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.
I started using Windows as a young lad, but when I tried using Linux I easily transitioned to KDE. Then I tried Gnome and loved it, used it for a few years before moving over to Hyprland a couple of months ago and I can confidently say that I won’t be going back.
EDIT:
Forgot to mention that the main reason I love Hyprland is because of the crazy level of customization. I use it primarily on my laptop and can navigate easily with keyboard shortcuts, clicking, and even trackpad gestures.Don’t let somebody else’s idea of how to use a DE limit you, just configure whatever you want!
I do like hyprland, I think itll take some time to get a config right but it feels fun to use and thats why I swapped to linux, windows felt boring with its ui and on top of that had constant random so it wasnt the good type of boring. Most shocking part has been having 100s of tabs open and swapping without issue, on windows it did not matter which browser I used my computer would tweak after 20 tabs
Looks like we went the same way through the Linux world. Hyprland is both, it could be good looking like KDE and Gnome and it is keybind tiling like sway and i3.
I never realised before how much useless time we spend for mouse movings and clicks.
Wow trackpad gestures? I’m on gnome and their gestures are really good, if hyperland’s is just as good I might try it out.
I really like the gnome workflow plus a couple of extensions. Notably I ran across a tiling extension called “grid” that scratched my tiling window needs on my desktop, and gnome is amazing on my laptop trackpad. I zing through desktops quick! Anything it can’t do out of the box, you can find an extension for.
I like the feel of something different than windows.
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.
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.
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 want to divide by more than 4
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.
Actually I like Cinnamom the best. For VMs without video accelertion, XFCE. For media center and my laptop I stayed with Ubuntu/Gnome.
Work flow. Any desktop will do, that is more about Apps. For me Firefox, LibreOffice esp Calc, Python, Bash, Thunderbird, ssh, Zim, Geany are what I use most.
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.
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.
Xfce for speed, consistency, and reliability. For most of my workflow I began avoiding configuring a DE as much as possible by relying on AutoKey, Input Remapper, and simple terminal commands, because I can import those to fresh installs way easier.
I moved away from Plasma due to too many small yet annoying bugs.
PS all the software I use: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/software.html
Plasma does seem to have a lot of small annoying bugs, like rnow I have to click a widget so it loads on my desktop before dragging, if I just drag plasma closes out of the editor and my screen goes black for a second.
KDE Plasma and it’s configured to have everything in the same places as Windows as much as possible. I have to use Windows for work and gaming and like it when I don’t have to think much about which computer I’m using right now.
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.
I love plasma. I used to be into cinnamon, but since the steamdeck, I’ve changed my preference.
Now, I have fedoranplasma spin on my thinkpad.
I really like the windows style DE.
dwm is neat
I yearn for the day Debian gets proper DWL support
didn’t realize debian does not have dwm support. been thinking about putting it on my deb based laptop bc it feels so nice on my desktop. what do you run?
Sway right now, setup was super straightforward. I just wish it had some dynamic tiling functionality. Plus I really like the suckless mentality of starting with basic functionality and patching in features as needed.
Same. Check out breadonpenguins on the yew tube, some real cool tweaks on their GitHub. their vids inspired me to use dwm.
Love breadonpenguins, she def inspired me too, I’m talking about DWL tho, like the Wayland fork of DWM. I had some issues w the dependencies they had listed.
I still do not understand Wayland. It’s an alternative to X?
It’s to be the replacement for Xorg/X11.
I am not using DE i am using hyprland With arch Linux btw
I keep forgetting tiling managers arent des
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.
I just recently switched to using the COSMIC alpha, coming from KDE on my personal laptop and from GNOME on my work laptop. I absolutely love it. It’s very stable and polished for still being in alpha.
I really like its tiling and workspaces. The navigation just feels very natural to me. I am a very big fan of keyboard only navigation.
Since both of my laptops have hybrid graphics, I am also a fan of COSMIC’s approach to hybrid graphics, that it generally let’s you quite easily specify if you want to run an app on dGPU or iGPU.
And last of all it just looks gorgeous.