@aeva last time I installed KDE on a low-end system, it defaulted to no fancy effect and as a result it was more lightweight than GNOME who insisted on doing everything through the non-existing 3D hardware acceleration. I'll confess to not being a primary KDE user anymore, but from what I see with other machines I administer (including my mom's laptop, that uses the KDE Neon Ubuntu fork) this seems to still be the case at large, though it's possible this is distro-dependent.