I have been using Gnome as my desktop environment on Manjaro for a while now and I really like it. I like it's design and it's usability a lot. The problem is that it's kind of heavy for this laptop I'm using. This laptop has 4GB of RAM and inevitably freezes if I dare to open too many tabs on chromium or try to use a few programs at once. I feel like this might be partly gnome shell's fault.
What would you recommend as a fully functional DE for manjaro. I don't really care about layout customization and having thousands of options to configure, just like it to work well out of the box and not freeze all the time.
I know chromium is extremely heavy: This adds up to almost half a GB. But I have to use it for whatsapp web, Netflix, some google apps... By the way, is this memory usage normal? Can I make chromium lighter on resources? Is there an alternative browser that syncs with my google account and lets me use Netflix,...?
[EDIT] Makes me wonder how chromebooks handle chrome with such low specs.
This should help, It did for me. I have GB on my 5 yr old Dell Inspiron 15R with 6GB of RAM... I have since gone from 27% RAM at boot with no apps open to less that 10% and numerous containers [windows] open.
thats the one desktop i really want to try when i get back into linux its so nice and for the thread I3 is probably the best if you dont mind losing alot of eye candy
XFCE or LXDE, you're probably gonna need to install compton if you go with XFCE
Either that or go with a WM, to I like how awesome worked out of the box, but you have stuff like openbox or i3 too, a WM will need some more tweaking than a DE though.
I saw a post on Reddit about there being an official Ubuntu remix of this. Looks really good I just don't know much about it. I actually thought it was another Gnome 3 port.
I have a Mid-2009 13" MacBook Pro that is dual booted with Antergos and Gnome 3. I may try a Window Manager on it to see if it can help with the CPU. Its an 8 year old dual core that wasn't overly high end to begin with. It has 8GB of RAM, but the CPU cries as soon as it has to do something.
It is lighter that GNOME. but not to the point where you will notice the difference in any real world scenario. same programs open. Min Browser watching a movie, and System monitor open.
The spectacular speed improvements in Solus OS are not because of Budgie, they are because of two things:
it's an original distro, with all packages custom compiled for a lean system, from the kernel upwards... this has the disadvantage of not having that much packages in the repos, the software portfolio is good, but not great.
on Intel specifically, all the optimisations that take advantage of specific Intel CPU handles, are used in SolusOS. That is not the case in other distros, and makes quite a difference.
