cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1789763
For me its KDE.
Personally, I’m a bit torn currently… I’ve mostly used Pop!_OS’s customized Gnome desktop since I fully switched to Linux in 2019, and I am also rather eager to try out their upcoming, Rust-based Cosmic Desktop too.
However, I have come to quite like KDE on my laptop now running OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s a fantastic experience, and honestly more distros should ship with it rather than plain Gnome.
Curious what others here say their favorite is though!
I’m a KDE guy. It does what I need, has the options I want, and stays out of my way. I’ve used just about everything though. I used to like XFCE and GNOME 2 but it feels like KDE is the most actively developed nowadays, and I can shape KDE to be minimal if needed. With Wayland being the way that it is, it currently feels necessary to stay on the most actively maintained DEs for compatibility.
Yeah, I’ve begun to come around to that thinking as well. I’m curious to see what S76 has for their Cosmic DE that’s written in Rust. I imagine I’ll stick with that, though if that doesn’t pan out well, I’d likely consider switching to KDE Plasma as my primary DE for my gaming/work PC.
We’ll see if Cosmic DE is good enough to dethrone KDE/GNOME. My hopes are not high that S76 can do it better, but I’d like to be surprised.
Based on early views of it, I think it’ll certainly give Gnome a run for it’s money. If nothing else, it’s helping to flesh out a Rust-based GUI toolkit for the rest of us. Iced is gonna be a lot more powerful in the end, whether their DE succeeds or fails.
The one with the funny mouse logo. (XFce)
Xfce is a good DE, honestly! I’ve used it with custom RPi setups before with good effect.
On desktop: KDE because of the amount of customization that is possible. I’ve been trying window managers but I haven’t found one I like yet.
On mobile: Phosh because it feels a lot more complete compared to other options.
KDE because it’s very usable right out of the box and because it’s basically windows but better. Since I have to use windows at work, switching between that and KDE is very easy.
I use Cinnamon (the one with Linux Mint). I know I could probably be more efficient with other DEs and I’d like to try Wayland, but it does what I need and I’m used to it.
Not really a DE, but… suckless’s DWM. I have no idea how they fit a window manager into 20KB AND made it actually usable on the daily
Same. I’m currently in a setup with dwm, rofi and jonaburg-picom, and is the most pleasant desktop experience of my life
Hard agree. I have a foot switch that sends a mod keypress for mine. Changed my whole workflow.
At this moment, I’ve already tried almost every DE excluding some tiling wms or things like LabWM/Openbox/IceWM. I’ve spent most time tryings these DEs on Fedora, and for me these years with Fedora were the most frustrating ones in my whole Linux experience. I really loved Gnome, but Gnome 44 felt so unstable for me (Nautilus freezing when context menu opened and both mouse buttons pressed, constant crashes of some internal components like tracker-miners, memory leaks in Gnome software and so on). Mate and Cinnamon both were great, but on my current rig Xorg just doesn’t work for me, especially in some games utilizing DXVK when FPS exceeds my 144hz refresh rate and everything becomes too choppy. Budgie looks great too, but last time I tried it it was impossible to switch to a different keyboard layout on a lock screen, and the whole DE just was constantly crashing. And most of my time I spent on KDE starting from 5.14. From version 5.22 I fully switched to Wayland session, and while it was a mess until 5.27 released, which fixed constant freezes when your clipboard had too many things inside, but with latest Fedora release the whole experience became a nightmare for me - KDE applications were crashing, default power profiles made my laptop instantly shutting down when something power intense was started on a discrete card (AMD RX 6600M), and then I just decided to try a new Debian release in a total despair from my whole experience. So I installed Debian with KDE, set everything I need, and… oh my god, I think I finally found my zen. KDE 5.27 with Wayland works SOOOO stable I just couldn’t believe I wasn’t running it on Xorg. Laptop stopped shutting down when discrete GPU was utilised on battery, it always wakes up from sleep, it just works flawlessly. I even guess I never was more happy in my whole life xD
So looks like Fedora was my main problem for the whole time, and maybe I should try Gnome on Debian someday, but as for now I’m just so tired, and I just want my computer to work without trying to surprise me with sudden instability when I really need to work. And sorry for my long boring story not even really related to DEs, but while I was writing this comment for some reason I thought I should say about all these things, heh
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I used AfterStep then WindowMaker a long time ago…then eventually settled into GNOME, which has mostly worked for me over its many iterations. I’ve tried KDE throughout its history…but it’s never clicked for me.
Yeah, for a while I also found that Gnome, despite the irritations that comes with it, was just overall a less… intrusive DE. Though S76’s customizations helped make it more like the MacOS experience I had come from. However, recently with all the work that KDE has put into Plasma, I’ve sorta begun to come around to it. Especially with Wayland, it really shines on Tumbleweed with that.
KDE Plasma Dragonized. (default Garuda Linux desktop)
gnome ftw
mostly i3wm (or sway on wayland systems), like some of the other folks here. my studio machine uses kde just to keep things loose for creative projects, but i’m on the fence as to whether or not it gets in the way more than it helps… and sometimes i’ll fire up WindowMaker for about 5 minutes until the nostalgia wears off and i actually want to start getting things done XP
but out of the above, i feel like i3 or sway hits a good sweet spot in terms of moment to moment flexibility, and tight, mostly predictable behavior. i like being able to dig in and customize keyboard controls and automation without getting too deep in the Code Zone
My preferences aren’t super strong, but I like Xfce because of its lightweightness and customizability. Prior to Xfce, I used Gnome…which is neither of those but still fine.
KDE with custom shortcuts and window rules. It can even have dynamic tiling
