I will start out by saying that this isn't a post about bashing Linux or DEs; if anything, it's a cry for help because I want to be able to use Linux daily on my workstation.
I've been using Linux on my servers for the past decade without any issues — ever, regardless of the distribution. It has always been rock solid and stable, exactly as it should be. Linux on servers has made a name and image for itself by just working and by being stable, reliable and rather maintenance-free.
I cannot however say the same about desktop, BUT Linux itself isn't the issue. Every few months I get the itch of wanting to try to make it work. It always comes back, "what if it's good now?", "what if something revolutionary got released that fixes all the shortcomings?", but while it is getting slightly better every time, it's still unusable. I've concluded that the culprit comes down to the Desktop Environments. Linux itself, be it Debian, Arch or anything else, isn't the issue. It's the desktop environment which breaks the deal in multiple ways, such as:
Laggy desktop — Tried multiple DEs and they each have their own issues. KDE and XFCE came close, but KDE is generally unresponsive, and XFCE is laggy. It's always some sort of an issue that it's either related to something I can't fix, or some obscure package that's supposed to "fix" it, but I cannot find it, or build it, or it just doesn't work etc.
Generally unresponsive DE — The windows, menus or any other random elements are unresponsive. It could be that dragging a window to the top of the screen to maximize it is unresponsive/takes a lot longer to maximize, or that the start menu just takes 5 seconds to pop up at times etc.
Just weird issues — random black screens, unreliable random behavior (without changing anything, desktop/visual things just break). Things such as the display order becoming random every now and then, or the main display being changed, or random white/black artifacts just being stuck on the screen and so on.
The things mentioned above don't even include the still-forever infamous issues regarding the lack of software support and gaming, but I'm willing to cut my losses there by going through the trouble of either running Windows in a VM or dual-booting. As long as I can get my work done, I don't mind that.
I could go on about things that aren't as they should be for hours, but I think I got my point across. I've tried countless distros with essentially all desktop environments currently available, on both X11 and Wayland. I was really hoping Wayland would magically bring fixes to all my issues, but turns out even less things support it due to it being "too new", and X11 being "too old" and inefficient. I've stumbled upon threads ending with the explanation that X11 just caps the framerate of your DE to the refresh rate of your monitor with the lowest refresh rate (yes, I tried kwin-lowlatency, does not work) and just obscure stuff like that with no practical next-step or something practical I can do or go off of.
I'm at a loss here, I see people on the internet talking about how good desktop Linux is nowadays and how stable it is, how you can finally use it daily, but I just fail to understand how. Are their standards too low or are mine too high? I can only speak for myself, and I don't consider my standards to be too high. I just want my machine to perform as it should and not be limited by software, because the hardware definitely has the horsepower to power it all and not have a god damn laggy desktop experience:
CPU: 9th generation i7
GPU: RTX 2070 8GB
RAM: 16GB dual-channel
Even then, it's always been like this even on previous machines. Same on an older decent machine I have, running a 7th gen i7 and a GTX 970.
Or is it just an illusion? The fact that the desktop Linux community has been used to so, so much worse in the past, and now that it's becoming better I've fallen under the impression/illusion that desktop Linux is up to standard for daily use...? I simply don't get it. As long as Windows, as bloated as it is, can run "up to my standards" and enable me to get my work done efficiently every single day, as well as play games, why can't desktop Linux do the same in the context of so many people saying it's so good nowadays? Where's the disconnect?
I will mention that I'm very open-minded when it comes to the way I use my computer, my workflow, apps etc; I just fail to understand how and why the experience is so poor. For example, on KDE, so many panels, menus, windows waste so much space on the screen. When you right click on your desktop, the animation makes the menu lag and if you move your cursor downwards slightly while the animation is happening, even without releasing it will choose the option that your cursor would've hovered over, giving a choppy effect to the whole thing. I get that you can tweak and change all of those, and I have, but it feels wrong. When I'm using a linux desktop, it doesn't feel like I'm interacting with the thing I'm seeing. It feels like there are 3 middlemen carrying my action back and forth, causing an unresponsive feeling. I cannot say the same about Windows. When I'm on Windows, I have the feeling that the window I'm moving is actually there, moving in real time. When I click on a menu, or scroll, or interact with any GUI element, I know what to expect and I know what is happening with it. When something freezes or is lagging, I understand what is happening under the hood and I know how to proceed to let it think. It's a weird thing to explain but it feels very weird and wrong on Linux.
I have of course tried various DEs, various drivers, tweaks, customizations and everything under the sun, but in the end it always ends up being either laggy or seriously unstable.
I'm a software developer and, by definition, a power user — I work with lots of heavy workloads, large files and resource-intensive applications all day. In my free time I like to play some games from time to time, but on my adventure of trying to make Linux work, I haven't even gotten to gaming because of the aforementioned.
Sorry for the long post, but it's been a long time that I've been thinking about these things and now they came out all at once. I really want to understand what's happening and if it's possible to make it work. I think this goes without saying, but this isn't a post meant to bash Linux, DEs or anything in particular. It's just a conglomerate of frustrations that have been piling up because I just don't get what is not working in this whole scheme. The point of this post is to open the discussion and help me understand what is not working and why. If you've read the whole thing, thank you and I hope we can find answers.
