Default (pre-installed) template flavor - considering change from gnome to xfce

General Discussion
21

For me there is definitely a big impact. Just to name a few points

  • There are no previews for jpg that are within an ftp folder
  • Files over smb can’t be opened by double click. I.E. open libreoffice file via double click starts libreoffice to make it disappear immediatly.
  • gnome-keyring wont work for flatpak so you have to login to skype on every start of the vm
  • Look and feel of xfce is ugly and cluttered compared to nautilus. It will confuse new people.
  • Working with bookmarks is no user experience

That all makes me stick to the gnome template.

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22

Gnome every time for me. Xfce and fedora 38 in Qubes 4.2 is just difficult to work with, imo.

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23

I am using KDE/Qt-based applications in own templates based on fedora-minimal. It is not that easy to set KDE right, make it look good, make everything bigger, add icons and other stuff. So, it would be great to have fedora-kde at some point, or, maybe even as a default template.

Dolphin, Gwenview, Okular, Konsole have no much in other Desktop Environments, especially Gnome. Also file manager Dolphin already has Qubes OS file copy integration.

Gnome’s applications I do not like: no features even basic ones, no flexibility, even GTK file save/open dialog is so broken, so defective compared to KDE’s or even MS Windows, that I do not know why people use it at all.

All considered, my preferences for applications suite for templates:
KDE (best) >> XFCE > LXDE > GNOME (worst).

2 Likes
24

The simpler->the better, the better-> the more secure. Hence, xfce, for me.

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25

I was really hoping for it to stay to gnome.

2024-03-14-22-25-12-416
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interesting that gnome is second lightest os on ram…

glad it will continue to get supported, dissapointed its not the default

26

Could you please name the source / age of this video?
I have found values that greatly differ from the ones, presented on the screenshot, e.g.:>

Without further ado and half an hour youtube videos full of nothing here’s the data in MB (megabytes):

DE RAM Used RAM Shared Buffers Disk Read*
KDE Xorg 1511 45 536 904
KDE Wayland 1487 71 454 910
Gnome Wayland 1422 12 341 834
Gnome Xorg 1355 31 364 846
Cinnamon 858 46 328 785
Mate Compiz 624 17 226 699
XFCE 597 13 224 732
LXQT 491 28 250 739
IceWM (baseline) 271 1 189 -

** - the amount of data read starting from a cold boot to a desktop environment, including a file mananager and graphical terminal emulator.

RAM Used includes all the default background applications, services and daemons which a particular Fedora spin is running.

Source: 2022 Linux Desktop Environments System Usage (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXQT, Cinnamon, Mate)
There was also a detailed description, how those tests were made on the page.

This page from 2019 came to this numbers:

Cinnamon: 624 MB Memory used
GNOME:    612 MB Memory used 
KDE:      733 MB Memory used
LXDE:     318 MB Memory used 
LXQt:     391 MB Memory used
MATE:     465 MB Memory used
XFCE:     448 MB Memory used

I am a bit skeptical about the results from this page, but still for an complete picture I include them here, again the author outlined his methods on the page:

MB ENVIRONMENT

97 FreeBSD Text Console
614 Openbox
1361 MATE
1548 XFCE
2622 GNOME
2843 KDE/Plasma

Later a new statistic was added with different settings that seem more realistic (not quite sure what that means in relation to the first representation)
(somehow, it won’t format to a nice table here, but if you want to look it up: it’s at the end of the page)

One last comparison from here:

GNOME:        736 MB Memory used
KDE:          633 MB Memory used
Cinnamon:     631 MB Memory used
MATE:         540 MB Memory used
Xfce:         453 MB Memory used
LXQt:         400 MB Memory used
LXDE:         235 MB Memory used

To sum up, it seems to me that measuring DE’s is an art in itself that delivers various results…
Most of the time, however, xfce seems to be on the more efficient side.

1 Like
27

Also it is difficult to make comparisons because it is difficult to
make sure that comparisons are using the same functionality.
For a completely unscientific comparison, running with no swap, 12 qubes
up in normal use, switching between KDE and Xfce, suggests that KDE
uses between 200-300MB more memory than Xfce.
The extra functionality that KDE provides in use of Qubes makes it
worth it. I have dom0 pegged at 2GB and am not aware of any slow down
because of use of KDE.

2 Likes
28

Thanks for the info! Could you give a brief description of the added features with KDE?

29

You could use a pragmatic approach, and compare the templates you are considering using.

Booting the template:
xfce - used: ~260M / used+cache: ~400M
gnome - used: ~400M / used+cache: ~700M
minimal gnome - used ~230M / used+cache: ~400M

The minimal gnome template has gnome shell, nautilus, and uses the gnome-settings-daemon for styling, visually it looks identical to the full template.

The gnome template does use more memory, when you compare the full templates, but with the minimal template you can get the same memory usage as xfce.

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30

I apologise for the delayed reply, crappy handheld shot and lack of URL. it’s very true that depending on the configuration, your results may very. as I understand it, these at the time of testing were all the default minimal iso installs. but this illustrates that depending on the installation, the desktops all have similar ram usage. if you remove animation effects on them all, im sure you can even give them all that unbloated snappy feel.

I guess I have generally found it frustrating that qubes doesn’t default to gnome, and debian for that matter, but understand there’s probably very good reasons to use fedora especially back when I first tried/adopted qubes. I can also recall a time 20 plus years ago when I was frustrated that OSes didn’t default to xfce even before the gnome fork and why people didn’t all use mandrake. My partner really liked qubes and used it as a daily driver for almost a year before switching back to something not VM based. (manjaro / gnome).

I tried setting gnome as my default for pretty much everything and now qubes doesn’t work at all. I am not all that interested in troubleshooting and relearning a workflow (xfce) while I’m in the middle of a big project. my main workstation died, and Id like to reinstall an os on the new ssd/mobo. I gave it a quick try and swapped DEs but I’m just gonna reinstall what I had and come back to look at qubes when I’m not in production/in a panic.

I’ve been using physically separate machines /devices to help compartmentalise my digital life, but I’ve also used qubes in the past occasionally. I even successfully passed through multi-gpu setups to various desktop machines. it’s super appealing to use qubesos in concept, but in execution it doesn’t go smoothly for me and I often quit around the 2-3 month mark. The last time I tried (summer 2023), it was that I couldn’t pass android devices to a guest for USB debugging (adb/fastboot). so I installed a second ssd in the laptop and did dual boot to Debian for that. but then I didnt bother booting to qubes hardly anymore because I needed to compile regularly, but this getting off topic… however maybe lends context to my vote (o:

in the long run i guess all this to say, if folks working on this have the time, energy and resources, yes please! This is a vote for official support/release of qubes-gnome. if not, that’s okay too! I love the linux free open source community. I love that y’all put so much time and effort into something we can all benefit from. I’m always retrying qubes because I want to love it. the inability to change the host DE has been the biggest holdback for me using it 100% though. the clean UI, ‘overview view’ and hot action corner are great for my workflow, especially with the Dash to Panel/Dash to Dock and the KStatusNotifier extentions

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