KDE, it's the swiss army knife of DEs.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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I'm a long time supporter of Xfce, but I have to say Cinnamon these days. It's light on resources while being feature rich. Also it's the default on Mint and it just works.
I use XFCE, but I like Cinnamon too. I use Nemo and Xed instead of Thunar and...whatever.
Switched from i3 to sway to hyland. I like the virtual desktop setup and noiseless facing interaction.
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
True people only use i3 or the-other-i3-for-wayland
/s, of course. But still my personal choice
KDE plasma, unless it's on a tablet, then Gnome
Xfce
KDE Plasma for ease of use if using Nvidia Otherwise Hyprland or exwm
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.
The amount of not KDE answers here surprises me. Y'all a bunch of nerds [endearing]
i3
best tiling on X
I am absolutely with you about i3. Simply great (there is also dwm or qtile)! But it is a WM, not a DE, what OP asked about.
fair
xfce+i3 i guess
You mean switching between the DE xfce and the WM i3wm, right? Yep, this works and it can indeed make life sometimes easier to have a DE and a WM aside each other.
yeah, basically just running xfce but replacing xfwm4 with i3
i was kinda surprised how well it worked tbh, i had been using i3 on it's own for like a year before i tried it
Oh, I did not know about the possibility of replacing xfwm4 with i3. I too am using i3 for some years and like a lot to have a clean surface which facilitates focussing on my tasks. However, never thought about integrating it in a DE.
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
-
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
-
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.
Sway for a laptop, Plasma for desktop.
Had you have asked me a few weeks ago, I probably would have said Sway for both,.or maybe Gnome for the desktop... But I decided to check out KDE again for the first time in like 20 years, and while it's still kind of a hot mess it has come a long way.
KDE for the desktop and xfce for the laptop
why not kde for laptop?
I'd imagine lower power laptop? Though I'm using KDE on a laptop from 2012 and it works fine
Herbstluftwm with dmenu. Just a windows manager. I've gotten used to using the command line for things I used to rely on a DE for.
I'm happy with Linux Mint so far (2 mos in)
which desktop env tho? Cinnamon?
Yes, Mint Cinnamon. Weird combination of names tho, I don't even want to think about combining those flavors.
Had To scroll way too far to find Cinnamon so here's back to the top.
Probably Plasma because it's familiar and you're able to customize it extensively over time.