In the past I've tried to use KDE and just never found it all that appealing. Sure, it was pretty, but it was also pretty buggy in my own experience.

Last night, for no particular reason, I decided to install KDE Plasma desktop environment on my laptop to try it out again and I've got to say... it's not bad.

Now, I'm an XFCE man through and through. Aside from some very short stints with Cinnamon (w/ Mint), XFCE has more or less been my choice for well over a decade now.

With that said, I'm not switching to KDE full-time, at least not anytime soon. But I was pretty impressed with it after having not even considered it an option for many years. May be worth checking out again: https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/

I'm considering tossing it on my workstation as well to see how it does in multiple monitors and under real use.

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Barnacle wrote on August 28, 2023 at 12:19 AM

I used XFCE from 2006 until around 2011 and it was pretty nice and lightweight. Then I switched to a laptop running Gnome for a few years, but noticed later versions became a bit sluggish. On my current machine (a laptop based on Ryzen 7 with 40 GB of RAM) I switched to KDE Plasma because its performance is pretty good, it's compatible with Wayland and it has a lot of built-in applets and stuff. And it didn't have the frequent CPU activity spikes I was seeing with Gnome.

Despite the lack of Wayland support, XFCE is really nice, although I'd consider LXDE or Enlightenment on a low RAM machine. Enlightenment looked amazing last time I tried it on an old laptop.

someoneonarchlinux wrote on August 29, 2023 at 3:32 PM

I have currently installed cinnamon, xfce, gnome, lxde, lxqt, mate and plasma on my Debian PC. Most often, I find myself using lxde and plasma. I admire plasma's looks! I primarily use lxde because it is so lightweight, and my computer is 15 years old. However, it does struggle a bit when running plasma...

Rambler OP wrote on August 26, 2023 at 11:14 PM

Update: Tried running in on my workstation. It's performs like dog shit.

Back to XFCE fulltime.

expiccione wrote on August 27, 2023 at 8:34 PM (edited by a moderator on September 8, 2023 at 1:44 AM)

You can try to strip some part of Plasma to make it less heavy on resources. Still, if your hardware's shit, there's nothing doing. I've got a laptop which barely runs bspwm xd.

What you are looking for is baloo and PIM shit, which is almost useless. if you take a look at htop, you can see what is chugging RAM and other resources.

Anyway, what hardware do you have to not run Plasma?

not_bob wrote on September 7, 2023 at 7:15 PM

That's cool and all, but I'm going to stick with fvwm2. I like a window manager that uses less than 200k of ram.

kolyzzy wrote on September 10, 2023 at 9:13 AM

I use KDE Plasma and by my experience it works pretty great with two monitors.