I've used XFCE for years, but the major changes in current made me want test Plasma5 (again). After a few weeks of really trying to appreciate KDE, it's hard to go back to XFCE. KDE is just better. It doesn't seem to chew up more memory (maybe less), it doesn't run slower (maybe faster), many bugs have been squashed, it looks better, it's more configurable...

Meanwhile XFCE just seems to be stuck. And that irritating bug that broke ALT-F1 as a shortcut to open the pull-down menu is still there. And probably will be until hell is frozen.

I'm sad to see it go, but right now it's not cutting it.

Yup I'm a long time XFCE user. I'm now running KDE on 3 of 4 Slackware work stations. I prefer KDE now.

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I have to credit KDE for cleaning up bugs. It felt rough in the past, but works quite well now. I would never have expected to switch.

If only KDE would implement tabbed windows . . . .

Agreed, although I use a window manager for that. I could never give up a window manager.

I really do like Plasma, but tabbed windows (plus the right-click menu) keep me with Fluxbox 90% of the time.

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Yes, Xfce was great before the Gnome developers hijacked gtk. I still use it though, in combination with kwin, which, together with krusader, is the only kde component I can stomach.

Probably only of any interest to File Manager Aficionados but...

I got hooked on File Managers back in DOS with PCTools PCShell and Norton Commander. My first GUI was OS/2 2.1 and not having a real file manager was difficult. Because it had Win-OS2 I resorted to it's Win 3 style manager a lot. Then 3rd Party file managers became available and saved my bacon. I happily spent dollars to have a native, solid file manager.

When I began using Slackware in 1996 I immediately liked the Konqueror file manager mode but when I discovered Krusader I was happy as a pig in.... well I wallowed in glee. Then along came Dolphin and I wasn't very happy with it... at first. Little by little because it was as simple as Konqueror but had split windows like Krusader and a few nicely configurable options Dolphin won me over.

Then KDE4 came to Slackware and that early version was not even a Hog but rather a mammoth, blubbery, intractable Walrus and I switched to Xfce... for almost 2 years. Keeping an eye on KDE, I saw that finally at one point KDE4 became reasonable and because I was bugged by a few minor bugs in Xfce that KDE didn't have, slowly I came back to KDE.

When KTown came out (thank you thank you thank you Alien Bob) I stopped using 14.2 almost altogether and fully migrated to Current with KTown as my daily driver and was overjoyed that Dolphin had only gotten better. VTown was more of the same, and now I find myself even willing to live with a few Dolphin bugs in Current with complete confidence they will be resolved soon. I have used Xfce and Fluxbox as a fallback from time to time, but Plasma 5 has my complete loyalty, even though I had to jump through hoops to create an environment in /opt to run a few discontinued KDE 3 apps that I don't want to do without.

In fact, I am impressed and pleased that it is even possible to keep old discontinued stuff around and working while enjoying all the latest improvements. It is my opinion that KDE has the most promising dev team out there for DEs. I have never been warm for Gnome and now, seeing where it is headed, I can't stand that mess. I am probably, at least to some substantial degree, a KDE fanboi. It is, for me, the best, and I strongly urge anyone to try it out. Don't rest on prejudice or past faults. See for yourself. It's worth the effort, what little there actually is, to find out if it appeals to you. It's pretty damned great! Xfce just falls short. If it weren't for it's KDE support, it would be a fail, for me anyway.

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I tried it in current a few days ago, and I do get why people like KDE/plasma. But it's always the first thing I deselect when installing Slackware. It's huge, over 3 GB. So I like that it's there, So I can feel good about the fact I just saved 3 GB

I've learned my lesson from the gnome2 --> gnome3 "upgrade" So I won't invest myself kde/plasma desktop and toolset. ( Whatif plasma6 is gonna suck?).

Xfce is still a relatively small install and low mem usage, especially after some tweaking. And I simply use the same tools for the stuff I do (lftp, mc, gnumeric, seamonkey, bash, vim, etc, etc). And if xfce4.16/18 sucks, I just move to icewm or openbox with no pain at all. With complete investment in kde/plasma toolset that would be a different story.

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Have you set your programs to be un-grouped? Is that what you mean a tab for every instant of say like dolphin.
or Firefox.

In actions select set to not grouped
.
Sorry if I miss understood.

Just for gits and shiggles I just tried running Xfce with the same desktop wallpaper while running the exact same Firefox instance with 10 tabs up and the same Conky running. Normally I substitute Kwin for Xfce's xwfm compositor as Kwin solves screen tearing and is just way smoother but I disabled Kwin for a fair test.

Results: Both use 8% RAM under the above same conditions and this is without disabling baloo, akonadai or any of the past "transgressors"... stock defaults. In fact Conky and Firefox usage dwarfs both KDE Plasma and Xfce.

In all fairness I am still experiencing some minor Dolphin copy problems and authentication for setting time via System Settings (no problem from cli) but I expect those issues to disappear soon. On a scale of 1-10 Thunar rates a "5" at best, no comparison to Dolphin (9) or even Krusader (7). Xfce finally seems to have solved some bugginess with remembering base desktop settings and given it's not running any index utilities it does feel somewhat faster. I still like Xfce, just nowhere near as much as Plasma 5. If, for any reason I wanted an actual barebones environment that is still capable of running Dolphin, I'd just launch Fluxbox. Fluxbox is absolutely and substantially lower resource usage and super fast. However my workflow is faster on Plasma, but likely because I'm used to it. I'm not as used to Fluxbox to be sure, having only spent a few months in it, but that doesn't apply to Xfce in which I spent ~2 years.

I know habit is rather important since my introduction to Linux was in OS/2 emx runtimes which allowed me to run Enlightenment a MAJOR improvement over Presentation Manager that I used for roughly 3-4 years yet trying even a vastly improved Enlightenment environment on Slackware didn't win me back. My habits had changed. If they ever got that proposed toggle between full DE and Tiling working it might be a contender once more, but for the foreseeable future, it's Plasma for me (though I still applaud Slackware for offering so many choices by default).

Kudos to the KDE devs!

I would be interested to know how to disable baloo, as I cannot simply remove it like Akonadi - and so far I have poked around in the settings and did not find such an option - I may have missed it, but I doubt there is such an option. Whether it is recommended to just leave Akonadi packages, I have yet to hear a reason why, so until Plasma5 actually complains that Akonadi is missing, I will opt not to even install it. Unfortunately I have to keep KDE-PIM packages as I just get a black screen on startup without it, so yea - the only thing I can get away with is leaving Akonadi out.

With regards to mem usage as a whole, I will also reiterate as I did in other threads that in this day and age - the mem hog is the browser unfortunately - so even if you were to be running the most basic WM - you can still reach GB of RAM usage just because of the browser -

Back to the main point though - I do see myself using Plasma5 at this point, considering mem usage is either on par or slightly below that of say MATE , and now that even XFCE is getting heavier slightly, I probably will not even bother playing with XFCE further down the line.

I was in the same boat. I used xfce4 in a stock config, and I'll probably use KDE the same. I tweak shortcuts and change desktop pictures, but nothing big. I still use openbox on another system. That I configured a lot. I love it, but I miss some things like a good power manager for example.

Yeah, even with the supposed bloat, as full-featured DEs go, KDE runs slim -- as slim as XFCE or better. As you pointed out, Firefox eats up ram like cookie monster eats cookies. So KDE's footprint is fraction of my total use. Dolphin is excellent and a big upgrade over Thunar for me. Hats off to these devs.

You won't even find a way in the GUI to re-enable it.

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