Last week I was asking about when and why you started using Linux, thank you everyone who took their time to write an answer! It was interesting to read all of your guys stories and I was surprised just how far back some of them go.
Now I am curious about your guys DE/WMs. What do you use? What do you like/don’t like about it? What have you tried? What is you go to? Any you absolutely can not stand the sight of? Any that you tried that disappointed you?
Once again no judgment, just curious about peoples experiences.
I’m a big fan of tiling WMs. Even though in the past I did try GNOME/KDE, I never really sticked because I wanted a more bare-bones experience to learn how to configure the system via command line.
At first, I tried i3, then switched to dwm as using a real programming language for configuration felt more liberating. Unfortunately, it also didn’t work out because I quickly stumbled upon patches incompatibilities and it was a nightmare to debug.
As a result, here I am, running AwesomeWM. Getting used to millions of keybindings was painful, but it was certainly worth it because
nobody can use my computer nowto me it’s really convenient to do everything with a keyboard.I’m a KDE guy through and through now. GNOME has a better workflow in my opinion, but the stronghanding isn’t something I’m a fan of. KDE doesn’t try to fight me as much and has taken some cues from GNOME (e.g. the window viewer being hot-cornered to the h
I’ve tried Cinnamon, and it’s a good starting point for Windows users but the plugin store needs more love from them. MATE + Compiz is a good combo but Compiz is very much on its way out, I’m hoping MATE has a good compositor when they move to Wayland (or they use Wayfire). I’ll use XFCE if I need something more lightweight.
Shorthanding? I feel like I am missing some knowledge here.
Yea the Windows like feel is what drew me to Cinnamon and I have it still setup very Windows-like.
basically “my way or the highway”, essentially what Apple does and why you might see a lot of KDE fans complain or even make fun of GNOME. It wouldn’t be so bad if GTK wasn’t something other DEs like KDE had to deal with.
For example, KDE has a GTK version of their default theme that updates on colour scheme changes, to keep GTK/GNOME apps consistent with KDE’s. With the move to libadwaita, those apps will look inconsistent when run on KDE. Gradience at least helps a bit.
Ahhh I see, thanks! For some reason I was guessing it had something to do with shortcuts, I was very off lol
I’ve only tried a few of them.
For mint, I went with XFCE and Cinnamon.
For the lightweight Linux distros, I just went with whatever was bundled with them. None of them stood out, which is probably by design.
Tried KDE as well, and its customization options just blew me away. I always use it now for desktop installations.
Gnome, of course, on anything with a trackpad. I hate trackpads with a passion so I look for DEs that would make using them less painful.
Are we including WMs? I’ve only tried I3WM, Qtile, and (iirc) awesome, I’m awful with WMs so I can’t really stay with them for long. My productivity takes a dive lol.
I added the post to include WMs as well, they slipped my mind for some reason when making the post.
What does Gnome do differently when it comes to trackpads?
I think I lasted a whole lot of 5 minutes when actually using i3, it made me feel way too stupid. Seeing people use it is impressive, actually using it is another story (to me).
it made me feel way too stupid
Glad I’m not the only one who felt that. In the end it just frustrated me so I never tried again. Lol.
For Gnome, like someone has said, it’s the workflow. Imagine like Android on pc. Gestures, app drawer, etc. I’d go back to KDE in a flash if I weren’t using a trackpad, but swiping/gestures on trackpad is just too convenient. The devs don’t want it to be customized, afaik, so that part is tricky. Customization is extremely limited.
Yea, you definitely aren’t.
Ahhh I see, I never use those anywhere so I am not missing anything even though I use the trackpad quite a lot. Thank you for the answer!
DE? My typewriter can’t print GUIs and if it coud it’s just bloat. /s
I don’t really need DEs. A WM and at most a taskbar is all I need. But I use xfce on my main machine because I installed it when setting up the os and it doesn’t annoy me with features I don’t want, so I never bothered switching to something else.Fixed the post the post. Completely slipped my mind to mention WMs as well, my bad :D
Thought you are gonna make a seperate post about WMs in the future.
