I have a hard time recommending it, but I ran Deepin on Arch a few years and was blown away by it. There were some weird limitations to how much you can customize, and I prefer window managers in general, so I eventually stopped using it. But that was the best time I had with a DE in Linux overall.
(context – from the early days of MacOS, Cmd-W was close window – Windows and Linux remapped Cmd to Ctrl (instead of Super) when copying a lot of the keyboard shortcuts)
KDE. It’s pretty good these days. I used it in 1999 when it was new. I used it in 2009 when it was messy. I didn’t use it for about a decade, opting instead for tiling window managers and plain cwm(1) on OpenBSD.
I finally installed it again in 2021 and it’s been fine. Solid desktop, does what I need it to, but requires a lot of configuration up front to not be annoying. I want simple and consistent, with double click to open things and single click to highlight, and I don’t want a popup dialog box in the corner every time my Konsole bell rings. I want animations and transparency, but I don’t want to wait a half a second for my window to minimize. I don’t want workspaces, just like I didn’t want a cashew in the corner of my screen 15 years ago. If I tell my dock to be floating, it needs to stay floating and not change its shape and size when I maximize my window.
KDE requires some tweaking out of the box so that it stays out of the way. But once set up, it’s nice.
3.5.10 was the best KDE ever, but I’m on 5.27 and I don’t have any complaints.
I’ve used gnome for years, about a month ago I decided to give KDE a try on my old spare laptop. Two days later it was on my desktop and work laptop. I am loving KDE.
Although I use sway, I used KDE for a long time and XFCE prior. They’re both phenomenal. I’d love to see XFCE make its way to wayland in the future.
As an aside, I feel like Wayland has a market ripe for the introduction of lightweight DEs. Sure, it has the very lightweight (hyprland, sway, river, dwl) and heavyweight (KDE, Gnome) but nothing between like XFCE, LXDE or MATE
Also a fan of sway! Plenty configurable, and swaymsg+jq bash scripts can go a long way. Hoping we’ll see more development in lightweight DEs as well- Wayland is pretty great, and sway could use with some more features. also nice username :D
I used to have that problem with Ctrl + Q and Ctrl + Shift + W. I used AutoKey to map them to an empty AutoKey phrase.
AutoKey lets you target only specific types of windows if you want, so you can additionally limit these mappings only to the browser.
You can also map Ctrl + W to an AutoKey script that converts it to Ctrl + Backspace: keyboard.send_keys(“<ctrl>+<backspace>”)
The difference between phrases and scripts in AutoKey is that phrases can only output dumb text (and expand some macros), whereas scripts are Python code that can do stuff with the keyboard, mouse, windows etc.
I’m using AutoKey scripts like that in some games to automate weird key combinations and it has a very good response time. If it’s responsive enough for a game it will probably work for text editing.
Yes, but that’s not always the case. For example, I use Portainer to drop into the shell of my Docker containers with a “terminal UI” and that tricks me into using Ctrl + W.
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