Which desktop environment, and why?

I also asked about distro LINEAGE in another post.

Which Linux distro / which lineage do you use?

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt ・ Apr 16 '21

#linux #discuss #fedora #docker

Comments

[Alex Lohr]

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.

[MT]

i3wm. Because I love it

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

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).

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

What was your review of Gentoo Linux?

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

I’m personally rather fond of Gentoo for a couple of very specific reasons:

• The performance gains from using code optimized for the specific CPU micro-architecture of the local system, while not huge (usually not more than single digit percent improvements over generic builds of the same code), are somewhat significant for my typical usage.
• The customizability that Gentoo allows for is huge for me, both because it lets me keep attack surface as minimal as possible by not enabling functionality I don’t need, and because it allows me to make use of features which are not readily available in more mainstream distros because the distro maintainers either don’t see them as worth worrying about, or don0t feel that they’re stable enough to let users use them.
• I find Portage a lot easier to work with when dealing with custom packages (which I do work with on a semi-regular basis) than most other options. Building a custom DEB or RPM is tedious, a custom APK for Alpine is a serious pain in the arse, and while Arch is not horrible it’s still not great. On Gentoo though, a custom package amounts to maybe a dozen lines of shell script in the right directory layout.
• Gentoo is also one of the few distros that gives you near complete flexibility with the storage stack. This is big for me because I’m a bit obsessive about reliability and maintainability of persistent storage in my systems (to the point of ensuring I can do live, online storage device replacements without any downtime and without any need to boot into a separate OS).

The downsides are a lot more general though:

• Installation is pretty much entirely DIY. For most people this is a major hurdle because they’re used to dealing with much more actively guided installation processes, but it can also, ironically, be a good thing, because it means that you can put together a Gentoo system without needing to actually do it on the system you are putting together without much difficulty compared to Fedora or Debian (this is wonderful when working with VMs or systems that need to use a network filesystem for their root filesystem).
• Regular day-to-day management of Gentoo systems is a bit more involved and a lot more technical than most other Linux distros. You pretty much have to understand how each part of your system works, at least at a conceptual level, to be able to manage it, unlike distros like Ubuntu or Mint which try to hide all of this from the user as much as possible.
• Updates can take a very long time, especially if you only do them infrequently, and tend to use a lot of system resources compared to most other distros. Gentoo builds almost everything locally unless you go out of your way to set up a binary package host (but even then you have to build everything somewhere), so you have to deal with compile times and the overhead associated with building software (which can be quite bad at times, WebKit for example takes about 45 minutes to build even on a very fast system, and LibreOffice and LLVM are even worse). This in particular is the primary reason I don’t use Gentoo literally everywhere, as I have some systems that either lack the processing power to support this or need to have minimal system impact from updates.

[trollmannen8]

I use GNOME. I love that it's keyboard-centric and has pretty good shortcuts.

[Jean-Michel Plourde]

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.

[Roman Right]

i3wm + polybar
Incredibly comfortable to manage windows and jump between workspaces

[Jesse Phillips]

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.

[Daniel Ziltener]

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.

[Daniel Ziltener]

XFCE being light is an urban legend. It's fatter than Plasma and afaik even GNOME are.

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

Thanks for sharing.

Albeit not really lightweight, its default looks looks better than GNOME3 and KDE IMO.

[Heiker]

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.