KDE 4.9 Goes Into Beta

The 4.8.x versions of KDE offered a very nice feature set and improved performance over previous versions. Yes, they are still more resource intensive than most other desktop environments (Unity is one obvious exception) but less resource intensive than previous KDE 4.x releases. That's a step in the right direction. I'm looking forward to seeing what the 4.9 series of releases looks like.

I couldn't agree more, and if you turn off nepomuk and akonadi, and use desktop effects minimally if at all, things get even snappier. For me it feels lighter than either Unity or gnome-shell, and comparable to some implementations of XFCE (e.g. Xubuntu), not to mention endlessly configurable.

Quoting:if you turn off nepomuk and akonadi

That is the key from what I can see. Of course, if you need that functionality you make the trade off in performance if you have the system resources. I was surprised at how well my system performed even with nepomuk when I was testing ROSA 2012 Marathon.

Quoting:For me it feels lighter than either Unity or gnome-shell

Agreed. That was one of the things that really impressed me. They do more and consume less.

Quoting:and comparable to some implementations of XFCE (e.g. Xubuntu)

Yeah, but Xubuntu is an incredibly slow and somewhat bloated XFCE implementation. Compared to other XFCE implementations I use KDE 4.8.x is still a slug.

Quoting:not to mention endlessly configurable.

Now this I agree with :)