curious why KDE by default?

[dieselnutjob]

Hi
I've had my Pinebook Pro for three days and I like it a lot.  I like the keyboard and I love the battery life.
I just wondered why it was decided to put KDE on by default?
I haven't used KDE for years and years, in my mind KDE and Gnome are both "heavy weight" desktop environments and so for years I used XFCE and more recently I have been playing with LXQT.  For someone who started with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 I actually feel more comfortable with these "simple" desktop environments.
So is my understanding of KDE / Gnome outdated?  Would the battery last longer and the disk have more space with LXQT?
The KDE Manjaro on the Pinebook Pro seems to maybe prove me wrong but I'm curious to learn.
thanks DNJ

[tophneal]

KDE 5 (Plasma) IIRC became pretty popular once released b/c it was leaner than previous versions. Truthfully Gnome runs pretty well on the PBP too.

If you switch to LXQT you'll probably notice a snappier UI, but I doubt it would make any drastic improvements to performance or battery life.

[xmixahlx]

kde has come a long way, but is still a massive beast.

it seems like the desktop most used by manjaro, and manjaro are largely supporting the PBP in development. i still think xfce is a better default.

i still prefer sway or i3.

gnome has become ridiculous.

[rimaille]

On sway, got between 2.5W and 4W browsing, watching videos at 50% luminosity, 185Mo RAM used at start...
I used to be an openbox user before, but wayland is much better choice on pbp with panfrost.
And as you, I don't understand the choice of KDE, but I understand people are different and want different things. I want it light and really customizable.

[dieselnutjob]

From what I understand, it's because Manjaro supports the hardware best (USB-C charging, USB-C video output and compatibility for select USB-C docks, Panfrost GPU driver) and KDE seems to be the favourite desktop environment for Manjaro.

That said, I already found that Debian can run 32 bit binaries (so Raspbian binaries) straight out of the box and I haven't gotten Manjaro to do that. I guess that Debian will catch up.

But hey, the default KDE Manjaro is lovely thing and I do really like it.

[gabeeg]

I used to love KDE back when I ran Mandrake ...then moved away for a many years. I gave KDE a try again with Manjaro on the PBP, and it is my favorite currently.
Mem usage very reasonable IMO and I am really enjoying it again.

[tophneal]

gnome has become ridiculous.

I beg to differ! Aside from v3.34 (which was problematic across all arches it seemed) the only issues I have had with using Gnome (on many distros) were actually issues with mesa. Gnome runs freakin' great on the PBP! Especially once 3.36 hit, it came with a heck of a lot less bloat, and threw in a few helpful things, eliminating the need to install another app (like Tweaks.)

[Damon]

KDE is default on Manjaro because the Manjaro devs are KDE fanboys. (They can be dismissive of questions about GNOME or other desktops they don't have images for.) KDE and GNOME are much lighter than they were in the past, both use reasonably limited RAM and are responsive on the PBP. KDE uses somewhat less RAM at idle (<400 MB).

Manjaro uses Xorg and I haven't seen anything about plans to switch to Wayland. To get my GNOME desktop, I installed their XFCE image, installed GNOME and switched to GDM. With SDDM or LightDM, whichever Manjaro is using, I couldn't get a Wayland session to start.

I read that a panfrost developer uses GNOME-Wayland, so I'm pretty confident I'm getting the latest imprrovements with the mesa-git packages in every update.