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!

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
    8·
    9 months ago

    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).

  • pewpew@feddit.it
    7·
    9 months ago

    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

  • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    With that little ram, you’re better off with jwm, lxqt, lxde, or icewm. Not xfce or mate, that require over 600-800 MB of ram just to start up. In fact, with so low ram, you’re better off with something like Haiku.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    6·
    9 months ago

    I’ve been using mate, generally happily. I don’t remember what if any issues I had with xfce. I hated gnome.

  • Quazatron@lemmy.world
    5·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    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?

  • m4m4m4m4@lemmy.world
    4·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      1·
      9 months ago

      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.

  • verdigris@lemmy.ml
    3·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • Dustwin@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • christos@lemmy.world
    2·
    9 months ago

    One for xfce. I have installed it too many times, very rarely crashes, very friedly, reliable, fast. However, it is a matter of taste / habit really.