cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28037255
Hey hey people. Relatively new Arch user here, but not new to Linux in general. I’ve been using Arch with KDE Plasma on this HP laptop from 2013, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot after spending a long time on Mint/Cinnamon.
But, I’ve noted that KDE is a bit slow on this machine, and is probably a bit too much. Earlier today, I decided to try out something lighter, and installed LXQt on it as a second DE. The experience was okay, with much improved responsiveness, a nice customizable retro look, and overall simpleness that still did the job mostly. But I also ran into a few issues that probably had to do with having two different DEs on the same machine and user. One thing in particular ended up annoying me so much I went back to KDE: The Discover app would just refuse to play nice with setting a dark theme on the rest of the environment, even when I tried setting it up with qt6ct.
So now I’m considering going to XFCE instead, as I probably should have done from the beginning. I just wish it had Wayland support already (I know it’s being worked on). Do you have any suggestions or tips for me in regards to this? I’m sure a lot of people will recommend their favorite tiling WM which I’m not sure I want to get into.
Also, other than that, upon returning to KDE, I found that my Discover would crash when trying to update Flatpaks (the only thing I install through it) and started thinking this experiment somehow broke it… but it’s Flatpak itself that seems to have an issue today. Might have to do with the latest curl update? Dunno if I should make a separate thread for that. https://discuss.kde.org/t/kde-discover-broken-with-latest-curl-update/21475
Just on the KDE front, I’m assuming you’ve optimised your KDE set up for your PC?
If not, first open your Settings app and in the search box type “Effects” - disable all the fancy desktop effects.
Next, if you’re on X11, go into the “Display and Monitor” section and disable compositing (you can also temporairly disable this with Alt+Shift+F12 to see what impact it has). This option is not available in Wayland; but you may be better using X11 if you don’t have a dedicated GPU? I’m not sure I’d be messing with Wayland on an old laptop; I’ve had serious issues on a high end PC - definitely improved with 6.1, but I’m using X11 still.
But KDE 6 isn’t as svelt as KDE 5 was, so even optimised it may just not be up to the job.
XFCE is a good shout, and should run nicely on a 2013 laptop.
This laptop does have a dedicated GPU and was quite decent for the time. It was my only gaming machine for quite some years. Now I want to keep it alive with Linux for other general uses or work. Said dedicated GPU has been the source of many issues even when it still was under issues. The setup of Intel i5 with integrated graphics + an AMD Radeon GPU is uh… shaky under most driver circumstances and applications never know which of the two to use (usually defaulting to the wrong one)
I’ve been running Wayland to “get used to” the newer technology, and I don’t think that in itself has much impact on performance… Even if I do turn off the effects on KDE, I still feel like it’s doing way way more than I need or want it to do, and it does have a very noticeable impact on the speed things happen. Slightly slower than Cinnamon was, although both are also still way faster than it’s last Windows install… lol
Right now the main “problem” I have is that KDE is handling a few things I want it to handle, and that there’s a lot of applications I installed alongside it that I’d have to remove to swap fully to another DE. Almost makes me think it’d be easier to do another clean Arch install, but that took me almost a week to fully set up. (as I’d start to find the things that I hadn’t yet configured or installed gradually)