if there will be a lightweight DE for W.
My tests showed that KDE with all its ingredients can indeed be sluggish on not so well performing hardware.
However, its window manager 'kwin' is lightweight! Having read so much about KDE being slow, I was much surprised to experience the excellent performance and low memory footprint of kwin in comparison to others. It performed astride to only one other window manager (sorry, forgot its name after I then decided to stay with the more feature-rich kwin, then).So, consider to use as your lightweight DE some light base, like LXQt, and chose it to run with kwin configured as its window manager.
I have been investigating LXQt and it's come a long way but it's not exactly light for what you get even if you use Openbox or xfwm. On my test system RAM consumption logging into Desktop on the same reference computer (figures have some rounding):
Enlightenment: 450 Mb
XFCE4: 740 Mb
LXQt + Kwin: 820 Mb
KDE Plasma: 1.3 Gb
I often hear the argument "well systems today have lots of RAM who cares!". Well I do for one... If you're going to eat up RAM show me something for the transaction (ie KDE with a few WM FX is at least giving a reason to use RAM). Even on a basic reseller box with 8Gb of RAM these are tight enough margins if you rely on large sample libraries and flip open a modern Web Browser. If I'm getting nothing for the RAM expense I'll stick with a more more efficient DE thanks..
Statistics: Posted by GMaq — Fri Feb 21, 2025 12:21 am