this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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So a few months back I asked about you guys os in c/asklemmy, so this time I wanna ask about your desktops you use on this same account.
(I use kde but plan to move to cinnamon I find kde buggy and gnome tracker3 randomly broke for no reason + themeing so yh idk if these happened to anybody)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

KDE Plasma 5.

It's default on Slackware =P

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Slackware still on kde 5 makes sense

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Xfce

I've daily driven every major DE except KDE (GNOME, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon) and I always ended up switching back to xfce. I'm not a fan of GNOME's workflow and since it's not that customizable without extensions, that made me switch from it very quickly. I used Cinnamon on Mint for a few months and while the experience was mostly fine, it sometimes felt a bit laggy. As for MATE, while I love the GNOME 2 layout and it's a relatively lightweight DE, I encountered plenty of visual bugs there and I could very easily replicate that GNOME 2 layout on Xfce (without a system menu, but still).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Nobody uses cinnamon? Honestly - I really like using cinnamon with Debian. I heard that they promised not to fuck with the UI for no reason unlike... everyone! @Mwa Cinnamon is a fairly nice, easy to use desktop - I don't really care which is better, but if they change it, you have to re-learn it. Top tip for UI design - don't think that your users want to re-learn how to interact with your UI - they might go outside, or elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah i like the ui.

[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 week ago (2 children)

kde plasma, it's fast, it's pretty, it's handy, it has all the keyboard shortcuts.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

The only desktop that has a clipboard feature(superkey + v) I love, most of the desktop I see don't have it and the clipboard show up as a system tray app.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

KDE Plasma on all my computers and also as desktop mode on Steam Deck. because it supports the latest technologies especially when it comes to graphics (HDR, VRR) also has best support for Wayland and multi-monitors. It looks great out of the box and it has a lot of features out of the box and I do not need to battle with adding some extensions that break with almost every update. KDE Plasma is also the most flexible desktop and I can set the workflow really to fit my desires and I can actually set many options and settings. And despite all these built-in features and configurability it still uses very few system resources and is very fast and smooth. Oh and the KDE community is one of the most welcoming I have met in FOSS world, and they listen to their users instead of the our way or the high way mentality I have so often encountered in GNOME for example. So yeah TLDR KDE Plasma is the one I like the most of all in the industry, even when compared to proprietary closed alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago (7 children)

GNOME. Eagerly waiting for cosmic.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Xfce... Because I donno, been using it for many years

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Ngl I like xfce because its Snappy, even on modern pcs.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Gnome. It just works out of the box and I can fly through it using the keyboard and touchpad without having to configure it first.
I've done the whole song and dance with tiling WMs, or going through all of KDE's settings until it was perfect, but I just can't be bothered anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (4 children)

these days Hyprland but previously i3.

i basically live in the terminal unless i'm playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.

not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

I'm still on i3 as it's been convenient, but this:

this has all become very specialized over the past decade

resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it's persistent across installations.

One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3's config:

bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause

But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I'm in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#

CURRENT=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
ZOOM=$(xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Meeting")

if [[ -n "$ZOOM" ]]; then
    # if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM}
    xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT}
else
    # otherwise do play/pause
    playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi

and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sway. Very customiseable and extremely snappy

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

Cinnamon. Desktop environment peaked in the Windows XP/Gnome 2 days and everything else is just change for the shake of change. :C

My only annoyance is lack of Wayland support. Tried out cosmic, but it doesn't have the Windows XP/Gnome 2 style window list.

Screenshot for anyone interested:

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

Gnome, be it PC or Laptop. It just remains out of my way with it's minimalism. Tried KDE for a while, and I seriously can't stand it, personally.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Was a Gnome user until Gnome 3.

Since Plasma 5, I use KDE Plasma.

I'm just going to share my unvarnished opinions here, I clearly understand that Gnome users feel differently, and that's okay.

  • Gnome 3 performance was objectively worse on every bit of hardware I tried than Plasma. (Unfortunately I had functional gripes with Plasma 4 so couldn't use it.)
  • The years of faffing about I had trying to be happy with Gnome 3 and trying to use other alternatives until Plasma 5 was ready pretty much convinced me of this:
    • Gnome devs care more about achieving their vision of how a desktop should be used than they do about accommodating users who might feel differently. This is my perception, and it's a deeply held opinion. No matter how strongly you feel I'm wrong, you aren't going to change my mind. You can come at me if you want, but it's going to bear no fruit.
    • KDE devs have a vision, but place nearly equal importance on ensuring their users can make different choices if they choose. If this isn't true, they do a damn good job of pretending it is, and that's good enough for me. 🙂
  • I'm unhappy with the degree to which it appears the Gnome team has actively worked against the ability for users to easily customize, and with various feature removals that at this point are so far in my past that I probably don't remember the specific things that pissed me off, but I remember their explanations for feature removals being salt in an open wound every last time I cared enough to investigate their stated reasons.

