I’m currently testing Fedora KDE on a VM (windows host) before eventually switching over to Linux completely.
Gnome. Feels most polished and least cluttered to me.
Seconded. I used to use Ubuntu, but I switched to Debian + GNOME and I love it.
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Plasma definitely. Xfce is second.
Any preferences on the distro? I’ve been enjoying Fedora but I’ve also tested Ubuntu and enjoyed that
You should try Arch btw
Not for beginners, that’s just mean
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Tbh youre probably better off on something like Linux Mint or something else Debian or Ubuntu based. Fedora is a good distro but rpms are a lot less common than debs are and alien does not entirely fix that issue.
While I would still recommend Ubuntu or Mint or even Debian, I have been using openSUSE for years and have never run into a case where I had to compile software.
I’m not sure why you are bringing Gentoo into it here. I mean that all the software I have tried to install is either available in the repos or available as an appimage/flatpak. Were it not available in binary form I would need to compile it - and I have not run into that scenario.
I’ll probably end up settling on Ubuntu. Thought I’d try a couple before making a final decision.
Ubuntu is doing an annoying attempt to generate lock-in and profits by forcing snap on everyone and making it annoyingly difficult to avoid.
Consider one of the ubuntu derivatives (there’s a number of them, Mint, Pop etc) in preference to ubuntu itself, a debian derivative (KDE neon for example) or go with Fedora if you’re a business orientated user.
I landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed about five years ago and still don’t see myself hopping to another one
Opensuse TW or Fedora
Fedora Plasma is truly awesome!
Install gentoo
But for real, depends on your use case I use arch on my dev machine and you get nearly every package in the AUR
Plasma. It’s the most customizable and you can dive in and shape it. It feels much more natural for me to jump into.
I put xfce on older hardware.
Distro wise I tend to go with Ubuntu flavors most because they seem to have better compatibility for various software and stuff I need, but I haven’t really shopped around too hard in years. Work is RHEL (and clones) and they make me sad.
I’m thinking of settling on Ubuntu for the same reason. It’s easy enough to get a VM setup and test other distros if needed
KDE is what finally got me to switch from Windows.
Out of the box I found it a better user experience than Windows 10s desktop, but having it be stupid easy to customize and theme on top of that has made me never wanna go back.
KDE for me. As much as I hate windows, I like the floating windows, task bar and tray. KDE has that out of the box and lets me tweak all the little annoyances away.
Of all the things I hate about Microsoft Windows, the GUI design is not one of them. The content of those windows is janky as all hell. But the floating windows, taskbar, and tray? Those are all great.
I love the minimize all windows button. It is so small and functional, I always use the KDE Widget that copies it, and IMO, KDE should use it by default
Plasma, but only on Wayland (which is better anyway unbiased opinion).
Man i didnt realize how much better Wayland is until I had to use a provided setup for a few weeks.
The fact that I can’t swipe to switch virtual desktops on xorg was enough to make me question why xorg doesn’t offer such basic things after all the years
The swiping thing is apparently a deliberate decision by KDE for whatever reason.
Well, yeah, but they made that decision, because X11 is a pain to implement and debug this stuff on.
That sounds like a pretty good reason yeah
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How are you swiping, out of curiosity? I have windows occupying the whole screen.
I switch workspaces with a keyboard shortcut or by clicking buttons on the panel.
It’s with three fingers on a touchpad.
There’s some short clips of it here: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.25.0/
Oh I see. But I thought such gestures were available a long time ago, I remember apps like Fusuma, and there was talk of adding them to libinput so that every DE could let the user assign actions to gestures.
Yeah, this is now using the libinput gestures. It’s mainly exciting, because it’s available out-of-the-box, even for non-techies and lazy people (me).
With general technological advances and I believe Windows having similar gestures, it’s now also rarely the case that touchpad hardware doesn’t support multi-touch input…
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Gnome 44. Simple, familiar and all my extensions work!
