I’m currently testing Fedora KDE on a VM (windows host) before eventually switching over to Linux completely.
nachtigall ( @nachtigall@feddit.de ) English53•9 months agoGnome. Feels most polished and least cluttered to me.
IrritableOcelot ( @IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org ) 12•9 months agoSeconded. I used to use Ubuntu, but I switched to Debian + GNOME and I love it.
narwhalperson ( @narwhalperson@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English9•9 months agoI agree. I use gnome on nix and it has been great, especially on a touchpad.
MyNameIsRichard ( @MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml ) 52•9 months agoPlasma definitely. Xfce is second.
Any preferences on the distro? I’ve been enjoying Fedora but I’ve also tested Ubuntu and enjoyed that
MyNameIsRichard ( @MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml ) 3•9 months agoI landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed about five years ago and still don’t see myself hopping to another one
thanksforallthefish ( @thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe ) 2•9 months agoUbuntu is doing an annoying attempt to generate lock-in and profits by forcing snap on everyone and making it annoyingly difficult to avoid.
Consider one of the ubuntu derivatives (there’s a number of them, Mint, Pop etc) in preference to ubuntu itself, a debian derivative (KDE neon for example) or go with Fedora if you’re a business orientated user.
- Joliflower ( @imgel@lemmy.ml ) 2•9 months ago
Opensuse TW or Fedora
FarLine99 ( @FarLine99@lemm.ee ) English2•9 months agoFedora Plasma is truly awesome!
HouseWolf ( @HouseWolf@lemm.ee ) English30•9 months agoKDE is what finally got me to switch from Windows.
Out of the box I found it a better user experience than Windows 10s desktop, but having it be stupid easy to customize and theme on top of that has made me never wanna go back.
nottheengineer ( @nottheengineer@feddit.de ) 27•9 months agoKDE for me. As much as I hate windows, I like the floating windows, task bar and tray. KDE has that out of the box and lets me tweak all the little annoyances away.
Dandroid ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) 14•9 months agoOf all the things I hate about Microsoft Windows, the GUI design is not one of them. The content of those windows is janky as all hell. But the floating windows, taskbar, and tray? Those are all great.
ChristianWS ( @ChristianWS@lemmy.eco.br ) 7•9 months agoI love the minimize all windows button. It is so small and functional, I always use the KDE Widget that copies it, and IMO, KDE should use it by default
Miku Luna \ she/it ( @backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 17•9 months agoPlasma, but only on Wayland (which is better anyway unbiased opinion).
corship ( @corship@feddit.de ) 5•9 months agoMan i didnt realize how much better Wayland is until I had to use a provided setup for a few weeks.
The fact that I can’t swipe to switch virtual desktops on xorg was enough to make me question why xorg doesn’t offer such basic things after all the years
Miku Luna \ she/it ( @backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 3•9 months agoThe swiping thing is apparently a deliberate decision by KDE for whatever reason.
Knusper ( @Knusper@feddit.de ) 3•9 months agoWell, yeah, but they made that decision, because X11 is a pain to implement and debug this stuff on.
Miku Luna \ she/it ( @backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 2•9 months agoThat sounds like a pretty good reason yeah
lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English1•9 months agoHow are you swiping, out of curiosity? I have windows occupying the whole screen.
I switch workspaces with a keyboard shortcut or by clicking buttons on the panel.
Knusper ( @Knusper@feddit.de ) 1•9 months agoIt’s with three fingers on a touchpad.
There’s some short clips of it here: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.25.0/
lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English1•9 months agoOh I see. But I thought such gestures were available a long time ago, I remember apps like Fusuma, and there was talk of adding them to libinput so that every DE could let the user assign actions to gestures.
Knusper ( @Knusper@feddit.de ) 1•9 months agoYeah, this is now using the libinput gestures. It’s mainly exciting, because it’s available out-of-the-box, even for non-techies and lazy people (me).
With general technological advances and I believe Windows having similar gestures, it’s now also rarely the case that touchpad hardware doesn’t support multi-touch input…
WinterAir ( @WinterAir@lemmings.world ) 16•9 months agoI use Debian with XFCE.Really lightweight and stable
qyron ( @qyron@sopuli.xyz ) 7•9 months agoBack to Debian after a long hiatus and XFCE was my choice for the exact same reasons.