Plasma 6 does everything I want the way I want. I have loaded it (and Plasma 5) on very low end and very high end hardware and found it performant and functional on both, consistently.

You'll note I don't claim it to be the best. There are folks out there for whom the Gnome vision happens to be how they like to work, or who aren't bothered by whatever hoops you have to jump through currently to customize a Gnome environment, and I'm sincerely happy for those people. For them, Gnome is the best.

There are lots of other DEs and of course tiling WMs exist, but it takes me no time at all to have a fresh plasma install working the way I want my computer to work and looking the way I want it to look, and thus I literally have zero complaints. So for the past few years I haven't even looked at any alternatives. If there's ever a time that I don't find the desktop product itself, and the KDE development team's approach to desktop development, to be absolutely perfect fits for me, I'll look elsewhere - but honestly probably not at Gnome.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

KDE, because it has all the features I need and also because I love theming and while QT apps can be themed pretty easily, GTK theming is somewhere between being absolutely horrible and non-existance.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

KDE Plasma. I just like it. It seems to have options to do what I want, for the most part. There's some things I wish it had, like a way to programmatically get the active window under Wayland, so StreamController could automatically change pages.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

xfce4. Stable as hell. X11. Can move windows around using just some keypresses.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Gnome on Nixos I like how standard it is I know what to expect

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

Wood. Usually medium density particle board.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

I love KDE. It's got easy to use power user features and is very robust.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

Gnome. I actually started with KDE. It's a good DE, but it's got so many options that I had choice fatigue. I constantly tweaked my taskbar instead of focusing on what I wanted to do. And it was easy to get it to a "looks broken" state

When I tried Gnome, I fell in love with it. I love the unique workflow, lack of distractions, the modern adwaita design, etc. Everything felt so polished

That being said, I don't like how Gnome devs seemingly can't agree on anything with other desktop environments. And I don't like how they refuse to support server-side window decorations. Like, I agree with them that CSD are better than SSD, but it would be reasonable to support SSD for toolkits that haven't/don't want to implement CSD themselves, right?

I'm excited for Cosmic. It looks like it combines the best of Gnome and KDE, and the devs don't have the “my way or the highway” mindset

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

KDE Plasma. It came on my steam deck which was my first intro to it, it blew me away and installed it on my laptop and finally ditched Windows shortly after. Works great for me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

KDE all the way, it's incredible especially since 6

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I am extremely basic and I'm using the XFCE that came with Linux mint. I don't need anything fancy.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

XFCE4. It's intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss

Enough features so that it "just works" (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.

Can't wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don't have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

I dont use a DE, I use a WM.

Semantics aside I’m on Hyprland, been using it for 6 months now and absolutely love it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

LXDE/LXQT because I grew up using potato computers and now I can't stand it if my DE uses more than 2% of my hardware resources

though I am currently using KDE because for fuck knows what reason, Kubuntu is the only prepackaged Linux I've been able to get to boot on my weird Samsung laptop and I haven't bothered to gut KDE and replace it with LXQT yet

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

Windows 10

Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.

I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

KDE Plasma and I refuse to use anything else on Linux unless there's no choice.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

KDE. It's customizable without adding lots of weirdness. It's got a solid set of included tools like Dolphin and Konsole. It's generally very stable and visually attractive.

No shade to other DEs. I've tried lots of them, I even have a couple of alternative DEs I'll log into when they are useful (i3 is great if I am doing something repetitive). But KDE is just the most comfortable for me for daily use.

The non-Gnome COSMIC DE that System76 has been developing is looking really promising though. I have the alpha on a spare laptop and find it very functional.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Depends on the computer I run. On fast computers (more than 5,000 passmark cpu points), i use gnome on whatever distro. On mid-speed computers (1000 to 5000 points), I use linux mint with cinnamon. On very old computers (400-1000), I use debian with XFce.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (5 children)

MATE (prn: MAH-Tay)

because it comes with standard Trisquel and is a smooth DE experience.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Gaming PC: GNOME (it works fine and I don't care about much else there)

Laptop: dwl (dwm for Wayland) and suckless tools. Ultra lightweight and comfy for browsing and watching videos. Usually at the same time.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

XFCE. I also like tiling WMs, but I often have to share computers and they are too unintuitive for the rest of the family.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (8 children)

I use gnome on my main machines, but looking to migrate to cosmic, and I use xfce on more limited devices.

I like the kde project, but I tend not to use it, because I find it a bit overwhelming, even after customizing it, it's hard to explain. I have issues with too many elements in front of me.

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