Not Happy With Budgie

brent

To answer your question:

If you liked the way Mate did business, you will like XFCE. they are visually and philosophically similar to me. It's very uncomplicated.
Gnome: I keep trying it but the Two Worlds at Once thing is not good for a person like me as I like to see my entire workload together in front of me.
edit: deleted a meandering

bubba66

I have used XFCE extensively with Solus and found it to be a solid choice.

BuzzPCSOS

Axios I know this was not exactly what you asked but why not just put Plasma on your second laptop too? Despite XFCE having lower resource usage they all require the same amount of RAM to be able to install which kind of sets the performance bar (price of upgrade RAM vs value of budget PC with low RAM). I run Plasma on an old i3 CPU with just 4gb RAM and performance is quite adequate. At the moment the biggest issue has been momentary freezes on low-end spec Plasma PCs but that seems to have cleared over the last two updates (still watching).
I might be installing XFCE in the next few weeks for a friend who considered Plasma too slow on her Lenovo Ideapad with i3 gen4 CPU and 4gb RAM. It seemed fine to me so it would be interesting to see what difference XFCE makes.
It has been a while since I jumped ship from Solus Budgie to Plasma. Plasma just seemed to need less changes to make it friendly to me. Generally I feel that the closer its kept to stock then the less likely breakage.

brent

BuzzPCSOS feel that the closer its kept to stock then the less likely breakage.

^^ this as far as Budgie

Axios

BuzzPCSOS On the ideapad bios there are 2 bios user/tech
Tech is hidden not for faint of heart scares the crap out me when I go into it..lol
But there are things there that are wild for a laptop..
And I dont scare on this stuff easy.

mkl

I would use XFCE if it could handle the changing monitor setup. For example, using only the laptop monitor, then the docking station with the laptop display and two external monitors, etc. ... but apart from Gnome and KDE, not much else really works with that.

Harvey

But My KDE desktop has been doing fine so far and just keeps updating.
My Laptop is main concern I think KDE will be to Heavy for it.

As I said in another thread my old laptop with an Intel Core i5 M 540, integrated graphics, SATA SSD and 4GB RAM had no problems running Plasma. If I recall correctly wetgeek tested all editions years ago and noted Plasma was using the least resources (We didn't have XFCE back then).

So unless your laptop is significantly worse than my old laptop you'll probably be fine.

Axios

Mostly web browsing and Youtube videos its big screen and light and thin decent battery life.
Not a do all Laptop guy just need basics and have desktop for the meaningful stuff.

Harvey

Axios
From quick googling of benchmarks it appears your CPU and GPU are better than my old laptop, although mine does have a 1600x900 resolution but that just means my worse GPU has to work harder than yours. RAM is obviously the same capacity but mine is DDR3 not DDR4 , mine would be slower again.

The real limiting factor is the HDD, everything feels awful on a HDD and if you use Plasma I would disable file indexing. Its in systemsettings -> search -> file search -> select radio button "Nothing (disable indexing entirely)" and click apply.

BuzzPCSOS

Axios CPU and RAM would be fine for Plasma as they stand. Seriously get rid of that spinning rusty disk tho. Get a 120gb SSD, there are plenty of barely used secondhand ones out on eBay with good health for the price of a few cups of coffee. You would see a speed boost of about 6X. Well worth the investment.

Axios

BuzzPCSOS It only fits a laptop slim drive I looked at it when I first got it
there was some reason will revisit the matter.

BuzzPCSOS

Axios I think I remember discussing something like that. Lots of SSDs are fairly slim anyhow, the Kingston ones came with a spacer to make them up to the full width of a hard drive.
A very quick look online indicates that Play-stations requires a slim SSD so there will certainly be an availability although possibly at a higher cost due to the gaming connection. Check existing drive dimensions and compare with those for various SSD manufacturers.

Solarmass

+1 for replacing HDD with SSD.

No idea about xfce, I haven't tried it in years..

On AMD and NVIDIA you can try to force hardware acceleration for X11 by creating config file in /etc/..
Maybe you can do the same thing for Intel HD 510.

qsl

I've used Plasma, Budgie, and Xfce.

I really like the do-dads that Budgie has and just seems intuative in how it does things. But ultimately doesn't work well with how I use a computer.

I like Plasma's control, but ends up being overkill in the parameters you can adjust and having to remember all the adjustments you made.

Xfce isn't the best but ends up being the least bad choice. It lacks the refinement of the others but has the basics down to a science. Any occasional flakiness is usually resolved with just a reboot and has been the least problematic of the three.