Not counting the Steam Deck, since KDE isn’t actually turned on while you’re running games.
Normally I’m a Gnome guy, but I’m building a tiny low power portable computer and wanting to keep resource utilization low, so I’m investigating other options.
KDE. It doesn’t get in the way.
KDE because I want a setup that just works.
i3wm for me, no DE. I do like KDE when I run a DE though.
KDE currently. Modern GNOME drives me somewhat insane - too “streamlined”. I used WindowMaker for a long time and somewhat miss it, but I’ve had problems with compatibility with some software (Steam).
gnome with “dash to panel” and “arc menu” extensions. familiar and unobtrusive, but seemingly resource heavy. for a low spec machine, my vote would go to xfce.
Tried XFCE, KDE and GNOME but settled on GNOME.
XFCE struggled with window management especially when gaming. KDE is too messy and inconsistent. GNOME is just easy, and my wife can use it without asking questions.
Sway mixed with KDE,
games don’t really like it and Pipewire doesn’t work for video recording for some reason (it has to do with the KDE xdg-desktop-portal) but it’s a small price to pay for salvation I guess.I know Sway is a window manager, not a DE - but KDE applications and services seem to fill the gaps.
They’re not necessary, but you won’t catch me dead with a GTK file chooser popup open, and I haven’t figured out how to set up Ranger to replace Dolphin (nor do I really want to).Take a look at Hyprland, they have an xdg-desktop-portal implementation that apparently works with that stuff. https://github.com/hyprwm/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland https://www.hyprland.org/
not a de, i use hyprland.
maybe something like xfce or a tiling window manager would have the lowest recurce cost
@[email protected] Hyprland, but technically it’s a tiling window manager and Wayland compositor.
Hyprland + waybar and bemenu. Not truly a DE, but I love the look and the minimalism and I like to do things in the CLI anyway.
I’m not even sure.
Whatever comes with mint? I had a hard drive die, and my buddy hooked me up when I realized I couldn’t read the windows key on the sticker any more. He was going to do some kind of fuckery to let me keep 7 despite that, but he’d been talking about Linux for a few years, so I asked what he thought about that.
He asked me a few questions, about what kind of programs I need to use, and when none of them were a pain in the ass for an idiot like me to deal with, he set it up for me. Told me it was mint, helped me set things up where they look nice and made sure I have what I need. Haven’t fucked with anything since, and that was about two years ago.
I think default mint is cinnamon
I use mostly KDE plasma, especially for gaming, but sometimes switch to Hyprland for online Pen and Paper, since i prefer the automated tiling when opening tons of documents
KDE Plasma xorg. I use discord streaming quite a bit with friends so Wayland isn’t an option and I’m not using a third party discord client since that’s against discord ToS.
KDE Plasma is great!
Feel free to keep on trucking with your setup. I’ve been using a different solution for discord streaming and wanted to share in case it sounds helpful for you. It’s been an improvement for me. Your mileage may vary.https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/discord-screenaudio
Do not use your main account, make another one only for streaming with audio. Works with x11 and Wayland has more features. It’s a slight annoyance to have to connect to a discord chat with a second account but this works really well for streaming. TOS is sustained with main account and you actually get working audio/video streaming with a second account that won’t get banned (been doing this for years) but even if it does it won’t matter because it’s only used for streaming.Just another option, feel free to disregard if it’s not right for you.