> I would think KDE should disable akonadi and stuff by default personally - its super useable without all the heavy weight "crap".
I agree. Unfortunately, they replaced Nepomuk with Baloo in 4.13 (I think; Baloo seems more aggressive than the former) and have effectively taken the stance that users cannot (easily) disable it [1]. It's somewhat infuriating, because adding your home to the ignore list doesn't appear to work as advertised and it'll happily index everything including /var (bug?), NFS mounts, and anything it gets its grubby mitts on. The only solution I found that works is here [2] because there's no longer a UI to disable it (unlike Nepomuk). Beyond that, you're absolutely right: With all the cruft disabled, KDE is quite nice (long time user here as well).
That said, I'm happy with KDE, and I enjoy it in part because of the eye candy (probably a poor excuse). I've used LXDE on an old laptop before but there are always features that I seem to miss. Otherwise, it's great for users looking to avoid the cruft or have limited resources. LXQt brings some of the clean appearance of modern KDE with it, so that's a definite plus. It makes me eager to take it a spin, then possibly try it out on that old laptop--which doesn't play nicely with KDE no matter what's disabled.
[1] http://vhanda.in/blog/2014/04/desktop-search-configuration/
[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1390267#p1390267
I agree. Unfortunately, they replaced Nepomuk with Baloo in 4.13 (I think; Baloo seems more aggressive than the former) and have effectively taken the stance that users cannot (easily) disable it [1]. It's somewhat infuriating, because adding your home to the ignore list doesn't appear to work as advertised and it'll happily index everything including /var (bug?), NFS mounts, and anything it gets its grubby mitts on. The only solution I found that works is here [2] because there's no longer a UI to disable it (unlike Nepomuk). Beyond that, you're absolutely right: With all the cruft disabled, KDE is quite nice (long time user here as well).
That said, I'm happy with KDE, and I enjoy it in part because of the eye candy (probably a poor excuse). I've used LXDE on an old laptop before but there are always features that I seem to miss. Otherwise, it's great for users looking to avoid the cruft or have limited resources. LXQt brings some of the clean appearance of modern KDE with it, so that's a definite plus. It makes me eager to take it a spin, then possibly try it out on that old laptop--which doesn't play nicely with KDE no matter what's disabled.
[1] http://vhanda.in/blog/2014/04/desktop-search-configuration/
[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1390267#p1390267