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?
GNOME
i3
the less I need a mouse on a laptop, the betteredit: 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
full fledged de with tiling ?
spoiler
kde with Krohnkite
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.
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
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.
I use kde on my 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.
KDE customize to how ever you like to use it!
@aMalayali KDE - desktop or 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.
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 🤷.
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.
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.
I agree with this! I run i3 for all my builds and it’s great!
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.
I recently switched from i3 to hyprland and quite like it. Wayland still has some issues, but the better scaling makes it worth it.
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.
i3 and never looked back!
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).
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!I like Enlightenment. It uses 400 MB of RAM on my old laptop/
