Ubuntu and Mint are heavyweights nowadays. KDE has slimmed down and is now midweight. I used Mint for years, tried Ubuntu MATE, some XFCE using distros, and now run MX with KDE desktop. It’s fast and pretty, with lots of good tools. I have Kubuntu on my Chromebook and old laptop. I can’t say any of them are bad, but I never preferred straight Ubuntu.
If you stick with (x)buntu 20.04, you won’t have to upgrade for years. 20.10 is good for 9 months so you have to keep upgrading, which is not hard but you have to keep doing it every 6 months or so. The Mint upgrade procedure is a little trickier than Ubuntu’s.
What I want nobody to forget is that the whole “lightweight” thing is never one-sided. A desktop environment on its own will actually never be “lightweight” or “heavyweight”. It always has to be evaluated within the timeframe of this specific DE’s version.
For example, a brand new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB costs about 60 bucks and is tiny. You can pretty much run a normal Linux distribution on it.
If I had this device in 1990, when selling it, I would’ve become so rich, I would’ve never needed to worry about money again and my grandchildren would still profit from the money.
So you always have to tie such judgments to the current state of technology.
Now my personal example:
I have a laptop that is about 6 years old and even then it wasn’t really good. It has a medium Intel processor and 4GB RAM.
It runs Debian with KDE and it runs very smoothly, as long as you keep app usage reasonable.
So, from my experience, at least since KDE Plasma, it is a pretty lightweight DE. Maybe not as “lightweight” as LXQt, but it’s definitely in the low range, perhaps even competing with XFCE, especially if we count in usability (KDE has great usability).
So I’d say, from today’s perspective, KDE is very “lightweight”, while XFCE, MATE and LXQt are “extremely lightweight”. I personally think they are almost “too lightweight”. Because I do not see a purpose for running such extremely slimmed down desktop environments, except in very niché cases, like when you are trying to revive a laptop that is ages old, just for fun. However, I do not find it reasonable for a normal person with a laptop that is similar to mine, to go below KDE, at all.
Time has changed and even cheap 100 bucks laptops don’t need the lightweightest Puppy Linux to run well. They can easily run KDE, too.
I would be very interested in the results with MX.
Not a very good test, but some may find this interesting.
4 Distro – All on the same HDD – All booted to the same Laptop.
Measurement was made after boot & waiting 2 minutes from the top command.
Xubuntu 18.04 mem total = 399
MX 19.3 --------------------- = 412
Mint Cinnamon 19.3 ------ = 564
Zorin 15 ---------------------- = 735
Total memory was in MB.
With the computing power stuffed into current mobile phones or single board computers, there is hardly any need to use a desktop environment with reduced functionality on your everyday use machine.
There are, of course, many use cases where you don’t need a desktop environment at all, like a box controlling your garden’s irrigation, embedded systems in a vehicle or a very reduced computer just running a X-server connected to a remote virtual machine (slim client).
As a side note, I have a question to those of you running “heavier” desktop environments, like Cinnamon, Gnome etc.: Do they have any advantage over KDE? I have been a fan of KDE ever since it came out in 1998 and I switched from fvwm2 to it, so I’m not objective in this matter and I’d like to know why anybody would choose anything else, especially given the fact that you can customize KDE’s look and feel up to the tiniest detail.
As with the “lightweight” thing I neither do think that there is just a plain “better” DE over any other. For example, the huge benefit (and perhaps at some point disadvantage?) KDE has, is being ancient. It’s so old, it had plenty of time to mature. Okay, to be honest, there were some resets since Plasma, since it was such a huge change, but to my knowledge not much changed about most core features. So they could still build on those achievements from way back then.
That said, we have to put it in the current timeframe again. From my personal perspective, Cinnamon is a very “new” distribution. I even remember when it was a huge deal when it just was released with Mint. However, now looking back, that was today a long time ago too. Perhaps 10 years? I don’t remember it too much. I just remember the big deal about it. So perhaps it had enough time to mature, as well. I don’t know.
Finally, each software has their own goals. Perhaps Cinnamon doesn’t even want to be ultimately customizable. Or look at Unity. Unity wants to do everything right on their own, without user interaction. That’s why it purposefully never was really customizable. Though I guess, it was in turn easy to get into, without a lot of trouble (I never used Ubuntu much, so can’t leave a qualified comment on that).
Well, as Lubuntu and the other distros have got 3 years of support (LTS version) with one year overlap I´d have to install every two years anew.
Yet despite this fact I´d say I will stick to that routine as I don´t prefer straight ubuntu either.
Thanks for your views on the matter.
Many greetings.
Rosika
Thanks a lot for this great evaluation of yours and the examples you provided.
I definitively give KDE a thought.
Many greetings.
Rosika
@easyt50:
Thanks for this nice and informative comparison, Howard.
