Honestly, At this point, KDE is just as light as XFCE and Gnome is pretty low too. From my testing, minimal KDE on Arch or Gentoo install pulls it ~450-500mb at boot, Manjaro and Suse around 550-600mb.
Fresh Gnome on Arch or Gentoo I've seen ~650 at boot and around 750 with Ubuntu, around 650-700 with Fedora.
Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment, but KDE is quickly catching up. Nvidia still lacks, even with their EGL support. I use a Nvidia 1060 6gb on an updated (KDE 5.24), but several year old Manjaro KDE install with XOrg as a daily driver, and it's very smooth for me. Games work great. Maybe some occasional stuttering on my monitors that are 144 and 60hz (xorg limitation).
Gnome's gestures and by far and away better then KDE's too (at least as of 5.24, but 5.25 adds many more).
> Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment
Agreed, with a caveat— Gnome's Mutter compositor for Wayland has bugs. It does not support server side rendered window decorations while KDE does. This means that the title bars for Alacritty[0] terminal emulator and the mpv[1] video player are ugly and not so functional. This is an intentional decision by the GNOME team[2]. Also the screen locks while watching videos on mpv because Mutter does not support the idle-inhibit protocol, although work is currently being done on this[3].
The window decorations stuff drives me batty. Titlebar and buttons aside, there seems to be a widespread misunderstanding about window shadows. There is some vague effort afoot[1], but a surprising number of developers don't really care whether they're consistent (note, nobody even mentions shadows in that extremely long gitlab issue you linked to), despite the Gtk folks going to tremendous efforts to make them look nice for their specific toolkit. Which is great, until you have a Gtk 3 app beside a Gtk 4 app and it looks like they're each being affected by a different light source, begging the question: why do we even have them? Shadows are supposed to create a consistent sense of space and guide the eye around the desktop, but if they're all different, that isn't happening. They're just noise.
To be fair, it's difficult because Wayland clients might have rounded corners and other odd shapes, and I'm not in a position to really look into it myself so I shouldn't complain, but argh, the indifference about it is frustrating.
Ugh. I enjoy the GNOME look and feel but every thread on their big tracker makes me want to switch desktop environments. "Your standard is irrelevant because we don't want to follow it" is something I'd sooner expect from Microsoft than from an open source collective.
No way,
From my personal experience on my machine with 6gb ddr3, 5400rpm disk, i5 3rd gen KDE is so annoying to use and even multitasking is laggy while on xfce it's very smooth relatively.
This was observed on Ubuntu, Arch and opensuse. Opensuse KDE was the worst of them all while arch with Xfce ran the fastest of them all.
Sounds like a configuration issue somewhere. I've run KDE on several computers with no lags, and I am quite sensitive to lags.
I also run KDE on an under-powered (even at the time it was released) x86 tablet released in 2011 (the Airis Kira Slimpad - Intel Atom N450 1,66 GHz, 1 GB RAM DDR2 @ 800Mhz, Intel GMA 500). It was the only desktop environment that was kinda usable on a tablet at the time. It's slow (this tablet is exclusively used to play music by auto starting Clementine), but not slower than anything else.
A 5400rpm disk is tough though with today's distributions and maybe Xfce does fewer disc accesses than KDE. You probably should disable desktop search if you haven't.
I guess it's the hdd thats causing the problems. I guess your tablet has emmc flash storage causing it to be pretty responsive compared to my machine that's better spec and newer too........
I think your issue is the 5400rpm disk. KDE uses a lot more of dynamic libraries (for various plugins) compared to xfce. On hard drives, that means a lot of random disk accesses, which tends to slow down startup speeds a lot.
Fresh Gnome on Arch or Gentoo I've seen ~650 at boot and around 750 with Ubuntu, around 650-700 with Fedora.
Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment, but KDE is quickly catching up. Nvidia still lacks, even with their EGL support. I use a Nvidia 1060 6gb on an updated (KDE 5.24), but several year old Manjaro KDE install with XOrg as a daily driver, and it's very smooth for me. Games work great. Maybe some occasional stuttering on my monitors that are 144 and 60hz (xorg limitation).
Gnome's gestures and by far and away better then KDE's too (at least as of 5.24, but 5.25 adds many more).