If you have to pick only one Desktop Environment and use it till your computer breaks, what would you choose? - AOS for Lemmy.World - A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use.

113179

If you have to pick only one Desktop Environment and use it till your computer breaks, what would you choose?

1y 2mon ago by lemmy.world/u/mazzilius_marsti in linux@lemmy.ml

I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it's Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)...etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.

Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the "Flagship Manjaro version". I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.

After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.

What about you guys?

That's not too hard a question for me, I've been using the same DE for years: KDE

KDE is one of the main reasons for me to use Linux. I immensely like the performance, silence and battery lifetime of MacBooks. But if I have to work with anything but KDE, it's not worth it for me. The only thing OSX does better than basically any other desktop out there, is the ability to drag whole virtual screen between monitors.

I'm running XFCE (but you could do KDE) on my intel Mac, you can get best of both worlds. I heard silicon is more difficult with Linux tho.

Has KDE improved since 2010-ish? I gave up KDE because gnome was just a better DE at the time. Gnome sucks now, but I found i3/sway. Haven’t given KDE a second chance yet

Oh yes. Much better since the KDE4 branch / debacle.

KDE

Plasma's not that old, it just came out a few years ago...

2008?

I'd rather not use a computer at all than use GNOME for the rest of my live.
For me it's KDE Plasma all the way.

For those of us that expect room to breathe and make our machine work for us rather than the other way around, we feel like Gnome takes a lot of liberties away for the sake of "simplicity." There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.

The primary contributors who work under The Gnome Foundation also come off as controlling and arrogant in a lot of cases, and refuse to take community feedback to heart, whereas KDE has literal summits to get user feedback on major core features we want to see which then later get added to their backlogs and sprints as Epics. Gnome acts a lot like Apple in the sense that they're very much "we know what's best for you better than you do."

Now, the singular area I can give Gnome true props in is their accessibility functionality, but that's primarily it. KDE's accessibility is fairly behind by about a decade in comparison.

That's just my take, take it as you will.

I miss old Gnome. I wish they'd stuck with the old Gnome 2 design philosophy but breathed new modern design principals into it, instead of trying to go the Ubuntu Unity route. Maybe something like Cinnamon but even more flexible and feature-rich.

Use Mate. It is based on the old Gnome 2

I was waiting for someone to say that.

I like that Mate is a thing, but like I said, I'm looking for something thats based on it but as if its had the same 20 years of enhancements everything else got.

The closest thing to that I've found is quite literally KDE. So I use KDE.

There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.

There are also plenty of features that gnome has that kde and other desktops and wms don't have. It's all about tradeoffs and what's acceptable or necessary for you.

Honestly, that defaulting to the Search field in the Save dialog when I'm trying to save something just gets me wild. It beggars the imagination why the developers think that's a reasonable thing to do and it colors my whole perception of the DE.

This and shortcut for creating a subfolder doeesnt work in save dialogue.

I haven't lasted long enough after the Search piss-off to notice the tomfoolery of that. Well, you probably shouldn't be creating new folders from there, don't you understand how the workflow-as-handed-down-by-Jehosaphat is supposed to be used?

There must be something about GNOME in particular that some people love, and others hate.

GNOME is heavily opinionated.

As such it gets praise from people that share that opinion and gets hate from the people that do not. Many other DEs are much more configurable, giving a broader audience the possibility to adjust everything to their liking.

You know how the ending of LOST or Game of Thrones can bring up feelings in people? That's how it was for me when Gnome 3 first came out. I had been using Gnome 2 for a few years and had a good workflow, and then suddenly, everything changed. Back then Gnome 3 was buggy and lacked a lot of things, which didn't help. It also didn't help that the devs took a "the problem is you" stance to all feedback. That said, I use Gnome now, and I like it, it took some years to mature and become good. But the feeling is still there sometimes.

GNOME is a lightly upgraded MacOS interface. Every time I’ve had to use a Mac has pissed me off so GNOME gives me war flashbacks.

Not necessarily the DE’s fault but ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Gives me more Windows 8 flashbacks than Mac.

