Hello,
I am planning to install manjaro KDE plasma 20.0.3 or GNOME 20.0.3 in my laptop as a dual boot with windows 10 already installed.
Not sure if I get the same agility and speed like xfce version if I install KDE version with my current hardware as mentioned below. Need your suggestions please…
Processor: Intel i3 8th gen
RAM : 8GB
Graphics Car: Intel UHD graphics 620
Not sure which edition to go for, my expectation is to have both customization and speed
Performance differences between xfce and KDE will be small. If you want a lean system you could also consider the minimal edition of KDE, won’t help in performance but in system size. For the performance the kind of your disk might make a difference especially for booting a SSD is a huge improvement compared to a HDD. Customizing in KDE is superior, Gnome is rather on the opposite.
With regard dual boot best follow this guide:
With your Intel UHD it should be super snappy even with lots of wobblies and other desktop effects to give it some extra polish.
Hi wollie.
Thanks for your inputs and for the notes on dual boot, it comes very handy.
May I know where can I find the minimal edition of KDE, I do see the offical edition in website …
Thanks Ben for the info…
Here you are:
I’ve tried both DE’s on Manjaro and to backup the initial response to your question on this thread, I agree there’s not a lot in it performance wise: XFCE is fractionally “snappier” in certain cases but not really faster.
I’m using KDE Plasma myself with an Intel Kaby Lake i3 7100 and integrated HD630 plus 8GB of DDR4 RAM clocked at 2133Mhz only…and it’s quick! And I’m using a 1TB Caviar Blue HDD and not an SSD. Boot up times will differ, however, depending on the desktop and hard-drive used.
Yeah I too tried having XFCE on HDD and the boot time was faster…hoping i could achieve the same with KDE plasma.
I m here because of windows 10 long boot time 
I have an Intel i5-8400 “Coffee Lake” (6-core, no Hyperthreading) with Intel UHD 630. It has 16 GiB of DDR4 RAM, although it had only 8 GiB when I bought it. I also do have the system installed on an (SATA3-connected) SSD.
My boot time, from pressing Enter at the GRUB screen to the SDDM login screen, is around 10 seconds. It used to be 11, but I’ve customized my /etc/mkinitcpio.conf ─ which is used for building the initramfs ─ because I have my /usr on a separate partition, and the new configuration shaved one second off of the boot time.
As @Ben said, with the integrated Intel graphics, you can make ample use of all the eye-candy that KDE Plasma offers, from translucency and blur over drop-shadows to wobbly windows, the spinning desktop cube ─ in my case, it’s more of a carousel, because I have 12 virtual desktops 
─ and lots more. And 8 GiB of RAM is plenty. 
You desktop look cool @Aragorn… 
10 seconds boot time is good …I would go ahead on KDE plasma and see what my boot time is …Thanks for your inputs…
hey if you want to further customize the ui check out
this video
