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Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better W
by dingdingdang 2y ago
Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.
- IWeldMelons 2y agoKDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.
- candiddevmike 2y agoSource?
- ahoka 2y agoIt used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2, when it was still a thing. I don’t know why it got a reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I used to run it for years though, really liked it for a while.
- BanazirGalbasi 2y agoI think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the reputation of XFCE was justified.
- johnisgood 2y agoXubuntu was lighter than Ubuntu (when it had Gnome), at least that is how I remember it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bombela 2y agoAlright I do use KDE those days. I have used XFCE before. I don't think I can believe that KDE is lighter in term of response/lag. I didn't check the ram usage because Firefox is taking it all anyways.
- nine_k 2y agoAuto Tab Discard [1] does wonders to Firefox RAM consumption if you open lots of tabs. Has the "recommended" badge. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
- louky 2y agoAbsolutely! It was a game changer for me. No more OOM with 16GB RAM
- consteval 2y agoI think KDE can be lighter in terms of response/lag if you turn off animations. On most desktops with dedicated graphics though it probably doesn't matter. Definitely on those older Intel 6000 type graphics and earlier though it does make a big difference.
- mikae1 2y agoAnd, no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued. LXQt if you want something with less features, Plasma if you want more features. They're both performant.
- heresie-dabord 2y agoIt's absurd that people who recommend "light" Linux distros mention DEs that are much heavier than LXQt and LXDE. As for Wayland, I use it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian xwayland). It works well enough, but there is some kind of bug that causes xwayland to fill the swap space at almost 100%. When this happens, I find it necessary to close applications to reduce the swap usage.
- mikae1 2y agoWhat do you mean by heavy though? Plasma is feature heavy but definitely not memory heavy.
- kelnos 2y ago> And, no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued. Not sure what you mean. We have CSDs available for people who like it, but they can be turned on and off. If you're talking about random GTK apps that run on Xfce, there's not much we can do about that; we don't set app policy. That's one of the nicer things about Wayland, though: there's a way for the compositor to tell applications "I'll draw the decorations". On X11 there's no protocol for that, only a way for an app to tell the window manager it wants to draw its own, without a way for the WM to say "no, don't do it".
- mikae1 2y ago> If you're talking about random GTK apps that run on Xfce, there's not much we can do about that; we don't set app policy. Yes, guess you're correct. Qt apps in Plasma was a better mix for me. I have consistency and no funky titlebars.
- tankenmate 2y agoBut unfortunately KDE is Wayland only now, so no way to turn the compositor off.
- LorenDB 2y agoThat is just false. Source: the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed packages provide an up-to-date X11 version of kwin.
- signa11 2y agothis statement is not correct. kde can do both x11 and wayland. checkout the arch-wiki (kde plasma wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE) to see how.
- IWeldMelons 2y agoI run x11 on my Debian 12.
- consteval 2y agoI do too, but this doesn't really count because Debian Stable is still plasma 5.
- kelnos 2y agoLighter I won't entirely disagree with: I think a default install of KDE will still be heavier than Xfce, but GTK3 isn't the lightest toolkit, and you can slim KDE down without losing much functionality. But I don't get the HiDPI point? Certainly 4.16 had issues with HiDPI, but in 4.18 you can set the UI scaling factor, and I believe shortly before and/or after initial release, we fixed up all the issues of blurry image rendering. I have a HiDPI screen and it's worked very well for me, and looks nice.
- IWeldMelons 2y agoGTK3 had no fractional scaling, GTK4 had it broken, but QT has the best fractional scaling I've seen.
- EasyMark 2y agodefinitely my go to for VM's and VNC for lightweight no need to fiddle installs.
- pjerem 2y agoI love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen. And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ». It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.
- nine_k 2y agoHmm, can't agree, having run Xfce for years on HiDPI screens. Go to Settings, Appearance, Advanced, set the font DPI to something like 144 or what works for your screen. The only thing that does not obey this is Firefox; the way to adjust it is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something like 1.5 in about:config.
- mmphosis 2y agoLinux Mint XFCE. Appearance > Fonts > DPI Custom DPI setting: 144 makes fonts across the desktop larger. The default setting: 96 seems fine to me. The default in Firefox was -1.0 which is also fine.
- pjerem 2y agoLast time I tried (a few months ago), the text was indeed bigger but most window layouts were broken, the icons kept the same size etc etc …
- wkat4242 2y agoKDE is really excellent on HiDPI. Running it here on a 4K 24" screen and it looks amazing
- YarickR2 2y agoWhat monitor do you use ? 24" 4K is such a rare thing these days ; I'm using cheapo LG , but I always look out if there's something better
- 2y ago
- prmoustache 2y agoIf you really want a just working and actually lightweight (instead of pretending like XFCE), you choose icewm.
- hnisoss 2y agoapples and oranges tho. you can use icewm instead of XFWM