Cheers.
Rosika
@Aaron_Renny :
Yes, I´ve been using Lubuntu myself - ever since I switched to Linux. Like you I´m disappointed that LXDE is dropped here.
Interesting.
Would that be an alternative? I was (perhaps mistakenly) of the opinion that LXDE isn´t supported any more or at least not further developed. I thought that was the reason why Lubuntu switched to LXQt.
I was already having my eyes on LXLE (DistroWatch.com: LXLE and https://www.lxle.net/ ). This distro still uses the LXDE desktop which I like a lot.
Yet it was rumoured the current version of LXLE would be the last one due to EOL of LXDE…
Try Manjaro, it runs forever with no time limit and is auto updating to the next level when you do update. It can only be installed in UEFI not BIOS. Or try Linux Mint 20 it has 5 years support and is a delight to use.
Graham
I’ve used Ubuntu / Unity [and many other distros] for years. However my first choice, on multiple PCs, is now Cloudready from Neverware. Runs like a dream and the great news is that Google just bought them yesterday so things will just go from strength to strength.
So there are now at least three of us who know about Abrowser fantastic! Thanks for the link as I did not know this. Mina is quite correct, yet it is relevant for me as I use it every day. Good to know what people thought of Abrowser back in 2008 and I am sure it is even better today – that’s the cool thing with Trisquel – it just does everything so sweet without a fuss. During Trisquel updates I watch and am fascinated by what is going on after the downloaded packages are unpacked and the speed at which they are configured or implemented. Abrowser was recently subject to a large update along with over 50 languages. (Love Vanadium browser on my GrapheneOS phone too.)
Did not think anyone would be interested – just love how it is set up by Trisquel out of the box and don’t want or need to mess it up. So if a particular web page [GMX (auto-recognition)] does not load properly I switch to super fast, light, Midori and manage my email accounts via their super interface.
However on my Dell Latitude laptop; as I don’t trust Ffox-Mozilla or ubuntu I use both Epihany and Midori (Web is the web browser for the GNOME desktop and for elementary OS, based on the popular WebKit engine. It offers a simple, clean, beautiful view of the web featuring first-class GNOME and Pantheon desktop integration. Its code name is Epiphany. - Midori is a Web browser that aims to be lightweight and fast. It aligns well with the Xfce philosophy of making the most out of available resources. It has a customizable interface using the GTK+ toolkit.) But to be brutaly honest I mostly boot Dell Laptop with Tails+Tor running live from a USB stick – so fast and normal you forget that you are just running in RAM. (and of course way more secure than the installed ubuntu)
By the way Trisquel default email is Icedove based on thunderbird, but I use Geary because I can’t get it to send emails – something to do with needing certificates I think.
Wine is great for me but as always does not suit everybody’s needs.
Hey @Mina and @Rosika … regarding distro-hopping for evaluation. Ah well – from a start point of having HP with Vista Home Premium grinding to a halt with no support I grasped the nettle and bought the used refurbished Dell from a shop who offered to set it dual boot with ubuntu and Win10-Pro. I noticed a magazine saying it was an ubuntu manual for beginners published by LinuxFormat. How cool is that; even with ubuntu feeling totally alien I was soon making rapid progress using and liking it with quick and easy updates, no AntiVirus software and free programmes for everything from a secure store. Hey what’s not to like – I was so happy. Even more so when I discovered it’sFOSS…!
So next time that I was in the shop I bought latest issue of Linux Format magazine with free DVD full of goodies and a distro-OS or two. You can guess the rest – month after month bought latest issue – gobsmacked at the number of distros; Hey and no downloads iso images and all that jive.
The grey sleeveless DVD was from Linux Magazine with Zorin OS-15 on one side and MX Linux 19 on the other side.
So I still had an almost dead hated HP Notebook and slipped one of the DVD’s in the drawer and booted up. Brilliant – fantastic what could I say? Each with their good and bad points to try and retry as often as I liked. MX and Mint seemed so professional whilst a few were most definitely not to my liking.
There was a consensus that there was nothing like a full installation whereas Virtual vs RAM distros opinion was not clear. Along came a DVD with three distros – one being Trisquel 8 which I kept going back to time and again. So this decision was not too difficult encouraged my another it’sFOSS member, as I could always install another distro or just scrap the hated HP Notebook.
Loved it from day one – even bought it a new battery – such that I hardly ever use the ubuntu-Win10 Dell nowadays and realised with hindsight that there was no need to buy it. However as Akito and Mina would remind all about the pathway of lessons learned…?
ps
Me too and thanks for practical experiments on a level playing field - fantastic value at two cents
Off subject, but another question if you don’t mind.
