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 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!
Xfce4 is my preferred terminal no matter which distro I’m on.
I use xfce on 2 machines, mint on one.
I’ve used xubuntu, which was my introduction to Linux and xfce.
Xfce is customizable in so many ways. Runs on anything, and is solid.
I’m happy with XFCE and am looking forward to Wayland support.
Xfce. It does what I want it to do and little else.
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.It can share TDE’s popcorn.
My vote is with the Rat and I refuse to elaborate.
I’ve been using mate, generally happily. I don’t remember what if any issues I had with xfce. I hated gnome.
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.
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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.I am not sure how I feel about it but there seems to be some resistance in the GTK world. Desktops like Cinnamon,MATE, and XFCE have said they are going to stick with GTK3. Mint has proposed a common suite of GTK3 apps called Xapps that would maintain GTK3 versions of some of the applications that GNOME has pulled to GTK4.
https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/xapps.html
One of the best things about the GTK world was that you had a choice of DEs but got the same universe of “native” applications with any of them. Sadly, it seems that there may now be GNOME and “other GTK” DE universes. On the plus side, there will be a haven for those that want off the GNOME train without as much “left behind” feel as MATE users have had.
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).
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?
MATE is a bit heavier than XFCE.
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 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.
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!
I don’t love the default XFCE look but the default in distros like EndeavourOS or CachyOS are awesome. It is like a totally different DE.
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
XFCE for the aforementioned reasons and not depending on gnome. Xmonad otherwise.
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.
