Some DEs are focused on resource efficiency, but don’t look fancy. Others are fancy, but require a fairly modern setup. I have KDE (Fedora) installed on my laptop, I love its look and options. But it is not always snappy, some little freezes occur as well, even in basic situations (opening Firefox and v2rayN simultaneously was one of the cases). The most problematic thing is almost every app taking around 2-3 secs to open its window.
Many people would just tell me to install Xfce, but I still want a fancy desktop, I believe it is something I can afford on my setup. First I thought of GNOME, but it is controversial: some sources report GNOME as well optimized even for low-end machines, other claim it is much heavier than KDE.
What it your experience with desktop environments and their performance? Perhaps you have compared various DEs within the same distro and setup? How performant GNOME actually is compared to KDE? What are the balanced options to explore?
What distro do you use?
I found KDE to work better in some distros than others.
For instance Fedora KDE is not the best, I had it being sluggish last lime I tried it. Now I’m on Opensuse KDE and it’s flawless.
Also I have found KDE surprisingly working better than XFCE, but I think most of that has been because wayland support.
I use Fedora and KDE really sucks here. It is bearable only with minimal options and animations enabled. Only thing keeping me from ditching is that I’ll have a long time picking something else that satisfies me, because I want a fancy desktop, but not a sluggish one. Have you seen a DE that features a couple of nice animations and effects and can mimic MacOS, but is lighter than KDE?
Xfce is just probably better optimized for X11 currently. Most of lightweight DEs probably are, I guess?
Xfce is the king of stability, but it comes with a limited set of features.
You could try cinnamon, thought that would meant using linux mint, as cinnamon and linux mint come in a pack.
Well, there still is a Cinnamon flavor of Fedora, maybe I’ll try it