What desktop enviroment do you use and why?

Mwas alt (prob)@thelemmy.club to Linux@lemmy.ml – 181 points –

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)

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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.

KDE Plasma on all my computers and also as desktop mode on Steam Deck. because it supports the latest technologies especially when it comes to graphics (HDR, VRR) also has best support for Wayland and multi-monitors. It looks great out of the box and it has a lot of features out of the box and I do not need to battle with adding some extensions that break with almost every update. KDE Plasma is also the most flexible desktop and I can set the workflow really to fit my desires and I can actually set many options and settings. And despite all these built-in features and configurability it still uses very few system resources and is very fast and smooth. Oh and the KDE community is one of the most welcoming I have met in FOSS world, and they listen to their users instead of the our way or the high way mentality I have so often encountered in GNOME for example. So yeah TLDR KDE Plasma is the one I like the most of all in the industry, even when compared to proprietary closed alternatives.

GNOME. Eagerly waiting for cosmic.

I think that's what popos comes with, never looked into what the differences are between them or why one would want to switch

I like gnome also. I'm going to try cosmic de but probably won't use it full time.

I do use the PaperWM and dash to dock extensions, so it isn't stock gnome. I normally don't like extensions or addons but these are well done and it seems like they have staying power.

I already use the cosmic alpha and it works great. No crashes so far, the only thing that has happend twice in 2 Months of using it is the screen locker did not display after waking up from suspend which meant I needed to go to a VT and kill cosmic-session

I tried it and mostly love it. It's not quite polished enough yet for me and I have two main complaints. First, half of my keyboard shortcuts don't work anymore, and I wasn't able to fix that last I tried. Second, it wouldn't let me lock my computer or suspend. Had to shutdown everytime. Other than that and random librecalc crashes, I'm excited to see where it is in the coming months. Really rooting for the pop team

Using it on my latest install. Not bad. I mostly picked it for the visual aspects but I'm in the fence about it's functionality. It feels like it takes more clicks than it should to open stuff.

Perhaps, but it's also good to remember that it's still in Alpha. That could still change. I feel like it would be hard to give a good review before it's at least RC1

Xfce... Because I donno, been using it for many years

Xfce is light and crisp! Looks great and works well with my myriad low-end computers 🐁

Always ran xfce on my old used thinkpads!

I first used XFCE on my old 700mhz processor Thinkpad back in the day. Back then, Gnome and especially KDE were known to use excessive resources on low-end machines so XFCE was preferred.

However, I actually quite liked the DE so I just switched to it permanently, even on my more capable machines. I've been running XFCE for around 15 years 😆

Same because it works really well over VNC. It feels almost like I’m actually on a local machine.

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.

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.

You don't have to configure KDE you know. You can just keep the defaults like you're probably doing with GNOME.

Sway. Very customiseable and extremely snappy

Same.

I dont do much customization, but the endevorOS community edition has decent defaults.

Just working cleanly with tiling feels so good. You dont have to use the mouse to move all the windows around. But if you hold the super key, you can just drag windows around to make a perfect layout. But often than not, i just want 2 windows side by side, with no wasted space. Done.

these days Hyprland but previously i3.

i basically live in the terminal unless i'm playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.

not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.

I'm still on i3 as it's been convenient, but this:

this has all become very specialized over the past decade

resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it's persistent across installations.

One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3's config:

bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause

But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I'm in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#

CURRENT=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
ZOOM=$(xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Meeting")

if [[ -n "$ZOOM" ]]; then
    # if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM}
    xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT}
else
    # otherwise do play/pause
    playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi

and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.

Another i3 user here. I slowly transitioned from KDE when switching keyboard layout stopped working as well as some other DE related things.

Ended up writing custom script for switching. Currently implemented with rofi in Perl, bc I like the syntax.

I still like having a bit nice gui, so i have wallpapers, some icons, etc. But I fell in love with terminal along with neovim : ) , soo kinda looking for that middle ground between look, performance and functionality.

Haven't finished tweaking all the configs to my liking, but after that vanilla Arch is the direction I plan to go, since many things in my current install that I have as well as haven't customized work a bit questionably or exist for no reason.

Perl, bc I like the syntax

You... Monster

Cinnamon. Desktop environment peaked in the Windows XP/Gnome 2 days and everything else is just change for the shake of change. :C

My only annoyance is lack of Wayland support. Tried out cosmic, but it doesn't have the Windows XP/Gnome 2 style window list.

Screenshot for anyone interested:

Me too, and it sorta has Wayland support, but it's not real good. I also like Cosmic, I think it has a good future ahead of it.

