What desktop environment are you using?

kwerk

kwerk

kwerk

Wise Guy
Soldato
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23 May 2009
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I saw there is a thread for which distro but not which x windows. I use rh/centos from the console but have never used linux as a desktop. I just tried the gnome versions that come with ubuntu and fedora and hated them. I'm not interested in ipad-esque twitter, chatting, amazon, music, pictures, etc rubbish like ubuntu is bloated with.

I want strictly utilitarian but at the same time something that works without a lot of tweaking. Thats the only thing I liked with ubuntu is the nvidia drivers were working out the box without having to mess about with modprobe or whatever. The old centos one was ok to work with, gnome 2 I think?

I think cinnamon or kde plasma is what I need?
 
MATE is the Gnome 2 fork. Cinnamon is Gnome 3 made to function like Gnome 2. I actually like Gnome 3. When it was first released I hated it because they kept breaking everything with every incremental update that came along. But since moving to Fedora 21 Gnome is actually my favourite DE to use. Having said that, KDE 5 is pretty awesome as well and I'm debating whether to go with KDE or stay using Gnome 3 with Fedora 22 later this month.
 
MATE. I can't stand GNOME 3 and KDE has always been awful IMO. Cinnamon and LXDE are both pretty okay. Haven't used Xfce in a long time, but it was alright too back in the day.
 
I installed Centos 7 and I'm happy with it out of the box, and more so after using the gnome tweak tool a bit, and tweaking the fonts to subpixel rendering. Only thing is there is a lot of wasted desktop space in app windows from the top panel and inefficient menu layouts, I'd prefer to consolidate it with the bottom panel because I have it on a laptop screen. And the colors seem sort of washed out even with nvidia drivers. I will try out MATE though.
 
KDE4 on my desktop and KDE5 on my laptop, I've had a few too many bugs on my laptop to risk upgrading my desktop too soon.
 
XFCE on both the desktop and laptop. I would use Ubuntu's unity but icon placement is terrible.
All the others never felt any good to me.
 
Plasma 5 (KDE) or MATE 1.8.2 mostly, though I do like Cinnamon for its default 'open as root' context menu in Nemo (file manager). I did like XFCE with the Whisker menu on Arch but I went back to MATE due to consistent XFCE bugs where a custom Whisker menu icon would disappear every time you rearranged open windows. On a more powerful machine (this one is 6+ years old) I'd take Cinnamon as default probably, but MATE is just as nice looking and way leaner. On Ubuntu 15.04 MATE or Debian with MATE you're talking 160MB RAM on boot. Fedora is more but it boots a lot more services by default too. Cinnamon is >500MB on boot on non-Mint distros in my experience. Way too much.
 
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I have KDE/Kubuntu. Used to be quite fond of XFCE since I used to run some fairly underpowered hardware but it's a bit... temperamental. I'd really like to keep using XFCE but it feels so behind the curve these days.
 
I liked the KDE spin of Linux Mint when I tried it on my desktop, though for laptops currently preferring Unity. I hated it when it first came out (also Gnome 3) but after using a MacBook Air with the dock on the left-hand side I got used to it and started to enjoy.

Currently waiting to see what happens with the RazorQT and LXDE merger though. :)
 
It's a personal preference, but I dislike overly fancy environments, so I use XFCE regardless of the power of the machine. I've also used i3, which is nice, but it's simpler to have everything the same, so XFCE wins.
 
I'm using i3wm but it's down to personal preference and having choice is one benefit of using linux.

I found once I had used a tiling wm for a few weeks I didn't want to go back to dragging & resizing windows.
 
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