An interface that works well on touchscreens, but feels clunky on mouse and keyboard and the general theming of it looks more phone like than a desktop PC. Gnome itself being harder to theme doesn't help with that.

That being said I'd pick Gnome over all else for touch devices. I threw it on an old Surface 3 and it worked better than the original Win8 interface.

I agree it looks kind of like a phone. But, and take this with a big grain of salt because I didn't use Gnome for very long at all, I thought it was really nice to navigate. I ended up using the mouse much less than I do now with Cinnamon.

I was team Gnome before Gnome 3 came out. Nowadays I don't mind it for auxiliary computers that I don't interact with regularly. It has a huge community behind it and that is a quality in its own right. But since MATE never really managed to become a worthy successor to Gnome 2 I guess I'm team Plasma now. I got it "forced" on me by my beloved Steam Deck and I can definitely see why Valve went for it.

Currently I'm experimenting with Hyprland but that is definitely too early to call it my forever pick, so Plasma it is.

why do you think gnome is the default on everything?

Because distros have a sick sense of humour.

And there was me thinking because it's really good?

It's not though.

The most popular de is no good

Baffling

Much like Windows.

Except people are forced to use windows. Not so with gnome

If you say so

I do

DE is no good

totally

KDE. Been upgrading the same environment for 5 years just keeps getting better.

I started around maybe KDE 3?

Was on KDE 2, KDE 3 was absolutely incredible, ran it on Mac when it was supported on xquartz.

4 was a mess, but got better, 5 & 6 are fine, but it's overall far better than any other DE, it's just so customizable, the only other thing that comes close is xmonad or something.

I mean, they added a ton of features, especially minor or niche ones, but a lot of amazing ones like KDEConnect too.

But what makes KDE the best is that the features don't get in the way of core functionality anymore, the basic DE is always safe and they generally layer stuff on such that it doesn't break anything.

So basically the opposite of most of modern software nowadays.

GNOME because it works out of the box like GNOME

KDE Plasma.

It has been great for gaming, adopting Wayland protocols at a faster rate than other DEs due in part thanks to Valve's contributions.

I freaking love GNOME & Adwaita, but I'll switch back when I deem it better than Plasma.

Desktop environment? Who needs a desktop environment?

Bro watches videos through ASCII conversion in the cli😭

mpv for the win

but if you really want your ASCII conversion: mpv --vo=caca or mpv --vo=tct

It's actually possible! Thats amazing lol

Bro doesn't need DE to watch videos. Bro doesn't need DE to do anything.

Bad apple in text may be more impressive than it on the Nintendo.

TBH, I've always wanted to do this.

This isn't even hard. KDE without a second thought.

I regularly try other desktops, and I regularly come back to the only desktop with any sort of reasonable thought put into it.

My computer doesn't really break, I'm Ship of Theseus-ing it regularly.

Apart from that, the only one among the normal window based ones that has felt like it respects my will to configure stuff in ways that feel right to me has been KDE Plasma.

XFCE, using it for over 10 years, not planning to change it unless the DE changes radically.

username checks out [also: same]

Also an old fart, also love XFCE

Definitely Gnome here. Though I have a long list of notes, it mostly just works exactly like I expect with little friction or guessing. I donate $100/year to both Gnome and KDE since they are both good pieces of software, and I love that I get to chose mine. Further, I think KDE is the logical choice for something like the SteamDeck where it's going to have a lot of gamers that expect computers to work like Windows. (even if I don't like it, >_<)

Probably KDE, it's the most 'complete' feeling to me with settings and GUI for most things.

I would say the same & I don’t even use it—but I would trust it being around the longest & is better than GNOME IMO.

KDE

Cinnamon by and far.

I've used so many distros and DEs I don't even know where to begin, but Cinnamon got me hooked for the long run. It's legitimately the most polished and "ready to run" DE I've ever used, yet still allowing for far more customization than Windows ever offered.

Cinnamon's been working well for me; I'd choose that, and I don't mind waiting till my laptop breaks to reassess what DE I want!

