- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
Bottom left is Awesome WM. Ask me anything or tell us your picks!
(and feel free to tear me apart on my picks)
You must log in or # to comment.
First used: TWM / TVWM
Then: FVWM
Then: Windowmaker
Then: Enlightenment (briefly)
Then: Gnome (briefly)
Then KDE (to this day)I played around with a number of others, but never really used them much.
Favourite DE & Current DE: GNOME. Simply the only one with a consistent and modern design.
Least Favourite: cosmic. This needs a lot more polish before I consider it anywhere close to an actual option. Currently it looks childish to me.
First DE used: Unity. It’s been a long, long time.
DE you wanna use in the future: None. I’m done DE hopping, no DE can deliver the level of consistency and polish that GNOME can deliver anymore.
Longest used DE: Pantheon. On elementary OS. Gnome took a long time to get its shit together, but at least it did.
Honourable Mention: KDE. It’s… Meh. It fixed some things consistency-wise, but it’s still stuck in the past when it comes to UI paradigms. It claims customisability, it’s only customisable in ways that barely matter anymore and can only break consistency. Insane workload on the app devs and the theme devs to have something working reliably as well.
have you used Cosmic recently? It sounds like everyone has outdated opinions on it. I’ve been using it for months and I would say it’s long ready for daily use.
You really sound to me like a typical Gnome snob ngl
Gnome snob!
My goodness man have you no decency?!
What’s the DE you want to use in the future? I’m not great with logos. Thanks 😊
Huh, developing a new DE for X11 is… A choice.
Both my favorite, longest used and current DE would be MATE. Currently running it off and desktop running Debian and a laptop running Fedora. Super customizable and very speedy. Beyond that I really enjoy Gnome but haven’t used it in a bit.
What’s that raindrop one in the middle?
Hyperland, a wayland based tiling wm
First: Gnome Favorite: Gnome Longest Used: Gnome Least Favorite: KDE Current: Gnome Future: Gnome
Used Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE in the past. Bucking the trend, I think Gnome is fine and does what I need it to do. You do you, though. That’s what is great about Linux.
Gnome + Wayland + NVIDIA drivers = Not a good time.
Gnome was fine, gnome today is unusable.
I’m an AMD fan so I haven’t ran into that issue. I could see how that is a problem though.
Non deterministic alt tabbing with arbitrary “buddy windows” is the most frustrating desktop experience imaginable. It’s less bad without nvidia in the mix but still seen it happen with Intel chips as well. Moved back to sway for tiling goodness and my sanity is restored.
What sort of issues do you run into with GNOME w/ Nvidia? I’m curious because it has been rock solid for me with 5070ti on a laptop.
The most maddening behavior with alt tab. Let’s say I have 4 windows open on a single desktop split on a single monitor. [A|B] and [C|D]. C and D become best buddies, if I alt tab from A to D to reference something, A loses focus and I get both C and D visible. It becomes impossible to look at A and D together. Had no issues with sway/Wayland/nvidia. Nor with xfce but trying to let x be dead. Don’t have the issue with gnome/Wayland on Intel chips.
Favorite: Cinnamon.
Honorable Mention: KDE.
Least Favorite: Gnome.
First: Gnome.
Current: Cinnamon.
Longest Used: KDE.
Future: CinnamonSway all the way bay bay
I use Linux btw
Favorite DE: Niri First DE used: XFCE DE you want to use in the future: Niri Honorable Mention: Hyprland least favorite: Anything non tiling, or maybe Hyprland due to a lot of minor annoyances Current DE: Niri longest used DE: i3 Current Distro: NixOS and Arch
You should try Niri!
I’ve considered it, but i’m not sure if I like the scrolling tiling yet…
At first its novelty, then it starts to make sense, and then you can’t live without it. I’ve tried to switch to other DE’s a couple of times including similar ones like MangoWC and I always come back. I used Cosmic for 30 mins before I ragequit and went back to Niri.
I tried Niri for a little more than a month and it is great I feel that regular tiling is better. Sure, the scrolling layout has the benefit of not having to resize windows as often, but at the cost of having to look/search for those windows that overflow the workspace view. Also Niri has a problem that when you toggle fullscreen on a window inside a column it will expel it out from the column. And I’m not a fan of the dynamic workspaces amongst some other little quirks too. I have a blog post about it if you atre interested.
