give advice to speed up KDE all with ease.

First we set our KDE to ask for the minimum the use of your CPU to do it from the menu go to System Settings and go to Appearance of Applications and choose the Style tab, and set in the Fine Tuning High resolution and low use CPU, or better still low resolution and low CPU usage and click on Apply. This way Plasma is not going to overload our CPU.

Now let’s take away some effects that can slow down our desktop environment to make it always go to System Settings and go to the Desktop Effects tab and from there all the effects we remove the above check of Blur (have less transparency in the windows of our panel but gain in speed) and the thumbnail on the taskbar and then also to other effects that do not use, after click on Apply to confirm the changes.

KDE Nepomuk is enabled by default which allows us to perform detailed searches on our PC, we do not use this feature if we can turn it off to do more and go to System Settings in the Desktop Search, and take away the pressure of Nepomuk Semantic Desktop and click on Apply.

To speed up KDE startup is especially useful to have a session to empty every time we go to do so under Startup and Shutdown Manager and click on logon session starts with an empty session and click on Apply to confirm

Now we can disable some applications that are launched automatically at startup but that did not use to do that we start the terminal and type:

dolphin sudo /usr/share/autostart/

will open our file manager with some of these files can be deleted:

konqy_preload (konqueror preload)
kaddressbookmigrator (if you have previously disabled akonadi not needed)
KOrganic.desktop (krganizer alerts)

and close the window.

To speed up our KDE applications can also be removed in a few words Krunner remove the notification that appears when an application crashes to do so click on ALT + F2 and type kdebugdialog and press send and it will open a window from there we click Check None and then click Apply to confirm.

Booting our distribution and we should notice improvements in speed and responsiveness.

If you have any other advice on how to speed up KDE you can report it by commenting on this article.