KDE 4.9 (and above) workspace comes as a great relief when the major distributions resort to some fu**ing desktop environments (such as gnome and unity) and/or spin some lame reiterations (such as cinnamon, mate and a ton others). The latest KDE workspace is way too much polished than unity and gnome3 - highly usable, customizable and not so resource-hungry. But you can still make it lighter and faster if you don't rely much on desktop search function and KDEPIM stuff like kaddressbook, kmail and the rest. Amaik, very few people use them anymore, and can be done without them. Just a working set of thunderbird, pidgin and firefox, and you can very well dump kdepim + akonadi + nepumok + strigi.
By "Dump" I mean "Disable", cos you can't remove those packages as they are deeply integrated into the workspace. Here's how you can disable:
#1 Add these lines (if they don't exist, else make necessary changes in them) to ~/.kde/share/config/nepomukserverrc
[Basic Settings]
Start Nepomuk=false
[Service-nepomukmigration1]
autostart=false
[Service-nepomukstrigiservice]
autostart=false
#2 Then add these lines (if they don't exist, else make necessary changes in them) to ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc
[QMYSQL]
Name=akonadi
Host=
User=
Password=
Options="UNIX_SOCKET=/home/manmath/.local/share/akonadi/db_misc/mysql.socket"
ServerPath=/usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi
StartServer=false
#3 Open ~/.kde/share/config/kdedrc and set "autoload" to false for nepomuksearchmodule
[Module-nepomuksearchmodule]
autoload=false
#4 Finally, remove the file nepomukcontroller.desktop and akonaditray.desktop from /usr/share/autostart/, if they exist.
Log out or restart your system to experience the lightness and speed of your sexy KDE workspace.
