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!
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.
I use Xfce, as do most of my Linux friends, it’s lightweight and simple yet also very customizable.
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 EndevourOS or CachyOS are awesome. It is like a totally different DE.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
About haiku, isn’t it still too experimental? Like for using websites, when it comes to security?
If you do try Haiku, use Falkon as the web browser. You will have a much better experience than the other Haiku browser options.
About haiku, isn’t it still too experimental? Like for using websites, when it comes to security?
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.
Thanks for the suggestions!
I’m not exactly a low end enthusiast, like doing it for fun, but I find myself around low end devices daily, from lack of alternatives, so I’ve been experimenting with software, trying to make the experience a bit better. To give a bit more of context, here’s what I use:
I have a somewhat decent main computer (although it has some hardware issue that makes it unstable, but it’s another topic), that I use with fedora and gnome, but I have a small 2 in 1 laptop that I use for writing and light web usage, shared with my gf. It has 2gb of ram and an atom z something cpu. It’s currently running mx linux with 32-bit firefox, and runs better than one would expect, but still a bit slow. My mom has a mini pc with 4gb of ram and a celeron n30 something. It’s running debian with xfce. The ram is fine, but I find it really slow. My sister has a laptop with the same ram and a very similar cpu, same situation, but it’s currently running fedora with lxde (it had fedora with gnome before and was very very slow, so I suggested a change, but my sister insisted on keeping fedora, because she liked it. Surprisingly, the lxde version is much lighter than I expected). The worst machine is from my gf’s brother. He enrolled in an online course and needed a pc for the classes, so he took one they had sitting in a corner. It has a pentium cpu (don’t remember the model), 2gb of ram and came with windows 7, so I replaced with mx linux and it’s running worse than before.
My vote is with the Rat and I refuse to elaborate.
Xfce works nicely with Bspwm window manager. I dont need polybar or other hard to configure status bars. Xfce panels are easier and you can make them looking like a typical polybar if you want 😉. Maybe Mate can do the same, idon’t know.
One for xfce. I have installed it too many times, very rarely crashes, very friedly, reliable, fast. However, it is a matter of taste / habit really.
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).
I’ve been using mate, generally happily. I don’t remember what if any issues I had with xfce. I hated gnome.
