I use KDE Plasma. Ever since they made it modular, it uses a lot less RAM and is stable. Gnome uses more resources but you don’t get anything for it. Whenever I try another desktop environment, I always end up missing something in Plasma.

The main reason I try other DE’s is that Plasma just doesn’t look as good no matter what theme I try. Gtk desktops look better to me.

I just installed Gnome, mainly because I love the look of the Adwaita-dark theme. That’s really the only reason. That and I accidentally borked my /home partition on my laptop. But I was very surprised at the choppiness of the animations. When I connected to my stereo via bluetooth, the music squelched every now and then. 0AD was almost unplayable. When I checked the ram usage, it was huge, compared to Plasma. 1.6 gigs after starting some programs but then quiting them. So, I looked it up and arrived here.

The thing is that I have 4 gigs of ram on that laptop. It shouldn’t have been happening.

I remember when KDE was considered a bloated RAM hog. I’ve also read that Gnome is supposed to give up some of its RAM when other programs need it. Apparently its a myth or doesn’t work as it should.