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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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KDE : it's the only DE where I can have 2 identical panels (app pined+ full system tray) on each of my 2 screens without installing extensions.
KDE can do what I want without having to look for extensions. Breeze theme is good enough for me, I don't need to look for something else. So far it's the best out of the box experience I had.
I prefer Gnome look, but I distr'hop too often to have the courage to setup the desktop every time.
Cinnamon is sold and easy to use. I use gnome but if I had to choose something else I would go cinnamon
Moksha DE is also good one. Budgie feels more bettter for new users than Cinnamon
I've been an user of XFCE4 for a decade now. It just works, easy to set up, low-resource impact.
Would openbox count?
80% of the full UI of a proper de but with 30% impact on really slow hardware.
Whoa, but the comma splice.
Are we doing popularity contests here?
I like Sway, it obviously needs a bit of configuration to be useful, but that's partly what I like about it, and using a distro like Guix (Nix configured with Lisp) makes it easy to have the same settings on multiple PCs. Otherwise I like GNOME; it's well supported and has many good apps. Touch/touchpad support is really good as well.
Gnome.
The workflow is amazing once it "clicks" (but in the few days it takes before that happens, man it's annoying. You end up asking yourself time and again why don't they just copy Windows like everybody else)
With the exception of ElementaryOS, Gnome seems to be the only DE that really cares about design, especially in terms of consistency. Random bits of text in different sizes, different fonts in different places, inconsistent padding, improper handling of rounded corners, etc all really bug me. Most people don't seem to notice or care (probably because MS has trained us not to care about UX consistency lol), but for me it wears me out and makes me hate using PCs. Gnome is a polished UX and it feels like everything was designed very purposely, with a lot of thought.
There's a good ecosystem of GTK4/Libadwaita apps.
Probably have the best accessibility features.
It's really stable for being a modern DE.
I respect the devs for having a vision and sticking to it, despite getting hate/death threats for it. It's led to a different and very functional DE, unshackled from the traditional Win95 UX paradigm.
E: just because it's not your DE of choice doesn't mean you need to downvote me or send me DMs calling me names lmao. Some people in the Linux community are completely unhinged lol
Gnome devs are getting death threats? If so that's terrible but not surprising as the community can be really distasteful at time.
I doubt it's happening anymore. But it did happen for a while after the change to Gnome 3
Xfce lover here. I tried Cinnamon for a bit and it is impressive, but I then moved to KDE on wayland. It's better than I thought. I decided to leave it almost not customized, just the panel on top and a couple of widgets. The thing with KDE, for me, is that you can't not love the developers for all the things they try to do and all the improvements they always bring. It's an impressive work. So, xfce on xorg and kde on wayland is my way to go. I'm not a fan of Gnome. It looks good at first, but after a bit I realize that simply it's not for me, not even the way it looks.
KDE is to busy for me. I need stupid simple and KDE is messy.
That is true. And so I am trying to not mess with it, which is a first for me actually😅
Well if it works for you that's good. We all have different tastes
KDE Plasma.
Im a KDE-Opensuse Jihadist
KDE. Looks great OOTB. Looks better if you spend an hour or two setting it up on day 1.
" Simple by defauly, Powerful when needed" is exactly what KDE is. Just try pressing function keys(F1-F12) and see how it expands its features. Oh and the edit mode!
I recently switched to KDE. What tweaks do you recommend (other than finding a theme you like)?
I love Gnome even if the fact that I have to add 2-3 extensions to make it work to my taste bothers me a little bit.
It should have a bit more options by default, while still retaining the beautiful UI.
I’m trying KDE in a virtual machine a little bit, but I guess I’ll never really explore its capabilities if I don’t daily drive it.
By the way, could someone explain what’s the difference between a WM and a DE?
WMs typically do not include stuff like a custom GUI for system settings and do not have a suite of GUI software associated with it (think Kate, Konsole, Dolphin etc) - it is just a piece of software for managing windows, you have to put the rest of the desktop together yourself.
Thanks for the answer. But then it means that people get a distro with a DE and install a WM on top of it? Or do you have distros coming with just a WM? What's the advantage of a WM compared to a DE?
