Kde4: Autostart

I like having total control over what gets loaded when I log on to my desktop. Thankfully Kde4 gives me very good control over this. Personally I've never been a big fan of using XDG *.desktop files for autostarting applications. I have to say that it is very simple to add autostart programs through Kde4's system settings. But I prefer using basic bash scripts to load what I want, maybe it is because I'm used to doing so with Openbox.

From what I have discovered Kde4 has essentially two user specific Autostart directories, not counting the XDG standard directories. Also it has one shutdown directory which essentially executes whatever you want when you logout. I'll explain later why that could be useful.

Udisks: Mount Devices Without Password Prompt

I like being able to quickly access my plugged in devices through Dolphin by simply clicking on them in the sidebar. However everytime I do this it keeps asking me for my password. Thankfully it is very easy to get rid of this annoyance.

Since I am running pretty much a full Kde4 desktop, I'll just assume that you will have some kind of policykit/polkit agent installed. Almost all distributions have one installed by default, however since I run Arch Linux this might not always be the case.

KDE4: Change Window Manager

There are two ways to change the default Kde4 window manager. One involves creating a script that changes a global variable and the other involves using Kde system settings. While both methods work I always find solutions involving working in a terminal to be simpler and faster. Still I will be detailing both methods to the best of my knowledge.  

Update: Recently it has become quite popular to try out the new opengl es mode of kwin. Which was originally aimed to bring proper compositing to mobile platforms and is paving the way for compositing on wayland. Currently it seems that this new code will eventually replace the old opengl code. The reasons to why this is so interesting is that it supposedly brings a few perfomance improvements. I've yet to confirm this, but it does run fine on my netbook using intel drivers. But on my desktops using Nvidia graphics it fails miserably, this could be beceause of the code or because of the Nvidia drivers, who knows. Anyway it is worth trying out, but keep in mind that your mileage may very greatly depending on what kind of hardware and drivers you are using.

Have a look at Martin Gräßlin's blog for further details.
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/07/running-kwin-with-opengl-es-2-0/

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.