Your Favourite Linux Desktop Environment

[Guest]

Mine is XFCE because of it's incredible flexibility. What's yours? Looking forward to hear from you!

[Naijin]

19 minutes ago, WickedThunder86 said:

Mine is XFCE because of it's incredible flexibility. What's yours? Looking forward to hear from you!

I'm using Solus OS which uses Budgie environment.

[CWALD]

by the time I figured out how to change it Gnome had grown on me enough to not bother. I also enjoy messing with KDE plasma though  

[KaitouX]

Not really my favorite but I currently use KDE, I tried Gnome twice, on Ubuntu 18.04 3 years ago and Fedora last May, both times it was extremely laggy in my system. I also have a laptop(that I almost never use) with Cinnamon, but haven't used other DEs for extended periods of time.

[Giganthrax]

MATE is pretty good.

[xAcid9]

KDE
Deepin
i3

Scrotwm

[AlanyG21]

In my case, the ones that any distribution can use are XFCE, KDE and Cinammon, but my favorite of all is Gnome Zorin (The Gnome Fork made for Zorin OS)

[10leej]

I don't really use a Desktop Environment. I use just a window manager and the one I use is dwm.

Setting this up is not for the feint of heart, but my system idling with 178mb of memory and 0% overall cpu utilization is something in and of itself. The trade off is that I had to setup CUPs and Network utilities manually. But the system is so much faster as a result (I'm also running Gentoo and a self compiled kernel which really helps) with a system cold boot to user enabled gui in less than 10 seconds.

Much better than the old days when you hit the power button make a cup of coffee drink it, swap the boot disk to the root disk, go make a heavy breakfast, tell X11 to startup go take the morning shower get dressed for the day and come back to login, go get the morning news paper and come back to a gui. (Windows wasn't really better back then either)

[CWALD]

38 minutes ago, 10leej said:

I don't really use a Desktop Environment. I use just a window manager and the one I use is dwm.

Setting this up is not for the feint of heart, but my system idling with 178mb of memory and 0% overall cpu utilization is something in and of itself. The trade off is that I had to setup CUPs and Network utilities manually. But the system is so much faster as a result (I'm also running Gentoo and a self compiled kernel which really helps) with a system cold boot to user enabled gui in less than 10 seconds.

Much better than the old days when you hit the power button make a cup of coffee drink it, swap the boot disk to the root disk, go make a heavy breakfast, tell X11 to startup go take the morning shower get dressed for the day and come back to login, go get the morning news paper and come back to a gui. (Windows wasn't really better back then either)

do you know of a good guide or resource to try this out? sounds like it could be very cool

[LBrocato]

• XFCE - use to be light weightbut getting to heavy atm
• LXDE- died
• Mate-need update things if want keep being a usable desktop
• KDE to heavy for some computers
• GNOME - has to much bloot but lots of desktop built on top of it . it currently going in the wrong direction
• Deepin- comes from Chinese company. could be spying on you
• LXQT - since it has lack of people useing some thing are broken in some distros
• open box -  light but discontinued
• flux box -l ight but discontinued
• i3 and other wm- hard to configure some just start u in a black screen, so you need rofi and some other thing to get started 
• UKUI- Chinese government project can possible spy on you
• Enlightenment really meant to be a wm but it now a full desktop. it mad for elementary os
• TDE (Trinity)  great desktop it lacking in thing that u would want in a desktop environment for 2021
• Lumina plays bad with linux really made for bsd
• Wayfire if you like wayland and useing xwayland it good . some program will not work correctly cause it wayland display sever and use useing a program that only support xorg. 

I could seat here and talk about others but their no need . Personly i dont know nuch bout about window mangers but i learn more about linux being on it then being on cinnomon cinnamon or a other desktop environment. I made my i3 have all floating windows. snice switching to wm i go with out a panel. all i have is rofi and clock widget.

