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.
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 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.
Fluxbox.
As minimal or extreme as one desires.
Along with Slackware, it’s my type of K.I.S.S.
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
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.
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.
Hyperland. Nice, simple, and looks good.
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.
I use kde6+Wayland. I do like the simplicity of Cinnamon, but it runs games slower than kde, even though mangohud claims they run at the same speed. For example, in Cinnamon it’ll say 60fps when it’s clearly in the 30s-40s, and kde actually runs the same thing at 60fps. This is with every tweak i could find, and yes, including turning on the setting to turn off compositing during games.
Kde6 is still quite buggy at times, but I’m really enjoying Wayland’s smoother general behavior over x11, even with x11 stuff like wine/proton. This is on arch + AMD rx 6600 xt. I used old gnome 2, then mate, then Cinnamon for years, but if KDE can clean itself up a little bit (no judgment tho, i get it) it may be my permanent DE. Generally when i go to report a bug, it’s already reported by someone else…
Kde plasma for all the reasons you hate it for 😂
I love Gnome even if the fact that I have to add 2-3 extensions to make it work to my taste bothers me a little bit.
It should have a bit more options by default, while still retaining the beautiful UI.
I’m trying KDE in a virtual machine a little bit, but I guess I’ll never really explore its capabilities if I don’t daily drive it.
By the way, could someone explain what’s the difference between a WM and a DE?
WMs typically do not include stuff like a custom GUI for system settings and do not have a suite of GUI software associated with it (think Kate, Konsole, Dolphin etc) - it is just a piece of software for managing windows, you have to put the rest of the desktop together yourself.
Thanks for the answer. But then it means that people get a distro with a DE and install a WM on top of it? Or do you have distros coming with just a WM? What’s the advantage of a WM compared to a DE?
Some distros have editions with a WM (usually i3) as a default, yes. These editions tend to come with some basic config so it’s more usable out of the box. But you can also install WMs side by side with DEs and then switch in the login manager (GDM, SDDM), just the same as you can install multiple DEs on a system. You could also install a headless version of a distro first and then install only the WM and whatever other tools you want on top of that. Basically all system settings can be changed through config files or CLI programs, for some things like audio and bluetooth there are good DE-independent settings programs like pavucontrol.
You can also replace the WM built into KDE (kwin) with i3, for example, but that’s pretty messy, IMO.
As for advantages, WMs are usually very keyboard driven, you pretty much never have to touch the mouse. They also tend to be fairly light weight and use little RAM. My favourite i3 feature is that workspaces are per-monitor, so I could easily move multiple windows between monitors and not lose the way they are set up.
As for disadvantages, changing any system settings tends to be a research project, because there is no centralized solution, it’s even worse than Windows in this regard. Personally this is the main reason I switched back to KDE from i3. I could also never get theming to work quite right.
Thanks for the really good and helpful explanation!
To be honest it’s often difficult to understand every Linux subtilities, but the community is really great and compensate the lack of information you’re getting inside your distribution.
I like KDE. But when I need x11 or something lighter weight, I use budgie.
I would say aesthetically always preferred gnome but my laptop which is pretty low end ran slow on it. Kde is in that ballpark for my laptop in terms slowdowns but for the most part it floated through. That was when I used like manjaro.
But I moved on to antix for stability. It has icewm that they configured for the distro. I loved it.
Due to some hardware issue I tested out other distros to see if it was hardware issue or not. Currently my laptop has gnome on it I think.
I currently use Sway primarily. On my work machine, I have to use Zoom, so I use i3 on X1q which acts/feels virtually identical to Sway. (Or rather, the other way around. Sway was made to be a Wayland compositor drop-in replacement for i3 which has been around for a long time.)
You can run Zoom in a VM if you are so inclined. You just need GPU acceleration for video decode to have good performance.
