What's the best light desktop env to install in a Linux distro?

I usually go with Xfce.

- Wayland development is also well under way for Xfce.
- I was debating myself between those 2. I like xfce, and they announced recently that they have plans to move to Wayland but maybe I'll give LXQT a try to see what it is like. Thanks for the answer
  
  I think XFCE has way more themes etc. Both are extremely themable though.

PSA no matter how light your distro, any modern app or webpage will use all that power

That's fast enough to run the latest Linux Mint with Cinnamon. I have two laptops with the exact same cpu speed (passmark score) and 4 GB of ram. With 2 GB swap file you will be in business.
- Oh, that's pretty neat info. I'm more of an Arch user but I might give Linux mint a try now that I know that. Thanks
  
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cinnamon Cinnamon is available for Arch, would be the same or better

I'm running Kubuntu on less than that on a desktop and it works just fine.

If you are still using X, get Fluxbox, very lightweight, requires some config, but that is fairly easy.
- +1 for Fluxbox!
  It’s such an underrated WM
  
  Yeah, unfortunately it seems like it will not get a Wayland version though...

If you don’t need a full desktop environment, check-out IceWM.
I recently checked-out Trinity ( essentially KDE 3 modernized ) and was surprised how decent it was. I used it in Q4OS but it may be available in your distro.
- I use IceWM on antiX. Seems to be a good mix of low resource usage and aesthetics.

LXQt, XFCE Or a window manager, they’re all lightweight.

the big guns: Gnome or Plasma
the middle tier: Xfce or LXQt
the lightweights: tiling window managers (and there’s a LOT to choose from)
the alternative crowd: Mate, Cinnamon, Regolith
- I think gnome and KDE Plasma are just too heavy. And I would use a WM if it was for me, in fact that what I use in my daily driver but it is for someone not that tech savvy. I may check one from the alternative crowd tho. Thanks for the answer
  
  I seem to remember hearing about Plasma having similar memory usage to XFCE. Don’t quote me on that lol
  
  plasma is surprisingly performant
  
  Try KDE Plasma, you can strip out a ton of it, for example XOrg entirely, baloo, animations, etc.
- OP asked for desktop env, and tiling window managers are... Well only window managers and not desktop environments...
- I like MATE. It feels familiar. (I’m a GNOME user 😅)
- the alternative crowd: Mate, Cinnamon, Regolith
  Middle tier too.
- not sure, if cinnamon still qualifies as alternative considering the massive Linux Mint crowd.

Technically not a DE, but I like plain openbox.
- Wasn‘t there a crunchbang project putting this nicely together with debian? I remember it fondly, but that is centuries ago…
  
  Bunsen Labs and Crunchbang ++ carry that flag now.

Its fairly difficult to find "up-to-date" performance / RAM comparisons of Linux Desktop environments, but here's a decent one from 2019 comparing memory usage of different Ubuntu flavors.
The most surprising thing is that despite KDE Plasma's reputation as being more ram-hungry, it actually used less ram than XFCE, meaning its developers have been making performance a focus.

A window manager like i3 or Openbox. If you are curious what that's like, then try out Bunsenlab Linux. (XFWM4 is also a great choice, but it requires some know how to properly rip out the rest of Xfce, like the relatively heavy desktop and the panel)

Does Xfce count as light? It's got plenty of features. Should fit in 4gb well enough though.
- If xfce doesnt count as light I don't know what would
- Well when I used tu it like 12 years ago it was very light. I'll have to check now. Thanks for the answer

I love OB with tint2 and conky , no de needed.
- If it was for me I could use something like that. But I don't think the person I'll give the pc to would be able to lol
  
  I think what you need is LXQT in that case. It's light while still being a DE.
  
  If it's for someone else, I'd pick Mate or XFCE. Should feel familiar to Windows (which is what I'd guess they're coming from), and it should be light enough to work on that hardware.
  ElementaryOS comes with Pantheon, which is also very light, iirc, and it might be worth trying out via a live ISO.
  
  Could you tell me what would be lacking? There's a surprising amount of bells and whistle s you can add to the setup. Check out bunsenlabs distro for an example.

Xfce

Does not answer your question, and someone already mentioned it in a thread, but don't forget zram when only 4GBs are available.

Moksha Desktop environment Bodhi Linux
- Or Fedora Budgie Edition

I have a thumb drive with Mint Mate installed on it and it runs fine on a 4gb i5 - 3rd gen.

