friendica.eskimo.com
Gaming PC: GNOME (it works fine and I don't care about much else there)
Laptop: dwl (dwm for Wayland) and suckless tools. Ultra lightweight and comfy for browsing and watching videos. Usually at the same time.
Same.
I dont do much customization, but the endevorOS community edition has decent defaults.
Just working cleanly with tiling feels so good. You dont have to use the mouse to move all the windows around. But if you hold the super key, you can just drag windows around to make a perfect layout. But often than not, i just want 2 windows side by side, with no wasted space. Done.
I first used XFCE on my old 700mhz processor Thinkpad back in the day. Back then, Gnome and especially KDE were known to use excessive resources on low-end machines so XFCE was preferred.
However, I actually quite liked the DE so I just switched to it permanently, even on my more capable machines. I've been running XFCE for around 15 years 😆
I like gnome also. I'm going to try cosmic de but probably won't use it full time.
I do use the PaperWM and dash to dock extensions, so it isn't stock gnome. I normally don't like extensions or addons but these are well done and it seems like they have staying power.
I'm old, I come from old X11R4 time, motif, mwm, twm, fvwm, things from previous century. In modern Linux I used mostly gnome, and Cinnamon for a few years and tried to love it but cannot, I finally went back to Xfce because it works, it's simple, neat, nice, I have no icon on my desktop, I have a kind of windows 3 setup: a startup menu (and some quick launches), the window bar, the notification area with time etc
I'm using MX Linux for maybe 8 years now with Xfce
updated screenshot:
Gnome on one machine, LXDE on another.
I use Gnome on my main laptop, a Thinkpad P50. I bought it with a dock thinking I'd use it at my desk and on the sofa but it's a bit of a beast so that stays on my desk and I use an L440 with LXDE on the sofa. Considering trying LCARS on the sofa machine.
Gnome because it is the default in my district, works right out of the box and I'm too old to fart around with customizing things anymore.
I just want to get to work.
I use hyprland with KDE as my fall back.
My hyprland config is 95% stable but some apps give me a hard time, so I'll just run them in KDE.
I find KDE just works. With a baby, things need to work more often than not.
Sway on a chromebook with 4gb ram, sway on thinkpad t430, xfce on my gf's laptop, and gnome on my gaming rig that will go soon either cosmic or just sway.
For me sway is thewinner.
Sway with me... Marimba... Lalala
Edit: also gnome on the kichen pc with touch. Gnome is the only one that works fully on touch.
Gnome.
With NoMachine to my Windows Host, hot keys go to the host as intended.
Rustdesk can't do it in any config and they don't care at this stage.
An open letter from independent app developers to the wider GNOME communitystopthemingmy.app
Same. Didn't know about labwc, will look imto it when I switch to Wayland someday!
Did you come off a Crunchbang distro as well? 🙂
KDE Plasma
It was what came on the steam deck lol
Budgie has great potential. I really love the look and feel. And I especially love the side bar. I feel that's a feature that's missing in KDE.
Budgie however isn't "there" yet. I've experienced quite a few bugs using it and it's still missing a few features. But it's getting there. It might become my go to one day.
My favourite that I use lots of places is Gnome. Love using it. Use it completely stock.
I also use KDE, which is fine, but I don’t much care for it, I always find it to be buggy and unreliable. Could well be pebkac errors, but I’ve seen it across multiple machines over the years. With this said I still use kde on one machine.
I also use sway. Which is a wayland window manager. I find it very good. I’ve heard that hyprland is also good, but I’m not looking to mess with a window manager, I just like it to be simple, so I’ve not really tried it.
Cinnamon. Desktop environment peaked in the Windows XP/Gnome 2 days and everything else is just change for the shake of change. :C
My only annoyance is lack of Wayland support. Tried out cosmic, but it doesn't have the Windows XP/Gnome 2 style window list.
Screenshot for anyone interested:
Mate, lxqt and even xfce look very old. I know they can't have fancy effects but I think it's weird they don't come with a modern theme. They could make them look at least like Cinnamon. Even Windows 10 didn't have rounded corners and looked great, with or without blur. Simplicity can look good imo.
Cinnamon is great but it's GTK3 and a little bit older in terms of design (though it's more sane than whatever the new trends are so it's not bad but just not my thing).
Budgie isn't a very big project so idk how consistent it is (it's something I care about a lot). Though I think I never tried it myself.
But actually I don't hate all of that projects. I just like GNOME and it works so so so well for me. My troll behavior towards other DEs is just a joke inspired by "Mii beta" YouTube channel. Btw KDE has performance, even though it's more than feature-rich. That's impressive.
