What desktop enviroment do you use and why?
So a few months back I asked about you guys os in c/asklemmy, so this time I wanna ask about your desktops you use on this same account.
(I use kde but plan to move to cinnamon I find kde buggy and gnome tracker3 randomly broke for no reason + themeing so yh idk if these happened to anybody)
kde plasma, it's fast, it's pretty, it's handy, it has all the keyboard shortcuts.
KDE Plasma on all my computers and also as desktop mode on Steam Deck. because it supports the latest technologies especially when it comes to graphics (HDR, VRR) also has best support for Wayland and multi-monitors. It looks great out of the box and it has a lot of features out of the box and I do not need to battle with adding some extensions that break with almost every update. KDE Plasma is also the most flexible desktop and I can set the workflow really to fit my desires and I can actually set many options and settings. And despite all these built-in features and configurability it still uses very few system resources and is very fast and smooth. Oh and the KDE community is one of the most welcoming I have met in FOSS world, and they listen to their users instead of the our way or the high way mentality I have so often encountered in GNOME for example. So yeah TLDR KDE Plasma is the one I like the most of all in the industry, even when compared to proprietary closed alternatives.
GNOME. Eagerly waiting for cosmic.
Same. Gnome currently but will certainly be trying Cosmic
I think that's what popos comes with, never looked into what the differences are between them or why one would want to switch
I already use the cosmic alpha and it works great. No crashes so far, the only thing that has happend twice in 2 Months of using it is the screen locker did not display after waking up from suspend which meant I needed to go to a VT and kill cosmic-session
I tried it and mostly love it. It's not quite polished enough yet for me and I have two main complaints. First, half of my keyboard shortcuts don't work anymore, and I wasn't able to fix that last I tried. Second, it wouldn't let me lock my computer or suspend. Had to shutdown everytime. Other than that and random librecalc crashes, I'm excited to see where it is in the coming months. Really rooting for the pop team
Using it on my latest install. Not bad. I mostly picked it for the visual aspects but I'm in the fence about it's functionality. It feels like it takes more clicks than it should to open stuff.
Perhaps, but it's also good to remember that it's still in Alpha. That could still change. I feel like it would be hard to give a good review before it's at least RC1
Xfce... Because I donno, been using it for many years
Ngl I like xfce because its Snappy, even on modern pcs.
Xfce is light and crisp! Looks great and works well with my myriad low-end computers 🐁
Always ran xfce on my old used thinkpads!
I first used XFCE on my old 700mhz processor Thinkpad back in the day. Back then, Gnome and especially KDE were known to use excessive resources on low-end machines so XFCE was preferred.
However, I actually quite liked the DE so I just switched to it permanently, even on my more capable machines. I've been running XFCE for around 15 years 😆
Same because it works really well over VNC. It feels almost like I’m actually on a local machine.
Gnome. It just works out of the box and I can fly through it using the keyboard and touchpad without having to configure it first.
I've done the whole song and dance with tiling WMs, or going through all of KDE's settings until it was perfect, but I just can't be bothered anymore.
Gnome because it is the default in my district, works right out of the box and I'm too old to fart around with customizing things anymore.
I just want to get to work.
You don't have to configure KDE you know. You can just keep the defaults like you're probably doing with GNOME.
these days Hyprland but previously i3.
i basically live in the terminal unless i'm playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.
not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.
I'm still on i3 as it's been convenient, but this:
this has all become very specialized over the past decade
resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it's persistent across installations.
One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3's config:
undefined
bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause
But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I'm in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:
sh
#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#
CURRENT_WINDOW=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
# convoluted command to find the intersection of two searches
ZOOM_WINDOW=$(comm -12 \
<(xdotool search --name 'Meeting' | sort) \
<(xdotool search --class 'zoom' | sort))
if [[ -n "$ZOOM_WINDOW" ]]; then
# if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM_WINDOW}
xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT_WINDOW}
else
# otherwise do play/pause
playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi
and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.
[EDIT: Updated script as Zoom updated its window identities]
Another i3 user here. I slowly transitioned from KDE when switching keyboard layout stopped working as well as some other DE related things.
Ended up writing custom script for switching. Currently implemented with rofi in Perl, bc I like the syntax.
I still like having a bit nice gui, so i have wallpapers, some icons, etc. But I fell in love with terminal along with neovim : ) , soo kinda looking for that middle ground between look, performance and functionality.
