Exactly the reason I don’t use KDE on my $280 machine. Don’t get me wrong, KDE is great if your computer has more than enough juice to run it, but on this machine that I use daily as a portable machine, I guess using KDE would take too much system resources.
Which is why I’m sticking with MATE or Xfce. They don’t look as “barebones” as LXDE, but they’re definitely light on system resources, especially Xfce; and they’re both rock stable. MATE is a little on the heavier side, but MATE feels like a more complete package than Xfce. And since I’m not running utterly short on computing power, I figured I could spare a little more resources on running MATE instead of Xfce. I’m running Ubuntu MATE 17.10 here and it’s served me well, I don’t remember having seen an error message since I first installed it a month ago.
As some of you may know I used to run Xubuntu 17.10. Not that it’s bad, but like I said, MATE feels more like a complete package out of the box.
In case anyone’s curious about the specs of my $280 machine:
Intel Pentium N3710 (4C/4T, 2MB L2 cache, up to 2.56GHz)
4GB RAM
128GB SSD
Intel HD Graphics 405
…and if you ask me, I think I got myself quite a good deal for just $280.