Other "Lightweight Desktop" vs "feature-rich and resource intensive"

l008com

l008com

What does that ACTUALLY mean.

I'm sampling all of (or most of) the GUIs in desktop-installer
I got to xfce4 and it seems really nice?

So, in what way is it light weight? What features does it lack, that say KDE has? It looks pretty feature-full?

I understand a theoretical difference between something light weight and something not light weight. But I don't really understand the actual, technical difference here?
 
l008com said:
What does that ACTUALLY mean.

I'm sampling all of (or most of) the GUIs in desktop-installer
I got to xfce4 and it seems really nice?

So, in what way is it light weight? What features does it lack, that say KDE has? It looks pretty feature-full?

I understand a theoretical difference between something light weight and something not light weight. But I don't really understand the actual, technical difference here?
Click to expand...
I started off with xfce4 when I first started with FreeBSD because it seemed to be the easiest to install, but after a few years I found that it provided many things I didn't want or need and eventually decided on lxde which is much simpler and more lightweight.

It suits me ideally since all I need for Internet Browsing, where I spend quite a bit of time, is to install drm-kmod, xorg, lxde-meta and chromium.
 
I think for a lot of folk, "lightweight" in reference to a DE or WM means "how much of the system resources does it use?"
Does CPU jump to 75% from 5% when you open a window, move a window? Or does it jump to 6%?
How much memory does it take? Does your system use go from 50% to 75%?

Don't measure with a browser running; they all suck up resources, kind of correlated to how many tabs and what the tabs are doing.

One of the "most minimal of the minimalist" envrionments is good old twm. It's just a window manager, but was written when programmers were resource-aware.
 
What does it actually mean? It's hard to say. People generally describe "lightweight" DEs as ones that give you the essentials and little else. Look at the list of packages installed with say KDE Plasma, and you'll see a lot of extra software that you may or may not ever use. Look at the kf6- packages.
e.g.
baloo - desktop search indexer
kbookmarks
kparts
kunitconversion
kwallet
...
KDE has a lot of stuff even KDE users don't know about.
 
I would put Gnome and KDE on the full featured and heavy region. XFCE, MATE and Cinamon somewhere on between. LXDE and LXQT on the lower end. (Plus others like CDE and so on)

If you don't need a Desktop Environment (and you may not need one) you can make do with just a Window Manager like openbox, fluxbox, twm, etc. You will gain on the lightweight part but may lose on the feature side (again depends on your usage).

I any case if you then go and use a full featured browser like chromium or firefox (and respective derivatives) i would say the point of resource usage is moot. Just pick something that doesn't get in your way.

My personal long time choice is XFCE. For me it strikes a good compromise between features, customization and sensible defaults.

But this is for me that am a X user, if I was on wayland I would probably go with another choice.
 
Try a different approach: install and start X.org, then go to another console and start the programs you would like to have on screen all tthe time backgrounded. I have only X.org and openbox with a keyboard-oriented configuration file. No icons and right-click menu. The start screen is black with only the mouse pointer visible. Quite sure you can also rebuild a Gnome or KDE like this. A thing to improve for my mimimalist "desktop" is the poor clipboard functionality.
 
I have used XFCE for so long now. I use others now and then and they are usually excellent, though I seem to always gravitate back to XFCE as my daily driver.
 
I have openbox with auto starting xfe file manager, lxterminal and a browser. Some applications you like from Gnome , KDE and other may be installed and try to run from menu. That will be without other baggage.
 
I really think this thread can help if the OP tells us what is "needed". That's kind of the starting point.
They talk about this on a server: my experience with servers is "I want to have a couple terminal windows open so I can compare, maybe edit, maybe cut and paste between them. And occasionally run a browser to search stuff and maybe hit an internal web page for testing".

If that's the needed, then pretty much default installation of most DEs is overkill.
 
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