KDE Plasma vs Xfce
When comparing KDE Plasma vs Xfce, the Slant community recommends Xfce for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop environments for Arch Linux?” Xfce is ranked 1st while KDE Plasma is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Xfce is:
Xfce can be installed on several UNIX platforms. It is known to compile on Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Cygwin and MacOS X, on x86, PPC, Sparc, and Alpha.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Highly customizable
There are many customization options and possibilities to tweak the desktop, including widgets.
Pro Looks beautiful
The design of the three built-in desktop themes; Air, Breeze, and Oxygen, are very beautiful to some.
Pro Enjoyable to use
Thanks to looking awesome, and being customizable and flexible.
Pro Fast and efficient
Looks great! Dolphin file manager is without a doubt the best fully functional and easy to use and multitask with.
Pro Keyboard friendly
Nearly all actions can be driven with keyboard commands. Window management, including effects such as desktop overviews, can be triggered with a keyboard control (or mouse gesture) and some even support filtering results (such as windows shown) by typing. The KRunner tool (default keybinding: Alt+F2 or Alt+Space) provides searching local files, online sources, unit conversions, math and more all from a keyboard driven interface.
Pro KDE is an evolution on the classic desktop model
KDE is a great evolution on the classic Win95/XFCE approach. It's moving in innovative directions while respecting the classic metaphors.
Pro Has a file manager that provides a good balance between power and simplicity
The included file manager provides several icon, list and detail views to choose from along with features such as tabs, bookmarks, tagging, previews and metadata, network file access, bluetooth file transfers to/from devices, excellent removable storage integration, and an optional terminal panel while remaining fast and easy to use.
Pro Adheres to standards
Standards adherence allows for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops, with similar Wayland support being worked on. Applications not written with Plasma in mind work very well in Plasma as a result. The development team has also been instrumental in standard creation and adoption such as NETWM, X11 clipboard, icon themes, mimetype handling, application menu standardization, system tray protocols and notifications and more.
Pro Integration with mobile devices
KDE Connect allows integration of the computer and mobile devices on the same Wi-Fi network.
Pro Many coherent applications
What make plasma so nice is the galaxy of apps, sharing same look and feel, configuration and behaviour. This helps with making for a uniform looking desktop.
Pro Very customizable
One of the best aspects of KDE is that it gives you Lego-like tools called widgets. You can combine the widgets in the way that better fits you and get a Mac OS desktop layout, a Gnome 3 desktop layout, a mobile device desktop layout or a completely new desktop layout that works for you.
Pro Comes with a suite of powerful applications
Plasma Desktop generally comes packaged with a full set of applications to get users started, including a file manager (Dolphin), advanced file manager and browser (Konqueror), image and document viewers (Gwenview, Okular), the Calligra office suite, CD and DVD authoring (K3b), and dozens more. The desktop can be installed and used without these applications, but they add significant value for many people.
Pro Great for developers
Provides its own IDE for C++, Qt, HTML and through workspaces allows better organisation of work.
Pro Simple by default, powerful when needed
For the new Linux users (coming from Windows), they'll find everything easy and simple to use. But for old and experienced Linux users, they can customize the interface as they want.
Pro Low system resources consumption
Not as lightweight as XFCE, but pretty close (like +100MB in real use).
Pro Multi-device "Convergence"
Plasma Desktop provides seamless "zero config" integration of your Android device with your laptop and desktop machines via KDE Connect. Phone calls, SMS messages, cross-device copy and paste, media remote control, cursor control and more are supported.
The technology that Plasma Desktop is built on, simply called "Plasma", also provides interfaces for phones, tablets, netbooks, and media centers in addition to the desktop. These additional interfaces use the same underlying frameworks and therefore work well together and have a unified feel to them. They also support a common set of applications across them which adapt to the input methods and screen sizes.
Pro Integrated advanced search
Plasma Desktop comes with an integration search system that makes it easy to find local files, emails, contacts, events and more. The file manager supports tagging and rating files as well as full-content searching and the KRunner command window and the Milou desktop widget makes searching for files, emails, applications and other content by name, subject, category, tag, fulltext, etc. very simple. It does this with essentially no noticeable interference with day-to-day usage of the computer, thanks to the scheduling built into the backend system (Baloo).