KDE for sure. The modern versions look exactly like how I want a desktop environment to look out of the box, and they keep the full range of customizability that a desktop should, IMO, allow it's users to have. Which is something Windows just kept slowly getting rid of over the years.

I also prefer to have a taskbar that is ever present with a traditional start menu that's cleanly organized by category rather than the current full screen pop up "activities" search thing gnome does nowadays.

Gnome.

If it has to be a DE then I'd go with XFCE, otherwise I'd probably go with openbox.

KDE - I love to tinker and own my DE. 😎

I keep coming back to KDE time and time again. It's so easy to mess with, I can set it up exactly how I like it without much effort, and it always looks good because someone else did all the work making themes and widgets I use.

That said, I love XFCE, I'm just trash with CSS so it takes me forever to get it how I like, and on my Surface I can't get the scaling to work so everything is beyond tiny.

any computer I need to be stable enough for work/school: KDE

any computer whose primary purpose is for goofing off and gaming: LXQt (and I will spend the entire time configuring LXQt instead of gaming...)

Why not use steam or arch if it's just fucking around? Arch you can at least configure easily.

tbh hadn't heard of steam and always assumed arch was difficult to learn. but i had been considering trying arch just to see what the hype was about

SteamOS is the arch Linux off shoot they made specifically for the steam deck. It's great for integrated graphics gaming.

had no idea you could use it on not a deck!

I'm starting to goof around with Arch and if I turn into an "I use Arch, btw" I'm blaming you

I deserve that. But you don't deserve to be locked into any off shoot.

KDE the customization is off the charts

Gnome for me. I like it

gnome head all the way!!!

I'd say Gnome, since I'm so used to it that I feel it doesn't get in the way of the things I'm doing.
Because that would be my aim: something that doesn't interfere with the work I am doing.

Always wanted to like gnome but never could, and xfce is fine but I much prefer KDE, it is verry likely that I'll actually keep it till my pc breaks.

Gnome has the apple philosophy that the user conforms to technology, not the other way around.

No shade to Gnome, because there is a place for them in the ecosystem, but this is why I moved from Gnome 2 to KDE (with a few stops along the way). One size will not fit all.

Oh yeah for sure. I think if Gnome works for people they should use it. I'm not stoked on the situation of Gnome Extensions being needed for some pretty basic customisations, adding instability to the DE though.

KDE plasma. Coming from 30 years of running exclusively windows it's just the most comfortable and easy for me to use (way more than Gnome). Easily configurable, works. Can't ask for more.

KDE Plasma, I can't go back to SDR

KDE, always

Used it since I switched to the Linux Desktop 25 years ago. Quickly tried gnome, and others, and hated it.

KDE is fast, efficient, looks awesome, is ready to work with, and highly customizable

If it has to be a de, I'd pick gnome. Otherwise it's hyprland.

Plasma for the last decade. Then probably XFCE, then Cinnamon.

I try Gnome every year or so, but every time I get pissed off with it within a few minutes and wipe it off my machine.

LXQt or XFCE if I have to pick a DE. Fluxbox or openbox if I can get away with just a WM. ;)

I don't mind a little "change" every now and then, but still -- "Sway" on my "potatoes" (Orange pi zero 3 and Orange pi 5 max) and "Hyprland" on my x86_64 PC.

My daily driver is Arch running sway. Would be hard to go back from the simplicity and elegance.

Isn’t sway based on i3? i3 is a WM not a DE. But as sway is not X11, I’m not sure if it’s just a WM

Sway still primarily counts as a WM + Compositor, but considering it has keymaps, autostart, and libinput config mechanisms embedded in it, I would say it borders a desktop environment.

There is nothing better than Xfce, if you dont like the desktop, at least Xfce allows you to customize. KDE seems interesting, but the last time i tried it, 10 years ago more or less, it was a bit buggy.

You owe KDE a second look if it's been that long.

LXQT. Why? Because: It is lightweight, consumes little resources, is quite customizable, and has full Ukrainian localization.

