Suppose you’ve got an old PC - for arguments sake, assume a late 2000s PC with only 2GB RAM - which DE would you choose?

Note that whilst a simple WM + some lightweight apps might be a better option, to keep things simple, I’m limiting this poll to just DEs - and too ones which are still being maintained.

Also, in case you’ve voted for a non-obvious/“other” option, I’m curious to hear about your experiences on running that DE on an old machine - and why you’ve selected it over the more obvious choices.

  • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    It’s about 300mb lighter than KDE in my experiences. On 2gb of RAM, that makes a difference. Sure, going LXDE is gonna be fine too; but it lacks a lot of the polish that XFCE has. I honestly like both for different things.

    • Shareni@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      It’s about 300mb lighter than KDE in my experiences. On 2gb of RAM, that makes a difference.

      And both LXDE and LXQT use half as much RAM as Xfce.

      LXDE is gonna be fine too; but it lacks a lot of the polish that XFCE has. I honestly like both for different things.

      I’d rather be able to open more than 5 tabs than have a fancy UI. That’s why Xfce is on my newer devices, and I install those 2 whenever someone needs an ancient laptop revived.