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Comment by IntelMiner | Hacker News Reader

XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago

When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend on Wayland

After leaving KDE 5 to "marinate" overnight (I use Gentoo, so compiling an entire desktop environment like KDE can be time consuming) everything "just worked"

I miss the visual simplicity of XFCE and I'm hopeful to return to it one day, but in the interim, responsiveness is key

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Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config

Thanks for the tip. I didn't have it enabled, but to be honest I've never noticed any lag when playing back videos or in any other situation.

With all the cores in modern PC's I'd doubt if you would unless you're on a computer that is 8 or 10 years old

Y'all need to remember this in those threads when you say Linux just works and MS's registry is stupid and needs tweaking to work right.

Eh the thing for me is that the config is distributed and fairly easy to correct. If you're fiddling with Windows registry, you better make sure to do a snapshot/backup beforehand. I don't have to do any of that with linux, I just do a simple cp to file.backup and if I hose the system do an emergency boot or linux on usb and fix it.

This guy was using Gentoo on what I'm guessing is an older laptop. That kind of comes with the territory. You don't use LFS or Gentoo as a daily driver and expect not to do some footwork... but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." Of course, you have to do stuff on pretty much any PC, Windows, Mac or Linux. I own them all and know this to be the case... it's just that some people are blind to the things that they have to do everyday on their OS of choice.

Not an older laptop. Some 9th gen Intel i7 machine with a Radeon RX6400 GPU attached

Always an excuse... Why can't you just agree that this isn't how it should be but maybe you like Linux anyway?

Using Gentoo as an example of how Linux is hard to use is a bad argument. I have Mac, Linux and windows PCs and they all have fairly ridiculous thing that users of those OS's excuse because they are used to it. I'm not sure how that is an excuse. I'm just reiterating what my og comment said here.

"but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." "

I just started to make the transfer to Linux from windows. I have limited experience after running Ubuntu on a dual boot laptop back in school a long time ago. It wasnt my daily driver at the time but class required it.

I recently downloaded fedora onto a desktop and it has been a horrid experience. It's sooo slow compared to when windows was on the same hardware. It's so bad the kids won't use the computer unless it's the last one available. I regret the switch, but want the results. I cannot seem figure out what's causing it.

If you want "just works" your more likely to get it with Ubuntu than Fedora. As for being unbearably slow .... there aren't a lot of ways for that to happen unless you're using absolutely the wrong graphics driver.

A typical way would be using xfce's "enable display compositing" setting with a graphics driver that doesn't support proper acceleration.

I'm surprised people are saying this because Firefox works perfectly fine on X11 for me without config tweaks

If your hardware is supported (e.g. WiFi chips and GPUs are definitely a valid concern), I know of no post-install config that Debian with Cinnamon needs that you'd not also need to do on Windows, and Microsoft will put ads in your start menu for the trouble of buying their license at that

Firefox works fine on X11 without that setting, but perf ricers will always find something to tweak and complain about on any platform. You can bet some Windows users of Firefox have settings that Firefox is ""unusable"" without too. A certain segment of the population will apply this sort of audiophile mentality to anything you can think of. There are people who think cars are "undrivable" without some fancy hacked ECU, people who think the rental skis at resorts are unusable, and of course people who think the earbuds that came with their phone are completely unlistenable.

Reality is most people aren't sensitive to whatever it is these people believe they are perceiving and will get on fine with whatever the defaults are.

I tried enabling that. I was able to verify vaapi was enabled. But even using a "forceh264" plugin, Youtube defaulted to unaccelerated playback

It never worked on my (now dead) Asus netbook, although Chrome could do it.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.

> I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.

What hardware are you using where KDE is considered "resource intensive", yet it also has a GPU that supports Vulkan and hardware video decoding?

I've used KDE for a long time, and can't remember a time when I noticed its resource usage (and I used to daily drive a ThinkPad X200 as late as 2016)

I once noticed a memory leak in KDE when setting the background to a (very many image) slideshow instead of a single image. That was probably sometime around 2015.

Normally it's a bit tricky to calculate memory blame between X11, the WM, and the shell, since often their allocations are actually on behalf of an application, and killing the application will reclaim it.

I notice KDE's resource utilization more or less constantly. With KDE's bling turned all the way down, Kwin constantly uses 5-10% CPU when I am literally doing nothing (with my hands off the mouse/keyboard). This causes my laptop fans to noticeably spin up and makes them a lot more prone to spinning up more forcefully while doing a small task. With XFCE, my fan never audibly spins up unless I'm actively doing something. Even if I just do something small/quick, my fans don't spin up most of the time.

edit: typos

Laptops with loud fans makes it really easy to find inefficient software.

Most people nowadays would just get a fanless computer and give up on fighting the bloat. But I appreciate your sacrifice, thank you.

KDE 6 isn't really that much heavier than a "full install" of xfce to be honest. I just prefer the simplicity (probably 1/10th the adjustability of KDE) of xfce for ease of maintenance, but KDE is fine too.

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