Alright I do use KDE those days. I have used XFCE before. I don't think I can believe that KDE is lighter in term of response/lag. I didn't check the ram usage because Firefox is taking it all anyways.
I think KDE can be lighter in terms of response/lag if you turn off animations. On most desktops with dedicated graphics though it probably doesn't matter. Definitely on those older Intel 6000 type graphics and earlier though it does make a big difference.
> And, no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued.
Not sure what you mean. We have CSDs available for people who like it, but they can be turned on and off.
If you're talking about random GTK apps that run on Xfce, there's not much we can do about that; we don't set app policy.
That's one of the nicer things about Wayland, though: there's a way for the compositor to tell applications "I'll draw the decorations". On X11 there's no protocol for that, only a way for an app to tell the window manager it wants to draw its own, without a way for the WM to say "no, don't do it".
It's absurd that people who recommend "light" Linux distros mention DEs that are much heavier than LXQt and LXDE.
As for Wayland, I use it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian xwayland). It works well enough, but there is some kind of bug that causes xwayland to fill the swap space at almost 100%. When this happens, I find it necessary to close applications to reduce the swap usage.
Lighter I won't entirely disagree with: I think a default install of KDE will still be heavier than Xfce, but GTK3 isn't the lightest toolkit, and you can slim KDE down without losing much functionality.
But I don't get the HiDPI point? Certainly 4.16 had issues with HiDPI, but in 4.18 you can set the UI scaling factor, and I believe shortly before and/or after initial release, we fixed up all the issues of blurry image rendering. I have a HiDPI screen and it's worked very well for me, and looks nice.
It used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2, when it was still a thing. I don’t know why it got a reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I used to run it for years though, really liked it for a while.
I think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the reputation of XFCE was justified.
this statement is not correct. kde can do both x11 and wayland. checkout the arch-wiki (kde plasma wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE) to see how.