Pro Separate LTS version
KDE has an LTS version for people expecting stability.
Pro Easy-to-use software center
Apt, snap, and packagekit all show up in the built in software center. Updates show as an icon in the system tray from all sources.
Pro Activities (evolution of multiple desktops)
You can really separate your work environment from personal environment. Applications can be 'pinned' to a single Activity (spreadsheet for work, game for personal) or shown on all Activities (web browser, for instance).
Pro Innovative
Has a lot of good features preinstalled (Android integration with KDEConnect, etc.), and comes with lots of improvements and new features with new releases.
Pro Touchscreen support
Works well with touch devices and allows customization of gestures for them.
Pro Not based on GTK
A lot of users don't really like GTK's style and way of doing things.
Pro Familiar interface for transitioning Windows users
Pro Compiz and emerald compatibility
Eye candy visual effect with compiz and emerald.
Pro You can chose available Icon/Cursor/Workspace themes right in settings
Pro No crude RegEdit clone needed
Configuration is stored in plain text files.
Pro Powerful window management with configurable rules
Hiding a particular window's decorations, automatically or with a keyboard shortcut, showing a window on selected or all desktops, and lots of other rule-based features are easily configurable directly from the window manager's UI without scripting.
Pro Works on a wide variety of platforms
Xfce can be installed on several UNIX platforms. It is known to compile on Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Cygwin and MacOS X, on x86, PPC, Sparc, and Alpha.
Pro A true UNIX Desktop Environment
Xfce adheres to the UNIX philosophy, which means it strives for being modular, minimal and expandable. This makes it very much customizable. You can make it as minimal as you want and as heavyweight as you want depending on the features and modules/plugins you use.
Pro Highly customizable
Xfce offers plenty of settings, and even things like theming XFWM is a simple task (it's just a handful of images.)
Many possible permutations of window colors, borders, fonts, etc. Compositing can make it look downright sexy.
Pro Low system resource consumption
Not just helpful for older computers where few system resources are available, but also simply for those who want to get the most out of their systems.
Pro Rock solid stability
Xfce will never be the cause of your crash.
Pro Does what it's meant to do easily and efficiently
XFCE is a desktop environment first and foremost, it does not waste time being overly flashy or by being bloated with features.
Pro Designed for productivity
It loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.
Pro Low resource usage combined with flexible configuration
Pro Adheres to standards
A priority of Xfce is adherence to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org allowing for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops. This interoperability is particularly significant for users looking to, e.g., run alternative window managers.
Pro Window manager (XFWM) is a compositing WM by default
By having a compositing WM as the default WM makes way for a lot of visual tweaks and tricks that can and do make Xfce look great. You can adjust the transparency, shadows, borders, etc. and many other advanced tweaks are also available.
Pro Excellent panel management and selection of panel applets
Xfce provides excellent management of panels and a rich selection of panel applets.
Pro Easily Customizable as compared to other DEs
Pro Best for newcomers
Any one new to Linux feels comfortable using it.
Pro Well defined Session Manager
Pro Easy to export or import configurations
Pro HiDPI support
After release 4.14 Xfce supports HiDPI.
Pro Modularity and Ease of use
Don't like the default window manager? Just slap in bspwm.
A full DE that is both user-friendly and very configurable. Has no equal.
Pro Has a convenient launcher and a Genmon plugin
Pro 4.14 has beautiful and functional notifications
Pro Manages multiple displays with choice of monitor for desktop icons
Cons
Con Lost its way
On KDE3 you could fully customize every KDE application eg: you could move toolbars to all corners, add toolbar entries and all applications followed one interface guidline by having menubars, toolbars, statusbars etc. However since KDE4 some applications like Dolphin miss those features and it goes even further with the newer QML based applications.
Con Drains your battery
There is a lot of stuff on KDE the will drain your battery more quickly than on other desktops. For example, it uses many SVGs which have to be rendered before display, kwin also needs a working compositor.
Con Shell-style ≠ widget-style
The Plasma-shell is unable the use the current Qt style for its interface thus making it hard to get a consistent user interface.