I tried Cosmic and quite liked it. Just waiting for them to add a gnome 2 style window list widget with the window names.

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.

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Gnome, be it PC or Laptop. It just remains out of my way with it's minimalism. Tried KDE for a while, and I seriously can't stand it, personally.

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.

KDE, because it has all the features I need and also because I love theming and while QT apps can be themed pretty easily, GTK theming is somewhere between being absolutely horrible and non-existance.

The guys at catppuccin who made a gtk theme said it was a pain to maintain which makes sense.

Gnome on Nixos I like how standard it is I know what to expect

Funny I use KDE on NixOS because it's the only OS where it doesn't freeze my whole system up and I have to force reboot. (issue caused by AX210 Intel driver)

Gnome. I actually started with KDE. It's a good DE, but it's got so many options that I had choice fatigue. I constantly tweaked my taskbar instead of focusing on what I wanted to do. And it was easy to get it to a "looks broken" state

When I tried Gnome, I fell in love with it. I love the unique workflow, lack of distractions, the modern adwaita design, etc. Everything felt so polished

That being said, I don't like how Gnome devs seemingly can't agree on anything with other desktop environments. And I don't like how they refuse to support server-side window decorations. Like, I agree with them that CSD are better than SSD, but it would be reasonable to support SSD for toolkits that haven't/don't want to implement CSD themselves, right?

I'm excited for Cosmic. It looks like it combines the best of Gnome and KDE, and the devs don't have the “my way or the highway” mindset

I don't like how Gnome devs seemingly can't agree on anything with other desktop environments

Yeah, especially how they dont include minimize and maximize window buttons by default, that's incomprehensible LOL

I'm not a Gnome user but I stopped minimizing my windows years ago. Don't need that if you (a) don't have icons on your desktop and (b) move your windows over to another workspace when stuff gets crowded.

That's like saying I don't need to clean my room if I can just shove everything into the closet

Shoving everything into the task bar doesn't strike me as more orderly. Less so really.

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I love KDE. It's got easy to use power user features and is very robust.

KDE all the way, it's incredible especially since 6

It's been great almost since I started using it.

I started using it exactly when 4.0 came out, because that's when I started using Linux and I thought learning 3 didn't make sense. But 4 only got stable around 4.4 I think. The problem was that 4.0 wasn't intended to be for end users yet, but distributions didn't realize that and packaged it right away.

KDE didn't repeat that mistake. 5.0 was almost completely smooth sailing (some applications took a long time to port and looked ugly, that's it), and 6.0 was completely seamless.

I dont use a DE, I use a WM.

Semantics aside I’m on Hyprland, been using it for 6 months now and absolutely love it

KDE Plasma. It came on my steam deck which was my first intro to it, it blew me away and installed it on my laptop and finally ditched Windows shortly after. Works great for me.

I am extremely basic and I'm using the XFCE that came with Linux mint. I don't need anything fancy.

What's the difference between this and cinnamon?

My understanding is XFCE is lighter weight and simpler. Little to no animations, for example.

https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-cinnamon-mate-xfce/

I'm definitely into cinnamon more than the other two. Thanks for the link. I was about to try the XFCE until I seen that. Glad I didn't waste my time. I've got decent hardware so not too concerned about the extra ram etc. I just with cinnamon has KDE customization without getting buggy once you pile on 10 different extensions.

LXDE/LXQT because I grew up using potato computers and now I can't stand it if my DE uses more than 2% of my hardware resources

though I am currently using KDE because for fuck knows what reason, Kubuntu is the only prepackaged Linux I've been able to get to boot on my weird Samsung laptop and I haven't bothered to gut KDE and replace it with LXQT yet

XFCE4. It's intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss

Enough features so that it "just works" (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.

Can't wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don't have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.

Wood. Usually medium density particle board.

XFCE. I also like tiling WMs, but I often have to share computers and they are too unintuitive for the rest of the family.

You can use i3 inside xfce. I think (not sure) you can do this on a per user basis.

You can run i3 inside XFCE on a per user basis, but convincing my wife/kids to swap users when they need the computer for "just a second"...

I just take the win that they are on Linux and use a shared account.

Depends on the computer I run. On fast computers (more than 5,000 passmark cpu points), i use gnome on whatever distro. On mid-speed computers (1000 to 5000 points), I use linux mint with cinnamon. On very old computers (400-1000), I use debian with XFce.

I actually found Cinnamon to be more resource intensive than Gnome on most computers.

