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?

  • bbbhltz
    5•2 years ago

    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.

    • @CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi
      2•2 years ago

      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.

    • @aMalayali@beehaw.orgOP
      1•2 years ago

      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.

  • DarkThoughts
    2•2 years ago

    Plasma KDE.
    I prefer the typical Windows like layout and it offers a lot of customization options that the other DEs are missing.

  • Haunting_Tale_5150
    2•2 years ago

    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.

  • @konodas@feddit.de
    2•2 years ago

    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.

    • @snauth@lemmy.ml
      2•2 years ago

      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.

    • klz
      1•2 years ago

      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.

  • cfx_4188
    2•2 years ago

    I like Enlightenment. It uses 400 MB of RAM on my old laptop/

  • lpslucasps
    1•2 years ago

    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.

  • @okiloki@feddit.de
    1•2 years ago

    I recently switched from i3 to hyprland and quite like it. Wayland still has some issues, but the better scaling makes it worth it.

    • vividspecter
      1•2 years ago

      I’ve used Sway for a few years but Hyprland is certainly on my list.

    • rankshank
      1•2 years ago

      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.

  • @4ffy@lemmy.ml
    1•2 years ago

    I have not used a desktop environment on a laptop in a very long time. For a long while, I had fluxbox installed and that was good enough. Nowadays, my laptop almost exclusively runs EXWM. I can’t really recommend that for general use though.

    If I were to install a full DE now, I think I would go for LXQT. I love Openbox, and I would probably end up replacing the panel with tint2. That would be a decent environment, I think.

  • bitwolf
    1•2 years ago

    Gnome hands down has the best laptop experience. If you follow the intended workflow of using tiled windows and many workspaces. You can get to a very large number of windows, without getting lost, even with just the laptop screen.

    Additionally the paradigm does translate well to a desktop for the times you are docked.