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?
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
GNOME
Yeah i use gnome on my laptop, desktop, and tablet. Works great on all, but thrives on the tablet and laptop
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.
I agree with this! I run i3 for all my builds and it’s great!
i3 and never looked back!
Cinnamon for me, It looks like old Windows
Cinnamon is great. I just did a fresh install of Mint on an older laptop.
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.
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.
On laptops Gnome has a big advantage in the multitouch gestures for the touchpad, and as everyone says it’s pretty polished. But lately I’ve been using KDE since it offers a lot more functionality and customization out of the box. Most of it’s apps are like a swiss army knife and I love that. KDE is also catching up in the multitouch gesture department.
Plasma on Wayland has got multitouch gestures as well.
The gestures are not as polished as gnome on wayland
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.
Oh look, downvoting opinions has already crept to the fediverse… Have an upvote to fix things.
I’m with you on this one, I try other DEs and keep coming back to GNOME. Got a new NVIDIA Optimus laptop for work, haven’t gotten around to installing Linux on it yet but that will be GNOME. Stuff just gets done, most other DEs make me tinker with settings a lot… not to mention WMs. XFCE may be the exception, but it feels too dated.
Plasma.
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’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).
XFCE minimal but good looking. You could also go for MATE or Cinnamon…
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.