I recently made a new linux install (to replace my constantly breaking, likely due to my own doing Manjaro install). I went with Cinnamon initially, but in order to try out Wayland, I moved to KDE plasma.
I'm on NVidia, with two different resolution screens. Which causes occasional problems. But overall it's fine.
XFCE4 ! Stable, simple and EndeavourOS’ design is top notch !
However there are some glitches from time to time. Nothing to serious but when I use Lutris + Wine my desktop bar does some wired shit.
Also when coming back from sleep I have to "pkill xfce4-session". Though I'm not totally sure it's an xfce issue...this could also be Nvidia or X11 related... Didn't dived to deep.
these days Hyprland but previously i3.
i basically live in the terminal unless i'm playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.
not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.
I'm still on i3 as it's been convenient, but this:
this has all become very specialized over the past decade
resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it's persistent across installations.
One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3's config:
bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause\#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#
CURRENT=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
ZOOM=$(xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Meeting")
if [[ -n "$ZOOM" ]]; then
# if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM}
xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT}
else
# otherwise do play/pause
playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fiplayerctl directly.Another i3 user here. I slowly transitioned from KDE when switching keyboard layout stopped working as well as some other DE related things.
Ended up writing custom script for switching. Currently implemented with rofi in Perl, bc I like the syntax.
I still like having a bit nice gui, so i have wallpapers, some icons, etc. But I fell in love with terminal ~~along with neovim : )~~ , soo kinda looking for that middle ground between look, performance and functionality.
Haven't finished tweaking all the configs to my liking, but after that vanilla Arch is the direction I plan to go, since many things in my current install that I have as well as haven't customized work a bit questionably or exist for no reason.
I have an i3 and a hyprland installation.
I like tiling wms but Wayland still has some annoying issues so I like having the more stable i3 installation on my main computer.
Plasma.
When I try Gnome, within a couple minutes I encounter the Save dialog that defaults the cursor to the Search field instead of the Filename field, and the top of my head goes spinning across the room, and I uninstall it.
I have mine look and work almost as exactly as Windows 10, which I really love in terms of UI/UX. It's the most easiest and fastest desktop interface I've ever used so far.
I have a tiled app menu and I even changed the window decorations to look like Windows 10. I hate rounded corners. It's such a waste of screen space.
I use gnome on my main machines, but looking to migrate to cosmic, and I use xfce on more limited devices.
I like the kde project, but I tend not to use it, because I find it a bit overwhelming, even after customizing it, it's hard to explain. I have issues with too many elements in front of me.
I'm running MATE on my laptop. It gives me what I need (a task bar, space for some instrumentation, the usual desktop functionality, a way to start applications) and nothing that I don't care about (wobbling windows, compiz, stuff like that). My DE is a tool; I use tools that don't get in my way because I have work to do.
I might give COSMIC a try in a few months, I haven't decided yet.
Was a Gnome user until Gnome 3.
Since Plasma 5, I use KDE Plasma.
I'm just going to share my unvarnished opinions here, I clearly understand that Gnome users feel differently, and that's okay.
Plasma 6 does everything I want the way I want. I have loaded it (and Plasma 5) on very low end and very high end hardware and found it performant and functional on both, consistently.
You'll note I don't claim it to be the best. There are folks out there for whom the Gnome vision happens to be how they like to work, or who aren't bothered by whatever hoops you have to jump through currently to customize a Gnome environment, and I'm sincerely happy for those people. For them, Gnome is the best.
There are lots of other DEs and of course tiling WMs exist, but it takes me no time at all to have a fresh plasma install working the way I want my computer to work and looking the way I want it to look, and thus I literally have zero complaints. So for the past few years I haven't even looked at any alternatives. If there's ever a time that I don't find the desktop product itself, and the KDE development team's approach to desktop development, to be absolutely perfect fits for me, I'll look elsewhere - but honestly probably not at Gnome.
My understanding is XFCE is lighter weight and simpler. Little to no animations, for example.
itsfoss.com/linux-mint-cinnamo…
Confused with the available choices of Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce variants in Linux Mint? Let me help you with which Linux Mint version should you use.Dimitrios (It's FOSS)
KDE for my main PC. Pretty with floating panels, KDE Connect, QT apps are often the best apps in their class and are perfectly integrated (FreeCAD, krita, okular, kdenlive, vlc, dolphin, etc...) And konsole is also very full featured.
I don't know what KiCAD uses, but it also seems very well integrated into the KDE desktop unlike most gnome apps.
XFCE on MX Linux for an old Intel Compute Stick to keep it very usable.
I'm running KDE Plasma with the revived Krohnkite for auto tiling. Plasma 6.2 seems to have fixed most of the bugs from 6.0 and 6.1, at least the ones I've noticed.
