I’m currently testing Fedora KDE on a VM (windows host) before eventually switching over to Linux completely.
Gnome. Feels most polished and least cluttered to me.
Seconded. I used to use Ubuntu, but I switched to Debian + GNOME and I love it.
I agree. I use gnome on nix and it has been great, especially on a touchpad.
Plasma definitely. Xfce is second.
Any preferences on the distro? I’ve been enjoying Fedora but I’ve also tested Ubuntu and enjoyed that
You should try Arch btw
Not for beginners, that’s just mean
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Ubuntu is doing an annoying attempt to generate lock-in and profits by forcing snap on everyone and making it annoyingly difficult to avoid.
Consider one of the ubuntu derivatives (there’s a number of them, Mint, Pop etc) in preference to ubuntu itself, a debian derivative (KDE neon for example) or go with Fedora if you’re a business orientated user.
I landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed about five years ago and still don’t see myself hopping to another one
Opensuse TW or Fedora
Fedora Plasma is truly awesome!
Install gentoo
But for real, depends on your use case I use arch on my dev machine and you get nearly every package in the AUR
Plasma. It’s the most customizable and you can dive in and shape it. It feels much more natural for me to jump into.
I put xfce on older hardware.
Distro wise I tend to go with Ubuntu flavors most because they seem to have better compatibility for various software and stuff I need, but I haven’t really shopped around too hard in years. Work is RHEL (and clones) and they make me sad.
I’m thinking of settling on Ubuntu for the same reason. It’s easy enough to get a VM setup and test other distros if needed
KDE is what finally got me to switch from Windows.
Out of the box I found it a better user experience than Windows 10s desktop, but having it be stupid easy to customize and theme on top of that has made me never wanna go back.
KDE for me. As much as I hate windows, I like the floating windows, task bar and tray. KDE has that out of the box and lets me tweak all the little annoyances away.
Of all the things I hate about Microsoft Windows, the GUI design is not one of them. The content of those windows is janky as all hell. But the floating windows, taskbar, and tray? Those are all great.
I love the minimize all windows button. It is so small and functional, I always use the KDE Widget that copies it, and IMO, KDE should use it by default
Plasma, but only on Wayland (which is better anyway unbiased opinion).
Man i didnt realize how much better Wayland is until I had to use a provided setup for a few weeks.
The fact that I can’t swipe to switch virtual desktops on xorg was enough to make me question why xorg doesn’t offer such basic things after all the years
The swiping thing is apparently a deliberate decision by KDE for whatever reason.
Well, yeah, but they made that decision, because X11 is a pain to implement and debug this stuff on.
That sounds like a pretty good reason yeah
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How are you swiping, out of curiosity? I have windows occupying the whole screen.
I switch workspaces with a keyboard shortcut or by clicking buttons on the panel.
It’s with three fingers on a touchpad.
There’s some short clips of it here: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.25.0/
Oh I see. But I thought such gestures were available a long time ago, I remember apps like Fusuma, and there was talk of adding them to libinput so that every DE could let the user assign actions to gestures.
Yeah, this is now using the libinput gestures. It’s mainly exciting, because it’s available out-of-the-box, even for non-techies and lazy people (me).
With general technological advances and I believe Windows having similar gestures, it’s now also rarely the case that touchpad hardware doesn’t support multi-touch input…
But screen sharing was not possible for me. Which is kinda a deal breaker. Is that implemented yet?
Gnome 44. Simple, familiar and all my extensions work!
I use Debian with XFCE.Really lightweight and stable
Back to Debian after a long hiatus and XFCE was my choice for the exact same reasons.
me as well
Xfce. It’s lightweight and looks great with a little bit of customisation. For me it’s the perfect balance between performance, usability and looks
KDE
It’s like a swiss-army knife of DEs.
I try to make it look like Windows 7.
I love KDE Plasma, been using it for years. Cinnamon is very good too, especially for folks that like the Windows 7 style.
Cosmic is nice from the little I’ve used it, but I prefer a DE with more options.
Not a Gnome fan personally, I’ve tried it many times, just can’t get into it, but objectively it’s solid.
KDE
Gnome
Personally I’ve been on KDE for a few years, I love the way I can customize my workflow, from the default apps to the panels layout. The KDE team has made fantastic progress since I’ve started using it, and it’s now very stable and feature rich. I’m very excited for the upcoming Plasma 6
And as a reminder to everybody, please donate if you can, no matter what software you use. Especially if you’ve been using that DE for a while. Open source projects like these are always in need of funding!
Every time I hear this, I’m tempted to try KDE again, but every time I do, I run into stability issues.
I really like the customizability, particularly being able to set up the workflow you want. But then I hit stability issues and that just kills it for me - pun only somewhat intentional.
I guess it’s a hit or miss depending on the hardware. I’ve never had a single stability issue with plasma ever since I started using it
I doubt it’s a hardware issue. That said, fair enough re: experiences may vary.
XFCE. It’s just so easy to click and drag things where I want them and edit icons to be uniform.
Have you tried testing out DE in a virtual machine? It’s a big time saver versus installing it on actual hardware.
I’m doing all my testing on a VM before committing and doing a bare metal install
Good call, just be aware that while you can (pretty much) install any DE on any distro. Many distros will have a ready prepared install that may feel quite different to you adding the DE later.
If that’s not clear, Ubuntu with cinnamon DE is very different to Mint Cinnamon. Same with Kubuntu (KDE Ubuntu) and KDE Neon (Debian KDE).
All of the differences are of course replicable, they’re themes and tools and configs. But for example it took me literally most of a day to get Arch with cinnamon to feel like Mint cinnamon.
Ah good to hear. I was not smart enough to do that when I was first getting into Linux and I only had one PC so you can imagine the headache.
You can also boot a live CD. Last time I switched distro I got a bunch of live CDs and picked the one where everything was working out of the box (accessing shares, playing music/video, printing, Bluetooth, hooking up my phone to USB, gaming controller etc.) (Ended up on Manjaro btw.)
Totally. You can typically get CDs at the dollar store these days. I have a few from dealing with older computers now but I also have a sizeable amount of USBs now and several computers.
What made you decide on Manjaro?
Oh it’s only “CD” in the name, you can boot the image from a USB stick. No need to go out and buy actual CDs.
I wanted to move away from Ubuntu and .deb based desktop distros because they don’t do well with long term use.
The way debs work, if you want third party software you have to add repos individually. But each of them tracks dependencies only within their scope. So eventually you end up with combinations of packages that the installer cannot solve anymore and you can’t upgrade your main packages. Which results in an reinstall.
I wanted something Arch-based because I heard it takes “rolling distro” seriously and you can keep upgrading and using it indeterminately. And there’s a single third party repo (AUR) which only breaks its own packages when the main system is updated, but not the main system. Which seems like a reasonable compromise.
But I wanted a more polished desktop experience so no plain Arch. The candidates were Manjaro, Garuda and Endeavour so that’s where the live CD test came in.
Yeah I know I’ve used them for years but I keep some on hand for older devices.
Fair enough. I used Manjaro for a while, maybe a year, and it kept breaking my system. I’ve been using EndeavourOS and Fedora ever since and haven’t had an issue.