I like floating WMs, although I don’t dislike
stackedtiled ones, it just feels a bit better to drag windows and stacked ones are not more efficient for me. As long as a WM can display multiple windows I could probably live with it. But I like dwm, because it has a built-in status bar, it’s configurable and it’s small. Goes without saying; I like minimal software. I used Openbox in the past, but dwm + dmenu have default key bindings I like a lot, so I don’t bother setting up Openbox anymore.I think these 2 can definitely be merged in one post since they are kinda related. I have plenty of other things I would like to make posts to ask about things(software/hardware/setup related) because its interesting to me to see how people do things differently and hopefully also learning new things along the way, but I don’t wanna seem too nosy :/
Pardon my ignorance here, but what is the difference between a stacking and floating one? I get what a tiling and what a stacking one is, but I can’t figure out the difference between stacking and floating one because when I look it up it just tells me its the same? Unless you mean stacking as the one I am thinking of a tiling?
I meant tiling oops. Stacking is floating.
I am glad you ask all these questions, beause it’s interesting and otherwise I might have to ask. Don’t worry, people don’t have to answer and I for example don’t mention things I don’t want to say.
Ah ok, things make more sense now :D
Yea, that is fair. I will post a new one in a few days. If you have anything specifically you are curious about fell free to make a thread and ask the questions yourself too :)
Ok, I will actually start this time.
I been basically just using Cinnamon for the past 8 years. Since I used it for so long it is super familiar with it, I know where to find anything I possibly need and I can set it up the way I like in about 2 minutes. So it is just very comfortable for me to use it. And why change it if it works right?
Other than that the only thing I really tried (as in I used for more than a few days) was KDE and I hated it which was very disappointing to me because I heard so many people liking it. I had a really hard and confusing time trying to set it up the exact way I wanted and got hit with a nasty bug when the search would just stop working day 2 or 3 of using it. Maybe I just hit a very bad timing when I did but I have no interest trying it again.
I’m one of those that love KDE (provided the device can handle all the customization stuff I do there lol). I had the opposite experience - KDE was the easiest one to customize to my liking. Even easier than XFCE. Gnome, however, is an absolute PITA. Cinnamon is great, too.
I felt like KDE just had too many options because what I want is actually really really simple. I kinda gave up halfway through end went for “close enough” but I wasn’t really happy with it. But it was mainly the bug made me give up and go back to Cinnamon.
my arch computer has DWM, and on this one i’m running bone-stock cinammon
I have never found a reason to leave i3. It is good and does what I need. I tried bspwm for a hot minute and there was aspects I liked, but I felt the documentation was lacking. DWM is annoying to patch. I might try out Hyprland when I feel wayland is ready but still there are features that are missing and some will never be present. I am a big fan of X11 Forwarding and am mad people think it is not worth continuing.
If you use Hyprland the owner of this server will probably love you forever. He mentioned it to me one too many times. I never used X11 forwarding, but I am also sticking away from Wayland for now as well since I need something I know I can relay on working 100% the way I know and I need.
Macroing is another
I use KDE. The workflow I’ve kept almost completely vanilla aside from shortcuts and the always on top button. The rest is minor theming, like changing is the accent color. I started a custom icon theme that I may come back to, but it’s nothing much (all I’ve really changed is the minecraft launcher to be a bee 🤣).
I use KDE just cause everything just works, and there’s always been an easy setting for me to simply toggle. And despite all the settings I feel I’ve been able to find what I need just fine.
There was one point in time that I did try customizing the workflow of Plasma. It was pretty fun coming up with some crazy ones but in the end it didn’t really jive with me. If I do come back to changing the workflow I think I’d like to make a couple global themes to switch between a Plasma/MacOS/Unity layout. It’s fun to switch it up sometimes ✨
I am curious, why is Minecraft a bee?
I am glad you had a very different KDE experience than me :)
Well, the idea was to make a cozy teddy-bear themed desktop. So honey, bears, bees, red/yellow/brown hearts and more brown colors in general :) So for example I might change firefox’s icon to a brown fox with red tail and the globe color to a golden honey yellow, or Brave’s icon from its orange to a brown. And I forgot but the other icon I changed was discord’s blue circle to a brown heart. So, small simple changes really :)
Oh noo, haha. Don’t worry tho, Cinnamon is great. I started with Mint so it has a small place in my heart :)
That sounds like a really cute theme idea! I hope you finish it up at some point :)
I bounce between XFCE and Neon. XFCE is preferred due to the very light weight and “stay out of my way” approach. I love simple. I also keep Neon installed because I like to see where the boundaries are pushed, and I did grow up in the golden age of CompViz / 3D cubes, etc. so I can enjoy chrome and rice when I see it 😂
KDE for years now. Shit just works and you can customize crap out of it. I used Awesome previously, but I am too old for tha stuff now. Life is too short.
