So a few months back I asked about you guys os in c/asklemmy, so this time I wanna ask about your desktops you use on this same account.
(I use kde but plan to move to cinnamon I find kde buggy and gnome tracker3 randomly broke for no reason + themeing so yh idk if these happened to anybody)
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Long time i3 user, recently switched to Hyprland+Wayland. I just don’t like mice, don’t enjoy using them, and I find the snappiness and responsiveness of keyboard-centric workflows very fun and enjoyable.
I am a software developer, and I am very impatient when it comes to my tools: I like my feedback cycles and interactions to be as tight as possible. This limited study from 2015 showed that developers, on average, spend ~26% of their productive time on stuff that is not related to either code editing or comprehension, including 14% spent on UI interactions. Tiling window manager allows me to streamline most of these interactions through hotkey bindings and shell automation, >!so I prefer spending literal months polishing my dotfiles instead!<
KDE for my main PC. Pretty with floating panels, KDE Connect, QT apps are often the best apps in their class and are perfectly integrated (FreeCAD, krita, okular, kdenlive, vlc, dolphin, etc…) And konsole is also very full featured.
I don’t know what KiCAD uses, but it also seems very well integrated into the KDE desktop unlike most gnome apps.
XFCE on MX Linux for an old Intel Compute Stick to keep it very usable.
I’m running MATE on my laptop. It gives me what I need (a task bar, space for some instrumentation, the usual desktop functionality, a way to start applications) and nothing that I don’t care about (wobbling windows, compiz, stuff like that). My DE is a tool; I use tools that don’t get in my way because I have work to do.
I might give COSMIC a try in a few months, I haven’t decided yet.
Enlightenment. It’s pretty and really fast. Of course you can’t complete with the speed of tile wm. But their development speed is so slow…
I’ve been experimenting with DEs on a low end machine (celeron n3010, 2gb ram), and so far, I’m still on xfce, but I forgot to test Enlightenment. Gonna give it a try.
I install enlightenment in a asus netbook. Still working. Haven’t updated for so long. ~10 yrs?
May I ask what distro you’re using?
Bodhi. I tried to compile by myself first. But it sometimes won’t work. Too much trouble. Bodhi is simply easy and allow me to stay in Ubuntu/Debian based, as long as you don’t need really new packages. But we have flatpak, right?
I’m shocked I had to scroll this far for the first fluxbox/Enlightenment/windowmaker user
After trying mostly everything, I always come back to my “custom desktop”: (openbox + xfce4-panel + thunar + xfce4-terminal + dunst) … for the last 15 years or so. It doesn’t get in the way, is fast AF, it takes very very little ram/cpu (4.5 Mb !!) and it has everything I need (even tiling via keyboard). It’s VERY customizable and it does as I tell. No crashes, no weirdeness. It just works. I will probably move to labwc in a future, just because… wayland. And now I’m about to use it on a steam deck… it’s gonna be fun.
Reminds me of how lxqt uses openbox for its windowing.
AFAIK, lxde uses openbox, and lxqt uses xfwm.
Lxqt uses openbox, I tested it, and am pretty sure lxde ships its on window manager.
I should have said I was speaking about debian. Other distros may use different defaults.
Ohh
Same. Didn’t know about labwc, will look imto it when I switch to Wayland someday!
Did you come off a Crunchbang distro as well? 🙂
I started playing with linux (ubuntu and a macbook [I know, the worse combo possible]) around 2006 or so. I tried some linux distros before, but just for fun, never as a daily driver. I come from the times of DOS and even a little before that (amiga 500, commodore 64, spectrum…[I feel old]) . After some time with ubuntu, I found out ubuntu was bloated and quite slow, so I gave debian a try and never came back after that. Among others, I tried crunch and bunsen and while I liked them, I got a few ideas from them and applied them to my vanilla debian installs. I usually install debian testing netinst and a script I made to install/customize packages/apps/etc. A debian install (testing netinst from usb pendrive) from 0, usually takes me about 15 min.
