You're viewing part of a thread.
Plasma best for customisation and/or new Windows users.
GNOME best for macOS migration and/or great out of the box experience.
Cinnamon best when you hate fun and/or yourself.
Sauce: Mint Cinnamon was my first ever distro but I still hate it.
How about XFCE and LXQt?
LXQt is something I would only use on ANCIENT hardware. I mean hardware from a while before 2011. It’s hideous and barely gets updates.
XFCE is a weirder one. It’s very customisable but also doesn’t get updated much. In my experience it provides barely any performance advantages over KDE although it is smoother than GNOME on crap hardware, so there’s that.
I don’t need either and wouldn’t use them unless I did.
Looking at all of these, it does seem that KDE is probably the best. Oh I guess it depends on the user, but still.
I use GNOME when I’m on Linux. KDE has had this bug for years now which makes working with a home server more annoying, and despite having grown up with and still using Windows I find GNOME comfortable.
There are other options too. Budgie is derived from GNOME and made to feel more Windows-like. It’s very pretty. Pantheon is probably somebody’s favourite although I personally despise it. And if you like having a gorgeous backdoor for the CCP, you can use DeepIn.
And if you vow to never again touch grass, you can even switch to a TWM such as Worm or Awesome. You shouldn’t, but you can.
With Linux, you kind of have to fumble your way around and pick some stuff for yourself, like the desktop environment. It also depends on what type of user you are, and what type of work you do. However, I do want to switch to a tiling window manager like Awesome or Sway though. It just seems much more efficient and less resource-intensive.
It’s definitely less resource-intensive, but that hardly matters on modern hardware unless you’re doing insanely fast computations and need every spare resource.
As for more efficient, that heavily depends on what you’re doing. It’s mostly suited to programmers and maybe some writers, but if you’re looking to do graphic design, animation, anything like that… fuck no. Just no.
That's true though, if I use any modern hardware, I'm not really going to suffer performance penalties whether I'm using GNOME or KDE as compared to LXQt or XFCE.
I've actually never used a tiling window manager, so I don't really know how unsuitable it is for a creativity-based workflow like needing to design graphics or animation or video editing. Can you tell me why it's troublesome to use TWMs (or any WMs?) for that kind of work? This is just out of curiosity though, since I don't do that kind of work.
I have barely used them, so I’m not the best at explaining, but for me it boils down to a number of things.
First, TWMs are meant to work with keyboard shortcuts more than with any mouse input. Easy for those to conflict with the shortcuts of your app.
Second, compatibility might be an issue if your TWM doesn’t use a normal compositor. I don’t know how well something like Blender would render its UI on a TWM.
Third would be that a lot of creative apps are not meant to be tiled by the system and have their own solutions for window management, which could conflict with the TWM.
I’m sure there are more reasons. I can’t think of them just now.
That's persuasive! I'll stick with GNOME/KDE then. 😂
LxQt is actively maintained though? It's the mainline Lx project now instead of LXDE. I just upgraded Debian last week and LxQt went from 0.16 to 1.2.
I find LxQt surprisingly powerful for a lightweight DE. I have basically no complaints. It is ugly af out of the box but it also has pretty good customization options so that I'm now happy with how it looks. It runs like glass on my old laptop as well.
If I were using this machine as a desktop I'd use KDE, but it's mainly a server that I still want a UI for, so LxQt fits the bill perfectly.
For applications like that it makes sense. But afaik it still doesn’t plan to support Wayland at all so anyone doing multi monitors can get fucked lmao
They're actually working in Wayland from 1.3. There some support already in 1.2. Otherwise I would've chosen a different DE because I do want to be on Wayland eventually.
Basically I saw a brighter future coming for LxQt compared to LXDE and XFCE which is why I chose it.
I may be confusing LXDE with LxQt then. I was thinking of a de that’s basically confirmed to be on life support/maintenance only with no major overhaul planned. My bad.
Yeah, LXDE is the one that won't be maintained anymore. Pretty easy mistake to make so no worries.
I don't even use Mint anymore, but Cinnamon is still my favorite DE by far. I guess that means I hate fun? Why can't you just say you dislike a thing without insulting everyone who does?
I’m being tongue-in-cheek. I personally find Mint boring and dated, and it can be pretty buggy on newer or more complex setups. I don’t actually think that you “hate fun”, it’s my hyperbolic way of saying that Cinnamon isn’t fun to use for me.
Sometimes being literal makes things less fun, too.
I personally find reinventing the wheel every few years with user interface tedious and pointless, and in my experience Cinnamon has been the least buggy DE. They all have their flaws and strength though, and it's cool if you didn't have the same experience I did with Cinnamon. Choice is a good thing.
You can be tongue-in-cheek without being insulting though. I'm not really upset or anything. I'm just 10,000% out of patience for people being inconsiderate right now. That's not really your fault though, so, you know, sorry if that came across as judgemental.
I didn’t find it judgmental, I was slightly concerned that you were genuinely upset. I have some autistic friends who find it difficult not to take things literally and feel genuinely hurt, so I’m often cautious not to make jokes with them that seem mean-spirited.
I didn’t mean to be insulting to any people who actually enjoy Cinnamon. Sorry if it came across that way.
No problem then. We're all good.