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
Yeah i use gnome on my laptop, desktop, and tablet. Works great on all, but thrives on the tablet and laptop
i3 and never looked back!
I love how customizable i3 is but I’m not ready to go keyboard mode yet lol
I really get that.
It’s a bit of a curve, but it gets suprisingly easy suprisingly fast.
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.
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.
I started with ubuntu then mint on desktop and then vm. I hated Gnome in those days, prefering KDE or XFCE (even i3wm). Now that my laptop is on EOS, I tried Gnome again and it’s much better for use with a trackpad. So yeah, different DEs for different tastes/uses/systems.
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!
Plasma. I have it configured to match my workflow.
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.
I like Enlightenment. It uses 400 MB of RAM on my old laptop/
XFCE minimal but good looking. You could also go for MATE or Cinnamon…
@aMalayali KDE - desktop or laptop.
KDE customize to how ever you like to use it!
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
xfce since it came default with eos and its pretty lightweight
I haven’t tried Gnome since they trashed the UI ;) and I wasn’t ever much of a KDE fan so the only desktop I have ever used since the demise of Gnome 2 is XFCE.
However I’ve switched back to Window Maker (a window manager) on my main PC and on my VM’s and I may do so on my laptops too. I don’t really need a desktop so to speak, I just use
wmsystray
to add a system tray and things like NetworkManager, bluez etc all end up there giving me what I actually do use of a desktop.I’m the weirdo over in the corner using TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment, forked from KDE3) on both my desktop and laptop.