[1]

Earlier this month I provided a look at the [2]KDE Plasma 6.7 Wayland vs. X11 session performance for graphics/gaming on CachyOS using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics. Since then Phoronix readers -- including some [3]premium supporters -- requested seeing some additional desktops tested with the latest CachyOS packages. So here we are now with seeing how KDE Plasma 6.7 compared to the Wayland-only GNOME Shell 50.3 desktop as well as the X11-based Xfce 4.20 desktop on CachyOS.

[4]

Like the earlier tests, this latest round of cross-desktop Linux gaming/graphics testing was done with the [5]Razer Blade 18 2026 as the company's first laptop pursuing Linux certification .

[6]

Due to having only a finite amount of time since having to return that review sample and already shipped back, the desktop comparison was limited to KDE Plasma 6.7.2, GNOME Shell 50.3, and Xfce 4.20. CachyOS / Arch Linux does have the experimental Xfce Wayland support but when trying to log-in to that session there was just a black screen. So for Xfce 4.20 it's the X11 representative in this comparison.

[7]

A range of Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks were carried out with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU graphics on the NVIDIA R610 driver while comparing these desktop options. All the settings/configurations were kept at their defaults for each desktop.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=cachyos-desktops-july-2026&image=cachyos_desktops_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/plasma-67-wayland-cachyos

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/phoronix-premium

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=cachyos-desktops-july-2026&image=cachyos_desktops_2_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/review/razer-blade-18-linux

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=cachyos-desktops-july-2026&image=cachyos_desktops_3_lrg

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=cachyos-desktops-july-2026&image=cachyos_desktops_4_lrg