Wayland in old hardware

I have an old pc, with 4 gb Ram and intel graphics card. Should i try Wayland on my Plasma desktop or its going to be heavy on resources?

I’d also be interested in a technical answer to the resource question, just because everyone seems to want to go that route.

Personally, I’m rather Wayland-agnostic, having used and loved X.11 over decades now, even back in the days when we could prank colleagues by letting snowflakes or wandering cats appear in their X.11 sessions, hee hee.

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I have an older ThinkCentre with 4gb ram an Intel graphics and it does very well.I do not do anything other than browse the web and it does that very well.I would suggest make sure you set up swap and you should be ok.

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xscreensaver --lock on them :slight_smile: Been there, done that back on the campus.

i5 Ivy Bridge with 8gb I think, I’m not on it right now, works great. 4gb should be ok too surely. KDE with latest kernel and Wayland for years now. Try it out and it should be fine! :grin:

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Regarding resource usage, to my knowledge, the difference between X11 and Wayland depends more on the specific compositor or window manager used rather than the display server protocol itself.

In this case the relevant question should be, if kwin is heavy on resources for your specific hardware. The display protocol is irrelevant when it comes to usage as the difference between them should be minimal.

Theoretically, Wayland should even have an edge over X11 by combining the display server and compositor thus reducing the overhead.

I would look at Sway or Hyprland if the resource usage is of primarily concern.

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I run Plasma with Wayland (or X11) on an old Intel Atom Quad Core with 2Gb RAM. I can’t do much else with it, even surfing the Internet puts the memory under a strain. 4 Gb should allow you to do the basics but not too much at the same time.

A window manager will free up more of you resources at the cost of some convenience.

Try a window manager (compositor). In terms of resource usage, river is the lightest. Sway is also light and stable enough for a daily driver. Hyprland is for more powerful hardware.

I don’t think it would be any heavier on resources than x11, it might be marginally more demanding of your gpu, but when I say marginally I truly mean it.

Good thing about plasma if that’s what ur using tho; you can always easily switch between x11 and wayland and just compare it yourself.

I don’t think wayland vs x11 is a question you should be asking for performance, neither has a very major edge over the other generally speaking.

The question for wayland vs x11 is one of functionality, can it do everything u need it to? If the answer is yes for both, then it doesn’t matter what you use.

If you want to conserve memory as others have said, a minimalist environment might be better.

You don’t have to quite go as far as go for sway, hyprland, i3, openbox, dwm or something like that. Btw chroot is right about hyprland being for more powerful hardware, it’s minimalist and light but geared more towards feature completeness and graphical effect capabilities than resource conservation.

You can just go for lxqt or lxde, those are plenty light.

I use an I5 from 2013 with 4GB RAM, a 240GB SSD and zram-swap. My usecase is office use, internet, gimp and a little bit video editing. It’s fast enough, the memory usage is between 1,5 and 3 GB.
Of course newer components are faster, but I use this model till it dies.

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