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nachtigall ,

Gnome. Feels most polished and least cluttered to me.

IrritableOcelot ,

Seconded. I used to use Ubuntu, but I switched to Debian + GNOME and I love it.

narwhalperson ,

I agree. I use gnome on nix and it has been great, especially on a touchpad.

TootSweet ,

Sway

sping ,

Sway is a WM not a DE. So you create your own DE? Or, I see Regolith is integrating sway, I think with Gnome Flashback as with i3. Not sure if there are others.

TootSweet ,

Yeah, I thought about not responding on the basis that Sway wasn’t a DE, but someone else responded CWM, so I figured at least if I bucked the system, I wouldn’t be alone in it.

Plus, not everyone really knows the difference between a DE and a WM. And not everyone knows that a lot of people don’t use a DE. So, often times, people use “DE” and “WM” synonymously, not really knowing there’s a difference.

(Not saying that describes OP or anyone here in particular. But there was definitely a time when that described me. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that described some folks who were browsing this thread.)

governorkeagan OP ,

I didn’t realise that people use them interchangeably. I’ve got an idea on what a WM is and what a DE is but nothing super in depth.

lemmyvore ,

A WM is literally just the window manager. It makes windows work and have a border and maximize and stuff but that’s it.

A DE gives you a lot of other stuff: a root window that makes up the “desktop”, panels & widgets, notification area, an application menu, workspaces, window and workspace switchers, global hotkeys, the concept of a session and stuff related to it (things to run on start, or saving your session between reboots), a unified theme and fonts etc. etc.

There are also programs that fall somewhere between these. For example tiling WM tend to fill the whole screen so they don’t care a lot about all the things I mentioned but they can integrate with some other stuff to some extent. Or something like OpenBox which includes a very lightweight desktop, menu and panel so I guess you could call it a DE but it’s all contained in one executable.

sping ,

I’ve really appreciated running i3 within gnome-flashback. I keep hitting things that just work, that I didn’t even realize I wanted. I hit the pause/mute button on my headphones when watching youtube and it paused… Things like ssh agents, hotplugging monitors and having it remember your preferred config, the main gnome settings GUI, the compose key, etc… I’m just not interested in reinventing all that, even though each individual step is usually not hard.

I’m glad to see Regolith is making a DE with Sway. One day I’ll migrate from i3 and I may let Regolith give me a DE.

CorrodedCranium ,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

XFCE. It’s just so easy to click and drag things where I want them and edit icons to be uniform.

Have you tried testing out DE in a virtual machine? It’s a big time saver versus installing it on actual hardware.

governorkeagan OP ,

I’m doing all my testing on a VM before committing and doing a bare metal install

CorrodedCranium ,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

Ah good to hear. I was not smart enough to do that when I was first getting into Linux and I only had one PC so you can imagine the headache.

lemmyvore ,

You can also boot a live CD. Last time I switched distro I got a bunch of live CDs and picked the one where everything was working out of the box (accessing shares, playing music/video, printing, Bluetooth, hooking up my phone to USB, gaming controller etc.) (Ended up on Manjaro btw.)

CorrodedCranium ,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

Totally. You can typically get CDs at the dollar store these days. I have a few from dealing with older computers now but I also have a sizeable amount of USBs now and several computers.

What made you decide on Manjaro?

lemmyvore ,

Oh it’s only “CD” in the name, you can boot the image from a USB stick. No need to go out and buy actual CDs.

I wanted to move away from Ubuntu and .deb based desktop distros because they don’t do well with long term use.

The way debs work, if you want third party software you have to add repos individually. But each of them tracks dependencies only within their scope. So eventually you end up with combinations of packages that the installer cannot solve anymore and you can’t upgrade your main packages. Which results in an reinstall.

I wanted something Arch-based because I heard it takes “rolling distro” seriously and you can keep upgrading and using it indeterminately. And there’s a single third party repo (AUR) which only breaks its own packages when the main system is updated, but not the main system. Which seems like a reasonable compromise.

But I wanted a more polished desktop experience so no plain Arch. The candidates were Manjaro, Garuda and Endeavour so that’s where the live CD test came in.

CorrodedCranium ,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

Yeah I know I’ve used them for years but I keep some on hand for older devices.

Fair enough. I used Manjaro for a while, maybe a year, and it kept breaking my system. I’ve been using EndeavourOS and Fedora ever since and haven’t had an issue.

thanksforallthefish ,

Good call, just be aware that while you can (pretty much) install any DE on any distro. Many distros will have a ready prepared install that may feel quite different to you adding the DE later.

If that’s not clear, Ubuntu with cinnamon DE is very different to Mint Cinnamon. Same with Kubuntu (KDE Ubuntu) and KDE Neon (Debian KDE).

All of the differences are of course replicable, they’re themes and tools and configs. But for example it took me literally most of a day to get Arch with cinnamon to feel like Mint cinnamon.

boblaw0 ,

Gnome on laptop, gnome with extentions on one pc and kde on another.

mikesailin ,

LXQT followed by Plasma

bbbhltz ,
@bbbhltz@beehaw.org avatar

Same

nottheengineer ,

KDE for me. As much as I hate windows, I like the floating windows, task bar and tray. KDE has that out of the box and lets me tweak all the little annoyances away.

MyNameIsRichard ,
@MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml avatar

Plasma definitely. Xfce is second.

governorkeagan OP ,

Any preferences on the distro? I’ve been enjoying Fedora but I’ve also tested Ubuntu and enjoyed that

netchami ,

You should try Arch btw

thanksforallthefish ,

Not for beginners, that’s just mean

imgel ,

Dont listen to this removed. Try arch after you feel comfortable with Linux.

xkforce ,

Tbh youre probably better off on something like Linux Mint or something else Debian or Ubuntu based. Fedora is a good distro but rpms are a lot less common than debs are and alien does not entirely fix that issue.

raptir ,

While I would still recommend Ubuntu or Mint or even Debian, I have been using openSUSE for years and have never run into a case where I had to compile software.

Secunergy ,
@Secunergy@social.tchncs.de avatar

@raptir @xkforce Isn't compiling normally for ?

raptir ,

I’m not sure why you are bringing Gentoo into it here. I mean that all the software I have tried to install is either available in the repos or available as an appimage/flatpak. Were it not available in binary form I would need to compile it - and I have not run into that scenario.

governorkeagan OP ,

I’ll probably end up settling on Ubuntu. Thought I’d try a couple before making a final decision.

steersman2484 ,

Install gentoo

steersman2484 ,

But for real, depends on your use case I use arch on my dev machine and you get nearly every package in the AUR

MyNameIsRichard ,
@MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml avatar

I landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed about five years ago and still don’t see myself hopping to another one

thanksforallthefish ,

Ubuntu is doing an annoying attempt to generate lock-in and profits by forcing snap on everyone and making it annoyingly difficult to avoid.

Consider one of the ubuntu derivatives (there’s a number of them, Mint, Pop etc) in preference to ubuntu itself, a debian derivative (KDE neon for example) or go with Fedora if you’re a business orientated user.

FarLine99 ,

Fedora Plasma is truly awesome!

imgel ,

Opensuse TW or Fedora

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