My favourite DE has got to be Cinnamon, as much as I like KDE and XFCE, I prefer the simplicity of cinnamon where as in KDE has a bit too much of everything in the customization scene and XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right.
Cinnamon to me is perfect as I easily transferred from Win 10 to Mint and soon Manjaro Cinnamon Edition.
What is your favourite DE and why? Tiling WM DE’s can be counted as well seeing as they have nifty navigation features.
Having successfully convinced me to move away from Xfce after GNOME 2 was deprecated, my main DE has been MATE for such a long time. However, I am being wooed by KDE Plasma lately. I remember running Plasma 5.26 on Slackware 15-current and was blown away at how snappy it was on an old Dell Latitude E6410 with a 1st-gen Core i5 520M! I can only imagine how nice Plasma 6.x is in comparison.
MATE has also been stable for me on the BSD side, running it on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but Plasma might woo me away on there as well, especially once Plasma 6 is available on OpenBSD 7.6.
I also prefer to run Fluxbox on much less powerful hardware, regardless of the OS it’s on.
Fluxbox.
As minimal or extreme as one desires.
Along with Slackware, it’s my type of K.I.S.S.
I prefer KDE a lot, because:
- the UI is simple, material-ish and beautiful
- it doesnt sacrifice usability or waste screen space like GNOMEs minimalism
- it runs 100% on Wayland
- it runs GNOME apps without modifying them a bit. There is an issue where Fedora doesnt want to use Adwaita icons, but a short autostart entry solves that. KDE Breeze dark/light can sync to adwaita dark/light
- KDE has tons of legacy support features, have a look at my experiment where I explored many of them
- it is modular and can be pretty minimal (I would like a more barebones version, without all the floating stuff etc)
- all the settings are in the same app! This is a huge issue with all the small ones, where nontechnical users need to know the difference between “GTK settings” “lightDM settings”, etc.
- Systemsettings are searchable, all settings pages are accessible from the global search, some pages are even shown when you use an alternative word, you can always search in english and your local language
- it is very actively developed
- it has tons of unique features.
- it has the biggest most complex apps situated in a DE on Linux. Period. KDEnlive, digiKam, Krita, Kate, Dolphin, …
Yeah, I am comfortable with most DE’s, I’m flexible but I prefer KDE+Wayland.
Dolphin is poorly threaded though. For example: If I drag a large file from a network share to the desktop I can not drag another one to the desktop until the first copy have completed. If I connect my VPN or just an away-from-home wifi, Dolphin freezes, probably because it can’t find the local SMB connections in the “Remotes” group.
I’m also watching COSMIC, it has a very well though out architecture though I suspect the first version will be too simplistic in terms of features - for example vs Dolphin.
Yes a lot.
The network stuff sounds like some big issues.
To my knowledge GNOME is better here?
You should absolutely report these issues with good detail.
I like COSMIC too as a work in progress. It is damn elegant, minimalist, perfectionist.
But I dont like the general desktop UI style, the overview, the menu.
They are also just starting, but it has a big future I think.
I am always testing it and it is pretty cool. Already better than many alternatives I would say, at least if you replace some apps.
pcmanfm-qtfrom LXQt is actually the best filemanager next to KDE Dolphin, and has very few dependencies.Qt apps on COSMIC are currently pretty broken, but there may be some KDE people stepping up and this is likely also fixed. Different from… some other big desktop… where KDE apps are all broken.
Vanilla GNOME because simplicity, very modern look and stability. Cinnamon is nice too but it’s just not for me. Its workflow is slower in my use cases
KDE Plasma because I can bend it to my workflow. When I try Xfce and especially Gnome, I feel I have to bend to their workflows.
I’ve been on BSPWM for nearly 2 years now. Custom scripts and keybindings all over the place. My workflow is so customized and keyboard centric with this TWM. Vim bindings in the terminal, Vimium in the browser, and a heavily customized Neovim Text Editor with Espanso Text expander global keybindings very where… Not too mention a 55 key split Ortholinear Keyboard with custom firmware…yeah… My hands almost never touch my mouse except to game.
I’ve had this type of itch to keyboardize my workflow more. I learned about colemak keyboard mods, and started following the rabbit hole haha. Did you design your keyboard pcb too? or just wrote custom firmware?
Nah, didn’t go that far (yet), just heavily edited a qmk_firmware configuration. So yeah, I’ll admit I didn’t exactly write my own keyboard firmware.
I have the soldering tools ready for when I have time to learn. Sadly I only have time for software lately, and hardware/firmware has had to take a back seat.
Customizing your workflow around the keyboard is a helluva drug though! If it weren’t for Vim being configured for QWERTY out of the box, I’d probably configure a COLEMAK or DVORAK setup as well.
I’d encourage you to go as far down the rabbit hole as you’re comfortable, the learning curve can slow you down initially, but the dividends pay off in the long run imho.
It is definitely something
Lol, yeah I know it’s definitely not for everybody.
Woahh thats so cool!!
I think your QMK config counts (for now;)) What are some useful things you’ve changed?
Yeah, im a bit worried about vim binds for alternative layouts as well. I think some people use a layer mod to keep normal mode as QWERTY (or a “normal mode” layer) but insert mode uses their regular layout. Others apparently use their non-qwerty layout for everything (but i guess change hjkl). Apparently it’s not too bad… but probably depends on the person.