Nonetheless it is a great window manager and it is in my top 3.
Niri’s workspaces are just rows, windows being expelled from the columns when fullscreened is very much expected.
I suppose what you want is floating the window and making it fullscreen, returning it to it’s position in the layout after returning it to it’s normal size?
To be honest, sounds like a bit of pain to implement.
I suppose what you want is floating the window and making it fullscreen, returning it to it’s position in the layout after returning it to it’s normal size?
I want to fullscreen a window that is contained within a column and when I toggle out of the fullscreen the window must not be expelled out of the column(staying in place). For example in Hyprland’s scrolling layout windows that are fullscreen keep are kept in the column (it looks clunky as hell).
To be honest, sounds like a bit of pain to implement.
I talked to Niri’s developer long time ago on Matrix and he agreed on that, however this behaviour (or apparent behaviour) is not the same with tabbed windows withing a column. I understand that within the windowing logic it is a hard thing to do, and that they are not the same operations.
For what is worth, I’m not the only one with this problem, many people have expressed the same thought.
Well, it’s because the whole column is fullscreened instead of a single window in that case. I guess you can abuse it a little bit and write a script that’d switch the column into tabbed mode before fullscreening a window if the column has more than one window in it.
I don’t think there is a way to know if the column is already tabbed, though. Might need a bit of unholy incantations to make it all work.
Niri is crazy good. I get itchy without it now
niri and dank material shell 🙏👌
What’s your beef with Gnome?
Maybe OP likes a more Windows-like UI
That’s not really my issue. I actually prefer MacOS like-interfaces, although in the grand scheme of things I don’t actually care. I mostly just want to be able to choose what I want though.
People talk about how gnome is the obvious choice for people coming from a Mac, but, well, I came from a Mac and I hated gnome. It wasn’t Mac-like at all, it just felt oddly locked-down, with loads of wasted space. The suggestion that Mac users would like it tells me that those people have never actually used a Mac.
Meanwhile, I can quite easily make Plasma look like macOS if I wanted to.
Has anyone cracked the launcher bar in Plasma 6 since Latte Dock didn’t make the jump?
What do you mean?
idk… it just feels very locked down, and honestly every time i’ve tried it, there’s been some issue with it. I feel like it’s not customizable enough for me, and also the themeing is inconsistent.
That’s honestly exactly how I would describe KDE, but to each their own!
you would describe KDE as… not customizable?
And I had that same reaction when you said Gnome wasn’t customizable.
Inconsistent
Probably never found the widget store.
For me, it’s “use it the dev way or no way at all” mentality baked in.
If you like the GNOME way of doing things, you’ll feel great. If you don’t like any aspect of it, it will be very hard to rectify.
Interesting that you had similar experience with KDE, because mine is on the contrary. Whatever I could envision, it could be made with KDE - even the stock one. Essentially, you can even recreate much of GNOME experience within it, if you so prefer.
There is a whole extensions library for Gnome for customization.
Sure. But they are still more limited in scope in my experience, not to mention security concerns and other problems.
How is that different than KDE? You can recreate the KDE stock layout in Gnome too.
Basic layout - maybe, but barely the experience.
- Can GNOME alter the system behavior beyond keybindings? Stock KDE can. You can make it not just look, but behave like GNOME to the point you won’t notice the difference.
- Can GNOME freely edit all buttons everywhere in any Adwaita app? KDE apps can, and KDE can always edit any top bar buttons of any apps and make them do whatever.
- Can GNOME easily spam as many elements as you want everywhere and edit the hell out of them to your heart’s content? Stock KDE can.
- Does GNOME offer graphical, WYSIWYG, zero-config, zero-code way to alter any look and feel element of the system? Stock KDE does.
- Can GNOME at least support some basic things like widgets without me having to reach for extensions? Stock KDE can.
KDE allows you to turn your system into anything you want without ever touching a single config, and this goes immeasurably beyond a basic layout. It all comes out of the box, too. I only faced GNOME after experiencing KDE, and it felt so heavily like walls and walls and walls everywhere.
Now, I’m not saying GNOME is bad, and this is not a fanboy contest. But customizability of all things is clearly a win on KDE’s side.
The point of Gnome is that you can’t do those things without extensions. It makes it way harder for grandma to fuck something up. But you can still do them. On the other hand I have found things that are easy to customize in Gnome with extensions, like laptop trackpad gestures, that are nonexistent in KDE with or without extensions as far as I can tell.