Maybe I'll switch to XFCE/MATE, but not if there are a lot of things not translated, or if the translation is worse than even Google Translate.

XFCE would be my choice too

KDE.

Until my laptop dies or cannot support it, I'm sticking with KDE Plasma. Love how MX configured it (because I'm lazy) and absolutely will keep using it for as long as my laptop survived or can hold it.

Might try other ones in VMs (like ratpoison) in the future for other machines I might set up in the future, but for now KDE Plasma is my go-to that I'll probably be using for a long time.

Gnome

Xfce, ol' reliable.

LXQT or KDE I just like the QT look and feel.

GNOME is great in general but not for me, it is too much MacOS alike and too limited for my liking.

Difficult. Paperwm/ Niri has the best workflow.

I am looking forward to set niri as compositor on cosmic.

it's probably gonna be plasma6 by a hair over cinnamon on a rolling distribution. as much as people shit on manjaro here and on that other site, it has never broke on me--whether i update constantly or let it go 2-3 months between them.

but if the de and the underlying os are magically compatible, and those and programs kept up to date, never obsolete, and new ones appear for it as needed or desired... then sorry, it won't be linux... i'm going back to something like 95osr2, 98se or w2k.

W2k was the best.

I've been using spectrwm for over a decade https://github.com/conformal/spectrwmand have no plans to change

Interesting, do you know i3wm? If so, what is the advantage of spectrwm over it?

I've looked at i3wm, but I never used it, so I don't know. If I had to move to another wm, i3wm seems like the first one that I'd look at, since they seem so similar

I have a whole system around it, different machines sharing their config files (over a git repo), so if I tweak one, the others catch-up.

Also, you can "build the config file" (I am cat-ing several dynamic blocks depending on the machine I am sitting on) and then init the DE.

Ah, nice. I have a similar setup, I have a repo, and for each rc-file, I do:
cat shared/${general_config} ${machine_name}/${machine_specific_config} > ${rc_file_name}

So for spectrwm it does: cat shared/spectrewm.conf laptop/spectrewm.conf > ~/.spectrewm.conf

Hahahah, same! I use a folders named as the hostname to build that machine's config on the fly. And all my config files are in one repo that then I stow

The one I'm using right now of course!

I used Ratpoison for well over a decade, and only replaced it with sway once I had a new machine and figured it was time to try Wayland. Apparently that's some 4-5 years ago already.

Hurrah for a fellow rat poison user! (I haven't used it in ages though.)

Cinnamon for 2 reasons

KDE is missing a lot of features which still only works in Gnome. Like the taskbar Calendar app syncing events with services like Google Calendar
cinnamon is extremely stable and doesn’t move your icons around when you connect to an external display with your laptop and the display has a different resolution.

KDE Plasma for ease of use if using Nvidia Otherwise Hyprland or exwm

I'm in either terminal or browser most of the time, DE is not an issue for me... KDE has an easy battery life optimization feature for laptops, so I guess I'll go KDE

XFCE. It's lightweight, easy to tweak and looks great. I run it on my 6 y.o. potato laptop

The surprising thing is that KDE would run on there just fine too. If you don't add all the PIM stuff, it's almost a wash in memory usage and just as snappy.

😂

Lol, yep. It's always funny to see xfce as being light weight.

Is this where I continue the meme and say I use arch by the way?

On the other hand KDE discover... Yikes. The software manager uses as much memory as XFCE.

I was just joking around, I hope you didn't take it too personally. I've been hearing a lot of KDE enthusiasm lately.

And xfce is great, but it has its pitfalls.

I also get excited about projects, I'm no different.

MATE has been on most of my machines, except the BSD ones.

But past year or so, I have grown a fondness towards ctwm, and gradually migrated my machines to it, Linux and BSD alike.

It is not a DE, but the fact that I have to assemble my suite of software myself on my machines, makes the point of using DEs moot.

I use XFCE. If their Wayland support isn't ready when openSUSE Tumbleweed eliminates support for x11, I'm not sure what I'll go to.

openSUSE Tumbleweed eliminates support for x11

Wait, what?

