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 would say aesthetically always preferred gnome but my laptop which is pretty low end ran slow on it. Kde is in that ballpark for my laptop in terms slowdowns but for the most part it floated through. That was when I used like manjaro.
But I moved on to antix for stability. It has icewm that they configured for the distro. I loved it.
Due to some hardware issue I tested out other distros to see if it was hardware issue or not. Currently my laptop has gnome on it I think.
GNOME with a bunch of extensions and themes. It looks and works way better than Plasma, which I’ve tried, and I find the UI too crowded and unpolished.
I use kde6+Wayland. I do like the simplicity of Cinnamon, but it runs games slower than kde, even though mangohud claims they run at the same speed. For example, in Cinnamon it’ll say 60fps when it’s clearly in the 30s-40s, and kde actually runs the same thing at 60fps. This is with every tweak i could find, and yes, including turning on the setting to turn off compositing during games.
Kde6 is still quite buggy at times, but I’m really enjoying Wayland’s smoother general behavior over x11, even with x11 stuff like wine/proton. This is on arch + AMD rx 6600 xt. I used old gnome 2, then mate, then Cinnamon for years, but if KDE can clean itself up a little bit (no judgment tho, i get it) it may be my permanent DE. Generally when i go to report a bug, it’s already reported by someone else…
I use KDE, because it runs perfectly on wayland and covers 100% of my needs.
Budgie looks very promising now and I want to explore it further. Also LXQT is perfect for older devices or if you want a KDE, but simplier.
KDE and associated KDE programs crash randomly all the time for me. I switched back to Windows for a few weeks and am patiently waiting for plasma 6.1 and Nvidia 555 drivers to go to stable.
GNOME. Won’t say I don’t hate it sometimes but every time after a few weeks using anything else I’m back to gnome. The polish and smoothness are unparalleled, and I don’t really customize a lot. I did used the Plasma 6 beta and seemed great even if it’s not my preference of design language, but haven’t tried since. I should give it another go.
I’ve used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.
And then on various other machines.
Xfce on my desktop at work that I don’t use that much (work mainly from home) and just needed to set up quick. It’s totally fine, like xfce always is.
Gnome on my tablet (basically a Surface knock-off). I don’t really like gnome, but it’s the only thing I’ve tried that works well OOTB for a touchscreen.
PekWM on an old macbook running debian. Great stacking WM. Super flexible, and the tabbed windows for any app are cool.
LXQT on an ancient (2009?) dual-core laptop that I mainly just use for writing in nvim. Works well for a simple setup.
Gnome for its looks, simplicity and intuitive ways, but after Plasma 6 release, KDE seems to be up par with Gnome’s UI/UX so at the moment Plasma ia my favourite desktop.
As for WMs I tried i3, Sway, and Hyprland. Overall Hyprland is my favourite because of its special workspace mechanics, customization and options. But if looks had no value to you and you like Sway’s scratchpad mechanic then sway is for you (plus its documentation is mostly clearer, better organized and well written than Hyprland). Btw I am not comparing their tiling because there are use cases for each person and you can acomplish each others tiling mode with plugins.
Having successfully convinced me to move away from Xfce after GNOME 2 was deprecated, my main DE has been MATE for such a long time. However, I am being wooed by KDE Plasma lately. I remember running Plasma 5.26 on Slackware 15-current and was blown away at how snappy it was on an old Dell Latitude E6410 with a 1st-gen Core i5 520M! I can only imagine how nice Plasma 6.x is in comparison.
MATE has also been stable for me on the BSD side, running it on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but Plasma might woo me away on there as well, especially once Plasma 6 is available on OpenBSD 7.6.
I also prefer to run Fluxbox on much less powerful hardware, regardless of the OS it’s on.
Also KDE here, but largely without modifications from defaults. I turn off a few things, but more or less it's exactly what i expect from a DE without taking up too many resources. I really buy in to the K-suite apps for almost everything too, so it all works together nicely.
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