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@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      1 year ago

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

    • pendsv@discuss.tchncs.de
      5·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • oranki@sopuli.xyz
      11·
      1 year ago

      Oh look, downvoting opinions has already crept to the fediverse… Have an upvote to fix things.

      I’m with you on this one, I try other DEs and keep coming back to GNOME. Got a new NVIDIA Optimus laptop for work, haven’t gotten around to installing Linux on it yet but that will be GNOME. Stuff just gets done, most other DEs make me tinker with settings a lot… not to mention WMs. XFCE may be the exception, but it feels too dated.

  • bbbhltz@beehaw.org
    6·
    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.

    • CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi
      2·
      1 year 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
      2·
      1 year 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.

  • Jure Repinc
    6·
    1 year ago

    On my laptops I like the same one as on my desktops: KDE Plasma. With any other I quickly start missing the features that KDE Plasma offers and the configurability and customizability. And It is also quite lightweight for all that it offers. Others often offer much less and consume more resources then KDE Plasma.

    • ProtonBadger@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, KDE Plasma is surprisingly light on resources. I’m flexible and can make almost any desktop environment work for me, maybe because I started back in the day with TWM and FVWM on HPUX. However, given the choice I run Plasma with the Latte dock, I got it setup to look like a macOS/Unity mix on my Laptop.

      I recently got it going with Wayland, even though I’m using a NVidia gfx card in Dedicated mode, and it’s just amazingly smooth and free of several X11 old annoyances. Gaming through Proton/XWayland works well too.

  • rise-if-you-would@kbin.social
    6·
    1 year 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.

  • naeap@sopuli.xyz
    6·
    1 year ago

    i3
    the less I need a mouse on a laptop, the better

    edit: ok, you specifically asked for a full fledged DE and not just a WM. well, I picked what I needed and with Manjaro i3 as base, I had a nice place to start

      • naeap@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        1 year ago

        i3 just feels much faster. can’t change back to anything more bloated at the moment. It wrecks my nerves waiting for a window to open on other DEs/WMs - although it’s often not much of a difference.

        I’m very happy with my current setup. would like to try sway, but I think Wayland/sway isn’t completely there yet.

        • 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          1 year ago

          haha I was being half serious here, as fun as I have with kronkite on my space heater, its is a layer of bloat on top of a mountain of bloat so not what you want in op’s case

  • lpslucasps@lemmy.pt
    6·
    1 year 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.

  • MattMist@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    I’m the type of person who gets tired of a DE after using it for too long, so I’m using Budgie right now and I really like it. However XFCE is pretty nice, too, it’s what I used to use.

  • konodas@feddit.de
    5·
    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.

    • snauth
      3·
      1 year 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.

      • Aarkon@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        +1 for Sway. Discovered it a year and a half ago, put it on my laptop, then on my desktop as well. Not gotten into how to really configure it to fit my needs or so, but I’m quite happy with the out of the box experience.

        Only downside is the lack of hardware acceleration for the GUI.

    • klz@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year 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.

  • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

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