XFCE for life.
XFCE has always seemed to cover most any “normal” desktop experience I’ve ever needed, still even beating Windows hands down (as if that’s difficult, especially these days).
Granted, I don’t use KDE Connect or … what ever else KDE has over XFCE. The styling options are fun, but I’m too old to care about style these days.
I have NOT compared them to confirm any of the supposed lesser resource usage of XFCE, so if you’re going to roast me, tell me why (preferrably with direct data so we can all know).
IDK what y’all are on about. KDE + Khronkite uses very little RAM. There are a few background things you can disable if you don’t need them to make it even leaner.
It also just works, with so many integrations, all maintained for you.
My brief foray into discrete WMs like Sway was nostop “oh, it doesn’t have a WiFi manager? Oh, no sharing? Oh, no…” and I ended up having to install a bunch of stuff manually, manually configure it all, tie them together with some scripts and services that break with updates, and find out I did a no-so-great job because I haven’t spent literally thousands of man hours in integration and ended up using a lot of extra disk space and RAM anyway!
Breathes.
So yeah. Big DEs are nice. And lean, mostly.
Unused ram is wasted ram. Change my mind
I got plenty of ram. We’re using it.
This applies when RAM is used as temporary cache or something that can be instantly freed the moment it is needed otherwise. This doesn’t really work for justifying higher RAM use by KDE, unless you would never need that RAM for anything else anyway.
I use KDE because it is good, though. Also I don’t think KDE even uses more RAM than other DEs that are designed to be lightweight. Last time I compared, it used the same or less memory as LXDE.
Also I don’t think KDE even uses more RAM than other DEs that are designed to be lightweight. Last time I compared, it used the same or less memory as LXDE.
Firefox without any website loaded uses more RAM than a full Plasma session.
The difference being that in the one of those cases you still need to open a browser instance before you are able to browse the web.
Also, higher ram usage by programs makes it less likely that their actively used RAM (ie what it is actually currently using) fits in your CPUs caches, making them run slower.
It’s just really oversimplifying memory usage. OS designers had that same thought decades ago already, so they introduced disk caching. If data gets loaded from disk, then it won’t be erased from memory as soon as it isn’t needed anymore. It’s only erased, if something else requests memory and this happens to be the piece of “free” memory that the kernel thinks is the most expendable.
For example, this is what the situation on my system looks like:
free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 25Gi 9,8Gi 6,0Gi 586Mi 9,3Gi 15GiOut of my 32 GiB physical RAM, 25 GiB happens to be usable by my applications, of which:
- 9.8 GiB is actually reserved (
used), - 9.2 GiB is currently in use for disk caching and buffers (
buff/cache), and - only 6.1 GiB is actually unused (
free).
If you run
cat /proc/meminfo, you can get an even more fine-grained listing.I’m sure, I could get the number for actually unused memory even lower, if I had started more applications since booting my laptop. Or as the Wikipedia article I linked above puts it:
Usually, all physical memory not directly allocated to applications is used by the operating system for the page[/disk] cache.
So, if you launch a memory-heavy application, it will generally cause memory used for disk caching to be cleared, which will slow the rest of your system down somewhat.
Having said all that, I am on KDE myself. I do not believe, it’s worth optimizing for the speed of the system, if you’re sacrificing features that would speed up your usage of it. Hell, it ultimately comes down to how happy you are with your computer, so if it makes you happy, then even gaudy eye-candy can be the right investment.
I just do not like these “unused RAM is wasted RAM” calls, because it is absolutely possible to implement few features while using lots of memory, and that does slow your system down unnecessarily.- 9.8 GiB is actually reserved (
Sponsored by swap
I just prefer tiling windows managers idk
KDE Plasma can do that, too, via a KWinscript: https://codeberg.org/anametologin/Krohnkite 🙃
On a more serious note, this is a genuine recommendation. I’ve been using Krohnkite and similar scripts for a few years now, and they’re absolutely fine, especially since Plasma 6 introduced a native, manual tiling mechanism, which they just have to configure.
Especially for newbies wanting to try out tiling window management, without having to figure out a minimalist environment like a bare window manager, this is a great entrypoint IMHO.
yeah, kde is da best… i tried to use some of the others but kde just works so much better
Thats cool and all but hyprland and dank material shell are just too good for me to switch off of.
If you don’t use Gnome or KDE or one of the other big DEs, do you basically have no (user facing GUI) programs installed by default? If so, don’t you end up installing a bunch of programs from one of those anyway?
Keyboard shortcuts. And also, launchers.
I think most window managers typically come with just a fee GUI apps preinstalled, but most users install more.
They open as tiles not windows, look up hyprland
It basically favors keyboard only use over mouse
I was actually just considering trying out a different DE like Cosmic or a compositor like Hyprland, but idk if it’s just a “grass is greener” thing or not. KDE’s got a lot going on for it and switching between QT and GTK is a pain, and I’ve never used a compositor so idk what to expect.
I switched my work PC to Pop a couple months ago and seriously gave Cosmic a try.
I had issues with it remembering screen positions and monitor settings would get reset to default on every boot. I installed KDE last week and it was like changing to a comfortable pair of shoes. Everything magically started working exactly how it should.
Cosmic is still beta but I’m excited for it none-the-less as I use Gnome with all the cosmic extensions today. I just find that KDE feels dated and limited and Cosmics ease of customizability is very appealing
I guess that’s the only reason I’m considering trying something else, KDE is great because it’s got so many options, but also it’s got too many options you gotta mess with to get it looking just ok.
KDE is cool, but i was a heavy shortcut user even on Windows. Me discoovering Hyprland is akin to a drug-addict trying out heroine, because i can’t go back now.
Moved from KDE to hyperland, while keeping some of the ecosystem, like KDE PIM, Dolphins, Okular and the other standard apps.
Best decision for my daily work I made in a long time
It’s all about the workflow efficiency for me, not RAM. And the tilers for KDE and Gnome have always been unreliable in my experience.
Did you try on KDE since Plasma 6 came out? It introduced a native, manual tiling mechanism, which just needs to be configured by a KWinscript to make it automatic, so it still feels native when you resize the tiles. I’m pretty happy with Krohnkite these days either way…
Not a fan of either so I’ll just watch
