Have been dabbing with KDE Neon Plasma 6 and RAM usage has increased significantly from previous iteration. It uses at least 5Gs instead of previous 3.5 with CPU usage floating about 20-30 range. Think this is what it was for previous ed. too.
Windows 11 has always used about 60% of 8Gs of RAM but CPU usage is much lower than KDE Neon Plasma 6 - somewhere between 5-8%
Both tests made with Firefox browser open to Youtube.
Anyway to improve this on KDE?
Not sure what your point here is.
Are you surprised something that was released 10 years ago demands less memory than something that was released a few weeks ago?
Are you on such an old computer that you lack the memory?
In that case there are other desktops like for example xcfe that requires less memory.
Also, try closing firefox and try check htop one more time.
Suppose the idea of passing time escapes me.
Like you said, perhaps its time for a new machine or switch over to xfce or even back to KDE Plasma 5 for now.
Have you enabled hardware video acceleration (GPU) in Firefox? That drastically lowers CPU %. Maybe Firefox does it for Winblows automatically.
That is a good point, if hw accel works with all the DRM bs that was implemented not to long ago.
Does HW accel work OOTB on neon? (respect if it does)
It’s not only the “hdmi foundation forum” that are being a-holes to the open source community… 
I would say 8GB minimum if you want to run a “normal desktop” (please do not murder me for that comment, I hope you know what I mean by that) with the latest software.
If you have 8G and a swap you should be just fine using plasma 6. Might be some stuttering if the swap is being used, but it SHOULD absolutely be usable.
Lower than 8, it should not crash, but the experience is probably, lets say, less than optimal.
Unused ram is wasted ram. Unlesss you notice slowdowns or something it’s probably fine.
If the increased usage is from plsamashell, you might have a broken 3rd party plasmoid somewhere
On my machine plasmashell takes the same amount of ram as it did on plasma 5.
I have no idea, it should if we are talking about “user-friendly” distros. I use Arch so there’s plenty of documentation there.
It’s not that easy.
I has to do with copyright and laws, and distro maintainers do NOT want to get sued ala USA method.
You can read a little about it here. Digital Rights Management (DRM) Overview
kde e.v. is in germany, canonical ltd. in the uk. there are no software patents there, so there should not be a legal hurdle at least.
Apart from the above, what does harware video acceleration for all GPUs (VA-API and VDPAU) have to do with a general DRM description? Also Ubuntu being billion rich already pays for proprietary codecs for *Chromium afaik and Firefox has openh264.
Canonical are PATRONS of KDE, they do not own or control it in any way afaik.
From the wiki:
KDE Patrons
A KDE Patron is an individual or organization supporting the KDE community by donating at least 5000 Euro (depending on the company’s size) to the KDE e.V.[27] As of February 2024, there are nine such patrons: Blue Systems, Canonical Ltd., Google, GnuPG, Kubuntu Focus, Slimbook, SUSE, The Qt Company, and TUXEDO Computers.[28]
It has to do with how the hardware is manufactured, if they are licenced within the chipset or rely on software, I think.
I’m not going to pretend I understand it all but it is def not “it works ootb on everything”.
I think it is similar to how nvidia users can get 4k unlimited fps on hdmi while AMD gpu user don’t.
It has to do with licensing.
Canonical may be relevant, because neon uses ubuntu packages built by canonical
Would you look at that, I didn’t even need to put a random word in all capital letters to point that out
And KDE Neon is the only distro in existance right?
Maybe try to learn something instead of just trying to confirm yourself.
Does that one word (patrons), capitalized to point out why you were wrong, trigger you that much?
I’m so sorry!
But if that triggers you that much, there is a mute button where you can mute everything I type! 
With 8 GB-RAM you can use ZRAM, Note: not ZSWAP.
you can generate 20-GiB of ZRAM reserving only the half (or less, my lz4 compress with 5.6-ratio, in you case would be 3.71 GiB) of your actual physical RAM. If you generate 16-GiB ZRAM, finally you will reserve only 2.86 of physical RAM and have a total of minimum of total 20-22 GiB RAM.
ZRAM is much better & faster than SWAP or ZSWAP 
All the instructions (for newbie), if you want go this way, are here.
If you have problems or doubts about this… just contact me or make your doubts & problems public… it’s up to you.
Just be aware that:
You can’t hibernate without swap. Just using zram won’t work for that unless you hack the s**t out of it. Probably best to shrink the root partition and add some real swap. Or add a permanent swap file, I suppose.
And:
Hibernating to swap on zram is not supported, even when zram is configured with a backing device on permanent storage. logind will protect against trying to hibernate to a swap space on zram.
It’s an answer to the question
“Does HW accel work OOTB on neon?”
Why would any other distros be relevant in this context? Come on dude, you’re not smart enough to be that obnoxious and arrogant.
You’re always commenting here like you know better than everyone and more often than not you’re just flat out wrong, yet you never learn some much needed humility. It’s a pattern, and I think it’s time someone said it.
ZRAM - that’s what SpiralLinux does by default, and it is snappy!
Plasma 6 is probably out of the picture for a while, for this distro and many others.
As an average user, who prefers letting a distro replace a partition and do the rest, as i tend to believe it knows the system before doing anything.
this’s a topic for distributors, although, the partitionmanager could do it too & very simply
“If you have 8G and a swap you should be just fine using plasma 6. Might be some stuttering if the swap is being used, but it SHOULD absolutely be usable.”
You think there may be stutter even if the swap is on an SSD?
My swap starts to get used well before my RAM is fully used. Is that normal? Is it because I set too generous a swap file size?
RAM is 12 GB and swap is 13 GB.
Should my swap maybe be less than 6 GB?
I never use hibernate because I’ve had corruption issues in the past when using that. Instead, I use daily the sleep function.
Could be. Even though ssd:s are fast, they are not ddr-memory-fast.
It can, depends on how system is setup and how applications are coded.
Size does not matter, it could be 1TB. Swap is is written to when it is written to.