[LINUX USERS] What's your personal favorite DE?

[DillPo313]

What's your favorite desktop enviroment? Why do you like it? What makes it better then others? My personal favorite is KDE. It's so professional and nice looking. I like the windows-esque live previews. The slight transparency is a nice touch too.

 

[FAST6191]

I try to keep on top of most of them. However even on crazy powerful machines I usually go with "the lighter, the better, up until you start compromising on the ability to do things like search, basic tasks and folder/file manipulation with context menus or general menus", mind you this does usually mean I stick with XFCE unless the distro comes with one of the other lightweight ones. As most things these days would seem to go through the browser or have their own defined UIs the general DE (to say nothing of when the base of a DE is used and then everything else is stripped out and replaced -- other than Amarok and Kdenlive (both of which are very nice) I do not think I have ever really used KDE software despite actually using KDE at several points).

 

[sarkwalvein]

XFCE.
Lightweight as hell, and does the job perfectly.

[Insert pretty XFCE picture here, that looks like a desktop from one decade ago but perhaps more colorful]

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I personally prefer KDE, pretty much for the same reasons in the OP.

Using Linux Mint with KDE on my laptop, runs a hell of a lot smoother than Cinnamon or Gnome ever did.

 

[DillPo313]

I personally prefer KDE, pretty much for the same reasons in the OP.

Using Linux Mint with KDE on my laptop, runs a hell of a lot smoother than Cinnamon or Gnome ever did.

I use Chrubuntu-KDE. It's a Kubuntu distro for Chromebooks. Luckly mainline kernel support is coming 3.17!

 

[jacobas92]

Openbox with tint2 and Compton for compositing. Lightweight, functional, and looks good.

 

[grossaffe]

I used to enjoy Gnome (2.0) back in the day. Gnome 3 trying to be a touch-screen interface ruined it for me. XFCE is really similar to what I liked about Gnome, and it's less intensive. I do customize my desktop to look a lot like the old Gnome 2 days, though.

 

[DillPo313]

I used to enjoy Gnome (2.0) back in the day. Gnome 3 trying to be a touch-screen interface ruined it for me. XFCE is really similar to what I liked about Gnome, and it's less intensive. I do customize my desktop to look a lot like the old Gnome 2 days, though.

You sound like the ideal audience for MATE.

 

[jurassicplayer]

Missing a couple of DEs and some of those aren't even DEs.

Pantheon, Deepin, EDE, Sugar, Hawaii, ROX, Trinity (aka KDE 3.5), GNUstep...
Some of them probably next to nobody uses, but some of them look very neat (I have always liked how Deepin and Hawaii looked, but Pantheon DE is also nice) and have a fair amount of users.

If I had to pick a DE specifically, I would probably go XFCE, but LXQT looks really interesting and there are some things about the QT framework that I like. I'm really waiting on LXQT to see what applications they are going to pick up because sometimes I'm really tempted to try for that mythical lightweight QT desktop. Most of my applications that I currently use are GTK though. My preference towards XFCE is pretty much: not heavy like kde/gnome, looks really decent without too many wtf moments, cycling wallpapers, and feels about right.

I didn't really like how gnome went at all, and I've tried kde a couple of times. KDE is just kind of strange. I would get it and be like "ALRIGHT, time to try full KDE" and then customize it to mostly how I wanted stuff...but sometimes I had to make compromises for the strangest things. Like how I can't manually change the size of the clock to show all the numbers when the panel is slim or how some of the widgets that I dragged around went offscreen or something and I could never get them back. They were running...just not where I could see them. Pretty much, I felt that KDE looked pretty nice, but I wasn't utilizing any of the features specific to KDE despite having it use more resources. Some of them I don't even like (Activities). Funnily enough, I have a post on my blog about my KDE experience...

I tried to use Enlightenment18 rather recently...but for some reason the LiveCD that I tried (forgot if it was Elive or Bodhi) just seemed to have issues with Chromium...or maybe it was flash. Configuring everything was also kind of wonky since everything seemed to spawn a new config window with a bunch of tabs to flick through...and the menu didn't look customizable. It doesn't look bad, but I can't really say it looks amazing either since you still need to have GTK/QT on top of Enlightenment, all three of which look fairly different from one another.

Mainly I hover around Openbox or Awesome and don't bother with a DE. Compton deals with my compositor wants well enough, although I wouldn't mind having some better transitions that compiz or kwin have...not that I want to use either of them. Compiz is apparently not maintained all that well...and standalone kwin is a strange setup that apparently IS possible...Not that I want to do it.

 

[DillPo313]

Missing a couple of DEs and some of those aren't even DEs.

Pantheon, Deepin, EDE, Sugar, Hawaii, ROX, Trinity (aka KDE 3.5), GNUstep...
Some of them probably next to nobody uses, but some of them look very neat (I have always liked how Deepin and Hawaii looked, but Pantheon DE is also nice) and have a fair amount of users.

