I think GNOME looks very visually appealing with it’s consistency. The Libadwaita library has a nice aesthetic and looks very clean with nice spacing for elements to “breathe”.
I still prefer KDE since I can tailor the look to my needs and I prefer to have clutter over extra clicks. (I have top bar with “Opened programs”, Launcher, System tray, Time and a global menu and KWin script for managing Activities)
I feel like modern era of design has gone a bit overboard with the “clean” direction. It can be contrasted with Windows XP where you click “All programs” and you literally get all programs in the start menu with options of how to run or open them. I prefer to do “Menu” - > “Submenu” - > “Thing I want”.
Come to think of it I should probably make a launcher for KDE.
I once put an HDD into a completely new machine with all new hardware (same architecture, though), and it booted without any issues whatsoever. Must be 15-20 years ago but I still remember the new machine.
Linux always was exceptionally great when it comes to hardware changes after installation.
Localsend only does files/pictures/a quickie bit of text, but I find it more convenient and reliable than kdeconnect. Localsend’s iphone app is in better shape too, if you need that.
mpv for videos, there are different extensions to automatically open YT videos with it.
beets for sorting music
nicotine plus for looking for music
syncthing
zathura
improving performance isn’t easy if you feel like things are running smoothly, but there are a few laptop specific things like tlp that you could look into although I suspect that distro uses them out of the box
Next time it does that, run the “journalctl | tee journalctloutput.txt “command and see if it has lines from before the boot. If it does, paste the output of the lines from that boot to see when and how it’s failing or succeeding.
I like the look of tiling wms with a top bar. Hyprland looks especially nice with rounded corners and color gradients. Too bad it’s not stable enough to be my daily driver at the moment.
Definitely Microsoft… I haven’t watched the video, nor do I know any controversies, my M3 MacBook air to me is proof enough that Microsoft was and still is handicapping arm on the desktop…
There are many options, but I’d say on those specs anything will run more or less fine with some tweaks/settings.
Personally I would go with KDE Plasma, because I feel most comfortable with it. It can be pretty light on system ressources when configured properly. Disable all the visual stuff (animations, blur, anti aliasing) and some of it’s background modules (baloo and some other stuff that you personally don’t need).
But you should take the one you are familiar with and find out how you can tweak it to be more light. Cheers
I have tested KDE plasma in my main pc for a few weeks now and the ram consumption seems pretty high and have too many options. I’m looking for something light and easy to use (not many options) since the pc is going to be used by someone not very tech savvy.
Measuring RAM usage is extremely tricky, because programs will use more than they need, if there is lots of unused RAM available. Check out www.linuxatemyram.com if you want to learn more.
For me KDE Plasma uses over a gig on my main PC after a fresh boot. But it also ran perfectly fine on a 512MB ancient laptop.
I have no idea about the main question, though I too am interested in the answer. I do know the format for the shared partition doesn’t matter. I would go ext4 because I like it’s stability and don’t need btrfs’s features, but use whatever you want.
I think gnome and KDE Plasma are just too heavy. And I would use a WM if it was for me, in fact that what I use in my daily driver but it is for someone not that tech savvy. I may check one from the alternative crowd tho. Thanks for the answer
Got any guides on how to strip plasma down to the bare necessities? I have it on a machine with 4 GB RAM, but I don’t know how to optimize it for such old hardware.
I updated this project once. This is a very good start on what packages you need.
There are metapackages different for each distribution, like plasma-meta on Arch or plasma-workspace on Fedora.
This may be too bloated, but leaving out some core components (like infocenter or display) may result in random Systemsettings pages missing.
Also on Fedora, the “Netinstall” “minimal” variant is impossible to include wireless packages (“hardware support” group) so it is easier to start from a normal KDE install and just remove things you dont need.
Some things are also settings like balooctl disable && balooctl purge
By the way, you might also investigate window managers, which aren’t as full-featured as DE’s but are even lighter on resources. Back in the day before KDE and Gnome, I used Window Maker , which is based on Steve Job’s NextStep’s UI. Only works with X, not Wayland, though. https://www.windowmaker.org/
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