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@beehaw.org
    2·
    1 year 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.

  • bellsDoSing@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    Tried many, but Xfce won for me:

    • great keyboard support (tiling windows, virtual desktops, etc.)
    • doesn’t get in the way
    • compact re UI (don’t like modern GNOME look with lots of whitespace)
    • lightweight

    And even though I use terminals a lot (neovim, git, etc.), I never stuck with tiling window managers in the end (e.g. i3). Rather I’m heavily relying on:

    • virtual desktops (8 or so)
    • manual window tiling via shortcuts
    • tmux
    • dlarge6510@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago

      Like you I never latched onto tiling wm’s. I did think they were fun to play with but unless they use Emacs keybindings I don’t think my brain will like learning a whole set of new ones.

      I love virtual desktops however. Used them from the start!

  • dlarge6510@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • bitwolf@lemmy.one
    1·
    1 year 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.

  • unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    KDE

    If there was a modern Window Maker, I would use that. I mean with a notification area and when I minimize Firefox or Chrome I don’t get five icons in the corner and it works as a Wayland compositor and supports HiDPI scaling.

    • dlarge6510@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 year ago

      I just use Window Maker. It got an update recently. Notifications work out of the box, Firefox and Chrome have never created multiple icons, not seen that.

      It is not a Wayland compositor which is fine as I only use X11 and probably won’t use Wayland till it’s mature enough. I went back to Window Maker several years ago and it’s working just fine. With wmsystemtray I have a system tray so things like NetworkMakager and hplip and blue-z all can latch on and display their icons, I don’t need a desktop environment now!

  • konodas@feddit.de
    0·
    1 year 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.