Basically, I have a 2014 computer with 4 GB of RAM, and I’m wondering whether to use Arch, EndeavourOS, or openSUSE. I really want to try Rice and use Hyprland, but that will be my second distro. The computer is a secondary one, so it’s no big deal if it breaks.
I’d suggest EndeavourOS with XFce (removing the endeavouros addons after installation to save ram). I can make it boot at 460 MB of RAM. Hyprland uses about 900 MB. Might be of interest with just 4 GB of RAM. For example, on Omarchy, which uses arch/hyprland, it uses about 900 mb of ram, but it’s super slow with btrfs and some changes they’ve made. So on an old PC, XFce might be your friend. XFce can be themed really well, here are my attempts:
macos: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114009689446895521
macos classic: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114875117360852977
win11: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114874435763184758
beos: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114751365408638345
Actually plasma uses less resources than xfce. Not many people seem to know this, but its both better looking and more efficient.
You also get full Wayland support. So I would actually recommend plasma, but both can be installed and tried since we are blessed with choice in the Linux world.
This mainly depends on the distribution and default configuration of the desktop environment. You can make KDE Plasma use less RAM comparable to XFCE, but that’s not the case with the default setup which most people compare.
Erm, no, it doesn’t. Plasma requires over 1.2 GB of RAM on a clean boot. It’s a much more complex DE.
It is NOT more efficient than Xfce. I live booted Fedora KDE, and it was painfully slow. Mint Xfce and Void Xfce, on the other hand, worked perfectly.
Ok :)