I also asked about distro LINEAGE in another post.
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I also asked about distro LINEAGE in another post.
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Raymond Baghumian -
Ben Halpern -
Bogomil Shopov - Бого -
Michael Tharrington -
Oldest comments (24)
I use XFCE, because it is simple and unobtrusive. I considered switching to Enlightenment or LXQT at some point, but never really got around to do so.
i3wm. Because I love it
XFCE. It’s simple, configurable, and most importantly, efficient. The only other desktop environment I ever liked enough to actually use is Cinnamon, but I can’t get that on Gentoo anymore (it got dropped from Portage due to a general lack of maintainership).
What was your review of Gentoo Linux?
I’m personally rather fond of Gentoo for a couple of very specific reasons:
The downsides are a lot more general though:
I use GNOME. I love that it's keyboard-centric and has pretty good shortcuts.
I used GNOME for the last 3-4 years because it's the default desktop env. Recently, I dove into i3wm because I wanted my stuff always at the same place and have more customization.
I couldn't be more pleased by a desktop env than with i3wm. When I log in my browser, IDE, Slack and Spotify all open in their seperate workspace and I can retrieve them with Mod+ so I can finally ditch the ****** alt+tab. I also like how you can rearrange the windows of a workspace: you can put them stacked on top of each others, side by side dividing your spaces how you want, etc.
i3wm + polybar
Incredibly comfortable to manage windows and jump between workspaces
I used xfce for years, it is solid and good workspace control. I took a short period with i3, workspaces take on a new meaning and core to its function. Today I am using Gnome, the new approach to task management is interesting.
I found i3 was very primative on its application launch. Not having a menu to launch applications is a problem for me, I don't always know everything. I also had to change out the default launcher so I could launch applications with names I knew. It just can't find apps as well as gnome-do.
Plasma all the way! It is customizable, sleek, fast, and has a great community behind it. It also doesn't throw stones in your way when you try to do something that doesn't strictly adhere to the developers' ideology (GNOME does this).
If I may also recommend a distribution, openSUSE is still the definite edition of a KDE Plasma distribution :) There's the Argon and Krypton live CDs with the latest releases.
XFCE being light is an urban legend. It's fatter than Plasma and afaik even GNOME are.
Thanks for sharing.
Albeit not really lightweight, its default looks looks better than GNOME3 and KDE IMO.
LXDE. I switched to debian but I found out too late they don't have qtile in their official repositories, so I went with LXDE because I know they use openbox as the window manager. Now, qtile and openbox are very different but for my specific workflow that doesn't have a big impact.
I use i3wm bcz it's a window manager, and lightweight and customisable, and I can almost add shortcuts for everything, and it's a manual tailer, so I can choose where and how the next window be, finally it's configuration is completely understandable and simple
Probably this is the only window manager, that can add or remove keybindings on the move,
Ex:
modes
I use gnome. Actually, I haven't found my Linux yet, but currently gnome serves me well.Having a terminal already makes me very happy. I am just having problems with some updates, that I am having to reinstall several (apps) instead of just updating.I like a nice design, but I also don't give up high customization power. For now I am very satisfied.
I have dual boot with KDE and GNOME because I like both of them and I’m not able to take a final decision. I’m waiting to try GNOME 40 and see if having the horizontal virtual desktops (like KDE) helps me to decide which one is for me.
XFCE.
It's like plasma but lighter and equally personalizable
Plasma is objectively lighter than XFCE
KDE Plasma, hands down, for its infinite configurability, low RAM consumption, and beautiful appearance with little effort (none, actually, it looks great out of the box even if copying the Windows paradigm way too much). Also, no stupid CSD titlebars. And the ability to "Add new [stuff]" to pretty much every aspect of the desktop is unparalleled on any other DE on any OS.
GNOME 3/40 takes the macOS approach of "you're to stupid to decide for yourself," then tries to make up for it with perhaps the hackiest extension ecosystem ever created (they're like bandaids, if bandaids performed life-threatening surgery every time you put them on; surgery all but guaranteed to kill you if you aren't the right age, blood type, and eye color). Deepin is gorgeous, but good luck if it's not exactly the way you want it already.
Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon, and every other Mutter-based/GNOME 3 fork DE are pretty much do the same, just with different desktop paradigms, because GNOME 3 made it such a hacky pain to extend.
Mate and XFCE are lightweight, performant, and fairly customizable, but both still have quite a few bugs and/or lots of ugly little paper cuts, especially with panels and widgets (and XFCE's Orage "calendar" widget is a crime against humanity).
I may not be as "leet" as the "haxors" using one of the trendy tiling managers (though there are about 27 different KWin scripts for tiling windows if I want that sort of thing in Plasma), and may not be consuming as little RAM as those using LXDE/LXQT, [WHATEVER]Box, etc, but at least my desktop doesn't require hacking a config file for simple settings changes and doesn't look reminiscent of Windows 98 or older.
With that said, if Mate ever got the old GNOME 2 (formerly the most configurable desktop, from which Mate was forked) style up to date with desktop computing in this decade AND squashed bugs which have persisted since GNOME 2 AND made it easy to select KWin as the window manager, I'd be on board. For all the ridicule it received, Ubuntu's (still GNOME 2 based) pre-Unity Netbook Edition is probably the best DE that ever existed (at the very least, its full-screen menu was the best of the sort that ever existed - please stop trying to imitate macOS's Launchpad, it's really not that good).
Clean install of desktop environment (on Arch linux) seems to be best at the get go for KDE / Plasma, and not that good for Xfce.
However, both Xubuntu and Manjaro Xfce (and perhaps Mint Xfce, IIRC) had Xfce well done at the very start.
I find GNOME 3 less customizable; however, Ubuntu MATE and my memories of old Ubuntu GNOME 2 are fairly customizable.