My favourite DE has got to be Cinnamon, as much as I like KDE and XFCE, I prefer the simplicity of cinnamon where as in KDE has a bit too much of everything in the customization scene and XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right.

Cinnamon to me is perfect as I easily transferred from Win 10 to Mint and soon Manjaro Cinnamon Edition.

What is your favourite DE and why? Tiling WM DE’s can be counted as well seeing as they have nifty navigation features.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    492·
    7 months ago

    I prefer KDE a lot, because:

    • the UI is simple, material-ish and beautiful
    • it doesnt sacrifice usability or waste screen space like GNOMEs minimalism. I especially like the buttons etc. of Qt apps, where GIMP is already struggling with the huge hugeness of GTK3.
    • it runs 100% on Wayland
    • it runs GNOME apps without modifying them a bit. There is an issue where Fedora doesnt want to use Adwaita icons, but a short autostart entry solves that. KDE Breeze dark/light can sync to adwaita dark/light
    • KDE has tons of legacy support features, have a look at my experiment where I explored many of them
    • it is modular and can be pretty minimal (I would like a more barebones version, without all the floating stuff etc)
    • all the settings are in the same app! This is a huge issue with all the small ones, where nontechnical users need to know the difference between “GTK settings” “lightDM settings”, etc.
    • Systemsettings are searchable, all settings pages are accessible from the global search, some pages are even shown when you use an alternative word, you can always search in english and your local language
    • it is very actively developed
    • it has tons of unique features.
    • it has the biggest most complex apps situated in a DE on Linux. Period. KDEnlive, digiKam, Krita, Kate, Dolphin, …
    • ProtonBadger
      9·
      7 months ago

      Yeah, I am comfortable with most DE’s, I’m flexible but I prefer KDE+Wayland.

      Dolphin is poorly threaded though. For example: If I drag a large file from a network share to the desktop I can not drag another one to the desktop until the first copy have completed. If I connect my VPN or just an away-from-home wifi, Dolphin freezes, probably because it can’t find the local SMB connections in the “Remotes” group.

      I’m also watching COSMIC, it has a very well thought out architecture though I suspect the first version will be too simplistic in terms of features - for example vs Dolphin.

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
        31·
        7 months ago

        Yes a lot.

        The network stuff sounds like some big issues.

        To my knowledge GNOME is better here?

        You should absolutely report these issues with good detail.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
      6·
      7 months ago

      I like COSMIC too as a work in progress. It is damn elegant, minimalist, perfectionist.

      But I dont like the general desktop UI style, the overview, the menu.

      They are also just starting, but it has a big future I think.

      I am always testing it and it is pretty cool. Already better than many alternatives I would say, at least if you replace some apps.

      pcmanfm-qt from LXQt is actually the best filemanager next to KDE Dolphin, and has very few dependencies.

      Qt apps on COSMIC are currently pretty broken, but there may be some KDE people stepping up and this is likely also fixed. Different from… some other big desktop… where KDE apps are all broken.