The clamps lol, i love it!
Honestly my first olkb was the Planck from DROP. A 40% keyboard where the numbers and symbols are each on their own separate layer. The defaults on the Voyager were very clunky IMHO, so I simply switched them to the defaults of the Planck, including moving the home row up one whole row. This left a few spare keys as the Voyager is a 55 key, so I simply added two Super keys instead of one as well as a few other duplicates.
I’ve also heard of some interesting workarounds for using Vim with Colemack/Dvorak. It is funny, when I first discovered OLKBs, I kept encouraging people to use them, and I still do. Same with Vim. But ultimately I get why people don’t. I’m so used to this workflow now, going back to a standard keyboard feels clunky and slow, and I’d imagine my setup feels awkward and alien to most if not all other people.
But it’s uniquely mine and I can type 100wpm if I am on a roll with his setup.
The clamps are a hilarious accident that happened to work for me. I was experimenting with different ways to get that near 90° angle shoulder width apart, and this was the3 soluuon I haphazardly stumbled on.
Glad you like it/find it entertaining! I wish you well in finding what works for you! ✌️
I use KDE, because it runs perfectly on wayland and covers 100% of my needs.
Budgie looks very promising now and I want to explore it further. Also LXQT is perfect for older devices or if you want a KDE, but simplier.KDE and associated KDE programs crash randomly all the time for me. I switched back to Windows for a few weeks and am patiently waiting for plasma 6.1 and Nvidia 555 drivers to go to stable.
I like best Gnome with modifications, not vanilla. A permanent dock as per “Dash2Dock Animated”, and the “Hide Top Bar” extension, so when an app gets maximized, both the top bar and the dock get out of the way. Also, disabling tap-and-drag via dconf (I really don’t understand why this is enabled by default on most Linux DEs, it’s extremely bad for usability), and enabling the min/max/close buttons via Gnome Tweaks. Other tweaks I like is the Bibata Modern Ice mouse cursor, and the Faenza icon theme. The rest are ok by default for the most part. It’s better than MacOS for me.
Second best gotta be Cinnamon, using the Cinnamenu menu extension, not the default menu. Overall, they’ve thought of almost everything building this DE and its settings. For those who want the best “Windows” could ever be, Cinnamon it is.
Third is XFce. It’s overall good, but it has some things that trigger me: no user admin app, no ability to turn off tap-and-drag (it just doesn’t turn off no matter what you try), and on Debian at least, the machine doesn’t go to sleep without asking for password (requires a policy-kit manual change). Its biggest advantage is that it’s lightweight and I use it as lot for old machines.
I find the rest under-par. I don’t like KDE, and I have thought long and hard why I don’t. It’s not how KDE is structured or works. KDE in fact is fine as a DE! Very powerful. It’s the Qt toolkit that bothers me. When an app loads, it kind of loads in chunks. It doesn’t blast everything rendered in the screen to feel smooth and modern, it kind of renders it as it reads it. And this just bothers me in a UI more than anything. Another thing I dislike is the long right-click menu on the desktop (same for Cinnamon btw).
MATE is nice but it’s just buggy. You setup your panels one way, you logout, you login back again, and the items have changed position. Fully reproducible for me under many different distros. Very, very annoying.
LXDE/LXQT, Budgie, etc, are not as developed as I liked them to be.
emacs
Also KDE here, but largely without modifications from defaults. I turn off a few things, but more or less it’s exactly what i expect from a DE without taking up too many resources. I really buy in to the K-suite apps for almost everything too, so it all works together nicely.
I basically add Windows-style buttons for minimize/maximize/close and I’m good to go. It’s not perfect, but certainly the best.
I’ve been using dwm for well over 10 years now… It just works, does what I want. Super easy to extend as well, and I can only blame myself for any bugs.
Not a DE but a WM, but i3.
In the future, probably Cosmic, because I like Gnome’s aesthetic and I prefer something lighter, and because I like i3’s worklow.
Gnome for its looks, simplicity and intuitive ways, but after Plasma 6 release, KDE seems to be up par with Gnome’s UI/UX so at the moment Plasma ia my favourite desktop.
As for WMs I tried i3, Sway, and Hyprland. Overall Hyprland is my favorite because of its special workspace mechanics, customization and options. But if looks had no value to you and you like its scratchpad mechanic then sway is for you (plus its documentation is mostly clearer, better organized and well written than Hyprland). Btw I am not comparing their tiling because there are use cases for each person and you can acomplish each others tiling mode with plugins.
I never liked KDE in the old days, but now it’s the only choice in my mind.
If I had to pick a backup, probably xfce.
I’ve used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.
And then on various other machines.
- Xfce on my desktop at work that I don’t use that much (work mainly from home) and just needed to set up quick. It’s totally fine, like xfce always is.
- Gnome on my tablet (basically a Surface knock-off). I don’t really like gnome, but it’s the only thing I’ve tried that works well OOTB for a touchscreen.
- PekWM on an old macbook running debian. Great stacking WM. Super flexible, and the tabbed windows for any app are cool.
- LXQT on an ancient (2009?) dual-core laptop that I mainly just use for writing in nvim. Works well for a simple setup.