Con Hard to customize
For example to create a Qt theme you need to learn Qt and C++. To create a plasma theme you have to use SVGs that follow a strict standard. For creating login themes you need to know QML. Icon themes for KDE are big and complex around 1000 different icons in ~8 sizes.
Con Too complex
Shows too many options at once often time, making it more complex than simplistic.
Con Difficult to turn off some transparency
Some of the transparency settings for Plasma can only be removed by changing away from the standard theme altogether. A bit disappointing as so many other things are configurable to the deepest detail and transparency in the wrong place can make reading menu entries for example difficult at times.
Con Perceived clunkyness and slowness
Emphasis on perceived. It's a myth from the days when SSDs, gigabytes of ram and cpus above 1GHz and more than one core were a fantasy. On anything semi modern (i5 2500k, 8 gb memory and 256 gb ssd is total overkill and that's a 5 year old system) it's as fast as anything.
Con Weird behaviour of PowerOff/Restart/LogOff buttons
No matter what button you press you get the same screen where you actually have to choose what you want to do
Con Too buggy
It has still a lot of bugs, like losing the function for the meta key, which can be a pain to set-up again in the first place.
Con Sometimes taskbar doesn't appear
Con Swollen look out of the box
In default theme elements are extremely large, which makes screen feel smaller than it really is. Some of the things are not easy to fix - even compact main menu still has awful huge paddings and header font size in calendar is ugly.
Con No native package manager frontend
KDE discontinued all of its native package manager frontends like: Kynaptic, Muon or Kpackage and fully relies on PackageKit, however, PackageKit was mainly made with the RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) in mind and does not support all the features of more advanced package managers like dpkg or emerge/portage.
Con Bloated on some distributions
Although the Plasma desktop itself is by no means bloated, some distributions delivers KDE versions with a ridiculous amount of bloat.
Con Some applications warn when running as root
This can be distracting to the user.
Con Add-on installation can be tricky
Adding themes and widgets can be tricky.
Con Sound output problem
You need to go in sound settings to switch between speakers and HDMI display sound. You can't switch easily just from sound widget located in task bar.
Con Only one theme
Sue you can install a few other Qt themes but the all will have issues with some parts of KDE like QML based interfaces since they are all optimized for the breeze theme. So in the end you have to love or hate the only fully working one UI theme(breeze , that you can adjust with color themes and a few settings).
Con Held back by dedication to emulating Windows
One of KDE's pros is that it works similarly to 90's-era desktop environments such as Windows. However this holds it back from being able to present something that works intuitively for people who aren't familiar with how computers back in the 90's worked.
Con Difficult to use on virtual machines on version 5
KWin compositing is restricted to xrender on virtual machines which makes the default booting process difficult as 3D graphics needs to be turned off from the VM itself.
Con Poor support of 4K screens
Even scaling doesn't help. Many places keep small font or icons.
Con Limited in themes, especially the most modern ones
Most of the themes are created for the GTK world, it means GNOME. KDE Plasma is very limited when compared to the whole quantity of GTK2 and GTK3 themes available.
Con Not for production
May be extremely buggy and there are unnecesary configurations which takes away time to do actual work.
Con Kirigami is buggy
The newer QML based interface is too much tied to the breeze style. So if you use another style(like Qt's default Fusion) you will have a mixed desktop interface of fusion and breeze. It also fails at certain points to set the correct color in a widget so if you use a dark theme you will often face dark text on dark background issues.
Con Does not support HiDPI
Xfwm for example does not support scaling.
Con Terrible project infrastructure
The whole project is split across various sites so contributing is really hard. You also need to register on every site separately.
Con Now with Client Side decorations
Recent development versions introduce GNOME-ClientSideDecorations for some Xfce applications. Like on GNOME this breaks the overall consistency of the desktop. Eg: GNOME and some Xfce applicaions will use GNOME based interfaces like CSD's and popovers while the most other will use normal titlebars and popupmenus. This also makes it almost impossible to use Xfce >=4.15 components on traditional Window Managers like: Openbox, Fluxbox or IceWM.
