XFCE vs KDE

[trinidad]

Advertised as up to date with QT5. Should be fine on KDE.

https://www.digikam.org/news/2019-02-10-...ouncement/

TC

[Moltke]

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/xfce...decoration

Xfce 4.16 is switching to GTK header bars, but they’re more commonly referred to as client side decoration (CSD) as window borders are rendered client side (GTK), not by the window manager.

[TheDead]

Geeting eager to compare an official "Made by Jerry" Linux Lite in KDE Vs XFCE!

Go Jerry Go! .
Edit : wording

[Moltke]

I had my wife and her mother try KDE's plasma desktop, they don't use Linux but windows, they told me they found it easy to use and find stuff, that it looks very much like Windows so opening programs and files wasn't difficult at all, I also had them try XFCE, their experience was quite the opposite; they told me they found it more diffcult than they did with plasma to do the same things; look for and find stuff as well as opening files and programs. I frankly don't get the why but this is what they told me, maybe it's because I'm so used to XFCE that I think it's as easy to use as plasma, but it might not be the case for other people, well, it certainly wasn't for both my wife and her mother.  Since LL's been created with Windows users in mind looking to make the switch to Linux or who are already in that process and at least from the results I got in this test I did, with a very tiny sample though but still a sample - planning to do it with a larger one - and more importantly from LL's target audience and according to jerry's own words

Trust that whatever is decided upon in 2 years, it is purely for our target audience.

I think switching to KDE's plasma desktop may prove to be the right move.
I've been using the plasma desktop for like a month or so and so far I have to say that it's been a pleasant experience, I said in other opportunities how I like awesome window manager because it's keyboard driven, well, turns out so is plasma; every action you can think of  can be configured to be triggered from a key combo, yes, every action; launch/close programs; minimize/maximize, move/resize, switch/alternate windows and many more options. I love XFCE but Plasma's a great DE too and now that's not such a resource hog anymore - at least for now - and quoting jerry's words again

With so many developers onboard and it getting lighter by the day, with high configuration, it would be criminal to ignore it.

having a LL+Plasma DE might be for the best.

[Valtam]

[member=7109]Moltke[/member] it's good to get some 'wife and mother' feedback. Thank you

[Artim]

And if KDE continues to trend lighter in many respects than Xfce, I'd support it too.  It's a hard balance between "newbie friendly" and "resource hungry."

[Moltke]

[member=7109]Moltke[/member] it's good to get some 'wife and mother' feedback. Thank you

No problem [member=2]Jerry[/member] Honestly, it happened by chance ;D it wasn't like I planned to do that, it just happened; I was using the laptop where I've been playing with KDE from a USB in persistent mode - and yes, it runs pretty smooth - and they were there like "what are you playing with now? another Linux?" I told them to give it a try and tell me what they thought.

Like I said in that post, I've been using plasma for a month or so, comparing performance against XFCE, by the way, in this same laptop I've installed XFCE too and while kde boots at 340-360mb xfce boots at 260-300mb, still a bit lighter than plasma but not for much. Resource usage is about the same in both when running a browser with one tab open - haven't really checked with more than one -, file manager and terminal; around 800mb in kde and around the same in xfce. I asked you a while back when you first started this thread how you compared xfwm4 against kwin regarding performance and you told me it was still early days but that at that moment you didn't see much of a difference, which I agreed too by then, but now I can say that kwin seems to outperform xfwm4 and here's why:
I've looked into it and still can't understand exactly whether that's the case or not but it seems that xfwm4 uses xrender and doesnt support opengl while kwin uses both opengl and xrender being the former the default which IMHO offers a better graphics performance since it uses hardware accelaration, well at least thats how I understand it, correct me if Im wrong please. Xfwm4 does what it does really good, it's never failed to me but it doesnt have as many features as kwin when it comes to manage windows; kwin offers plenty of options to configure the windows to behave the way you want them to, that being said, I cant really say whether thats a very good thing or not because I havent done anything in that regard except for a few changes here and there like windows' border size which unlike xfwm4 is not governed by the theme but by kwin itself, apart from that I'm still using most of the defaults.

Dolphin is a great file manager, I don't think or can't say its better than thunar since it doesn't support root mode which is disabled by default and I use that quite a lot, then again, I can do the same things from the terminal only that it feels more confortable using a GUI. Another feature thunar has that dolphin doesn't is the ability to create custom actions which I also use a lot too, however, one could install some plugins that extend their capabilities, apart from that it works really good and havent had any issues with it so far.

