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It's 2012 and my laptop has 8GB of RAM, which means that my booted-up idle machine with a modern graphical DE uses less than 5% of available RAM. I wouldn't call it sad.

KDE as 'Desktop Enviroment' is consuming less than 200MiB on my machine.

That includes kwin, window manager

plasma-desktop, desktop and panel

krunner, application launcher

kded4, multiple daemons

A complete session of KDE includes Nepomuk and Akonadi which are libraries helping KDE's applications, not the 'Desktop Enviroment'.

Disclaimer: Im a KDE contributor.

Edit: formatting.

Not really, when even low end laptops have 4GB RAM. There's nothing horrible about using the resources you're given.

NEW low end laptops. My Linux desktop maxes out at 4GB. Not everyone is buying a new machine every 12 months. Resource constraints are still something that people have to work with. When you're developing for yourself its fine to just make it work on what you have but when you're trying to get others to use your project 'works for me, buy new hardware' isn't going to win you fans.

Sure, you shouldn't use the most recent hardware as your target, but neither should you spend development time and code complexity to avoid overtaxing 10 year old hardware.