MATE (prn: MAH-Tay)

because it comes with standard Trisquel and is a smooth DE experience.

Ha, had no idea it was pronounced like that. I've always said MATE like "date"/"rate"/"fate"

You probably didn't even know it's pronounced Jimp too!!

/s

Oh yeah I heard of trisquel, those gnu endorsed distros.

Fully free distro list

If you know how to source hardware that uses fully-free drivers, they are worth a look.

Guix and Parabola also look interesting.

or if you want your firmware to be open source and stuff they are for people who follows gnu project free philosophy(in my opinion).

Windows 10

Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.

I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.

I'd suggest switching to open source apps or apps that work on Linux, maybe check up on the compatibility of games you play over at ProtonDB.

That will make your transition smoother.

People who are brand new to linux should start with immutable kde based distros, you'll have a much better time with fedora kinoite.

I'm down to help support infinitely, my matrix is available on my profile, feel free to message with any troubleshooting needs.

I switched to PopOS from Windows 11 in three hours. I had been backing everything up for weeks though. Generally everything I did on Windows works out of the box on PopOS.

Aside from my bluetooth speaker not connecting automatically and needing to run a Windows VM for Corsair peripheral LEDs, I’ve not had to do a ton of customization.

It’s been well worth it. Really enjoying it so far and highly recommend.

Yeah Linux still has plenty to work on. It's unfortunate how limited the support is. If game and app developers could target Linux, then the cost to support and maintain would be lower than they have to do with Windows. Unfortunately, market share and power of defaults work against us.

If you can, look towards getting a steam deck. At least that is a Linux thing that is pretty decent and portable.

I game on both the deck and a desktop with pop!_os. I can say gaming on my desktop is just as good if not better than the deck for because it can leverage my desktop hardware and it’s way easier to go under the hood with proper peripherals. Linux has come a long way with gaming. Most of the shit that doesn’t run on linux are games that cost too much for too little content or they’re just gonna be battle pass/cosmetic farms that cater to whales and aren’t actually fun in any sense of the word.

If you’re gonna be a top 0.0001% competitive gamer, you’ll probably wanna stick to windows. If you don’t play FPSes competively, a linux based gaming PC is probably fine. Me? I’m a middle aged dude with kids who racks up about 20 hours a week somehow, and linux more than suits my needs.

I’ve had more success with Lutris and Wine in getting certain abandonware games (Black and White for example) to run than I ever did on Windows.

My advice: Don't wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you're under pressure to figure it out all at once.

Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.

Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.

Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.

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Gaming PC: GNOME (it works fine and I don't care about much else there)

Laptop: dwl (dwm for Wayland) and suckless tools. Ultra lightweight and comfy for browsing and watching videos. Usually at the same time.

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My desktop environment of choice would be XFCE. It's simply easy to configure while not giving me choice fatigue like KDE does. Also I don't like Qt for some reason.

GNOME is great but I find their extensions to be super clunky sometimes. Some of them even break in between updates. The main selling point of gnome (for me) is the minimal look and feel, extensions kind of ruin that a little bit.

Don't get me wrong plasma and Gnome are wonderful DEs but XFCE provides a simple and balanced desktop IMO. The only thing that's missing is full Wayland support.

P.S : Anyways most of the time I would be running a window manager instead of a DE, my current favourite Wayland window-manager is Labwc because it gives me openbox vibes.

I use i3. Pretty bare bones, so it took me a while to get productive with it. But it's all exactly how I want it, it's all mine.

Budgie, because I like the way it looks.

Budgie has great potential. I really love the look and feel. And I especially love the side bar. I feel that's a feature that's missing in KDE.

Budgie however isn't "there" yet. I've experienced quite a few bugs using it and it's still missing a few features. But it's getting there. It might become my go to one day.

it would be great if the budgie team would integrate budgie-extras (which is a collection of Applets) made by UbuntuBudgie contributors by default, i've had it installed on my Fedora Budgie system from the copr repo and it basically completed the experience for me

KDE. It's customizable without adding lots of weirdness. It's got a solid set of included tools like Dolphin and Konsole. It's generally very stable and visually attractive.

No shade to other DEs. I've tried lots of them, I even have a couple of alternative DEs I'll log into when they are useful (i3 is great if I am doing something repetitive). But KDE is just the most comfortable for me for daily use.

The non-Gnome COSMIC DE that System76 has been developing is looking really promising though. I have the alpha on a spare laptop and find it very functional.

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Gnome on the laptop, its keyboard and touch gestures are the best for notebooks. I also like its simple design and reliability.

