this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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So a few months back I asked about you guys os in c/asklemmy, so this time I wanna ask about your desktops you use on this same account.
(I use kde but plan to move to cinnamon I find kde buggy and gnome tracker3 randomly broke for no reason so yh idk if these happened to anybody)

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[–] _lunar@lemmy.ml 1 points 59 seconds ago

trinity because it's lighter than almost everything else while having more features than almost everything else

[–] skybarnes@discuss.online 2 points 42 minutes ago

KDE all the way, it's incredible especially since 6

[–] JTskulk@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago

I love KDE. It's got easy to use power user features and is very robust.

[–] dirtbiker509@lemm.ee 4 points 2 hours ago

KDE Plasma. It came on my steam deck which was my first intro to it, it blew me away and installed it on my laptop and finally ditched Windows shortly after. Works great for me.

[–] wer2@lemm.ee 5 points 3 hours ago

XFCE. I also like tiling WMs, but I often have to share computers and they are too unintuitive for the rest of the family.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.

Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don't need to look sexy.

My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.

Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.

Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I've tried to like it for years, but I just don't care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.

I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I've watched.

[–] simonced@lemmy.one 2 points 32 minutes ago (1 children)

Also Cinnamon main here, love the lightness of it.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 points 19 minutes ago

It's really solid.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

What broke with tracker3 ?

[–] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 1 points 1 hour ago

@BCsven @Mwa I disabled tracker and use plocate from a shell to find stuff. The reason, tracker's crawl of the disk space is extremely inefficient, but plocate keeps track of things like directory update times so does not recrawl a directory if the time stamps have not changed, thus saving a lot of disk I/O.

[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (4 children)

Windows 10

Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.

I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.

[–] yrmp@lemmy.world 1 points 10 minutes ago

I switched to PopOS from Windows 11 in three hours. I had been backing everything up for weeks though. Generally everything I did on Windows works out of the box on PopOS.

Aside from my bluetooth speaker not connecting automatically and needing to run a Windows VM for Corsair peripheral LEDs, I’ve not had to do a ton of customization.

It’s been well worth it. Really enjoying it so far and highly recommend.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 points 13 minutes ago

My advice: Don't wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you're under pressure to figure it out all at once.

Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.

Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.

Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.

[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 points 48 minutes ago* (last edited 47 minutes ago) (1 children)

People who are brand new to linux should start with immutable kde based distros, you'll have a much better time with fedora kinoite.

I'm down to help support infinitely, my matrix is available on my profile, feel free to message with any troubleshooting needs.

[–] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 1 points 13 minutes ago

@communist @UltraGiGaGigantic I disagree, I started with Redhat and moved to Ubuntu, MUCH prefer the latter.

[–] Acters@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Yeah Linux still has plenty to work on. It's unfortunate how limited the support is. If game and app developers could target Linux, then the cost to support and maintain would be lower than they have to do with Windows. Unfortunately, market share and power of defaults work against us.

If you can, look towards getting a steam deck. At least that is a Linux thing that is pretty decent and portable.

[–] yrmp@lemmy.world 1 points 2 minutes ago

I game on both the deck and a desktop with pop!_os. I can say gaming on my desktop is just as good if not better than the deck for because it can leverage my desktop hardware and it’s way easier to go under the hood with proper peripherals. Linux has come a long way with gaming. Most of the shit that doesn’t run on linux are games that cost too much for too little content or they’re just gonna be battle pass/cosmetic farms that cater to whales and aren’t actually fun in any sense of the word.

If you’re gonna be a top 0.0001% competitive gamer, you’ll probably wanna stick to windows. If you don’t play FPSes competively, a linux based gaming PC is probably fine. Me? I’m a middle aged dude with kids who racks up about 20 hours a week somehow, and linux more than suits my needs.

I’ve had more success with Lutris and Wine in getting certain abandonware games (Black and White for example) to run than I ever did on Windows.

[–] frankwilco@lemm.ee 3 points 4 hours ago

XFCE.

I recently switched to it after a year or so with KDE. Deff see some improvement in terms of battery life with my laptop, but I'm still not used to the lack of WinKey+Num shortcuts (I'm aware of docklike, but I need labels for open windows).

[–] icogniito@lemmy.zip 5 points 6 hours ago

I dont use a DE, I use a WM.

Semantics aside I’m on Hyprland, been using it for 6 months now and absolutely love it

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 hours ago

XFCE4. It's intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss

Enough features so that it "just works" (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.

Can't wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don't have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.

[–] abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 6 hours ago

OK so I have used several DEs but right now I'm on Plasma 6 because frankly, it's the best out there. It's easy to use, customizable, intuitive and looks nice. Is it on the heavier side? Yes, but that's okay. Also it helps that I have learnt the keyboard shortcuts on this.

I have used XFCE, Mate and Cinnamon in the past. If KDE somehow vanished off the face of the planet, I would likely switch to XFCE because it's light, customizable and fully functional.

