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?
What distro do you use?
I found KDE to work better in some distros than others.
For instance Fedora KDE is not the best, I had it being sluggish last lime I tried it. Now I’m on Opensuse KDE and it’s flawless.
Also I have found KDE surprisingly working better than XFCE, but I think most of that has been because wayland support.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
This is absolutely nonsense!
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.
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 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.
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.
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
New noctalia v5 is not quickshell based and uses even less resources.
XFCE can look fancy too. Just look up some guide, how to set it up.
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.
Have you looked at Cinnamon? It’s modern and comes with a lot of features. It supports both X11 and Wayland.
Does it support Wayland? I know they’re working on it, but last I read it was still a WIP.
Yes. I just assumed it was stable since it’s there to choose from at the login screen. I really don’t use Mint, so I can’t verify how stable it is.
I tried it just yesterday.
Wayland support does exist in cinnamon. You can enter a wayland session and it will work. But it doesn’t bring to the table all the expected wayland improvements, like for instant perfect fractional scaling.
What does instant perfect fractional scaling mean?
Imagine you want to scale your desktop at 125%.
On X11 it was really hard to so so, and not very good. It basically worked by doing some strange tricks with the resolution, tanking performance and making it having numerous visual bugs, screen tearing or blurry fonts. And you often had to close and open the session for it to apply.
With wayland is possible to have fractional scaling without those issues. With crisps fonts, performant, and everything just working as expected. Also it could change easily within the session.
But wayland allowing for it doesn’t mean that all compositors have implemented it. Most still have issues. I think KDE was one of the fews that just recently anounced that they solved that problem and that you can scale the desktop without any worries.
That sounds promising! I’ve been experience this issue with my Thinkpad T14 with the incredibly stupid 1080p resolution. I’ll try some options with Wayland there.
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. :)
I use niri, I don’t know if it’s ressource demanding or not but the readme seems to say it works fine on old computers:
Performance: while I run niri on beefy machines, I try to stay conscious of performance. I’ve seen someone use it fine on an Eee PC 900 from 2008, of all things.
Regarding eye candy it’s also very sober by default, it can do animations, blur and transparency but you have to ask for it in conf.
It looks like a window manager for the younger generation.
I use it because It’s a nice middle ground between traditionnal wms and tiling ones. No messy stacking windows, no need to think too much about the layout, plus you get a larger screen than everyone at no cost :)
with the caveat that it’s lighter because it does less stuff for you by default
There are very nice looking things like noctalia or dankmaterialshell that can take care of everything for you (dms in particular), including bar/dock/niri conf/wifi etc. It’s much easier to have something functional and nice looking than before (including with other wms like sway).
I use niri, I don’t know if it’s ressource demanding or not but the readme seems to say it works fine on old computers: Performance: while I run niri on beefy machines, I try to stay conscious of performance. I’ve seen someone use it fine on an Eee PC 900 from 2008, of all things.
That sounds promising!
Regarding eye candy it’s also very sober by default, it can do animations, blur and transparency but you have to ask for it in conf.
That’s good! While I love eyecandy, I don’t understand why you want it with a tiling window managers, but that’s just me being old I guess.
I use it because It’s a nice middle ground between traditionnal wms and tiling ones. No messy stacking windows, no need to think too much about the layout, plus you get a larger screen than everyone at no cost :)
I can’t imagine ever using it, but it’s great that it works for you (and a lot of other people). :D
I haven’t really looked into any of the modern alternatives, but it feels like they’re a lot easier to get started with if you’re new to tiling window managers, which can be overwhelming as it is.
There are very nice looking things like noctalia or dankmaterialshell that can take care of everything for you (dms in particular), including bar/dock/niri conf/wifi etc. It’s much easier to have something functional and nice looking than before (including with other wms like sway).
You lost me here. What is noctalia, dankmaterialshell and dms? :D
And docks? Like those bouncy panel thingies in Mac OS?
You lost me here. What is noctalia, dankmaterialshell and dms? :D
Nice “desktop shell” projects that you can install in addition to your wm of choice to get all the stuff that you expect from a DE without having to set it up manually. Otherwise since a wm comes with nothing but window management you’ve got to go the traditional route of picking up a bar, an app launcher, a screen locker, a widget to connect to wifi and plenty of other things to have a decent experience out of your wm. With noctalia or dankmaterialshell (dms is just the short way to write it) you don’t spend a week setting everything up to then be sad it’s not as pretty as what people do on unixporn.
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.
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.
Right now wayland implementation differs a lot in each compositor.
KDE is probably the one who is doing the better and most up to date implementation of wayland right now.
I got about 20-25% better battery life when switching to Wayland with a fairly similar setup (Sway instead of i3).
If you experience performance issues, it’s most likely a bug.
Fedora KDE ships with Wayland so I use Wayland. No option to swtich, even though I probably have X11 installed
X11 was completely removed in Fedora 43 I believe
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandOnlyGNOME#Wayland-only_GNOME
This applies to the GNOME edition. While KDE is planning to drop X11 support, it hasn’t yet. And I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some x.org packages in my installation, not sure if they are full or just for Xwayland
Ah right, I forgot about the different editions! Been on GNOME for so long.
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.
