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?
Have you done any tuning of KDE? I run it in a virtual machine with no hardware video acceleration and it feels fine. Turning off the compositor and animations might make a big difference.
I’ve applied a MacOS theme (the one from zayronxio) and that’s probably all. I don’t know whether it uses the compositor or not, it is mostly just the dock and a couple of liquid glass widgets which seem to be snappy. I believe, there’s no more animations than it was by default.
If you look in the system settings under Hardware -> Display and Monitor -> Compositor there are some things you can tweak in terms of latency if it’s enabled. I personally have “Enabled on startup” unchecked and my VM is pretty snappy - but my theme may be simpler as well. Try changing things there to see if you notice a change either way.