Drew ( @crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz ) 6•9 months agome as well
hottari ( @hottari@lemmy.ml ) 15•9 months agoGnome 44. Simple, familiar and all my extensions work!
Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English13•9 months agoGnome
Corroded ( @CorrodedCranium@leminal.space ) English13•9 months agoXFCE. It’s just so easy to click and drag things where I want them and edit icons to be uniform.
Have you tried testing out DE in a virtual machine? It’s a big time saver versus installing it on actual hardware.
I’m doing all my testing on a VM before committing and doing a bare metal install
Corroded ( @CorrodedCranium@leminal.space ) English3•9 months agoAh good to hear. I was not smart enough to do that when I was first getting into Linux and I only had one PC so you can imagine the headache.
lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English2•9 months agoYou can also boot a live CD. Last time I switched distro I got a bunch of live CDs and picked the one where everything was working out of the box (accessing shares, playing music/video, printing, Bluetooth, hooking up my phone to USB, gaming controller etc.) (Ended up on Manjaro btw.)
Corroded ( @CorrodedCranium@leminal.space ) English2•9 months agoTotally. You can typically get CDs at the dollar store these days. I have a few from dealing with older computers now but I also have a sizeable amount of USBs now and several computers.
What made you decide on Manjaro?
lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English2•9 months agoOh it’s only “CD” in the name, you can boot the image from a USB stick. No need to go out and buy actual CDs.
I wanted to move away from Ubuntu and .deb based desktop distros because they don’t do well with long term use.
The way debs work, if you want third party software you have to add repos individually. But each of them tracks dependencies only within their scope. So eventually you end up with combinations of packages that the installer cannot solve anymore and you can’t upgrade your main packages. Which results in an reinstall.
I wanted something Arch-based because I heard it takes “rolling distro” seriously and you can keep upgrading and using it indeterminately. And there’s a single third party repo (AUR) which only breaks its own packages when the main system is updated, but not the main system. Which seems like a reasonable compromise.
But I wanted a more polished desktop experience so no plain Arch. The candidates were Manjaro, Garuda and Endeavour so that’s where the live CD test came in.
Corroded ( @CorrodedCranium@leminal.space ) English1•9 months agoYeah I know I’ve used them for years but I keep some on hand for older devices.
Fair enough. I used Manjaro for a while, maybe a year, and it kept breaking my system. I’ve been using EndeavourOS and Fedora ever since and haven’t had an issue.
thanksforallthefish ( @thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe ) 2•9 months agoGood call, just be aware that while you can (pretty much) install any DE on any distro. Many distros will have a ready prepared install that may feel quite different to you adding the DE later.
If that’s not clear, Ubuntu with cinnamon DE is very different to Mint Cinnamon. Same with Kubuntu (KDE Ubuntu) and KDE Neon (Debian KDE).
All of the differences are of course replicable, they’re themes and tools and configs. But for example it took me literally most of a day to get Arch with cinnamon to feel like Mint cinnamon.
Xenanthropy ( @Xenanthropy@beehaw.org ) 13•9 months agoI love cinnamon a lot
UraniumBlazer ( @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee ) English13•9 months agoIn my (and my friend’s) experience, KDE has been notoriously unreliable. We faced issues like the wifi icon just disappearing randomly, the time thingy disappearing, etc.
I have been using GNOME for around five years now (I temporarily switched to KDE 2 yrs back and reswitched to GNOME 3 months later). Till now, GNOME has been extremely stable for me. The only issue that I experienced was a memory (although that was fixed in subsequent updates).
Hence, based on this experience, if you’re looking for stability, I would highly recommend GNOME. However, if u’r looking for more customization at the cost of less stability, KDE ain’t bad.
dukatos ( @dukatos@lemm.ee ) 2•9 months agoKDE is very stable. You are using some bad, 2 years old version because Ubuntu LTS cycle.
UraniumBlazer ( @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee ) English2•9 months agoI don’t think so. I was using Garuda at the time, which is based on Arch.
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) 11•9 months ago
KDE, I enjoy the whole ecosystem both visually and functionally.
GenBlob ( @GenBlob@lemm.ee ) 11•9 months agoGNOME
kudzu 🌈 ( @kudzu@tilde.zone ) 9•9 months agoI like Xfce and Plasma, it’s pretty hard to decide between the two
atetulo ( @atetulo@lemm.ee ) 9•9 months agoKDE
It’s like a swiss-army knife of DEs.
I try to make it look like Windows 7.