KDE is now my favorite desktop

XFCE or LXDE anyone? Honest question - If you use XFCE or LXDE or similar minimalistic DEs, are you happy with the choice? or do you feel somethings are missing that are available in KDE, MATE and the likes?

pixelation in fonts, apps sometimes just not working, input latency, unpleasant to look at, brightness controls, notifications, could probably write out an entire 2500 word essay.

You lose the application integration I have with KDE when you use apps from the KDE suite or even QT apps.

Back when the lightweight desktops were popping up, KDE was considered pretty memory heavy. Thing is, KDE hasn't really kept up with growing RAM sizes as well as Windows has. ;-) So unless you're trying to run a Linux desktop on a potato, I'd say KDE should now be considered pretty lightweight.

I used to mostly use XFCE and moved to KDE as it supported high DPI screens better.

I've been using XFCE for the better part of two decades now (I still run into people upset about the changes XFCE made in 2003, i.e. 4.0), and I am perfectly satisfied. Though as the saying goes: what I don't know I don't know; so I may be missing out on a better experience, but at least I am content enough that I don't bother seeking it out.

Though, my monitors are also from 2010, so a lot of the visual problems people have with XFCE, I don't.

We also did a lot of intentional action to get the resource usage down in the Plasma 5 generation and timeframe.

E.g. the machine we optimized for during at least one or two Plasma dev meetings I remember was the original Pine64 Pinebook, which was a very under-powered device. We had a stack of them to hand to devs. Intentionally as a "if we can get it to fly there, it'll fly anywhere".

So it's not just that we haven't gotten worse, we also did get legitimately better in later releases compared to some of our porkier ones (which also did exist).

Is XFCE minimalistic? It feels to me like it's just a modern continuation of the desktops we had in the 90s and early 2000s. Instead of adding in a bunch of extra stuff and moving things around to keep people busy, they're just quietly making it a little better with every release.

The only desktops I've used since 2007 are XFCE and macOS, so I guess I don't know what I might be missing from KDE or MATE. But XFCE absolutely blows macOS out of the water, so at least I'm not missing anything from that alternative.

I have a Rock64 that runs LxQT.

I run KDE Plasma on my laptop. KDE animations are too bloated and heavy for the Rock64, and there's way too many preferences to fiddle with to disable them all. If there was some kind of global "lightweight mode" checkbox in the plasma prefs, I might give it another try.

LxQT is fine. The main gripe I have with it is there's no sort of LxQT-meta package on ArchLinux which installs everything I actually need without a lot of fiddling. I spent a couple weeks just gradually figuring out things were missing that would make the environment a lot better. It would be nice if it just included things like oxygen icons and whatever. I understand lightweight, but they should have an "opinionated" lightweight option since I just want something that runs well on a SBC.

I used to run XFCE on an arm chromebook for a few years as my daily driver. Between the two, XFCE seemed much easier to install/customize. IDK about now, since that was before the latest release which uses latest GTK. I assume it is less lightweight now as a result of that change.

I've used XFCE for a 2011 laptop, it was about as fast as LXDE but better polished. Windows was unusable there, and XFCE made the computer feel brand new. Only the modern websites that would still cause slowness, but the OS was great.

Even back in the day KDE pointed out that in real world use they were not as memory heavy because everything depended on the same toolkits that were shared. Meaning your startup memory use was higher, but once you launched the applications/tools you were going to use KDE used less. (this of course depended on which tools you ran, KDE assumed all KDE tools, run a non-kde application and it doesn't work)

LXQt with kwin (for kwin's nice compositing effects.)

Desktop Environments always feel a bit clunky to me. A Window Manager like i3 or something is easier.

I get the idea of a desktop environment offering more consistency. But, my system feels very consistent. It is really easy, because there are only ~4 types of windows: Firefox, Evince, a terminal, or some ephemeral matplotlib graph.

I wouldn’t think of it as missing out on anything. You just become familiar with the ecosystem of mostly terminal utilities.

I've used kde for years, but earlier this year I decided to try xfce.

My goal was to have my own setup without "bloat" I never used. So my own task manager of choice, my search bar of choice, etc.

My initial impression of xfce was that it was much snappier than kde. My main gripe with xfce was the lack of wayland support.

A big personal issue; while my own custom setup was ok, I still had to maintain it, and I found myself trying to make xfce like kde. So might as well use kde I guess.

Another super specifc thing I missed was that its window manager didn't support defining horizontal gradients in the titlebar, so I couldn't rock a true windows classic theme. It could do vertical gradients, but that's not the same.

Now I'm back to using KDE.

Yes, this is my only gripe with Xfce.

Everything is sooo small on my 16" notebook and when I zoom it gets blurry.

I recommend that you try labwc. It's lean and supports Openbox themes.

I switched from X11 and LXDE to Sway and had a good experience. But Sway was my slippery slope to labwc.

https://github.com/labwc/labwc

I use xfce because it is stable, simple and lightweight. Perhaps I don't know what I'm missing but I'm very happy with it.

labwc + Openbox theming

https://github.com/labwc/labwc

XFCE for me, when my netbook was still alive.

