As I’ve used linux on and off over the years I’ve tried to develop a longer term feel for various desktop environments to really know what works for me and what doesn’t. It can take a while of regular use before you discover things that may annoy you and make you want to look at switching.
**So linux users tell me about your favorite DE, why you like it and what you don’t like about it.
Also give me some likes and dislikes of other DE’s you’ve used enough to get a good feel of.
**
I currently favor Budgie for it’s gnome like polish sane defaults(everything works like I’d expect without changing much in settings) and cohesive settings menus. The biggest gripe I have is the app menu options on the panel. I don’t know why any modern DE would not have a menu that you can pin favori…
As I’ve used linux on and off over the years I’ve tried to develop a longer term feel for various desktop environments to really know what works for me and what doesn’t. It can take a while of regular use before you discover things that may annoy you and make you want to look at switching.
**So linux users tell me about your favorite DE, why you like it and what you don’t like about it.
Also give me some likes and dislikes of other DE’s you’ve used enough to get a good feel of.
**
I currently favor Budgie for it’s gnome like polish sane defaults(everything works like I’d expect without changing much in settings) and cohesive settings menus. The biggest gripe I have is the app menu options on the panel. I don’t know why any modern DE would not have a menu that you can pin favorite apps to like Cinnamon or Whisker menu. It’s also apparently not as light as I would have thought, being close to cinnamon in terms of RAM footprint.
I like most things about Cinnamon’s design but I have had a lot of small stability issues with nemo and quirks with suspend not working and lock screen never putting panels to sleep. though the machine I used it on was setup a little janky so it could be because of that.
Xfce is pretty solid if not a little clunky with panel customization and theming. It still has an ancient bug where windows borders have a resize trigger of like 1 pixel and if it isnt setup with whisker menu by default it’s clunky to get the super key to work right with it.
I can’t really figure out what anyone would prefer about MATE over Xfce. There seem to be a lot of functionality and appearance overlap with those DE’s and most people say Xfce is more feature rich, polished and supported than MATE. Xfce seems to capture the Gnome 2 look and feel pretty well. So to me MATE seems kinda superfluous.
With KDE I never liked the default setup and I really hate the settings overload. I would often have to google where a setting is. It’s the same reason I stopped using vivaldi browser.
I gave up on GNOME also somewhat because I got tired of spending so much time setting up the tweaks and extensions to bring back all the options and functionality that the gnome foundation decided we don’t need.