KDE on desktop, I'd use gnome, but kwin has more gaming relevant features.

What features are these?

VRR, HDR.

It also had an early patch for nvidia support on Wayland earlier in the year.

I believe mutter-vrr has gotten merged though, behind a dconf flag

I use gnome on my main machines, but looking to migrate to cosmic, and I use xfce on more limited devices.

I like the kde project, but I tend not to use it, because I find it a bit overwhelming, even after customizing it, it's hard to explain. I have issues with too many elements in front of me.

"Overwhelming", that's the word I was looking for to define KDE. Thank you.

agree i wanna get rid of kde but i dont wanna reinstall on my distro cachyos.

You can install more than one desktop environment at a time. Your login manager should let you pick which one you want to log into.

yeah i think i like to try new desktops in vms more personally, but if i want 2 desktops at the same time then ok otherwise if i wanted to replace my desktop a full reinstall is better.

You can have them installed next to one another. Just like you can have Firefox and Links installed at the same time. Or twm and gnome3. It comes down to how much work you want for yourself.

i3. Superb for keyboard-driven environment. Ultra fast, so responsive and configurable. The best.

GNOME because of PaperWM

I used that combination, too. But I have settled for only the useless gaps extension for now. PaperWM was behind Gnome version too long and now I have seen there is Niri getting better and better. I will switch someday, I guess. It has the same concept as PaperWM, but is a scrollable/linear WM from the ground up.

I love niri, last time I looked it was not yet on par with paperwm which is why I'm still on it.

Xmonad. I prefer tiling window managers, & I tried Sway but I can’t do color work without proper color management… something Wayland doesn’t support. Thus, I moved back to my old Xmonad config awaiting Wayland to get its shit together after years saying color management was around the corner & distros still adopting it despite not being ready.

XFCE. it's dumb, simple, it gives you a panel to access your programs, your desktop icons, and nothing else. I just want my computer to let me do my things, not have a built-in 'brew a cup of coffee' button

KDE. Because of its simplicity. Unsarcastically.

I agree. KDE out of the box just looks solid and works. Especially when i came from Windows it was nice to know where basic functions are, and then slowly learn the cool stuff. But generally i like things to just be tidy and "bland" in the sense of not customized crazily.

I have two, KDE on my laptop that runs Arch (btw) which is my tinkering machine, and GNOME/Pop!_OS on the desktop, which is the one other people use and I'm not allowed to break lol.

Although I might switch the desktop to COSMIC at some point if it doesn't cause too much trouble.

KDE Plasma. I just like it. It seems to have options to do what I want, for the most part. There's some things I wish it had, like a way to programmatically get the active window under Wayland, so StreamController could automatically change pages.

Xfce4.

y tho

It's inexpensive on resources while leaving me nothing to really... need extra, I suppose. It's old so there's thousands of themes and ways to set it up, and it just feels like home. The speed of the animations and defaults to everything has a very stock Windows XP feel to the desktop despite it looking like nearly anything. The system doesn't get in the way of programs from other desktops or setups in mind and always steps aside.

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.

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.

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I use KDE, no bugs for me (I found one but it's already fixed in the latest update) and it's feels like my second home

I'm running KDE Plasma with the revived Krohnkite for auto tiling. Plasma 6.2 seems to have fixed most of the bugs from 6.0 and 6.1, at least the ones I've noticed.

I was using Sway/SwayFX for a few months but was missing some KDE Gear apps like Dolphin and Okular which I couldn't get to display correctly. KDE is afaik the only desktop with a working Qt theming engine right now, so I can't really see myself switching (unless maybe if they break Krohnkite again).

KDE for my main PC. Pretty with floating panels, KDE Connect, QT apps are often the best apps in their class and are perfectly integrated (FreeCAD, krita, okular, kdenlive, vlc, dolphin, etc...) And konsole is also very full featured.

I don't know what KiCAD uses, but it also seems very well integrated into the KDE desktop unlike most gnome apps.

XFCE on MX Linux for an old Intel Compute Stick to keep it very usable.

GNOME, because I started with Red Hat 6 and I'm used to it, on Fedora Silverblue, because I have a long history of fucking up my PC and that makes it harder. For remote machines XFCE because the mouse is cute.

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

updated screenshot:

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.

I stopped usin em myself cus my laptop aint nun too fancy and i hated watching my system use 1.5+ while not doing jack, so i tried window managers a couple times until it stuck :3 i3 btw

Traditionally I've been running lighter desktops like opebox, xfce, or lmde. Last couple of years I've been using MATE with good results.

