If I needed one more reason to run away from KDE 5, the fate just gave it to me. It might have to do with Arch and how their derivatives are put together, but still, I don’t feel like repairing such a shit. I don’t want to go back to startx running twm, nor to win starting Windows 3.1 from MS-DOS, but this was too much, and it definitely was the legendary last straw.

Oh, the good old times of Slackware 3.0. You were issuing startx, and, provided the previously run XFree86 -configure went well, in the end X was doing an exec fvwm2. If I wanted a different window manager, all I had was to edit the last line of .xinitrc. Nowadays, everything is so complex, and I never understood why.

I was in my installed Arch mix, obtained this way:

  • I installed Salient OS KDE (originally v21.03).
  • I added several DEs: XFCE, MATE, Cinnamon, i3. On occasions, I toggled between them.
  • I added Chaotic-AUR, for 2-3 packages I preferred not to build from AUR.
  • I just kept updating it as required.

Yesterday, I decided I no longer want to keep updating so many packages I don’t use, so I uninstalled whatever packages were in Cinnamon, i3, MATE, XFCE. Then I allowed the system to update, after some time of skipping all the updates (Windows habits die hard). As it also had a newer kernel, I decided to reboot.

It worked perfectly after the restart… or did it?

I wasn’t doing anything, I didn’t start any program, and updates, they were none. And yet, the CPU fan was busy, albeit not constantly. As it was the case, the CPU was oscillating between about 25% and 75%, for no good reason whatsoever!

The first thing I noticed: 3.04 GB of RAM! On a freshly started system?! Also, six Xorg instances?!

Sorting by CPU revealed that there wasn’t any single process to take unusual chunks of CPU. There were however too many of them busy with… what? Say… No less than 18 instances of kwin_x11!

I also had six konsole processes (I only opened one), and… 18 plasmashell instances to match the kwin_x11 ones!

Such a joke of a situation would have been impossible in all versions of Windows… except maybe for Windows 10, which is getting worse with every day (don’t get fooled by WSL 2). OK, what is this, a virus?

The RAM increased up to 3.34 GB, then it seemed to drop to a minimum of 1.38 GB:

After 15 minutes, I guessed maybe a reboot won’t hurt (Windows, again), but guess what?

Close to 3 GB of RAM for nothing, CPU load keeping the fan noisy, 18 kwin_x11, 18 plasmashell and 6 konsole for a single one: I must be dreaming! God, I want back to Windows 3.1!

And here’s how I decided to install something else instead of this shit.

NOT an Arch derivative.

NOT with KDE Plasma 5.

But also not GNOME and not something based on Ubuntu or Debian.

Is there anything, anything at all that’s not broken in 2021 in the software shitland?