My favourite DE has got to be Cinnamon, as much as I like KDE and XFCE, I prefer the simplicity of cinnamon where as in KDE has a bit too much of everything in the customization scene and XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right.
Cinnamon to me is perfect as I easily transferred from Win 10 to Mint and soon Manjaro Cinnamon Edition.
What is your favourite DE and why? Tiling WM DE’s can be counted as well seeing as they have nifty navigation features.
I prefer KDE a lot, because:
- the UI is simple, material-ish and beautiful
- it doesnt sacrifice usability or waste screen space like GNOMEs minimalism. I especially like the buttons etc. of Qt apps, where GIMP is already struggling with the huge hugeness of GTK3.
- it runs 100% on Wayland
- it runs GNOME apps without modifying them a bit. There is an issue where Fedora doesnt want to use Adwaita icons, but a short autostart entry solves that. KDE Breeze dark/light can sync to adwaita dark/light
- KDE has tons of legacy support features, have a look at my experiment where I explored many of them
- it is modular and can be pretty minimal (I would like a more barebones version, without all the floating stuff etc)
- all the settings are in the same app! This is a huge issue with all the small ones, where nontechnical users need to know the difference between “GTK settings” “lightDM settings”, etc.
- Systemsettings are searchable, all settings pages are accessible from the global search, some pages are even shown when you use an alternative word, you can always search in english and your local language
- it is very actively developed
- it has tons of unique features.
- it has the biggest most complex apps situated in a DE on Linux. Period. KDEnlive, digiKam, Krita, Kate, Dolphin, …
Yeah, I am comfortable with most DE’s, I’m flexible but I prefer KDE+Wayland.
Dolphin is poorly threaded though. For example: If I drag a large file from a network share to the desktop I can not drag another one to the desktop until the first copy have completed. If I connect my VPN or just an away-from-home wifi, Dolphin freezes, probably because it can’t find the local SMB connections in the “Remotes” group.
I’m also watching COSMIC, it has a very well thought out architecture though I suspect the first version will be too simplistic in terms of features - for example vs Dolphin.
I like COSMIC too as a work in progress. It is damn elegant, minimalist, perfectionist.
But I dont like the general desktop UI style, the overview, the menu.
They are also just starting, but it has a big future I think.
I am always testing it and it is pretty cool. Already better than many alternatives I would say, at least if you replace some apps.
pcmanfm-qt from LXQt is actually the best filemanager next to KDE Dolphin, and has very few dependencies.
Qt apps on COSMIC are currently pretty broken, but there may be some KDE people stepping up and this is likely also fixed. Different from… some other big desktop… where KDE apps are all broken.
I use KDE, because it runs perfectly on wayland and covers 100% of my needs.
Budgie looks very promising now and I want to explore it further. Also LXQT is perfect for older devices or if you want a KDE, but simplier.
emacs
Vanilla GNOME because simplicity, very modern look and stability. Cinnamon is nice too but it’s just not for me. Its workflow is slower in my use cases
I like best Gnome with modifications, not vanilla. A permanent dock as per “Dash2Dock Animated”, and the “Hide Top Bar” extension, so when an app gets maximized, both the top bar and the dock get out of the way. Also, disabling tap-and-drag via dconf (I really don’t understand why this is enabled by default on most Linux DEs, it’s extremely bad for usability), and enabling the min/max/close buttons via Gnome Tweaks. Other tweaks I like is the Bibata Modern Ice mouse cursor, and the Faenza icon theme. The rest are ok by default for the most part. It’s better than MacOS for me.
Second best gotta be Cinnamon, using the Cinnamenu menu extension, not the default menu. Overall, they’ve thought of almost everything building this DE and its settings. For those who want the best “Windows” could ever be, Cinnamon it is.
Third is XFce. It’s overall good, but it has some things that trigger me: no user admin app, no ability to turn off tap-and-drag (it just doesn’t turn off no matter what you try), and on Debian at least, the machine doesn’t go to sleep without asking for password (requires a policy-kit manual change). Its biggest advantage is that it’s lightweight and I use it as lot for old machines.
I find the rest under-par. I don’t like KDE, and I have thought long and hard why I don’t. It’s not how KDE is structured or works. KDE in fact is fine as a DE! Very powerful. It’s the Qt toolkit that bothers me. When an app loads, it kind of loads in chunks. It doesn’t blast everything rendered in the screen to feel smooth and modern, it kind of renders it as it reads it. And this just bothers me in a UI more than anything. Another thing I dislike is the long right-click menu on the desktop (same for Cinnamon btw).
MATE is nice but it’s just buggy. You setup your panels one way, you logout, you login back again, and the items have changed position. Fully reproducible for me under many different distros. Very, very annoying.
LXDE/LXQT, Budgie, etc, are not as developed as I liked them to be.
