Ding Ding Ding
In the blue corner, weighing at 400MB ram or less in usage. XFCE with a easy to use UI and light footprint. It has a good file manager and pretty much is the go to standard if you want a cinnamon windows like desktop but less weight for old machines and netbooks.
In the green corner, the ancestor of Gnome 3, born out of hatred for its future counterpart, we have MATE. MATE is also a lean desktop and is easily customizable using different panels if you were a mac, windows or unity desktop user. Without bias I exclusively use this on Ubuntu MATE for a laptop between me and my brother.
Which contender in the desktop ring do you prefer? Why? What’s the positives and negatives for you?
Round 1, GO!
i use xfce, but entirely because it worked well when 16 megabytes of ram was considered average and it literally took almost a half hour to log in and start using a browser on both gnome and kde.
is mate as lightweight as xfce?
My vote is with the Rat and I refuse to elaborate.
KDE because I have 64GB and I don’t care about memory usage and I like using a computer that looks like it’s from the 2010s at least.
KDE’s menus upon menus upon menus makes it look and work like W95 for me, just made of shiny plastic instead of something beige.
Also, I feel XFCE’s default looked awful about ten years ago, it looks modern and slick now, esp. with a theme like Arc installed! And it’s incredibly customisable and riceable!
Xfce. It does what I want it to do and little else.
XFCE or LxQT > MATE in my opinion, but if I was trying to make a lean system I would just use a tiling wm, probably sway.
With that little ram, you’re better off with jwm, lxqt, lxde, or icewm. Not xfce or mate, that require over 600-800 MB of ram just to start up. In fact, with so low ram, you’re better off with something like Haiku.
I believe they mentioned the ram used by xfce, not the total system ram, but thank you for the recommendations, I’m really interested in software able to run in very low end hardware.
I do the same for my friends and family, installing linux for them while their laptops only have 2 or 4 gb of ram. XFce with debian on slow hardware, mint on 4 gb laptops with medium speed. However, for something really low end, do consider Haiku, as I wrote earlier.
Neither. Cinnamon on Debian. Has just enough bling to be pretty and still manages not to be fat, and pretty similar to both your choices.
I have used both in the past, but now use neither of them, have been exclusively a KDE Plasma user for several years by now and no longer feel like trying much different.
GNOME 2 was the first DE I ever used on GNU/Linux, so MATE has a nostalgic feel to me. I do not think Xfce is very radically different from it in its functionality, although the default configuration is somewhat different. This is really mostly a matter of personal taste.
Love how 2/5 comments suggest using KDE (like any sane person) and I totally wasn’t going to do the same (like any sane person).
I’ve been using XFCE for so long that it feels really awkward when I have to use Gnome or KDE.
XFCE is solid, reliable, stable, unobtrusive, lean, responsive.
It is also the reason I’ve not used Wayland yet.
I’ve used XFCE for more than a decade now and this is my experience exactly. People usually recommend it for lower end systems, but I’ve yet to find anything more comfortable, even for my high-end desktop PC.
Every few years, when an all-new fancy Gnome/KDE version is released again, I give it a try, but I’m always back to XFCE within days.
Xfce works nicely with Bspwm window manager. I dont need polybar or other hard to configure status bars. Xfce panels are easier and you can make them looking like a typical polybar if you want 😉. Maybe Mate can do the same, idon’t know.
XFCE for the aforementioned reasons and not depending on gnome. Xmonad otherwise.
been using xfce4 since it’s the default desktop environment for MX Linux and it’s really rock solid whilst treading the line between a full-on DE and a WM. To me it’s a lot more customizable than mate and has significantly more development behind it (can’t wait for 4.20!). With that being said i don’t necessarily have a problem with using mate and its app suite, the bottom being a taskbar instead of that just being part of the top bar is something i can get behind but you can achieve that with a panel profile on xfce just fine
I’ve been using mate, generally happily. I don’t remember what if any issues I had with xfce. I hated gnome.
For me it’s MATE.
For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.
MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.
Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).
