What's your favorite DE?

What's your favorite DE?

  • GNOME

    Votes: 3 18.8%

  • KDE Plasma

    Votes: 2 12.5%

  • MATE

    Votes: 2 12.5%

  • Budgie

    Votes: 1 6.3%

  • Unity

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • XFCE

    Votes: 3 18.8%

  • Enlightenment, Openbox, i3, etc

    Votes: 2 12.5%

  • Other (post below)

    Votes: 3 18.8%
  • Total voters
    16
  • Poll closed .
L

Lunar

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 26, 2007
Messages
444
I'm curious to see what everyone is using as their chosen DE these days. I know I may step on some toes here, but I grouped tiling and window manager desktops into one category so as to not have too many poll options.
 
I'm a Cinnamon fan. I'm using Mate right now but I prefer Cinnamon. I really wanted to like Budgie as I think it is beautiful but there were just a couple minor things it lacked compared to Mate or Cinnamon.
 
Not a big sample but its interesting to see everyone has a different favorite. One of the strengths of Linux is allowing you the freedom to run what ever DE you like... or multiple DEs.

I mainly run Gnome... I like its simplified layout, and when I am using other DEs or a windows or mac machine I find myself hitting the super key expecting an active programs screen to pop up... its disappointing. :) I am one of the few that like vanilla gnome, but I do load a couple nice to have plugins.

I also have a warm fuzzy spot for XFCE and do use it often as well. Its not flashy but its solid works is easy on resources and still looks really great when setup right. I have tried to like Mate or Budgie or the LX DEs for the same reasons but every time I try I go back to XFCE and wonder why I was bothering to look elsewhere. If simple layout no fuss no muss lean and mean is what you are looking for XFCE is imo the best option.
 
I use Budgie now and love it. Can't wait to see what Ikey does with Budgie 11 when they move to QT. Like ChadD said though we have such a great set of options for DEs under Linux. I used XFCE for years. Love it. Still love it. Problem is it's too long in the tooth and will probably never get HiDPI support. MATE is pretty good too. If I didn't like Budgie so much I could see myself using Solus MATE.
 
Vermillion said:
I use Budgie now and love it. Can't wait to see what Ikey does with Budgie 11 when they move to QT. Like ChadD said though we have such a great set of options for DEs under Linux. I used XFCE for years. Love it. Still love it. Problem is it's too long in the tooth and will probably never get HiDPI support. MATE is pretty good too. If I didn't like Budgie so much I could see myself using Solus MATE.
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I too am excited to see what Budgie becomes with the switch to QT. I feel like being tied to GNOME is holding Budgie back a bit. From what I can tell they want to actually create a full DE from scratch, and I'm totally on board with that. Also, are you liking Solus? I've been considering the switch, but I've been running this Manjaro install for quite a while now, and its been working well enough for me that I haven't been able to bring myself to migrate over to something different.
 
Although I haven't really used it longer then just check it out status. I as well am looking forward to seeing what the budgie guys do with their switch to more independent status. Moving over to QT and doing things their own way exciting. They seem to have a great team and are doing some interesting things.

When they start moving over to their new code base I'm for sure going to give their DE a longer shake. Gnome is safe and you guys are right XFCE is fantastic but doesn't exactly have a dev team that is banging out new features every week. :)
 
I want to try Solis, looks very interesting. I might set it up on the 'loaner'.
 
Lunar said:
I too am excited to see what Budgie becomes with the switch to QT. I feel like being tied to GNOME is holding Budgie back a bit. From what I can tell they want to actually create a full DE from scratch, and I'm totally on board with that. Also, are you liking Solus? I've been considering the switch, but I've been running this Manjaro install for quite a while now, and its been working well enough for me that I haven't been able to bring myself to migrate over to something different.
Click to expand...

I love Solus. Never did I think I'd leave Arch but Solus did it. It's stable. It's fast. Great additions like Clear Boot Manager (bulletproof kernel upgrades. YAY!) that no other mainstream distro has. Ikey gives a shit and engages the community on a daily basis. Not to mention the stuff he's done for gaming with his Linux Steam Integration snap and things. Curated rolling release so syncs on Friday. They actually did a full sync yesterday to correct some issues with the stupid NetworkManager applet and fix Firefox 57. Apparently 57s default compiling settings make it slower so Ikey had to fix it and instead of waiting till Friday they synced yesterday. Lots of other things in there too.

Looks like kernel 4.14 may hit Solus on Friday as well. I'm think I'm going to move one of my laptops over to the unstable repos and help test some of it. I don't really care if my laptop blows up and I also trust Ikey to fix it pretty damn quickly if something does blow up.

Ikey has already started Budgie 11. He's shown screenshots of bits and pieces. Looks really nice using KWin at the WM. Budgie 11 is gonna be badass.
 
ChadD said:
Although I haven't really used it longer then just check it out status. I as well am looking forward to seeing what the budgie guys do with their switch to more independent status. Moving over to QT and doing things their own way exciting. They seem to have a great team and are doing some interesting things.

