Hey hey people. Relatively new Arch user here, but not new to Linux in general. I've been using Arch with KDE Plasma on this HP laptop from 2013, and I've been enjoying it a lot after spending a long time on Mint/Cinnamon.
But, I've noted that KDE is a bit slow on this machine, and is probably a bit too much. Earlier today, I decided to try out something lighter, and installed LXQt on it as a second DE. The experience was okay, with much improved responsiveness, a nice customizable retro look, and overall simpleness that still did the job mostly. But I also ran into a few issues that probably had to do with having two different DEs on the same machine and user. One thing in particular ended up annoying me so much I went back to KDE: The Discover app would just refuse to play nice with setting a dark theme on the rest of the environment, even when I tried setting it up with qt6ct.
So now I'm considering going to XFCE instead, as I probably should have done from the beginning. I just wish it had Wayland support already (I know it's being worked on). Do you have any suggestions or tips for me in regards to this? I'm sure a lot of people will recommend their favorite tiling WM which I'm not sure I want to get into.
Also, other than that, upon returning to KDE, I found that my Discover would crash when trying to update Flatpaks (the only thing I install through it) and started thinking this experiment somehow broke it.... but it's Flatpak itself that seems to have an issue today. Might have to do with the latest curl update? Dunno if I should make a separate thread for that.
https://discuss.kde.org/t/kde-discover-broken-with-latest-curl-update/21475
while I'm not sure about the tiling WM front I can help with the KDE optimization on Arch part:
To preface I'm sharing sections of my Bash script that I'm in the process of eventually releasing under AGPL-3.0 which should help explain the editing/verboseness of them.
For base/minimal Arch Linux Packages:
For Installing Core Packages
KDE Focused Packages
AMD GPU Related Packages
Some packages were omitted from the installation lines above as this was taken from my custom installer for self-hosting services.
I'd recommend checking the links provided above to to figure out what additional packages you want for yourself🤗
If you still have issues with KDE X11/Wayland on Arch or Ubuntu, feel free to DM me and I'll try my best to help👍
Alright, thanks for that. I'll take a closer look later today when I'm at the PC, but the plan today is to try out different minimal environments to see what I like. And this time I actually remembered to make a Timeshift snapshot ahead of time (my latest one was like a couple of weeks ago)
no worries and best of luck!
Wait. Should you really do pacman -Sy for all of those? Won't that cause problems? Shouldn't it just be pacman -S or go -Syu?
ah thank you for calling that out👍
pacman -Syis definitely a mistake and you are correct in that it should be-S <packages>or-SyuI've edited my previous comment to reflect this thank you!