I got rid of my window from my secondary partition(gaming addiction) and now I have a 128 GB m.d. i have been running Linux mint for most of my Linux experience but want to try out something out side the traditional windows setup
I have tried those setups
- Linux mint xfce
- Linux mint cinnamon
- fedora workstation(gnome)
- fedora silverblue(gnome immutable)
- fedora kde
- majaro cinnamon
I would hope for sometimes were the learning curve isn’t too extreme for me(i3 was too much)
I’d find a distro to settle on, not a desktop environment. Most distros have most desktop environments. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian all ship the major desktop environments. I would simply choose the one that best fits your needs.
Want to run on the newest software available? Fedora
Want long-term support for the install and am okay with using slightly older versions of software? Debian
Don’t care about the software part, and the most ready install out of the box? Go for Ubuntu or Linux Mint
In terms of desktop software. KDE is the most like Windows, but still far better in my opinion. Gnome is its thing, more similar to a mac, but still not quite the same.
Did you read my post like at all?
I meant something that breaks the traditional windows environment. Stuff outside xfce , cinnamon and kde. gnome doesn’t work for me on keyboard and mouse. I want a distro to mess around with, not distro to settle on, i am fine on linux mint as is, just wanted to try a distro as a side hobby
I’d still find a distro to settle on, not a desktop environment.
What desktop environment do you want to try that you can’t find on Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu?
Maybe give hyprland a run? That sure breaks away with the traditional paradigm. I’ve been running it a couple months on Arch and love it. Maybe use it with quickshell so it comes preconfigured like a “light” DE, at least at first.
You certainly don’t see that on Windows:
I mean at this point you’ve pretty much hit most things with the exception of a WM but you’ve stated that i3 was too much for you so…there isn’t really anything else. you’ve done xfce, cinnamon, gnome, and kde. that’s it. Other than say LabWC but if i3 was too much than that’s not going to be much better. And I’m assuming when you say “too much” you mean editing the configuration?
you could do something like Niri or Hyprland with Quickshell/DankMaterialShell where the config is all done essentially via the DMS/GUI setup for it.
Honestly the last one would be COSMIC DE. but if you’ve used GNOME already you might not like it. COSMIC does give you the option to toggle between stacking and tiling so that’ll be different than what you’ve already used but if you liked the customization of the previous DE’s you’ve used you’re going to be disappointed with COSMIC as the customization for it right now is very limited.
Fedora has an i3 flavor, you could try that - or just install whatever WM you want to check out on your current setup. You can usually select your WM on the login screen once it’s installed.
My bad, phrases that badly. I meant to avoid i3
Sloppy reading on my part as well. Seems like you want something between the standard windows/macos experience and i3, and that sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure it exists
terminal only
Try out a floating wm. I don’t know any on Wayland at the moment, but when I didn’t want the full DE experience back in 2008 but tiling was still too daunting, I installed fluxbox and used it for years. It’s simple yet unique and very lightweight.
If you want to break out of the windows mold, tiling windows managers are where its at. You’ve already explored that route with i3, and there are other alternatives, but they all have a bit of a learning curve unfortunately. hyprland might be worth a try. I’ve only dabbled but I did remember it being a bit more beginner friendly than i3. But be prepared to be confused, read a bunch of forum posts and edit config files for a bit.
I’d say PopOS with the relatively new Cosmic Desktop could be something interesting for you to try of you don’t really want to go into configurations that much. It has floating and tiling windows that you can switch easily.
GNOME and vanilla Xfce are fine, but you can also try ElementaryOS as a distro.
If you want extreme flexibility, use Arch Linux, since it makes it trivial to swap out which window manager you’re using. It sounds like you’re familiar with Linux at this point, so you probably have the requisite knowledge to give Arch a spin.
Niri is supposed to be a pretty interesting WM if you’re looking for something new. I’d be interested to hear why i3 was too much, since I found it to be pretty smooth to pick up.
If you want to go out there, tiling window managers are neat. I want to try hyprland at some point as well.
try nixos / guix
You should try cosmic.
