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?
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.