I use cinnamon, for that very reason. Just works, and works well for my use case, is very stable, and I've no wish to learn and configure another desktop paradigm.
I've been using cinnamon as well but in 20.04 the new mac-ish taskbar that conflates the quick launch favorite apps and running apps in one widget turns me off. Starting to look for alternatives that aren't trying to copy Apple.
Installed apps and running instances of installed apps are different concepts, damnit, and I don't need a phone-like interface that fakes the idea that all apps are "always running" when they are not.
KDE user here. What you say is false. Xfce is quite primitive in comparison, it has a miniscule amount of features and hence gets away with using less memory. Observational data:
KDE really has become very bloated. First of all, I cannot uninstall any part of that huge list with the exception of kdeconnectd (don't want/need) or plasma-browser-integration-host (maybe want/need); AFAICT this problem is existing, but not at all pronounced in Xfce.
Due to lazy design choices by the responsible programmers, KDE fails to scale properly down to the user's circumstances or preferences.
• I do not have multiple desktops configured, yet I must spend 532M
• My computer chassis only has a power button that does something in the desktop environment when triggered, and any power saving settings are off, yet I must spend 389M for that
• I do not have any of the five accessibility features enabled, yet I must spend 277M
• I have only one monitor attached, yet I must spend 213M listening for an additional
Then there are many initialisation processes hanging around after the desktop environment has already started. Xfce does not have this problem.
A lot of the processes I cannot even identify in the sense of telling what use they are to me.
Some processes exist only due to their own doing where the responsible programmers painted themselves into a corner (like with the tray icons fiasco), or no one competent stepped in and stopped the submission of a solution that has a simple and superior equivalent.
• Why is there a 153M cache cleaner hanging around resident in memory? This is a job for periodic timer (cron/systemd). Even if real-time cleaning is needed for some bizarre reason, then one would attach an inotify listener to the cache directory, and every time a file is added or changed, a small <1M process executes that calculates the diskspace in use, and only when we are over the threshold, then execute the big cleaning process. Exit the process when done.
• Why is there a daemon for applying the colour scheme? I mean, it's only 7M, but this used to be a checkbox in the settings dialogue.
You're looking at virtual memory and not resident memory. I've never had KDE take up 3.5GB of memory on a machine with 4GB, 8GB or 32GB of memory. Right now, kwin_x11 occupies 110MB of resident memory on my machine while claiming 3.4GB of virtual memory. Similarly, konsole occupies 54MB of resident memory and 928MB of virtual memory on my machine.
Virtual memory[1] is not at all the same thing as resident memory[2].
I've experienced similar amounts of memory usage to the stats in this article when it comes to KDE vs Xfce memory usage[3].
The findings from the article are non-reproducible, too. When I run the desktop environments with a text editor and terminal each, `free -h` reports a clear difference in the "used" column:
Cinnamon with Mint is very stable and tuned, very good to get job done. It has very low cpu consumption. I don't know why but gnome always eats lots of resources. Plus this very old famous bug, keep me away from gnome-shell for good.
Unfortunately not. Muffin, the compositor is based on a really old version of Mutter, and it’s missing a lot of performance work and fixes that make latency lower and output less likely to hitch, hidpi works better, etc. They need to just drop their fork and use the upstream version. They haven’t added anything significant to Muffin to justify keeping it—-the differences to gnome are done with other packages.
The free drivers work in the sense that you get a working desktop. But by no means can you get good performance on something that puts something other than light burden to your card. Nvidia gives no clues as to how to implement clock boost over the minimum base frequency in driver, so the free driver only uses the minimum available computing power, enough to get the desktop running.
same here. the 4 quadrants limited tiling works pretty well. Sometimes switch over to KDE as well just to have a change of pace but unsurprisingly it works a lot like cinnamon, just with a lot more options that I dont' really change from the default :)
