Ding Ding Ding
In the blue corner, weighing at 400MB ram or less in usage. XFCE with a easy to use UI and light footprint. It has a good file manager and pretty much is the go to standard if you want a cinnamon windows like desktop but less weight for old machines and netbooks.
In the green corner, the ancestor of Gnome 3, born out of hatred for its future counterpart, we have MATE. MATE is also a lean desktop and is easily customizable using different panels if you were a mac, windows or unity desktop user. Without bias I exclusively use this on Ubuntu MATE for a laptop between me and my brother.
Which contender in the desktop ring do you prefer? Why? What’s the positives and negatives for you?
Round 1, GO!
My vote is with the Rat and I refuse to elaborate.
XFCE or LxQT > MATE in my opinion, but if I was trying to make a lean system I would just use a tiling wm, probably sway.
Xfce. It does what I want it to do and little else.
Neither. Cinnamon on Debian. Has just enough bling to be pretty and still manages not to be fat, and pretty similar to both your choices.
KDE because I have 64GB and I don’t care about memory usage and I like using a computer that looks like it’s from the 2010s at least.
KDE’s menus upon menus upon menus makes it look and work like W95 for me, just made of shiny plastic instead of something beige.
Also, I feel XFCE’s default looked awful about ten years ago, it looks modern and slick now, esp. with a theme like Arc installed! And it’s incredibly customisable and riceable!
I don’t love the default XFCE look but the default in distros like EndeavourOS or CachyOS are awesome. It is like a totally different DE.
I’ve been using XFCE for so long that it feels really awkward when I have to use Gnome or KDE.
XFCE is solid, reliable, stable, unobtrusive, lean, responsive.
It is also the reason I’ve not used Wayland yet.
I’ve used XFCE for more than a decade now and this is my experience exactly. People usually recommend it for lower end systems, but I’ve yet to find anything more comfortable, even for my high-end desktop machine.
Every few years, when an all-new fancy Gnome/KDE version is released again, I give it a try, but I’m always back to XFCE within days.
i use xfce, but entirely because it worked well when 16 megabytes of ram was considered average and it literally took almost a half hour to log in and start using a browser on both gnome and kde.
is mate as lightweight as xfce?
MATE is a bit heavier than XFCE.
Afaik the most stable DEs on Linux are GNOME and Xfce. I don’t see many advantages of MATE so Xfce is my preferred option. MATE has a better app selection though.
I have used both in the past, but now use neither of them, have been exclusively a KDE Plasma user for several years by now and no longer feel like trying much different.
GNOME 2 was the first DE I ever used on GNU/Linux, so MATE has a nostalgic feel to me. I do not think Xfce is very radically different from it in its functionality, although the default configuration is somewhat different. This is really mostly a matter of personal taste.
I’m happy with XFCE and am looking forward to Wayland support.
With that little ram, you’re better off with jwm, lxqt, lxde, or icewm. Not xfce or mate, that require over 600-800 MB of ram just to start up. In fact, with so low ram, you’re better off with something like Haiku.
I believe they mentioned the ram used by xfce, not the total system ram, but thank you for the recommendations, I’m really interested in software able to run in very low end hardware.
I do the same for my friends and family, installing linux for them while their laptops only have 2 or 4 gb of ram. XFce with debian on slow hardware, mint on 4 gb laptops with medium speed. However, for something really low end, do consider Haiku, as I wrote earlier.
If you do try Haiku, use Falkon as the web browser. You will have a much better experience than the other Haiku browser options.
If you are a low-end Linux enthusiast, I would also recommend the Trinity desktop. Just as MATE is a continuation of GNOME 2, Trinity is a modern version of KDE 3. I was quite surprised how light and functional it is.
If you want to give it a shot in a VM, the Q4OS distro includes it as a default DE option. If you really want to be impressed what can be done with little RAM, try the 32 bit version of Q4OS.
Love how 2/5 comments suggest using KDE (like any sane person) and I totally wasn’t going to do the same (like any sane person).
XFCE for the aforementioned reasons and not depending on gnome. Xmonad otherwise.
Nobody ever talks about LxQt, that was my first GNU/Linux experience on Lubuntu 19.10. It had a modern design only using about 300 MB of RAM. LxQt is watching the match outside the ring
Hey I’ll sit in that corner.
I’m on lubuntu from 18.04 and by 24.04 it grew in to a swan.It can share TDE’s popcorn.
been using xfce4 since it’s the default desktop environment for MX Linux and it’s really rock solid whilst treading the line between a full-on DE and a WM. To me it’s a lot more customizable than mate and has significantly more development behind it (can’t wait for 4.20!). With that being said i don’t necessarily have a problem with using mate and its app suite, the bottom being a taskbar instead of that just being part of the top bar is something i can get behind but you can achieve that with a panel profile on xfce just fine