I’ve been testing out arch since I got a steamdeck as a replacement for my main PC a few weeks ago but I don’t think it’s gonna stick. I’ve got a vanilla arch install running but it’s way too cumbersome to reinstall/maintain it. I have to say, arch feels lighter. I will probably take another look at it sometime.
Wayland is neeeeeaaaaar!. LabWC is the closest to openbox I’ve found. I just hope it is as snappy and stable as openbox is always been. The config is pretty similar and the way it works (as little as I’ve tried it) is also quite similar.
About eyecandy and so, I have to say KDE and Gnome looks better everytime I take a look at them, but I feel like I have to be waiting for them to complete the tasks I ask of them, they don’t feel as “immediate” as openbox (KDE is getting there) and since I don’t use a compositor, games always run as expected (I’m talking X11 only). I’ve read about KDE/xfce running great so many times, but I had microstutters in games and or less avg FPSs while gaming, and switching to openbox just fixed that. I found out that disabling compositing in xfce also fixed that… but in that case I’d just rather go the openbox way. Openbox/lxde/lxqt can be pretty/ok/nice too:
About the “desktop” concept, I just need a panel, a file manager and a terminal, all the applets KDE has feel redundant, slow and way too much windows>8-alike. I like windows 98 functionality better (do as I say, let me alone, don’t pester me with notifications and applets and crap everywhere). For example, I have always hated the “safe remove drive” applet from windows/kde and so on. I just go to thunar, click on the eject icon close to the drive… and done.
Sorry for the long post, and of course this is my own experience, to each their own…etc. Just use what you like/works for you and mix it however you like (one of the best things linux has).
Excuse my english (not my mother language) and I’m quite sleep deprived.
I stopped usin em myself cus my laptop aint nun too fancy and i hated watching my system use 1.5+ while not doing jack, so i tried window managers a couple times until it stuck :3 i3 btw
My desktop environment of choice would be XFCE. It’s simply easy to configure while not giving me choice fatigue like KDE does. Also I don’t like Qt for some reason.
GNOME is great but I find their extensions to be super clunky sometimes. Some of them even break in between updates. The main selling point of gnome (for me) is the minimal look and feel, extensions kind of ruin that a little bit.
Don’t get me wrong plasma and Gnome are wonderful DEs but XFCE provides a simple and balanced desktop IMO. The only thing that’s missing is full Wayland support.
P.S : Anyways most of the time I would be running a window manager instead of a DE, my current favourite Wayland window-manager is Labwc because it gives me openbox vibes.
Xmonad. I prefer tiling window managers, & I tried Sway but I can’t do color work without proper color management… something Wayland doesn’t support. Thus, I moved back to my old Xmonad config awaiting Wayland to get its shit together after years saying color management was around the corner & distros still adopting it despite not being ready.
Xfce. Partly because I’ve used it for a long time, but mostly because it does what I need it to do and little else.
KDE Plasma. I like having a familiar start menu and keyboard shortcuts
KDE. Because of its simplicity. Unsarcastically.
Typically I don’t use a DE. I’ll go for dmenu + dwm usually if I only want a WM. I find the default bindings and behaviour for the tiling is the most ergonomic when comparing it to other WMs like i3.
When I do have to get a DE setup then I’ll use XFCE because I like how it stays out of the way and I find it easy to customise.
I currently use Gnome on my laptop, but I’ve toyed with returning to KDE for a while. I used KDE briefly back in the v3 and v4 days felt like it was a bit bloated compared to Gnome v1 and v2. Cinnamon is nice but a bit heavyweight on graphics. I should probably return to XFCE or Mate.
i3. Superb for keyboard-driven environment. Ultra fast, so responsive and configurable. The best.
Gnome and Cosmic. Gnome 'cause of simplicity and Cosmic because of Rust.
!I am a Rust programmer and I love this language!<
