Most customizable desktop environment?
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KDE has the most options out of the box. You can make it look like Gnome, or act like a tiling window manager, or like Windows 7, 10 or 11, just with the options it contains from the start.
Gnome comes with almost no options. If you add extensions, or know enough to make your own, the sky is the limit. But I wouldn't call that "customizable", you can write your own themes for Plasma, too.
Xfce is another one that's very flexible. But it's very hard to get it to look and feel modern, it will always be an old school desktop, no matter what theming and added docks you throw at it. -
If you don't mind me asking, what makes gnome more adaptable in terms of functionality than KDE?
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Gnome is very functional, it's just meant to function one very specific way.
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KDE fs
Or roll your own via a compositor and various tools a la Hyprland
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Yeah, I second this. You may want to look in to DEs/WMs like DWM (C), Xmonad (Haskell), and AwesomeWM (lua) that let you customize them through programming.
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Gnome makes it easier to make you adapt imo. KDE gives you so much options that it's scary and overwhelming to learn and configure when you just want to use something in the way it's intended to be used immediately.
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KDE if you want to just configure stuff. Gnome if you want to code or manually style stuff.
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KDE if you want to just configure stuff. Gnome if you want to code or manually style stuff.
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Probably Emacs. /j
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I customised Xfce a lot, only with menu settings.
I removed the window shortcuts from the status bar, the focused window title is written on the status bar. The window manager was removed for bspwm. The result is an optimized screen space while keeping the convenience of a DE. -
xfce indeed.
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EndeavourOS's default XFCE theme looks very modern to me ! I mean sure it looks more like old school windows era, but that doesn't bother me at all. I like simplicity and customizability.
What's cool about XFCE, its only about config files to customize your whole DE.
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If infinite customization is what you're after you shouldn't use a DE. A WM like i3 och hyprland is much better suited for that
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I would say XFCE and Cinnamon; no two XFCE's look alike and Cinnamon can easily be molded into something very different as well.
I see a lot of people recommending KDE and Gnome; I've found those surprisingly rigid, although there are more guides on how to “rice” KDE into the most non-KDE things so there's that.
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Great operating system, that. Shame it lacks a text editor.
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This. Or a window manager to code the whole thing.
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Agreed, but use sway instead of i3 for Wayland support.
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Doesn't gnome change their APIs all the time between minor versions, so themes and plugins have to be constantly rewritten?
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No desktop environment. Get a compositor, a runner/menu/app-grid, maybe a panel or dock, set some shortcuts, done desktop environment.
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Btw, every.single.one of those one-icon plugins, like battery-indicator or pulseaudio-plugin, should at least have a icon-size chooser in their settings. Always needs debugger and some custom CSS.
