Some DEs are focused on resource efficiency, but don’t look fancy. Others are fancy, but require a fairly modern setup. I have KDE (Fedora) installed on my laptop, I love its look and options. But it is not always snappy, some little freezes occur as well, even in basic situations (opening Firefox and v2rayN simultaneously was one of the cases). The most problematic thing is almost every app taking around 2-3 secs to open its window.
Many people would just tell me to install Xfce, but I still want a fancy desktop, I believe it is something I can afford on my setup. First I thought of GNOME, but it is controversial: some sources report GNOME as well optimized even for low-end machines, other claim it is much heavier than KDE.
What it your experience with desktop environments and their performance? Perhaps you have compared various DEs within the same distro and setup? How performant GNOME actually is compared to KDE? What are the balanced options to explore?
The young fellows love this eye candy, and so I do. You’re right, I need to give a tiling WM a try. I have already thought about how inconvenient constant switching between the keyboard and the mouse is, and how unergonomic touchpads are.
I love eyecandy as well! It’s what got me interested in Linux back when Beryl was a thing. :) However. When it comes to tiling window mangers, I personally find it distracting, but I completely understand the appeal of it for others. A lot of the desktop screenshots looks really cool, but I don’t see how people can be productive with all the bling. :D
I’ve been a happy keyboard driven user for a long time now, and I can’t ever imagine going back to using the mouse for all the things. I still use it for my secondary web browser though, but that’s becasue a lot of websites sucks. :( I’m pretty sure that escaping most usage with any pointing device have saved my writsts from a lot of pain!
A mouse is still much better than a touchpad. It was the real pain when I had no working mice at home.
I believe people are productive because they feel comfy with that, but some prefer strict minimalism. I’m somewhere in between I guess.
The mainstream OSs are trying to make the user type as little as possible. Just drag, click, and voila. But when it comes to Linux, if you take the advantage of precise control of your system within the terminal, you have to switch between the keyboard and the mouse all the time if you use a traditional desktop environment, so the advantage of drag-and-click simplicity vanishes.