KDE ftw
KDE is my favorite, but I’m excited to try Cosmic once it’s a little farther along.
I also love Cinnamon, not because it looks great, or has a ton of customizablity, but because it is so stable. It’s been the best #JustWorks DE in my experience.
Those are the only two I use regularly. Xfce is nice once you get it customized, but it’s kind of a pain to get configured. I don’t have much use for sophisticated tiling, so tiling window managers are just curiosities to me. I’ve played with i3, Sway, Hyprland, and a few others over the years.
I wish I had a use case for them, but alas, all my day to day needs are handled just fine with basic Window snapping, tmux, kitty tabs, and occasionally using a second virtual desktop.
I tried lots of DE’s when distros started switching to GNOME 3.
Now I just run Xfce on everything.
I have only really used xfce. It’s still fun to install Kali on devices but really I use xfce.
Just a user though, not a pro
the first DE I used on Linux was cinnamon and I was like “wow, this is great, everything makes sense to me out of the box”
And then I tried Gnome and was incredibly put off by it, like “why the hell is this over here, this layout is strange to me. Why are all these unconventional features on by default, this is very annoying.”
And then I tried KDE and I was like “wow, this is great and everything makes sense to me out of the box, also there’s all these features and options, I don’t know what they do, but i don’t have to interact with them if I don’t want to.”
I’ve used GNOME and I’ve used KDE. Don’t have a problem with GNOME but KDE is just how I like my desktop experience to act. I am intrigued about Cosmic though.
KDE and GNOME each have their shortcomings. KDE has never been completely stable for me but it’s so much better than it used to be. GNOME is the best at what it’s good at and the worst at everything else. There’s no grey area with gnome.
Cosmic looks super promising. I need to play with it.
Do it. You know you want to…
I just install the Fedora spin of COSMIC. So far, I have to say that I’m impressed by it. It’s pretty lightweight and nimble on low-end hardware while still having just enough customizing to be satisfying. The DE is also pretty easy and simple to use. It also appears to be very stable and tolerant during use.
If you got time, I would tell you to just try it. It has quickly gone from “I’m not very sure about this choice.” to “Hey, I kinda like this.”
I quite like KDE Plasma on my steam deck, but on my desktops I always use XFCE
Ironic given XFCE is supposed to be the light weight one and the steam deck is the portable device.
I like both of them, though. Plenty of customizations in both, not that I tinker around much any more.
I just want a conventional desktop paradigm that feels relatively integrated. For almost a decade I used Cinnamon until I found myself really wanting Wayland. For the past 5 years or so, I have used GNOME. It’s clean, and with a few tweaks it meets my needs.
I’ve been using KDE since ver 2.something.
I like the idea of tiling window managers.
But I’m old.
I’m set in my ways.
I don’t want to get used to new things.KDE has tiling.
KDE was wild a feral in the early days of plasma. It was heavier than GNOME. It was unstable. It was a nice visual refresh but functionally terrible. It’s really pulled away from that thankfully.
I’m waiting for Cosmic to mature
It has so many great ideas, all it needs is time and polish.
I tried Cosmic for a week. It looked nice but I returned to LXQt because I want:
- To display time in ISO 8601 without also messing with locales
- To customize my file manager columns
- To use Emacs in a terminal emulator
- To not have my windows scattered to the four winds every time I lock my screen because the fancy window tiling feature is half-baked
- To have the X window manager back. I’m sure some people with use cases besides mine that are compatible only with Wayland, but I simply don’t see the need nor do I wish to be a guinea pig submitting bug reports when so many guinea pigs before me had years of their lives sacrificed polishing X.
Also, the performance of programs like the default Cosmic file manager was much slower then comparable alternatives like pcmanfm-qt which I know run fast even on 2005 Compaq laptop hardware.
Fair.
I would love to give GNOME an honest try, but there are so many ways in which it feels like it’s actively working against me. In KDE I can for example create as many panels as I want on as many monitors as I want. On GNOME? There’s an extension to put the panel on another monitor, but then you can’t use the dock. I guess the GNOME developers don’t use multiple monitors? I mean you can’t even set different wallpapers on different monitors without a third party application.
As for Niri, Hyprland and all that… Yeah, they’re cool, but I’m too old nowadays. I just want shit to work, even though I do miss some of the functions that exist e.g. on Hyprland that doesn’t exist in KDE. But on the other hand, the developer of Hyprland is an asshole, so I wouldn’t really want to promote or use the project anyway.
to me, gnome seems to be just bad ui design for people with stockholm syndrome about it.
Still waiting for XFCE‘s Wayland support. Until then Plasma it is
I’ve yet to see anything that compares to kde, and I just don’t understand why so many distros default to gnome!
Never had a problem with XFCE, even doing some weird stuff with metrics in the task bar.
Though I do not tinker like I did when I was younger, nor do I know what Plasma has over XFCE that’s not cosmetic in nature.
Red Hat has invested so much in GNOME they will probably never want to hear about changing to KDE Plasma. And Suse will follow Red Hat (which never made sense to me).
SuSE use KDE as the default, them and Manjaro are the only two bigguns that do, really
Not the Suse professional edition that I tested a couple of weeks ago. Only the community editions default to KDE.
Oh :(
Gnome is the most stable DE with all features included, it also has minimal amount of system options to still have all features.
XFCE misses a lot of features, such as printers. KDE has all bells and whistles but is less stable.
KDE is not unstable, even heavily tweaked
I’ve been using Linux for twenty years. I didn’t use KDE until they declared Plasma 5 ready for primetime. (I hated Plasma 4, and didn’t like the look and feel of KDE 3.5 at all)
Since hopping on with Plasma 5 I have absolutely no interest in anything else. I love KDE Plasma and it just keeps getting better.
That’s me in OP.
How I feel about gnome
I like the ones that are forks of pre-ruined Gnome. MATE is my favorite of that type.
Mate is a solid fuckin choice. 10/10
Windows 10! Hell no I’m on windows 3.11 before they ruined everything!!
I know this is a joke, but before I discovered GNU-Linux I used XP and didn’t hate it. I was usable. Microsoft hadn’t yet completely stripped away user autonomy.
When did you stop using XP?
The next laptop I bought came preinstalled with Windows Vista (AKA Windows Millenium version 2). It was so frustrating I decided to investigate alternatives. I even considered going Macintosh. But I was at a bookstore and saw one of those Linux magazines with a free disc from which I could install Linux. I think it was Ubuntu on the disc (before Unity). I was hooked. I use Trisquel now.
I mean, everyone liked XP and most everyone tried to keep using it years after Microsoft wanted us to stop. Everyone hated vista.
But modern gnome is excellent. My joke was trying to point out that hating it while liking the old version seems like a uniquely old man thing to do, just hating change for being change
Gnome 3 got rid of desktop icons and the menu of Gnome 2, it was also a resource hog. Mate offers what I liked about Gnome 2. Sue me.
while liking the old version seems like a uniquely old man thing to do, just hating change for being change
Gnome 3 was a huge paradigm shift. Most people who noped out of Gnome afterwards disliked very specific things about it, not just hating change for being change. This is a really dismissive and kind of insulting take.
TIL I am not a one. I never chose XP; I didn’t ever install that cartoonish bloatfest over win2k on my home pc.
I’m interested in other DEs, i swear! I just don’t use them, or like them!
