There are many issues coming from Plasma using an older method of launching all its processes.

Things like kdeconnectd, which open attack surface, cannot be reliably stopped. Most services under /etc/xdg/autostart/ are not possible to control from the GUI in systemsettings.

There are things like XWaylandVideobridge, the proxy for GTK to the global menu, legacy systray icon support or the Maliit Keyboard which will not be used by most people, but still always run in the background.

There is tons of more stuff, and it all makes Plasma bigger and slower, and prevents user control, as most processes seem to have multiple init systems, and many auto-restart when killing them, so that neutering the /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop didnt fix it.

It seems pretty chaotic to me, as there are likely multiple ways processes are managed, in parallel. But it is systemd-independent 🤷

I took the time and implemented something, you can find it here. It is a script that neuters the xdg/autostart entries and replaces them with user systemd services with some thought about how they could work.

This is experimental, but I would really like to test this further, together with Plasma upstream, and unify and fix that stuff. GNOME supposedly did that, having all the desktop processes be initiated by user systemd services.

I am just learning about most of that but it is really interesting!

What do you think?