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?
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.