[–] nemno@lemmy.world 4 points 7 hours ago

xfce, i dont need that other bloat.

[–] ace_garp@lemmy.world 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

MATE (prn: MAH-Tay)

because it comes with standard Trisquel and is a smooth DE experience.

[–] theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Ha, had no idea it was pronounced like that. I've always said MATE like "date"/"rate"/"fate"

[–] ace_garp@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

You probably didn't even know it's pronounced Jimp too!!

/s

[–] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 13 points 10 hours ago

Gnome, be it PC or Laptop. It just remains out of my way with it's minimalism. Tried KDE for a while, and I seriously can't stand it, personally.

[–] doomsdayrs@lemmy.ml 12 points 10 hours ago
[–] Xuntari@programming.dev 5 points 8 hours ago

I use i3. Pretty bare bones, so it took me a while to get productive with it. But it's all exactly how I want it, it's all mine.

[–] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago

Xmonad with XFCE in no-desktop mode.

I can use the xfce tools to configure things like mouse and screen settings, but visually it's just xmonad.

[–] thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 10 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Gnome on Nixos I like how standard it is I know what to expect

[–] TheFrirish@jlai.lu 1 points 3 hours ago

Funny I use KDE on NixOS because it's the only OS where it doesn't freeze my whole system up and I have to force reboot. (issue caused by AX210 Intel driver)

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[–] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 9 hours ago

I'm running KDE Plasma with the revived Krohnkite for auto tiling. Plasma 6.2 seems to have fixed most of the bugs from 6.0 and 6.1, at least the ones I've noticed.

I was using Sway/SwayFX for a few months but was missing some KDE Gear apps like Dolphin and Okular which I couldn't get to display correctly. KDE is afaik the only desktop with a working Qt theming engine right now, so I can't really see myself switching (unless maybe if they break Krohnkite again).

[–] slowbyrne@lemm.ee 2 points 8 hours ago

COSMIC most of the time and then gnome as a fallback when I run into any temporary issues I can't work around.

I do this with a custom bluebuild image I made that uses ublue (fedora 41) as a base and then added cosmic on top along with some other layers that I need/want.

[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 13 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (3 children)

Was a Gnome user until Gnome 3.

Since Plasma 5, I use KDE Plasma.

I'm just going to share my unvarnished opinions here, I clearly understand that Gnome users feel differently, and that's okay.

  • Gnome 3 performance was objectively worse on every bit of hardware I tried than Plasma. (Unfortunately I had functional gripes with Plasma 4 so couldn't use it.)
  • The years of faffing about I had trying to be happy with Gnome 3 and trying to use other alternatives until Plasma 5 was ready pretty much convinced me of this:
    • Gnome devs care more about achieving their vision of how a desktop should be used than they do about accommodating users who might feel differently. This is my perception, and it's a deeply held opinion. No matter how strongly you feel I'm wrong, you aren't going to change my mind. You can come at me if you want, but it's going to bear no fruit.
    • KDE devs have a vision, but place nearly equal importance on ensuring their users can make different choices if they choose. If this isn't true, they do a damn good job of pretending it is, and that's good enough for me. 🙂
  • I'm unhappy with the degree to which it appears the Gnome team has actively worked against the ability for users to easily customize, and with various feature removals that at this point are so far in my past that I probably don't remember the specific things that pissed me off, but I remember their explanations for feature removals being salt in an open wound every last time I cared enough to investigate their stated reasons.

Plasma 6 does everything I want the way I want. I have loaded it (and Plasma 5) on very low end and very high end hardware and found it performant and functional on both, consistently.

You'll note I don't claim it to be the best. There are folks out there for whom the Gnome vision happens to be how they like to work, or who aren't bothered by whatever hoops you have to jump through currently to customize a Gnome environment, and I'm sincerely happy for those people. For them, Gnome is the best.

There are lots of other DEs and of course tiling WMs exist, but it takes me no time at all to have a fresh plasma install working the way I want my computer to work and looking the way I want it to look, and thus I literally have zero complaints. So for the past few years I haven't even looked at any alternatives. If there's ever a time that I don't find the desktop product itself, and the KDE development team's approach to desktop development, to be absolutely perfect fits for me, I'll look elsewhere - but honestly probably not at Gnome.

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[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 5 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

KDE for my main PC. Pretty with floating panels, KDE Connect, QT apps are often the best apps in their class and are perfectly integrated (FreeCAD, krita, okular, kdenlive, vlc, dolphin, etc...) And konsole is also very full featured.

I don't know what KiCAD uses, but it also seems very well integrated into the KDE desktop unlike most gnome apps.

XFCE on MX Linux for an old Intel Compute Stick to keep it very usable.

[–] notthebees@reddthat.com 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

OpenBox but that's a window manager, not a DE.

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[–] richardisaguy@lemmy.world 54 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

kde plasma, it's fast, it's pretty, it's handy, it has all the keyboard shortcuts.

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