I hope the LiveCD would dump the KDE Workspace and start the KDE Partition Manager alone by X.org. Then it would be awesome partition tool when you have only the partition application running and you could get job done with it.

@Fri13:
What would you gain from it?
Or is something disturbing you work (window decoration, clock, etc)?

Easier to learn and use, demands less RAM and CPU when you do not need to run KDE workspace but just Xorg + Partition Manager.
The LiveCD idea is to be a partition tool, not a typical desktop what is used to browse web, listen music and play videos. So all those non-goal features should be forgotten and just offer the partition manager. Then if it would be something like 100Mb download image people would use it more likely than other partition tools what offer CLI at such space. Clonezilla and other tools would be more difficult to use.

Now I understand you better, I had the impression you wouldn't get your "job done with it."
I don't think having the full desktop was a wanted feature, but just the easiest way to get the LiveCD done with Suse Studio.
Of course 100Mb download would be an advantage for people with lower bandwidth and less RAM is always good especially for older PCs

[...] Release: KDE Partition Manager Live CD 1.0.3 [...]

Regarding "easier to learn and use": As it is now you have to double click on _one_ icon on the desktop to start KDE Partition Manager. There is no KDM login, you're auto-logged-in. That seems simple enough, doesn't it? ;-)

Demanding less RAM and CPU: Without Plasma, everything else a KDE application need would still have to be running (knotify, dbus, KDED etc). And Plasma is really not doing much on the Live CD, so the difference is probably hardly worth thinking about.

The use case does probably indeed not includes listening to music; hence Amarok is not included ;-). Browsing the web? I'm not sure. The first versions did not include Konqueror and I had complaints about it. And I can see why: When you're trying to save data from a hard drive that has problems, a browser in the live system might very well come in handy to look something up somewhere on the web. Think more "data rescue" than "one shot partitioning".

Leaving out Plasma and Konqueror would not get us down to 100 MiB. Most space is taken up by non KDE system stuff and, surprise, surprise, by the Oxygen icons that come as one monolithic package of about 90 MiB, IIRC.

It would be entirely possible to reduce the size without giving up much functionality, but, to be honest, that is not something I'd like to spend too much time on. Maybe someone else is interested in stepping in here?

"As it is now you have to double click on _one_ icon on the desktop to start KDE Partition Manager. There is no KDM login, you’re auto-logged-in. That seems simple enough, doesn’t it? ;-)"

Not just the single click but that you have the desktop, you have panels and all other things. They are meaningless for the partition tool. They eat RAM and CPU. The longer the booting time is, more difficult the partition tool is actually use.
This is not a problem for new and fast computers with advanced users when doing it one time. But even advanced users start to feel it difficult when you need to partition few dozen harddrives on different computers and you need to click that one icon on the desktop.

"The use case does probably indeed not includes listening to music; hence Amarok is not included ;-). Browsing the web? I’m not sure. The first versions did not include Konqueror and I had complaints about it. And I can see why: When you’re trying to save data from a hard drive that has problems, a browser in the live system might very well come in handy to look something up somewhere on the web. Think more “data rescue” than “one shot partitioning”."

That is something what should be on totally different image then. There should be just the partition tool and then the one what is now presented.

"Leaving out Plasma and Konqueror would not get us down to 100 MiB. Most space is taken up by non KDE system stuff and, surprise, surprise, by the Oxygen icons that come as one monolithic package of about 90 MiB, IIRC."

What is by one way really bad thing as they are not modular. That is one thing what people complain when the KDE SC gets update and there gets one icon changed, they need to download whole oxygen package over slow 3G connection, or even worse, over 56k connection (what is still used very much).

IT-Admins needs fast and easy tools. For them the Plasma-Desktop is no use. Even many normal users do not care about it as they just want to get the partition resized or moved.

This is one reason why Clonezilla is so popular among IT-admins as it is very small, fast and powerfull and easy to to use because you do not have anything else than the tools. But for normal users it is still too difficult (select keymaps for keyboard etc). Where this would be much better if you just get partition manager in front of you where you can set the things and just reboot back. Especially such is very needed with Mac OS X as users have hard time to partition the drive as Mac OS X does not allow anything to do with the disk.

I just tried it and loved it. The interface is beautiful and easy to work with. The partitioning I did was done quickly and easily, with no doubt at all about what the actions would do. I used it on an Athlon 1.3 and it worked just fine, performance wise. I only wish you would add a front end to partimage. That would make this a very strong tool.