I’ve gotten a new laptop these last few months and been playing around installing and re-installing endavour os and a couple of other distros. I’ve flicked between KDE and XFCE on endavour. I prefer KDE personally but went to XFCE in the hope of slightly better performance. KDE was using something slightly over 1gb ram if memory serves, XFCE is marginally better using 0.9-1gb RAM on boot.
Is this normal? Last time I used linux on a laptop with the same specs (4gb ram, quad core 1.1ghz, acer travelmate b118 spin) it seemed to run a bit faster and lighter. Now this laptop seems to get bogged down very easily if more than a few apps are open and things start crashing and the mouse starts crawling across the screen at a snails pace. Last time I was using manjaro, but that’s another arch based distro which if anything I’ve heard is just more bloated.
Battery life also seems pretty low, I’m getting 7 hours at best, the manufacturer claims 13 and I’ve consistently gotten 10+ on similar laptops in the past (though most of them had 720p, non touch screen screens, and I have found other convertible laptops and those with 1080 screens to drain the battery more in the past as well), I put in a new battery when I bought the laptop not long ago.
Hi @Trak
First of all welcome to the wonderful EndevourOS world.
My personal point of view, KDE Plasma is the king of DE. Yes XFCE might be a little lighter but not worth sacrificing KDE Plasma.
My own experience and I am sure many other users mentioned that now, though 4GB would be enough, it is only enough to run the system and one app with light use (a browser without many tabs open). Another app would make it slow.
I have been there myself, A brand new Asus Laptop, i3 processor AND ONLY 4GB RAM. I suffered the same issues.
After discussions here it was agreed that currently to have a decent performance you need 8GB RAM at least.
So, I upgraded and added 16GB RAM so total 20 GB.
Since then I am enjoying and working flawlessly no matter what I open or use. It is though i3 processor performing much better than some old i5, i7 processors with less RAM.
So, I think you would be much better upgrading RAM to be total 8GB RAM at least, so you can use KDE Plasma without issues.
I can’ really comment on that, maybe the distro you were using? Cache Memory? Processor? There maybe many reasons.
I hope this helps.
Previous few laptops i used with linux were similar if not the same processor (all quad core, 4gb ram, i think intel atom/celeron whatever they sell it as now, even if they weren’t all the same processor the specs were identical). I mentioned in the OP i used manjaro in the past, which is also an arch bases distro and if anything (from what ive heard) it is more bloated.
I used to be able to use a browser (with lots of tabs, im a bit of a hoarder with those) and a script based 3d modeler, plus probably more with no signs of slowdown. Right now browser+package manager (pamac or bauh) feels like im living on the edge.
On a related note, since youre a kde user, what from the list of startup services can i safely disable when using kde? Stuff like kde connect, kwallet etc. Are useless to me and seem to be at least part of my high ram usage problem. Trying a minimal install now with kde (unticking stuff like kdewallet in the installer) but again im not sure what i can safely untick.
@Trak
Personally with only 4 GB ram i would be using Xfce. KDE uses much more ram than Xfce and that’s okay if you have 32 GB like i do. But 4 GB you are going to find it using up a bunch of it.
Thanks guys. I did switch over to XFCE for a while, but there wasn’t any noticable improvement for me, and I much prefer KDE’s taskbar and how it handles pinned/open applications. Things seem to be running a bit better on my latest install, though I’m not too sure what I’ve done differently.