PSA no matter how light your distro, any modern app or webpage will use all that power

Its fairly difficult to find “up-to-date” performance / RAM comparisons of Linux Desktop environments, but here’s a decent one from 2019 comparing memory usage of different Ubuntu flavors.

The most surprising thing is that despite KDE Plasma’s reputation as being more ram-hungry, it actually used less ram than XFCE, meaning its developers have been making performance a focus.

I usually go with Xfce.

If you are still using X, get Fluxbox, very lightweight, requires some config, but that is fairly easy.

KDE plasma. From my experience it uses less resources than lxqt and xfce and works out of the box while lxqt and xfce required extra work to get wifi, screen brightness controls and audio working. I can have 10+ tabs in a chromium based browser open without lag on an old laptop with 2GB ram and 1.33 - 1.83GHz 4 core intel atom from 10 years ago.

I would go mx linux fluxbox

Xfce

Does not answer your question, and someone already mentioned it in a thread, but don’t forget zram when only 4GBs are available.

A window manager like i3 or Openbox. If you are curious what that’s like, then try out Bunsenlab Linux. (XFWM4 is also a great choice, but it requires some know how to properly rip out the rest of Xfce, like the relatively heavy desktop and the panel)

You could try Niri. I have tested it with a ~10 year old notebook with a 1st gen Core i5 cpu.

But, even newest Gnome runs smooth on this machine.

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LXQt, XFCE, Maté, TDE. Any of them will do. Which you choose depends on personal preference and how large an ecosystem you want—LXQt has only a few basic applications, TDE has pretty much everything that was in KDE3, the others are somewhere in between.

river or sway

I’d go with XFCE

• the big guns: Gnome or Plasma
• the middle tier: Xfce or LXQt
• the lightweights: tiling window managers (and there’s a LOT to choose from)
• the alternative crowd: Mate, Cinnamon, Regolith