tomscharbach I may have missed something, but the KDE Plasma DE implementation is identical, as far as I can tell (having looked carefully at both in Live sessions for about an hour) between the two builds, the difference being the number of applications included.
Unfortunately, and by accident, I wrote my conclusion about Darkstar here in this thread, and not in the Other Interesting Distros thread where the rest of my evaluations (including Darkstar) are. I described all my troubles with Darkstar, and why I could no longer continue evaluating it. (It's right here, if you scroll up a ways.)
You read it here, because you explained to me how all video cards todoay can handle 16-bit color depth, as opposed to the 32-bit depth that the full Plasma version uses. I wasn't aware of that. Darkstar is the edition that told me I was using 16-bit color, and I should change to 32-bit color for better performance. The full Plasma version never did that, as it was already using 32-bit color. They're not the same.
And after I installed the VirtualBox guest additions, the Darkstar edition would only display a black screen. After I installed the guest additions on the full Plasma version, it began resizing itself automatically as I took it to full-screen, and it shared its clipboard with the host machine,so I could take screenshots on the VM and paste them on the host.
I didn't compare the Darkstar and Plasma editions by running live USB sticks, but by installing them onto VMs with 32 GB virtual drives, and trying to configure them as I would a distro I were installing onto hardware. There were HUGE differences between the Plasma and Darkstar editions, such that my exploration of Darkstar needed to be cut short.