When they start moving over to their new code base I'm for sure going to give their DE a longer shake. Gnome is safe and you guys are right XFCE is fantastic but doesn't exactly have a dev team that is banging out new features every week. :)
Click to expand...
Well, do keep in mind that the XFCE team are still actively working on migrating everything over to GTK3, so someone is still working on it in some capacity.
 
Vermillion said:
Ikey has already started Budgie 11. He's shown screenshots of bits and pieces. Looks really nice using KWin at the WM. Budgie 11 is gonna be badass.
Click to expand...
Where? I'd love to see those screenshots. I don't see them on the Budgie blog. If you have links I'd love to see them!!
 
How does the Steam integration under Solus work? What's so special about it?
 
Lunar said:
Well, do keep in mind that the XFCE team are still actively working on migrating everything over to GTK3, so someone is still working on it in some capacity.
Click to expand...

Indeed I was looking forward to what they come up with... it does take them a year or more between updates though sadly. On the plus side they seem to know their limitations at least and don't add half cocked buggy features, they keep it simple and clean. Makes it a solid choice imo for older hardware. I use it now and then when I have clients that have older hardware around but will still do the job just fine. Have a few stripped down xfce running machines in warehouse type situations.
 
ChadD said:
Indeed I was looking forward to what they come up with... it does take them a year or more between updates though sadly. On the plus side they seem to know their limitations at least and don't add half cocked buggy features, they keep it simple and clean. Makes it a solid choice imo for older hardware. I use it now and then when I have clients that have older hardware around but will still do the job just fine. Have a few stripped down xfce running machines in warehouse type situations.
Click to expand...
So, I personally have a love hate relationship with XFCE. I love how lightweight and efficient it is, but if I have one complaint that pretty much has made MATE my goto lightweight DE is the size of the resize area on windows in XFCE. I know that there are ways around it, but it's infuriating enough to me, that I just don't use it for that one reason.
 
Lunar said:
So, I personally have a love hate relationship with XFCE. I love how lightweight and efficient it is, but if I have one complaint that pretty much has made MATE my goto lightweight DE is the size of the resize area on windows in XFCE. I know that there are ways around it, but it's infuriating enough to me, that I just don't use it for that one reason.
Click to expand...

I really want to try Gnome again after seeing some of Lunar's screen shots, the problem is that every time I try a new DE there's always some minor little annoyance that ruins the whole experience for me in comparison to MATE.
 
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BulletDust said:
I really want to try Gnome again after seeing some of Lunar's screen shots, the problem is that every time I try a new DE there's always some minor little annoyance that ruins the whole experience for me in comparison to MATE.
Click to expand...
So, if there's one thing that will annoy you to no end with GNOME, it will be nautilus. They have dumbed it down so much, that I think it has got to be the worst file manager on Linux at this point. I'm actually almost certain that there is some ncurses file manager out there that will make nautilus look like crap.
 
Lunar said:
So, if there's one thing that will annoy you to no end with GNOME, it will be nautilus. They have dumbed it down so much, that I think it has got to be the worst file manager on Linux at this point. I'm actually almost certain that there is some ncurses file manager out there that will make nautilus look like crap.
Click to expand...

I fully admit to replacing gnomes file manager with thunar from xfce. lol
 
I like XFCE, been using it since ubuntu came out with that unity garbage. It might not look as fancy as some of the other options out there, but it does what i need, and doesn't feel like its getting in my way. Then again the 2 main things i always have open is a whole bunch of terminals and firefox, so i guess i don't really need anything fancy.
 
Lunar said:
So, if there's one thing that will annoy you to no end with GNOME, it will be nautilus. They have dumbed it down so much, that I think it has got to be the worst file manager on Linux at this point. I'm actually almost certain that there is some ncurses file manager out there that will make nautilus look like crap.
Click to expand...

Totally, not a fan of Nautilus at all and that's the exact reason why - I blame Ubuntu. That's the reason why I can't stand vanilla Ubuntu, it's too simplistic.
 
I use a combination of SharpE and Emerge Desktop (yeah they're both not in development anymore, but the combination works for my needs), and Dopus for my file manager.


Or is this thread only for Linux DEs? ;)
 
BulletDust said:
So they're improving performance in games?

I guess I'm a little confused, I've never experienced an issue with Steam beyond desktop icon shortcuts not working.
Click to expand...

Performance may improve but it's more about making everything work nice. Some games have their own libraries to replace the aging ones in the original Steam runtime. Those libraries conflict among games and conflict with the system. So LSI corrects that. It'll intercept those calls and that way the game get the latest libraries no questions asked. There's some games where there are graphical glitches due to the libraries they use and using the newer corrects that.

If you want specifics you can dig around Ikey's G+ stream as he comments about it quite a bit. https://plus.google.com/+IkeyDoherty

The Solus stream may have more info too. https://plus.google.com/+Solus-Project
 
Honestly, I've never had an issue with Steam under Ubuntu that was in any way a deal breaker. However, hats off to the Solus team for pushing to make an already great OS even better! Good job.
 
