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.