it’s an old 2-in-1 m-core 2-core Skylake CPU with active touch support. I tried Gnome and it was sluggish. Seems like the animations are heavier. The next best thing for touch is KDE. I am wondering if KDE feels snappier than Gnome?
Specs:
- Dell Latitude 5175
Intel Core m5-6Y57 2C/4T
8GB LPDDR3-1600 MHz
Samsung PM871 MZYLN256HCHP, 256 GB. SATA III.
Intel HD Graphics 515
Intel’s Dual Wireless-AC 8260
Active stylus, Auto rotation.
I installed Gnome and it wasn’t smooth. it was sluggish. This has to do with heavier animations and Javascript?
The next best thing is KDE.
There is the option of dual booting windows with Xfce as well.
plasma will definitely be snappier than gnome, but it will still challenge this device with only 8GB of ram (half of that will be needed for the plasma desktop).
you can also set animation speed in plasma to “instant” to effectively turn them off.
you can, of course dual boot windows and your plasma distro of choice, tho with such limited drive space there won’t be a lot you can do with either one, i would suggest just picking one OS.
it is possible to install more than one Desktop Environment, but it can generate issues with environment variables and such, if they conflict, and then there is the obvious issue of needing more disk space…
particularly for XFCE which is based on the GTK toolkit and so brings with it a lot of dependencies you don’t need for plasma.
if you wanted a snappier desktop than plasma then i would point you toward LXQt which will reuse a lot of the same dependencies as plasma (both based on Qt), so then less bloat.
kubuntu or fedora a both good for plasma
lubuntu is the best for the LXQt desktop if you just wanted to have that by itself (which may be your best option).