OK so I have used several DEs but right now I'm on Plasma 6 because frankly, it's the best out there. It's easy to use, customizable, intuitive and looks nice. Is it on the heavier side? Yes, but that's okay. Also it helps that I have learnt the keyboard shortcuts on this.

I have used XFCE, Mate and Cinnamon in the past. If KDE somehow vanished off the face of the planet, I would likely switch to XFCE because it's light, customizable and fully functional.

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.

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 was also considering using budgie, but i dont like how inconsistent design, like parts of the desktop is light even tho dark mode is on and theming is split into another app.

I'm on Hyprland mostly because of all the tiling window managers out there these days, it feels like the most usable default config and the ecosystem (e.g. hyprlock etc) feels pretty complete.

Typically I don’t use a DE. I’ll go for dmenu + dwm usually if I only want a WM. I find the default bindings and behaviour for the tiling is the most ergonomic when comparing it to other WMs like i3.

When I do have to get a DE setup then I’ll use XFCE because I like how it stays out of the way and I find it easy to customise.

Enlightenment. It's pretty and really fast. Of course you can't complete with the speed of tile wm. But their development speed is so slow....

I've been experimenting with DEs on a low end machine (celeron n3010, 2gb ram), and so far, I'm still on xfce, but I forgot to test Enlightenment. Gonna give it a try.

I install enlightenment in a asus netbook. Still working. Haven't updated for so long. ~10 yrs?

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.

Sway, will try the new cosmic once its in beta

Gnome.

With NoMachine to my Windows Host, hot keys go to the host as intended.

Rustdesk can't do it in any config and they don't care at this stage.

TDE. Functional, stays out of my way, but still reasonably full-featured. The development team is dedicated to adding useful features while keeping the original look and feel, so I don't have to go hunting for settings that have inexplicably moved or changed defaults every time I update. It doesn't support Wayland, but I'm Wayland-neutral (that is, I have nothing against it, but I have nothing against X either).

I don't see many distros,people use the at all often but it's definitely for some people.

KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.

Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don't need to look sexy.

My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.

Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.

Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I've tried to like it for years, but I just don't care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.

I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I've watched.

Xfce. Partly because I've used it for a long time, but mostly because it does what I need it to do and little else.

COSMIC most of the time and then gnome as a fallback when I run into any temporary issues I can't work around.

I do this with a custom bluebuild image I made that uses ublue (fedora 41) as a base and then added cosmic on top along with some other layers that I need/want.

How’s your experience with cosmic? I’m using a very similar setup with a custom bluebuild image pulling from secureblue. Currently on Gnome but impatiently waiting for cosmic to hit some level of stability

It depends on what you would consider stable. I would install it alongside gnome for now and try it out. You can just leave it on your system getting updates while you use gnome and just pop in every once and a while. It's up to you if you want to enable cosmic-greeter and disable gdm for your login page, but if you want stability, just stick with gdm for now.

KDE Plasma. I am not good with making edits/tweaks to desktop environments and really like how MX has it set up.

KDE for its Wayland performance and features and occasionally I switch to hyprland if I need a more focused work environment.
In the past I used Cinnamon but it became ever more buggier on Arch and due to lack of Wayland support still it was a dead end anyway.

I use DWM in place of a window manager because I love the lightweight, minimalist base, and i like to customise my setup very finely. (I use Arch btw)

My favourite that I use lots of places is Gnome. Love using it. Use it completely stock.

I also use KDE, which is fine, but I don’t much care for it, I always find it to be buggy and unreliable. Could well be pebkac errors, but I’ve seen it across multiple machines over the years. With this said I still use kde on one machine.

I also use sway. Which is a wayland window manager. I find it very good. I’ve heard that hyprland is also good, but I’m not looking to mess with a window manager, I just like it to be simple, so I’ve not really tried it.

idk why in my experience the bugs in gnome where worse then in kde.

I always find gnome to be rock solid, even on Fedora, which is not known for a conservative attitude w.r.t. stability. Perhaps just my specific hardware

gnome currently because nearly everything i use is designed for gnome and looks mismatched on other DEs. but the gnome workflow largely feels like a prison.

Xmonad with XFCE in no-desktop mode.

I can use the xfce tools to configure things like mouse and screen settings, but visually it's just xmonad.

For my main workstation and main laptop:

  • Cosmic themed GNOME - I just like the way it looks and works without any changes. The basic tiling functions are something I find helpful at times too.
  • Plasma 6 - It works pretty well and looks nice. I don't do a lot of customization, so it's not a big deal to me. For my other machines I'm currently using Cinnamon, GNOME, Budgie, and LXDE.
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I gave an original Surface Pro tablet and I use Ubuntu's Gnome on it. It's perfect for tablets I find. Not so great for desktop PCs.

