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Disabling bloatware
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Linux
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A user that want a minimal environment installs a modern complete and featurefull entire desktop environment and then complains that it's too bloated, at five only on Lemmy.
What is this, reddit nowadays? /S
Anyway, you should uninstall plasma and switch to any of the many more basic Linux GUI environment that better suit you needs, that the magic of Linux after all, nobody forces you to use what you don't like or don't approve on your own machine
Modern DE ≠ unnecessary metadata-collecting services which you can not control within the DE interface. I do not want a "minimal" environment, I want one that looks pretty and is adjusted straightforwardly. Background metadata syncing has nothing to do with graphical environment. I understand that KDE is a whole ecosystem, but a service like this, shipping together with the DE, unreachable through normal settings interface is not what I'm expecting from a DE. Especially from such a modern and featurefull one. If I wanted to manage my DE with text configs, I would go for hyprland or something like this. It's the issue with KDE that it doesn't implement accessible configuration options for certain components. Hereby I'm not saying that KDE is totally bad. My main complaint isn't the existence of Akonadi by itself, some people I'll hardly ever meet in person would find its functionality extremely useful for a reason. But the fact it is uncontrollable with any KDE settings is dissapointing.
The actual magic of Linux here is that I can still find a text config and disable anything I don't need there. Without ditching a whole DE because of a couple of things I don't like.
PS. I have never been on reddit.
So what's the point? A modern and fully integrated de uses background services and those services are required for many pieces to work so much that they have made not that easy to disable the service?
If that's the point, you are definitely being unreasonable.
On the other hand the service can still be disabled understandably by text file editing to prevent users from breaking their system. I find the lack of an UI setting to disable it a reasonable choice, and yourself are telling me that it's still removable by user anyway. A power user indeed, but still user manageable.
Plasma user base definitely is not the customize everything people. I think it's reasonable that akonadi needs deeper user action to be disabled
That service is local only and needed for many apps to work, including stock widgets.
What is your point against akonadi exactly?
I would complain about that search indexer daemon (kglobalaccel or something similar) in plasma that still after years sometimes gobbles up 100% on a CPU core after screen unlock instead ... But whatever
Again, this syncing service has nothing to do with providing a graphical environment. Its functionality has a different purpose.
Disabling this particular service can not break the whole desktop environment. It is simply disabling some additional features, that are absolutely not crucial for the system's operation. As far as I can tell, simply re-enabling this service brings the features back, it is an easily reversible action, so there is no reason to hide it in order to prevent breaking by an unexperienced user.
If you open any article on Linux DEs comparison, KDE Plasma will be mentioned as offering extensible customization.
My point against Akonadi is that it is hard to disable for no serious reason. Whether you use it's features or not, you get it running in the background, and you don't have a normal option to manage it.
Thank you for mentioning the indexer daemon, I will investigate if I need it or it is superfluous for me.
I suggest you open a ticket on akonadi or plasma settings to add that option. That would be a good addition I am always for more settings....
But no, plasma is indeed not in the ballpark of highly customizable de. Maybe more than gnome, but the bar is really low
AFAIK, anything more customizable than KDE relies heavy on text configs and scripts. Another level both in customization options and knowledge required. I will come up to that eventually, but for users, who are not ready for such way of configuring, KDE will stay the most customizeable option.
So, really the issue is you expect KDE to present it in UI which is not the case. You would have to use the control binary to stop it from running (
akonadictl stop). To prevent it from running in the future, you'd have to edit/create it's configuration in$HOME/.configand add something likeStartServer=falseto[General].There is no way to do this in the UI. Akonadi itself isn't bloatware though. It's an important component that lets "desktop" applications access PIM. It can be a resource hog, but that's not the same. It serves a valid role. So long as you aren't using Kalendar, Kmail, etc, just remove it.
It's using your data locally on your machine. If you don't trust one of the biggest open source projects in the community, perhaps computers is not your thing. :D
I do not need this particular feature anyway. Neither locally, nor in a cloud. But I'm not given the opportunity to know about it and turn it down straightforwardly. It works silently, it can be only discovered via process monitor, and the only way to turn it down is digging into the terminal, as if I didn't have a graphical environment suite from one of the biggest open source projects in Linux community installed.
That's the downside (or upside, depending on how you look at things) of choosing a kitchen-sink distro. You get served everything and you don't have to care or know about anything.
However. Since you seem to be more of a power-user than a casual user, perhaps you didn't made the best choice for yourself. Perhaps building your own setup based on a bare-bones Fedora installation would have been a better fit for you? :)