 

[LBrocato]

delete

 

[ZFSinmylungs]

@LBrocato
" i3 and other wm- hard to configure some just start u in a black screen, so you need rofi and some other thing to get started "
Hahahah you think that's hard?

But yeah - my favorite GNU+Linux desktop environment would be - my own: I get to choose what I want, and how I want it, comes with no pre-installed applications, no bloat, perfect for RAM usage.
WM = Window Manager
i3 WM is ok, perfect for newbies
dwm is okay, but I have experienced some graphical difficulties when switching tags, while watching videos - freezes.
awesome WM aka AWM - very good, although it's based on dwm - it has resolved the issue that I had with DWM above.
Thought.. I do have a couple of bugs -_- so I have to restart AWM on every login.. to get my wallpaper displayed properly ( this is with more than 1 monitor, keep in mind, might work perfectly if you have only ). I have tried both sxiv and feh - both seem to fail. The AWM IRC seems to be dead AF, although I once got support, that seemed to not work :/

[LloydLynx]

MATE. It's a properly polished and very user friendly DE which runs perfectly smooth on 13 year old Intel graphics OOTB. That last part is very important to me.

[Alexeygridnev1993]

I like KDE because of how customizable it is. You can add whatever "plasmoids" you want and change the look of your system completely. It's also not too resource-heavy. GNOME developers (both the developers of GNOME itself and of applications for it) are just arrogant, they do not officially support any customization and even went so far as to write an open letter saying "Please don't theme my apps!" (https://stopthemingmy.app/).

The fact that the only officially supported "theme" in GNOME is called Adwaita ("the only one" in Sanskrit) kinda says it all.

[LBrocato]

Their a few thing wrong with distros when it comes to desktops and display mangers . One thing  distros put to much custom themeing,and  letting other area go untouched/fixed . One thing they need to do is have only the villain version of each desktop in their repository and let us chooice which desktop we want on the first boot. things like  pulseaudio , media codecs and bluebooth also could be fix or made to be installed easyer.  They should be  no reason you have to install a different repo to get the codecs to work . Example  opensusa uses zapper but to get the code to fix some video problems u need to install Packman repos. As for the display manger problems I found them in neverly all distros, I just simply disable them and  get my desktop environment, or window manger to start  from terminal

[10leej]

On 8/12/2021 at 2:49 PM, CWALD said:

do you know of a good guide or resource to try this out? sounds like it could be very cool

Distrotube on youtube has great videos on getting started with Awesomewm and Qtile, and delves quite a bit into dwm (what I use) and xmonad both of which I don't recommend.

I recommend starting with the i3 window manager or Spectrwm if you want a human readable config file. i3 has the best written documentation and largest community.

 

As for Gentoo, there's the handbook and yes read the whole thing before you run the install especially if you never ran a minimal distro before (prime example being Arch linux)

[Gorilla Warfare]

Budgie

[10leej]

On 8/13/2021 at 2:14 AM, LBrocato said:

open box -  light but discontinued

Open box is feature complete, not discontinued.

[chrono76]

I don not use a desktop environment, I use a window manager just like @10leej, in my case I chose Spectrwm, which is almost as minimal as Dwm but it has more sane defaults and an easy to read config file. I have also used awesome when I want something that works more as its own mini desktop environment, since it has its own notifications, system tray and integration with dmenu to run programs.
 

[LBrocato]

On 8/17/2021 at 5:45 AM, 10leej said:

Open box is feature complete, not discontinued.

then why are distros droping support for it and it older bother lxde and things dont work specially on lxde

 

[10leej]

12 hours ago, LBrocato said:

then why are distros droping support for it and it older bother lxde and things dont work specially on lxde

 

LXDE is end of life that's why, the LXDE team moved to LXQT and still sue openbox as the window manager on that platform.

Openbox is still supported by distro's, as an X11 window manager it never really has to change much, and really the only issue nowadays is the window borders not supporting hidpi displays, of which is a non issue because there's no need for window decorations anyway.

Also this ocnversation should probably be moved out of this thread as we'r steering it off topic.