After trying out Cosmic, Gnome,KDE Plasma, and Hyprland, I feel like plasma is the most usable for me coming from Windows. It solves the gripes I had about lack of customizability while still starting me off with a familiar homebar. I will be going back and forth with gnome for a while.
I really like gnome and the sliding desktops, and all the extensions seem to make it very customizable as well, but not directly like plasma, instead you mix and match (or make) extensions to get the look you want. (correct me if im wrong, I used it for a day)
Hyprland seems very nice for multitasking but the keyboard focus of the presets ive tried doesn’t really appeal to me, I like being able to just use my mouse sometimes.
Cosmic, is definitely an alpha and im interested to see what it becomes, wont be using it now.
Cinnamon, Feels like Gnome done right,it’s stable,customizable,Mehh resource intensive. Sadly no HDR AND VRR and a bit messy underneath the hood but I can use gamescope for HDR and VRR and i kinda wish the extension ecosystem was great. My workflow idk but I rarely use gtile actions like Send to kde connect and file converting is useful.
ive used many de’s and wm’s over the last 15+ years and ended using gnome the most. most familiar with it now so, its fine for me.
I use Mate on my laptop; before that I used Cinnamon.
To be honest, DEs are basically terminal window managers for me. If I didn’t need a graphical web browser for everything I do (because that’s basically what software is these days - shit you log into from a web browser) I’d probably be using GNU Screen or possibly Twin to manage multiple shells instead.
If the drag-and-drop functionality of modern DEs wasn’t so helpful I’d probably still be using twm because I like stuff that does what I need, and otherwise stays out of my way.
XFCE and well, straightforward usage without endless tweaking and customization. On the other side, I recently(~2 years:)) felt in love with tiling window manager BSPWM and keyboard-driven usage.
GNOME on my laptop, using the trackpad. Three-finger swipe up to switch tasks/search. Two-finger tap for context menus. Three-finger tap for things like opening in a new tab, or closing a tab. Simple, intuitive, efficient, comfortable.
My preference is the opposite of yours. I just recently set up Hyprland and I love it for the focus on keyboard and the ease of customizing the keybinds.
The other thing I love is the tiling. I almost always have two windows side by side and in every other DE I’ve used (haven’t used cosmic), I always had to faff about to get my windows half and half or into the quarters. So pair that with the keyboard focus and hyprland is the winner for me.
yeah i don’t know what the use case is for hiding or partially hiding windows as if they’re papers on a desk other than sheer skeuomorphism.
Agree. It’s a windowing behaviour I’ve hated forever. Before jumping to linux I used macOS for a long time and the only thing that made it tolerable was a toolbar app that let me create custom keybindings for splitting windows. When inwent Linux I went gnome initially as it gave pretty close to the same functionality built in with super+arrow keys, but there is some stuff about GNOME that just does not work for me. So for me, Hyprland is great
I can have multiple windows open at large size, arrange them to overlap so I can peek at the important part and click to bring one to the front. Like in a file browser, I can have multiple directories in multiple windows and switch back and forth without losing sight of the other one entirely.
I tried working with tiling and while it felt kinda cool, in the end it didn’t solve any problem I have. At most I’m working in 2 different windows 99% of the time and I have a second monitor for that. So it’s not that hiding windows is a use case, it’s that tiling them isn’t one.
Hyprland is kinda cool since you can still have windows over windows if you need/want it, I was worried since the width can be off and its easy to just open a window and scale iy manually to see text properly, it doesnt solve any problem I have tho, just forces me to use the keyboard more than I want to.
I definitely want to spend a sunday just customizing and tinkering with it tho, sounds fun.Rnow plasma works super well for me, love that you can right click windows and have them always stay on top or always be below, useful when using the transparent terminal. Hyprland has a top popdown terminal (at least the config I used) which is kinda sick, but not really necessary lol.
I often dont use my keyboard when casually browsing, reaching for it constantly is annoying in those cases, I’m assuming yall that use linux more are more used to the opposite and not using a graphical interface.
plasmas had no issues going half and half or quarters, better than windows at least, but yeah my monitors are relatively small compared to what other ppl have, so i never divide by more than 4
After many years of tiling wms I recently settled on Plasma. I found that tiling causes more issues than it solves (window rules much?!). For me tiling only is useful for terminals but there are other solutions for that (tmux for example).
