Suppose you’ve got an old PC - for arguments sake, assume a late 2000s PC with only 2GB RAM - which DE would you choose?
Note that whilst a simple WM + some lightweight apps might be a better option, to keep things simple, I’m limiting this poll to just DEs - and too ones which are still being maintained.
Also, in case you’ve voted for a non-obvious/“other” option, I’m curious to hear about your experiences on running that DE on an old machine - and why you’ve selected it over the more obvious choices.
xfce is fine, generally for most things.
From my experience it’s barely lighter than KDE. LXQT/LXDE destroy it in every benchmark and in every test I’ve tried.
It’s about 300mb lighter than KDE in my experiences. On 2gb of RAM, that makes a difference. Sure, going LXDE is gonna be fine too; but it lacks a lot of the polish that XFCE has. I honestly like both for different things.
And both LXDE and LXQT use half as much RAM as Xfce.
I’d rather be able to open more than 5 tabs than have a fancy UI. That’s why Xfce is on my newer devices, and I install those 2 whenever someone needs an ancient laptop revived.
It depends on what you are doing. KDE is not as clean and light weight
The point is that LXQT and LXDE use half as much ram as Xfce. I’m not saying OP should use KDE.
From my experience, while LXQt uses ~20-25% less RAM than XFCE, it runs way faster and uses less CPU than XFCE.