Haven't finished tweaking all the configs to my liking, but after that vanilla Arch is the direction I plan to go, since many things in my current install that I have as well as haven't customized work a bit questionably or exist for no reason.
Sway. Very customiseable and extremely snappy
Same.
I dont do much customization, but the endevorOS community edition has decent defaults.
Just working cleanly with tiling feels so good. You dont have to use the mouse to move all the windows around. But if you hold the super key, you can just drag windows around to make a perfect layout. But often than not, i just want 2 windows side by side, with no wasted space. Done.
Gnome, be it PC or Laptop. It just remains out of my way with it's minimalism. Tried KDE for a while, and I seriously can't stand it, personally.
Cinnamon. Desktop environment peaked in the Windows XP/Gnome 2 days and everything else is just change for the shake of change. :C
My only annoyance is lack of Wayland support. Tried out cosmic, but it doesn't have the Windows XP/Gnome 2 style window list.
Screenshot for anyone interested:
Me too, and it sorta has Wayland support, but it's not real good. I also like Cosmic, I think it has a good future ahead of it.
I tried Cosmic and quite liked it. Just waiting for them to add a gnome 2 style window list widget with the window names.
Agreed.
Was a Gnome user until Gnome 3.
Since Plasma 5, I use KDE Plasma.
I'm just going to share my unvarnished opinions here, I clearly understand that Gnome users feel differently, and that's okay.
Plasma 6 does everything I want the way I want. I have loaded it (and Plasma 5) on very low end and very high end hardware and found it performant and functional on both, consistently.
You'll note I don't claim it to be the best. There are folks out there for whom the Gnome vision happens to be how they like to work, or who aren't bothered by whatever hoops you have to jump through currently to customize a Gnome environment, and I'm sincerely happy for those people. For them, Gnome is the best.
There are lots of other DEs and of course tiling WMs exist, but it takes me no time at all to have a fresh plasma install working the way I want my computer to work and looking the way I want it to look, and thus I literally have zero complaints. So for the past few years I haven't even looked at any alternatives. If there's ever a time that I don't find the desktop product itself, and the KDE development team's approach to desktop development, to be absolutely perfect fits for me, I'll look elsewhere - but honestly probably not at Gnome.
You can try something like budgie,mate and cinnamon if you rlly want gnome done right.
i use zorin os's gnome with forge, once cosmic comes out ill switch to that
whoops accidentally replied to a comment
KDE Plasma. I just like it. It seems to have options to do what I want, for the most part. There's some things I wish it had, like a way to programmatically get the active window under Wayland, so StreamController could automatically change pages.
Gnome on Nixos I like how standard it is I know what to expect
Same!
Funny I use KDE on NixOS because it's the only OS where it doesn't freeze my whole system up and I have to force reboot. (issue caused by AX210 Intel driver)
xfce4. Stable as hell. X11. Can move windows around using just some keypresses.
XFCE4 ! Stable, simple and EndeavourOS’ design is top notch !
However there are some glitches from time to time. Nothing to serious but when I use Lutris + Wine my desktop bar does some wired shit.
Also when coming back from sleep I have to "pkill xfce4-session". Though I'm not totally sure it's an xfce issue...this could also be Nvidia or X11 related... Didn't dived to deep.
GNOME
Wood. Usually medium density particle board.
I love KDE. It's got easy to use power user features and is very robust.
Gnome. I actually started with KDE. It's a good DE, but it's got so many options that I had choice fatigue. I constantly tweaked my taskbar instead of focusing on what I wanted to do. And it was easy to get it to a "looks broken" state
When I tried Gnome, I fell in love with it. I love the unique workflow, lack of distractions, the modern adwaita design, etc. Everything felt so polished
That being said, I don't like how Gnome devs seemingly can't agree on anything with other desktop environments. And I don't like how they refuse to support server-side window decorations. Like, I agree with them that CSD are better than SSD, but it would be reasonable to support SSD for toolkits that haven't/don't want to implement CSD themselves, right?
I'm excited for Cosmic. It looks like it combines the best of Gnome and KDE, and the devs don't have the “my way or the highway” mindset
I don't like how Gnome devs seemingly can't agree on anything with other desktop environments
Yeah, especially how they dont include minimize and maximize window buttons by default, that's incomprehensible LOL
I found some negative press about cosmic which can be valid or not.
