Some DEs are focused on resource efficiency, but don’t look fancy. Others are fancy, but require a fairly modern setup. I have KDE (Fedora) installed on my laptop, I love its look and options. But it is not always snappy, some little freezes occur as well, even in basic situations (opening Firefox and v2rayN simultaneously was one of the cases). The most problematic thing is almost every app taking around 2-3 secs to open its window.
Many people would just tell me to install Xfce, but I still want a fancy desktop, I believe it is something I can afford on my setup. First I thought of GNOME, but it is controversial: some sources report GNOME as well optimized even for low-end machines, other claim it is much heavier than KDE.
What it your experience with desktop environments and their performance? Perhaps you have compared various DEs within the same distro and setup? How performant GNOME actually is compared to KDE? What are the balanced options to explore?
You probably want MATE, XFCE, LXQT, or god forbid Trinity.
Out of those, i personally find XFCE to be the most tolerable, and you can get some pretty decent looking themes setup for it. My system uses around 600mb on a cold boot, in theory I could get it down to 400mb but that comes with a good amount of drawbacks. CPU usage among all of those options is negligible.
I use and love KDE Plasma. I don’t tend to have performance issues, but I have pretty high-end hardware (per 2023). The performance should be dependent on your hardware. If KDE on your laptop has performance issues, then the only thing that will improve it is if you get a new laptop with better specs. Otherwise, I’d recommend Xfce, Mate, or possibly COSMIC. There have been a lot of improvements lately for Wayland support under Xfce. If you want to use Qt-based applications, then maybe LXQT would be right for you. It’s like the love child of LXDE and KDE. I personally can’t stand it myself, lol. It never felt right to me. But like, that’s just me. As you may know, one’s choice of desktop environment or window manager is highly subjective. So just try a bunch of things out. Don’t use a VM to try them because it won’t have the same feel as running natively. Maybe have a separate ‘testing’ partition where you install some distro and play around with various DEs and WMs. CachyOS makes it super easy to install them using meta packages.
Regarding GNOME: I’m using it to on all my devices, low end to high end. I would suggest just trying it and see if you like it.
Yeah, I’m on that boat as well.
XFCE can look fancy too. Just look up some guide, how to set it up.
Depends on what you mean by a DE’s “look”, if you just mean the theme and layout then you can theme something like xfce or lxqt to look similarly modern.
I’ve not tried it, but you could try cosmic? Or switch to a tiling WM or a scroller like Niri which would be even lighter (with the caveat that it’s lighter because it does less stuff for you by default).
What the actuall hell… I heard niri to be very resource-demanding… Should stick with tty /j
Niri is one of those ‘modern’ tiling window managers, which comes with a lot of eye candy and what not. It’s probably a lot lighter than your average desktop environment, but compared to a traditional tiling window, I would consider it fairly resource heavy.
So it is called heavy in the scope of tiling WMs, now I see
I would assume so. I have never seen anyone call it heavy, but I’m also not in circles where it’s being used either. It looks like a window manager for the younger generation. :)
The young fellows love this eye candy, and so I do. You’re right, I need to give a tiling WM a try. I have already thought about how inconvenient constant switching between the keyboard and the mouse is, and how unergonomic touchpads are.
I love eyecandy as well! It’s what got me interested in Linux back when Beryl was a thing. :) However. When it comes to tiling window mangers, I personally find it distracting, but I completely understand the appeal of it for others. A lot of the desktop screenshots looks really cool, but I don’t see how people can be productive with all the bling. :D
I’ve been a happy keyboard driven user for a long time now, and I can’t ever imagine going back to using the mouse for all the things. I still use it for my secondary web browser though, but that’s becasue a lot of websites sucks. :( I’m pretty sure that escaping most usage with any pointing device have saved my writsts from a lot of pain!
A mouse is still much better than a touchpad. It was the real pain when I had no working mice at home.
I believe people are productive because they feel comfy with that, but some prefer strict minimalism. I’m somewhere in between I guess.
The mainstream OSs are trying to make the user type as little as possible. Just drag, click, and voila. But when it comes to Linux, if you take the advantage of precise control of your system within the terminal, you have to switch between the keyboard and the mouse all the time if you use a traditional desktop environment, so the advantage of drag-and-click simplicity vanishes.
Have you looked at Cinnamon? It’s modern and comes with a lot of features. It supports both X11 and Wayland.
I recommend you to try a window manager, maybe niri, but with something like dank material shell or noctalia, it is very light and can look very fancy
If you want low resource but pretty OOtB, Wayland’s compositor Hyprland is pretty flash. It’s not a DE, but it comes wiþ effects and styling built-in.
I don’t use it; I don’t use Wayland. WMs are basically ways for me to swap between full or minimally split-screen applications, and þere’s not a lot of room þere for flashy. But Hyprland has a reputation for being pretty.
Getting rid of þe DE part is where you’ll save þe most on resources.
[…] almost every app taking around 2-3 secs to open its window.
This also happens if you have your system on a hdd instead of a sdd.
Not sure if that’s normal. LibreOffice or a webbrowser for example take a while. A calculator or something small should open instantly.
I have an SSD. And it used to be snappy on Windows 10. The browser I use is not that bloated, again, it used to open instantly on Windows.
I think Browsers on Windows sometimes do dirty tricks and already load on boot (in the background). So once you click to “open” the browser, it’s already in memory and pops up instantly. That might be the reason why it’s instand on Windows, and takes time on Linux.
Both my browsers on Linux also take 2-3s to open. Though I regularly don’t notice. I’ll just leave the browser open all day, because I need it all the time. I closed and re-opened it right now, and it definitely also takes a very few seconds on my machine with a GNOME desktop.
Why would a thing like Waterfox preload on boot? The boot by the way is also pretty slow, systemd loading 100500 services on start I guess. But now this is an idea - enabling browser loading in background at boot
