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!
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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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. It does what I want it to do and little else.
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.
I’m happy with XFCE and am looking forward to Wayland support.
XFCE for the aforementioned reasons and not depending on gnome. Xmonad otherwise.
For me it’s MATE.
For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.
MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.
Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).
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.
