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?

    • dadarobot
      1•2 years ago

      Yeah i use gnome on my laptop, desktop, and tablet. Works great on all, but thrives on the tablet and laptop

  • bbbhltz
    2•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
      1•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.

  • @okiloki@feddit.de
    2•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.

  • lpslucasps
    2•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.

    • @dlarge6510@lemm.ee
      2•2 years 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 for many more years 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!

      YMMV regarding the HIDPI thing, I have never had a monitor with such a narrow pixel pitch to need anything like that.

  • godless
    1•2 years ago

    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).

  • 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.

  • @bellsDoSing@lemm.ee
    1•2 years 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

    An 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
  • rise-if-you-would
    1•2 years ago

    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.

  • Mnmalst
    0•2 years ago

    I recently switched to xfce.
    I used KDE exclusively since 2004. That’s a very long time but KDE Plasma in combination with nvidia got worse, what felt like, every single day over the last years, so it finally came to the point where I had no choice to look for something that works better.
    Super happy with xfce after I set it up almost exactly like my KDE setup. Sure there are some thing that are not as “well rounded” than some of the excellent Plasma features but over all it works great!

      • Mnmalst
        1•2 years ago

        That was the main reason I choose it over the others. Having a stable DE that doesn’t change much which works great with nvidia and xorg.