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.
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 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.
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Kde plasma for all the reasons you hate it for 😂
I like KDE. But when I need x11 or something lighter weight, I use budgie.
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…
Gnome on laptops (gestures just work really well!) and KDE on desktop. Although I don’t use half of the customisation features of KDE
This is the way
GNOME with a bunch of extensions and themes. It looks and works way better than Plasma, which I’ve tried, and I find the UI too crowded and unpolished.
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.
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 every where… Not to 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.
Here’s a pic of my current setup. The keyboard is prebuilt (Voyager ZSA), just with custom firmware. Couple clamps keep it vertical for ergonomics.
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! ✌️
GNOME. Won’t say I don’t hate it sometimes but every time after a few weeks using anything else I’m back to gnome. The polish and smoothness are unparalleled, and I don’t really customize a lot. I did used the Plasma 6 beta and seemed great even if it’s not my preference of design language, but haven’t tried since. I should give it another go.
Hyperland. Nice, simple, and looks good.
XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right
Just replace xfwm4 with i3wm for example. That and the fact you can use most Xfce tools outside of Xfce is why it’s my favourite.
KDE. Looks great OOTB. Looks better if you spend an hour or two setting it up on day 1.
I recently switched to KDE. What tweaks do you recommend (other than finding a theme you like)?
" Simple by defauly, Powerful when needed" is exactly what KDE is. Just try pressing function keys(F1-F12) and see how it expands its features. Oh and the edit mode!
Im a KDE-Opensuse Jihadist
