Linux desktop environment opinions

[Zepp]

As I've used linux on and off over the years I've tried to develop a longer term feel for various desktop environments to really know what works for me and what doesn't. It can take a while of regular use before you discover things that may annoy you and make you want to look at switching.

So linux users tell me about your favorite DE, why you like it and what you don't like about it.

Also give me some likes and dislikes of other DE's you've used enough to get a good feel of.


I currently favor Budgie for it's gnome like polish sane defaults(everything works like I'd expect without changing much in settings) and cohesive settings menus. The biggest gripe I have is the app menu options on the panel. I don't know why any modern DE would not have a menu that you can pin favorite apps to like Cinnamon or Whisker menu. It's also apparently not as light as I would have thought, being close to cinnamon in terms of RAM footprint.

I like most things about Cinnamon's design but I have had a lot of small stability issues with nemo and quirks with suspend not working and lock screen never putting panels to sleep. though the machine I used it on was setup a little janky so it could be because of that.

Xfce is pretty solid if not a little clunky with panel customization and theming. It still has an ancient bug where windows borders have a resize trigger of like 1 pixel and if it isnt setup with whisker menu by default it's clunky to get the super key to work right with it.

I can't really figure out what anyone would prefer about MATE over Xfce. There seem to be a lot of functionality and appearance overlap with those DE's and most people say Xfce is more feature rich, polished and supported than MATE. Xfce seems to capture the Gnome 2 look and feel pretty well. So to me MATE seems kinda superfluous.

With KDE I never liked the default setup and I really hate the settings overload. I would often have to google where a setting is. It's the same reason I stopped using vivaldi browser.

I gave up on GNOME also somewhat because I got tired of spending so much time setting up the tweaks and extensions to bring back all the options and functionality that the gnome foundation decided we don't need.

 

[mikeymikec]

LXDE (Lubuntu 18.04), I think it later became LXQT.

KDE (Kubuntu and Debian)

Mint Cinnamon 21.x - currently here.

Probably not the response you're looking for, but I got along with all of these desktop environments, I can meet a reasonably customisable DE halfway basically. What let me down with most of the ones I've tried since 2018 is down to how well-polished the distro is (e.g. lack of bugs, particularly in the software that it ships with), rather than the UI being just so for my tastes (the only exception I can think of is that I think the default Ubuntu interface looks dumb. Like MacOS but not quite).

Lubuntu 18.04 LTS was fine, but reached the end of support so I tried Lubuntu and Kubuntu 20.04, then tried KDE on Debian, and three issues stand out in my albeit vague memory:

simple-scan - a GNOME app to scan paperwork. It's a very simple design and workflow, perfect for scanning single or multiple sheets into one or multiple files, worked flawlessly on LB18.04 and Mint Cinnamon 21.x, but on *ubuntu 20 LTS and Debian it would do interesting things like hang for 45 seconds while doing more than one sheet.

LibreOffice Calc - the 'Sort...' UI would hang for about 15 seconds for no good reason. Perfect on LB18 / MC 21.x.

Debian and LSB support (so I could get a fully-featured printer driver for my Epson printer). Debian IIRC was like "no, we don't do that, because we're special", and after a series of such incidents on Debian I had truly had enough of it, things like having to arse around to get sudo working properly on a new install: "oh, you want the first user you set up on this computer to be able to sudo? How weird and completely unexpected!".

Other annoyances like one distro-supplied app comes with weird and not easy-to-use/see scrollbars that don't match the other apps (IIRC LibreOffice was the problem here, and/or Firefox), looking up solutions like "oh, you should uninstall the libreoffice-qt package" or something similar that just made me think, "why didn't the distro devs do this?", it shouldn't be a job for the end user to make the interface consistent.

I've been using MC 21.x just just over 3 years according to my notes, and I have a grand total of one bug that I had to find a solution for (VLC audio stuttering after system resume). Other than that it has "just worked" on both my Haswell build and my AMD7000 build. I have the feeling that when I do my first MC install for a customer, I'm only going to be doing basic setup stuff (e.g. set up printer/scanner access) and then make aesthetic changes according to the customer's preferences. That's the way it should be!

My only interface consistency beef with MC21 is XnViewMP, which sometimes matches the general UI settings/theme and sometimes not. However, it's not a default app and its lack of consistency doesn't create a usability issue for me.

 

[Zepp]

I kinda liked LXDE but it's the only DE i've tried that not only doesnt have a whisker like menu with pinnable favorite apps, but doesnt even have a search bar in the app menu.

I havent used LXDE/LXQt for any extended period but I never liked the openbox window manager. It's too minimalist and usually doesn't play well with modern theming. But Im a pretty novice 'ricer' I did find out you can get KDE's window manager to integrate with lxqt which looked really slick in youtube videos. I tried to set it up myself but it didnt work right so it seems to require more tinkering.

My only interface consistency beef with MC21 is XnViewMP, which sometimes matches the general UI settings/theme and sometimes not. However, it's not a default app and its lack of consistency doesn't create a usability issue for me.

are you using the native installed version of xnview or the flatpak? IIRC I tried to install the native on deb13 but got a dependency error and just went with the flatpak version.

 

[lxskllr]

I use xfce and plasma. I like both. My main requirement is that I can set up a desktop to be similar to gnome2 with a panel on top, and a panel on bottom. I don't like desktops like gnome3+, and don't want to put in effort with 3rd party tools to force it into being what I want. If I can't do what I want with builtin tools, I'm not interested in using it.