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-on-cosmic
Repeating my other reply verbatim as you just did the same:
First, to be clear, this isn't so much "press" as a blog entry. Second, there are only so many mentions of "rust cultists" and "my rust" I can read in a blog before losing interest.
KDE Plasma. It came on my steam deck which was my first intro to it, it blew me away and installed it on my laptop and finally ditched Windows shortly after. Works great for me.
KDE all the way, it's incredible especially since 6
It's been great almost since I started using it.
I started using it exactly when 4.0 came out, because that's when I started using Linux and I thought learning 3 didn't make sense. But 4 only got stable around 4.4 I think. The problem was that 4.0 wasn't intended to be for end users yet, but distributions didn't realize that and packaged it right away.
KDE didn't repeat that mistake. 5.0 was almost completely smooth sailing (some applications took a long time to port and looked ugly, that's it), and 6.0 was completely seamless.
I dont use a DE, I use a WM.
Semantics aside I’m on Hyprland, been using it for 6 months now and absolutely love it
I am extremely basic and I'm using the XFCE that came with Linux mint. I don't need anything fancy.
What's the difference between this and cinnamon?
My understanding is XFCE is lighter weight and simpler. Little to no animations, for example.
LXDE/LXQT because I grew up using potato computers and now I can't stand it if my DE uses more than 2% of my hardware resources
though I am currently using KDE because for fuck knows what reason, Kubuntu is the only prepackaged Linux I've been able to get to boot on my weird Samsung laptop and I haven't bothered to gut KDE and replace it with LXQT yet
XFCE4. It's intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss
Enough features so that it "just works" (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.
Can't wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don't have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.
Gaming PC: GNOME (it works fine and I don't care about much else there)
Laptop: dwl (dwm for Wayland) and suckless tools. Ultra lightweight and comfy for browsing and watching videos. Usually at the same time.
suckless tools
Wow real pro spotted.
Depends on the computer I run. On fast computers (more than 5,000 passmark cpu points), i use gnome on whatever distro. On mid-speed computers (1000 to 5000 points), I use linux mint with cinnamon. On very old computers (400-1000), I use debian with XFce.
I actually found Cinnamon to be more resource intensive than Gnome on most computers.
Not my experience here, especially if extensions are used on gnome, but I hear you. I find xfce to be lightest. Sure, there are other more light wms, but they're not modern and suitable for daily use.
KDE Plasma and I refuse to use anything else on Linux unless there's no choice.
Besides, Plasma can look like anything else anyway, so why switch?
Windows 10
Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.
I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.
I'd suggest switching to open source apps or apps that work on Linux, maybe check up on the compatibility of games you play over at ProtonDB.
That will make your transition smoother.
People who are brand new to linux should start with immutable kde based distros, you'll have a much better time with fedora kinoite.
I'm down to help support infinitely, my matrix is available on my profile, feel free to message with any troubleshooting needs.
@communist @UltraGiGaGigantic I disagree, I started with Redhat and moved to Ubuntu, MUCH prefer the latter.
If Windows makes you happy keep using it. You owe a bunch of Linux nerds anything.
Damn right he owes us!! /s
Yeah Linux still has plenty to work on. It's unfortunate how limited the support is. If game and app developers could target Linux, then the cost to support and maintain would be lower than they have to do with Windows. Unfortunately, market share and power of defaults work against us.
If you can, look towards getting a steam deck. At least that is a Linux thing that is pretty decent and portable.
I game on both the deck and a desktop with pop!_os. I can say gaming on my desktop is just as good if not better than the deck for because it can leverage my desktop hardware and it’s way easier to go under the hood with proper peripherals. Linux has come a long way with gaming. Most of the shit that doesn’t run on linux are games that cost too much for too little content or they’re just gonna be battle pass/cosmetic farms that cater to whales and aren’t actually fun in any sense of the word.
If you’re gonna be a top 0.0001% competitive gamer, you’ll probably wanna stick to windows. If you don’t play FPSes competively, a linux based gaming PC is probably fine. Me? I’m a middle aged dude with kids who racks up about 20 hours a week somehow, and linux more than suits my needs.
I’ve had more success with Lutris and Wine in getting certain abandonware games (Black and White for example) to run than I ever did on Windows.
Fair
My advice: Don't wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you're under pressure to figure it out all at once.
Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.
Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.
Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.
Ha, had no idea it was pronounced like that. I've always said MATE like "date"/"rate"/"fate"
You probably didn't even know it's pronounced Jimp too!!
