On Monday 14 January 2008, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
The "Look and Feel" factors have come to overshadow all else. Often in some cases literally pushing system resource demands way out of proportion. Anyone care to name their bloatware examples? I will state that the window managers of light footprint tend to have an amusing fraction of resource usage compared to KDE or others.
All reports are that KDE4 is lighter than KDE3. I wouldn't consider KDE bloatware myself, but I guess that is subjective.
Also try not to compare apples and oranges. :)
That is, if you're comparing *window managers*, compare them to KWin, not to all of KDE. And don't include kdelibs in your comparison unless you're prepared to include the libraries used by Other WM.
Regardless of the comparison, realize that kdelibs and Qt are used by not merely KWin, but also all the desktop applications in KDE. Since these are shared objects, in theory, the overall memory consumption should be minimized.