But like I said before, to each their own. We are just talking about two different approaches to the same solution. I often recommend KDE to people who are coming over from Windows, but after over 25 years of trying different ones I keep going back to Gnome personally. The only major exception was when Gnome 3 came out I spent several years on Mate (a fork of Gnome 2).
KDE has trackpad gestures for 4 years now, but user configuration is still pretty much nonexistent. Don’t know how things are on GNOME’s end, but since you say it’s customizable there, I’ll give it a spin sometime!
To each their own indeed! I remember my ex specifically asked me to install GNOME as her first DE as she stepped into the Linux territory. Who was I to object? :)
Tell me you use Arch (btw) without telling me you use Arch, btw.
well, I thought it was important since usually people using Cosmic are on Pop!_OS
Favorite: KDE. The GOAT babyyy
Least Favorite: Deepin, due to the privacy concerns
First DE: XFCE
Honorable Mention: Cosmic. It is sexy with decent balance of customization & strong unified vision. It is early on though so not quite ready for prime time. Some bugs, and resource consumption could be better.
Current DE: KDE
Potential Future DE: Might see what thr fuss is about with WMs like Niri. It seems more complicated to set up than it needs to be, but I like the tiling and use of desktops sort of like GNOME but better.
Longest used DE: KDE
Current distro: Fedora KDE
Gotta say, I don’t really think there’s any big issues with Cosmic anymore. They are updating very very quickly, and at this point is consumes less resources than XFCE…
It also has a native tiling mode xD
That’s good to hear! I tried it earlier this year and it was responsive and all (when not buggy) but sitting at 3 or 4 GB of RAM idle. I might give it another go.
i tried cosmic on nixos a while back and it was a bit clunky and missing a couple of bits
time to change that couple of lines of config and try again
i use gnome btw :)
I totally understand people who like Gnome, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not for me.
Since i’m on a rolling release, I thankfully always have the newest versions of Cosmic. They recently also added blurring effects, so that’s pretty fun. Hope it works better for you now!
- Fave: Sawfish WM
- First: Either KDE3 or Xfce, not sure which one was first
- Future: Sawfish hopefully
- Least Fav: Gnome, anything that’s tiling
- Current: Sawfish
- Longest: Either Sawfish or Xfce, not sure which
- Honorable Mention: amiwm because it actually has the pull-down-the-screen thing
- Current Distro: Slackware
Hehe. I love these. I wonder what’s next? Text editors? Web browsers? Terminal emulators? Init systems?
I was a mite tempted to make a logo for my xmonad config, that I’ve whimsically been calling a window manager, called Tabularboonad for about 14 years. But really, it’s just an xmonad config.
I was a mite tempted to attempt to wrangle some contrived reasoning, and positioning on the chart, for my wminizer scripts, since (similar to the prior distro one, with my bedrocklinux use), I do not limit myself to just one wm (or distro), and really, I can switch between any window managers I have installed (and have listed in one of wmnizer’s wmrotate scripts (or the selection list, in the wmnizer2 branch)), such as xmonad, dwm, herbstluftwm, spectrwm, dk, icewm, openbox, without restarting X11(Xorg/XLibre/Pheonix/TinyX), keeping all my gui running seamlessly, as I switch wm in a split second. … So if following the logic of BedrockLinux, that it’s the distro I use, not the multitudes within/upon it, then instead of xmonad (+^)I should say wminizer [(oops, just realised i misspelled wminizer as wmnizer in the rudimentary logo I hastily scribbled for it earlier [when tempted use it here], lol, doh.)]. But, that’s not the same. Doesn’t feel right to try use that logic.
I suppose I should not have been so surprised to see xmonad show up so much in this one.
Whee. These are fun.
wasn’t really planning on making another one, but yknow what? Maybe I will make one for web browsers
- Favourite: GNOME
- Honourable Mention: Stable Hybrid Release (SHR) for OpenMoko
- Least Favourite: dwm
- First: twm or maybe fvwm95 on Slackware 96
- Current: GNOME
- Longest Used: GNOME
- Future: GNOME
In the 1990s I also used IceWM and Enlightenment. My first DE was KDE, but I have been using GNOME pretty consistently for twenty years.
