What's your favorite DE, and what does your workflow look like?
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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.
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My Cinnamon desktop (LMDE 6)
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Tried i3 a few years back. Never went back. Fucking love it. Would like to ditch X for Wayland soon though. Need to move to Sway but a bunch of scripts depend on X.. Probably wouldn't be too much of a nightmare to transition, but for some reason I've been putting it off for years.
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Here's mine, simple and functional
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Started with Gnome, then i3, Hyprland and now Sway. Gnome not being designed around customisability made me switch to i3. Hyprland has had some stability issues and regressions that annoyed me and so I switched to Sway. Thinking of trying out river at some point.
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After a lot of jumping around I settled for Plasma, with just use the default dark theme plus a few minor tweaks and that's it. It's super easy to use and it runs pretty smoothly now unlike 5+ years ago. I was into the whole tiling wm rabbithole for a while but got bored of it and I mostly just want everything fullscreen so I wasn't even making use of the tiling.
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My memory is foggy but ive used xfce for a long while, then switched to i3gaps with void linux. stopped using linux cuz they couldn't locate the developer or something( like we didn't get updates for half a year 0_o)
... I ended up forgetting how to use i3. I dont know what the community uses nowadays but my god i3 was AMAZING. It felt like a caveman that just learned how to make fire- and it was a big fucking fire.
I reaaaaally want to use i3 again but do not want to spend the time relearning everything. Highly recommend it though.
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I really like gnomes look with a few extensions tho, with plasma I feel the constant need to tinker just because I can and its two clicks away, with gnome I just use my computer and the extensions just work, not as much customization, even for placement, but definitely a lot more useful extensions that just work.
