My favourite DE has got to be Cinnamon, as much as I like KDE and XFCE, I prefer the simplicity of cinnamon where as in KDE has a bit too much of everything in the customization scene and XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right.
Cinnamon to me is perfect as I easily transferred from Win 10 to Mint and soon Manjaro Cinnamon Edition.
What is your favourite DE and why? Tiling WM DE’s can be counted as well seeing as they have nifty navigation features.
I’ve been on BSPWM for nearly 2 years now. Custom scripts and keybindings all over the place. My workflow is so customized and keyboard centric with this TWM. Vim bindings in the terminal, Vimium in the browser, and a heavily customized Neovim Text Editor with Espanso Text expander global keybindings every where… Not to mention a 55 key split Ortholinear Keyboard with custom firmware…yeah… My hands almost never touch my mouse except to game.
I’ve had this type of itch to keyboardize my workflow more. I learned about colemak keyboard mods, and started following the rabbit hole haha. Did you design your keyboard pcb too? or just wrote custom firmware?
Nah, didn’t go that far (yet), just heavily edited a qmk_firmware configuration. So yeah, I’ll admit I didn’t exactly write my own keyboard firmware.
I have the soldering tools ready for when I have time to learn. Sadly I only have time for software lately, and hardware/firmware has had to take a back seat.
Customizing your workflow around the keyboard is a helluva drug though! If it weren’t for Vim being configured for QWERTY out of the box, I’d probably configure a COLEMAK or DVORAK setup as well.
I’d encourage you to go as far down the rabbit hole as you’re comfortable, the learning curve can slow you down initially, but the dividends pay off in the long run imho.
Here’s a pic of my current setup. The keyboard is prebuilt (Voyager ZSA), just with custom firmware. Couple clamps keep it vertical for ergonomics.
I think your QMK config counts (for now;)) What are some useful things you’ve changed?
Yeah, im a bit worried about vim binds for alternative layouts as well. I think some people use a layer mod to keep normal mode as QWERTY (or a “normal mode” layer) but insert mode uses their regular layout. Others apparently use their non-qwerty layout for everything (but i guess change hjkl). Apparently it’s not too bad… but probably depends on the person.
Honestly my first olkb was the Planck from DROP. A 40% keyboard where the numbers and symbols are each on their own separate layer. The defaults on the Voyager were very clunky IMHO, so I simply switched them to the defaults of the Planck, including moving the home row up one whole row. This left a few spare keys as the Voyager is a 55 key, so I simply added two Super keys instead of one as well as a few other duplicates.
I’ve also heard of some interesting workarounds for using Vim with Colemack/Dvorak. It is funny, when I first discovered OLKBs, I kept encouraging people to use them, and I still do. Same with Vim. But ultimately I get why people don’t. I’m so used to this workflow now, going back to a standard keyboard feels clunky and slow, and I’d imagine my setup feels awkward and alien to most if not all other people.
But it’s uniquely mine and I can type 100wpm if I am on a roll with his setup.
The clamps are a hilarious accident that happened to work for me. I was experimenting with different ways to get that near 90° angle shoulder width apart, and this was the3 soluuon I haphazardly stumbled on.
Glad you like it/find it entertaining! I wish you well in finding what works for you! ✌️
KDE : it’s the only DE where I can have 2 identical panels (app pined+ full system tray) on each of my 2 screens without installing extensions.
KDE can do what I want without having to look for extensions. Breeze theme is good enough for me, I don’t need to look for something else. So far it’s the best out of the box experience I had.
I prefer Gnome look, but I distr’hop too often to have the courage to setup the desktop every time.
WMs typically do not include stuff like a custom GUI for system settings and do not have a suite of GUI software associated with it (think Kate, Konsole, Dolphin etc) - it is just a piece of software for managing windows, you have to put the rest of the desktop together yourself.
Thanks for the answer. But then it means that people get a distro with a DE and install a WM on top of it? Or do you have distros coming with just a WM? What’s the advantage of a WM compared to a DE?
Some distros have editions with a WM (usually i3) as a default, yes. These editions tend to come with some basic config so it’s more usable out of the box. But you can also install WMs side by side with DEs and then switch in the login manager (GDM, SDDM), just the same as you can install multiple DEs on a system. You could also install a headless version of a distro first and then install only the WM and whatever other tools you want on top of that. Basically all system settings can be changed through config files or CLI programs, for some things like audio and bluetooth there are good DE-independent settings programs like pavucontrol.
As for advantages, WMs are usually very keyboard driven, you pretty much never have to touch the mouse. They also tend to be fairly light weight and use little RAM. My favourite i3 feature is that workspaces are per-monitor, so I could easily move multiple windows between monitors and not lose the way they are set up.
As for disadvantages, changing any system settings tends to be a research project, because there is no centralized solution, it’s even worse than Windows in this regard. Personally this is the main reason I switched back to KDE from i3. I could also never get theming to work quite right.
Thanks for the really good and helpful explanation!
To be honest it’s often difficult to understand every Linux subtilities, but the community is really great and compensate the lack of information you’re getting inside your distribution.
The workflow is amazing once it “clicks” (but in the few days it takes before that happens, man it’s annoying. You end up asking yourself time and again why don’t they just copy Windows like everybody else)
With the exception of ElementaryOS, Gnome seems to be the only DE that really cares about design, especially in terms of consistency. Random bits of text in different sizes, different fonts in different places, inconsistent padding, improper handling of rounded corners, etc all really bug me. Most people don’t seem to notice or care (probably because MS has trained us not to care about UX consistency lol), but for me it wears me out and makes me hate using PCs. Gnome is a polished UX and it feels like everything was designed very purposely, with a lot of thought.
There’s a good ecosystem of GTK4/Libadwaita apps.
Probably have the best accessibility features.
It’s really stable for being a modern DE.
I respect the devs for having a vision and sticking to it, despite getting hate/death threats for it. It’s led to a different and very functional DE, unshackled from the traditional Win95 UX paradigm.
E: just because it’s not your DE of choice doesn’t mean you need to downvote me or send me DMs calling me names lmao. Some people in the Linux community are completely unhinged lol
I currently use Sway primarily. On my work machine, I have to use Zoom, so I use i3 on X1q which acts/feels virtually identical to Sway. (Or rather, the other way around. Sway was made to be a Wayland compositor drop-in replacement for i3 which has been around for a long time.)
" Simple by defauly, Powerful when needed" is exactly what KDE is. Just try pressing function keys(F1-F12) and see how it expands its features. Oh and the edit mode!
I like Sway, it obviously needs a bit of configuration to be useful, but that’s partly what I like about it, and using a distro like Guix (Nix configured with Lisp) makes it easy to have the same settings on multiple PCs. Otherwise I like GNOME; it’s well supported and has many good apps. Touch/touchpad support is really good as well.
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