I used to have arch linux, until the developers pushed an unstable update that destroyed my kernel and made me have to do some shady stuff I just didn't want to do anymore. Although I really hadn't had problems with X11 (because that is what I used + some raw window manager), I remember once I wanted to create a new user for some reasons, and the desktop was, as you described, very laggy. This goes to show that, maybe if you are not careful when installing X11, you can easily get in trouble.
Unfortunately, I can't do anything to help you further but suggest you the thing that relieved all the problems I previously had with arch, that is fedora. As a little context, after my kernel broke the 5th time, my a friend of mine suggested me fedora, so I decided to make the change. And it is great! The standard ISO contains a GNOME desktop environment on Wayland windowing system, and although GNOME is prone to be very bloat-y, the standard installation is really clean and it doesn't move slow at all-- And my PC isn't so great either, I have 8 i5 (intel) CPUs and 8 GB ram, so it's not really state of the art.
I've seen Fedora being recommended around, but I'm not really getting why. I'm saying that as in, I think that DEs are the culprit, not the underlying OS. Would Fedora with KDE/XFCE perform any better?
I mean, OSs do have an impact on DEs, to the extent that if you do not scrape everything aside the basic functionalities of the OS, you are left with what you are given out of the box, and for OSs like ubuntu, the DE you could get would be very janky, to say the least. Fedora, though, manages wayland pretty well in my experience, and, as I've said, GNOME works pretty well. But this is as far as my knowledge expands, and I really couldn't say what would be the case for KDE/XFCE. But, once again, trust that the standard installation of fedora linux works pretty well, and I would recommend you to give it a try
I think some people are getting a few things about software and Linux wrong, aside from opinions on what looks better or that things work more to your liking it's just not possible that Windows is more performant or is more stable than something like XFCE, and that's based on the fact that XFCE do way less things than the Windows 11 environment. XFCE runs on virtually anything despite its age and Windows 11 can't run on a laptop that is a few years old. I know the comparison is a little bit unfair as Windows 11 is the whole OS but you get the idea.
Now that doesn't mean your problems are not happening, you have to take in mind that vendors don't test things on Linux but they do on Windows, so somethings will take some effort on your side to work and others might not work at all you have to do some research.
What you mention seems to be a problem related with the drivers, have you tried the nouveau drivers? Have you checked how well supported your current card is?. If you are not happy with the latency have you tried to tune the kernel scheduler for your particular needs? Have you tried changing the desktop configuration? I haven't tried KDE in ages but if its known for anything it is because in KDE you can modify anything in the configuration, I'm pretty sure you can disable the animations.
I recently bought a laptop and the screen used to flick a lot on Linux but it was barely noticeable on Windows. Do you think it was because Linux was worse?, it turns out the WiFi card is in a place in which it interacts with the screen and that's why the screen flicks, knowing this the seller made the WiFi driver configuration on Windows so the power emitted by the card was the lower side but on Linux this is not the default because why would it be?
My wifi card interacted witht the power management system so I had to use an usb wifi driver for 8 months of my life lol
Use Gentoo. Just kidding. RTFM. (Half-)kidding again.
Before I go on with the content of my comment, a disclaimer is in order: anyone's OS preferences are defined by what they want an OS for, what they look for in an OS, as well as their past experiences with OSes. My experience will in no way be representative of anyone else's, but I suppose there are a few people out there who can resonate with my experience. I'll try to answer the post in the context of my own experience.
A brief summary of what OSes I've used, in the spirit of the previous remark: I used Windows XP through 10 until my first year of uni, when I dual-booted Ubuntu on my laptop and decided to get rid of Windows after 6 months because it was a serious pain when it came to doing computer-science-y things (and I was becoming increasingly privacy conscious at the time, since this is a thing). Due to issues with migrating from one LTS version to another (I wasn't very familiar with the process at the time) after a couple of years of usage, I had to reinstall the whole thing a couple of times (but in the end I managed to restore my system's state to the extent I wanted with the new version), so I started to look for more distros. I experimented with Fedora (since someone I knew used it as a daily driver and claimed it was very stable), Manjaro (since it is rolling-release and has quite a few perks of Arch while being user-friendly), Debian (I was just bored), and eventually settled with Arch, which I've been using for the past year or so without any (major) issues. Currently I use two machines — an M1 Macbook (for unavoidable reasons) and a 4 year old Dell laptop, and among the OSes I use are MacOS and multiple headless and desktop versions of certain Linux distros — and my current favourite is still my laptop with Arch installed on it.
Coming to the issue with the DEs, I use i3-gaps (which is a WM and not a DE) and it's never been an issue. Perhaps the real solution is to not use DEs (/s). But in all seriousness, I have a laptop with worse specs than yours (8th gen i7, a GPU which I haven't used for a while), and I remember GNOME (on my Ubuntu install) running faster and more smoothly than Windows on a higher-powered laptop that someone I know used. I would never willingly swap out my current setup with any DE; it looks and feels much better, and is faster than pretty much every DE I've tried out.
