Arch user trying out lightweight desktop environments
Arch user trying out lightweight desktop environments
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
Try Xmonad! I run a community for it at https://infosec.pub/c/xmonad
It’s super lightweight and is the only formally verified window manager. There’s a new version being created for Wayland called Waymonad.
What does "formally verified" mean?
I’m glad you asked!
Formal verification is an automatic checking methodology that catches many common design errors and can uncover ambiguities in the design. It is an exhaustive methodology that covers all input scenarios and also detects corner case bugs.
One of the most futuristic companies I know of is Runtime Verification that uses formal Methods in industry. They have a list of accomplishments that seem like vaporware including a semantic babel fish called the K framework that can translate between languages based on formal, semantic definitions of each.
Tiling WM that you are not sure you want to get into: Sway. It's a great alternative to i3 IMO.
What I use when I care to put in the effort of setting something up in great detail: Enlightenment. Some may argue that it's not "lightweight", but you can readily include only the bits you want, and avoid things like network config guis and system tray apps or whatever it is that you don't want. Even when you're using "all the things" which is not technically "lightweight" what it IS is performant. Oh, it's also very pretty.
I was having the same issue with discover when I was trying LXQT a few weeks ago and I wasn't able to find a fix. This post made me look into it more and according to this reddit post, Discover uses the Kirigami UI framework, this led me to this forum post which says that you need to install the 'plasma-integration' package to make QT themes work with Kirigami based applications.
Incredible. I have never even heard of a Kirigami, and here I only thought I had to worry about if applications were Qt (which version) or GTK (also which version) and running under Xorg or Wayland. What the hell is a Kirigami. Well, thanks for the heads up. Such are the joys of being a Linux user!
Xfce for Wayland would be frigging amazing. That desktop is so fast on modern computers you can't take your finger off the mouse button before the app is launched and ready.
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.
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.
Interesting! At some point I'll probably switch to Wayland, so it's good to hear there are minimalist solutions developed 👍
Not that relevant to your post, but I'v been avoiding DE's altogether since the very first day I knew they weren't required to have a proper distro.