Which desktop environment do you prefer when using Ubuntu? Do you like GNOME's modern approach, or does the lower resource consumption of Xfce-style minimalism appeal to you more? Or perhaps a customized environment tailored to your own preferences is more practical for you? If you share the reasons behind your choice, it would contribute to the discussion.
Which desktop environment would you recommend for Ubuntu?
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My personal preference has generally been GNOME, because its modern interface and better touchscreen compatibility make it more intuitive to use. Ubuntu's default use of GNOME also simplifies integration and performance optimization. However, recently I tried Xfce on a system—especially when running it on older hardware—and the performance difference was striking: RAM usage was nearly halved, and system responsiveness improved significantly.
Of course, I also love customizing my own environment to find the perfect setup. For example, switching to i3wm revolutionized my workflow by letting me arrange windows quickly via keyboard and configure the screen from scratch. Freeing myself from GNOME's mouse dependency turned out to be satisfying both in terms of productivity and system resources. If your workflow relies heavily on the keyboard, I’d argue that a minimalist and customizable environment is far more efficient in the long run.
To be honest, I’ve grown a bit cold towards GNOME lately. The RAM pressure starting with Ubuntu’s default 3.28+ versions and the shell’s tendency to freeze occasionally became really annoying. For example, even in a simple session, watching Netflix with Chrome open in 5 tabs would push the system into swap at just 1.2–1.5 GB of RAM—that’s frustrating. If you don’t have an SSD, this seriously impacts performance.
Lightweight environments like Xfce 4.14+ or LXQt tend to be more stable overall—they run on about 30–35% of GNOME’s RAM usage on similar hardware, with proportionally lower CPU consumption. This makes a huge difference, especially on older laptops or systems like Ryzen 3 with 4GB RAM. That said, if you’re used to GTK3’s modern toolkit, Xfce’s theme and effect support can feel limited. Ultimately, my preference depends on the use case: if you’re into coding, multi-session terminals, or containers, GNOME’s virtualization optimizations might be more beneficial.
Finally, if you just want a pleasant desktop experience, it’s worth running some benchmarks before enabling compositors. When I switched to GNOME 42 with Wayland a few months ago, I ran into issues with NVIDIA’s open-source drivers—had to add the `nvidia-drm modeset=1` kernel parameter and force Mutter to make it work. Bottom line, choosing a desktop environment isn’t just about memory usage—it also depends on your driver support and customization needs.
Why not give KDE Plasma a try? It's modern and highly customizable, plus it doesn't consume as many resources as GNOME does.