/s
Oh yeah I heard of trisquel, those gnu endorsed distros.
Fully free distro list
If you know how to source hardware that uses fully-free drivers, they are worth a look.
Guix and Parabola also look interesting.
I use gnome on my main machines, but looking to migrate to cosmic, and I use xfce on more limited devices.
I like the kde project, but I tend not to use it, because I find it a bit overwhelming, even after customizing it, it's hard to explain. I have issues with too many elements in front of me.
KDE. Because of its simplicity. Unsarcastically.
I agree. KDE out of the box just looks solid and works. Especially when i came from Windows it was nice to know where basic functions are, and then slowly learn the cool stuff. But generally i like things to just be tidy and "bland" in the sense of not customized crazily.
Xfce4.
y tho
It's inexpensive on resources while leaving me nothing to really... need extra, I suppose. It's old so there's thousands of themes and ways to set it up, and it just feels like home. The speed of the animations and defaults to everything has a very stock Windows XP feel to the desktop despite it looking like nearly anything. The system doesn't get in the way of programs from other desktops or setups in mind and always steps aside.
My desktop environment of choice would be XFCE. It's simply easy to configure while not giving me choice fatigue like KDE does. Also I don't like Qt for some reason.
GNOME is great but I find their extensions to be super clunky sometimes. Some of them even break in between updates. The main selling point of gnome (for me) is the minimal look and feel, extensions kind of ruin that a little bit.
Don't get me wrong plasma and Gnome are wonderful DEs but XFCE provides a simple and balanced desktop IMO. The only thing that's missing is full Wayland support.
P.S : Anyways most of the time I would be running a window manager instead of a DE, my current favourite Wayland window-manager is Labwc because it gives me openbox vibes.
Am the opposite of you, I don't like gtk.
Haha, to each their own I guess.
Xmonad. I prefer tiling window managers, & I tried Sway but I can’t do color work without proper color management… something Wayland doesn’t support. Thus, I moved back to my old Xmonad config awaiting Wayland to get its shit together after years saying color management was around the corner & distros still adopting it despite not being ready.
I love my Xmonad. I haven't customized it except for one thing for fullscreen windows. I have no widgets or toolbars or desktop icons or anything besides dmenu as a launcher and xterm for everything else. And I love it. However I have some subtle graphics issues like screen tearing when watching certain 4k content, hidpi scaling issues that I could never resolve for all applications and sometimes my GPU doesn't like my TV (which is my main monitor). These are likely the fault of nouveau, but I wonder if Wayland will fix them.
I really wish XMonad would support Wayland. I don't need it to, but gnome on wayland was just really really smooth. Maybe I can set up another window manager with the exact same key bindings on wayland, since like I said I don't customize it at all.
I have two, KDE on my laptop that runs Arch (btw) which is my tinkering machine, and GNOME/Pop!_OS on the desktop, which is the one other people use and I'm not allowed to break lol.
Although I might switch the desktop to COSMIC at some point if it doesn't cause too much trouble.
Budgie, because I like the way it looks.
Budgie has great potential. I really love the look and feel. And I especially love the side bar. I feel that's a feature that's missing in KDE.
Budgie however isn't "there" yet. I've experienced quite a few bugs using it and it's still missing a few features. But it's getting there. It might become my go to one day.
it would be great if the budgie team would integrate budgie-extras (which is a collection of Applets) made by UbuntuBudgie contributors by default, i've had it installed on my Fedora Budgie system from the copr repo and it basically completed the experience for me
Have they finally moved to Qt?
i3. Superb for keyboard-driven environment. Ultra fast, so responsive and configurable. The best.
Gnome on the laptop, its keyboard and touch gestures are the best for notebooks. I also like its simple design and reliability.
KDE on desktop, I'd use gnome, but kwin has more gaming relevant features.
What features are these?
VRR, HDR.
It also had an early patch for nvidia support on Wayland earlier in the year.
I believe mutter-vrr has gotten merged though, behind a dconf flag
GNOME. Love the simplicity!
XFCE. it's dumb, simple, it gives you a panel to access your programs, your desktop icons, and nothing else. I just want my computer to let me do my things, not have a built-in 'brew a cup of coffee' button
I agree.
True words
gnome currently because nearly everything i use is designed for gnome and looks mismatched on other DEs. but the gnome workflow largely feels like a prison.
