KDE4: Remove The Plasma Desktop

Now why would you want to remove the Kde Plasma-desktop? True it is the one things that really defines and makes up what you see when you start Kde. But it also one big resource hog. Hence if you like everything about Kde but do want a little faster and less memory consuming desktop, then getting rid of the Plasma-desktop might just be what you have been looking for.

Update: Since Kde 4.8+ I feel that it has gotten significantly faster and really does not benefit as much from removing the Plasma-desktop. Currently I'm using the full Kde4 desktop on my old netbook and it is really fast. Actually due to the very much improved compositing (kwin & kwin_gles), it draws and redraws everything much faster when switching desktops. Compared to other non compositing window managers. I've only compared it to Xmonad and Openbox, since those are the only two other window managers I tend to use. However this is not to say that the memory footprint comes even close to being within the ranges of the more minimalistic desktop configurations. However, I feel that as long as my desktop remains fast and responsive with the applications I use, I really could not care less about the initial memory footprint.

Warning!

I should tell you that if you remove the Plasma-desktop. You will be presented with a completely black desktop. And you will not be able to interact with it in anyway. Keyboard shortcuts will work fine, but there will be no clickable elements on the screen. Make sure you have your global shortcuts set up right so that you do not become stuck with a black desktop.

Old Method:

This is the old method and affects all users on the system. I really can not recommend using this anymore.

Kde4 follows the usual xdg standard. Which means that you should find all of its global startup items in “/usr/share/autostart”.

$ ls /usr/share/autostart
------------------------------------------------------------------------
kaddressbookmigrator.desktop
kalarm.autostart.desktop
kgpg.desktop
klipper.desktop
kmix_autostart.desktop
krunner.desktop
kwrited-autostart.desktop
nepomukcontroller.desktop
nepomukserver.desktop
plasma-desktop.desktop
plasma.desktop
polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1.desktop
printer-applet.desktop
restore_kmix_volumes.desktop

Simply remove the all the plasma* files and the Plasma-desktop will no longer autostart when logging in. Keep in mind that this will affect all users on the system running Kde4.

New Method:

Go into System Settings >> Startup and Shutdown >> Autostart. Simply uncheck “Plasma Desktop Workspace” and next time you login it will no longer load the plasma-desktop.

While you are in here you might notice that there is an entry called “plasma-netbook” in here as well. You could uncheck plasma-desktop and enable plasma-netbook to see how the default netbook desktop is configured. Personally I find it very non spectacular and you can achieve exactly the same look by configuring the plasma-desktop yourself. Because it is just another way to set up your desktop.