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Desktop environments: performance vs modern look
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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I use and love KDE Plasma. I don't tend to have performance issues, but I have pretty high-end hardware (per 2023). The performance should be dependent on your hardware. If KDE on your laptop has performance issues, then the only thing that will improve it is if you get a new laptop with better specs. Otherwise, I'd recommend Xfce, Mate, or possibly COSMIC. There have been a lot of improvements lately for Wayland support under Xfce. If you want to use Qt-based applications, then maybe LXQT would be right for you. It's like the love child of LXDE and KDE. I personally can't stand it myself, lol. It never felt right to me. But like, that's just me. As you may know, one's choice of desktop environment or window manager is highly subjective. So just try a bunch of things out. Don't use a VM to try them because it won't have the same feel as running natively. Maybe have a separate 'testing' partition where you install some distro and play around with various DEs and WMs. CachyOS makes it super easy to install them using meta packages.