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?
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.