I have tried out Gnome, KDE, Lxqt and Xfce on a regular desktop and all of them feel nice. I haven’t tried many DE’s on a laptop.
Are there any particular DE’s you like on a laptop, because of things like power consumption and efficiency that would not come normally into consideration for a desktop?
If you haven’t tried them, I recommend giving them a try. They all have something to offer.
I don’t use Gnome, for example. People knock on it a bit BUT a large group of people swear by it for workflow.
KDE Plasma is the dream for anyone who likes to tweak settings. I used it on my laptop for a long time and it is very convenient. It also manages power and monitor settings very well. In terms of memory usage it is now similar to XFCE.
XFCE is perfect for people who don’t like change. It is a slow moving DE; tried and true.
Right now I am using LXQt. Not sure why I decided to do that. It looks ok. It is fast and light. That’s it’s claim to fame. It can be used with different WMs which is nice.
Are there any particular DE’s you like on a laptop, because of things like power consumption and efficiency that would not come normally into consideration for a desktop?
I can’t say I’ve ever looked into it. But, I found that KDE handled things very well. I used my laptop for full workdays, getting 11 hours out of it.
I started with ubuntu then mint on desktop and then vm. I hated Gnome in those days, prefering KDE or XFCE (even i3wm). Now that my laptop is on EOS, I tried Gnome again and it’s much better for use with a trackpad. So yeah, different DEs for different tastes/uses/systems.
Thank you.
If you haven’t tried them, I recommend giving them a try. They all have something to offer.
I have tried them on desktop and in most cases, I did not have any serious issue with them. I was thinking which one would be better optimised for laptops.
KDE handled things very well
I’m on KDE now. It’s good. Was thinking whether there are any DE’s that are specifically recommended for laptops, for efficiency or ease of use.
XFCE minimal but good looking. You could also go for MATE or Cinnamon…
I’m a KDE guy and use it myself on my notebook, but GNOME with its multitouch gestures and polished (if a little inflexible) workflow is also an excellent fit.
GNOME
Yeah i use gnome on my laptop, desktop, and tablet. Works great on all, but thrives on the tablet and laptop
GNOME, despite the critiques it receives it’s the most polished one and the one that gives me less problems
I have nothing against gnome and it’s defiantly the most polished, but in the same time it has alot of small inconveniences that are only fixable with plugins and messing around with the settings.
For my workflow kde is usable out of the box with almost no configurations.
xfce since it came default with eos and its pretty lightweight
I’m the type of person who gets tired of a DE after using it for too long, so I’m using Budgie right now and I really like it. However XFCE is pretty nice, too, it’s what I used to use.
From what I hear, budgie may not get further updates.
Cinnamon for me, It looks like old Windows
Cinnamon is great. I just did a fresh install of Mint on an older laptop.
Of the ones I tried, my top 3 would be cinnamon, budgie, and kde. KDE is probably the best bet for modern features ATM, cinnamon for simplicity.
I recently switched from i3 to hyprland and quite like it. Wayland still has some issues, but the better scaling makes it worth it.
I’ve used Sway for a few years but Hyprland is certainly on my list.
Also a fan of hyprland, will be ovewriting my arch+kde desktop with my laptop’s nixos+hyprland flake this week. Wayland definitely has some early adoption pains but the tearing reduction alone makes it worth it.
Tried many, but Xfce won for me:
- great keyboard support (tiling windows, virtual desktops, etc.)
- doesn’t get in the way
- compact re UI (don’t like modern GNOME look with lots of whitespace)
- lightweight
And even though I use terminals a lot (neovim, git, etc.), I never stuck with tiling window managers in the end (e.g. i3). Rather I’m heavily relying on:
- virtual desktops (8 or so)
- manual window tiling via shortcuts
- tmux
Like you I never latched onto tiling wm’s. I did think they were fun to play with but unless they use Emacs keybindings I don’t think my brain will like learning a whole set of new ones.
I love virtual desktops however. Used them from the start!
Gnome hands down had the best laptop experience. If you follow the intended workflow of using tiled windows and many workspaces you can hey very far with just the laptop screen.
However it does translate well to a desktop for the times you are docked.
The only problem is that it only supports half tiling, which is quite annoying if you are using large screens.
I recently switched to xfce.
I used KDE exclusively since 2004. That’s a very long time but KDE Plasma in combination with nvidia got worse, what felt like, every single day over the last years, so it finally came to the point where I had no choice to look for something that works better.
Super happy with xfce after I set it up almost exactly like my KDE setup. Sure there are some thing that are not as “well rounded” than some of the excellent Plasma features but over all it works great!xfce is the least buggy de I ever used, never seen anything not work as intended on it even on very low en hardware
That was the main reason I choose it over the others. Having a stable DE that doesn’t change much which works great with nvidia and xorg.
@aMalayali KDE - desktop or laptop.
Plasma. I have it configured to match my workflow.
