One of the unfortunate things I run into on social media is this idiotic perception that KDE is bloated and cumbersome, then when you drill down into the argument, you often find that these same people haven't used it for 10-15 years.
I'm not sure how you can fix branding perceptions that are based on fallacious experiences that weren't updated in the last decade, but I think some manner of user evangelism can also help!
I've got a couple old laptops from 2007/2011 era - are you talking about KDE Plasma or a different DE? I'm down to try just about whatever you recommend.
I run KDE Plasma on a 10 years old underpowered tablet (1G RAM, Intel Atom 1.66 GHz, slow SSD - 32G too) [1]. Anything else is unusable on this tablet. It is slow but it works. Xfce and LXDE are probably lighter, but were barely usable on it when I tried and I'm not sure they would be so much faster. Browsers and apps are certainly what eats your RAM, and with KDE you get apps that share a lot of code in memory. Xfce / LXDE don't provide many things so you will need some Gnome or KDE apps anyway.
I wouldn't bet that Xfce is that much lighter than Plasma nowadays (but definitively disable features like search indexing on slow hardware). On 2G of RAM, you probably should choose between KDE, LXDE, XFCE, maybe MATE (or lighter environments), the one you like the most. I can't say for Cinnamon ; probably fine. Gnome is probably too heavy.
If a person used KDE 10 years ago and it was bloated, and I haven't used it since, I don't think it's fair (or helpful for that matter) to use terms like 'idiotic' when trying to convince someone to give the project a second chance.
Their use of the term is not meant personally I'm sure, but for anyone applying insights that are ten years out of date in a fairly rapidly changing field of software like this, they are hardly going to win awards for being smart are they?
This happens too much with software - look at various open source filesystems that had reliability issues in the early days (which is pretty reasonable), someone writes a piece that highlights this and years later people are still parroting it as current insight - with the downside being that it can crush a project and thus in time make a self fulfilling legacy.
KDE has always been the most bloated in the initial install. However when you actually try to do something you discover that whatever the environment they are all about as big, with KDE being the smallest since they trade initial bloat for in use leanness.
Not trying to hate on KDE, I know many people who love it, but I have found it less performant on old hardware than Xfce. (Maybe its a cpu/GPU rather than ram thing?) I started using Linux last year, and tried KDE last month.
If the hardware is really old to not br able to support animations properly, just disable those animations. Transparency effects can be disabled as well. Everything. It is by far the lightest and most efficient DE
One of the unfortunate things I run into on social media is this idiotic perception that KDE is bloated and cumbersome, then when you drill down into the argument, you often find that these same people haven't used it for 10-15 years.
I'm not sure how you can fix branding perceptions that are based on fallacious experiences that weren't updated in the last decade, but I think some manner of user evangelism can also help!