XFCE.

I recently switched to it after a year or so with KDE. Deff see some improvement in terms of battery life with my laptop, but I'm still not used to the lack of WinKey+Num shortcuts (I'm aware of docklike, but I need labels for open windows).

Winkey on linux is called superkey you can configure it to do what you want in settings.

I used enlightenment for something like a decade. When Gnome hit the big time I used Gnome because it looked Nice and was very flexible. I went back to Mac and Windows Land for a bit, when I came back I went Gnome again. I just screw around for a day looking and picking plugins and fighting with it to get it exactly how I wanted it. After fighting with one of the older plugins that mustn't doing what I wanted to do I saw somebody mentioned using KDE. I tried KDE and sure enough every single thing I was plugging the hell out of Gnome for was a default setting in KDE. I'm currently running Plasma. I must say that Cinnamon's not bad either.

Oh yeah I was also running gnome with alot of plugins after a fedora update, boom tracker3 does not wanna work anymore, kde(fedora and cachyos) it's in the desktop no relying on 3rd party plugins and cinnamon I can agree with you, I think of cinnamon gnome done right,with a windows 10 like ui.

Plasma.

When I try Gnome, within a couple minutes I encounter the Save dialog that defaults the cursor to the Search field instead of the Filename field, and the top of my head goes spinning across the room, and I uninstall it.

Gnome on one machine, LXDE on another.

I use Gnome on my main laptop, a Thinkpad P50. I bought it with a dock thinking I'd use it at my desk and on the sofa but it's a bit of a beast so that stays on my desk and I use an L440 with LXDE on the sofa. Considering trying LCARS on the sofa machine.

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I'm an XFCE account. I find XFCE to be nice and fast. It's decently light - not the absolute lightest, but most of its installation size is from dependencies you were going to install anyway like GTK.

For now, it's still on xorg, but I think they're working on it.

Long time i3 user, recently switched to Hyprland+Wayland. I just don't like mice, don't enjoy using them, and I find the snappiness and responsiveness of keyboard-centric workflows very fun and enjoyable.

I am a software developer, and I am very impatient when it comes to my tools: I like my feedback cycles and interactions to be as tight as possible. This limited study from 2015 showed that developers, on average, spend ~26% of their productive time on stuff that is not related to either code editing or comprehension, including 14% spent on UI interactions. Tiling window manager allows me to streamline most of these interactions through hotkey bindings and shell automation, >!so I prefer spending literal months polishing my dotfiles instead!<

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.

Currently, Plasma. But I have ADHD a bit, so I’ve gone back and forth between that and Gnome mostly. I do like Cinnamon and I really want to spend time with Xfce and maybe others just to see what feels most comfortable right now. I’m trying to go for keyboard comfort these days, so we’ll see where I land at some point!

Used Mint with Cinnamon for a long time, but always wanted to try KDE after distrohopping a bit. Had it on when I switched to Arch, but didn't like how slow it felt on my old laptop so I tried LXQt and then XFCE. I wanted a modern lightweight environment with Wayland support, but I'll have to wait for it to be implemented. In the meantime, I riced my XFCE just how I like it, and I really like how complete and responsive it is.

You can get experimental wayland in lxqt tho, you need a window manager that supports it and a package,but xfce is currently implementing it.

Yeah I'm waiting for those. Truth be told, the process of modifying my Arch to have XFCE and remove KDE completely without reinstalling was... A trip. At least for the foreseeable future, I want to leave it as is, since it's working and it looks very nice to me.

Sway on a chromebook with 4gb ram, sway on thinkpad t430, xfce on my gf's laptop, and gnome on my gaming rig that will go soon either cosmic or just sway. For me sway is thewinner. Sway with me... Marimba... Lalala

Edit: also gnome on the kichen pc with touch. Gnome is the only one that works fully on touch.

trinity because it's lighter than almost everything else while having more features than almost everything else

Last update 27th Oct 2024? Trinity is still kicking around? I have so many questions...

Will there be Wayland support?

What is the purpose of it?

Does it even use later versions of Qt?

How lightweight is it (how much RAM and CPU does it use on a cold boot?)?

  • I'm really not sure what they're planning for Wayland at the moment (if anything), but one of the plus sides is that it isn't too dependent on it's default window manager, and I was even able to run most parts of it via XWayland under Wayfire with only a handful of issues that probably wouldn't be too hard to resolve in the future (e.g. multiple desktops on kdesktop).