Some distros have editions with a WM (usually i3) as a default, yes. These editions tend to come with some basic config so it's more usable out of the box. But you can also install WMs side by side with DEs and then switch in the login manager (GDM, SDDM), just the same as you can install multiple DEs on a system. You could also install a headless version of a distro first and then install only the WM and whatever other tools you want on top of that. Basically all system settings can be changed through config files or CLI programs, for some things like audio and bluetooth there are good DE-independent settings programs like pavucontrol.
You can also replace the WM built into KDE (kwin) with i3, for example, but that's pretty messy, IMO.
As for advantages, WMs are usually very keyboard driven, you pretty much never have to touch the mouse. They also tend to be fairly light weight and use little RAM. My favourite i3 feature is that workspaces are per-monitor, so I could easily move multiple windows between monitors and not lose the way they are set up.
As for disadvantages, changing any system settings tends to be a research project, because there is no centralized solution, it's even worse than Windows in this regard. Personally this is the main reason I switched back to KDE from i3. I could also never get theming to work quite right.
Thanks for the really good and helpful explanation!
To be honest it’s often difficult to understand every Linux subtilities, but the community is really great and compensate the lack of information you’re getting inside your distribution.
I would say aesthetically always preferred gnome but my laptop which is pretty low end ran slow on it. Kde is in that ballpark for my laptop in terms slowdowns but for the most part it floated through. That was when I used like manjaro.
But I moved on to antix for stability. It has icewm that they configured for the distro. I loved it.
Due to some hardware issue I tested out other distros to see if it was hardware issue or not. Currently my laptop has gnome on it I think.
Gnome on laptops (gestures just work really well!) and KDE on desktop. Although I don’t use half of the customisation features of KDE
This is the way
GNOME with a bunch of extensions and themes. It looks and works way better than Plasma, which I've tried, and I find the UI too crowded and unpolished.
I use kde6+Wayland. I do like the simplicity of Cinnamon, but it runs games slower than kde, even though mangohud claims they run at the same speed. For example, in Cinnamon it'll say 60fps when it's clearly in the 30s-40s, and kde actually runs the same thing at 60fps. This is with every tweak i could find, and yes, including turning on the setting to turn off compositing during games.
Kde6 is still quite buggy at times, but I'm really enjoying Wayland's smoother general behavior over x11, even with x11 stuff like wine/proton. This is on arch + AMD rx 6600 xt. I used old gnome 2, then mate, then Cinnamon for years, but if KDE can clean itself up a little bit (no judgment tho, i get it) it may be my permanent DE. Generally when i go to report a bug, it's already reported by someone else...
I like KDE. But when I need x11 or something lighter weight, I use budgie.
Kde plasma for all the reasons you hate it for 😂
XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right
Just replace xfwm4 with i3wm for example. That and the fact you can use most Xfce tools outside of Xfce is why it's my favourite.
Hyperland. Nice, simple, and looks good.
GNOME. Won't say I don't hate it sometimes but every time after a few weeks using anything else I'm back to gnome. The polish and smoothness are unparalleled, and I don't really customize a lot. I did used the Plasma 6 beta and seemed great even if it's not my preference of design language, but haven't tried since. I should give it another go.
I've used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.
And then on various other machines.
I currently use Sway primarily. On my work machine, I have to use Zoom, so I use i3 on X1q which acts/feels virtually identical to Sway. (Or rather, the other way around. Sway was made to be a Wayland compositor drop-in replacement for i3 which has been around for a long time.)
You can run Zoom in a VM if you are so inclined. You just need GPU acceleration for video decode to have good performance.
Having successfully convinced me to move away from Xfce after GNOME 2 was deprecated, my main DE has been MATE for such a long time. However, I am being wooed by KDE Plasma lately. I remember running Plasma 5.26 on Slackware 15-current and was blown away at how snappy it was on an old Dell Latitude E6410 with a 1st-gen Core i5 520M! I can only imagine how nice Plasma 6.x is in comparison.
MATE has also been stable for me on the BSD side, running it on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but Plasma might woo me away on there as well, especially once Plasma 6 is available on OpenBSD 7.6.
I also prefer to run Fluxbox on much less powerful hardware, regardless of the OS it's on.
I never liked KDE in the old days, but now it's the only choice in my mind.
If I had to pick a backup, probably xfce.