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)
kde plasma, it’s fast, it’s pretty, it’s handy, it has all the keyboard shortcuts.
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.
Kde so sexy
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.
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
I don’t like how Gnome devs seemingly can’t agree on anything with other desktop environments
Yeah, especially how they dont include minimize and maximize window buttons by default, that’s incomprehensible LOL
I’m not a Gnome user but I stopped minimizing my windows years ago. Don’t need that if you (a) don’t have icons on your desktop and (b) move your windows over to another workspace when stuff gets crowded.
That’s like saying I don’t need to clean my room if I can just shove everything into the closet
Shoving everything into the task bar doesn’t strike me as more orderly. Less so really.
I found some negative press about cosmic which can be valid or not.
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-on-cosmicRepeating my other reply verbatim as you just did the same:
First, to be clear, this isn’t so much “press” as a blog entry. Second, there are only so many mentions of “rust cultists” and “my rust” I can read in a blog before losing interest.
I’ve seen that blog post. Tbh Vaxry is kinda unhinged. I think he cares about Cosmic being written in Rust more than the “rust cultists” themselves :P
Oh, I didn’t know that I randomly found this blog.post.
GNOME. Eagerly waiting for cosmic.
Same. Gnome currently but will certainly be trying Cosmic
I think that’s what popos comes with, never looked into what the differences are between them or why one would want to switch
Using it on my latest install. Not bad. I mostly picked it for the visual aspects but I’m in the fence about it’s functionality. It feels like it takes more clicks than it should to open stuff.
Perhaps, but it’s also good to remember that it’s still in Alpha. That could still change. I feel like it would be hard to give a good review before it’s at least RC1
I already use the cosmic alpha and it works great. No crashes so far, the only thing that has happend twice in 2 Months of using it is the screen locker did not display after waking up from suspend which meant I needed to go to a VT and kill cosmic-session
I tried it and mostly love it. It’s not quite polished enough yet for me and I have two main complaints. First, half of my keyboard shortcuts don’t work anymore, and I wasn’t able to fix that last I tried. Second, it wouldn’t let me lock my computer or suspend. Had to shutdown everytime. Other than that and random librecalc crashes, I’m excited to see where it is in the coming months. Really rooting for the pop team
I like gnome also. I’m going to try cosmic de but probably won’t use it full time.
I do use the PaperWM and dash to dock extensions, so it isn’t stock gnome. I normally don’t like extensions or addons but these are well done and it seems like they have staying power.
Xfce… Because I donno, been using it for many years
Ngl I like xfce because its Snappy, even on modern pcs.
Xfce is light and crisp! Looks great and works well with my myriad low-end computers 🐁
Always ran xfce on my old used thinkpads!
I first used XFCE on my old 700mhz processor Thinkpad back in the day. Back then, Gnome and especially KDE were known to use excessive resources on low-end machines so XFCE was preferred.
However, I actually quite liked the DE so I just switched to it permanently, even on my more capable machines. I’ve been running XFCE for around 15 years 😆
Same because it works really well over VNC. It feels almost like I’m actually on a local machine.
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.
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.Gnome because it is the default in my district, works right out of the box and I’m too old to fart around with customizing things anymore.
I just want to get to work.
You don’t have to configure KDE you know. You can just keep the defaults like you’re probably doing with GNOME.
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.
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.Another i3 user here. I slowly transitioned from KDE when switching keyboard layout stopped working as well as some other DE related things.
Ended up writing custom script for switching. Currently implemented with rofi in Perl, bc I like the syntax.
I still like having a bit nice gui, so i have wallpapers, some icons, etc. But I fell in love with terminal
along with neovim : ), soo kinda looking for that middle ground between look, performance and functionality.Haven’t finished tweaking all the configs to my liking, but after that vanilla Arch is the direction I plan to go, since many things in my current install that I have as well as haven’t customized work a bit questionably or exist for no reason.
Perl, bc I like the syntax
You… Monster
I love KDE. It’s got easy to use power user features and is very robust.
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
KDE all the way, it’s incredible especially since 6
It’s been great almost since I started using it.
I started using it exactly when 4.0 came out, because that’s when I started using Linux and I thought learning 3 didn’t make sense. But 4 only got stable around 4.4 I think. The problem was that 4.0 wasn’t intended to be for end users yet, but distributions didn’t realize that and packaged it right away.
KDE didn’t repeat that mistake. 5.0 was almost completely smooth sailing (some applications took a long time to port and looked ugly, that’s it), and 6.0 was completely seamless.
GNOME
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.
You can try something like budgie,mate and cinnamon if you rlly want gnome done right.
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whoops accidentally replied to a comment
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.
Sway. Very customiseable and extremely snappy
Same.
I dont do much customization, but the endevorOS community edition has decent defaults.
Just working cleanly with tiling feels so good. You dont have to use the mouse to move all the windows around. But if you hold the super key, you can just drag windows around to make a perfect layout. But often than not, i just want 2 windows side by side, with no wasted space. Done.