Which desktop for performance and UI scaling?

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I have a laptop with a Celeron N4020, 4GB RAM and a 2560x1600 display (an Adreamer Leobook 13, for anyone interested). I normally use Windows (although I do use some Linux machines at work and have toyed with Linux over the years), so don’t have lots of experience with desktop Linux variants, but after some research I chose Manjaro Xfce on the assumption that it would be a good choice for the entry level hardware.

It indeed is a lot more responsive than Windows and although it has its share of small issues (which I’ll ask about later if I continue to use it) it feels like something I could get used to.

The problem I want to ask about first is UI scaling. The 2560x1600 13.3" display is very sharp, and text is very small if used at 1:1. Windows allows scaling the UI to x1.25 or x1.50, which is more comfortable.

In Xfce though I only see a x2 option, which is too big, and the scaling doesn’t affect Falkon, which I installed as a browser because I’ve read it’s the most lightweight, and it includes the functionality I want (which is mostly a vertical tab tree). (I also installed Brave so I could watch Netflix.)

Another alternative is display scaling, which, when set to 0.7, produces something that I find usable, even if it doesn’t look as good as UI scaling. The problem is that I tried installing and running a game (Legend of Grimrock), and it showed only a partial screen, and it took me a while to realise that it must be because of the scaling.

I could have worked with it if I was able to set different scaling to different workspaces, but I don’t think that’s a thing.

So I’m assuming that if I want usable scaling, I will have to use another desktop. (That’s assuming that usable scaling exists in another Linux desktop.) The question is then: is there a Manjaro version with a desktop that supports good fractional scaling (if it works on Falkon all the better) and would perform decently well on the slow hardware?

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Here is a good article about the subject:

Also, have a look here:

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Thank you. That does look like a good article.

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I got stuck at the Window Manager step. It says to do things under the Style tab, but there’s no such tab. The tabs available are: Cycling, Focus, Accessibility, Workspaces, Placement and Compositor.

Edit: I will continue with trying to install a theme and tweak other stuff.

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Plasma has a good scaling - I have a laptop with similar screen size - using 1.5 provides a good compromize.

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Start >> Control Centre >> Window Manager:
2024-12-22_19-23

It has but in my experience Plasma needs decent graphics. This is an ultra-low-power Celeron 4020 with a TDP of 6W and an Intel UHD 600 that takes its memory from the already tight 4GB of ram (although upgrade to 8GB might be poss) running already a fairly high-res display, I doubt this will work smoothly.

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Yes - I noted that - plasma is not more demanding than xfce - and yes the CPU and available RAM leaves litte to no room for optimization.

There is only one way to tweak performance - go pure wm - openbox becomes the obvious choice.

This can be achieved using a community edition, see the → Spins category

→ SbK LXQt 24.2.1
→ https://maboxlinux.org (Mabox Linux - Browse Files at SourceForge.net)

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I would use KDE. To enable scaling in KDE add this line to the etc/environment file:

PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING=1

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Thanks for the link to the LXQt spin. I agree, a low resource desktop is a great way to go. LXQt needs just 600mb of ram for the desktop. The CPU of the op only has 2 cores, no hyper threading, and a top speed of 2.8 ghz. I use the LXQt spin as my desktop, and I have a 13 year old CPU. It works fine. My wife has it on a athlon x2 5600 (2.8 ghz) and it works ok. Mabox is another great choice.

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