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?

  • naeap@sopuli.xyz
    6·
    vor 2 Jahren

    i3
    the less I need a mouse on a laptop, the better

    edit: ok, you specifically asked for a full fledged DE and not just a WM. well, I picked what I needed and with Manjaro i3 as base, I had a nice place to start

      • naeap@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        vor 2 Jahren

        i3 just feels much faster. can’t change back to anything more bloated at the moment. It wrecks my nerves waiting for a window to open on other DEs/WMs - although it’s often not much of a difference.

        I’m very happy with my current setup. would like to try sway, but I think Wayland/sway isn’t completely there yet.

        • 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          vor 2 Jahren

          haha I was being half serious here, as fun as I have with kronkite on my space heater, its is a layer of bloat on top of a mountain of bloat so not what you want in op’s case

  • lpslucasps@lemmy.pt
    5·
    vor 2 Jahren

    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.

    • pendsv@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      vor 2 Jahren

      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.

  • konodas@feddit.de
    3·
    vor 2 Jahren

    Tiling window managers like i3 are imho nice for laptops, since they do not waste any space and can be easily controlled via keyboard. Takes a while to get used to them, however.

    • klz@kbin.social
      1·
      vor 2 Jahren

      I’m the opposite. I only use tiling on desktop. When using screens under 4k a simple left/right split is all I feel which gnome can do out of the box.

    • snauth@lemmy.ml
      1·
      vor 2 Jahren

      i3wm on my laptop, light on resources, keyboard-driven saves screen estate (no window decorations), and picom makes it easy on the eyes (rounded corners, shadows). If you prefer wayland, sway (and swayfx) is the way.

  • 0x4E4F
    3·
    vor 2 Jahren

    Started out with xfce, used lxde for a short while… it was too minimalistic for my taste. Tried KDE for about a week, that was the oposite, too flashy. Went back to xfce, haven’t tried anything else since. It’s a sweet spot IMO.

    I was told that MATE is similar to xfce, but I haven’t tried it yet. For me, it’s a means to an end, if it works, why change it 🤷.

  • Haunting_Tale_5150@kbin.social
    3·
    vor 2 Jahren

    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.

  • godless@latte.isnot.coffee
    2·
    vor 2 Jahren

    I’m using xfce everywhere, it’s simply the most lightweight and I got so used to fast reactivity that I couldn’t care less about barebone icons (and even those have come a long way since).

  • MattMist@kbin.social
    2·
    vor 2 Jahren

    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.