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!
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.
I’m happy with KDE since 2009. But I’d have a really hard time if I were to choose between those two.
I think I “know” MATE because before KDE I used to use Gnome2 so it feels nostalgic to me. The Applications/Places/System menu was the tits and it beat the shit of whatever start menu you put in front of it, and Gnome’s decision to get rid of it was the stupidest idea ever (among many other of their utterly stupid decisions). I’d really miss that menu if it weren’t for that I got used to associate some keystrokes to launch my favorite apps so I don’t even use a start menu or whatever, rather than Krunner.
On the con side it seems to me MATE is being developed at a slower pace than Xfce’s, and it seems less customizable than it - well, at least for me that’s a con - thought I’m not really a “ricer” or anything I just got used to a certain way to do things on the desktop and I remember having to fiddle with Gconf2 to do stuff like you did with friggin’ Windows Registry editor.
I got to use Xfce back in the day too. It has an Applications/Places menu just so people wouldn’t think they blatantly copied Gnome, but it’s more than 10 years since Gnome got rid of it so I don’t know why they haven’t took it. Xfce feels somewhat more customizable, has the veteran badge and seems to have more developers backing it up.
But it’s being developed with GTK+3/4 so I guess at some point they’ll suffer from the
shittificationGnome-ization of GTK and, as I said before in some other post, if I were them I’d move all my shit to the E libraries (even more, I’d do a fusion of the Enlightenment desktop and Xfce). Also I happen to be a graphic designer so the lack of care they have onto some things sticks like a sore thumb to me, like those poorly designed settings dialogs on some stuff that even have some dumb horizontal scrolling just because they couldn’t care less about that.Just on your Enlightenment point there, I tried Bodhi Linux a few years ago because the Enlightenment desktop looked really good, but over time they (Bodhi) had to create their own desktop because Enlightenment appeared to have almost stopped work.
Might be something for you to check out…?
Of course not - if Xfce has too few people working on it, MATE has even less than them, and Enlightenment has even less than MATE. And note that Enlightenment is not only the desktop environment per se but the E libraries (and those are no regurgitated shit - for example, some car makers have used them on their infotainment systems). I’d think it’d be amazing if those two (or those three) could do a Dragon-ball-z kind of fusion, I think those three have really similar goals. Hell, if that was actually a thing most probably I’d move to that.
I know Xfce folks have submitted patches to GTK over the years, but it’s just that GNOME’s enshittification has pregnated GTK to a point of no return and Xfce devs are very well aware of that (for example, the libadwaita thing).
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.
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).
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 machine.
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.
I use XFCE for the recent years I love it. It’s stable, fast and feature complete. XFCE4 terminal works great as well as other XFCE4 apps. I only wish they implement proper high DPI support!
I’m happy with XFCE and am looking forward to Wayland support.
I’ve been using MATE since Gnome 3. I really liked the simplicity of Gnome 2 and was unable to adapt to their “new” way so I switched to MATE and it just clicked. I tried Gnome 3 a few times again but I just can’t.
As for why MATE instead of XFCE or others? Because I already used and tried XFCE in the past and prefered Gnome 2’s look and feel. In fact, I have been going out of my way for years to keep every app using GTK2 and my favourite theme because I like how it looks and feel, and Gnome 3 and GTK3 broke this. So MATE it was. They switched to GTK3 too eventually but it gave my time to adjust.
My only “complaints” about it are the file manager Caja, and the way you can list windows, which both feel very basic. I would like those two to get better.
I try and use different DE from time to time, from Fluxbox to E17, but I just go back to MATE. My favorite DE of all time was E16 but it took waaay too long for E17 to be functional and I ended up keeping MATE.
Nobody ever talks about LxQt, that was my first GNU/Linux experience on Lubuntu 19.10. It had a modern design only using about 300 MB of RAM. LxQt is watching the match outside the ring
Hey I’ll sit in that corner.
I’m on lubuntu from 18.04 and by 24.04 it grew in to a swan.
I’ve been using mate, generally happily. I don’t remember what if any issues I had with xfce. I hated gnome.
I have used both as Ubuntu flavours when I needed a lighter desktop on older hardware. XFCE was absolutely solid, worked and brought new life to the hardware. But, I wanted just a little more pizazz so, I moved to Mate. It was just as quick, felt a bit more modern but it wasn’t as rock solid as XFCE. XFCE is perfect for stability. Mate is more modern but younger so maybe not as solid. It’s been a while since I took either out for a spin though. Time to fire up the VirtualBox I suppose.
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.
