What's your favorite DE, and what does your workflow look like?
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Laptop yes. But no desktop environment, just a window manager, Sway.
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I keep hearing good things, ill try it out, when I first looked it up it didnt seem as customizable based off screenshots but im seeing posts about how its more customizable than gnome
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KDE.
Mostly like Windows 7, but I recently moved the dock to the top.
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Plasma does seem to have a lot of small annoying bugs, like rnow I have to click a widget so it loads on my desktop before dragging, if I just drag plasma closes out of the editor and my screen goes black for a second.
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Sway is it. I tried originally building it all up from scratch. It was fun, and taught me how all the pieces fit together, but now I just grab the EOS community dotfiles and make a few minor tweaks.
For me, it’s not a “workflow” that is sped up, it really just helps me remember where stuff “belongs”. Workspace 1 always has my Spotify, audio mixer, and discord/signal. Workspace 5 is gaming, etc.
Resizing and swapping window locations around is so simple with just super+mouse click/drag.
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The EOS files look a great place to start.
Do you default your apps to start on a particular workspace?
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I tried to do that when I started, but now it’s just habit. Super+Shift+# does most of the work.
My only complaint with the EOS configuration is the lack of Bluetooth on the bar. And the sound/screen brightness buttons don’t give any visual/audio feedback. I have some notifications imbedded, but they look and feel kinda janky compared to how nice and clean they are in Plasma.
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old school here, started with X Terminal and motif (mwm) and played with twm of fvwm last century. I have always like Xfwm/Xfce because it is simple and it works. I have the start menu/quick launches, the button bar where windows appears, and the icon area, a little bit like windows 95. No icons on my desktop.
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Yeah I added bluetooth in mine, it'll show me whats connected on hover and just launch the gnome app for bluetooth if I click it, super lazy implementation. I don't need brightness controls so never looked at them.
EOS seems to use mako for notifications? I have never tried it.
I use swaync, which once themed and the rights bits you want, added, is ok. I wanted something more like the Gnome notification drop down that had do not disturb, media player controls, extensible menus, etc. in it.
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Yeah, I just have one that launches blueman-manager. Not elegant, but works well. I only ever use BT on my laptop. So my desktop doesn’t even have it.
For music control I added a custom Spotify element to my waybar that shows now-playing, and lets me play/pause/skip/etc without having to go back to workspace 1. That’s all I need.
Tiling is just so nice once you get used to it. No more fiddling around with window placement.
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I use Cosmic and really like it- have used i3, Awesome and Gnome in the past for a while too, I really likes them.
The most time I spent with a set up was Awesome + rofi, which I really enjoyed. I customised literally everything and spent hours tweaking stuff.
That was super fun, but in all honesty my workflow is more or less:
- Open up a terminal (alacritty, tmux + fish shell + helix editor)
- Open up a browser (Firefox, have played with others but there's always some quirk where I give up)
- That's it.
Honestly, all the tweaking is fun for me, but with my workflow I have like 0 requirements for anything fancy. Daily driving cosmic is going nicely for now, and seems to mostly get out of my way.
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KDE is the easiest for coming from Windows, you almost never never need the command line or anything "extra" to customize it (beyond what even Windows will allow).
GNOME (especially in Ubuntu) by default is more Macintosh-like which might appeal to some people, it's "simpler" but any customizations will require navigating the add-ons (and in my experience inevitably the command line too).
I think KDE is the one for most people who just want a functioning PC. GNOME could be good for the PC you might make for your parent. Bonus points for an immutable distro which are even harder to break.
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KDE has given me the desktop I need for the past few years. Hyprland isn't a desktop environment, as far as I know.
Before KDE I used Cinnamon on Linux Mint. It was functional, but after many years I wanted a change.
Use whatever suits your needs. In my experience, KDE and Cinnamon are the most complete desktop environments without having to install extensions or extra software. Both are mature, have large communities behind them, and release incremental updates frequently. Those are my criteria for a good desktop environment.
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I use Mate on my laptop; before that I used Cinnamon.
To be honest, DEs are basically terminal window managers for me. If I didn't need a graphical web browser for everything I do (because that's basically what software is these days - shit you log into from a web browser) I'd probably be using GNU Screen or possibly Twin to manage multiple shells instead.
If the drag-and-drop functionality of modern DEs wasn't so helpful I'd probably still be using twm because I like stuff that does what I need, and otherwise stays out of my way.
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ive used many de's and wm's over the last 15+ years and ended using gnome the most. most familiar with it now so, its fine for me.
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I should take another crack at sway. I didn't know about EOS. I started with nwg-shell.
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Trying cinnamon right now, Its definitely functional, closer to windows back when I liked it. Feels boring, but in a good for productivity way.
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Trying cinnamon and it might be the superior parent rec, its basically older windows, very straightforward ui, not flashy, Gnome (at least the default i had) didn't have a start bar and required clicking the windows button to see clickable stuff that weren't icons. With extensions it can be basically windows or mac tho. (so if you directly setitup for them or guide them its more modern feeling/superior)
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After trying cinnamon, i think gnome reaches that middleground better with extensions than cinnamon, it feels more off to the side with older windows.
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Looks like we went the same way through the Linux world. Hyprland is both, it could be good looking like KDE and Gnome and it is keybind tiling like sway and i3.
I never realised before how much useless time we spend for mouse movings and clicks.
