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MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world

Arch user trying out lightweight desktop environments (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Varyag@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/linux@lemmy.world

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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

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[–] halm@leminal.space 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah, just skip DEs altogether and setup Openbox with a minimal panel like tint2. It's not for Wayland — there might be an alternative, light window manager for that, I wouldn't know.

[–] tal 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I have not used it, but labwc is apparently an openbox-alike compositor for Wayland.

Firstly, we believe that there is a need for a simple Wayland window-stacking compositor which strikes a balance between minimalism and bloat approximately at the level where Window Managers like Openbox reside in the X11 domain. Most of the core developers are accustomed to low resource Desktop Environments such as Mate/XFCE or standalone Window Managers such as Openbox under X11. Labwc aims to make a similar setup possible under Wayland, with small and independent components rather than a large, integrated software eco-system.

[–] halm@leminal.space 1 points 2 months ago

Interesting! At some point I'll probably switch to Wayland, so it's good to hear there are minimalist solutions developed 👍