What's the best light desktop env to install in a Linux distro?

I want to revive an old Lenovo laptop with an AMD A6 2.6GHz and 4GB ram, what would be the best option for a DE?

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the big guns: Gnome or Plasma
the middle tier: Xfce or LXQt
the lightweights: tiling window managers (and there’s a LOT to choose from)
the alternative crowd: Mate, Cinnamon, Regolith
- I think gnome and KDE Plasma are just too heavy. And I would use a WM if it was for me, in fact that what I use in my daily driver but it is for someone not that tech savvy. I may check one from the alternative crowd tho. Thanks for the answer
  
  plasma is surprisingly performant
  
  I seem to remember hearing about Plasma having similar memory usage to XFCE. Don’t quote me on that lol
  
  Try KDE Plasma, you can strip out a ton of it, for example XOrg entirely, baloo, animations, etc.
  
  Got any guides on how to strip plasma down to the bare necessities? I have it on a machine with 4 GB RAM, but I don't know how to optimize it for such old hardware.
  
  I updated this project once. This is a very good start on what packages you need.
  There are metapackages different for each distribution, like plasma-meta on Arch or plasma-workspace on Fedora.
  This may be too bloated, but leaving out some core components (like infocenter or display) may result in random Systemsettings pages missing.
  Also on Fedora, the "Netinstall" "minimal" variant is impossible to include wireless packages ("hardware support" group) so it is easier to start from a normal KDE install and just remove things you dont need.
  Some things are also settings like balooctl disable && balooctl purge
- OP asked for desktop env, and tiling window managers are... Well only window managers and not desktop environments...
- I like MATE. It feels familiar. (I’m a GNOME user 😅)
- not sure, if cinnamon still qualifies as alternative considering the massive Linux Mint crowd.
- the alternative crowd: Mate, Cinnamon, Regolith
  Middle tier too.

83 comments