If I had to pick a DE specifically, I would probably go XFCE, but LXQT looks really interesting and there are some things about the QT framework that I like. I'm really waiting on LXQT to see what applications they are going to pick up because sometimes I'm really tempted to try for that mythical lightweight QT desktop. Most of my applications that I currently use are GTK though. My preference towards XFCE is pretty much: not heavy like kde/gnome, looks really decent without too many wtf moments, cycling wallpapers, and feels about right.

I didn't really like how gnome went at all, and I've tried kde a couple of times. KDE is just kind of strange. I would get it and be like "ALRIGHT, time to try full KDE" and then customize it to mostly how I wanted stuff...but sometimes I had to make compromises for the strangest things. Like how I can't manually change the size of the clock to show all the numbers when the panel is slim or how some of the widgets that I dragged around went offscreen or something and I could never get them back. They were running...just not where I could see them. Pretty much, I felt that KDE looked pretty nice, but I wasn't utilizing any of the features specific to KDE despite having it use more resources. Some of them I don't even like (Activities). Funnily enough, I have a post on my blog about my KDE experience...

I tried to use Enlightenment18 rather recently...but for some reason the LiveCD that I tried (forgot if it was Elive or Bodhi) just seemed to have issues with Chromium...or maybe it was flash. Configuring everything was also kind of wonky since everything seemed to spawn a new config window with a bunch of tabs to flick through...and the menu didn't look customizable. It doesn't look bad, but I can't really say it looks amazing either since you still need to have GTK/QT on top of Enlightenment, all three of which look fairly different from one another.

Mainly I hover around Openbox or Awesome and don't bother with a DE. Compton deals with my compositor wants well enough, although I wouldn't mind having some better transitions that compiz or kwin have...not that I want to use either of them. Compiz is apparently not maintained all that well...and standalone kwin is a strange setup that apparently IS possible...Not that I want to do it.

I know some of them aren't really DEs but they do the same basic tasks so I lumped them together. I didn't add the ones that hardly anyone uses. (I just simply forgot deepin. I love that one too.) I agree with you about LXQT, it's lightweight and manages to look like nice like KDE. Unfortunately, (even though I love love KDE) every other DE is unstable and crashes frequently. To the point where I don't even want to try them anymore. I have to wait for kernel 3.17.

 

[natkoden]

Gnome 3

I also like Cinnamon.

 

[Arras]

I used Fluxbox + tint2 for a while. Looks good and gets the job done - the only problem was that most programs looked kind of ugly.
Also I kind of like Unity, don't kill me

I could never properly run KDE because my linux PC was a piece of shit and I really didn't like the look of XFCE for whatever reason, so eh.

 

[DillPo313]

Also I kind of like Unity, don't kill me

Lol, I legit missed that the first time I read it. I like Unity too. I can't use it until kernel 3.17 because my hardware isn't fully supported in Linux yet and I random lock ups and freezes right now. Don't worry, this isn't OMG Ubuntu.

 

[yusuo]

I used to enjoy Gnome (2.0) back in the day. Gnome 3 trying to be a touch-screen interface ruined it for me. XFCE is really similar to what I liked about Gnome, and it's less intensive. I do customize my desktop to look a lot like the old Gnome 2 days, though.

I use Mate for the pure reason it's that it was built to resemble gnome 2.0, ok there are a few differences but for the most part it's good for me. I haven't tried out the newer kde versions though, I just like what I know

 

[lampdemon]

Kde 3.5 was good, 4+ not so much(I didn't like that I couldn't customize certain things), and gnome was a good replacement for kde until I found out about Xfce.

 

[TyBlood13]

XFCE for simplicity's sake for me

 

[Pagio94]

Cinnamon. It has a weird bug where some edge of the windows would not show or be black and you can see the desktop background, but it's a lot smooth. I'll try other DE soon

 

[DillPo313]

Cinnamon. It has a weird bug where some edge of the windows would not show or be black and you can see the desktop background, but it's a lot smooth. I'll try other DE soon

I actually got started in Linux with Mint back in '06. My first distro.

 

[The Catboy]

I personally mess around with LXDE, but I often have my fingers in XFCE4 and MATE, some times both at the the same time. I've even been caught with Unity in my bed.

 

[kuwanger]

IceWM (+ Rox). Beyond being lightweight, what I most like about it is that it seems to have the most consistency when it comes to when/where it reacts to mouse/key presses--it's really hard to exactly spell out what that means, but it has a lot to do with hotkeys almost always working, focus stealing very uncommon (at the expense of newly created windows not getting focus (and yes, this is a preference thing so you can have newly created windows obtain focus)), menu pop ups only after you release the mouse/key, etc. That isn't to say IceWM is perfect as it seems to have issues with some programs managing to steal focus (gimp and chromium come to mind), hotkeys don't always work properly in fullscreen (you have to switch virtual consoles to get redraw working properly again), and one almost maximized window hovering over a maximized window can result in you accidentally closing the bottom window. But with all those complaints, I haven't found anything better. :/ *shrug*