friendica.eskimo.com
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?
I settled on herbstluft in I think around 2015 and 10 years later have still never felt the need to migrate anywhere else.
I did about a year ago give up lightDM for emptty, but that doesn't really count.
It’s wild to me how GNOME evokes such strong opinions in folks. It really is a love it or hate it kind of deal (I’m in the “love it” camp).
I wonder why that is. I like KDE ok, but it doesn’t elicit a strong emotion from me. KDE works fine, I just really like GNOME.
There must be something about GNOME in particular that some people love, and others hate.
For those of us that expect room to breathe and make our machine work for us rather than the other way around, we feel like Gnome takes a lot of liberties away for the sake of "simplicity." There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.
The primary contributors who work under The Gnome Foundation also come off as controlling and arrogant in a lot of cases, and refuse to take community feedback to heart, whereas KDE has literal summits to get user feedback on major core features we want to see which then later get added to their backlogs and sprints as Epics. Gnome acts a lot like Apple in the sense that they're very much "we know what's best for you better than you do."
Now, the singular area I can give Gnome true props in is their accessibility functionality, but that's primarily it. KDE's accessibility is fairly behind by about a decade in comparison.
That's just my take, take it as you will.
I mean, we already know the solution to gnome's drivel is to use something else.
This comment chain is specifically about criticizing gnome.
Personally, I'm disgusted by the "matter of fact" tone GNOME devs take to criticism only to be wrong in the end.
It's like, they dig their heels in so deep on dumb shit like "the dock should be on the side because vertical space is at a premium!" and then renege after years of users telling them they're wrong. Literally whoever is floating ideas like that on their team needs to be fired and blacklisted, but unfortunately they're probably promoted.
They also can't be arsed to include proper settings, so it's up to everyone else to pick up their slack.
At some point, it starts to feel like weaponized incompetence. I genuinely do not want GNOME's culture to pervade more parts of the free software ecosystem.
I remember when kde looked like xfce and yeah back then it was buggy. Today it looks like a slightly jank windows 7 but with the giant buttons and curved corners that characterize 2015 software.
Most of the bugs seem to come from Wayland still being vaguely trashy and kde not having fully migrated from xorg
Agreed. I used to be a diehard XFCE fan and hated KDE. Then I saw their resource usage came pretty close to each other but KDE had way more development behind it so they could add Wayland support (which I actually don't even use.)
KDE used to be buggy and bloated. They've been improving stability for years and their efforts really show. I used to think it was bloated, but it really isn't if you only use the parts you need. I use it pretty similarly to XFCE, it just has more dev support.
I currently use GNOME and would continue to but if it were a low spec machine, probably icewm or jwm.
y'all sure like KDE though 🤢
Cinnamon by and far.
I've used so many distros and DEs I don't even know where to begin, but Cinnamon got me hooked for the long run. It's legitimately the most polished and "ready to run" DE I've ever used, yet still allowing for far more customization than Windows ever offered.
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.
Well, it's gotta be a tiling system. And a good one. At this point I can't function in a non-tiling environment. Specifically a manual tiler with an auto-tile a la i3 w/ i3-alternating-layout or a dynamic tiler that still let's you break stuff (doesn't really exist).
It's just a better way to use a computer, and I can't go back. It's so much nicer. I would stop using a computer before I go back to dragging windows around.
And that rules out most DEs. It rules out Mac OS and Windows, as well, but at least on Windows I can almost get by with Fancy WM. It's "okay."
And speaking of just getting by, that's Polonium with KDE. KDE is pretty good as an "environment," but it doesn't have a tiler that meets my needs, or at least I thought it didn't until recently. Then I discovered Polonium. It works pretty well. Used it for several months (and still do on one machine). It's very bare bones tho, and is hard to configure the handful of floating windows I do want like popups. So KDE is just scraping by.
GNOME on the other hand has the excellent Pop Shell 2. But well, GNOME is GNOME. It's buggy when you try to use it a different way than intended. God forbid I want Qt, Gtk2, Gtk3, Gtk4, and libadwaita apps to all look nice on my system! It's clunky, but the tiling is excellent at least.
Now you mention XFCE. So what about that? You could use i3 as the WM for Xfce. I used i3 for years and years and years as my WM and know how to build a DE around it. Why not use Xfce + i3?
Well, the thing is X11 is as good as dead, and while XFCE now supports Wayland, you can't use a tiling system with the Wayland version of XFCE.
So what does that leave me?
Nothing. At least for a full on DE, which is what you asked.
There is not a single (pre-made) Desktop Environment that suits my needs. Not a one. Either it doesn't support good tiling, is too rigid, or hasn't switched to Wayland.
My only options are:
Right now I'm on Hyprland. May go back to KDE bc multi monitor is being weird on Hyprland rn.
My one hope is that COSMIC polishes itself up and gets to its first real release.