What is the minimum required processor and amount of memory to run plasma 6 properly? I’d like to have an answer regarding the type of processor, a bit old, because I regularly install Linux on computers of elderly people who have old computers. I’ve been doing this for years, and now that I know KDE a bit better, I think it’s a better choice to install on retirees’ computers.
The requirements probably differ by distro and how they set their OS up. I don’t think there are official requirements from KDE on this.
Which distro do you favor? And how old, time-wise?
From personal experience, a core2 duo and 2Gb ram can work, but not well. HDD vs SSD makes a huge difference as well.
But imo 4gb and preferably 6 is the better choice. Until fairly recently (end of 2025) I was running Plasma 6 (KDE neon, so Ubuntu) on this 2013 HP i3 laptop. I did move the HDD to a small SSD, which made a HUGE difference, more so than moving from 4gb to 6gb of ram. No problems or slowdowns for web browsing and office type activities.
It will be the web browser that ruins everything, to be honest.
what i tell ppl is is 8GB of ram or more to run plasma well, with room to surf the web and have office documents open.
less than that, and i would look more toward lubuntu as a more efficient DE for older machines.
CPU wise, i’ve run plasma on 2nd gen i7 and it works well enough… it’s not super CPU intensive.
but the first thing to do with any older machine is use and SSD for the OS, and maybe keep the HDD for cold storage.
For sure, it’s a good idea to stick with just one or two tabs, and close them when you’re not using them…
Installing to a 250GB SSD (SATA) was the single biggest upgrade of the decade…
But it was browsing, not photo editing or video editing, that drove me to upgrade from 4, to 8, to 16GB… especially as I’d often want to open a browser at the same time as I was doing something else.
So sure, PLASMA will run fine on 4GB.
I’ve run it on a 4GB system for a while doing lots of web browsing and it was fine, so I think 4GB is a comfy minimum.
a usable desktop should let you do more than just open a browser tho.
i have mutiple tabs open, some office docs and a music player in addition to dolphin and some konsole windows… nothing at all extreme about what i’m doing.
my ram stands at 7.GB…. so if i had an 8GB machine i would be at my limits.
yes, you can probably get the desktop to appear on the screen and not crash if you touch it on as little as 1GB of ram, but what’s the point really? too prove that you can? life is too short for that.
If you’re installing linux for older people, I completely don’t understand your statement “KDE a bit better”. That’s total b…s. All older people care about is a working and stable shell around a browser. I’ve been installing, for example, openbox for well over 20 years that couldn’t run kde by far, make it look like a snail. By far. I’m over 60 by now and if my mom would like me to give her a proper, stable and fast OS on her ol’ medieval computer, kde would hardly be on my mind. Here’s minimum requirements:
And less…
Now, I’m not saying kde is bad. I’m saying that, unless you know what core installs are, kde is a bad choice. Of course, if a 8 gig ram with an intel i5 is considered 'low specs"… Otherwise, forget it. Old folks want to talk with their grandkids on a smooth system and don’t have to cal 911 when their system is stalling. On a < 8gig ram and < i5 pentium computer. And it doesn’t have to be floating wm’s btw.
You’re going too far here. You can have a limited system which is usable.
What you’re suggesting is already pushing it (as you say) for an 8GB system, which is what pushed me to upgrade to 16GB… but that’s a matter of choice.
But as OP already stated:
So for them, maybe life is too short to assign significant portions of income to purchasing new hardware. is a better phrasing 
Overall, though, I’d vote for Linux Mint with Cinnamon, it’s a very nice desktop - fairly rigid (no problem unless your old folks are more into ricing than checking their mail).
I believe that any computer with 4GB of RAM released in recent years should be able to run this. because whenever I boot up my computer, it consumes around 2GB of memory.
I’ve installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon on old folks’ computers before. It works well.
Plasma is pretty light these days, though. Maybe not as light as Openbox, but still pretty light compared to Windows, MacOS, even GNOME.
I think it will depend more on whether you think the intended recipient will benefit from the features that Plasma offers, and whether you trust any distros to be bulletproof enough to withstand the accidental damage that novices can cause.
I’ll have to run some tests eventually, but I’ve def had a bunch of stuff going on at once, such as a LibreOffice with it least 20 tabs open, and discover doing something, and LibreOffice Writer active, and it was fine. Not fast, but chugging along pretty well.
I’ve tested doing all kinds of stuff on my 4GB Chromebook. Running KDE Linux. It is eating quite a bit into its swap space, but its technically usable. Probably don’t need to go this hard tho.
It was a little awkward using the tiny little track pad while looking through my external capture window but there ya go lol.
On a sidenote ( most stuff the younger chromebook, DE’s.. generation never heard of), in terms of weight ( and as such speed)…Some tilers. Icewm. JWM. Openbox.Fluxbox. Compiz ( yes yes. I used to do compiz standalones, with all the bells&whistles compiz offers). Pekwm. Xfce. Nowadays kde. Cinnamon. Budgie. Gnome. Dunno if it’s still a thing ( debian offers it), a kde openbox session. You’ll loose the panel, but that’s easily replaceable with something like lxpanel, tint2, xfce4 panel whatever. Imho a better solution than LXQT.
It’s not. Sure, you could even run gnome. But how…
Indeed …
Just out of curiosity, on a 512 MB RAM system (if I see that correctly, its a little small for my old eyes) what browser would you recommend? Firefox or Chrome (the later split into 2 tasks) eat up roughly 950 MB with KDE Discuss in one, and only one, Tab open here alone and that can jump up to nearly 2GB on the Youtube Homepage for example (without even playing a Video). Or is that memory usage somehow DE dependent, would not think so.
None. The yellow-ish screenshot was on something called Slitaz. It doesn’t exist anymore but that OS was phenomenal. I actually bought a very old pc with only 512 ram just to see what that OS could run on. Believe it or not, it still was very fast. I ran chromium on that thing if I recall correctly. I modified the lxde iso to run openbox and tint2 only. It actually booted at 28 Mb ( even Puppy linux was a lot heavier). But, it’s no longer available. But no, I doubt you can run a modern browser with only 512 Mb. Not even on something like Antix or a Debian minimal. That other screenshot was a debian minimal, a setup from scratch with 2 Gigs I believe. FF hovered around 1 Gig-ish on that one. It’s all desktop specific. There’s, for example, already a big difference in a standard, say, Debian iso and a minimal. The ram usage for a browser will differ on those.
Debian minimal/openbox/tint2/Rox desktop:
“Default” Sparky ( Debian-based)LXQT iso ( one ssb running)
Default MX ( Debian), xfce with openbox wm, firefox running:
So, I’d say that in order to have a functional modern browser running properly, you’d need 2 Gigs of ram on a lightweight system ( unless you have something exceptional like RIP Slitaz)
I mean something like Lynx would work pretty well, just as long as you don’t need to see anything other than basically only text lol.
I also gotta try some of these floating window managers one of these days. Seems pretty neat.
That is a shame as the first computer I had Internet access with, and still own, has 18 MB RAM in words eighteen. 2 MB Chip plus 16 MB Fast RAM and that had a graphical Browser. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately 
) it is the cheaper Amiga 4000 model with a Motorola 68EC030 CPU lacking a Memory Management Unit that would be necessary to run any kind of Linux.
My machine has only 4GB RAM and plasma 6 has been working fine. I replaced the Plasma System Monitor with btop to save memory.