dalto Why not just remove the applications you don't need?
You beat me. I just logged on to ask that same question. Whether that makes sense depends on the user's situation. I run all Solus machines with a 120 GB SSD, and that'a about 4 times what I need, but it's hard to find smaller SSDs these days.
Marco, In my situation there's a NAS that's about half full ... about 17 TB currently free. (I didn't want to keep buying increasingly larger disks as they filled up over the years, and throwing away perfectly good smaller disks.)
My point is, it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to spend time and energy removing software that I don't use from all my Solus machines. The games, browsers, build tools, editors, media players, libraries, and so on, that I don't use, never affect the performance of my OS.
Even on a smaller machine, until it becomes a problem with storage getting filled up, I don't believe it makes a significant difference in performance.
My advice is to pick the DE that gives you the bigger grin, and offers the functionality and options you want. Plasma is my choice, given those criteria. Your opinion might differ. Either way, you'll have a fast, responsive, beautiful UI that brings you much pleasure. You just can't lose. 😃