As far as my thoughts on KDE go: people might say it is nice, but I hate how it is so bloated and installs 1e9 packages whenever you try to install it (and it is a pain to uninstall everything that it installs in the name of utilities). If you really want a desktop environment on Linux, you should probably try out GNOME. I've tried XFCE, KDE, GNOME, LXDE and LXQt, and I would go for GNOME over any other any day (if I had to use DEs). Not sure why you faced issues with XFCE, it was one of the faster ones I have tried.
One major issue with Linux is that not all hardware is compatible with Linux -- this is mostly because of Windows' market share, and how basically every non-Apple laptop is meant to be a Windows machine these days, which also makes Windows more "convenient" to use, even though it is riddled with horrendous issues (being super-bloated, security, lack of transparency, practically no customizability, being proprietary and so on). The ArchWiki maintains a (somewhat outdated) list of machines that are known to be compatible with Arch, and Canonical maintains this website for a similar purpose for Ubuntu (and if Ubuntu runs on it, pretty much every other distro should too). I would recommend going through this list and the Arch forums about information about your machine and its compatibility with Linux in general. Let's proceed assuming you have a machine on one of those lists (or one that someone else is using perfectly).
If all you're looking for is a "beginner-friendly" Linux desktop setup that "just works", I'd say Ubuntu is a good start -- everything (including the DE) works out of the box. Fedora is better for a bit more experienced users (like you, presumably), and the only reason I didn't stick to it was that it, like most other popular distros, tries to force choices down your throat. Manjaro is nice too, in that it brings you some of the benefits of Arch (AUR, pacman, being rolling release and the like). One of the things I don't like about it is pamac existing when pacman is totally fine, but if you do everything with pamac, it is fine. However, I've heard stories of Manjaro breaking over time when left unmaintained (mainly because of Manjaro trying to be many things at the same time) but not with Fedora. If you're an intermediate-advanced user and really want to go and customize your system to your heart's content, Arch is a great choice. It has super-comprehensive installation instructions, as well as information about almost everything you could possibly use on your system along with a great community and a forum for any issue you might be facing. The one thing you would need to be careful about is that you need to keep updating your packages somewhat frequently (and restart after each update to be safe), but it hasn't been a big deal for me for a long time. Just use the stable repos (and not the testing ones) -- there is a reason why stable repos exist in the first place. The lack of software support you mention in your post is a total non-issue with Arch -- or with other distros either -- and I'd say it is just a prevalent myth that might have been true some years ago, but is unnecessarily being dragged out. People who use specialized software form a very small minority; I never claimed Linux was a distro for literally every use case out there. Most people won't even notice they had a different OS if you just gave them a browser, and if you're being exceedingly generous, a file manager.
It's not really a huge deal to use a Linux desktop without any issues at all, you just need to be a bit careful while setting it up (for Arch, the requirement is to just be good at following instructions) and follow standard maintenance procedure, and it will never bite you in the back. I would never abandon my Linux setup for any other OS willingly.
GNOME has a lot of good things about it (for example it visually actually looks like it was designed in the 20s, not in the 90s or 00s), but it seems to just keep becoming worse and worse in other respects. There are more random mystifying bugs than there were in 2005. I get "activation of network connection failed" sometimes when my connection is fine, the battery indicators stopped working correctly at some point, Nautilus somehow is infinitely slow when searching for files compared to instant results from the command line, Nautilus has adopted the convention from Windows where it pretends your home directory is the root of the filesystem sometimes, and random tooltips never disappearing and similar visual bugs are still a thing.
At the same time, I can name an equal number of similar issues in Windows too, so maybe these aren't exactly problems?
Linux is made for gods, windows is made for slaves
I quite badly know Linux. I started use it seriously half year ago, after university course about it, which was very simple, and since then my usage of it rapidly increased.
My computer runs on Windows 10, and has virtual machine which runs on Debian 11:) (previously it was Ubuntu). Of course, for games and chilling I use Windows, but every time I want to code something, I find it more comfortable to do it in Debian. Mostly because of convinient package system, and much more beautiful shell commands, which I quickly learned and use for automatisation.
But I can nothing say about its environment, because I very rarely use it. Some time ago I installed new environment, but still don't know anything about it, because usually my work starts from opening terminal:) Also, here people several times said, that environments are laggy. I hadn't seen any strange behaviour of them, except that their forms are quite weird. Also, I didn't have anything strange with the system itself.
I personally use Xubuntu distro which comes with XFCE. I migrated to it when the Windows 7 died. I was able to do everything I need here. Except for playing some games, I guess. The only thing that failed me was the mate calculator. For some reason it was unable to divide two logarithms which led to me not submitting the correct solution. Now I use gnome-calculator.
I honestly don't understand what is wrong with other people's computers. The biggest issue was the dual boot with Windows and with the Windows itself. It was needed exclusively because of gaming and nothing else.
Perhaps I am fine because the main program I use is the Firefox browser and IDE and sometimes steam. I am frightened when you say something like "kwin-lowlatency".
Well, the only thing that I can suggest you is not to try to "make something work on linux" if it works on Windows (like some games). Just use dual boot it is not that complicated.