At some point, probably after Fedora stops supporting x11, openSUSE plans to follow suit, and it will no longer be available in the repos. There's no firm date for when this will occur, though. I read about it on the official forum.

Sad

Yep. I've had no problems with x11. It's always been super stable.

Wayland is now default, you have to add a few x11 packages to have an x11 login now. Also SE Linux Enforcing by default.

Whatever I can hit the super key and type what program I want. If it can open a browser steam or dark table, the rest doesn't matter much. I was on crunchbang++ then popOS then fedora now I'm on arch with hyprland

till

\sigh

You've obviously felt my pain. Maybe 6th install will take 🤞

I'm a cog in the machine and use KDE, but xfce is awesome, I would use xfce if I couldn't use KDE.

KDE plasma, unless it's on a tablet, then Gnome

I thought KDE was the popular choice to be honest. I feel like all the toolp newish OS are using KDE and the top old OS are using Gnome.

Call me basic, but mint xfce. It’s light, customizable, and so damn stable. That’s all I really want. I love messing with other distros but this one is my baby

My current desktop is xmonad + xfce in no-desktop mode. Almost no configuration in xmonad, all the stuff like monitor layout and mouse props is handled by xfce. And yes my laptop that I used it on for 6-7 years is now broken (ish) so I've already unlocked this acheivement.

I do feel slightly guilty about not moving to wayland, but I'm not sure how that would improve my experience at all. I did hear xfce is almost there on wayland, so maybe I can move to sway + xfce on wayland at some point.

Why did you pick DK among the "same kind" ones? (like i3wm, which is what I currently use)

Finally a cultured person!

I'm using PopOS Cosmic alpha (not based on Gnome) on my new laptop and like it a lot so far. It has a few rough edges, but nothing I'd switch to something else over. (In fact, I did use the Gnome version of Cosmic until my previous laptop broke.)

Probably either KDE or NsCDE, I always seem to come back to those

Xfce, and Cinnamon. You can't force me to choose just one.

I've been using Mate ever since Gnome-2 transitioned to Gnome-3 and I didn't like the transition. I like a clean screen with simple menus, Plasma is just way too cluttered for me.

Flip a coin between cinnamon and plasma

KDE since 2002. KDE 4 lyfe.

I'll stay on XFCE until I die ... or until my Hyprland config is finished. Whichever comes first.

Probably Plasma because it's familiar and you're able to customize it extensively over time.

Not a DE, but I've been using sway for around 5 years now, and I have no intention of moving away from it unless something really bad happens. I love using it, and it's been behaving perfectly all tgis time.

I'm happy with Linux Mint so far (2 mos in)

which desktop env tho? Cinnamon?

Yes, Mint Cinnamon. Weird combination of names tho, I don't even want to think about combining those flavors.

I've been daily driving Hyprland for 4 years now. Before that it was DWM, and before that Gnome. I was never a KDE fan, don't know why... I never disliked it, I just preferred Gnome.

KDE for the desktop and xfce for the laptop

why not kde for laptop?

I'd imagine lower power laptop? Though I'm using KDE on a laptop from 2012 and it works fine

Well, it's gotta be a tiling system. And a good one. At this point I can't function in a non-tiling environment. Specifically a manual tiler with an auto-tile a la i3 w/ i3-alternating-layout or a dynamic tiler that still let's you break stuff (doesn't really exist).

It's just a better way to use a computer, and I can't go back. It's so much nicer. I would stop using a computer before I go back to dragging windows around.

And that rules out most DEs. It rules out Mac OS and Windows, as well, but at least on Windows I can almost get by with Fancy WM. It's "okay."

And speaking of just getting by, that's Polonium with KDE. KDE is pretty good as an "environment," but it doesn't have a tiler that meets my needs, or at least I thought it didn't until recently. Then I discovered Polonium. It works pretty well. Used it for several months (and still do on one machine). It's very bare bones tho, and is hard to configure the handful of floating windows I do want like popups. So KDE is just scraping by.