It seems that each desktop environment (DE) has it own file manager. My LM 20 is Cinnamon DE and come with nemo file manager. LM Xfce comes with file manager Thunar.
So when you say you like KDE is it b/c of the DE itself or the the file manager that comes with it.
Your question earlier about Cinnamon DE. Coming from Win 10 and working with Linux now for just over 2 years, I really like the feel of Cinnamon. My biggest complaint about Cinnamon is the copy function. 1) Minor - it single thread copies. ie; one at a time. So if I am coping a large file and then want to copy a very small file, the small copy waits until the first copy is finish. 2) Major - coping a very large file from USB to HDD cause the PC to become unusable until the copy was finish. I do not consider my PC to be slow. CPU = i5-4570 with 8 GB ram.
It’s certainly the former. KDE comes with Dolphin as default which looks pretty nice, but I prefer others. Last October we were discussing file managers in this forum:
I then pointed out that my personal favourite was krusader
So, when I say, I like KDE, it’s for a variety of reasons:
It combines great looks with the ability to fine-tune almost any aspect of its looks and behaviour.
Most properties can be changed easily through menus whilst you still have the option to edit config files manually for an even deeper level of control.
It is very mature, stable and rather efficient when it comes to using resources.
It comes with a lot of handy tools preinstalled, like KDEConnect which makes interaction between your mobile and your Linux computer a piece of cake.
It was, in my view, the first successful attempt to create a Linux desktop suitable for not-too-techy users.
Its developers’ contribution to the FOSS universe has been incredible:
It greatly popularized Trolltech’s Qt framework which finally made the development of well-looking and modern X11 apps a real thing.
Its very own rendering machine KHTML for the then default web-browser and file manager Konqueror became the base for webkit which then became the core for all modern browsers’ except Firefox’s rendering engines.
Is this really a Cinnamon issue? If I copy files with, say, mina@rechner:~$ cp foo/* bar, won’t any system not always copy one file at a time?
Isn’t this likely to be more an issue of the disk controller rather than of the desktop environment? Large read/write operations will rapidly fill the controller’s buffer and will therefore make it difficult for other applications to access the disk. If you then do this copy operation with the help of a graphical file manager, the latter one will have to additionally check the progress of the operation putting additional load on both controllers in order to properly display the operation’s progress.
In my experience, on any operating system (including the ones from Microsoft) it’s always better to do large file copies on the command line.
Thank you for your suggestion.
But as I pointed in post #12 in response to @Mina I´d rather opt for a distro with DEB package management and with fixed release (instead of rolling). That said I´m sure Manjaro is great.
Cool, I looked up the respective package list (trisquel 9.0) on DistroWatch.com: Trisquel GNU/Linux .
There´s a huge amount of abrowser-locales listed indeed. Impressive.
I use Midori as well: on my BodhiLinux VM. It´s really fast and lightweigt.
I should think so.
On KDE Installation › Wiki › ubuntuusers.de there´s the respective procedure described, although in German. sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop should do the job. It installs all KDE applications used in Kubuntu as well.
Parallel installation of several desktop environments can lead to undesired side effects. Settings for theme, fonts, panels, icons etc. can have negative impacts on other desktop environments. For pure trials of such, it is advisable to use a live system from CD/DVD or a pen drive.
⚠ Warning! ⚠
Despite the theoretical possibility of revamping an existing Ubuntu system with e.g. Unity into a Kubuntu with KDE Plasma, in practice this often leads to hard to define problems with often unknown causes. In the case that you feel like definitely switching your desktop environment, a fresh installation from a proper medium, say, for KDE Neon or Kubuntu is highly recommended.
The installation went well and I can decide now whether to use enlightenment (standard desktop in Bodhi) or LXDE (even “Lubuntu”, as I did sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop with the additional components).
All hassle-free and perfectly usable - I´ve never experienced any problems so far.
Plus: I installed with the above-mentioned command from within a running Bodhi, i.e. from a terminal emulator.
It was only later that I learned it´s recommended to install further desktop environments from a virtual console.
But I didn´t experience any difficulties despite that.
I´d say: provided you make a (preferably) disk-backup (complete backup of the system, the installed programmes and your personal files) of your installation (e.g. with clonezilla, https://clonezilla.org/ ) there shouldn´t be any harm in trying another desktop.
fantastic! Thanks for the link as I did not know this. Mina is quite correct, yet it is relevant for me as I use it every day. Good to know what people thought of Abrowser back in 2008 and I am sure it is even better today – that’s the cool thing with Trisquel – it just does everything so sweet without a fuss. During Trisquel updates I watch and am fascinated by what is going on after the downloaded packages are unpacked and the speed at which they are configured or implemented. Abrowser was recently subject to a large update along with over 50 languages. (Love Vanadium browser on my GrapheneOS phone too.)
HP Notebook.
Impressive.