Konsole is a great terminal but I do prefer xfce's; its easier to use and customize, at least from a newbie point of view I think and honestly for me too.

Regarding the panel I have mixed feelings, I like that it comes with useful widgets by default unlike xfce's where you have to add them by yourself, I'm talking about things like network, volume control, clipboard manager, keyboard switcher/settings widgets but apart from that, I don't see any advantage over xfce's.

Whisker menu is good but KDE's is better, yeah; you can search, find and open anything in your pc from it; browser bookmarks, files, directories, software, anything. You can't do that in whisker. 

I won't talk about the looks because that is a whole different subject and in my opinion it's kind of irrelevant; one likes what one likes and not everyone likes what the rest do. Besides, LL has proven that xfce can look really nice and beautiful

Well, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience while using plasma so far and will keep on doing it when I see fit. Hope others may find it of any help when considering a probable LL move to using  plasma as the default DE.


 

[trinidad]

"Dolphin is a great file manager, I don't think or can't say its better than thunar since it doesn't support root mode which is disabled by default and I use that quite a lot, then again, I can do the same things from the terminal only that it feels more confortable using a GUI."

Try this from a root terminal: # QT_QPA_PLATFORM=x11 dolphin
Should open dolphin as root under x11. If it errors run a nested Xserver set a display number i/e 8 and open it there with the same command, but prefixed with: DISPLAY=8

The days of running graphical applications from root are ending. Too many bugs and too much security risk.  QT5 (newest KDE) runs on Xwayland or wayland thus the lack of root graphical application access. The security risk of the xinput utility (which has not been in Debian default installs since Deb 7, but is still in default Ubuntu and all XFCE) is reason enough to not use Xorg not to mention many patches in C code thrown about in the server source that are not coded precisely enough to be considered stable or secure. Of course xinput tools are not transparent under wayland and neither is the weak Xserver code.

TC 

[Moltke]

"Dolphin is a great file manager, I don't think or can't say its better than thunar since it doesn't support root mode which is disabled by default and I use that quite a lot, then again, I can do the same things from the terminal only that it feels more confortable using a GUI."

Try this from a root terminal: # QT_QPA_PLATFORM=x11 dolphin
Should open dolphin as root under x11. If it errors run a nested Xserver set a display number i/e 8 and open it there with the same command, but prefixed with: DISPLAY=8

The days of running graphical applications from root are ending. Too many bugs and too much security risk.  QT5 (newest KDE) runs on Xwayland or wayland thus the lack of root graphical application access. The security risk of the xinput utility (which has not been in Debian default installs since Deb 7, but is still in default Ubuntu and all XFCE) is reason enough to not use Xorg not to mention many patches in C code thrown about in the server source that are not coded precisely enough to be considered stable or secure. Of course xinput tools are not transparent under wayland and neither is the weak Xserver code.

TC

Thanks for the suggestion [member=5916]trinidad[/member]  but it didnt work, got this error message

Code:

root[member=7109]Moltke[/member]-pc:/home/moltke# QT_QPA_PLATFORM=x11 dolphin
Executing Dolphin with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.

Well, like I said I can do the stuff I do, i.e copy files from or into some directory which I can't as a non-root user via terminal, so it's not like this is a "critical neccesary" feature for me let alone new first time Linux users who may or may not know about running graphical apps as root. I kind of knew that it wouldn't work cause I tried by installing a service that enables root operations within dolphin and that didn't wok either. 

[trinidad]

What system is your KDE on? Redhat, Fedora, Suse, Debian, Mint or Neon? In Debian you can use dconf editor to get Dolphin root, and in Kubuntu LTS root access is already there in Dolphin in red in the side pane. My curiosity got the better of me so I fired up a VM of Kubuntu LTS today. What a beautiful DE. Many of the interfaces are reminiscent of Windows 10. The update interface in Discover is outstanding looking. My interest is piqued now. I gave up completely on Kubuntu at 14.04 but the new interface is outstanding. Personally I only use Debian gnome anymore since Deb 8, so it may take me a while to get used to the KDE interface and QT command chain again. The only system I have sudo installed on is Linux Lite so I forget sometimes that things work a little differently now. Also you can control the graphical backend for applications from Debian user space easier than on some other systems. It may be hard to believe but Debian gnome is the easiest steadiest system I've ever used. Been on it through 8, 9, and 10 now. I actually find a few of the ones called easy to use annoyingly difficult to keep stable. LL is an exception to that rule which is why I install it for new users.

TC