  • Initially, I suppose it was just to provide an option for people who weren't happy with KDE 4. These days, I'd consider the main benefits to be a nice way to have an old school UX for those who prefer that, and excellent performance on aging hardware. (In some ways the UX still outdoes KDE 5/6 IMO, such as TDE's version of Konqueror being a much more capable file manager than the current versions, or the highly configurable power manager.)

  • It uses a fork of Qt3, TQt.

  • This will vary from distro to distro, but I have it using just a little over 100 MB of RAM on a cold boot with MX on my ThinkPad X200T, and practically no idle CPU usage.

KDE Plasma because I can make it look, feel and work mostly like Windows. I have to use Windows at work and don't want to have to think too hard about differences between computers I use at work vs. at home.

I have mine look and work almost as exactly as Windows 10, which I really love in terms of UI/UX. It's the most easiest and fastest desktop interface I've ever used so far.

I have a tiled app menu and I even changed the window decorations to look like Windows 10. I hate rounded corners. It's such a waste of screen space.

i use zorin os's gnome with forge, once cosmic comes out ill switch to that

I'm really looking forward to the release version of Cosmic. Used to be a fan of Gnome-based Cosmic on PopOS, but Pop just kept on "popping" so I moved to Fedora Workstation. I have never looked back.

Anything I need to actually write code on, Gnome, because I'm addicted to mac-style gesture controls, but hate the holier than thou design philosophy Jony Ive bullshit; anything casual, KDE; but I am planning to try out Cosmic on something soon

KDE Plasma because it's the one I like. If it disappeared tomorrow, I'd use Xfce.

I'm running MATE on my laptop. It gives me what I need (a task bar, space for some instrumentation, the usual desktop functionality, a way to start applications) and nothing that I don't care about (wobbling windows, compiz, stuff like that). My DE is a tool; I use tools that don't get in my way because I have work to do.

I might give COSMIC a try in a few months, I haven't decided yet.

Currently I use gnome cosmic because of PopOS, integration and stuff. When I get around using Arch I'm certainly gonna get myself Plasma, because it's pretty af

KDE, it does what I want it to do.

I currently use Gnome on my laptop, but I've toyed with returning to KDE for a while. I used KDE briefly back in the v3 and v4 days felt like it was a bit bloated compared to Gnome v1 and v2. Cinnamon is nice but a bit heavyweight on graphics. I should probably return to XFCE or Mate.

It's hard to go back after Sway/I3 with pywal coloration, when everything is so sluggish in comparison. It's amazing to see gnome and KDE adding like a second to launch/quit of common applications. Tried hyprland, but animations seemed choppy (beefy AMD desktop), has that changed?

KDE, because despite my bitterness for the loss of Unity 8, I know it's merely nostalgia for me. I want something I feel like I can make my own without too much difficulty.

I miss Unity :(

Yes, it was bad in quite a few ways, but it also felt like a truly thoughtful desktop experience. Global Menu, HUD, merged maximized headers, etc

Same here! I'm happy to see the UBports fork is still active as Lomiri, I haven't checked it out in a while.

At the moment, my main machine is on KDE because it has very good Wayland support and isn't Gnome. I prefer Cinnamon

On my main laptop I use KDE, it's smooth and gets the job done. On my tablet, I use GNOME. It runs well, and is touch-optimized. On my other laptop, I use gnome for no particular reason.

COSMIC. I was using Hyprland before but I wanted to try the alpha. I found it stable enough for my use-case so I stuck with it

Plasma, but I'll be moving to cosmic as soon as it enables auto power off of monitors on idle

I have an i3 and a hyprland installation.

I like tiling wms but Wayland still has some annoying issues so I like having the more stable i3 installation on my main computer.

XFCE, lightweight and has a terminal. 's all i need when i'm not trying out something like xmonad.

I recently made a new linux install (to replace my constantly breaking, likely due to my own doing Manjaro install). I went with Cinnamon initially, but in order to try out Wayland, I moved to KDE plasma.

I'm on NVidia, with two different resolution screens. Which causes occasional problems. But overall it's fine.

Kde because i want customization and standard is also ok. I tried gnome but did not like that extensions were required for tray icons etc. Gnome is otherwise good.

I3 and hyperland i dont get. Some windows should not be very large no matter how much free screen space you have. Example is calculator or old school chat applications like pidgin. No native standard set of applications. Everything must manually be added and custom, like everything in kde settings(sound output, network settings, screen size etc). Waiting for when applications can recommend its screen size to the window manager.