I use Debian with XFCE.Really lightweight and stable
Back to Debian after a long hiatus and XFCE was my choice for the exact same reasons.
me as well
Xfce. It’s lightweight and looks great with a little bit of customisation. For me it’s the perfect balance between performance, usability and looks
Sway
Sway is a WM not a DE. So you create your own DE? Or, I see Regolith is integrating sway, I think with Gnome Flashback as with i3. Not sure if there are others.
Yeah, I thought about not responding on the basis that Sway wasn’t a DE, but someone else responded CWM, so I figured at least if I bucked the system, I wouldn’t be alone in it.
Plus, not everyone really knows the difference between a DE and a WM. And not everyone knows that a lot of people don’t use a DE. So, often times, people use “DE” and “WM” synonymously, not really knowing there’s a difference.
(Not saying that describes OP or anyone here in particular. But there was definitely a time when that described me. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that described some folks who were browsing this thread.)
Oh, but to answer your question directly, no I don’t use anything that could be considered a DE. I use “dmenu_run” from Suckless to launch applications. That’s about the only thing I “add” to Sway in my setup.
I didn’t realise that people use them interchangeably. I’ve got an idea on what a WM is and what a DE is but nothing super in depth.
A WM is literally just the window manager. It makes windows work and have a border and maximize and stuff but that’s it.
A DE gives you a lot of other stuff: a root window that makes up the “desktop”, panels & widgets, notification area, an application menu, workspaces, window and workspace switchers, global hotkeys, the concept of a session and stuff related to it (things to run on start, or saving your session between reboots), a unified theme and fonts etc. etc.
There are also programs that fall somewhere between these. For example tiling WM tend to fill the whole screen so they don’t care a lot about all the things I mentioned but they can integrate with some other stuff to some extent. Or something like OpenBox which includes a very lightweight desktop, menu and panel so I guess you could call it a DE but it’s all contained in one executable.
I’ve really appreciated running i3 within gnome-flashback. I keep hitting things that just work, that I didn’t even realize I wanted. I hit the pause/mute button on my headphones when watching youtube and it paused… Things like ssh agents, hotplugging monitors and having it remember your preferred config, the main gnome settings GUI, the compose key, etc… I’m just not interested in reinventing all that, even though each individual step is usually not hard.
I’m glad to see Regolith is making a DE with Sway. One day I’ll migrate from i3 and I may let Regolith give me a DE.
KDE
It’s like a swiss-army knife of DEs.
I try to make it look like Windows 7.
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In my (and my friend’s) experience, KDE has been notoriously unreliable. We faced issues like the wifi icon just disappearing randomly, the time thingy disappearing, etc.
I have been using GNOME for around five years now (I temporarily switched to KDE 2 yrs back and reswitched to GNOME 3 months later). Till now, GNOME has been extremely stable for me. The only issue that I experienced was a memory (although that was fixed in subsequent updates).
Hence, based on this experience, if you’re looking for stability, I would highly recommend GNOME. However, if u’r looking for more customization at the cost of less stability, KDE ain’t bad.
KDE is very stable. You are using some bad, 2 years old version because Ubuntu LTS cycle.
I don’t think so. I was using Garuda at the time, which is based on Arch.
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I see… Maybe I’ll give KDE a try again the next time I’ll distro hop!
Gnome
GNOME
Personally I’ve been on KDE for a few years, I love the way I can customize my workflow, from the default apps to the panels layout. The KDE team has made fantastic progress since I’ve started using it, and it’s now very stable and feature rich. I’m very excited for the upcoming Plasma 6
And as a reminder to everybody, please donate if you can, no matter what software you use. Especially if you’ve been using that DE for a while. Open source projects like these are always in need of funding!
Every time I hear this, I’m tempted to try KDE again, but every time I do, I run into stability issues.
I really like the customizability, particularly being able to set up the workflow you want. But then I hit stability issues and that just kills it for me - pun only somewhat intentional.
I guess it’s a hit or miss depending on the hardware. I’ve never had a single stability issue with plasma ever since I started using it
I doubt it’s a hardware issue. That said, fair enough re: experiences may vary.