BulletDust said:
Honestly, I've never had an issue with Steam under Ubuntu that was in any way a deal breaker. However, hats off to the Solus team for pushing to make an already great OS even better! Good job.
Click to expand...
And that is one of the main reasons why I want to give Solus a go. Ikey and his team do so much work for the entire Linux community, and not just their own distro. I mean, outside of contributing upstream, nothing says they have to do anything that they do, but they do it anyway.
 
Lunar said:
And that is one of the main reasons why I want to give Solus a go. Ikey and his team do so much work for the entire Linux community, and not just their own distro. I mean, outside of contributing upstream, nothing says they have to do anything that they do, but they do it anyway.
Click to expand...

Totally! Such enthusiasm is the reason I want to support the distro.
 
This is pretty much what I thought. Nobody likes unity and everyone else is all over the place.
 
KarsusTG said:
This is pretty much what I thought. Nobody likes unity and everyone else is all over the place.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't say that's entirely true. As it would turn out, there's enough interest in keeping Unity alive that there are talks of making an official community driven Unity flavor of Ubuntu. As soon as Unity was killed, the community picked it up.
 
Openbox with a couple of QoL applications (panel, pcmanfm)
 
KarsusTG said:
This is pretty much what I thought. Nobody likes unity and everyone else is all over the place.
Click to expand...
Choice is such a wonderful thing. Nobody liked windows8 "desktop" but they really had no choice...

While there are a million and one DE for Linux, they still interact with the system because SHOCK HORROR the joys of open-source and pseudo-standard and the best solution wins out.
 
naib said:
Nobody liked windows8 "desktop" but they really had no choice...
Click to expand...

Eh, Classic Shell was free, Start8 (and now Start10) are clean. I haven't seen the Windows 8 'UI' in years, never saw 8.1, and didn't see the Windows 10 UI when I upgraded because Start8 carried over and the whole time Windows just looked and worked like Windows 7 :).

[which isn't the same thing as Linux DE's, but does show that you weren't stuck with MS' poor idea with the 'universal' tablet interface]
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Eh, Classic Shell was free, Start8 (and now Start10) are clean. I haven't seen the Windows 8 'UI' in years, never saw 8.1, and didn't see the Windows 10 UI when I upgraded because Start8 carried over and the whole time Windows just looked and worked like Windows 7 :).

[which isn't the same thing as Linux DE's, but does show that you weren't stuck with MS' poor idea with the 'universal' tablet interface]
Click to expand...
you mean you had to go out and find something
 
[for the record, I haven't built my Linux desktop yet, and so I haven't voted in the poll...]
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Eh, Classic Shell was free, Start8 (and now Start10) are clean. I haven't seen the Windows 8 'UI' in years, never saw 8.1, and didn't see the Windows 10 UI when I upgraded because Start8 carried over and the whole time Windows just looked and worked like Windows 7 :).

[which isn't the same thing as Linux DE's, but does show that you weren't stuck with MS' poor idea with the 'universal' tablet interface]
Click to expand...

I tried Start8, it was by no means perfect. It wasn't in any way uncommon for it to completely crash the compositor.

In the end I dumped Windows 8.1 and went back to Windows 7.
 
BulletDust said:
I tried Start8, it was by no means perfect. It wasn't in any way uncommon for it to completely crash the compositor.

In the end I dumped Windows 8.1 and went back to Windows 7.
Click to expand...

Well, it's uncommon enough that I didn't have any problems on three different machines with at least five installs (there was some premature SSD death in there). And that's including upgrades to 8.1 and 10. It just worked.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Well, it's uncommon enough that I didn't have any problems on three different machines with at least five installs (there was some premature SSD death in there). And that's including upgrades to 8.1 and 10. It just worked.
Click to expand...

It was definitely Start8, as soon as I got rid of it the compositor crashing stopped - Furthermore it was always the Start menu that would crap itself. I've got no idea what Start8 is like under Windows 10, but there's no way anyone can claim that Windows has the flexibility of Linux when it comes to DE customization.

The first step to freedom is accepting that the Windows way of doing things is by no means the perfect way of doing things in most situations - It's simply your accepted way of doing things as you've been running Windows for the last 20 years.
 
BulletDust said:
It was definitely Start8, as soon as I got rid of it the compositor crashing stopped - Furthermore it was always the Start menu that would crap itself. I've got no idea what Start8 is like under Windows 10, but there's no way anyone can claim that Windows has the flexibility of Linux when it comes to DE customization.

The first step to freedom is accepting that the Windows way of doing things is by no means the perfect way of doing things in most situations - It's simply your accepted way of doing things as you've been running Windows for the last 20 years.
Click to expand...

Eh, I've dabbled with Linux all along- was running my first Linux server, a CounterStrike server, through my first router, a Linksys (the first one!) back when that was cool.

As for Start8, it worked in 10 seamlessly upon upgrading, but won't install on Windows 10.


[and you won't quote me as saying that Windows has Linux DE flexibility, just that users are not beholden to the new UIs]
 
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