KDE Plasma. I am not good with making edits/tweaks to desktop environments and really like how MX has it set up.
XFCE. I also like tiling WMs, but I often have to share computers and they are too unintuitive for the rest of the family.
You can use i3 inside xfce. I think (not sure) you can do this on a per user basis.
You can run i3 inside XFCE on a per user basis, but convincing my wife/kids to swap users when they need the computer for "just a second"...
I just take the win that they are on Linux and use a shared account.
XFCE. Because I'm an idiot, and all my computers are old.
I use i3. Pretty bare bones, so it took me a while to get productive with it. But it's all exactly how I want it, it's all mine.
xfce, i dont need that other bloat.
I'm an XFCE guy. I find XFCE to be nice and fast. It's decently light - not the absolute lightest, but most of its installation size is from dependencies you were going to install anyway like GTK.
For now, it's still on xorg, but I think they're working on it.
Xfce
Yep they are working on it.
After trying mostly everything, I always come back to my "custom desktop": (openbox + xfce4-panel + thunar + xfce4-terminal + dunst) .. for the last 15 years or so. It doesn't get in the way, is fast AF, it takes very very little ram/cpu (4.5 Mb !!) and it has everything I need (even tiling via keyboard). It's VERY customizable and it does as I tell. No crashes, no weirdeness. It just works. I will probably move to labwc in a future, just because.. wayland. And now I'm about to use it on a steam deck... it's gonna be fun.
Same. Didn't know about labwc, will look imto it when I switch to Wayland someday!
Did you come off a Crunchbang distro as well? 🙂
I started playing with linux (ubuntu and a macbook [I know, the worse combo possible]) around 2006 or so. I tried some linux distros before, but just for fun, never as a daily driver. I come from the times of DOS and even a little before that (amiga 500, commodore 64, spectrum...[I feel old]) . After some time with ubuntu, I found out ubuntu was bloated and quite slow, so I gave debian a try and never came back after that. Among others, I tried crunch and bunsen and while I liked them, I got a few ideas from them and applied them to my vanilla debian installs. I usually install debian testing netinst and a script I made to install/customize packages/apps/etc. A debian install (testing netinst from usb pendrive) from 0, usually takes me about 15 min.
I've been testing out arch since I got a steamdeck as a replacement for my main PC a few weeks ago but I don't think it's gonna stick. I've got a vanilla arch install running but it's way too cumbersome to reinstall/maintain it. I have to say, arch feels lighter. I will probably take another look at it sometime.
Wayland is neeeeeaaaaar!. LabWC is the closest to openbox I've found. I just hope it is as snappy and stable as openbox is always been. The config is pretty similar and the way it works (as little as I've tried it) is also quite similar.
About eyecandy and so, I have to say KDE and Gnome looks better everytime I take a look at them, but I feel like I have to be waiting for them to complete the tasks I ask of them, they don't feel as "immediate" as openbox (KDE is getting there) and since I don't use a compositor, games always run as expected (I'm talking X11 only). I've read about KDE/xfce running great so many times, but I had microstutters in games and or less avg FPSs while gaming, and switching to openbox just fixed that. I found out that disabling compositing in xfce also fixed that... but in that case I'd just rather go the openbox way. Openbox/lxde/lxqt can be pretty/ok/nice too:
About the "desktop" concept, I just need a panel, a file manager and a terminal, all the applets KDE has feel redundant, slow and way too much windows>8-alike. I like windows 98 functionality better (do as I say, let me alone, don't pester me with notifications and applets and crap everywhere). For example, I have always hated the "safe remove drive" applet from windows/kde and so on. I just go to thunar, click on the eject icon close to the drive... and done.
Sorry for the long post, and of course this is my own experience, to each their own...etc. Just use what you like/works for you and mix it however you like (one of the best things linux has).
Excuse my english (not my mother language) and I'm quite sleep deprived.
I'm on Hyprland mostly because of all the tiling window managers out there these days, it feels like the most usable default config and the ecosystem (e.g. hyprlock etc) feels pretty complete.
Hyprbar is not a thing. There is hyprlock hypecursor and hyprpaper.
My bad, thanks
I stopped usin em myself cus my laptop aint nun too fancy and i hated watching my system use 1.5+ while not doing jack, so i tried window managers a couple times until it stuck :3 i3 btw
Hyprland on my desktop
GNOME on my laptop