Con Missing some basic functionality for a desktop environment
Xfce is missing essential functionality like a file-archiver, polkit-client or even a bluetooth or wifi managers, so you have to find alternatives for those applications (eg: by stealing them from MATE or GNOME, which adds additional dependencies that will bloat Xfce and makes it easily even heavier than GNOME).
Con Lacks modern design and effects
No support for transparency, effects in opening or closing a file browser, or other effects like cube or cylinder, unlike, say, KDE.
Con Looks dated
It just looks like a 20 year old desktop in its stock form. However, it is possible for you to to give it a more elegant look using themes, icons and other customizations.
Con Looks ugly out of the box
Out of the box, Xfce is the one of the ugliest if not the ugliest DE out there. It definitely can become the most beautiful and gorgeous DE after a bit of tinkering and theming, but the default theme is not that good.
Con Uses many custom GTK widgets
Xfce is using many custom-made GTK widgets(like an custom pathbar, GtkDialog headers, Xfceiconview and more), while this makes it different to other GTK desktops it also breaks certain GTK styles that don't have workarounds for those widgets.
Con Configuration is stored in a database
All configuration is stored in xfconf or dconf which is like the WIndows Registry very hard to edit with simple tools.
Con Screen tearing issues
The built-in compositor for Xfce does not handle VSync, meaning that it does not address screen tearing for those with Intel integrated graphics. A third party solution will have to be used for those that do want VSync such as using Nvidia proprietary drivers to handle VSync or installing a third party compositor such as Compton.
Con Breaks standards
Sine 4.16 the developers ignore standards like the freedesktop icon naming scheme. Instead they now follow GNOME with rDNS icon naming breaking dozens of icon themes.
eg: gnome-calculator.svg becomes org.gnome.Calculator.png
rDNS naming also uses uppercase letters in filenames which is a bad idea on unix systems.
Con Sessions cannot be disabled
There is a known bug where sessions keep getting saved involuntarily. So even when you try to clean your saved session it will be reproduced the next time you login.
Con Not a full DE
With a pure Xfce environment you cannot do as much as with Gnome or KDE.
Con Xfwm theming is limited
For example, unlike metacity/marco/miffin it does not support different styles for window types.
Con GConf
It's the same Windows Registry clone as GNOME.
Con It doesn't support fn button for laptops
You can easily enable it, but it's not on out-of-the-box -> read comment.
Con There is no Thunderbolt GUI
Con Not good for different users' locales on one system
When you have users with different personal locales, XfcE has problems using the right locale for the right user.
Con Has become a GNOME2/MATE clone
It has lost its way since 4.4 and is now just another GNOME2-like desktop.
Con Will become more interconnected an less modular
Isn't as modular anymore as it was 10 years ago. In the future (4.16) they will also introduce GTK Client Side Decorations to all setting dialogs so you will have some problems with using a different Window manager or when using xfce components outside of Xfce/GNOME.
Con Out-dated
Development are often too slow and unable provide necessary functionalities.
Con One pixel wide window borders
The non-configurable, one pixel wide window borders make resizing difficult. Work-arounds exist but those are clunky at best.
Con Lack of useful tools
Con Openbox doesn't support Wayland
Con Officially is no Longer the Champion of Lightweight Memory Usage
According to multiple credible sources in the Linux world and the KDE developers, XFCE now uses more memory than Plasma 5.17, due to Plasma bringing better and faster updates. Even the XFCE folks admit XFCE is somewhat getting out of hand.
I suppose this was tested on a minimal install of Plasma, without the entire KDE ecosystem. So if you are concerned with memory usage and use a "build-it-yourself" distribution like Arch, avoid XFCE and install Plasma by itself.
Con Poor support
It can take years for the devs to answer to bug reports.
Con No sound effects
Xfce does not support freedesktop sound themes.
Con Focuses on artwork/eyecandy instead of usability
Sine 4.14 there was a shift to focus more on artwork than usability.
Con Not modular anymore
Until 4.10 xfce was the modular desktop and you could xfce apps and components outside of xfce, but nowadays all components are interconnected.
Con Too lightweight
Feels too lightweight and doesn't have enough packages and applications.