You can set specific applications as floating windows in i3 so that they take their original size

You can use i3 with xfce to have a menu and an icon bar if you want one.

Currently I am on KDE, but I am an xfce lover. I can't wait for the next xfce update and for Cosmic.

I am living KDE almost default. I have the impression that with too much customisation problems come.

Xfce is rock solid and rock solid after customisation too. It is truly amazing.

Gnome needs far too many extension for me to be usable. And so I avoid it.

Cinnamon is great too, but it's in the middle. If I don't want to use Wayland, at that point there is xfce.

KDE on my main laptop, Cinnamon on the TV-connected mini-PC in my living room. I like the customization options of KDE, and with Cinnamon I just wanted to test out Linux Mint, no big reason other than that. I used GNOME for some time with Pop_OS!, and it was not fully my thing. I plan to test out more DEs when I can free up an older laptop to do some more experimentation - for my main laptop I require stability, so I don't mess around with it too much.

Plasma, because I want things to Just Work(TM) and the customizability and modernity are neat. I like right click --> pin to top/bottom as well.

I really love both esp after KDE 6. But I use Gnome, KDE treats multiple monitors as separate entities I find the bugs distracting and there's only so much customisation I need. I slap open bar on and get to work.

Cinammon cuz I didn't knew it doesn't like kde plasma and now I am too lazy to change it fora bit of time.

KDE at home "gaming" desktop, but would love to move away from it, for various bugs and non-working configurations. At work and home laptop I am using WMs, riverwm / i3.

KDE, because I'm too lazy to switch back to XFCE, which offered every feature I already use in KDE except without the stuttering, the bugs, and the update cycle that breaks things way, way too often on a rolling release distro.

Or openbox. My old laptop has openbox, but that's more for screwing around with EWW than doing day-to-day things.

Gnome because it came with ubuntu and I'm too scared to change it to kde incase everything breaks. Really don't want to reinstall something else again either

I'm currently using Cinnamon because I thought it would be better than Xfce. While I do think that Cinnamon looks better, there were some minor things that I preferred with Xfce. I want to try Mate and maybe some of the other DEs if I can find a good distro that has them but I may go back to Xfce the next time I install Linux Mint.

Try Budgie

I can try that, do you know of any distro that has it preinstalled? I don't care too much about what it's based on but I might prefer a distro that's similar to Linux Mint.

I love gnome and use that for everything except gaming. If I want to game I use KDE

I've been using gnome for gaming, whats wrong with that?

I'm not sure why but on gnome my vram will fill up then gnome will crash. Doesn't happen on KDE. It's been happening for years on Nvidia and AMD

What broke with tracker3 ?

@BCsven @Mwa I disabled tracker and use plocate from a shell to find stuff. The reason, tracker's crawl of the disk space is extremely inefficient, but plocate keeps track of things like directory update times so does not recrawl a directory if the time stamps have not changed, thus saving a lot of disk I/O.

Tracker should not be recrawling everything, unless you delete the index with a tracker3 reset

Once it builds the initial index only new files or changed files should be recrawled for meta data.

The only time I have seen Tracker use cpu was when it got hung up on a file that had special code in it that was messing with parsing the data and so it would fail and retry over and over.

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I use KDE plasma 5 atm and i planning on an upgrade to 6 soon; but it's my daily driver so I've dragging my feet on it for a couple weeks now.

What happened when tried troubleshooting those problems you had?

I have numerous machines and use several. On my main, KDE because of all the customization. Widgets, window styles, colors, themes etc. It's really like exactly how I want for maximum efficiency and productivity.

I've got gnome on my hybrid notebook and my transformer pad because gnome with Wayland is amazingly compatible with touchscreen.

I have one machine running Elementary which has the Pantheon DE it's kinda like Gnome with modifications.

And finally, I have an older system so just for efficiency, LXQt.

I do enjoy trying out different ones and especially more esoteric ones that I occasionally come across.

Cosmic, just trying it out because i liked the extensions system76 made for gnome, and cosmic DE is more native experience of that.

Gnome on laptop, KDE on desktop. I go back and forth with those DEs.

XFCE + Compiz

The unholy combination of accelerated 3D graphics and performance, all without the stupid drawbacks of wayland.

Runs much lighter than KDE even with all the 3D cube and windows stuff enabled.

Extremely customizable as well. XFCE already does a great job of UI/UX, it just lacks a compositor to add flare (xfwm4 has no animations, only some blur effects).