I’m currently testing Fedora KDE on a VM (windows host) before eventually switching over to Linux completely.
I much prefer Cinnamon.
I like Xfce and Plasma, it’s pretty hard to decide between the two
Generally Plasma. I really like the look of Libadwaita applications, but the GNOME desktop is very much a “do it our way, or take a hike” - and some of the interactions that I’ve seen in the past between the GNOME group and others… well, lets just say whenever I see drama in the Linux community as of recently its always been either with GNOME or Wayland. That doesn’t necessarily instill a lot of confidence in me using either of those.
What’s with all the drama regarding Wayland? I’m seeing it constantly.
Some Wayland fans like to ignore reality, like the fact 80% of Linux users use Nvidia, or that Nvidia offers a free Linux driver for their own reasons and have zero incentive to open source it, or that even if it weren’t for Nvidia we still can’t use Wayland because it’s not ready and doesn’t do everything that X does.
When you ignore reality you tend to get into arguments constantly.
As far as I understand, its the major push for moving forward with Wayland and dropping X11 as fast as possible yet Wayland still doesn’t work for a lot of workflows (say, making use of global hotkeys, or Nvidia users, etc).
sway - stable and productive. Hyprland - beautiful, but performance is worse. i3 - same as sway, but sometimes better for legacy X11 stuff or applications that are still buggy at Wayland
Thanks for all your discussions. All your experiences are very helpful for me. Now here is my top list and reasons:
- Cinnamon (most familiar and very stable for me)
- XFCE (I like the responseness and lightweightness)
- MATE (stable and reliable)
- KDE (I like the configurability, but unfortunately I experienced a lot of instabilities and accidents)
- Gnome (I don’t like the new UI concept. When I tried it, it was laggy and non-responsive)
Out of this list:
- I3 (only head good things, but never tried it on my own installation)
- Cosmic (first time I heard about today)
- Budgie (first time I heard about today)
Gnome will be slow without acceleration. Were you running it in a vm?
Tried it on VM and Backup Notebooks. Especially on old Notebooks its hardly usable.
That is likely true although it may also have to do with a lack of ram and bad GPU support.
Cinnamon is, straight up, the best. The only annoying part is that damn debugger thing that shows up that damn and useless LookingGlass thing which defaults to Super+L. Super+L definitely should be Lock Screen instead.
Gnome. Feels most polished and least cluttered to me.
Seconded. I used to use Ubuntu, but I switched to Debian + GNOME and I love it.
I agree. I use gnome on nix and it has been great, especially on a touchpad.
When I switched from Windows definitely Cinnamon but by now it’s Gnome, it’s a little odd at first but I absolutely love the workflow!
Gnome doesn’t really support multiple monitors without addons.
As someone who uses GNOME on two monitors…I dont understand
Do you have any information on your second like weather or time? I love that most DEs have a panel or an option to have a panel in the second monitor.
I used to use this extension a while back, seems to have been forked and Ihaven\t tried it lately but it did it\s thing back when I used it.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/921/multi-monitors-add-on/
That’s exactly what I mean. For decent multi-monitor support, you have to add some roughly supported addon.
No DE. Just openbox + polybar + rofi
Do you think OpenBox is usable with minimal config? I’m looking for a WM which I won’t have to spend too much of time configuring, which is why I’m considering floating WMs
Honestly you can use Openbox right out the bag if you really wanted to. If you need to configuring autostart and hotkeys and the menu is really easy
I’ll configure the theme, hot-keys and maybe install a compositor or something. Thanks for the tip, I’m trying to decide between OpenBox and IceWM right now
maybe this is a hot take but I just really like vanilla KDE. I don’t even customize that much, I just think it looks and feels nice out of the box
Cinnamon LMDE
I use i3, I love it
Not a DE but I love it too!!
I love KDE Plasma, been using it for years. Cinnamon is very good too, especially for folks that like the Windows 7 style.
Cosmic is nice from the little I’ve used it, but I prefer a DE with more options.
Not a Gnome fan personally, I’ve tried it many times, just can’t get into it, but objectively it’s solid.
Gnome. It looks simple and elegant, is easy and intuitive to use, and everything I need is either built in or available as an extension.
The one caveat is that you probably shouldn’t update it right on day one of a new version release, because usually some extension devs need a few more days to update their stuff. My distro (Fedora) always releases new versions a few months after Gnome does, so this works out perfectly.
Hyprland
Honestly, this is the first I’ve heard of Hyprland, but it looks sick.
KDE if you want a customizable DE, Gnome if you like simplicity and XFCE if you are on less than 4GB. Anything else is mental illness mixed with boomer nostalgia.