GNOME on the other hand has the excellent Pop Shell 2. But well, GNOME is GNOME. It's buggy when you try to use it a different way than intended. God forbid I want Qt, Gtk2, Gtk3, Gtk4, and libadwaita apps to all look nice on my system! It's clunky, but the tiling is excellent at least.

Now you mention XFCE. So what about that? You could use i3 as the WM for Xfce. I used i3 for years and years and years as my WM and know how to build a DE around it. Why not use Xfce + i3?

Well, the thing is X11 is as good as dead, and while XFCE now supports Wayland, you can't use a tiling system with the Wayland version of XFCE.

So what does that leave me?

Nothing. At least for a full on DE, which is what you asked.

There is not a single (pre-made) Desktop Environment that suits my needs. Not a one. Either it doesn't support good tiling, is too rigid, or hasn't switched to Wayland.

My only options are:

Roll my own DE built around Hyprland/Sway, and since I'm on nvidia, those aren't fantastic options (albeit Hyprland works a lot better on Nvidia these days), and that's what I'm using.
Deal with the slight annoyance of the under-implemented Polonium in KDE

Right now I'm on Hyprland. May go back to KDE bc multi monitor is being weird on Hyprland rn.

My one hope is that COSMIC polishes itself up and gets to its first real release.

Ran KDE then Gnome a long time ago. Now it's openbox wm.

Xfce

LXQt

I've been using Cinnamon for most of the last decade, but switched to Gnome3 recently, heavily customized to work like Cinnamon. Basically because Wayland is finally stable enough to use.

If Cinnamon gets Wayland support working well, that's my choice. Otherwise I've got some Gnome3 configs that make it work pretty well, and I'd happily run it into the ground too.

Cinnamon, that's what I'm used to

I’d probably pick KDE. I use Gnome on almost every machine, but Gnome makes weird decisions, and I assume one day I won’t like one of them. KDE always seems to get better and add more options. I can make KDE work like practically any other DE, including Gnome.

fvwm :)

Switched from i3 to sway to hyland. I like the virtual desktop setup and noiseless facing interaction.

Had To scroll way too far to find Cinnamon so here's back to the top.

I'm a long time supporter of Xfce, but I have to say Cinnamon these days. It's light on resources while being feature rich. Also it's the default on Mint and it just works.

I use XFCE, but I like Cinnamon too. I use Nemo and Xed instead of Thunar and...whatever.

Well, for me it would be the setup i am now using since about 15 years:

WM: flwm Filemanager: ROX-Filer Background: feh

... and a ton of tools i accumulated over the yesrs

Sway for a laptop, Plasma for desktop.

Had you have asked me a few weeks ago, I probably would have said Sway for both,.or maybe Gnome for the desktop... But I decided to check out KDE again for the first time in like 20 years, and while it's still kind of a hot mess it has come a long way.

XFCE

Fluxbox.
Technically, not a DE, but a WM...which makes me the DE, I guess....

I've only tried KDE and i'm pretty happy with it. I dunno why I'd want a creepy foot gnome on my computer, and I don't really know of any others by name yet so.... I'mma pick KDE

The amount of not KDE answers here surprises me. Y'all a bunch of nerds [endearing]

I just don't like KDE and am not a big fan of stock Gnome either but the PopOS version with COSMIC features plus the Dash to Panel extension make it pretty useable

Herbstluftwm with dmenu. Just a windows manager. I've gotten used to using the command line for things I used to rely on a DE for.

I think in going to switch from XFCE to KDE just because the XFCE merit of using the least amount of the resources is no longer a reality. I miss LXDE

I stopped using the LX suite when they stopped working on LXDE and switched to LXQT. I think I need to look towards openbox for a minimal DE experience

Yeah, I really liked LXDE.

Twm, I'll extend it as needed.

Fedora Gnome. In my head it’s Linux.

True people only use i3 or the-other-i3-for-wayland

/s, of course. But still my personal choice

I have literally been using the same build of dwm as my desktop env since 2007.

Mint