There are many options, but I'd say on those specs anything will run more or less fine with some tweaks/settings.
Personally I would go with KDE Plasma, because I feel most comfortable with it. It can be pretty light on system ressources when configured properly. Disable all the visual stuff (animations, blur, anti aliasing) and some of it's background modules (baloo and some other stuff that you personally don't need).
But you should take the one you are familiar with and find out how you can tweak it to be more light. Cheers
- I have tested KDE plasma in my main pc for a few weeks now and the ram consumption seems pretty high and have too many options. I'm looking for something light and easy to use (not many options) since the pc is going to be used by someone not very tech savvy.
  
  Measuring RAM usage is extremely tricky, because programs will use more than they need, if there is lots of unused RAM available. Check out https://www.linuxatemyram.com if you want to learn more.
  For me KDE Plasma uses over a gig on my main PC after a fresh boot. But it also ran perfectly fine on a 512MB ancient laptop.

XFCE or LxQT but i have a preference for XFCE if it is for normal use.
- Same. Mostly because I used to run XFCE some years ago, but I might give LXQT a try. Thanks

I would go mx linux fluxbox

E

I'd go with XFCE

Probably lxqt. https://lxqt-project.org/ Very lightweight yet a full-on DE (minus bells and whistles). Found on most Linux distros repositories.
- Yeah I'll check LXQT. It's been a long time since I thinkered with distros an DEs. Thanks
  
  By the way, you might also investigate window managers, which aren't as full-featured as DE's but are even lighter on resources. Back in the day before KDE and Gnome, I used Window Maker , which is based on Steve Job's NextStep's UI. Only works with X, not Wayland, though. https://www.windowmaker.org/

For something with that little memory, I would use a minimal window manager; you'll want every megabyte of memory if you want to have any chance at running something like a javascript-capable browser without constantly hammering swap. fvwm, cwm, jwm, and ratpoison are all small window managers I enjoy; but do your own research into what window manager is the best for you.

Your biggest problem is going to be the 4 GB of RAM. Saving a few hundred megs on the DE will help but not much. If you run a web browser ( and I cannot imagine using a computer without one ) that RAM is going to fill up fast.
Honestly, I would use a 32 bit distro on that hardware.
Q4OS with Trinity, Antix, Adelie, and DSL are all pretty decent options.
- Zram
- What's wrong with 4Gb? It works fine for light usage and you can enable swap to a SSD for when you want something a little memory hungry like a lot of tabs.

KDE plasma. From my experience it uses less resources than lxqt and xfce and works out of the box while lxqt and xfce required extra work to get wifi, screen brightness controls and audio working. I can have 10+ tabs in a chromium based browser open without lag on an old laptop with 2GB ram and 1.33 - 1.83GHz 4 core intel atom from 10 years ago.
- s/chromium/Firefox/g

Xfce, LXQt or just install JWM and enjoy the 30 Mb idle RAM usage

honestly they are all pretty good at this point. start with the default ur distro supports. if that isn't to your taste try kde/plasma, gnome or lxde

Is the A6 from 2017/18? Should be fine with anything. My wife's laptop is from 2010/11. I tried all the DEs because of the lightness claims, I found GNOME worked the best, and it is super peppy running NixOS.
I asked online why GNOME would perform better than what is assumed a lighter DE, and a comouter dude says GNOME goes and gets everything it needs and caches it when you launch something so retrieval is faster in the app, KDE loads stuff on demand as it is asked for so a alow CPU and HDD hinderes KDE for me.
if you can afford it, by 4 more gigs of RAM
- Get an SSD as it will make your life way better

LXQt, XFCE, Maté, TDE. Any of them will do. Which you choose depends on personal preference and how large an ecosystem you want—LXQt has only a few basic applications, TDE has pretty much everything that was in KDE3, the others are somewhere in between.

You could try Niri. I have tested it with a ~10 year old notebook with a 1st gen Core i5 cpu.
But, even newest Gnome runs smooth on this machine.

That's a reasonable machine. You probably could use anything but if you want lighter weight you could use Xfce4. If it is a laptop you could use stock gnome with some swap as a backup to prevent OOM

In my experiments with a similar setup and integrated graphics, full-wayland Kubuntu feels much more responsive than Xorg-Lubuntu, for what it's worth

Moksha Heck, just install Bodhi Linux 7, your choice between Ubuntu based or Debian based.

river or sway

If the PC has an SSD, install anything you want, the PC will handle it fine.

Ironically, ChromeOS Flex would run smooth on those specs, since it does so on my dogshit Samsung Chromebook 3 with shittier specs.
- What the hell is that monstrosity?
  
  ChromeOS. It’s relatively simple, secure and runs on older hardware.