I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it’s Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)…etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.
Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the “Flagship Manjaro version”. I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.
After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.
What about you guys?
KDE Plasma. 6.3 is an extremely smooth experience.
KDE, it’s the swiss army knife of DEs.
KDE. I’ve been using it as my daily driver for roughly 10 years now, and barring any unforeseen excitement, it’ll stay that way indefinitely. Proably until I stop using Linux, anyhow.
XFCE would be my choice too
I’m a cog in the machine and use KDE, but xfce is awesome, I would use xfce if I couldn’t use KDE.
I keep coming back to KDE time and time again. It’s so easy to mess with, I can set it up exactly how I like it without much effort, and it always looks good because someone else did all the work making themes and widgets I use.
That said, I love XFCE, I’m just trash with CSS so it takes me forever to get it how I like, and on my Surface I can’t get the scaling to work so everything is beyond tiny.
This isn’t even hard. KDE without a second thought.
I regularly try other desktops, and I regularly come back to the only desktop with any sort of reasonable thought put into it.
I’ll stay on XFCE until I die … or until my Hyprland config is finished. Whichever comes first.
Always wanted to like gnome but never could, and xfce is fine but I much prefer KDE, it is verry likely that I’ll actually keep it till my pc breaks.
That’s the beauty of gnome: they don’t give a single fuck if you like it. You can return the favor.
Gnome has the apple philosophy that the user conforms to technology, not the other way around.
Apple actually had good visionaries and design decisions, sometimes.
Never been a fan of apple’s hardware decisions, but their software is routinely state-of-the-art even to this day.
They value treating the user like a human instead of a programmer. GNOME values removing as many features as possible to make their jobs easier.
No shade to Gnome, because there is a place for them in the ecosystem, but this is why I moved from Gnome 2 to KDE (with a few stops along the way). One size will not fit all.
Oh yeah for sure. I think if Gnome works for people they should use it. I’m not stoked on the situation of Gnome Extensions being needed for some pretty basic customisations, adding instability to the DE though.
Plenty of people just don’t have the brain capacity to read settings or multitask and that’s fine. If that works for them, good for them.
XFCE. It’s lightweight, easy to tweak and looks great. I run it on my 6 y.o. potato laptop
The surprising thing is that KDE would run on there just fine too. If you don’t add all the PIM stuff, it’s almost a wash in memory usage and just as snappy.
😂
Lol, yep. It’s always funny to see xfce as being light weight.
Is this where I continue the meme and say I use arch by the way?
On the other hand KDE discover… Yikes. The software manager uses as much memory as XFCE.
I was just joking around, I hope you didn’t take it too personally. I’ve been hearing a lot of KDE enthusiasm lately.
And xfce is great, but it has its pitfalls.
I also get excited about projects, I’m no different.
KDE.
KDE the customization is off the charts
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.
Probably KDE, it’s the most ‘complete’ feeling to me with settings and GUI for most things.
I would say the same & I don’t even use it—but I would trust it being around the longest & is better than GNOME IMO.
The amount of not KDE answers here surprises me. Y’all a bunch of nerds [endearing]