I had to get used to not being able to do workspace per monitor anymore but now I am using Activities which works really well actually. I am a dev and have a 3 monitor setup, one for logging (bunch of terminals), one for coding and one for the output of the project I am working on (browser).
I also play games for which Plasma is perfect, its xwayland implementation is flawless, even on HiDPI which cannot be said of Hyprland for example.
Tl;dr I like Plasma.
But dare you something doesn’t work as expected under plasma. Trying to figure out what causes the issue is a daunting task. Also you mentioned windows rules much, did you mean you prefer windows rules from plasma to tiling? Because setting up windows rules for all your applications is AT LEAST as bothersome as it is in any of the twms I tried/use (i3wm, river) or WMs like labwc.
KDE is the easiest for coming from Windows, you almost never never need the command line or anything “extra” to customize it (beyond what even Windows will allow).
GNOME (especially in Ubuntu) by default is more Macintosh-like which might appeal to some people, it’s “simpler” but any customizations will require navigating the add-ons (and in my experience inevitably the command line too).
I think KDE is the one for most people who just want a functioning PC. GNOME could be good for the PC you might make for your parent. Bonus points for an immutable distro which are even harder to break.
Trying cinnamon and it might be the superior parent rec, its basically older windows, very straightforward ui, not flashy, Gnome (at least the default i had) didn’t have a start bar and required clicking the windows button to see clickable stuff that weren’t icons. With extensions it can be basically windows or mac tho. (so if you directly setitup for them or guide them its more modern feeling/superior)
Zorin is another distro that (very successfully imo) does a windows-style taskbar with GNOME and is parent friendly, though like I said before, I think today I would go with something immutable for a non-techie because they’re very hard to break.
Universal BlueAurora KDE, or bluefin gnome are what id prob reccomend to any non gamers trying to use Linux after looking around, bazzite for gamers who dont want to tinker, cachyos for those who do. Seems like a straightforward way to get up and running, cachyos was hella easy to dualboot tho, universal blue doesnt seem to let me load a live os from my usb with a graphical installer, that was super helpful with cachy.
I am not using DE i am using hyprland With arch Linux btw
I keep forgetting tiling managers arent des
KDE and I keep it mostly stock. I usually get a compact desktop pager widget and add a kwin plugin to dynamically add/remove virtual desktops.
Tried i3 a few years back. Never went back. Fucking love it. Would like to ditch X for Wayland soon though. Need to move to Sway but a bunch of scripts depend on X… Probably wouldn’t be too much of a nightmare to transition, but for some reason I’ve been putting it off for years.
KDE has given me the desktop I need for the past few years. Hyprland isn’t a desktop environment, as far as I know.
Before KDE I used Cinnamon on Linux Mint. It was functional, but after many years I wanted a change.
Use whatever suits your needs. In my experience, KDE and Cinnamon are the most complete desktop environments without having to install extensions or extra software. Both are mature, have large communities behind them, and release incremental updates frequently. Those are my criteria for a good desktop environment.
Trying cinnamon right now, Its definitely functional, closer to windows back when I liked it. Feels boring, but in a good for productivity way.
Debian and xfce, generally. I’m happy to wait for features when they arrive, and xfce works fine.
However, Debian with gnome on my surface pro 6. Xorg just doesn’t handle rotation and touchscreen things very well.
On the other hand, several apps still behave very poorly under Wayland, so it’s a bit of a catch 22 at the moment.
I use Cosmic and really like it- have used i3, Awesome and Gnome in the past for a while too, I really likes them.
The most time I spent with a set up was Awesome + rofi, which I really enjoyed. I customised literally everything and spent hours tweaking stuff.
That was super fun, but in all honesty my workflow is more or less:
- Open up a terminal (alacritty, tmux + fish shell + helix editor)
- Open up a browser (Firefox, have played with others but there’s always some quirk where I give up)
- That’s it.
Honestly, all the tweaking is fun for me, but with my workflow I have like 0 requirements for anything fancy. Daily driving cosmic is going nicely for now, and seems to mostly get out of my way.
SwayWM
