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?
GNOME, despite the critiques it receives it’s the most polished one and the one that gives me less problems
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.
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.
I use kde on my laptop
Plasma KDE.
I prefer the typical Windows like layout and it offers a lot of customization options that the other DEs are missing.deleted by creator
GNOME
Of the ones I tried, my top 3 would be cinnamon, budgie, and kde. KDE is probably the best bet for modern features ATM, cinnamon for simplicity.
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.
Plasma on Wayland has got multitouch gestures as well.
The gestures are not as polished as gnome on wayland
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.
i3 and never looked back!
I recently switched from i3 to hyprland and quite like it. Wayland still has some issues, but the better scaling makes it worth it.
Also a fan of hyprland, will be ovewriting my arch+kde desktop with my laptop’s nixos+hyprland flake this week. Wayland definitely has some early adoption pains but the tearing reduction alone makes it worth it.
I’ve used Sway for a few years but Hyprland is certainly on my list.
I like Enlightenment. It uses 400 MB of RAM on my old laptop/
Started out with xfce, used lxde for a short while… it was too minimalistic for my taste. Tried KDE for about a week, that was the oposite, too flashy. Went back to xfce, haven’t tried anything else since. It’s a sweet spot IMO.
I have not used a desktop environment on a laptop in a very long time. For a long while, I had fluxbox installed and that was good enough. Nowadays, my laptop almost exclusively runs EXWM. I can’t really recommend that for general use though.
If I were to install a full DE now, I think I would go for LXQT. I love Openbox, and I would probably end up replacing the panel with tint2. That would be a decent environment, I think.
i3
the less I need a mouse on a laptop, the betteredit: 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
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.
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.
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.
I agree with this! I run i3 for all my builds and it’s great!