I actualy liked Ubuntu's Unity, and the move to GNOME did not made me an happy user.

As someone that used Gtkmm during the GNOME 1.0 days, the way current GNOME works and the overuse of JavaScript made me look elsewhere.

XFCE was good enough for me (I am old enough to have used twm), and looks rather nice.

Thanks for this work. I switched from xfce when I realised that KDE was nearly as lightweight.

I've used XFCE as my main DE for around 10 years, (I switched to MacOs a year ago), I think mostly depends on your workflow, for me the best thing was that it gets out your way, you have a simple menu to select apps, a taskbar, and that's about it. I tested Gnome and KDE a few times over the years and for me they are more bloated than what I needed for my workflow, but I agree they feel more cohesive and the aesthetics are nicer.

XFCE for virtual machines or low powered hardware

Yeah it legitimately trades blows with the lightweight desktops.

Me and probably a couple of other cave dwellers use Mate (someone must be, because it keeps getting maintained). It has a the Win 9x-era aesthetics and simplicity that I've not found anywhere else.

I've been a consistent XFCE user for over a decade. I think of it the same way I think of my desk - I'm not proclaiming its the best in the world, all I can tell you is that its pretty stable, clean and utilitarian, and I'm consistently productive on top of it.

I'm concerned about the XFCE team's approach to Wayland, which is to say they are not making any commitments to make a stable release for it. I've already had to take my new Debian install back to X11 to get XFCE working. I know that Wayland is contentious and not developed with clear communication with many DE teams, but the drift here is concerning, and I am considering trying to find something XFCE-like with full Wayland support.

XFCE is fine. I used to use it and there is a lot to like.

It lacks tiling, and I use some KDE apps very heavily (Kate, Dolphin) so KDE integrates a bit better.

I have thought of giving XFCE another go and I do not think there is anything critical I would miss if I had a tiling window manager (which would have some advantages over KDE's tiling, I think), but I have KDE configured in a way that works for me so not very motivated to do it.

I’ve happily used KDE for years, but recently I switched to XFCE. My only real pain point with KDE was that the screensaver often refused to resume after the monitor turned off due to inactivity. To unlock it, I had to open a framebuffer terminal and manually kill kscreenlocker_greet before KDE would accept my password again, after a delay of ~10 seconds.

XFCE isn’t as polished as KDE, and I do miss some features, like KDE’s excellent network applet that shows detailed statistics. But overall, the experience has been good, and I really appreciate how quickly I can unlock the screen after a pause.

I also enjoy the wide variety of themes. KDE has plenty of impressive dark themes, but very few light ones, and most of those fail to clearly differentiate the active window’s title bar from inactive ones. XFCE does much better here.

(Some people point out that XFCE doesn’t work with Wayland. That’s not an issue for me. My time with Wayland was highly frustrating, primarily due to the unreliability of keyboard layout customization. After months of struggling, I went back to Xorg and good old xmodmap.)

I used XFCE for more than a decade and it's my first choice when picking a DE. Two major issues tempted me to try KDE this year: the lack of Wayland support and the absolute asinine file picker/ chooser dialogue XFCE took from gnome, if I remember correctly. Having a file picker that marks the text of the file name, but when you start typing switches to the search bar drives me nuts. (Even when you just want to drop a downloaded file somewhere in a directory ... why would I want to search in these circumstances??)

I'm keeping an eye on XFCE and they plan to release Wayland support some time this autumn. Once this is somewhere near stable, I thin I will switch back again to XFCE.

Yes, another MATE user here (UbuntuMATE). I like how efficient and boring it is. It's also very consistent.

But I'm worried we're being left behind with the shift to Wayland.

Maybe that is unfounded.

I had fantastic results with lxqt some years on an HTPC. System used less resources and seemed more stable with Qt. Perhaps GTK is better these days, but at the time lxqt was a clear winner for that kind of scenario.

For a daily drive DE though, it may be too minimal?

That's genuinely awesome! You people rock! :-D

Xfce was my long-term desktop until recently. I loved that it was lightweight, clean, and generally well thought-out.

It has become more memory-hungry since then, losing some of its early advantage. And with the move to Gtk 3, it has adopted UI patterns that constantly get in my way. (Client-side window decorations, for example.) I worked around those changes as best I could for several minor versions, but eventually gave up the fight and switched to KDE. Turns out Plasma slimmed down a bit while Xfce was gaining weight, and it lets me turn off the bells and whistles that I don't want.

I'm happy to once again have a desktop that I enjoy using. I do miss Xfce's Thunar, but KDE's Dolphin is mostly not bad.

Hello, I am the other person who liked Unity. Now that we have met, the prophecy is fulfilled.

Seriously though, the fact that macOS still doesn't have an option to fully extend the dock horizontally or vertically drives me nuts. If you auto hide the dock it loses half of its value, and if you don't hide the dock then you have dead gaps in the corners that serve no purpose.

I recently switched from XFCE to KDE on wayland and I'm very satisfied with the switch. KDE is more stable, more customizable and at least as fast as XFCE. I don't notice significant resource usage from KDE either.

Thanks to your work, I have stopped DE switching and am very happy with KDE - may you folks always have this user focus!