KDE? LOL.

It's certainly a cool hacker exercise, but i hope everyone reading this understands how pointless it is for tablet/PDA end-users.

If you already do, you can skip the rest. If you don't, read on...

1) A windowmanager for a PDA shouldn't require more than a few MB of space. (The n770 root fs sits compressed on 128MB flash). KDE needs hundreds of megabytes (currently 800MB).
2) PDA apps should start quickly. KDE apps take several seconds to start on my Pentium III 950mhz.
3) PDA apps should be small and efficient, requiring kilobytes or at most a couple megs of RAM. KDE apps gobble tens of megabytes of RAM.

So what kind of PDA/tablet device would be suitable for KDE? The root filesystem should have a couple of GIGAbytes. The processor should be in the 1GHZ x86 class. RAM should be at least 256MB. And the display should really be at least 1024x768, since a number of KDE apps don't even work at 800x600.

This is certainly an interesting project for KDE fans. But to any n770/n800 end-users reading this, read and grok this: Some software is horribly inefficient, running ten to hundreds of times slower than optimized software. Some software is horribly bloated, requiring tens to hundreds times more space than an efficient implementation. The proliferation of incredibly powerful PCs has led developers down the path of ignoring compactness and efficiency, simply because they CAN. On a PDA/tablet, you can't ignore compactness and efficiency.

I've been programming since the days of 8-bit computers, and i've seen more than a handful of efficient PDA and PC windowing environments starting with the original Mac and Atari ST and Apple's Newton, all of which fit into a couple hundred kilobytes. Maemo ships with a functional, optimized, decently compact WM. KDE is, by comparison, horribly, disgustingly bloated.

This is not really a dig against KDE per-se. It definitely brings a lot of good desktop features to linux and provides a vast and powerful framework to application developers. But KDE on a PDA is like a hippopotamus on a motor-scooter.