I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it’s Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)…etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.
Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the “Flagship Manjaro version”. I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.
After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.
What about you guys?
XFCE
KDE, always
Used it since I switched to the Linux Desktop 25 years ago. Quickly tried gnome, and others, and hated it.
KDE is fast, efficient, looks awesome, is ready to work with, and highly customizable
Probably KDE, it’s the most ‘complete’ feeling to me with settings and GUI for most things.
I would say the same & I don’t even use it—but I would trust it being around the longest & is better than GNOME IMO.
KDE plasma. Coming from 30 years of running exclusively windows it’s just the most comfortable and easy for me to use (way more than Gnome). Easily configurable, works. Can’t ask for more.
KDE, it’s the swiss army knife of DEs.
KDE for sure. The modern versions look exactly like how I want a desktop environment to look out of the box, and they keep the full range of customizability that a desktop should, IMO, allow it’s users to have. Which is something Windows just kept slowly getting rid of over the years.
I also prefer to have a taskbar that is ever present with a traditional start menu that’s cleanly organized by category rather than the current full screen pop up “activities” search thing gnome does nowadays.
KDE the customization is off the charts
KDE plasma, unless it’s on a tablet, then Gnome
KDE Plasma for ease of use if using Nvidia Otherwise Hyprland or exwm
MATE has been on most of my machines, except the BSD ones.
But past year or so, I have grown a fondness towards ctwm, and gradually migrated my machines to it, Linux and BSD alike.
It is not a DE, but the fact that I have to assemble my suite of software myself on my machines, makes the point of using DEs moot.
Cinnamon for 2 reasons
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KDE is missing a lot of features which still only works in Gnome. Like the taskbar Calendar app syncing events with services like Google Calendar
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cinnamon is extremely stable and doesn’t move your icons around when you connect to an external display with your laptop and the display has a different resolution.
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Always wanted to like gnome but never could, and xfce is fine but I much prefer KDE, it is verry likely that I’ll actually keep it till my pc breaks.
That’s the beauty of gnome: they don’t give a single fuck if you like it. You can return the favor.
Gnome has the apple philosophy that the user conforms to technology, not the other way around.
Apple actually had good visionaries and design decisions, sometimes.
Never been a fan of apple’s hardware decisions, but their software is routinely state-of-the-art even to this day.
They value treating the user like a human instead of a programmer. GNOME values removing as many features as possible to make their jobs easier.
No shade to Gnome, because there is a place for them in the ecosystem, but this is why I moved from Gnome 2 to KDE (with a few stops along the way). One size will not fit all.
Oh yeah for sure. I think if Gnome works for people they should use it. I’m not stoked on the situation of Gnome Extensions being needed for some pretty basic customisations, adding instability to the DE though.
Plenty of people just don’t have the brain capacity to read settings or multitask and that’s fine. If that works for them, good for them.
Until they need gnome to do something it doesn’t do…
XFCE would be my choice too
There is nothing better than Xfce, if you dont like the desktop, at least Xfce allows you to customize. KDE seems interesting, but the last time i tried it, 10 years ago more or less, it was a bit buggy.
You owe KDE a second look if it’s been that long.
Agreed. I used to be a diehard XFCE fan and hated KDE. Then I saw their resource usage came pretty close to each other but KDE had way more development behind it so they could add Wayland support (which I actually don’t even use.)
KDE used to be buggy and bloated. They’ve been improving stability for years and their efforts really show. I used to think it was bloated, but it really isn’t if you only use the parts you need. I use it pretty similarly to XFCE, it just has more dev support.
I remember when kde looked like xfce and yeah back then it was buggy. Today it looks like a slightly jank windows 7 but with the giant buttons and curved corners that characterize 2015 software.
Most of the bugs seem to come from Wayland still being vaguely trashy and kde not having fully migrated from xorg
KDE.
