What will that mean for Gnome in the older laptops? KDE4 is not good for older laptops, Gnome-Shell will not work on older laptops. Will users of older machines need to go to XCFE?
Let's do a comparison of the system requirements of the 3 desktop environments:
For Gnome 2.0, the recommended system is Pentium 400 or equivalent with 128M RAM for desktop use. However, there have been reports of it working on a system as low as a Pentium 166 with 64MB of RAM.
Source: Â https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.0/
Xfce has a minimum requirement of an i486 with 32MB RAM for using the desktop.
As for KDE, there doesn't seem to be any definite information on what its system requirements are but most reports say it has higher system requirements than Gnome.
So, it seems you are right. Xfce is currently the best choice for those with old hardware. And it is good to know that several Linux distros have Xfce support.
