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?
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.
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
I like Cosmic because it’s a nice middle ground between something like sway and the more mature DEs (Gnome/KDE). The tiling experience is phenomenal but you can still use floating if you prefer. I have it on both my main machine (Gentoo) and my secondary (Fedora).
Have you done any tuning of KDE? I run it in a virtual machine with no hardware video acceleration and it feels fine. Turning off the compositor and animations might make a big difference.
I’ve applied a MacOS theme (the one from zayronxio) and that’s probably all. I don’t know whether it uses the compositor or not, it is mostly just the dock and a couple of liquid glass widgets which seem to be snappy. I believe, there’s no more animations than it was by default.
If you look in the system settings under Hardware -> Display and Monitor -> Compositor there are some things you can tweak in terms of latency if it’s enabled. I personally have “Enabled on startup” unchecked and my VM is pretty snappy - but my theme may be simpler as well. Try changing things there to see if you notice a change either way.
and how does the default breeze without the eye candy and widgets behave?
The default theme behaves more or less the same. But if I’m not mistaken, the default theme was “Fedora”
If you want a DE which looks similar to KDE, try Xfce with Arc theme and some nice icon pack.
I use KDE (and it’s snappy on my hardware) but I like it because it has a lot of features and advanced options which it tries to make easily accessible to the user. IMO this is pretty much the opposite of “modern”, which is usually very minimalist, and UX designers like to remove or hide as much as possible. I’ve tried Gnome several times but personally I can’t stand it just because it’s a modern UI :) You try as many as you can and pick the one that suits you best of course, just thought it was funny that the same word can have different meanings to people.
gnome and kde have always been the most dramatically resource hungry of the whole linux/foss eco system; both were almost unusable back in the early aughts.
I have a 2010 laptop. Tried KDE and GNOME (as well as other DEs). I found KDE lagged on the laptop, and GNOME was super responsive. People told me it would be the opposite of that because GNOME was a heavy desktop, but it just caches stuff so its always ready and on a 15 year old laptop the cache was faster than the processor :)
What is your RAM size or whatever the cache goes to (oops I have a gap in my computer knowledge)?
8gb RAM on that machine. kDE used less than GNOME, but when you check the memory stats the extra was cache, not bloat
Are you using Wayland or X11 as your Window Manager (WM)? I refuse to switch to Wayland because of how sluggish it feels on my Debian desktop.
Typically you can switch between the 2 on the login screen, usually in the bottom left or right.
Fedora KDE ships with Wayland so I use Wayland. No option to swtich, even though I probably have X11 installed
Now I don’t know for Fedora in particular but if you can install the XOrg/X11 packages and switch your SDDM theme so that it includes the X11/Wayland toggles perhaps you can get it working?
Unfortunately I can’t be much else help.
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.
Have you considered going DEless? Its been a while since I did but back then I was able to get a modern looking system with Openbox (amongst others but thats what I settled on). I dont know what the state of DEless windows managers are these days but I’ve seen some very nice looking setups. Might be something to consider?
