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)
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
- Gnome 3 performance was objectively worse on every bit of hardware I tried than Plasma. (Unfortunately I had functional gripes with Plasma 4 so couldn’t use it.)
- The years of faffing about I had trying to be happy with Gnome 3 and trying to use other alternatives until Plasma 5 was ready pretty much convinced me of this:
- Gnome devs care more about achieving their vision of how a desktop should be used than they do about accommodating users who might feel differently. This is my perception, and it’s a deeply held opinion. No matter how strongly you feel I’m wrong, you aren’t going to change my mind. You can come at me if you want, but it’s going to bear no fruit.
- KDE devs have a vision, but place nearly equal importance on ensuring their users can make different choices if they choose. If this isn’t true, they do a damn good job of pretending it is, and that’s good enough for me. 🙂
- I’m unhappy with the degree to which it appears the Gnome team has actively worked against the ability for users to easily customize, and with various feature removals that at this point are so far in my past that I probably don’t remember the specific things that pissed me off, but I remember their explanations for feature removals being salt in an open wound every last time I cared enough to investigate their stated reasons.
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.
KDE Plasma.
GNOME kind of looks nice but is too strict on customization.
Yeah, I can agree gnome is strict I don’t really like this design philosophy which can be found here.
Incredible. I guess I have a list of apps to avoid now. Thanks.
I use Mate. When I first started using a Desktop in addition to terminals, it was with Redhat 6.1, Redhat came with Gnome-2, I got used to it. I didn’t like the changes made in Gnome-3, so I switched to Mate which retained, or at least had the option to be configured to look as I was used to it, save for more refined graphics. It also works well remotely so that’s another reason I use it as much of my work involves remote acess.
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.
Reminds me of how lxqt uses openbox for its windowing.
AFAIK, lxde uses openbox, and lxqt uses xfwm.
Lxqt uses openbox, I tested it, and am pretty sure lxde ships its on window manager.
I should have said I was speaking about debian. Other distros may use different defaults.
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.
KDE Plasma because it’s the one I like. If it disappeared tomorrow, I’d use Xfce.
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.
I’m old, I come from old X11R4 time, motif, mwm, twm, fvwm, things from previous century. In modern Linux I used mostly gnome, and Cinnamon for a few years and tried to love it but cannot, I finally went back to Xfce because it works, it’s simple, neat, nice, I have no icon on my desktop, I have a kind of windows 3 setup: a startup menu (and some quick launches), the window bar, the notification area with time etc
I’m using MX Linux for maybe 8 years now with Xfce
Nice desktop, reminds me of cinnamon.
Just installed that in a VM to play with! Any particular reason that became your daily driver?
I have tested multiple distro, in the beginning was mostly hack of multiple things and almost LFS, downloading floppies images from usenet… I then started to use Debian early 00, then used Ubuntu for years, but I don’t like snap/flatpak and lots of changes Ubuntu made so I switched to Mint Cinnamon, but hated it, often broken, glitches, etc, so I switched to MX because it is Debian based, always up to date (like latest FF and latest Xserver with last night CVE fix etc and always native .deb, no snap/flat). I also always loved minimal DE so Xfce is perfect and light. Also I mainly develop in Linux, no games.
GNOME because it’s the only good option that looks modern and has proper development. Excuses of KDE fanboys that GNOME team makes weird decisions are not accepted.
I like both for different reasons. I’m hoping Cosmic will be a good blend of features from both, once it’s ready for the general public
They do make some strange choices. But yeah, I agree. Also, on Gnome, everything else feels a bit rough around the edges.
how about the other non big desktops (eg, mate,cinnamon,budgie,lxqt,etc)
Mate, lxqt and even xfce look very old. I know they can’t have fancy effects but I think it’s weird they don’t come with a modern theme. They could make them look at least like Cinnamon. Even Windows 10 didn’t have rounded corners and looked great, with or without blur. Simplicity can look good imo.
Cinnamon is great but it’s GTK3 and a little bit older in terms of design (though it’s more sane than whatever the new trends are so it’s not bad but just not my thing).
Budgie isn’t a very big project so idk how consistent it is (it’s something I care about a lot). Though I think I never tried it myself.
But actually I don’t hate all of that projects. I just like GNOME and it works so so so well for me. My troll behavior towards other DEs is just a joke inspired by “Mii beta” YouTube channel. Btw KDE has performance, even though it’s more than feature-rich. That’s impressive.
oh okay ig its satire, ik mii beta bro shills GNOME lol.
KDE Plasma
It was what came on the steam deck lol
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.You don’t have to configure KDE you know. You can just keep the defaults like you’re probably doing with GNOME.
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.
Am I the only one on here using Budgie. I just feel more comfortable with the workflow using Budgie.
That’s what I’d be using too. But it felt too incomplete and buggy. It’s not there yet, but it’s very promising.
I use hyprland with KDE as my fall back.
My hyprland config is 95% stable but some apps give me a hard time, so I’ll just run them in KDE.
I find KDE just works. With a baby, things need to work more often than not.
I used Enlightment for the last few years, but switched this year to XFCE because i like the look more. I’m using old-as-fuck-hardware and both DEs work good on my machines.
I agree the enlightment ui is not good looking ngl it made me not use it.
kde plasma, it’s fast, it’s pretty, it’s handy, it has all the keyboard shortcuts.
The only desktop that has a clipboard feature(superkey + v) I love, most of the desktop I see don’t have it and the clipboard show up as a system tray app.
You can get one in gnome too, via a plugin/extension (forgot the correctname for it)
At the moment, my main machine is on KDE because it has very good Wayland support and isn’t Gnome. I prefer Cinnamon
