Not really:

• RHEL is paid if you need more devices than the free license provides

• SEL and Ubuntu Pro don't have any free licenses as far as I remember

• you can mostly use windows without paying anything

Ubuntu, RHEL and Fedora use it as the default and they are very big distros. Idk if it's enough but that's what I know.

I mean, that's pretty irrelevant. If you were for example at least comparing the downloads of fedora Vs spins, that would be a beginning of something.

Idk. KDE was unstable for me and it always has bugs after major releases. They should test things better.

1. In case it wasn't obvious: stability is not reliability

2. So does GNOME, especially when you have a lot of extensions

3. KDE is pretty crap in both regards

Personal opinion.

Is that why every distro comes with vanilla GNOME? Oh wait...

But hey at least it's getting better over time.

Meanwhile over the years KDE got lighter than GNOME while constantly piling on features.

the most popular

Citation very much needed

one of the most stable DEs on Linux

Hardly, but I'm guessing you're thinking of reliability instead. Not really surprising when it's so stripped down that vanilla GNOME is pretty much unusable. When you extend it, in order to get a proper DE, that goes right out the window.

That fact makes it especially funny that vanilla GNOME is by far the fattest DE around. How it manages to use up more resources than KDE is beyond me.

Pre-blowback: fucking children is fine if they consent to it

Post-blowback: friends explained to me that it hurts the children and that they can't consent

The more snaps you have, the slower your machine will boot. It's uniquely shit technology that should die already.

sysVinit is only the default, it comes with systemd as well.

The tools are useful no matter the init system, and make life easier, especially for beginners.

In essence MX is just Debian with tools to make desktop use easier.

MX > stock

The point is that LXQT and LXDE use half as much ram as Xfce. I'm not saying OP should use KDE.

It's about 300mb lighter than KDE in my experiences. On 2gb of RAM, that makes a difference.

And both LXDE and LXQT use half as much RAM as Xfce.

LXDE is gonna be fine too; but it lacks a lot of the polish that XFCE has. I honestly like both for different things.

I'd rather be able to open more than 5 tabs than have a fancy UI. That's why Xfce is on my newer devices, and I install those 2 whenever someone needs an ancient laptop revived.

Just install a few of them, see what works, how much resources they use up, and what allows you to open more than one browser tab. Hell do it in a VM, Arco-B has a wide range of DE's to choose from in the installer.

From my experience it's barely lighter than KDE. LXQT/LXDE destroy it in every benchmark and in every test I've tried.

XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right

Just replace xfwm4 with i3wm for example. That and the fact you can use most Xfce tools outside of Xfce is why it's my favourite.