Kde & xfce

[bkahuna]

I prefer KDE if you really want all the OOHs and AAAHs, but XFCE does the job I've always wanted it to do. I find myself on both ends of the power spectrum when it comes to performance in the last few months so XFCE is squarely in the middle, and now not one of my preferred choices. I use Cinnamon (gnome 3) for my high powered machine and lxde for the netbook. XFCE does the job on the netbook, but I find myself trying to swap resource-heavy modules or applications for lighter ones (pcmanfm comes to mind), so lxde it is!

[R3v0lut10nary]

Originally Posted by bkahuna

I prefer KDE if you really want all the OOHs and AAAHs, but XFCE does the job I've always wanted it to do. I find myself on both ends of the power spectrum when it comes to performance in the last few months so XFCE is squarely in the middle, and now not one of my preferred choices. I use Cinnamon (gnome 3) for my high powered machine and lxde for the netbook. XFCE does the job on the netbook, but I find myself trying to swap resource-heavy modules or applications for lighter ones (pcmanfm comes to mind), so lxde it is!

Cinammon.... it's a noble effort, and seems to be rapidly catching on with a lot of folks, but I tried it for a very brief time and absolutely hated it. Admittedly I didn't give it a lot of time, but that's a reflection of how bad I thought it was.

- Effects were lagging for the simplest desktop animations.
- Kept crashing, I want to say it was at logout but it's been a while.
- Panel edit mode - what the f....? I couldn't get it to behave as expected.
- themes - ******

And to top it all off, it's got that gnome shell carry-over where you have to log out just to make some changes take effect.

[mmix]

IMHO, xfce is more simpler than kde, wish xfce have more complex routine about multiple windows/windows-array like plan9's acme, kde isn't right-complex to my taste.

[Pitfall]

After using KDE, I find XFCE to be lacking in configurability compared to KDE.
The only reason I find to use XFCE, is low system requirements in terms of CPU usage and RAM usage or a passionate hate on Qt. However, my netbook runs fine with KDE. After some tweaking, KDE can be reasonably lightweight on your system. Default KDE is a beast though with Nepomuk and all the fancy effects.
The main reason why I will not move away from KDE, is Krunner. Being able to type the application name like in Gnome3 is a lot faster than searching through menu's. Most used apps are sitting on my panel as a launcher.
The only thing that bugs me about KDE is the slow startup time compared to XFCE, which is almost none.

[secipolla]

With xfce-appfinder (alt+f2) you can do the same (it doesn't have as much plugins as krunner but it still can be extended with DIY custom actions).
There are other apps that have that keyboard search function too.