I was using Sway/SwayFX for a few months but was missing some KDE Gear apps like Dolphin and Okular which I couldn't get to display correctly. KDE is afaik the only desktop with a working Qt theming engine right now, so I can't really see myself switching (unless maybe if they break Krohnkite again).
COSMIC most of the time and then gnome as a fallback when I run into any temporary issues I can't work around.
I do this with a custom bluebuild image I made that uses ublue (fedora 41) as a base and then added cosmic on top along with some other layers that I need/want.
KDE, because I'm too lazy to switch back to XFCE, which offered every feature I already use in KDE except without the stuttering, the bugs, and the update cycle that breaks things way, way too often on a rolling release distro.
Or openbox. My old laptop has openbox, but that's more for screwing around with EWW than doing day-to-day things.
I have numerous machines and use several. On my main, KDE because of all the customization. Widgets, window styles, colors, themes etc. It's really like exactly how I want for maximum efficiency and productivity.
I've got gnome on my hybrid notebook and my transformer pad because gnome with Wayland is amazingly compatible with touchscreen.
I have one machine running Elementary which has the Pantheon DE it's kinda like Gnome with modifications.
And finally, I have an older system so just for efficiency, LXQt.
I do enjoy trying out different ones and especially more esoteric ones that I occasionally come across.
XFCE4. It's intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss
Enough features so that it "just works" (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.
Can't wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don't have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.
OK so I have used several DEs but right now I'm on Plasma 6 because frankly, it's the best out there. It's easy to use, customizable, intuitive and looks nice. Is it on the heavier side? Yes, but that's okay. Also it helps that I have learnt the keyboard shortcuts on this.
I have used XFCE, Mate and Cinnamon in the past. If KDE somehow vanished off the face of the planet, I would likely switch to XFCE because it's light, customizable and fully functional.
I dont use a DE, I use a WM.
Semantics aside I’m on Hyprland, been using it for 6 months now and absolutely love it
Xmonad with XFCE in no-desktop mode.
I can use the xfce tools to configure things like mouse and screen settings, but visually it's just xmonad.
Windows 10
Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.
I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.
Yeah Linux still has plenty to work on. It's unfortunate how limited the support is. If game and app developers could target Linux, then the cost to support and maintain would be lower than they have to do with Windows. Unfortunately, market share and power of defaults work against us.
If you can, look towards getting a steam deck. At least that is a Linux thing that is pretty decent and portable.
I game on both the deck and a desktop with pop!_os. I can say gaming on my desktop is just as good if not better than the deck for because it can leverage my desktop hardware and it’s way easier to go under the hood with proper peripherals. Linux has come a long way with gaming. Most of the shit that doesn’t run on linux are games that cost too much for too little content or they’re just gonna be battle pass/cosmetic farms that cater to whales and aren’t actually fun in any sense of the word.
If you’re gonna be a top 0.0001% competitive gamer, you’ll probably wanna stick to windows. If you don’t play FPSes competively, a linux based gaming PC is probably fine. Me? I’m a middle aged dude with kids who racks up about 20 hours a week somehow, and linux more than suits my needs.
I’ve had more success with Lutris and Wine in getting certain abandonware games (Black and White for example) to run than I ever did on Windows.
People who are brand new to linux should start with immutable kde based distros, you'll have a much better time with fedora kinoite.
I'm down to help support infinitely, my matrix is available on my profile, feel free to message with any troubleshooting needs.
My advice: Don't wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you're under pressure to figure it out all at once.
Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.
Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.
Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.
I switched to PopOS from Windows 11 in three hours. I had been backing everything up for weeks though. Generally everything I did on Windows works out of the box on PopOS.
Aside from my bluetooth speaker not connecting automatically and needing to run a Windows VM for Corsair peripheral LEDs, I’ve not had to do a ton of customization.
It’s been well worth it. Really enjoying it so far and highly recommend.
XFCE.
I recently switched to it after a year or so with KDE. Deff see some improvement in terms of battery life with my laptop, but I'm still not used to the lack of WinKey+Num shortcuts (I'm aware of docklike, but I need labels for open windows).
KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.
Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don't need to look sexy.
My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.
Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.
Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I've tried to like it for years, but I just don't care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.
I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I've watched.
Tracker should not be recrawling everything, unless you delete the index with a tracker3 reset
Once it builds the initial index only new files or changed files should be recrawled for meta data.
The only time I have seen Tracker use cpu was when it got hung up on a file that had special code in it that was messing with parsing the data and so it would fail and retry over and over.
Easy to force a tracker reset, or enable disable. Or even reinstall. Seems easier than findinf a new DE no?
Also tracker ahould not be using up so much diskIO or CPU like people mention, if it is it is tripping up on a files internal data, and status/logs will show which file(s)
